Good article by a sociopath in this weekend’s WSJ

I know I'm late to the discussion; I just saw this thread.

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Originally Posted by SAWBONES

It's been my longstanding observation that sociopathy has been steadily, and lately also rapidly, increasing in Western society, ever since perhaps the end of WWII.

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My grandfather was a sociopath if ever there was one, and while it made growing up a little harder on me, it also makes it easier to spot them.

Splitting hairs perhaps, but I sometimes wonder if there's more of it, or if instead people used to hide it or attempt to work around it more? It's been getting easier and easier to find other people that are really similar to yourself, and I think that's a really mixed blessing when it comes to ideas about personal accountability and license. I'm 45, and I've been watching the masks and the gloves coming off more and more as I age.

My thoroughly amateur speculation on the topic is that you have natural sociopaths- those who's brains don't work properly; and those who never grew out of the natural tendency of children to be sociopathic.
Our current society is doing very little about the latter problem, and may even be enabling and exacerbating it.

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Originally Posted by Totem Polar

Worth a read, to see things from the inside. I find myself at once interested, and feeling (go figure) some empathy for this individual, while also seeing into the effort to normalize sociopathy, psychopathy, and antisocial personality disorder. As someone who has seen first hand the destruction that a “snake in a suit” can wreak upon entire organizations and/or corporations—let alone individuals—I have very mixed emotions reading the article. I’ll pick up her book when it comes out, because, knowledge is power. JMO, OMMV, FWIW, etc.

https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/...opath-68ebe08b

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I read this article as well. First time I've ever seen a woman blame her actions on her lack of feelings. That made me laugh.

I read it credulously at first, but then I realized if she really was a sociopath, then some parts of that article had to have been lies. My money is on the story about stealing John Lennon's glasses.

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Originally Posted by JJN

I read it credulously at first, but then I realized if she really was a sociopath, then some parts of that article had to have been lies.

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There's no difference between the two.

There is only what is useful for her desired outcome and what is not.

It's worthwhile to look at a sociopath's function to learn what you can about them from it. But you have to understand that their only concern is whether or not a particular action will get them what they want, whatever that might be.

Just reading this. IIRC and I'm not vouching for its legitimacy or bothering to research it more, it seems that imaging suggests that sociopaths/psychopaths:

1. Have trouble recognizing emotions in faces in experiments where emotional faces are flashed for recognition of such. Normals can do that very quickly.

2. There are pretty well know facial recognition / emotional processing areas of the brain and theirs' seem smaller by a significant degree.

3. They are able to recognize weakness in people very quickly, faster than normals - in stimulus exposures of people's gait. The stimuli have been chose from those predators say they would chose as victims. Normals and sociopaths/psychopaths agree on victimhood but the later are so much faster in correctly identifying potential victims.

Causality for such brain differences - who knows. Such people may serve society as aggressive killers in the bodily or social/business sense when needed and thus they continue to breed.

This may be all psycho/neuro babble but it seems reasonable science. Are there degrees of such - maybe. Not interested in a professional data base deep dive - retired, I am.