Quote:
Originally Posted by Mutt
It's very subjective to call those type of people 'sociopaths', unethical, extremely selfish - in short, maybe they're just garden variety assholes.
People call Hitler a sociopath, I'm not sure of that, we seem to have a need to ascribe a mental disorder to everybody who does evil things. Then again as you've posted before the work of Gazzaniga, how much free will we have is now up for scientific debate and as we learn more about the brain maybe we'll find out we have much less than we think we do and Hitler was just an oddity, the wrong idiot in the right place and right time to fulfill his destiny.
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I don't know about "subjective". I see these people everywhere. I think Psychologist Martha Stout puts it best in describing a sociopath for simplicity, as someone not bound by conscience based emotions (regret, embarrassment, remorse, empathy, sympathy etc). The diagnostic criteria is tricky and between sociopathy, psycopathy and anti social personality disorders, very much overlapping and confusing and sometimes conflicting.
Really it comes down to an individual assessment of course, but the current numbers are pretty staggering.. even the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders puts it well into the millions.
These are often the people who excel. Think about "conscience based emotions" and what it means to have zero regret, remorse, empathy, sympathy, embarrassment etc. These people are very often the charismatic public figures all around us. They are in the military. I am sure some are scout snipers. These people are the stock brokers bilking old people for millions. They are the attorneys, sitting in a room, lying about anything claiming to fight for justice, but really just playing a game to win. They are the people who can manipulate others to invest in scams. They are the lazy cousin who is 36 and still living with his parents, still fucking up, still borrowing money from them, still saying he's got a job interview next week.
Why we don't readily see them for what they are, is because they have learned intuitively to fake emotional responses they observed to be socially acceptable. We see an appropriate response and thats often good enough... until we actually see a much broader pattern forming.
Think about this industry. How many millionaires are there from this industry alone who did very hard to understand things like all the fraud, theft etc etc etc and got wealthy from it.
Why didn't everyone else do the same?
Because we had those emotional responses they didn't. You and i stopped to think "thats wrong", "what if i get caught", "aren't these people getting fucked?". They didn't. In fact, they think you are silly and handicapping yourself for having those inhibiting emotions.
Sociopathy doesn't have to have anything to do with violence. I don't know what Hitlers problem was. I don't think there is a sound argument that mental disorders did not play a role in his behavior. Again, genetics, environment/experience all come into play in a very complex interaction of countless factors of varying weights, so to your point, its not entirely accurate to over simplify it with a single label. That tendency is actually a function of the brain and lies within the region that helps identify/interpret and attribute causality. It is behind the tendency that drives us to see answers as being simple black and white, right or wrong answers as those are really all that matters to issues pertaining to survival. touch the fire... get burned... therefore, touch fire = get burned.
As for the argument of Free Will... that's quite fascinating as well. I don't think it will go to a place anyone will like. It's already very certain that our understanding of what we believe to be "free will" and an act of conscious volition is deeply flawed and largely an illusion. After all, the simple fact is that conscious awareness is "after the fact"... meaning it comes only after unconscious mental processes have had their way, after the input has been filtered and distorted. Anything that arises to conscious awareness has already passed through endless unconscious mental processes. We do things and tell ourselves "see, i'm in charge"... but we have no real idea of what led up to us doing those things in terms of unconscious processing as the conscious mind has no access to those other processes. Gazaniggas discovery was probably the most fascinating of all... that we constantly lie about nearly everything we experience to escape burning calories thinking about it.