Most of us have seen this term, sociopath, for someone who is utterly lacking in compassion, empathy, or conscience. They are not clinically insane, and can act quite normal for entire lifetimes. They are just missing something, in some situations. When other people cry, they have to pretend. If you want an example of the sociopath as hero, just watch the hugely popular Dexter, currently the most popular show among Democrats, but no doubt also very popular with Republicans. I would suspect it’s a few point swing.
Can sociopathy be created through ideology or conditioning? I am thinking, specifically, of Jerod Loughner, assassin of a nine year old girl, 3 little old ladies, one judge, and someone I believe in their thirties. He does not appear to feel remorse.
Who shoots little girls, and feels no remorse? To call him schizophrenic does not seem right. His writings could quite easily be explained by being high. When you are high, things seem to make sense that really don’t. You can quite easily get to a clinically acute psychotic state through sleep deprivation, without actually being psychotic.
What I think most likely is that he absorbed in his environment an ethos of violence, specifically through music, but also through other media.
The question I want to ask is this: can ideas, in themselves, deprive people of conscience? Take the Communists in Vietnam. They committed all sorts of atrocities, for example taking flamethrowers to a village, killing hundreds, as very conscious policy. Who are these people who kill in cold blood simply because people are “class traitors”? How do you get to the state where torture is justified simply because someone has been accused of being an ideological other?
I see no practical difference between the rank and file soldiers who kept order in the “reeducation” camps of the Vietnamese “revolution”, and those who saw to order in the concentration camps of the Nazis. Who were these people? How did they justify to themselves what they did?
Effectively, it seems that the symptoms of sociopathy, of consciencelessness, can be achieved simply by creating a world view in which others are denuded of their humanity as a result of their belonging to some other group. For example, Leftists routinely blame Liberals for all sorts of things, in this particular case of complicity in murder.
Would it not be permissable to kill people who are complicit in murder?
I have been told explictly, on the Daily Cause, that it is acceptable to hate people who hate others. If you want to hate, then, all you have to do is find some group of cultural or ideological Others that you can paint as being “hating”. Then it’s on.
Clearly, some leftists are simply sociopaths searching for an outlet for their aggressive and often sadistic energies. Such seems to me to have been the case with Sergei Nechaev.
If you read that text, it advocates consciencelessness. It advocates destruction. It advocates the subversion of all social institutions, and essentially everything that is standing. It Nihilism, in a formal sense. That was the term used by opponents of this pattern of thought, which offered nothing but death, in pursuit of goals that were never defined.
How does ideology create hate? How does it enable people to stop feeling sorry for other people, where sympathy is a very natural human reaction?
These are of course old questions, but good ones, nonetheless. The reliable one inference I will make is that hatred is always wrong. It is clearly sometimes necessary to fight and even kill one’s enemies, but hating them is always wrong.
If you hate haters, you are a hater. This seems clear enough.
This is a bit rambling, but I wanted to think out loud on this for a few minutes.