Wisdom from Psychopaths?

I'd really like to be able to take back my upvote without flagging the article.

The ability to abstract oneself from the problem in a way that enables you to think about the problem is certainly something many would wish to be able to do better in at least one area in there lives. I find it easy to handle most things but anything personal, well I just end up like most and think about every negative permuation more than resolving the issue.

Though in a sence it is the ability to regret things that too me is the seperation that divides most.

I often say if 51% of the population were psycopaths then they would not be psycopaths but normals and the other 49% would be the exceptions and outcasts in many ways.

Ironicly in todays society that is against drugs and can't cope with somebody saying I've had a good life, can it end now we seem too impose the majority will upon them. Indeed if you said I want to die to a doctor and even explained why, many would probably push you to drugs that remove the emotional negatives and or section you in a mental hospital until you towed the line if I want to live even if the World is utterly insane.

Many a wise word is said by what people lable as `mental` patients and with that it is good to see the lable removed and the flash laid upon the bones so to speak with regards to psycopathic traits. When you break it down and look at various jobs and roles in society then you can certainly see that it is a set of skills most would envy. Then only negative is the big gotcha of impossing your will upon others to the detrement of there quality of life. That all said many bankers and financers happily ruin peoples lives in a more agonising way than any mental of phsical torture as we know it and with that have defined legaly allowed means to do what is in effect psycopathic traits. When a bank reposses a house do they send in councelors and break the news over a hot beverage, no they do it in a letter and with that are about as cold as any psycopath could ever come up with.

But we are talking about psycopaths who have crossed a legal moral line like murdering somebody and getting caught. Yet the same actions can be done in far more legal and less liable ways and means if you take the right approach. I'm sure there are psycopaths who have done such things and others who just maybe work in jobs like banks or important positions which enable them a more fine control upon there enviroment too effect others in more subtle indirect ways. After all for those of us who think about what can go wrong and waste that 90% of the time worrying about the unhappened, maybe that in itself is used to out own detrement if leveridged by somebody mindful of such weakness's.

After all not all psycopaths are criminals, we as society have just labeled them by default and with that there exist alot of predispositions that society places as a collective upon others and in many ways when you apply labels and blanket definitions and sterotyping then isn't that how racisism started.

So society could learn and should learn from them, after all everybody has something unique about them and with that you can learn something from every single person on this planet a impossible task but certainly one that should not be dismissed in a way that you ignore by default whole area's/groups/types/variations. That is probably the first leason you can learn and with that the most important one in my book.

interesting that you mention this, because a "bank", or in general, a corporation can be considered a psychopath. If you watch the documentary "The Corporation" (freely available on thepiratebay), it shows you the criterias that they used to measure a corporation that leads to this conclusion. But number 1 cause is the requirement of a corporation to make as much money for its shareholder as possible, and the CEO/chair/president/etc is legally bound to do this.

There's good reason to believe that such a world would be unstable. When too many people are willing to take advantage of too many other people then you will most likely have a tragedy of the commons [1]. Co-operation and altruism appear to be very important components for the evolution of species and the advance of civilization.

> After all not all psycopaths are criminals

This is true, and as with most things in life what's important is balance. As the article discusses, psychopaths tend to live "in the now" and have a very present-oriented time perspective, which certainly has some value. But too much of a particular time perspective, in this case with no past- and future-oriented time perspectives, creates a distorted map of reality [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Applicat...

[2] http://www.thetimeparadox.com/