Reddit reviews The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty
We found 9 Reddit comments about The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Basic Books AZ
That's a bit misleading. There are indeed people born psychopaths based on genes and/or in utero development. I highly recommend Simon Baron-Cohen's book, The Science of Evil on this topic.
Another key factor in this kind of evil is our innate tendency toward in-group and out-group behaviour, something we all seem programmed with, and can be activated by putting people in groups and into conflict with each other. For most of us it is dormant when we tend to identify with each other, instead of "them" as an enemy, and when there's no basis for conflict.
In many ways it is our vile biology. Where the experiences and hatred come into play is typically the activation of that innate "us vs them" tendency. That can easily grow into violence even between otherwise "normal" people with no ultimate problem with "them".
From the reflection and other visible letters, The Science of Evil
While I like the care you give to the subject, I would just like to fill in some cracks with a few resources. I have a background in AbPsych and one of my mentors did a lot of interesting work with real life psychopaths.
The baseline for psychopathy was first and best (so far) laid out by Robert Hare. This site has a nice explanation.
Two great books on the subject (non-fiction) are: The Anatomy of Evil and The Science of Evil. Something more in the popsci vein would also be Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test, though I have some personal qualms with Ronson’s view.
For fiction, there’s of course any of the works mentioned in the original post, as well as American Psycho and We Need to Talk about Kevin.
You ought to consider reading some books on psychopathy. Might connect a few more dots. Here are a few:
I think this issue really falls onto what you consider to be "modern psychology". Researchers have much understanding via neuroscience, genetic behavior science, evolutionary psychology, and more traditional psychological research.
For example, Simon Baron-Cohen (Sasha's cousin) is a world renowned psychological researcher on behaviour, particularly related to children, autism, and empathy. His book, The Science of Evil and Origins of Cruelty does a great job of summarizing the understanding of various causes and effects related to empathy-related problems, including Borderline Personality Disorder, autism, narcissism, psychosis, and Asperger's, and includes multiple inputs from sources such as genetics, childhood abuse or neglect, injury, and intermediary descriptors such as the brain circuitry and chemistry. (You can get a summary from various videos as well.)
If you really want to get into the detailed subject, I highly recommend the video course Biology and the Human Behaviour: The Neurological Origin of Individuality, taught by Robert Sapolsky and produced by The Great Courses. Sapolsky is always brilliant and interesting, and you can get a lot of this info from free videos around the internet just by a Google Video search on "Robert Sapolsky".
One of the key things I like about Sapolsky's course is that he starts off talking about the different levels of what we mean by causation. What does even "root" cause mean? One level describes the stimulus that results in the response behaviour, another describes the brain activity, another describes the chemistry, another describes the brain structure and interactivity ("design"), another describes the evolutionary pressures that cause the brain to be that way, another describes the variations, mutations, injuries, and other causes that create differences from the statistical norms, and so forth. Much of it is incredibly well understood, both as described by Sapolsky and Baron-Cohen.
In this context, the "let's bleed out the excess blood with leeches" description is highly inaccurate. That sort of thing was due to a complete lack of understanding. We have the understanding to a great degree with much of psychological problems. Rather, it is more an issue of treatment technology and development. I think a simpler description is that it's the engineering that's lacking, not the physics.
This is an area Sapolsky goes into as well. He does a great job of describing, for example, of how a reduced amount of a chemicals and/or the number of receptors can cause a certain problem or behaviours (e.g., schizophrenia), and treating with that chemical and address the symptom. But then he'll refer back to an earlier part of the course where he also described the effect of that chemical in other areas of the brain, and you can easily understand how increasing it to solve a problem in one area can create a problem in the other. So the issue comes down to how do you either increase the chemical at only that location of the brain or how do you increase the sensitivity (receptors) in those neurons in that region, which may ultimately be the source of the problem. We don't really have the technology to do either. (I may be remembering some of the details incorrectly, and I am not a neuroscientist, but this is the gist of the message.)
That leaves us with no workable solution even though we fully understand the root cause, and means we have no choice but to treat using these imperfect methods like addressing symptoms and trading off one problem for another (side effects).
Of course this whole description I give does not necessarily apply for all psychological illnesses, but then to be fair the same is true for many physical ones as well, often not understanding the source and limited by technology. Cancer is a great example, where we apply treatments that create major side effects and don't really "cure" the cancer. (We even refer to remission, at best, rather than cure.)
TL;DR: I think a better description is that we have pretty good understanding but currently lack sufficient technology to treat much better than we do at the moment.
> aspects of my abuse required me to extinguish my empathy and do things very far away from my core beliefs
The alters who handled that for you had a critical role in your survival. People who aren't able to dissociate and who experience this kind of abuse get pretty permanently messed up - meaning, think about the fact that if you didn't have those alters to step in, YOU would probably have become what they are. I think a persecutor generally IS a protector, the mindf*ck being that they learned the best way to protect you/others is by becoming the abuser. What they went through was trauma in the form of psychological torture, and I guarantee none of them see it that way. But as far as healing goes, that's how it ought to be approached with them.
The empathy piece is tricky. I read this book a while ago that really helped me understand more about how and why it can get shut off. It's called The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty. At the time I read it I was struggling with my own (lack of?) empathy but also trying to get a handle on how our abuser(s) could behave like a normal human being in one setting but then carry out unspeakable abuse in another.
Currently working my way through The Science of Evil, although I haven't been much in the mood for it.
I also just grabbed the first two volumes of East of West as a Christmas gift for my nephew, so I'm going to read through those right away to make sure they're age appropriate.
What do you usually enjoy reading?
There are also psychopathic ENTJs... ;-)
When I was looking for information about the "evil" psychological disorders, there was no way around “The Science of Evil”. It deals with empathy and what people with a lag of it are like. It's awesome!
https://www.amazon.com/Science-Evil-Empathy-Origins-Cruelty/dp/0465031420/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1491643106&sr=8-1&keywords=the+science+of+evil
Besides that, I totally agree. Whenever I have a goal in mind, there is nothing I am not going to break through!
Not pedophiles specifically, but here are a few about deviant behaviors in general that might interest you: