The Psychopathic Perspective

I’ve previously written about social predators, people whose primary mode of life consists, not of creating value, but of transferring value created by other people to themselves—

Psychopaths are one species of social predators. These are people who have no empathy, no conscience, and a fundamentally manipulative way of interacting with others. There is a cluster of other, related traits associated with psychopathy. Psychopaths comprise an estimated 1-3% of the population. But there are probably many more people who are generally manipulative or predatory but don’t have enough of the psychopathic traits to qualify as psychopaths.

In my previous post, I talked about why social predators are charismatic. Here, I talk about what it is like to be a social predator, and why social predators are unfixable. I’m not an expert on these things, but I’m going to speculate anyway.

1. The Psychopathic Perspective

I once heard of a test to supposedly tell if you think like a psychopath. (I can’t vouch for its scientific validity.) It starts with a story. A woman met an attractive man at the funeral for her own mother. They had a good conversation, but she didn’t get the man’s contact information. A few days later, the woman murdered her own sister. Why?

When you hear this, perhaps you start imagining scenarios, like maybe the sister disapproved of the woman starting a relationship with the man, maybe they had an altercation over it, etc. But no. The answer is: the woman killed her sister because she was hoping that she would then be able to run into that man again at the funeral.

That’s meant to illustrate how psychopaths think. Psychopaths will callously inflict enormous harm on others for trivial reasons. People are fascinated by psychopathy partly because it is hard for normal people to understand their frame of mind. How could a person do the sort of things psychopaths do? Do they not understand the harm they are causing? Do they, e.g., not understand that other people experience fear, pain, etc.?

As far as I understand it, social predators are aware of the pain and other harm they cause. They know that other people suffer when attacked, defrauded, etc. They just don’t care about this. If you think you can’t relate to this, I have two ways of helping you relate.

Animals

If you’re like most people, you actually have an easy way of understanding how psychopaths feel about other people. It’s the same as the way you feel about almost all members of other species. Over 95% of people in America are meat-eaters, and almost all of the meat they eat is from factory farms. Almost all of these people know perfectly well that animals suffer great harm as a result of this practice. They may not realize how much pain and suffering is involved (perhaps because they deliberately avoid this information), but people surely know that farm animals suffer harms much greater than the benefits we are getting. You probably know that too. But you probably just don’t care.

Torturing and killing another being just so you can have the pleasure of munching on their body parts really is comparable to the case of murdering someone just so you can run into a love interest at the funeral.

NPCs

The other way into the psychopathic mindset is to play computer role playing games. These games have loose story lines, in which one or more characters are controlled by humans (“player characters”), while other characters are controlled by the computer (“non-player characters” or “NPCs”).

NPCs, by the way, tend to be one-dimensional characters with a limited repertoire of behaviors, which is how they became a modern metaphor for people with overly conformist political views. But that’s beside the present point.

The way I relate to NPCs—and, I assume, the way most players relate to them—is the same as the way psychopaths relate to real people. They are purely means to my ends in the game. If killing an NPC gets my character any net advantage, however slight, I kill the NPC. Sometimes, I kill them just for the heck of it. I don’t take anything they say seriously, and I choose my responses to them based purely on what will cause them to do what I want.

(Aside: In one game, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the player has the option of following either the “light side” or the “dark side of the force”. In the latter option, one gets to do many astoundingly evil things. The most evil example is when your character has the option to force one of his companions to murder that companion’s own best friend. Just for the heck of it. That’s the most evil player action that I’ve seen in a game.)

Of course, there is a good reason for all this: I do not take into account NPCs’ feelings or interests because I know that NPCs have no feelings or interests, because, by definition, there is no one behind them. My interaction with other players in multiplayer games is completely different.

Psychopaths are like players of a role-playing game where they regard everyone else as an NPC. You might still find this hard to relate to, since the psychopaths don’t literally think the rest of us are NPCs (they don’t deny that other people are conscious). But they still feel about other people the way we feel about NPCs. Psychopaths, by the way, in addition to lacking conscience, etc., also generally experience shallow affect. This is also in line with treating real life like a game and real people like NPCs.

Again, psychopaths are only a subset of social predators, and other predators may have stronger emotions. But I think “treating real people like NPCs” sums up the manipulator’s way of life.

2. Why Are Predators Unfixable?

One psychiatrist I heard about said that over the course of his career, he has never successfully treated a manipulative person. This was a very successful, high-powered psychiatrist with decades of clinical experience—and yet he cannot help manipulators. If he can’t do it, probably few if any people in the world can help either. Why?

Biology

My previous post points to an explanation: social predation is an adaptation. These individuals are biologically programmed for preying on society. That is their ecological niche. Of course, most people are designed for mutually beneficial cooperation. A social species could not work if all or most members were social predators, any more than an ecology could work in which all or most of the animals were predators. But once there are people cooperating and producing value, there is a niche for a few people to live off the production of others.

If this is right, we would expect it to be, if not impossible, very difficult to train these people not to prey on others. It would be like trying to train a beaver not to build dams. Or perhaps a better analogy would be training a person to renounce sex—which has in fact been done, especially in religious contexts, but only a small minority of people can be so trained. Similarly, probably only a small minority of those with the “social predator genes” can be trained out of it.

The manipulator’s perspective

The other explanation is an explanation from within the manipulator’s perspective: how do things seem to them, and given that, why would therapy not change their behavior?

Fundamentally, manipulators don’t see other people as real persons. They regard other people as resources, like NPCs. If you’re playing a role-playing game, could one of the NPCs in the game give you effective therapy? Probably not, because you don’t have an attitude of taking the NPC’s statements seriously in the first place. Everything the NPC says is just part of the game, and you just have to figure out what you’re supposed to say in response to get whatever it is that you’re supposed to get from this NPC. E.g., if you have to role play having some kind of ethical conversion to get some in-game prize, then you do that. But you don’t actually change any of your attitudes.

Psychological therapy generally uses a personal connection between the patient and the therapist as a way of influencing the patient’s thoughts and attitudes. But social predators don’t form real connections; they role-play personal connections to get what they want.

3. Why Not Predate?

Social predators leave a wake of destruction wherever they go, partly because other people are not prepared for them. They often come across as charming and likable when people meet them, and most people have a default attitude of trust in other people, unless and until those others prove themselves untrustworthy. So the predator causes a lot of suffering before people figure out what they are. The predator (assuming they don’t get arrested) then just moves on to new people to exploit.

Ted Bundy was a remarkable case, who was able to charm even people who had seen the evidence of his murders; see my earlier post. He managed to get a new wife while he was on trial for murdering multiple women; he even charmed the judge in his trial.

But predators don’t have good lives; they don’t have lives that a normal person could envy, once properly understood. They can’t form lasting, meaningful relationships with other individuals, because they fundamentally don’t see people as people, and they don’t have the positive social emotions that form a large part of our experience (they can have negative social emotions, though—envy, desire for power and status, etc.) Close relationships with other individuals are the most important thing in human life that gives normal people a sense of meaning and satisfaction, so social predators are pretty much missing the main thing that makes life worthwhile.

(Some people, however, may be incomplete predators, such as people who have some loyalty to their families, but prey on everyone else. This might be the attitude of mafia bosses. I suspect, however, that even their relationships with the few people they care about are more selfish and less genuine than the relationships of normal people.)

4. What to Do

What can be done about social predators? On the societal level, we need norms and institutions that reduce the incentives for predatory behavior. Whenever we give someone a privilege or power, we always need to ask, “How would this be abused by a bad faith actor?” There always need to be penalties for abusing the system. That is of course why we have punishments for theft, assault, and so on. But we also need to think about (what most people tend to overlook) what happens when the people who are responsible for stopping crime are themselves the bad actors. E.g., there have to be punishments for police, judges, and politicians who abuse the system, just as we have for private citizens who abuse society’s trust. Because it definitely will be abused. Every role in every institution will sometimes be occupied by predators.

On an individual level, all you can really do about social predators is report their crimes, then completely avoid them. You cannot fix them, and there is no good to be obtained by interacting with them.