Thoughts on Psychopathy's Cultural Implications

[LQB]

Laura's lead article on the SOTT page (JFK and the Psychopathology of Politics) is directly related to this discussion, particularly the following passage she quotes from an article about Elizabeth Marshall Thomas:

In 1950, a 19-year-old girl left the elite Smith College in Massachusetts to join her family on an expedition that would change their lives. Prompted by her father's desire to visit unexplored places, the family set off for the Kalahari desert in search of Bushmen living out the "old ways" of hunter-gatherers. The girl, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, went on to celebrate them in her 1959 book The Harmless People, which became a classic of popular anthropology. Nearly 50 years on, Marshall Thomas's latest book The Old Way revisits the story - and finds that the Bushmen's fate is more complex than it seems.

The interviewer asks Marshall Thomas: Westerners mourn the loss of this hunter-gatherer society, but you take a rather different view...

Marshall Thomas responds : Yes, for me they are living in somewhat the same way, but with different economics. The idea that you help your own is still present. This is what kept the human race alive for 150,000 years.

The hunter-gatherers told anthropologists they don't define themselves by how they get food but by how they relate to each other. We saw that. They tried to keep jealousy at a minimum, with nobody more important or owning more things than anyone else. You gave things away rather than keep them. You wanted other people to think of you with a good feeling.

Q: Is that the "old way" of your book title?

A: Yes.

There was a time when the playing field was level and all species lived in this way. How people and their domestic animals live now is profoundly different.[...]

Q: What do you make of the accusations by some academics that your writing is too sentimental? A: My mother Lorna also wrote about the Bushman culture and we were both accused of over-emphasising the lack of violence in Bushman culture, but we were only reporting what we had seen. In the Bushmen groups we visited, we observed that there was much emphasis on cooperation and on avoiding jealousy. The reason was that life was pretty marginal and one way to get through was to have others who help you in your hour of need. Everything in their culture was oriented to this. So it isn't that they have a natural "niceness" - I never said that they did.They're just like everybody else. What they have done is recognise the damage one person can do to another and try to put a limit on it....

Good example - Thanks QueenVee!

 

[crazy_kizmet]

After reading the article THE PSYCHOPATH - The Mask of Sanity I could not help but wonder if in different times, the willingness of society to destroy (kill) psychopaths, reduced the genetic propagation that was suggested in modern times?
I am aware that by no means did any culture manage to squelch the genetic influence. But in our “kinder, more civil” culture, the thought that some people should be eliminated from society is taboo. In the old west, and even in the early 20th century, killing people who assaulted decency was often not so much a legal issue as a civil service often carried out by vigilantes. I have herd stories from the 1940's of wife beaters who were visited by several men from the church with the message that if their wife was injured again, the men would return for a final visit, and other such “old law” actions.

Is our attitude that killing the killer is wrong going to produce a murderous culture?

 

[Ryan]

You already posted this in a different thread, but I'll repeat my response here because it seems relevant to the topic. FYI crazy_kizmet, please don't cross-post to multiple threads - it shows a lack of consideration for the other members of the forum.

Is our attitude that killing the killer is wrong going to produce a murderous culture?

I don't see that as the case at all. If anything, there's an attitude that "killing the killer is right"! Look at capital punishment. Look at the glorification of assassins and vigilantes in the movies. How many innocent people have been framed for crimes others committed? The US is murdering civilians by the thousands in Afghanistan and Iraq, using the flimsy propaganda that "they killed our people first" as cover.

If you imprison someone wrongly, the mistake can be corrected. If you execute someone wrongly, the mistake cannot be undone.

Besides, normal people outnumber psychopaths by at least 9 to 1. If the awareness was out there - if everyone knew about these predators and how to protect themselves, then psychopaths would probably self-destruct in various ways anyway.

 

[name]

@Ryan
as I understand it, what crazy_kizmet writes about - killing the killer - is similar to the 'leaving them out in the cold' as practiced by the pre-agriculturals. And since you mention it, our contemporary 'justice' or 'legal system' has nothing to do with reducing trouble to society, but with protecting perpetrators, especially psychos. This last point has been broached oftentimes here on the forum. The concept of 'humane' punishment, jailing people ... is IMO essentially taking away a societal method of dealing with troublemakers and turning it around to cause more trouble: jailing or otherwise 'punishing' people serves no purpose other than assuring the survival (and recreation) of psychos and introduces ample opportunities (for them) to ponerize others.

@LQB
Regarding your initial post, I can only second you. If you look around, absolutely all actions of the 'West' along history have destroyed 'primitive' cultures of ppl who knew to live in peace with each other and with nature, and absorbed the more ponerized ones and their traditions.

 

[Laura]

In the Bushmen groups we visited, we observed that there was much emphasis on cooperation and on avoiding jealousy. The reason was that life was pretty marginal and one way to get through was to have others who help you in your hour of need. Everything in their culture was oriented to this. So it isn't that they have a natural "niceness" - I never said that they did.They're just like everybody else. What they have done is recognise the damage one person can do to another and try to put a limit on it....

"Life was pretty marginal... "

Looks like that is where the world is going at present, so ultimately, it may lead to an understanding of psychopathy even if it is only for a period of time that this knowledge can be held.

In response to crazy_kizmet's idea that people ought to eliminate psychopaths in another thread, I responded:

I don't think the "lead solution" is the right one either. Probably better to try to find ways to utilize their particular features if possible while, at the same time, preventing them from reproducing. Realistically, we know that even if a culture came to an understanding about deviants and learned how to find them a place in the world where they could be contained, or their energy redirected, over time, people would forget. Also, due to genetic recombination, it is possible for a line to be started again even if all of a given population had died out.

Most "primitive" tribes would abandon such individuals - even as children - and this usually was a death sentence.

There is a passage in Bram Stoker's Dracula that has given rise to a great deal of speculation as to his source for the remark:

"We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the
blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship.
Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down
from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them, which
their Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of
Europe, aye, and of Asia and Africa too, till the peoples thought that
the werewolves themselves had come. Here, too, when they came, they
found the Huns, whose warlike fury had swept the earth like a living
flame, till the dying peoples held that in their veins ran the blood
of those old witches, who, expelled from Scythia had mated with the
devils in the desert. Fools, fools! What devil or what witch was
ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?"

It's just an example of how deviants were dealt with in tribal societies... but it is interesting because we have speculated that the psychopathy gene is sex-linked, i.e. carried on the X chromosome. That means, it is carried and transmitted by the mother who may not manifest the characteristics at all. Now THAT could create (and does) some horribly tragic situations.

In the movie "The Bad Seed," it is suggested that the child inherited her psychopathy through her mother. The problem with this is that, in order for her to be a full fledged psychopath - as depicted - she would have to have received the gene from her father's x-chromosome contribution also. And if the father had the gene, he, too, would have been a psychopath because he would not have had another X-chromosome (as women do) to counteract its manifestation.

In any event, the situation can be likened to any predator/prey ecosystem such as rabbits and foxes. When there are a lot of rabbits, the foxes have a lot of food and increase. When all (or most) of the rabbits get eaten, the foxes begin to starve or kill each other. Then, when the foxes die back, the rabbits begin to increase again. And so it goes.

I will also add that in the example of the ecosystem, it is obviously the smart rabbits and those who learn to network who will survive. So, in a sense, psychopathy could be seen as a "force of nature" that "helps" evolution.

 

[QueenVee]

Another example of the way that "primitive" or "isolated" communities have dealt with psychopaths appears in in today's SOTT article titled What "Psycopath" Means: It's Not Quite What You May Think:

In a 1976 study anthropologist Jane M. Murphy, then at Harvard University, found that an isolated group of Yupik-speaking Inuits near the Bering Strait had a term (kunlangeta) they used to describe "a man who ... repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and ... takes sexual advantage of many women - someone who does not pay attention to reprimands and who is always being brought to the elders for punishment." When Murphy asked an Inuit what the group would typically do with a kunlangeta, he replied, "Somebody would have pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking."

 

[anart]

Welcome back, QueenVee, could you please respond to the questions posed to you in these threads?

http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=7587.msg54048#msg54048
http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=7434.msg52866#msg52866
http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=7553&p=2

There are a few other threads in which you've left direct questions unanswered as well, but it would be a nice start to at least resolve these.

 

[Roxter]

So what are the cultural implications? A “primitive”, small, tribal/shamanic culture could very easily deal with the occasional psychopath – banishment. Self-interest-only based behavior would endanger survival of the tribe and would most likely be dealt with harshly preventing any propagation of that genetic expression. So in the small tribal culture (hunter/gatherer type) the psychopathic “gene” could not survive.

I am not so sure about this theory... From what you're saying it presents the psychopath as unable to perceive the dynamic of the tribe-group and to adjust his agendas within that dynamic. From what I've read/seen about psychopaths - it looks to me like you're simplifying things too much. Maybe they are lacking common human emotions, but that doesn't mean they aren't able to observe and imitate and develop a suitable way of getting it 'their way', without being spotted right away and labeled as self-interest-only. If looking at it from that perspective, then their ability of not being 'bothered' by morality or consciousness (and depending on the quality level of their masks), is an advantage within a small community as tribe, just as it is in today's world, within the masses of people. At least it seems like that to me...

I see it almost exactly opposite to the idea that psychopaths would easily be eliminated in hunting packs. I think the presence of psychopaths in hunter-gatherer groups and the other group members' tendency to blindly follow them is what helped these groups to survive in the wilderness, which is also why they turn up in modern times, since a very short period of time has passed since humans hunted in packs. The lack of scruples and guilt allowed the leaders to make instant decisions in times of danger. I recommend "Political Ponerology" by Andrew Lobaczewsky as a reference. A "normal" person can be turned into a psychopath by possessing too much power over the lives of others, the source for the famous aphorism that "power corrupts."

The psychopath, in modern times, is not the main problem, it is, rather, the tendency of otherwise normal people to blindly follow the psychopath, whether he be a Hitler, a Jim Jones, or a George Bush. These tendencies were fixed within the human population by the fact that we are the descendants of those who survived in the hunter-gatherer packs long enough to breed, so we carry forward their tendencies.

 

[anart]

I see it almost exactly opposite to the idea that psychopaths would easily be eliminated in hunting packs. I think the presence of psychopaths in hunter-gatherer groups and the other group members' tendency to blindly follow them is what helped these groups to survive in the wilderness, which is also why they turn up in modern times, since a very short period of time has passed since humans hunted in packs.

Hi Roxter, and welcome to the forum. There are a few issues with what you've posted here. First off, how do you know that 'other members' of these ancient tribes have a tendency to 'blindly follow them'? Why would you think that a psychopath would be better at surviving in the wilderness (to early tribes, it wasn't 'the wilderness', it was their home) than psychologically normal tribal members?

The lack of scruples and guilt allowed the leaders to make instant decisions in times of danger.

That doesn't mean those decisions would necessary be good, or beneficial. In fact, psychopaths tend to be terrible decision makers due to their inability to focus on long term goals and consequences.

I recommend "Political Ponerology" by Andrew Lobaczewsky as a reference.

Yes, Red Pill Press published Political Ponerology and Laura Knight-Jadczyk (the founder of this forum) contributed. It is a seminal text.

A "normal" person can be turned into a psychopath by possessing too much power over the lives of others, the source for the famous aphorism that "power corrupts."

That is not true. A normal person cannot be turned into a psychopath. Not an essential psychopath, at least. A person who is not born an essential psychopath can display psychopathic behavior, and some of these are referred to as characteropaths in Lobacewski's book. Other people can be 'ponerized' and have their behavior fall in line with that of a psychopathic control system, but that does not make them psychopaths.

The psychopath, in modern times, is not the main problem, it is, rather, the tendency of otherwise normal people to blindly follow the psychopath, whether he be a Hitler, a Jim Jones, or a George Bush.

This is untrue. The psychopath is the problem - without the pscyhopath, who would the others 'blindly follow' as you put it?

These tendencies were fixed within the human population by the fact that we are the descendants of those who survived in the hunter-gatherer packs long enough to breed, so we carry forward their tendencies.

This is a bit of a stretch - do you have any data to back up this assertion?