I knew I should have asked you about it! We will talk again for hours. I’m looking forward to it.

Agreed. I think autism spectrum and psychopathy only look similar sometimes. They don’t come from the same thing, and we shouldn’t respond to them the same way. I think.

Hmm. There we differ. The more I learn, the more I think they are real things with a root cause. But then I’m only an informed layman at best. (Layperson?)

But I guess the distinction is that psychopaths/sociopaths don’t feel love or guilt, while Asperger’s people may have those emotions, but have trouble understanding other people’s emotions.

And, once you’ve taken the pejorative part out, that people with those conditions are necessarily dangerous, then it’s possible to acknowledge that there’s a fair bit of overlap. At present we have Asperger’s people saying, “We are NOT psychopaths!”, and while shows like Dexter are on tv I can see why they need to say that.

(I can’t imagine wanting to see an episode of Dexter, by the way. Entertainment? Side-issue.)

I don’t think they’re “natural” categories anyway, in the sense that they’re not specific diseases like, oh, conjunctivitus; they’re just masses of observations that psychologists have tried to gather together into a semi-coherent categories, with a name and definition.

So the boundaries are a little squirmy-wirmy, in the Whovian sense.

And I forgot to say thank you! It’s nice to know at least you agree with me broadly.

Edited to add: Are you 100% sure your friends were psychopaths? They sound like Aspies to me.

I have thought about writing a post on how I understand sociopathy to differ from sadism and autism spectrum. Because I know somebody who thought he was a sociopath for a while, and I wouldn’t want people like him to worry.

To clarify, I don’t think I’m a psychopath. But I do think that anyone in a cold rage is temporarily experiencing that state of mind, at least with respect to the object of the anger. And unfortunately for some years my life situation was causing me to experience a lot of that. I’ll add this to the bottom of the post.

I agree that you don’t have to be a psychopath to be a selfish and nasty, but I have wondered if it is a continuum.

It is startling how well your observations mesh with M.E. Thomas’s. She agrees with you that psychopaths can have moral codes, though she also said they tend to be idiosyncratic. Presumably because they’re not felt from within and it’s hard for them to learn from others.

Tonight I was talking with a friend about the fact that psychopathy rates are so much lower in East Asian countries. I have a feeling it’s because they get the necessary consequences from group pressure and stronger norms; you’re not expected to figure out your own moral code. Further evidence that environment can make more-or-less ethical sociopaths.

(1) I doubt very much that you’re even closely, even flickeringly for a second, a psychopath or sociopath. Being loveless and guiltless don’t seem to be your special characteristics.

Cold rage, and shutting down emotion when you’re hurting, is a different thing.

(2) This isn’t a disagreement with your post, just some anecdotes on my experiences with psychopaths. (Weirdly, I’ve been a psychiatric nurse, but that’s not where I met either of them.) Anyway, the media often portrays psychopathy and sociopathy as a kind of superpower, that frees people to do all kinds of horrible things with a merry quip.

But they’re actually disabilities, because we need love, pity and remorse to work cooperatively with other people. I’ve had friendships, though that’s only an approximate word, with people who don’t perceive other people’s feelings as “real”. They decided, on ethical grounds (one was a Kantian, one was utilitarian; it didn’t really matter) that they wanted to mix with ordinary people, work with them, have consensual sex with them, and so on.

So they learnt human behaviour by rote, never by feeling it. For example, if someone says a party starts at 7.00, you arrive about 7.30. (They always arrived at exactly 7.30; “more or less” was not a concept they could use.) Ask two questions of other people before you tell them what you’re doing; try to keep to that ratio. And so on. Most people don’t think about things like that; but some people have to be told them, and then keep them as rules.

Point is, they were both highly intelligent, observant people who meant well and were trying to behave ethically and trying to fit in. And yet, they still couldn’t pass for very long at all. Strangers would spot very quickly that something was really odd about them, and get uneasy.

Obviously, there’s some overlap between psychopathy and sociopathy, and autism and Asperger’s. The common ground is the difficulty in reading or relating to the emotions of others. But autistic people and people with Asperger’s aren’t necessarily loveless or without guilt.

I liked my two psychopath sort-of-friends partly because they’d thought out their morality for themselves. Every moral belief they had, they’d worked out intellectually from first principles. Also, they were smart, well read and interesting. They were still pretty difficult company, and being with them involved having to invent new and unexpected social rules on the fly. (“No, if you want to discuss the beauty of the waitress, you have to drop your voice; also, now we have to tip her a lot. No, not right now; when we leave.”)

The media image of a psychopath is someone really charming and manipulative. I don’t think that’s real. A psychopath trying to be charming has difficulty keeping the front up for long. And the charm works best in situations where other people’s judgement is impaired, and slightly odd behaviour is more tolerated, like some clubs or bars or parties. It’s very hard to mimic what you really can’t imagine feeling.

High-functioning, ethical psychopaths have a pretty hard road.

(3) This is the second disagreement. I don’t know Jian Ghomeshi, and never even heard his show. I don’t know if he’s a sociopath.

I don’t think that you have to be a sociopath to be a selfish, nasty asshole. He could be both of those things, but I’m only sure about the second.

If I were going to be sorry for him, it might be on the basis that he probably really does have a minority sexual taste, and he possibly did have trouble coming to terms with it when he was young.

But then (sympathy off from here on), because of what celebrity can do to people, he thought he’d found he didn’t need to work out genuine ways of getting consent. Fame, plus trying it on, would both get him what he wanted, and shield him from the consequences of his violent approach.

In Australia we have sportsmen who bash and rape women. They don’t claim bdsm as cover, they just say they got drunk, boo hoo, and it was out of character, and so on. But they’re just over-privileged assholes who live in a bubble within which they often get away with bashing and raping women. And they get surprised when the bubble bursts. I think that’s more like Jian Ghomeshi’s case.

I like the sympathy you express for psychopaths and sociopaths. It’s a hell of a hard life from what I’ve seen, and I’m glad I’m not in their shoes. (I’m pretty sure I’m not.)