Good Evening Friends,

We were talking about sociopaths. We are given to understand [through the medium of true crime dramatizations on television] that sociopaths "lack a conscience," because they seem so easily to be able to exercise the ultimate violence of those nearest and dearest to them. We are told by the consulting psychiatrists these shows often feature, that sociopaths do not feel certain normal human emotions.

Since they do not feel certain things but know that they are "supposed" to, they put on an act, pretending that they feel love, honor, friendship, loyalty and the like, when they do not. Remember the case of Susan Smith? She is the one who drowned her young children in a lake, having drugged them first and put them to sleep in the back seat of her car. Certainly, something must be "missing" from her psychological make-up.

Is there some "birth defect" at work in the mind-body connection of the sociopath (criminally insane?). I am not going to attempt to argue this logically. I believe I said, once, that I am not at all skilled at logical argumentation. But are we sure that the "act," the alleged play acting of sociopaths professing feelings of love, intimacy, and friendship, and the like, is an act?

But how could this not be the case? Surely these people are flawed in a way that medical science has not yet pinpointed and found a way to cure.

Do sociopaths "feel" love, friendship, and all the good things normal people are supposed to feel?

I am not in a position to say definitively that they do, despite their subsequent actions; but I don't think it has been adequately established that they do not. My thinking is that the so-called sociopath (and by the way, we are distinguishing these from the more traditional pyschopath, the serial killer who works on a much broader canvass, whose actions are not at all limited to violence against familiars, i.e., "Son of Sam," "Jack The Ripper," "BTK," and so forth, who are not included in my analysis) is that "basic" criminal whose actions are motivated by the simple fear = greed = violence trigger.

Remember, it is the criminal who engages in crime as a means to an end rather than an end in and of itself. It is the latter, to my way of thinking, that is the most fascinating criminal type. This is because unlike the bank robber or drug dealer from poor, "inner city," severely disadvantaged backgrounds, or even the serial killer who may have honed his skills in his youth by vivisecting small animals, it is not always clear, even in retrospect, as to what precisely will stimulate the sociopaths descent into murder.

And therefore we cannot identify them (by way of statistical probability - the way we can say that neighborhoods with seventy percent unemployment, no availability of public services to speak of, particularly education will likely donate a plurality of its young people to the machine that is, what some people call the "prison industrial complex").

With sociopaths, as I am using the term, background is no predictor. If I'm not mistaken, Scott Peterson came from an upper middle class background. He played golf in high school. Such young men and women, we are given to understand, had not usually been the victims of childhood abuse.

However, they have always come to a point in their lives of extreme desperation of one sort or another. This triggererd the fear which gave rise to greed - which they were empowered to exercise due to their soocioeconomic status and innate "charm." They then commit murder, which their charm and "respectability" shield them from the suspicion of having committed, for a time until the evidence against them becomes overwhelming.

Next time I will address the question of what the sociopath is supposed not to fee.

wingedcentaur