Psychopaths are estimated to make up 1 percent of the population and up to 25 percent of male offenders in correctional settings. CREDIT: Flynt | Dreamstime.com
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Psychopaths are known to be wily and manipulative, but even so, they unconsciously betray themselves, according to scientists who have looked for patterns in convicted murderers' speech as they described their crimes.
The researchers interviewed 52 convicted murderers, 14 of them ranked as psychopaths according to the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, a 20-item assessment, and asked them to describe their crimes in detail.
Using computer programs to analyze what the men said, the researchers found that those with psychopathic scores showed a lack of emotion, spoke in terms of cause-and-effect when describing their crimes, and focused their attention on basic needs, such as:
While we all have conscious control over some words we use, particularly nouns and verbs, this is not the case for the majority of the words we use, including little, functional words like "to" and "the" or the tense we use for our verbs, according to Jeffrey Hancock, the lead researcher and an associate professor in communications at Cornell University, who discussed the work on Monday (Oct. 17) in Midtown Manhattan at Cornell's ILR Conference Center.
"The beautiful thing about them is they are unconsciously produced," Hancock said.
These unconscious actions can reveal the psychological dynamics in a speaker's mind even though he or she is unaware of it, Hancock said.
What it means to be a psychopath
Psychopaths make up about 1 percent of the general population and as much as 25 percent of male offenders in federal correctional settings, according to the researchers.
Psychopaths are typically profoundly selfish and lack emotion.
"In lay terms, psychopaths seem to have little or no 'conscience,'" write the researchers in a study published online in the journal Legal and Criminological Psychology.
Psychopaths are also known for being cunning and manipulative, and they make for perilous interview subjects, according to Michael Woodworth, one of the authors and a psychologist who studies psychopathy at the University of British Columbia, who joined the discussion by phone.
"It is unbelievable," Woodworth said. "You can spend two or three hours and come out feeling like you are hypnotized."
While there are reasons to suspect that psychopaths' speech patterns might have distinctive characteristics, there has been little study of it, the team writes.
How words give them away
To examine the emotional content of the murderers' speech, Hancock and his colleagues looked at a number of factors, including how frequently they described their crimes using the past tense.
The use of the past tense can be an indicator of psychological detachment, and the researchers found that the psychopaths used it more than the present tense when compared with the nonpsychopaths.
They also found more disfluencies - the "uhs" and "ums" that interrupt speech - among psychopaths.
Nearly universal in speech, disfluencies indicate that the speaker needs some time to think about what they are saying.
Psychopaths appear to view the world and others instrumentally, as theirs for the taking, the team, which also included Stephen Porter from the University of British Columbia, wrote.
As they expected, the psychopaths' language contained more words known as subordinating conjunctions.
These words, including "because" and "so that," are associated with cause-and-effect statements.
"This pattern suggested that psychopaths were more likely to view the crime as the logical outcome of a plan (something that 'had' to be done to achieve a goal)," the authors write.
And finally, while most of us respond to higher-level needs, such as:
family
religion or spirituality
self-esteem
psychopaths remain occupied with those needs associated with a more basic existence.
Their analysis revealed that psychopaths used about twice as many words related to basic physiological needs and self-preservation, including eating, drinking and monetary resources than the nonpsychopaths, they write.
By comparison, the nonpsychopathic murderers talked more about spirituality and religion and family, reflecting what nonpsychopathic people would think about when they just committed a murder, Hancock said.
The researchers are interested in analyzing what people write on Facebook or in other social media, since our unconscious mind also holds sway over what we write.
By analyzing stories written by students from Cornell and the University of British Columbia and looking at how the text people generate using social media relates to scores on the Self-Report Psychopathy scale.
Unlike the checklist, which is based on an extensive review of the case file and an interview, the self-report is completed by the person in question.
This sort of tool could be very useful for law enforcement investigations, such as in the case of the Long Island serial killer, who is being sought for the murders of at least four prostitutes and possibly others, since this killer used the online classified site Craigslist to contact victims, according to Hancock.
Psychopaths have a reputation for cunning and ruthlessness.
But they are more like you and me than we care to admit...
Psychopath,
the word conjures up the image of a cold-blooded killer, or perhaps a fiendishly clever but heartless egoist...
There's Ted Bundy, who in the 1970s abducted women, killed them, and had sex with their decomposing bodies.
Or Hannibal Lecter from the film The Silence of the Lambs (1991), who cunningly escaped his various confinements and ended up eating the people he despised.
lack the ability to feel empathy, guilt and remorse.
Psychopaths,
Steal, lie and cheat, and have no respect for other people, social norms or the law.
In some cases, they torture defenseless animals, assault other children or attempt to kill their siblings or parents.
If caught, they fail to take responsibility for their actions, but tend to blame others, their upbringing or 'the system'.
According to some recent calculations, more than 90 per cent of male psychopaths in the United States are in prison, on parole or otherwise involved with the criminal justice system.
Considering that psychopaths are thought to make up only around 1 per cent of the general population, that number is staggering.
Because of this close link to criminality, psychopathy used to be known as 'moral insanity'.
This picture of psychopathy has dominated the thinking of both laypeople and researchers.
It's at once sensational and reassuring.
Psychopaths are sick, deranged, lacking in moral conscience. In other words, they're nothing like you or me.
But this is false.
There's no major ability that psychopaths lack altogether, and their deficits are often small and circumscribed.
They certainly aren't incapable of telling right from wrong, making good decisions or experiencing empathy for other people.
Instead, they suffer from a host of more mundane problems - such as being overly:
goal-fixated
fearless
selfish
What's more, perhaps 'our' reactions are closer to 'theirs' than we realize.
Like psychopaths, we can dial our empathy up and down; and for all the praise we heap on empathy, a closer look at this emotion suggests that it's nearer to a kind of self-preservation instinct than any 'warm and fuzzy' fellow-feeling.
Rather than freakish outliers then, psychopaths reveal important truths about human morality.
But are we ready to accept what they might teach us?
When debating what's wrong with psychopaths, researchers typically pitch two competing moral theories against one another.
One approach, known as rationalism, holds that judging right and wrong is a matter of reason, rather than feeling.
Some philosophers claim that psychopaths show that rationalism is plain wrong.
Psychopaths are as logical as you and me - in fact, they outsmart us all the time, hence their everyday depiction as connivers and con artists.
So the fact that they're rational but still capable of inhuman acts shows that moral sensibility can't be grounded in reason alone.
But something isn't quite right here. If psychopaths are so smart, why do they constantly get caught up with the criminal justice system?
In his authoritative portrait of psychopathy Without Conscience (1993), Hare,
describes a man who was on his way to a party when he decided to get a case of beer.
Realizing he'd forgotten his wallet, the man - who scored highly on Hare's psychopathy checklist - robbed the nearest gas station, seriously injuring the sales attendant with a heavy piece of wood.
So while psychopaths aren't irrational in the sense of being unable to think clearly, they seem to act irrationally.
They struggle with what philosophers call 'reasons for actions':
considerations that underlie our decisions to act, such as the likelihood that what we'll do will satisfy our goals and won't come into conflict with other projects or aims.
Although bludgeoning the shop assistant does, for example, serve the goal of getting beer for the party, it frustrates the more pressing and underlying desire to stay out of prison.
Psychopaths appear to be poor at integrating all the various factors that go into making good choices, and often have poor reasons for their actions.
The psychological evidence confirms that psychopaths have deficits in reasoning that affect how they make decisions.
They usually attend almost exclusively to the task at hand (whatever that might be) and ignore relevant contextual information - although when context doesn't play a role, they do very well.
Other studies have found that psychopaths have problems reversing their responses:
when actions that were previously rewarded are now punished - or actions that were previously punished are rewarded - they have problems adjusting.
Similarly, Hare and his collaborator Jeffrey Jutai found that, if psychopaths are asked to navigate a maze, they doggedly pursue their initial tactic even if doing so causes them to receive painful electric shocks.
These findings support the rationalist idea that psychopathic immorality comes down to some inability to reason well.
But you might have noticed that psychopaths don't experience fear as often, and in the same situations, as do ordinary people.
Last time I looked, fear was an emotion.
This brings us back into the camp of people who think that emotion, not reason, is central to ethics.
Typically, they focus on empathy.
When explicitly told to empathize with another, psychopaths could do it...
Apart from some notable empathy naysayers, such as the psychologist Paul Bloom at Yale University and the philosopher Jesse Prinz at the City University of New York, empathy is typically held in high regard among theorists and researchers.
Part of the reason is its excellent fit with a second major moral theory known as sentimentalism.
Dating back to the 18th-century philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith, sentimentalists believe that an ability to tell right from wrong is grounded in a tendency to feel what others feel.
Because we suffer along with others, we come to see their suffering as bad or wrong.
Thanks to these empathic feelings, we care about what happens to other people even if it doesn't directly affect us.
One of the best empirical sources for these claims is the social psychological research on empathic concern.
Psychologists working in development, such as Martin Hoffman at New York University and Nancy Eisenberg at Arizona State University, maintain that it plays a central role in social competence and moral understanding.
Skin conductance, for example, measures how good a conductor of electricity your skin is; it's a good indicator of your emotional state, since when you sweat in response to:
stress
fear
anger
your skin becomes momentarily better at carrying electric current.
As you might expect, when psychopaths are exposed to pictures of people in distress, they show less skin conductance reactivity than do non-psychopaths.
Other tests measure startle responses:
if you show a person pictures that they find threatening, they startle much more easily in response to loud sounds.
Psychopaths respond normally to direct threats, such as an image of the gaping jaw of a shark or a striking snake, but not to social threats, such as people in pain or distress.
Ordinary people react to both...
Neuroscientists have also studied the empathic responses of psychopaths.
involving functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the areas of the brain associated with empathy don't activate in psychopaths to the same degree as in control subjects.
But when the neurobiologist Harma Meffert and colleagues from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands explicitly instructed them to 'feel with' a hand that is being caressed or shoved aside, the researchers discovered that psychopaths were able to muster a normal response.
He showed psychopaths pictures of limbs in painful situations, such as a hand stuck in a car door, and asked them to either 'imagine this is happening to you' or 'imagine this is happening to someone else'.
When psychopaths imagined that they were in the painful situation, they showed something very close to the typical empathic brain response - but when they imagined someone else was in that very same situation, their empathy-related brain areas didn't activate much.
If psychopaths have an empathy deficit, then, it is a very puzzling one.
A different way of measuring brain activation throws further light on the puzzle.
Electroencephalograms (EEGs) measure brain activation over time, as opposed to fMRI studies, which produce measurements of brain activity at one particular moment.
EEG studies with psychopaths are quite revealing it turns out that their initial brain response to people in distress is largely intact.
Psychologists call this the 'orienting response', which is the act of turning your attention to a stimulus - in this case, another person in trouble.
This is associated with the sympathetic nervous system that mobilizes a defense response.
This first reaction appears to be entirely involuntary in psychopaths and non-psychopaths alike.
It's what happens in the later stages that is different:
instead of their defensive response continuing to get stronger, and their attention becoming even more focused on the person in distress, the psychopaths' response weakens and begins to die down.
It turns out that doctors show something of the same response as psychopaths do when expose to people being injected with needles.
Since doctors are perfectly able to empathize with others when they need to, the thinking is that the reduced response must be due to the person herself exerting cognitive control over her emotions.
Because they have to do things to patients that are unpleasant or even painful, doctors get used to it and suppress their normal empathic responses.
That explanation fits with what we know about the relationship between empathy and reward:
studies have found that men improve their understanding of what others think and feel only when they are paid to get it right, while understanding others is reward enough for women.
Leaving aside such thorny gender issues, we can conclude that people are able to modify their empathy according to:
punishment
habituation
reward
So perhaps we should think of empathy and psychopaths the same way:
they dull their empathic response to others in pain, but they are not naturally insensitive to it.
This evidence forces us to rethink not only psychopathy, but also empathy and its role in moral aptitude.
First of all, it's a mistake to think of what is wrong with psychopaths in terms of lacking abilities.
They're neither unable to comprehend what it means to have a goal or an end, nor are they incapable of feeling empathy for others.
They have deficient abilities, we might say, but these deficits are typically small and dependent on the context.
Similarly, on the empathic front, psychopaths aren't total outliers - in fact, many people describe them as extremely charming and personable.
Hare is one of the greatest experts on psychopaths, and in Without a Conscience he describes how he was conned by a psychopath, who invited him to give a paper at a conference.
He was supposed to receive an honorarium and have his travel paid for, but never saw a penny.
Although he spent a nice evening with the guy at the conference, he never suspected a thing.
The larger point is that for psychopaths to be able to fool experts, and to be able to persuade people to do things they would not otherwise do, they can't be emotionally stunted robots.
The usual story is that they are good at faking it; but another, more plausible, explanation is that empathy can't really be faked, and that psychopaths are simply better at turning their empathy on and off.
Psychopathy suggests that an important part of morality rests in our propensity to be personally distressed...
What makes this account of psychopaths' problems particularly interesting - but also subversive - is that they start to look a lot more like ordinary people.
Take empathy with others in distress.
An ordinary person goes to great lengths to avoid experiencing this emotion - by averting his gaze from the beggar on the street or choosing another channel when news of conflict and disaster come on the TV.
In some cases, it makes sense to protect oneself from the pain of others' pain.
We can't possibly change the fates of all who suffer, no matter what we do.
Then again, many of us could be more effective if we really tried.
What can I personally do about the crisis in Syria?
Probably more than I'm doing at the moment.
Most of us don't shy away from helping others because we can't but because we're unwilling to expend the time and resources that would be required.
So, psychopaths might not be so aberrant in their refusal to feel for those who suffer.
Perhaps they are simply at an extreme end of a spectrum on which most of us find ourselves.
The second big fallout of the research on empathy in psychopaths is a profound rethinking of empathy itself.
The empathic concern that most psychologists talk about sounds nothing like the aversive response to others in need that appears to be lacking in psychopaths.
This aversion is better thought of as 'personal distress' - an unpleasant experience that can be described by words such as:
'grieved'
'alarmed'
'disturbed'
'upset'
It arises as a defensive reaction to others' pain or fear - something we feel as much for ourselves as for the other, and that we try to avoid whenever we can.
Most psychologists think that personal distress is contrary to morality. Why...?
Because it leads us to avoid the person in need.
Turning this issue on its head, then, psychopathy suggests that an important part of morality rests in our propensity to be personally distressed.
We are motivated not to harm others because witnessing pain and distress is distressing - for us.
The psychopath's response to people who suffer indicates that what we recognize as morality might be grounded not simply in positive, prosocial emotions but also in negative, stressful and self-oriented ones.
This is not some cuddly version of empathy, but a primitive aversive reaction that seemingly has little to do with our caring greatly for the humanity of others.
Yet,
What exposes our common humanity more than the fact that I become personally distressed by what happens to you?
What could better make me grasp the importance of your suffering?
The personal part of empathic distress might be central to my grasping what is so bad about harming you.
Thinking about doing so fills me with alarm.
Arguably, it's more important that I curb my desire to harm others for personal gain than it is for me to help a person in need.
Social psychology research has focused on how we're moved to help others, but that's led us to ignore important aspects of ethics.
Psychopathy puts personal distress back in the center of our understanding of the psychological underpinnings of morality.
The last lesson we can learn concerns whether sentimentalists or rationalists are right when it comes to interpretations of the moral deficits of psychopaths.
The evidence supports both positions.
We don't have to choose - in fact, it would be silly for us to do so.
Rationalist thinkers who believe that psychopaths reason poorly have zoomed in on how they don't fear punishment as we do.
That has consequences down the line in their decision making since, without appropriate fear, one can't learn to act appropriately.
But on the side of the sentimentalists, fear and anxiety are emotional responses.
Their absence impairs our ability to make good decisions, and facilitates psychopathic violence.
Fear, then, straddles the divide between emotion and reason.
It plays the dual role of constraining our decisions via our understanding the significance of suffering for others, and through our being motivated to avoid certain actions and situations.
But it's not clear whether the significance of fear will be palatable to moral philosophers.
A response of distress and anxiety in the face of another's pain is:
sharp
unpleasant
personal
It stands in sharp contrast to the common understanding of moral concern as warm, expansive and essentially other-directed.
Psychopaths force us to confront a paradox at the heart of ethics:
the fact that I care about what happens to you is based on the fact I care about what happens to me.
Heidi Maibom is professor of philosophy at the University of Cincinnati.
She is the editor, most recently, of The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy (2017), and is working on her next book, 'Knowing Me, Knowing You: Adventures in Perspective Taking and Empathy'
In general, this lack of conscience may stem from a conditioned lack of emotional identification with the victim, a narcissistic love of self that overrides any concern for others, or the mechanical inability to feel any emotion other than ones which are chemical or hormonal in origin.
There are different categories of psychopaths depending on the underlying cause for their condition and how well they blend into society.
Criminal and Successful Psychopaths
Criminal psychopaths are those who are crude enough in their manipulations to be identified and apprehended by legal and medical institutions.
They are known as:
serial killers
con artists
burglars
mobsters
mad tyrants
rapists
and delinquents.
These comprise a small percentage of psychopaths, and only about 1% of the population.
The rest are successful psychopaths who evade detection by optimally conforming to social ideals without compromising their manipulative nature.
They are skilled at faking emotions and passing themselves off as:
charming
caring
sociable
people.
Some use their conformity to appear ordinary, others are more ambitious and become symbols of success by using their charm and intellect to rapidly climb the:
corporate
political
academic
religious
military
or social ladder.
Between 20% and 50% of the population is included in this category.
In general, criminal psychopaths consistently violate laws and social norms while successful psychopaths make use of them.
The orthodox medical establishment presently recognizes only the first category under the term “Antisocial Personality Disorder.”
There is no diagnostic term categorizing successful psychopaths, who continue to remain medically unidentified.
This is no surprise considering a significant portion of the medical establishment consists of these individuals.
When mainstream media and medical literature use the term “psychopath” or “sociopath,” they are referring to the small minority of criminal psychopaths.
To understand psychopathy, one must first understand human behavior.
The enigma of human behavior is commonly reduced to a question of nature versus nurture, genetics versus environment.
Typical of materialistic determinism, this model is dangerously simplistic because it focuses only upon the physical and causal basis of human behavior, leaving out the metaphysical factors which are equally as important.
An expanded model for human behavior would include the following factors:
environment:
physical influences
social conditioning
mind programming
and education.
genetics:
instinctual bias
physical limitations
neurochemical makeup
soul nature:
metaphysical composition based upon level of metaphysical evolution, acquired and shaped by the experiences of prior incarnations.
fate:
predestined and synchronistically arranged experiences that improve soul nature and thus change behavior, also the unwitting modification of one’s behavior to accommodate another’s fate.
free will:
personal action taken out of choice, entirely non-deterministic.
The individualized consciousness of souled humans affords them the ability to choose what to do with the genetic, environmental, and karmic conditions they acquire upon incarnating.
Souled psychopaths are either environmentally programmed to act against their own conscience, or else have made the consistent choice to behave in a narcissistic and predatory manner.
Those who are programmed have chance for recovery, while the attempt to change those who choose psychopathy only reinforces their behavior.
Souled psychopaths feel love and hate, but only love for self and hate for others.
This condition is well illustrated by certain Nazis or Zionists who love their own race but feel no guilt about murdering those of another.
Souled psychopaths also have empathy and conscience, but these are perverted and reserved for special cases.
For example, some mobsters seem to act upon a strong moral code and thus appear as upright heroes to those they protect but are nevertheless criminal psychopaths.
The greatest tyrants in history were souled psychopaths who passionately pursued their twisted goals.
Since:
love
empathy
free will
are qualities associated with having a soul, nonsouled humans are psychopaths by definition.
This doesn’t mean all act in obviously predatory ways, just that the severity of their manipulative behavior depends mostly upon environmental and genetic factors, which vary greatly from person to person.
Those who face adversity during childhood often mature into criminal psychopaths, while those who have more secure upbringings are less maladjusted and become successful psychopaths.
No amount of education, medication, or programming can instill genuine empathy and love within them, for they lack the soul nature necessary to exude these qualities.
Both souled and nonsouled psychopaths display disregard for the suffering of others.
While the souled psychopath loves himself beyond everyone else and thus feels justified in exploiting them, the nonsouled psychopath freely exploits others because he lacks the ability to love or empathize with anything.
Genetic characteristics determine the physical biases, limitations, and capabilities of an individual.
A nonsouled person will be at the mercy of these characteristics while a souled person can choose how to utilize them.
Souls often select the bodies into which they incarnate, seeking ones which provide the optimal “toolbox” for their metaphysical needs and best serves their learning agenda or mission.
Thus, genetics and soul nature tend to correspond.
A nonsouled person with a “sharp” set of tools may, in accordance with environmental programming, use his or her intellectual abilities to deceive and manipulate with perfection.
For example, the CEO who manipulated his way up the corporate ladder may simply be a nonsouled psychopath who used his genetic gifts to embody the societal norm of material success.
Genetic flaws can also result in brain abnormalities that hinder the balanced expression of emotion, a common condition in criminal psychopaths.
Chemical and electromagnetic factors can exacerbate these tendencies.
Because soul nature and genetics are coupled, the metaphysical significance of bloodlines becomes clear.
Bloodlines are characterized by concentrations of specific genetic traits passed down through generations.
Correspondingly, souled members of that bloodline share common metaphysical characteristics, suggesting that bloodlines provide the physical vehicle for the implementation of metaphysical goals requiring multiple generations to accomplish.
Thus there exist a variety of bloodlines, each with unique metaphysical predispositions.
While some are altruistic and noble in nature, others exist to engage in parasitical elitism and are genetically biased toward successful psychopathy.
In that case, nonsouled members would have a high probability of being actively psychopathic.
Among its souled members, most incarnate to optimally continue their malevolent agendas, while a few deviate and use their acquired abilities for the better.
By genealogically tracing bloodlines and correlating them with historical data, one can determine the fundamental destiny of its descendants.
For example, it is well known that US presidential candidates with the strongest royal lineage become elected.
Nevertheless, the important point is that branches of bloodlines biased toward psychopathy inevitably diffuse into the general population and exist in all races.
This implies several things.
First, it shows that not only is racist prejudice morally repugnant, but it is also logically flawed because its obtuse criteria falsely condemn the innocent among the hated race and excuses the virulent bloodlines within the favored race.
For example, the Nazis condemned the entire Jewish people as subhuman psychopaths when only a few non-semitic bloodlines passing themselves off as Jews justified this claim; there were equal concentrations of psychopathic bloodlines within the Caucasian race itself, obviously overlooked by the Nazis due to the blind favoritism of their ideology.
Second, unless a bloodline is geographically isolated or physiologically unique, it is impossible to identify psychopaths by these traits alone.
The purpose of identification is not to persecute them, but to identify such behavior when it occurs and understand why it happens.
The success of psychopaths depends heavily upon others excusing their action with rationalizations built on false assumptions.
For instance, a nonsouled psychopath may abuse his wife and after she leaves him, he may promise change and use sweet words to appear remorseful.
The false assumption is that this person is capable and willing to change for the better.
In truth, he is incapable of feeling empathy or remorse and fakes these qualities to perpetuate his manipulations.
Understanding the physical and metaphysical basis of human behavior allows one to avoid making such false assumptions and see through false guises that would otherwise appear as genuine.
Psychopaths who are most intelligent and powerful tend to use lesser ones to do their bidding.
This forms a web of control, a negative hierarchy of manipulation that spans from elite globalist cabals down to the neighborhood delinquent or psychopathic spouse.
This is not to suggest that the global elite are directly commanding local psychopaths, but rather that there exists a hidden element unifying this hierarchy.
This hidden element originates beyond our realm and consists of advanced non-human psychopaths of an alien or demonic nature who use hyperdimensional technology or telepathic influence to direct all lesser psychopaths, most easily nonsouled ones who lack freewill and are thus freely controlled.
This hyperdimensional control system may be appropriately termed the “Matrix,” and the lesser psychopaths may be called “Matrix Agents” due to the similarity between their functions and the themes depicted in the movie.
Empathy is antithetical to control, which is why control systems demand psychopathy as the standard mode of function.
Society is best manipulated through an abundant distribution of psychopaths among the lower and upper ranks of society.
Toward this end, certain bloodlines have been created or tweaked by negative alien forces to assist the incarnation of malevolently souled individuals, and thus some instances of psychopathy can be said to have alien origins.
Those not genetically biased toward psychopathic behavior are nevertheless easily programmed into supporting or idolizing such behavior, especially if they lack the freewill and discernment associated with having a well developed soul.
The problem of psychopathy rests upon the fact that only the minority of souled psychopaths who have been programmed against their conscience are capable of changing for the better.
The other two categories, nonsouled psychopaths and those who choose the path of predation, are in the majority, diffused among the population, and beyond rehabilitation.
Their emulation of social ideals and lack of guilt allows them to rise high in society and exploit the masses at large.
Our culture’s idolization of psychopathic qualities such as egocentrism, ruthless ambition, and superficiality provides warm waters for these sharks.
Thus, lack of knowledge among people concerning the prevalence, subtlety, and guile of psychopaths only perpetuates their behavior.
Because of ignorance of metaphysical factors, it is commonly assumed that all psychopaths are treatable.
In truth, souled psychopaths who choose their path and nonsouled psychopaths are beyond hope - any energy invested toward “changing them” will be wasted, or worse, serve to reinforce their predatory behavior.
In short, they abuse your respect, exploit your empathy, and feed upon what energy you put into them.
Doug Owen interviews Michael Cross, author of Freedom From Conscience - Melanie's Journey and the sequel FFC - Melanie's Awakening.
Michael explains why psychopaths are able to climb to the highest positions of power.
Michael shatters the Hollywood image of the crazy loner, instead showing which traits enable these people without empathy, without guilt, to win in a society dominated by glamour and soundbites.
It is a well-known fact that our society is structured like a pyramid.
The very few people at the top create conditions for the majority below. Who are these people? Can we blame them for the problems our society faces today? Guided by the saying “A fish rots from the head” we set out to follow that fishy odor.
What we found out is that people at the top are more likely to be psychopaths than the rest of us.
Who, or what, is a psychopath? Unlike Hollywood’s stereotypical image, they are not always blood-thirsty monsters from slasher movies. Actually, that nice lady who chatted you up on the subway this morning could be one. So could your elementary school teacher, your grinning boss, or even your loving boyfriend.
The medical definition is simple:
A psychopath is a person who lacks empathy and conscience, the quality which guides us when we choose between good and evil, moral or not.
Most of us are conditioned to do good things. Psychopaths are not. Their impact on society is staggering, yet altogether psychopaths barely make up one percent of the population.
Through interviews with,
renowned psychologist Professor Philip Zimbardo
leading expert on psychopathy Professor Robert Hare
former President of Czech Republic and playwright Vaclav Havel
authors Gary Greenberg and Christopher Lane
professor Nicholas Christakis
...among numerous other thinkers, we have delved into the world of psychopaths and heroes and revealed shocking implications for us and our society.
As more and more studies demonstrating the corrosive effect of psychopathy on government, finance, and business emerge, researchers have begun to explore how our society itself has been molded in the psychopaths' image.
Now, one of those researchers, Stefan Verstappen, shares his insights on psychopathy in modern culture.
The Laughs of Hillary Clinton - Expressions of A Psychopath?
As we ponder the dark implications of living in a world where large numbers of people rejoice at gruesome stage shows of death and merrily embrace the murder of decent men, we'll leave you with the final, disgusting words of the clearly psychopathic...Hillary Clinton:
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shared a laugh with a television news reporter moments after hearing deposed Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi had been killed.
"We came, we saw, he died," she joked when told of news reports of Qaddafi's death by an aide in between formal interviews.
Clinton was in Tripoli earlier this week for talks leaders of Libya's National Transitional Council (NTC).
The reporter asked if Qaddafi's death had anything to do with her surprise visit to show support for the Libyan people.
"No," she replied, before rolling her eyes and saying "I'm sure it did" with a chuckle.
Compilation of Hillary Clinton laughing off Tough Questions and at Inappropriate Times
