RE: A New Definition For Psychopathy
I disagree with this post so much I want to flag it.
If I were you, I would take this post down.
Because the information here is so bad, that it is dangerous.
A psychopath is someone who doesn't have the ability to feel warm empathy.
You and I would feel bad for killing a person, even if it was in self defense, even it was sanctioned by the govern-cement.
Psychopaths do not feel anything for killing a person. They can kill a person and then get the best nights sleep. There is no twinge of guilt. There is no sadness that they are gone. There is no sense of remorse.
You may ask, if this is so, why don't psychopaths kill more?
Well, to them, there is the hassle of cleaning up the body, and why kill someone when you can get them to kill themselves. It is much more fun to torture someone. To drive them insane. And the best, is that the did it all to themselves. They accepted all the lies willingly.
That is the world of a psychopath.
They are out there. Some place them as 5% of the population.
And they have no moral reserve about destroying your life.
They get all of their joy from duping other people.
Talking about psychopathy is not talking about someone who does questionable things, or even hurtful things because that is the current paradigm we live in. A psychopath, to us normal feeling people, has no warm emotions. They have ice running through their veins. And they leave a path of broken people in their wake.
Very true @builderofcastles; there is an oft repeated test whereby people are shown provocative words on screen, "normal" people react to seeing words like, 'murder', 'rape' and 'incest'. Psychopaths don't even register a flicker of emotion, proving their is a clear and definable distinction.
Cg
I don't disagree, but his conclusion isn't that people aren't genuine psychopaths. It's that the term has been conflated with so many non-psychopathic behaviors that it's starting to lose its meaning. In the same way classifying pick up lines or not agreeing to sleep with someone you don't find attractive as rape diminishes actual rape, misusing and overusing "psychopath" as a descriptor diminishes the horror of actual psychopaths.
Could have been worded better, but I get the point he's making.