(December 20, 2017 at 12:16 pm)Hammy Wrote:(December 18, 2017 at 11:02 pm)bennyboy Wrote: Conditioning is in fact learning, by definition. But I'm not sure wtf you are talking about right now, to be honest. I was talking about psychopathy, and about how I communicate with others to discover if my own impulses and instincts are unique to me or common among others. What does "societal conditioning" have to do with any of that?
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 think you are seeing all people as monolithic, as though psychopathy is a property like skin color. I see people as a complex interaction of parts, and I believe that most people have the capacity to willingly do harm to others, given the right social climate or other conditions. I'm 100% confident that I have the capacity to kill, and in wartime or some other very serious circumstance, I can imagine descending pretty far and willingly into that capacity.
I don't think that's psychopathy, though, and it has little to do with social conditioning.
In the end, I'd say that nature is brutal, and that primates are particularly brutal, including people. Our animal nature is violent and rapacious, and this nature is counterbalanced only by the evolution of memes in our modern Western societies. Sure, people can say, "Not me," but any war and dozens of psychological experiments show that the "not me" crowd vastly overestimate the degree to which their ideals stave off their animal instincts, either to lead or to follow, to survive or to kill.
