TomViolenz wrote:All possibly true, but that was not what I was getting at.
Apparently, if I understand the proffesionals from that green psychology field correctly, the condition of Sociopathy is not so much a pathological condition but an ability. Namely to tune the effect emotions have on you.
It only becomes a problem, when people start to use this capability to turn off their empathy or guilt of harming people. (Which when it happens, is the Sociophatic part, meaning the one we find phatological because it makes them move against society)
In itself though, and that's what I was musing about, this could be a benificial mutation and the next step in the evolution of our conciesness. Just imagine all the crimes that happen because of our emotional reaction at the moment (low impulse control), now imagine we could just free ourselfs from their influence in this deciding moment!!!
(Emotional advertisment would probably also stop working, just as emotional propaganda would! Oh, the terrorists! and Think of the children!!! come to mind.)
My mention of our leaders being possibly sociophaths, was not so much to give my moral outrage words, but to point out how far this ability can bring you!
(and to point out the evolutionary advantage it brings the bearer of that mutation by moving them to the top of the pack - unfortunately being on the top of the pack, doesn't mean having more offspring anymore. So that's a conundrum)
I think morality is rather a different issue.
And yes, an immoral person with these capabilities is a lot more dangerous than one without, but these two things are not necessarily tied.
This is not entirely correct. Psychopathy is essentially an ensemble of symptoms not all of which are necessarily present in those that are clinically considered to be psychopaths. The causes of these symptoms can be multiple, which means that psychopathy is not one thing, but rather a vague and ultimately unscientific diagnosis. To define it as narrowly as "the ability to Damon Salvatore" is a little simplistic. For example, there are some cases where psychopaths simply can't feel strong emotion, even when they want to, which leads them to engage in extreme and risky "thrill seeking" behaviour. Think Charles Manson.
In any case, we are for the most part overly emotional idiots—weak, whimpering prey in the eyes of our psychopathic left-wing overlords.