Some are committing murder, others are planning serial murder. Others are our neighbor, friend, partner, or mayor, and they may never do seemingly repulsive acts, even if they are. With their tricks, their contempt, their inability to help, their avoidance of responsibility, and their minimization of the achievements of others, they try to assert themselves in the same way.
They’re psychopaths, and even if it’s hard to believe, there’s a lot of them. Some can be found in slums mistreating dogs and others who approve your loan at the bank. Some are played masterfully, as Anthony Hopkins in his role as Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs?”And others act with the same mastery away from the cameras.
- Psychopaths go completely unnoticed in a society like ours.
- In which aggression.
- Individualism.
- Self-centeredness.
- Supposed charm.
- Indifference or coldness towards the suffering of others are socially approved resources to succeed.
- So if we want to defend ourselves from them.
- The first thing to do is to identify them.
Some authors such as Hervey Ceckley, Cooke and Michie, Robert Hare or Blackburn have tried to summarize the main characteristics of psychopaths, which we will return to later.
In short, what all these researches and the most recent studies suggest is that there is a predisposition to psychopathy, a tendency motivated by a nervous system in which the prefrontal lobe and amygdala are less prepared to interpret emotional keys and make decisions that lead to account for their personal and other well-being in the medium and long term.
The environment can foster antisocial beliefs and habits, fostering these innate resources, this gives us a clue: a person may have this organic predisposition, but if educated in a society with values and where triumph is not based on appearance, violence, manipulation. and false morality, will have a very low chance of developing this trend, even reverse it.
There are also psychopaths who make themselves, who had no genetic predisposition, but who, living in an extremely disturbing environment, ended up developing this trend. There are much more skeptical and pessimistic theories that psychopathy develops from age 3 to 5 and that the environment in which the person is located would not have as much influence.
It is estimated that one or two percent of the population are pure psychopaths. There’s a ratio of five men per woman. First in the world of crime, then in society integrated into professions based on appearance and pretence, such as politics, business or the direction of large spiritual movements that have only an economic interest.
These people often have an outside charm and remarkable intelligence on certain occasions. There are different classifications of psychopaths according to several authors:
Cleckley highlights the following diagnostic criteria for psychopathy:
On the other hand, psychologist and researcher Robert Hare mentions as psychopathic characteristics:
Blackburn considers four subtypes of psychopaths
Cooke and Michie point out:
If one or more psychopaths scold us physically or sexually individually or in a group, there is not much we can do to defend ourselves, unfortunately there is not one, nor two, nor three cases in which we know that there has been a group rape, in which the victim cannot do anything to defend himself.
In these cases, we would talk about a collective psychopathic mentality, in many cases augmented by the use of certain drugs, such as alcohol: not only did he commit an act of brutal violence, but he subsequently acted in total coldness, including mocking what happened.
However, there are situations in which we can detect a psychopath and we can distance ourselves from him: either in our workplace, at the beginning of a romantic relationship or without voting in an urn.
The main thing is to detect his manipulation with a very simple strategy: to show that nothing he says corresponds to what he does, a great indifference to the suffering of others, very degraded emotional relationships despite what he wants to show, his emotional coldness, in addition to his high self-centeredness.