Attempts to humanize psychopaths disgust me. As do their clever attempts to derail the talk of their danger by bringing up serial killers. I don't care about serial killers. They're not a problem at all. Nobody should give a damn about serial killers. We're humans, not some pathetic herd animals who can feel placated knowing that there are no literal wolves around. It's the socially-adapted, nonviolent psychopaths like her that are the real problem.
One interesting yet rarely described trait of their kind is that, for all their glib talk, the transcript ends up vacuous and incoherent. There's nothing to be learned, because for them language is not a means of communication but a tool for manipulation and control; the effort to weigh the evidence and determine which parts correspond to physical reality is incommensurate with the yield.
>> When you meet new people, whether professionally or personally or whatever context, do you present them with the version of yourself that fits the situation?
> Absolutely. Why tell them anything that they don’t need to know? They just need to know what they can expect of me.
Well darling, what they need to know most is that you'll screw them over the instant it benefits you, so you're not convincing me here.
The same is true for any attempt of harnessing psychopathic behavior in some benign project. You have to ensure that at every moment, in every situation, they don't believe that they stand to gain a penny from backstabbing you or committing an atrocity; just as they always calculate the cost-benefit of doing so. There is no trust, no bond, not even any sort of a grace period; it's like pretending to have domesticated a crocodile. You run out of meat, you're it. Soldiers, surgeons, law professionals, CEOs, bankers. Everywhere psychopaths are a net loss and a liability, waiting for the rule enforcers to get distracted.
Worst of all, many of them are quite functional. Very much so, in fact. This is why there's no treatment; psychopathy is an alternative local optimum in human mental phenotype, rather than a disability. A parasitic one that probably evolved relatively recently with the transition from family groups and small tribes to big, partially anonymized societies, which allow for unnoticeable cheating.
Some say psychopathy is a scale. I claim it's just that psychometrics is not mature enough; "puerile", as Hannibal Lector would put it. There is a clear difference between a person who would not flush in a public toilet and a person who would, given reasonable guarantees of not being caught, momentarily borrow an careless "friend's" credit card and then burn through his savings. Who would cut costs diluting medication for one's patients and pocket the difference. Who would, as an attorney, conspire with the prosecution to put the client behind bars after swindling him of his money. A couples therapist who would facilitate a breakup to turn a client into a personal sex toy. All these are behaviors that stem directly from psychopathic traits. If you really, genuinely don't feel any concern at all for the well-being of other people, you'll be ready to commit crimes far greater than anyone who merely seeks to harm people for the thrill of it would. Though psychopaths like the thrill, as they get bored easily, and they do tend to amuse themselves with cruelty.
I pity her partner. Slavery for 19 years, and who knows how bad it'll get. The guy sure chose poorly.
Psychopathy, in my opinion, is the sole unobjectionable justification for negative eugenics, inasmuch at it's heritable. There's nothing else that's so purely devoid of excuses and detrimental for society.