Ok, I have an hypothesis which I offer you to examine and comment on.
Presuming that hypothetical Sass is a Mensa-IQ type. That makes Sass smarter than 49/50 people.
Presume that Sass is very conscientious. This would make me more consciencious and ethical than about the same proportion of the population (As an expert said in the book ‘The Mating Mind’, if you want to know the average person’s conscientiousness, try to build a house and see whether the contractors put much effort into anything besides getting paid).
My presumptions holding, (and please do not disrail the argument by rejecting my presumptions), the vast majority of people are dumber and less ethical.
Since everything, including the concept of personality, beauty, money, etc, is all relative, to Sass’s point of view, Sass is surrounded by stupid sociopaths
While very very rare people might be smarter (Stephen Hawking) or more conscientious (to-be-canonized-Saints), they are so rare, and unlikely to ever cause problems for Sass, they are a non-factor.
So, is Sass surrounded by Stupid Sociopaths? Are you surrounded by them?
Sorry, but I’m going to have to derail your presumption.
If you want to presume that you’re uber-ethical, knock yourself out. I won’t fight the hypothetical. But you relate intelligence to ethics and that doesn’t flow at all. You’re making the assertion that someone with a 120 IQ is more well mannered than someone with a 110 IQ? How? Why? What?
But ok, you’re more ethical than 98% of the population. That doesn’t make society full of sociopaths any more than an Olympic sprinter thinks the rest of the world is full of quadriplegics.
These things are relative in relationship to averages and society at large, not to one person’s concept of them and society at large. Just because someone is a saint it doesn’t mean that everyone else is a murder.
Sometimes everybody around you seems to be a stupid sociopath because of different factors - Qadgop has more of them than most people because he works in a prison. I have more of them because I work in a downtown public library; I also am surrounded by more drunks, more crackheads, and more screaming children.
No she’s not. She’s positing two hypotheticals. One, that this hypothetical person is in the 98th percentile for intelligence. And, completely unrelated to this, the hypothetical person also happens to be in the 98th percentile for ethical behavior.
However, this doesn’t really make smarter or more ethical people “really rare”, or that this hypothetical person is doomed to be surrounded by stupid sociopaths. Like lots of people, I regularly scored in the 99th percentile on all those standardized tests we used to take back in school. However, at my current job I’m surrounded by people who seem a heck of a lot smarter than me. I’m not surrounded by dumb people.
And of course, to fight the hypothetical myself, I tend to find that the people who didn’t score well on those standardized tests aren’t all idiots, although some are. Plenty of people were just bored with those tests and didn’t even try. At the time I didn’t realize that there was any other possibility than to try to get the best score possible. Then a guy I knew said he just filled in circles at random. It’s not like this guy was smart or anything, but he was of normal intelligence. However, his test score would put him at the bottom of the curve. And while most people didn’t literally fill in circles at random, lots and lots of kids didn’t try very hard either.
Anyway, my point is that just because people don’t score in the 98th percentile on standardized tests doesn’t make them really dumb, although they could be.
Sure, I’d say you are surrounded by stupid sociopaths given your presumptions. But that’s only because of how you’ve defined “stupid” and “sociopath.” Any meaning to those terms or implications to the above are of course a separate question.
Seems to me that a lot of people look for a label to apply to a person or an idea so they know how to react to it, but it’s just a label. For example, in a refent thread someone accused another poster of condoning gossip. Well, so what? It’s not as if whatever the accuser defines as gossip is some automatically “bad thing” in some objective sense.
Same here–so what that you are surrounded by stupid sociopaths?
Because I would rather be surrounded by genius saints. Who wants to be surrounded by inferiors in mind and spirit at almost all levels of society? And almost every restaurant, tv show, movie, music program, is designed for the Stu-paths?
Inigo’s opinion is that most people are barely more intelligent or more generous than rabid gorillas. That notwithstanding:
If you’re setting up hypotheses in which you’re of above-average intelligence and above-average conscienciousnessitude, then from YOUR perspective of course you’ll be surrounded by stupid sociopaths.
The question then becomes: If you consider yourself surrounded by stupid sociopaths, does that make you a brilliant saint or just another of the self-satisfied mob?
Inigo is wise to view man as a partially hairless ape.
Well, I would hope awareness of the situation alone would allow one to not be part of the mob. I am surrounded by walmart shoppers (outside of walmart) and McDonald’s eaters, yet have I been absorbed into their blubbery mass despite avoiding those two corporate curses?
Sociopathy isn’t a relative term. It’s a specific condition, and it has no particular correlation to intelligence. A sociopath isn’t someone “less conscientious” than you, a sociopath is someone who completely lacks empathy or feelings of “guilt.” They’re comparatively rare. You aren’t “surrounded” by them (though you may know one or two, and even like them - they can be superficially very charming).
I would say that most people are assholes to one degree or another (or at least capable of it, depending on circumstances), but most assholes aren’t true sociopaths.
As to intelligence - well, half of all people have below average intelligence ;), but I think even innate intelligence can be compromised by traits such as incuriosity, selfishness, and various prejudices and bigotries.
So the answer to the OP is that she is not surrounded by “stupid sociopaths,” but that most people she comes in contact with have character flaws and are capable of stupid beliefs and actions.
And if the OP was a genius saint, wouldn’t the natural reaction the people around him/her (given basic human nature) be to throw stones at him/her and tear the OP down?
In the modern world, the only thing we, as a species, like more than putting our heroes up on pedestals seems to be yanking our heroes off of them before destroying them.
I could have made a fortune if only I’d sold trendy pedestal & rope franchises…
I don’t know about you, but I do have a higher than average number of stupid sociopaths/psychopaths in my environment. Probably about 20% of my patients fall into that category. Of course, I work in a prison, so it selects for those types of individuals. The smarter ones don’t go to prison so much; they more often go to law or advertising or politics.
But even in my environment, most of my patients do not suffer from sociopathy/psychopathy. I tend to view them more as lost/embittered souls, rather than human predators.
You’re in luck. People who pat themselves on the back for their IQ and regard everyone else around them as lesser beings rarely find themselves surrounded by inferiors - or superiors, or ,really, much of anyone. You’ll have plenty of alone time in which to enjoy your oh so edifying tv shows. Hypothetically.
In my humble opinion [hah!], you’re probably just not paying enough attention to the people around you to even know any of this. In short, you’re probably less than average in social behavior.
Too late.
Sociopathy is not relative, so even if you are really more conscientious than your fellow creatures, that doesn’t mean you’ve got more than the expected number of sociopaths around you. Not knowing what a sociopath is while dumping that term on most other people around you makes you a) ignorant, b) insulting and c) appear less intelligent than you claim to be.
You don’t get it. You are surrounded by people. Whether you call them stupid sociopaths or genius saints has no bearing on how they are going to act. All but a tiny minority of them have never heard of you and don’t know that you think they are stupid sociopaths.
People are just going to do what they are going to do, and you saying they are stupid sociopaths doesn’t change that.
Careful there, Doc. The Devil’s Advocate might demand of you a lengthy, insightful expert opinion missive supporting the re-humanization of your clientelle in the eyes of those of us who would NEVER wind up in The Penal System.
Aw who am I kidding…consider it demanded. We love reading your stuff.
Sociopathy is not a relative term of others to you, or others to a very high level of ethical behavior. It’s a clinical diagnosis for people who are sociopathic relative to the ethicality of an entire population.
I see that I’ve been ninjaed various times. You would do better to call people who are less ethical than you “less ethical” and not use an ill-fitting clinical medical term that has a real definition that doesn’t agree with your definition. That’s a pretty stupid thing to do.
