And again, there's no magic to this -- and I'd love to hear your objections to that -- but it just seems to me that...you know the estimates say 1% of the population are psychopaths. That's 3 million plus in the US. Eight percent are sociopaths. That's 24 million in the US and about 11 or 12% are psychopaths, sociopaths or narcissists. That's a lot of people! And now, about 30 or 40% of the people in jail are identified as sociopaths or psychopaths.
That leaves an awful lot of people out there who aren't. I did an interview with somebody who trains therapists on how to help people, mostly women,who have been in relationships with sociopaths and psychopaths and narcissists. She estimates that about 60 million people a year are victims of them. That's huge. And how are they victims? They are stolen from. They are in abusive relationships -- not where they're violent enough to necessarily get arrested, but they're hurt.
I think that people don't get how big a problem this is. One of the things I like to do when I look at our culture is I like to look at and kind of do a mind experiment...is how would indigenous cultures handle somebody? How would an indigenous culture handle somebody who hurt people and who lied and who didn't care about everybody else? I think that in an indigenous culture they wouldn't get away with it. They might be banned. They might be killed, but they definitely wouldn't get away with it because it's such as small culture -- there's 50 people, 100 people, and it's not like they could get away with it undetected. I do the same thing with billionaires. What would happen if somebody in a band, or a tribe, started accumulating a hundred times more than he, himself needed? They wouldn't put up with that either. They'd think he was crazy or they would say, "Get out of here!" or they'd say, "Just cut it out," and they wouldn't allow it to happen.
So, I think that what we need to do is to really understand these people. It's become pretty clear that there's general agreement that this is a dysfunction or disorder that has corrolates within the brain and brain structure; genetically there are a lot of markers that add up to that. So there's something there. I'll stop.
DS: Well, you know Rob I, again, think it's an important problem, but I think it's important that knowing so little, as you openly admit to, about the problem, we ought to investigate it from every possible angle without jumping quickly to conclusions. And one of the conclusions I hear at least implied in everything you've said is that we're talking about something genetic, from birth, immutable, part of a person from birth to death...
Rob: But wait, wait, wait...that's what the experts say about the 1% that are psychopaths -- that it is genetic; not so for sociopaths, not so...
DS: But if you can't tell who they are and you're looking at the behavior, for example, of billionaires, it is highly unlikely, given the different ways in which people have become billionaires, that there is something genetic in common across the field of billionaires and multi billionaires that unites them as sociopaths. I am and many, many people are a hundred percent in favor of not having any more billionaires, not by massacring them but by taxing them and reigning in their crimes, and forbidding that accumulation of wealth as a political measure; but to equate them and other people doing evil deeds as a category of people -- sociopaths, psychopaths -- that is defined genetically when we haven't examined their genes, is to rush to a conclusions. So when...
Rob: But I haven't though. I haven't said that about billionaires. I think that....although I've always been a fan quotations and there are quotations that go back for thousands of years that a rich man doesn't get rich without breaking some laws.
DS: Well, that's absolutely true, but does everybody who breaks the law do it with a sociopath's particular emotional detachment or do some of them do it in a slightly more normal human emotional way? And is there not perhaps a quite gradual, seamless transition from the most normal and empathetic person to the most sociopathic, and is there a clear place to draw that line? And if there is, is it only genetically or is it behaviorally? Because if you look at the United States Congress and you try to say which ones are the sociopaths and which ones aren't, you can't do it. You can't do it based on their behavior and, if you can't do it based on their behavior, what in the world is the point of trying to do based on their genes?
So I think when you talk about how such a person, based on their behavior, would be handled by an indigenous society, by a tribe of hunter/gatherers, who clearly are not inspecting someone's genes in a laboratory, are basing their decisions on behavior, and you jump to banning or killing as opposed to reforming, which is....reformative justice is such a major part of many indigenous cultures in great contrast to our own where we throw out the trash and we throw out the people, I think, is to jump to a conclusion that I think oversimplifies the problem and it's possible solutions.
Rob: Well though, wait. One of the things that I was really shocked and disturbed to learn, in learning about sociopaths and psychopaths, is that most experts don't believe that there is much reform that can be done with them because of the...I don't know why...but the general consensus is that it's difficult, if not impossible, to reform psychopaths and that they may hide it better, but they're still going to behave in ways that are psychopathic. And absolutely, I totally believe that whenever possible, reformative justice should be the kind that should be applied. People should have a chance, but, I guess, when I talk about what would happen in a tribe, it would be where people are just found to be unreformable.
DS: It just seems to me there are governments in the world that are pushing much better policies on others and there are governments that are pushing much worse; and it's not very likely because one society has more sociopaths in it than the other. It's because of the structures of those governments so that if you...
Rob: I agree with you there.
DS: ...if you educate people to resist lies and propaganda in their personal lives and in their politics, they're going to resist the lies and propaganda being pushed on them by the sociopaths and by the emotionally normal human beings who are making a buck in an evil system where your career advances if you write good propaganda. And so if we learn the skills of resisting political lies, we learn those skills for resisting the political lies, whoever is telling them. If we ban bribery, if we create a system of checks and balances that treats every single public official as a potential sociopath, which is exactly what the founding fathers of this country had in mind, then aren't we building resistance to the sociopaths as well as everybody else who's behaving evilly for whatever reason.
Rob: I love what you're saying. I think that is ideally what we should have, but we don't. I would love to know about any countries that do have a better system for protecting people in that way. I just don't know of it and I'd be very interested in learning about the ones that do that...
DS: Well, the list of countries that have publicly financed election communications, that have verifiable ballot counting, that have bans on bribery, that have not given human rights to corporations...you're talking about a lengthy list of countries. None is paradise and none is...
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
