Isn’t it strange how the mind works? I read with approval Dr Leedom’s latest post. In it she manages to be at once hard-nosed, realistic, and still keep positve. There are very real differences in the brains of those with psychopathic traits, she writes, but the brain is plastic and therein lies just a sliver of hope.
For some reason the opening lines of Martin Amis‘ novel House of Meetings came back to me. It is set in the Soviet Union:
Dear Venus
If what they say is true, and my country is dying, then I think I may be able to tell them why. You see, kid, the conscience is a vital organ, and not an extra like the tonsils or the adenoids.
Amis has also written a stunning nonfiction book about Stalinism, Koba the Dread, which has its own staggering opening:
Here is the second sentence in Robert Conquest‘s The Harvest of Sorrow: Collectivization and the Terror-Famine:
We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter of this book.
That sentence represents 3,020 lives. The book is 411 pages long.
And then I remembered that Amis’ cousin Lucy Partington was murdered by the infamous serial killer Fred West! How could I have forgotten? Amis wrote wrenchingly about it in Experience:
My family cannot understand the extraordinary collision that allowed him to touch our lives, and I have no wish to prolong that contact. But he is here now, in my head; I want him excised. And Frederick West is uncontrollable: he is uncontrollable. For now he will get from me a one-sentence verdict…. West was a sordid inadequate who was trained by his childhood to addict himself to the moment when impotence became prepotence.
Amis clearly knows a thing or two about psychopathy. Consider his compact ‘verdict’:
a sordid inadequate
-
- – this suggests ignoble actions and motives arousing moral distaste and contempt combined with a biological lack
trained by his childhood – dysfunctional modelling and upbringing by his family and surroundings
addict himself – this both highlights the central, pleasurable place wickedness played in his life and emphasises the crucial place of will (he didn’t become addicted he addicted himself)
to the moment when impotence became prepotence – here is the defining characteristic of the psychopath: he lives for the moments when his power or influence over others occur. Deep beneath this is a secret fear/knowledge of his utter unimportance/worthlessness.
Amis, through the imaginative power of the artist, has captured remarkably well the heart of the matter.
He is not an easy read, but it now occurs to me that in a way our theme has been one of his central themes. For example, Lovefraud readers have recently written worried letters about the perpetuation of psychopathy among the young via antisocial social environments and psychopathic genes. Time magazine’s recent cover story is about the phenomenon of youth delinquency in Britain. Amis was ahead of the curve when he wrote about it in his novel Yellow Dog.
His forthcoming book is a collection of essays on 9/11 called The Second Plane. (You can read one essay, ‘The Age of Horrorism’ , here.) The collection has received a lot of negative comment: Amis is a racist, etc. Well I’ve read a lot of Amis’ work and and can’t square with that judgement. (What he says is that Islamofascism produces awful racist feelings in him and he doesn’t know what to do with them.) I wonder whether some of the objections to his book are due to what we at Lovefraud encounter all the time: regular folks’ refusal to believe in human evil. These are the fortunate people who have not fully encountered evil – hope their luck holds out.
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Back to Dr. Leedom’s article – she makes it clear that the small candle of hope she holds out is not for the full-blown psychopaths Amis writes about, but for those with psychopathic traits.
Dr Steve-
I will look up the books- though I think I need to read something uplifting soon….
One point- the dysfuctional family.
I wonder statistically how many psycho come from them versus not.
Mine was/is fawned over. I recall an ex-wife telling me she had found cards he had left from his parents telling him he’d be the next…..
They groomed his ego steadily from early on.
The conscience IS a vital organ, and one I believe is there from birth…or not at all. It can be strengthened or weakened, but it cannot suddenly come out of nowhere when someone is older. Which is why the sentence, “Past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior” makes sense to me.
I remember the Wolf talking about doing something highly unethical within his musical group. He was going to take over the rest of the group from the unsuspecting (even) older man who had started it and hired everyone else long before the Wolf came along.
He told me this and did not bat an eye. Literally said it the way someone else would describe where they were planning on going for dinner.
“Wouldn’t that be unethical?” I asked.
He paused for awhile and then reluctantly agreed it would be, and back-pedaled on the issue. That was last year.
Guess what he did?
Yep. He’s now with the rest of the group, sans the guy who created that band and was its leader. He claimed to me that everyone else walked-out on the guy on a night he just happened not to be there. Well, that’s most likely a lie; he seldom missed a night of “performing.” But he knew by then I was on to his utter lack of conscience and ethics and would have realized the truth if he said he was present at the time.
This lack of ethics is not new for him, either. Two previous bands he’d been in described various power struggles they had with him, saying he had a “hidden agenda” and bad attitude, and complained like he was the band leader.
When he emerged from the ether into my life in 2006 he was a mess: he’d been having an affair with a married women and God knows what other drama. My life was problematic from family illness, but no personal soap operas, by choice. I had the feeling he was trying to get himself better through me, a ladder rung on his way back up. He was so tiny, frail and wan, the opposite of robust in mind, body and spirit. Over the next six months with me he changed dramatically – got healthier, looked much better, came back into himself. Once that happened, he was on the way out the door – and suddenly cruel, cold, calculating and demeaning.
What he doesn’t realize is that those changes for the better did not come from within – so they will not stick around. He can’t make them happen alone. Sure, he may find fresh supply, but eventually he will have to call on his inner resources, heart and goodness.
What doesn’t exist won’t pick up the phone or call back. He’ll be back to square one and may not even realize how his lack of conscience led him there. He can’t stand to be alone for even a few days….there’s just no “there” there .
I have to say that I don’t think a “conscience” is born in anyone, but a learned thing, but like intelligence vs knowledge, the knowledge is a learned thing, and I see intelligence as the “bucket” you are born with to put the knowledge in. Some people have a bigger bucket than others.
I think that while the psychopath may have a genetically smaller “bucket” in which to put a “conscience” (the knowledge of right and wrong and an awareness of doing it) I still think that they have “choices” whether to conform or not.
For example, there are still people in the world who are taught that female circumcision is “good” although our culture sees this as a horrible and painful mutilation and child abuse that no mother would allow her child to undergo for any reason.
People who are taught from birth that this is a good thing, who have in fact, undergone this themselves, who force this on their daughters are doing with with a “clear conscience” and in fact, would feel shame if they did not do this.
The content of our conscience is a learned thing–what is right and wrong in our culture, and our family, and our time. How strongly any construct within the conscience is considered good or evil is also another learned thing.
There are many behaviors in my conscience that were proscribed by my early teaching that I have chosen, as an adult, to reexamine and to “toss out” without I think great damage to my moral structure. In examining my own conscience though, I did NOT toss out “thou shalt not kill.” I did not toss out “thou shalt not steal” but I DID toss out “you have to be nice to everyone no matter what they do to you.”
In the old Jewish Law, a child was considered a child until age 12, and I think this was because a child, though they are developing a conscience and a knowledge of what is right and wrong in their culture, and developing an inner control over this, an inner “brake” on “wrong” behavior, before age 12 really don’t have the concept of “right and wrong” firmly implanted.
After age 12, in that culture, a boy was considered a man and treated as such by the Law. If he killed, he was tried as an “adult” because it was assumed that he had enough maturity to KNOW that it was wrong to kill another human, and should have had enough control over his own behavior to NOT kill.
We are seeing children as young as 9 become killers today, and many in the 12-15 year old age range. There is debate in our society if these killers should be considered adults or “children” in the legal system. Did they KNOW what they were doing was wrong? Should they have been expected to NOT do this thing, since they knew it was wrong? Where do you draw the line between “adult behavior” and “he’s too young to know what he was doing?”
A four year old who knows it is “wrong” to play with matches shouldn’t be sent to jail for life for burning down a house even though he KNEW it was wrong to do so, because he cannot be expected to foresee the consequences of playing with the matches. A 12 year old who deliberately sets fire to a house knowing that the people inside are sleeping and are likely to not get out in time…what about him?
Having watched a psychopath “grow up” from birth to a cold blooded killer incarcerated and still trying to “control” the universe, I honestly don’t know if my son ever had a conscience and then lost it or threw it away. I do know that there are some strong genetic things going on.
When my son was young, he was probably one of the most pleasant children to be around I have ever know. He seemed to want to please adults and performed well in school, was well mannered, not arrogant and not unusually aggressive. He was exceptionally bright and in every gifted and talented program offered, then sent to a Christian school. Until he reached puberty, an early one I might add, I could not have asked for a better child. I have even over heard him “counseling” other children who were troubled over their parent’s divorce, or in one case, the death of a parent, when he was 10 or 11.
Except for a moderate amount of scrapping with his brother when they were pre-school to first grade, he got along well with other children and adults. I can’t ever remember him doing anything nasty to other kids in the neighborhood and they were well enough supervised that I would have known.
At age 11, there was ONE episode that IN RETROSPECT, makes me wonder if the internal P-feelings were there, when he stole some money from my purse and bought a radio from another kid at school that he wanted and I told him we could not afford. Even when caught and confronted by the parents of the other kid, by me and the other boy, he DENIED, DENIED, DENIED and became totally defiant. He ran away from home. After this all “died down” though he resumed his previous behavior and outward expression of his “good attitude.”
All his friends were “the good kids” in the neighborhood until suddenly, over one summer, he stopped hanging out with the “good kids” and started to hang with THUGS. A Jekyll/Hyde switch that caught me totally off guard. He became belligerent to me and totally defiant. I was so taken back by this sudden switch in behavior that I took him to a physician and had him tested for drugs—he came up negative for everything except caffeine.
Did my son have a conscience of some sort and as he reached the “age of accountability” decide to throw out the contents of it, the way I reexamined the contents of my conscience and tossed out some of the things that I looked at and thought did not really apply to reality today? Did he decide to toss out his entire sense of “right and wrong?”
It is obvious to me that he has NO shame now, in fact, he gloats and glories on how horrible his crime of murder was “worse than the cops even know.” He is of course filled with rage toward me in particular because I have thwarted some of his “plans” and in the past turned him in to the police for theft.
Did he ever have any “shame?” When he was younger? I’m not sure because he rarely did anything to cause any problems until he did the Jekyll/Hyde switch at puberty and at that time I saw only rage and defiance.
He apparently still “seeks approval” though, but only from his criminal buddies, and shamelessly manipulated his grandmother and his brother and me. He lives in a fantasy world where he is “King” and even though he is in prison, he dreams of the day he is “free” to prey as he wills on anyone.
He is now a man who is “critically” deficient in only ONE aspect of character–he has no conscience. He is bright, charming if he wants to be, but his lack of conscience, that ONE critical thing out of all the other talents and blessings that he has, makes him a dangerous human being who should never be let loose in society to prey on others. What a waste of talent, intellect and a hundred other “good” things.
Just as Eliot Spritzer, former governor of NY, obviously had talent, intellect, charm, and the ability to accomplish things, lacked the ONE critical element to make him an outstanding man. Conscience. Spritzer was not raised in a ghetto, not raised in poverty, not raised in ignorance, didn’t lack an education, didn’t lack opportunities, neither did my son. For whatever the cause of their lack of conscience, this necessary element to complete a human being, it wasn’t all the things that our society “blames” on producing psychopaths. Psychopaths come in all colors, both sexes, and every economic status, and intellectual capacity.
The fanatics who took over the planes on 9/11 had “clear consciences” and thought they were might think that they were “psychopaths” and “killers” I think that they probably did have consciences, just trained to a “different” right and wrong from our culture. It scares me for our society when people are “trained” to opposing “rights and wrong” to that extent, but I don’t think it is lack of conscience that made them do it, but training in another culture opposed to our way of life here in the US.
There was a time when Christians thought it was “right” to invade Islamic countries (the Crusades) because the Islamic countries were “against God”—now the shoe is on the other foot. We no longer think it is “right” to invade them for religious purposes, but they think it is right to invade and attack us because we are “evil.”
Oxdrover,
I totally agree with you that training that leads to terrorism. THere are so many people involved that they can’t all be psychopaths. I think that for every type of “us vs. them” attack, there are the common people who get trained to do the dirty work, and the psychopaths that sit at a comfortable distance and orchestrate the whole thing.
I think that whoever gets brainwashed into perpetrating these crazy acts is just looking for something to believe in or some kind of certainty in life and the psychos take advantage of that. It doesn’t excuse it at all, but I think you are on to something, Oxdrover when you say that they had clear consciences. They were probably just so out of touch with the reality of what is right and wrong that they thought they were doing what was right.
By the way, I have a problem with anyone who says that they have “racist feelings” and doesn’t know what to do about it. Like he has no control over it. If Amis really knew about psychopathy, he would know that anyone from any country, any religion, and any background can be a psychopath. It is part of the nature of psychopathy that P’s use whatever they have at their disposal to gain power and abuse it. That includes religion. People on this blog have mentioned quite a few times how their BM was “very religious.” It is one of their ploys. It does not belong to Islam, it exists in every religion. So there is no reason to feel “racist” towards any certain group because it happens and has happened at many points in history with different religions. He, as a “scholar” should know that.
Ariadne,
It isn’t that these terrorists don’t “Know right from wrong”–they DO, but “their right=our wrong”–to THEM they ARE “doing RIGHT. To US they are doing “WRONG.” Their culture and the fanatics that are using their religion as a CLUB to hurt others are teaching them a (by our thinking) convoluted standard of right and wrong.
If you went back and met your own Christian ancestors from the 1200s they would most likely burn you at the stake. They would think that they were doing right because you believed the world was round. They believed that thought in your head was DANGEROUS to them. It proved you were EVIL. It proved you were bewitched by Satan and to protect themselves and the TRUTH you must be killed.
The radical Islamists believe that our way of life is DANGEROUS to them, and an affront to God and that they are doing “God’s work” to stamp out the evil creatures that we are so that we will not pollute the world.
There may be people in the ruling groups that are Ps, and know that they are manipulating the “common man” with religion to do their work and kill others, or they may be like the Apostle Paul who was obeying the Jewish law, and with a clear conscience helped to stone St. Stephen. Later, St. Paul realized that what he had done was Wrong, but at the time, he thought he was doing right!
I am sure some of the people who were involved in t he Crucifixion of Christ thought that they were doing right, even though the Pharisees (whom I consider Ps) had incited the population to cry out for his Crucifixion for his “crimes” of calling the Pharisees heretics. The Jewish leaders were afraid that Jesus would convince the population what scoundrels they were and so he had to be “silenced.” So they trumped up a charge, hired one of his “friends” to betray him, and hired liars for witnesses. Typical P behaviors, look at Eliot Spritzer’s persecution of various “political enemies, ” and threats against them.
I admit I am “prejudiced”—against fanatics of any race, religion or culture–I hate black bigots, white bigots, Islamic bigots, Christian bigots, and any kind of bully of any kind regardless of what their agenda is. I’m against radical left wing political views, I’m against right wing conservative views.
But I respect your right to believe anything in the world that you want to believe, as long as you do not forcibly try to inflict your views and opinions on ME or anyone else.
Where things get “sticky” is in international situations. If one group in country A is “wiping out” another group (genocide) does Country B have a duty to invade country A and put a stop to this behavior? Germany never attacked the US, but did we have a duty as a nation to try and protect the people that they were killing in their own country?
I know that there are 1000 answers to the above questions and I don’t have them all. I wish I did. I wish SOMEONE did.
When I was 18 I THOUGHT I did, and all things were “black and white” and now things are some shade of gray to me, with very few black and white issues. I no longer feel I can change the whole world. I try to look at as many sides of an issue as I can and if a decision on my part is required to make it as well as I can. To behave in a morally upright way as much as humanly possible. To “do unto others” is a way that I can face myself in the mirror, but at the same time, not to tattoo DOOR MAT on myself either.
Ariadne – To be fair, Amis doesn’t say that he does anything racists, he says he gets these feelings. This is involuntary – what is voluntary is what one does (in his case write a series of esays trying to understand it all.
OxDrover – I recently spoke with a teacher of a boy of 12 whose father said, “My son has never told a lie” and seemed genuinely to believe that. The teacher said to me that she has never heard the boy tell the truth! A little example. Teacher: “Stop chewing gum”. Student: “I’m not chewing gum.” Deny, deny, deny. It does make one wonder about the status of the ‘truths’ he tells Dad.
Oxdrover wrote:
“I have to say that I don’t think a “conscience”? is born in anyone, but a learned thing, but like intelligence vs knowledge, the knowledge is a learned thing, and I see intelligence as the “bucket”? you are born with to put the knowledge in. Some people have a bigger bucket than others.”
I agree up to a point. I actually had an argument with one of my friends not too long ago about nature vs. nuture when it came to the human conscience. I believe that most of us — 99% or more — are born with the capacity to feel normal things like compassion, empathy, sympathy, etc. for other people. But I do think that that for some clinical reason (I see it a lot in Aspbergers people), the conscience just is not there. They have to be “told” what is right and wrong and how to act accordingly to fit in with society.
If you met my ex’s family, you’d know that he was raised in a good environment with caring, nurturing people who did everything they could to set a good example. But he is lacking that certain base level of conscience. I’ve known the man for years, and I have never seen him authentically “care” about anyone, unless it somehow benefitted him.
So … yes and no on this one. I do believe there are people who are essentially born without a working conscience.
Dr. Steve,
Sorry if I sounded too angry in my post, I know it is a complicated subject. I know that a lot of people might get prejudiced thoughts looking at the issue of “one religion/way of life vs. another” but the fact that this kind of violence has happened so many times in history should be enough to stop those feelings.
Trying to find out why it is happening in this particular case is an admirable pursuit and I guess his gut reactions to it might have encouraged him to do so in the first place. But grouping 1.2 billion people together into one “race” is certainly a stretch. There is no one Muslim culture and no one way of thinking for all Muslims.
Sorry, this is getting way off-topic. Anyway, very interesting thread and it is probably true that a lot of the critics of his work just haven’t experienced the kind of evil that we have so they think he’s going comic-book-villian on us. If they only knew. . .
Dr. Steve,
I too have seen parents who thought their “little Johnny” did no wrong, usually those are parents who refuse to believe the reports of teachers, neighbors, and other children.
Fortunately, my “little Peter Perfect” wasn’t one of those kids. I lived in a neighborhood where all of us stay-at-home mommies monitored the entire pack of kids about the same age roaming the neighborhood.
Until he hit puberty he WAS this “perfect” kid except for that ONE instance of theft, and we lived in such a small town I would have known if he hadn’t been, the fact that I did live in a small town was why I even knew that something was wrong when he showed up at home with a radio he had asked me to buy for him, and I told him we couldn’t “afford” it. I immediately knew something was wrong, and the next day when the neighbors showed up with their little boy who had “sold” it to my son we confronted my son, all of us, and even with the evidence in front of him it was DENY DENY DENY—which was SHOCKING to me, because he had NEVER done anything like that before.
Sometimes now I wonder if his “perfection” wasn’t somehow pathological…why did he try so hard to please? Why did he never get into the things every other kid in the neighborhood was involved in? He seemed to be the JOY of every teacher he ever had, the “best friend” of all the other kids, and all that one could wish for in a kid—but something was wrong for sure? When he did “flip flop” into every parent’s night mare from every parent’s dream child, it happened so “suddenly” that I actually took him for a drug test (you couldn’t buy them over the counter then) and he came up clean as a whistle.
Over night he dumped his “good friends” that he had been friends with since before first grade, and started hanging with thugs, being openly defiant to me, and before long (about 3 months) I had NO control or influence over this kid at all.
Nevernever land, I think we are both saying the same thing, but our “definitions” of conscience are not quite the same.
My definition of “conscience” is the grief/shame felt by doing something you have been taught is WRONG.
Intelligence is the CAPACITY for education to one degree or another, but a VERY intelligent person can be totally ignorant if they are not TAUGHT and educated.
A person born with a CAPACITY for a conscience can be TAUGHT to do what you and I would call “evil” and not feel bad about it because he thought what he was doing was OK. I don’t’ think any child is born with the KNOWLEDGE of what is good and what is not because that “right and wrong” vary with culture and society, time and place.
In the US before the Civil War some people thought that slavery was ok, right or wrong, but each one thought that their view was “right” Today, we think slavery is WRONG. Period. In the middle ages people were burned at the stake for thinking the world was round, and people thought that was RIGHT to do so. Of course today if you think it is flat, people may laugh at you, but no one is going to burn you at the stake.
So really, I think all cultures change the definition of what is right or wrong as they progress or regress. The Romans thought murder was “wrong” yet they thought it was fine to have people torn to death in the arena for entertainment because they were “Christians.” Or to pay gladiators to fight to the death for their amusement.
I do think you can take a child and teach it that murder is right and that theft is right and that they will do those things and not feel that what they do is “wrong” or feel any guilt about it. Just as St. Paul participated in the stoning of St. Stephen thinking he was upholding the law of God, later to realize he was not, anyone can be taught that black is white and right is wrong.
Some of the problems with conscience is that Ps do not accept the “right or wrong” of ANY culture, only the “what I want is what I will do” attitude of all despots regardless of the culture in which they were raised.
Just as you can be “Ignorant” because you don’t have the capacity to learn much, or you can be ignorant even though you are very bright and have a great capacity to learn but no one ever taught you, I think a child can have no conscience because he didn’t have the capacity to hold one, and the other is that no one gave him one by teaching him right from wrong appropriate for his culture. How could any child learn that it is wrong to steal and take something from another child unless we (society and parents) taught him?