I.H.: I finish the book on a hopeful note because I think the struggle between this minority and the normal majority, in terms of human history is really a quite recent thing. That is I think from the beginning of the cultural revolution we began to discover the means because societies began to change radically.
When people I say if you go back two hundred years, 80% of the population in the world was living below what we would call the poverty line. Abject poverty where people were struggling everyday just to feed themselves so under those circumstances it's virtually impossible for people to get educated, to organize, to organize politically, to organize in civil society, to resist tyranny and so I end the book on a hopeful note by pointing to the people in the world today who are struggling and successfully struggling against tyranny and against this minority.
And I think in the long term, it is a good news story and I think particularly when we begin to realize now that we have the scientific knowledge that this minority exists, we can begin to formulate how we deal with them and how we build a more humane and a fair, more equitable, and more peaceful world.
So that's how I end the book, with quotes from various figures who are currently struggling and succeeding in the struggle against this minority.
R.K.: Okay so I'm going to kind of go in to more detail within some of the aspects of the book. As just about everybody who talks about psychopaths describes, you discuss how psychopaths don't have a conscience.
I should take a step back, you don't mention sociopaths. Why not? Why do you just, you refer to the three categories: narcissist, paranoids, and the psychopaths. But from what I understand, sociopaths are a huge additional group, described in DSM-V as the antisocial personality disorder.
I.H.: So I'm using the term psychopath and I would say Rob that there's a lot that isn't known as yet about these conditions and there's a lot about them that psychiatrists and psychologists are still trying to learn about these disorders and even in terms of the definitions there's also a lot that we don't understand and a lot of controversy and a lot of things that are still being argued about.
So for example as you mention that the sociopaths and psychopaths, sociopath is in DSM as you say, psychopath isn't. But within, I'm concentrating on psychopaths because I think the psychopaths and the absence of conscience of the psychopath is one of the most dangerous facets across all of the personality disorders and so researching psychopathy at the moment, the traditional way of looking at psychopaths and understanding psychopaths is based on Robert Hare's diagnostic which is really a part of that diagnostic is behavior of violence. A previous history of violence. So a lot of the research has been done on prison populations but there's another line of thinking now that is happening, another line of research which goes back really to the original Hervey Clerkey's original book on psychopaths which is less based on violent behavior and more based on the absence of conscience.
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