A reader asks:“Just curious, why would anyone wish to be, or become a psychopath ? Is the media responsible in any way ?”
That’s a good question. Yes, I think the media plays a role in this, but the media also reflects what goes on in society.
It’s not easy to give a final answer.
But I’ll give a few of the reasons that I think have at least a partial role.
In a vast society such as the one we live in (the ones we live in) it can be hard to control and regulate behavior in the population. So we instill rigid laws that everyone must abide by.
However, man’s nature is not all good, and there will always be urges towards what we would call anti-social behavior: Egotism, violence, excessive sexual and other kinds of gratification, greed and laziness.
When these urges are being suppressed to the extent where even death becomes ‘unnatural’ to us, these urges will tend to manifest in other ways, in ‘deviant’ ways. Psychopaths are good examples of a minority who don’t have the inner mechanisms to be self-suppressive (so to speak).
Since we’re talking about human nature per se, it is not odd that the few who represent all those things that are not allowed get the attention of the rest of society.
That’s one factor, but it can’t stand alone since there’re lots of criminals who are not psychopaths.
The next thing that comes to mind is ‘The Meaning of Life’.
When you live out the majority of your life in the service of someone else, working, learning how to live up to the expectations of society and then fitting in with all those rules and laws etc., it is natural for most to have a ‘higher goal’ or a ‘higher meaning’ that’ll urge you to keep going and keep abiding by the rules.
We used to find that in the ‘higher meaning’ of religion. Until very recently – less than 2 centuries ago – there was no such thing as not being religious. Everybody ‘knew’ there was a Heaven and a Hell, they knew there were angels and devils, and that these helped keeping people’s minds on track for what is the ‘greater good’.
The angels and gods were the carrot that kept you wanting to be good, and the demons and devils were those who threatened you with pending doom, hell and suffering and all that.
Among humans there were the witches and the sorcerers.
We don’t have such scare-crows or witches today. And we need somebody to blame. The choice has lately fallen on the psychopaths because common criminals are so plentiful, so common, they can no longer fill that role. We need something ‘exotic’.
That is the fear factor of it all. But fear has two sides and man has always had a fascination for ‘evil’ and ‘bad’. It is linked to what we associate with rebellion because all rebels of all times have been called ‘evil’ or ‘bad’ by their representative governments, those in power.
In our culture we can see it with ideas such as the ‘lone wolf’, in Western movies. But our present time has it’s equivalents.
Think of how many movies are made over the theme of the anti-hero?
The anti-hero represents the loner who plays by his own rules and does good that way, we love him especially when we see our governements can’t take care of evil in society.
A present day example is ‘Dexter’, the TV series.
And now we’re getting closer to the heart of the matter: Anti-heroes and regular heroes share a lot of traits. They’re resourceful, efficient, mentally strong and even physically strong (or tend to be), they don’t suffer from common human weaknesses such as fear and self-questioning, remorse or guilt. And they always know what to do, they emanate strong personality and are assured in their righteousness to do what they have to do.
To a lot of people psychopaths represent all of this. Especially for those who are damaged, who have been abused by those who should’ve taken care of them from early on in their lives. Those who have lost belief and faith in society’s ability to keep them safe or in society’s goodness. They are the most vulnerable towards falling prey to the false idea of the psychopath’s greatness.
They become psychopath wannabes.
Those of us who are psychopaths but who also have a decent intellect know we’re not good or special in the sense that we should be seen as the savior of mankind. We know what we are and we have no illusions in that regard.
But a few of us may decide to try and do some good, and we can do so without any problems because we don’t have a value system, no morals (wanting to be bad is not less a moralistic way of thinking than wanting to be good is, and to the psychopath it’s all the same. We run by what others call ‘instant gratification’, and there’re many ways to gain that. It’s idiotic and ignorant to think you can only be happy if you do bad. It’s the thinking of a Psychopath Wannabe. So yes, some of us may choose to try something new, to do good f.ex. by joining a forum such as this and tell others the truth about what and how we really are.
But as you can see, people do not like their illusions to be taken away from them, and so they fight back (slander, accusations, etc.).
To a psychopaths that’s all in a days’ work, of course, and in reality we atually thrive from such ‘attention’. That’s how ‘deviant’ or ‘sick’ our emotional preferences are. We know that all while the wannabes throw mud at us, imagining in their little minds that they’re hurting us, they’re just showing they haven’t understood a single thing and – most satisfying of all – they’re hurting themselves, because the point of it all is: You can not hurt me with words!! Why? Because there is nothing here to hurt! My emotions are ‘shallow’ (for lack of a better word), it takes a LOT more to get to me. I’ve even been subjected to what some would call torture, and that too didn’t deter me. It hurt, physically, sure, but so what? We all hurt SOMETIMES.
Or maybe we don’t. Psychopaths are said to have no emotions, and that’s not true of course. But we do have fewer kinds of emotions, and those that we do have are apparently both of lower intensity and are much more easily controlled by ourselves than the same kinds of emotions are with the normal human being or the Antisocial.
Psychopathy is nothing to strive for, and it cannot be learned, adopted or created (other than through physically intrusive operational means).
