Licensed mental health practitioner here. I normally don't post, but since there's an enormous amount of mis- and disinformation on here, I thought I'd say a couple of things.
<snip> So saying that 50% of corporate America or whatever scored as sociopaths on some instrument is a ludicrously silly thing to do.
What's their social impairment? How are they not functioning? <snip>
1. They don't care for other people, just profits.
2. Ahem, they just fucked the entire western world and brought down their own raison d'etre, in case you hadn't noticed.
More to the point, the reason these people score so high is because the nature of their work rewards that kind of behavior.
Yes, indeed.
I would be more worried about, say, 50% of clergy or Buddhist monks scoring high on a psychopathy "instrument,"
Except they don't.
but it doesn't surprise me that giving out a psychopathy screening instrument to corporate tycoons and politicians are going to give huge results. After all, they're being rewarded for doing what we ask them to be; the list of 'criteria' for psychopathy are the things most people would look for in a politician/successful CEO. How did they get to where they are able to take time to take a psychopathology screening instrument? Not by telling the truth and having empathy.
No, we didn't ask them to do that. We asked them to be responsible and thoughtful exemplars. People with vision for a sustainable future. Which they ain't.
Finally, there people in this world who are not mentally disturbed who are simply mean, evil people. There's nothing "wrong" with them in the clinical sense. They're just mean people. They're not psycho/sociopaths or anything else.
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