Are psychopaths evil?
Voltaire was right when he said:
Evil walks the earth...
If he was alive today, he may well have added:
...and he is a psychopath!
Maybe you believe that everyone is, at heart, a good person though some of us may have gone off the rails due to circumstances or upbringing.
Maybe your faith in the overall good in human nature suggests a shove in the right direction would enable psychopaths to redeem themselves, or maybe you think they can be ‘cured’ by religious conversion.
If so, I’d urge you to read more on the subject by checking out the links and publications listed on this site or, maybe, just read some of the real life criminal psychopaths' quotes here or view the video documentaries here...
The truth is - psychopaths don't want to change!
Evil walks the earth...
If he was alive today, he may well have added:
...and he is a psychopath!
Maybe you believe that everyone is, at heart, a good person though some of us may have gone off the rails due to circumstances or upbringing.
Maybe your faith in the overall good in human nature suggests a shove in the right direction would enable psychopaths to redeem themselves, or maybe you think they can be ‘cured’ by religious conversion.
If so, I’d urge you to read more on the subject by checking out the links and publications listed on this site or, maybe, just read some of the real life criminal psychopaths' quotes here or view the video documentaries here...
The truth is - psychopaths don't want to change!
"Psychopaths are generally well satisfied with themselves and with their inner landscape, bleak as it may seem to outside observers.
They see nothing wrong with themselves, experience little personal distress, and find their behavior rational, rewarding, and satisfying; they never look back with regret or forward with concern.
They perceive themselves as superior beings in a hostile, dog-eat-dog world in which others are competitors for power and resources."
They see nothing wrong with themselves, experience little personal distress, and find their behavior rational, rewarding, and satisfying; they never look back with regret or forward with concern.
They perceive themselves as superior beings in a hostile, dog-eat-dog world in which others are competitors for power and resources."
Some readers of my novel Remorseless, have told me the experience was like being inside the mind of a psychopath, and that was, they said, 'frightening yet enlightening', 'rather like visiting a foreign country' and 'perturbing but highly entertaining'.
Others have declared that ‘no-one can be that bad, surely!’ when considering the 'evil' villain's total lack of any redeeming features whatsoever.
The problem is our inborn tendency to believe the best in people, compounded by Hollywood's insistence that bad guys have some humanizing characteristics - even when the reality is different.
Script editors and agents often complain that seriously bad baddies are too 'cartoon like', and therefore must be diluted with some 'redeeming features' to suit Hollywood's interpretation of reality.
But while the psychopath may be superficially charming, beneath the facade he is devious, manipulative, selfish and egotistical in the extreme.
He really can’t understand how you and I feel as he has no empathy, though he may have learned to mimic our emotions.
He does not generally aspire to redeeming features, though he may, like a chameleon, display them when required...
Real life psychopaths make my character's escapades seem tame by comparison.
And, evil or not:
Psychopaths are detrimental to the rest of us.
Maybe I’m weird, but I think this topic is one of the most important issues facing society today, and that increasing our understanding of psychopathic characters is critical to the future of humanity.
It is becoming more and more apparent that successful, socially adaptive psychopaths are largely responsible for much that is wrong with our world.
So, are they all evil?
Not necessarily, but all psychopaths have the ability and inherent characteristics to be...