(December 20, 2017 at 1:05 pm)Rev. Rye Wrote:(December 20, 2017 at 12:16 pm)Hammy Wrote: All learning is conditioned but not all conditioning is learning.
Psychopaths don't learn to care they learn to pretend to care. The vast majority of people AREN'T psychopaths and you're talking like they might be. WTF are YOU talking about?
I'm not sure about Bennyboy's thesis, but I do think he does have a point. The vast majority of people aren't psychopaths, but I do suspect that quite a bit of the time, people can fall into the same exact traps as the psychopaths, empathy-wise. This might be unusual, but here's an example that I think should illustrate this point succinctly.
Imagine a man, old enough to have several grandchildren, many of which (as well as his wife and some of his sons) live with him. He loves crochet, and Wallace and Gromit cartoons. In addition, at the moment, he has a friend and his family staying over. Now imagine that, in the middle of the night one night, police break into his home and start shooting people. No charges given, no warning that they may have to resort to deadly force that was met with rifle fire, no nothing. The old man, one of his sons, and that friend (as well as the friend's wife and brother) are all dead. The old man was shot in the face while unarmed and still wearing his nightgown.
Imagine seeing this story on the news. How would you feel?
(And now scroll down for the punchline)
Now, here's the twist: This incident did happen, and you almost certainly have heard about it. That old man was Osama bin Laden. Literally the only thing I outright changed from the historical record (as opposed to simply omitting) was that the police were actually Navy SEALs (yes, even the crochet thing). You almost certainly changed your initial reaction to the story, didn't you? It's not hard to see why you changed your mind about it; the motherfucker was responsible for 9/11 and even before that, he was on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted list for terror attacks. Because the victim in this case was a monster responsible for the deaths of more people than most natural disasters, we hear about this and just shrug it off. Who cares about what happens to him?
You see where I'm going with this, right? I remember someone on TVtropes making this point, and while the Nightmare Fuel page for Real Life (and its sections on psychological disorders, specifically Emotional Disorders) has since been cut, after trawling the Wayback Machine, I finally found it:
Quote:You don't have to be a sociopath to not care. You just have to convince yourself that someone doesn't count, isn't the same as you. Most of the worst things we have done were done by people with no inherent madness, just a belief that the victims somehow deserved it, or else a refusal to think of them at all, or just thinking that you are following an obligation. Think of the people who participated in the Nazi regime but responds while being interrogated with "I am just doing my job." Think of the famous Milgram Experiment, where it has been observed that authority by itself can actually override empathy.
Most people aren't psychopaths, but most of us can become incredible simulations of one with shockingly little effort, given the right stimulus and/or situation and/or victim.
... my point was they're not psychopaths.
Lacking empathy is a far cry from being a psychopath. Besides psychopaths don't necessarily have no empathy, they just have weak empathy that they can switch on and off at will.
