Back in June, I came across a post by Linda Cockburn on her blog, Living the Good Life. Linda studies environmental law and her blog focuses on issues of sustainability. Its tagline is “Our ongoing attempts to live as sustainably as possible.”
The post that I came across is entitled “I am angry!” and, in it, Linda expresses her despair about the state of the world and the futility of placing hope in and comforting ourselves with small daily pro-sustainability lifestyle changes in the face of destructiveness on such a massive scale. Like many who have wrestled with this viewpoint, Linda appears to have been influenced by Derrick Jensen, since the post features an image of the graphic novel he produced along with Stephanie McMillan, As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Stay In Denial.
I was moved by what Linda was expressing in that post so I left a comment to share with her the idea that psychopathology may play a key role and to let her know about the field of ponerology, which has shed so much light on issues like this for me.
Linda responded right away with a comment that showed interest in those topics.
Then, a few weeks later, I got an email from Linda. She said my comment had thrown her off on a tangent looking into the ideas I had mentioned in the comment. She also said she was inspired to write an article about ponerology and how screening for psychopaths might improve workplaces, governments, the environment and the world at large. She wanted to interview me for this article.
A couple weeks after that I received a set of interview questions from Linda.
At that time, I was under the impression that Linda was writing an article for her blog that would just consist of the text of her questions and my responses. So I answered the questions at great length, thinking these would make up the bulk of her post. Only later, after I had responded, did I learn that she was actually writing a feature article for an Australian magazine called The Monthly, whose readers share an interest in law, politics and management.
Linda was then kind enough to share the early drafts of her article with me to get my feedback. As her editing process continued, though, it became clear to her that – perhaps because I had answered the questions having misunderstood their purpose or perhaps for other reasons – the information from the interview wasn’t well-suited to this particular article that she was writing, after all. However, since her questions had helped to surface some valuable information, we both agreed that it made sense for me to just post the interview, in its entirety, here on this blog.
As of this writing, Linda’s article is not yet published. If and when it is, I will link to it here.
So, without further adieu, here are Linda’s questions and my responses. (more…)
In the past few years, the media has seemed to feature increased coverage regarding the influence of psychopathy and sociopathy. This website was started both because this increased media coverage helped validate the importance of the issue and because there was a need for those media stories on the issue to be more widely promoted. The increased coverage is represented throughout this site, including in our online news and television news sections.
Still, I don’t know what it says about the media that the source providing the most frequent and insightful coverage about psychopathy and sociopathy may be a satirical newspaper, The Onion.
Recently, I’ve seen several examples of The Onion’s use of humor to shine a light on this still too-often-overlooked topic. (more…)
Last summer, while searching the web for ponerology-related information and people, I came across a website discussing a movie called I Am Fishead – or, cleverly, I Am <Fishead(.
It said the film is about corporate corruption and the role that psychopathy may have played in it.
The title, supposedly, refers to a Chinese saying that a “fish stinks from the head,” implying that this movie might be an exploration of how the dysfunction of our hierarchical society originates from those at the top of the pyramid.
Well, of course, I was very intrigued as I have not only dedicated a great deal of time and energy to learning about this topic, but specifically to advocating for more – and more forms of – education of the public about it.
My interest grew even stronger since I related to the background of co-director/co-producer of the film, Misha Votruba, a former psychiatrist who moved on from that career to more creative endeavors, eventually circling back to focus on a psychiatric topic – psychopathy – from a more activist perspective as a filmmaker.
The other co-director/co-producer of I Am Fishead is Vaclav Dejcmar, an economist and businessman with a lot of experience in investing and the financial markets. This background makes him an ideal complement to Misha Votruba in making this film that includes a focus on the overlap of psychiatry and our economic systems.
I finally got around to watching the film and I have quite a bit to say about it. This piece is going to get quite into depth about the film so if you’d prefer to see it first before knowing too much about what happens, you might want to watch it (I’ve embedded it below) and then continue reading this afterwards. If you don’t plan to watch it or don’t mind going into it knowing a lot of what happens, then feel free to read on.
The titles of Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 in the sections immediately below are those from the actual film, but names given to other segments in this synopsis/review are my own. (more…)
One of the most useful perspectives from which to consider questions in ponerology is that of evolutionary psychology. This is the field that asks how and why certain psychological traits and characteristics came about and were selected for during our long evolutionary past. And a number of thinkers have commented on how psychopathy might be viewed through this lens.
What a profound evolutionary development the emergence of humans without conscience was
Whether psychopathy is best understood as an aberration of normal human capacities akin to blindness or deafness or, rather, as a reflection of a different type of human being practicing a different, perhaps detestable to many, but also successful survival and reproductive strategy
Why some experts view psychopaths as “intraspecies predators” or even a separate subspecies of Homo Sapiens
Recently, a debate has been raging about these very issues. (more…)
The Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), the current gold standard test for psychopathy, assesses a person on a variety of elements that are classified into two main categories called “factors.” The first, Factor 1, consists of the person’s interpersonal or affective traits, basically measuring the extent to which they have an aggressive narcissistic personality. The second, Factor 2, consists of the person’s actual behavior and measures the extent to which they exhibit an antisocial or socially deviant lifestyle.
Previous research has shown that certain aspects of body language, including walking style, are characteristic of victims and that those scoring high on the Factor 1 measures of the PCL-R are more accurate than others in judging someone’s vulnerability simply from watching them walk.
Now, in “Psychopathy and Victim Selection: The Use of Gait as a Cue to Vulnerability,” researchers Angela Book, Kimberly Costello and Joseph A. Camilleri studied 47 inmates at a maximum security penitentiary in Ontario, Canada and found that not only, as expected, do the inmates scoring high on PCL-R Factor 1 more accurately than others judge people’s vulnerability by observing their gait, but they are also more likely to actually explicitly mention the victim’s gait in explaining why they perceived them as vulnerable. (more…)
One of the most powerful facts that I may have ever learned is that psychopaths differ biologically from other people. I remember the epiphany I experienced as soon as I internalized this fact, quickly realizing the profound implications it had for everything from psychotherapy to activism to day-to-day life.
When I wrote my detailed page about psychopathy, I made sure to include information about some of these biological differences. Many of them have to do with the ways in which psychopaths’ brain structure and function diverge from that of others.
Recently, a new study was published adding to this important and growing mass of findings. (more…)
