Utopia

Here's a little more on the subject of the last two posts. But not from me.

First, a statement of the problem:

Hare's research upset a lot of people. Until the psychopath came into focus, it was possible to believe that bad people were just good people with bad parents or childhood trauma and that, with care, you could talk them back into being good. Hare's research suggested that some people behaved badly even when there had been no early trauma. Moreover, since psychopaths' brains were in fundamental ways different from ours, talking them into being like us might not be easy. Indeed, to this day, no one has found a way to do so.

"Some of the things he was saying about these individuals, it was unheard of," says Dr. Steven Stein, a psychologist and ceo of Multi-Health Systems in Toronto, the publisher of the Psychopathy Checklist. "Nobody believed him thirty years ago, but Bob hasn't wavered, and now everyone's where he is. Everyone's come full circle, except a small group who believe it's bad upbringing, family poverty, those kinds of factors, even though scientific evidence has shown that's not the case. There are wealthy psychopaths who've done horrendous things, and they were brought up in wonderful families."

Hare himself doesn't estimate the numbers of the willfully obtuse as low as his publisher does though. He says...

"There's still a lot of opposition -- some criminologists, sociologists, and psychologists don't like psychopathy at all," Hare says. "I can spend the entire day going through the literature -- it's overwhelming, and unless you're semi-brain-dead you're stunned by it -- but a lot of people come out of there and say, 'So what? Psychopathy is a mythological construct.' They have political and social agendas: 'People are inherently good,' they say. 'Just give them a hug, a puppy dog, and a musical instrument and they're all going to be okay.' "

Criminologists? Sociologists? Psychologists? These folks are supposed to be the solution, not part of the #*$%/ problem! Fire them all. There is no excuse for this willful and wanton rejection of the known truth. That crowd needs a new you-know-what reamed.

They should be putting out public service announcements warning us that psychopaths pass for normal among us and instructing us to exercise caution in whom we trust. They should be giving practical advice on how to spot the warning signs. But what are they doing instead? Denying this truth! Who side are they on? Ours or the psychopaths'?

The more I learn about this crowd, the more I see how routinely invalid their tricky statistics are, the more games I find in the DSM diagnostic critera (designed to let foks with a God-complex diagnose by the seat of their Omniscience's pants), the more exposed bias and and error in their deplorably low accuracy-of-diagnosis rate, the more ridiculous illogic that no first-year science student would dare try to put in a report, the more social engineering I see...the more suspicious I get of this pseudoscience.

Actually, their ignore-ance of reality wouldn't be so bad if they didn't persecute anyone as mean and nasty and (of all things) "intolerant" for disagreeing to know the truth. How's that for projection?

That's the problem. The mental healthcare establishment and academia have to get out of the way. Clericalism is clericalism, and obscurantism is obscurantism, whether it's the medieval Catholic Church committing it or them.

You get a good idea of the goose-stepping peer pressure that enforces conformity within that group from the blog of a former therapist, Neo-NeoCon, in her bio and her archive of posts on political homogeneity and groupthink among therapists and her archive on the treatment she gets for political apostasy.

How political is their agenda?

Theoretically, therapists can work with anyone, but in actuality they tend to specialize and refer out those patients who press their buttons (such as, for example, child molesters). And, although this sounds like some sort of bad joke, I know quite a few therapists who say they would have difficulty treating a client whom they know to be a Republican.

And who calls whom "simplistic"? To think that way you have to think that Republican = evil. To that I say, why seek therapy from someone who needs it themselves?

Hare and others have shown that the neural network of gray matter in the brains of psychopaths is actually different, that you can't get through to them with therapy, because they are using different parts of their brains to process information than normal people. For example, a stimulus that would produce an emotional response in the emotional centers of normal people produces almost no activity in the emotional centers of brutal, cold-blooded psychopaths.

A surprise? Hardly. Anyone can switch off their human feelings. The entire nation of Nazi Germany switched them off on Kristalnacht. It is normal for us to switch them off in life-threatening violent situations (like a natural disaster or combat). Psychopaths and narcissists just have theirs switched off permanently and for everyone, even their own children.

Asked if he thinks there will ever be a cure for psychopathy -- a drug, an operation -- Hare steps back and examines the question. "The psychopath will say 'A cure for what?' I don't feel comfortable calling it a disease. Much of their behaviour, even the neurobiological patterns we observe, could be because they're using different strategies to get around the world. These strategies don't have to involve faulty wiring, just different wiring."

But the willfully obtuse pretend they don't hear that and are too stupid to realize that this brain difference could be by choice that becomes habit over time. No, they ASSUME that the brains of psychopaths are defective and need to be fixed with some microchip. Presto-chango! Now you would have a good person, they say, because there is no such thing as a person who chooses to be evil - just good people with malfunctioning brains damaged by society, which they also want to fix.

As Hare points out, by their screwy logic, true saints, selfless people, are different too, but we don't regard them as diseased. Yet.

These are the very people who run a system that stubbornly ignores the fact that their treatments only make psychopaths worse and lets the criminally violent ones out of jail, time and again, to rape and con and molest and murder some more.

How callous their bleeding hearts.

Are we not yet fed up with them? I say damn their political agenda. By deliberately keeping their prey in the dark about the existence of predators among us, they are contributing to the pain and suffering narcissists and psychopaths cause. They gotta stop lying. Ns and Ps aren't good people "suffering" from some disease: they are malignant. If it's a disease they have, they are thoroughly enjoying it.

One must just plain lie to deny that they freely CHOOSE to do evil, that they get their jollies from it, and that they know right from wrong.

The mental healthcare establishment must stop suppressing this knowledge, because everyone needs to know it. We need to know that there are people in OUR life who would go up to a puppy (when nobody's looking) waving a treat, saying, "Here doggie, doggie!" only to get close enough to torture and kill that puppy.

I don't care how much it rattles our cage to face the fact that there are people like that passing for normal among us. We need to know it.

Because that knowledge will make us stop ASSUMING that everyone we meet means us no harm. It will make us careful whom we trust. Just think how many con artists that would put out of business.

Knowing whom to trust ain't rocket science. It's just a matter of paying heed to the warning signs of bad faith. Like lying, imposing on personal boundaries, perverted reactions to things, slander, control freakism, and the like. It's just common sense: if a person lies today, they will lie tomorrow and therefore have no credibility, no matter how fine their reputation is. If he hit you once, he will hit you again. If she never says a good word about anyone behind their back, she never says a good word about you behind your back.

In other words, we need to know that there are predators among us so that we all take these warning signs seriously. Like all prey, we have to know that we are prey, and sniff the breeze so that we smell a wolf in sheep's clothing. So that we don't marry one, hire one, work for one, elect one, believe one, or follow one on a crusade.

No big deal. Till the 20th century, that's the way we lived - in the knowledge that there were human and animal predators around us. If we all still showed the necessary caution, imagine what a different and better world it would then be.

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