There was book written a long time ago called.”The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”. He was right that earlier minds were different but wrong on what the difference was.

Supporting evidence for this is studies that show Blacks have less empathy and a brief look at any place they control. Another good source is tame foxes. In four generations they took wild foxes and made them tame. They acquired a lot of attributes of dogs. Quote,”… By 2005-2006, almost all the foxes were playful, friendly and behaving like domestic dogs. The foxes could “read” human cues and respond correctly to gestures or glances. The vocalizations they made were different to wild foxes…”.

I believe that the foxes were breed for empathy even if that’s not what they were aiming for.

It’s possible that this came about by the elites “taming” humans. What they got was less violent people with a side effect of more empathy.

Sam J’s theory of civilization,”Civilization came about because of the rise of empathy. This allowed people to work together”.

Sam J’s theory of civilization, ”Empathy is necessary to form civilization. As capacity for empathy rose civilization rose with it.”

The psychopath question is an interesting and extreme example, but you see the same sort of thing going on in areas like education: How many little boys have been judged to be “hyperactive”, and then drugged into quiescence?

Did the people doing the research that created the standards for determining what constituted hyperactivity actually look at what was normal behavior across the population, or did they select a small sub-group the same way they look at psychopathy in criminals that are incarcerated, and then infer that the behavior they were looking at was abnormal and in need of medication, while it was actually the natural state of the average boy?

The one thing that I think needs to change in our society is the unquestioning veneration that the average person offers up to the “expert class”. Nine times out of ten, when you go looking at what these people have pronounced, against “popular wisdom”, it turns out there was an agenda, like the sugar industry was paying them to say that “fat is bad”. With the track record our brilliant researchers have, it’s a wonder anyone pays any attention to them at all, these days–How many times have they reversed themselves on coffee, in just my lifetime? Seems like every three-five years or so, there’s a new study out reversing what the last one said. After a bit, you start reading the damn papers with a very jaundiced eye, and looking cynically for who paid for what…

https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-a-psychopath

Interesting to read some self-perceptions, to note how many people might actually have this as a diagnosis and to note two other points these comments suggest:

1. There are actually ways in which this is a positive[ish] personality type and avoids some of the worst of other borderline personalities [they don't have wild, insane mood swings, depression, mania or anxiety.]

2. It kind of does have some interesting points of comparison with the autism spectrum, comparable cause or not.

I also recommend the short book Confessions of a Psychopath by the pseudonymous ME Thomas. Her book was illuminating and got some media play a few years ago. It started with her article in Psychology Today and she turned it into the book.

I perhaps demonstrated mild psychopathy myself by reading her article in a free copy in a waiting room and then, less passively, reading her book for free in installments while standing in a bookstore over a week or so. My contribution to the prevailing irony of life. It’s a very good read although structured in a periodically repetitive way.

One thing both those Quora people and Thomas do suggest is just how much this is a type within the normal range of human personality, far more able to function than anyone very far along the spectrum, let alone those with bad cases of BPD, a few other PDs, anxiety or depression. Once you get so bad as a psychopath to hit ASPD territory, less so.

On the whole, using the term as a shorthand for “dangerous” obscures more than it helps.

It’s like that doctor who was researching “the criminal mind”, and discovered that his brain scan looked just like the crazies he was researching.

You can’t look at small group of the outliers, and then make broad, sweeping generalizations about the rest of the population. Sure, there are people who commit crimes that match perfectly with the subset of what we’re diagnosing as psychopathy or sociopathy, but what we don’t know, because we’re not looking at the rest of the population, is if this is correlation or causation. I would wager that there are a lot of people out there who are what we could term “functioning psychopaths” who don’t go to prison because they never commit crimes, and that there are likely a bunch of people that have committed crimes, but who aren’t stupid enough (or, the cops aren’t lucky enough…) to be caught.

You can’t look at the people in prison and say “Yes, possession of this brain/mental condition means you’re doomed to be a criminal…”, because you don’t know what the incidence of that condition is in the general population. The scary thing about this sort of research is that the people setting public policy look at it, fail to recognize the limitations, and then make decisions about what needs to be done. And, with today’s technology…? The odds of enormous damage go up, tremendously.

I think we need to start implementing the precautionary principle a lot more, with this stuff, because we seem to be in a continual process of “discovery, misinterpretation, misapplication, disaster, ohshitwhatdowedonow…?”. Look at the nutritional BS, where the government seems to have triggered the obesity epidemic due to piss-poor biased research that appears to have been paid for by certain sections of agribusiness…