Still, to all who have commented on habitual liars and sociopathic/psychotic personalities and on con artists, I would like to add these tidbits from my years in a woman’s prison. (That was back in my very far-left days.)

First as to truly evil people: as a leftist, and a new prisoner, I knew they did not exist. Except for evil capitalists, robber barons, and the like. But my fellow prisoners knew better. They would point out the worst ones, saying “that woman is evil.” Thing was, some of the women they called evil would admit to you that that is what they were. They were indifferent about it.

One group that was not indifferent were the women who had killed their own children. Each was in her own private hell, whether it was visible at all times or not.

Prison was graduate school in con artists. After all, some of the best were there. There was general agreement that it takes an ordinary sucker (non-con-artists) around 5 years in prison before they become “con-wise.” That went both for new prisoners and new prison employees alike. That was about how long it took me.

The way it works is not that you ever become totally con-proof – one way or another, anybody can be had! But after 5 years there, you’ve been had so many times that you have learned the stories, the behavior, the signals. You’re not easy any more, and usually you don’t fall for it.

Liars were not at all unusual among prisoners. Yet, by being around each other 24/7 and comparing notes, we spotted the habitual liars pretty quickly. Liars contradict themselves a lot. So much that they cannot possibly keep track of all the things they have said. Outside of prison, habitual liars usually get away with lying, so they can escape getting labeled. They just have to keep moving around to keep so many contradictions from being noticed.

But in prison they can’t keep moving around, so in a month or two, everyone knows whether someone is an habitual liar. And after awhile, knowing who the habitual liars are, you get to notice their characteristics, the little things they have in common. Because of that, it is not unusual for former prisoners to easily spot habitual liars. They may not even know how they spot them. I spotted Clinton the first time I saw him on TV, but I can’t explain exactly how. I was just so familiar with habitual liars by then that it was automatic.

Once we knew someone was an habitual liar, we did not necessarily hold it against them. We were just on guard. With most, it was not aimed at harming anyone. Many just wanted to be liked or thought well of. Often their parents had been drunks or abusive, which made skillful lying a survival trait for their kids. When they tried to reform and turn their lives around, the lying was the last thing to go. It went deep.

As to whether there are evil people, there absolutely are. I wish I didn’t know and could forget some of the things I heard then. There are.

I have seen some, however, become Christians and change. (And in prison, other prisoners watch new converts a long time before they believe it is genuine, because they have seen so many fake it to make parole or beat their cases. It can work.) Still, sometimes we would see a really bad person turn around, through God. But you have to watch them a very, very long time to know whether to believe the reform is genuine. And use great caution with them from then on. Their reform may go a long way, or not.

There was a program on HBO where a psychiatrist interviewed a serial killer who worked for the Mafia as a contract killer, his nickname was “The Iceman” for his habit of storing his victims in deep freezes for a period of years then leaving them dismembered around New Jersey to hamper identification.

The psychiatrist pointed out that sociopaths have some qualities that are beneficial if they have a moral framework that they grew up with and adopted. Namely, they have an abnormally low response to what normal people would regard as fear. They don’t generate much of an emotional response to things others find horrific or terrifying, which comes in handy when you’re the guy in the bomb squad trying to defuse the package in front of you, or the guy that has to Take That Hill, or looking through a scope at a teenage pirate and putting a bullet between the human eyes you’ve been staring at for goodness knows how long. Sheepdogs, in other words, the people who do things the rest of us consider awful or scary and just pass it off as “doing their job”.

Of course, not everyone who is a SEAL or a Delta operator or a fireman is a sociopath, certainly not in the negative connotation. Many people with blunted emotional responses to terrifying things respond normally to their families and loved ones, and many people who do heroic things wonder how they did them after the fact. Training and dedication will make mechanistic physical actions that can be performed before the emotional impact of what’s being done is felt. If every soldier was a sociopath, it’s unlikely there would be any such thing as PTSD — a sociopath doesn’t feel trauma, and won’t feel stress later.

In the program, the abusive and vicious nature of The Iceman’s upbringing was discussed, and the lack of an adopted moral framework added to the hardwiring of a limbic system that just doesn’t respond to emotional trauma like the rest of us proposed as why The Iceman was The Iceman. If the theory is correct, it may explain why sheepdogs can smell other wolves. In my experience, the things we find subconsciously objectionable in others are the qualities we dislike the most about ourselves. If someone is a well-adapted member of society who’s always known they had a low emotional response, the maladapted will display the same behavior and trigger subconscious alarms, the kinds of alarms that can’t be easily argued away because they are nonverbal. What will become apparent next, if you listen to the subconscious, is that there is a basic lack of moral framework. This will be doubly disturbing because the moral framework is all that separates a well-adapted person with low emotional response from a sociopath.

http://www.cassiopaea.com/cassiopaea/psychopath.htm

The whole magilla.

the consequences wont take 20-30-40 or more years to appear,

Rumcrook, sorry, I was responding to two different subthreads and didn’t mean to link them.

The strain of rot I was referring to in #102 was the short-term thinking infesting our corporate business climate.

But on the larger point, I do think that any sort of rot, even that of putting sheep dogs on trial, can take generations to reach the tipping point. Because the rot doesn’t spring forth fully, ah, rotted. It starts small, a few people here and there held in check by the rest of the culture. But perversely, because they’re a small and insignificant part of the whole, they tend to escape being held accountable for their mistakes (since their mistakes don’t get turned into policy). Yet they are free to snipe at every mistep and unpleasant side effect of the larger culture, and this causes their numbers to grow. Possibly very slowly.

Thirty years ago we were kicking our sheep dogs. Ask Habu if you see him stop by. But there were some limits to how hard the rest of society would let the rotters kick. There are more rotters today, and they’re less inclined to listen to objections.

Or its an article of faith that it is.

I think there are lots schizophrenics in fundamentalist religions, we just don’t recognize it in this context.

the consequences wont take 20-30-40 or more years to appear,

its more likely the consequences are in the planning stages even as we write this thread.

becuase the wolves dont live in a bubble unaware of our self inflicted wounds, they are predators and have allready spotted our weaknesses and are trying to come up- with a plan to capitalize on it and destroy us once and for all.