Amanda Marcotte on Jennifer Kahn’s story on budding child psychopaths:
In the piece, Kahn compares psychopathy to autism, not because the two disorders are similar in their manifestation, but because psychologists believe they’re both neurological disorders, i.e. based in the brain and really something that the sufferer can’t help. This caused me to note on Twitter that even though the conditions are similar in this way, autism garners sympathy and psychopathy doesn’t. In fact, most social discourse around psychopathy is still demonizing and utterly unsympathetic to the parents, who are often blamed for the condition. It struck me as an interesting logic hole in our cultural narrative around mental illness, since the usual assumption is that sympathy for mental illness is directly correlated with inability to control your problems. Psychopaths give lie to that narrative. Turns out that we sympathize more with austistic people than psychopaths because we feel empathy for the struggles of autism, but psychopaths just make us angry. There’s no logic or rationality in play, just pure emotional reasoning, and the parents of psychopaths are the victims.
Assuming that psychopathy is a hardwired developmental disorder, we should feel great sympathy for the parents of psychopaths. If psychopathy is hardwired, it’s not their fault their kids are unable to feel empathy.
Kahn’s story makes it clear how horribly these parents suffer. Their children are manipulative, violent, and potentially dangerous. As long as they live, these parents will have to defend themselves against the predations of their offspring and worry that their kid is going to hurt other people. Kahn follows one couple whose psychopathic son keeps threatening his younger brother’s life. They suspect their son has a horrible defect that will destroy their family, but they can’t kick him out, because that’s not what families do. To add to their burdens, society blames the parents for their son’s condition.
Still, it doesn’t make much sense to feel sorry for psychopaths themselves. They’re not suffering. As Kahn explains, psychopaths are virtually immune to emotional pain and anxiety, and insensitive to punishment in general. Normal children feel anxious when they disappoint their parents, and therefore they have a built-in incentive to behave better. Psychopaths don’t care:
“Most kids, if you catch them stealing a cookie from the jar before dinner, they’ll look guilty,” Frick says. “They want the cookie, but they also feel bad. Even kids with severe A.D.H.D.: they may have poor impulse control, but they still feel bad when they realize that their mom is mad at them.” Callous-unemotional children are unrepentant. “They don’t care if someone is mad at them,” Frick says. “They don’t care if they hurt someone’s feelings.” Like adult psychopaths, they can seem to lack humanity. “If they can get what they want without being cruel, that’s often easier,” Frick observes. “But at the end of the day, they’ll do whatever works best.” [NYT]
If the developmental model is correct, psychopaths can’t help being psychopaths, but they are very much in control of each specific act of deceit or violence they commit, perhaps even moreso than most of us. Psychopathic children are perfectly capable of following the rules when it is in their interest to do so. Another expert on callous unemotional (C.U.) children (potential budding psychopaths) explains:
“The thing that’s jumped out at me most is the manipulativeness that these kids are showing,” he said, shaking his head in wonder. “They’re not like A.D.H.D. kids who just act impulsively. And they’re not like conduct-disorder kids, who are like: ‘Screw you and your game! Whatever you tell me, I’m going to do the opposite.’ The C.U. kids are capable of following the rules very carefully. They just use them to their advantage.” [NYT]
Mental and developmental disorders can be valid excuses for bad behavior. If a person literally can’t control their actions, it is unfair to blame them for what they do. But psychopaths are very much in control. To the extent that any of us have free will, and therefore moral responsibility, psychopaths have what we’ve got.
We might feel sorry for psychopaths because they’re missing out on the deep human connections that make life truly worthwhile. A psychopath would laugh at us, though. Human connection may be what makes our lives worthwhile, but a psychopath would argue that her life is complete as it is. She might say that we’re the unlucky ones who are held back from seizing what we truly want because of our weird hangups. As much as we feel she’s wrong, it’s hard to prove the point.
One tantalizing case study suggests that not everyone with psychopath-style brain damage gravitates to a life of crime and violence. James Fallon is a neuroscientist who discovered in the course of his research that he tests positive for all the genes and neuroanatomical features of violent psychopaths. (Video.)
It so happens that Fallon’s family tree is full of murderers. When Fallon asked the people closest to him whether he had psychopathic tendencies, they readily agreed. They said he was glib and superficially charming but hopelessly lacking in empathy. Yet, he’s not a violent man. He has spent nearly 40 years studying the brain, doing research that might lead to cures for diseases.
Fallon was a hyper-religious kid who won Catholic Boy of the Year in New York. Maybe a strict system of duty-based morality enabled him to act ethically even without a natural sense of empathy. I’m not arguing that religion is necessary or sufficient for anyone to live a moral life, but then again, Catholic ethics is a duty-based framework that attempts to formulate rules for behavior rooted in a rational grasp of duty rather than the visceral experience of empathy. So, Catholicism might have been a fortuitous background for Fallon, given his disability.
As Fallon explains in a lecture, once he learned he was a pro-social psychopath, he even resolved to act as if he were a more empathetic person because he felt that’s what a good friend and husband would do.
The best we can do is dispassion regarding psychopaths, rather than compassion. We should understand that some people are inherently predatory and know that we should be on our guard against them.
Social shunning is the worst thing we can do to someone with a mental or developmental disability. Even from a purely self-interested perspective, we should embrace people with other mental problems because our acceptance makes them more functional and less dangerous. (If indeed they were ever a threat, which the vast majority weren’t.) Ironically, neglect and ostracism can make people who were never dangerous to begin with into threats.
With psychopaths, it’s almost the reverse. Our acceptance makes them more dangerous because they have more opportunities to prey upon us. Our “treatments” just make them better psychopaths. The best we can do in a free society is to recognize psychopaths and warn each other about them.
Psychopaths are always with us. We should feel sorry for ourselves that we have to put up with them, and sorry for all their victims including their parents, but not sorry for the psychopaths themselves.
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