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almost every time I see someone say the word sociopath my opinion of them dips a little A tweet with optional thread.
The assumption built into using sociopath in a negative manner is that someone without empathy, someone able to inflict grave harm without feeling bad about it, is:- inherently dangerous
- evil by nature
and (often)
- to blame for most or all of the world's problems
more:
- The only thing making people kind to others is the exact configuration of brain that you have.
- The only thing that makes people evil is their brains working differently, them being different.
Your tribe and the other. It's bigotry with the serial numbers scraped off.
- The only thing making people kind to others is the exact configuration of brain that you have.
- The only thing that makes people evil is their brains working differently, them being different.
Your tribe and the other. It's bigotry with the serial numbers scraped off.
You probably like and love people that *don't* have you exact brain setup. Who could do terrible things to people that aren't friends without feeling a twinge of guilt. Who don't get that nice tingly chest feeling when they help people out. And those people Do Good Anyway.
What do you think these people among you think when you throw around words like sociopath, when you imagine a mythical psychological class that brackets around every villain of man? It hurts, while simultaneously showing them they *really* shouldn't speak up with objections.
Whatever you think about psychology as a practice, it's a simple truth that no Nazi war criminals were found to have personality disorders by anyone who examined them. Trump? Good odds he doesn't have NPD or the like.
As someone whose brain works differently, who relates to @GlitchesBrew's (slightly clunky) aphorism of "feeling like I'm bad person hardware that insistently installed a good person OS", as a fellow human being: Please stop using the word sociopath. Thanks for reading.
