Having served on a fugitive squad for five years, I have encountered some of the most evil, amoral, degenerate pieces of shit that society has to offer, and locked them up.
Sadly, there’s a factory somewhere still making more every day.
I disagree. Bad, evil, whatever you want to call it - is still a mental problem.
Think of it this way - if you were transported into them, including their brain, then you would be them. You would be just as evil. Does that mean you are evil now?
I don’t blame evil people for being evil any more than I blame a bear for trying to eat me (in theory, if a bear was trying to eat me. afaik no bears are currently trying to eat me)
There is no free will. Evil people deserve our sympathy just as much as good people. That is not to say that they should be premitted to do evil things, but there is no reason to make them suffer.
We should probably define evil. A lot of what’s described here is more extreme self-centeredness, which doesn’t make someone evil, per se.
They may do things that are wrong, hurtful, cruel, malicious or vindictive, but it’s always in the context of being extremely, relentlessly self-centered.
It’s the ones who do that stuff because they find it fun, or because they like to watch people or animals be injured, killed, squirm, suffer or otherwise be discomfited by these actions that I’d count as evil.
For example, the corporate CFO who does something that screws a bunch of retirees because it gets him a bonus isn’t necessarily evil, but self-centered and lacking conscience.
The CFO who does something like that simply because he wants to watch people squirm and hear them cry would be classed as evil.
Come to think of it, I can think of one person who I’d count in that category. It was a girl in college who would pursue and sleep with guys who had girlfriends just so she could rat them out and watch the fallout. That, and generally divulge any secrets she knew just so she could watch people squirm, even if it made her look bad, or if there was nothing else to gain in it for her.
Well it may be getting into True Scotsman territory, but I’m one of those people that believes bad behavior stems from psychological or intellectual problems. “Crazy” might be too far - that implies inability to function, and plenty of badly behaving people can pay their bills and “pass”.
I also believe “bad” is a next to useless term. There is too much variety in the nature of people, their motives, their behaviors, and the causes of their behaviors to generalize everything like that.
Complete amorality is my definition of evil. Extreme self-centeredness, so that nobody else’s well-being factors into any decision, except as they affect the sociopath’s well-being, is evil.
You don’t have ‘negative good’ in the real world. The meter just goes down to zero. Somebody with zero scruple is what we call evil.
I agree with this. I basically don’t believe in evil, much in the same way that I don’t believe in a god. But I believe that there are people who are incapable of feeling any empathy, and I think that there is very often an organic component to it.
Yeah. Everything we know about psychology indicates these people really do not have brains that function the same way as '‘normal’ brains.
[QUOTE=Some Study I Found]
Data in the literature report a reduction in prefrontal gray matter volume, gray matter loss in the right superior temporal gyrus, amygdala volume loss, a decrease in posterior hippocampal volume, an exaggerated structural hippocampal asymmetry, and an increase in callosal white matter volume in psychopathic individuals. These findings suggest that psychopathy is associated with brain abnormalities in a prefrontal– temporo-limbic circuit—i.e. regions that are involved, among others, in emotional and learning processes.
[/QUOTE]
I’d call that mental illness or a neurological disability or something. If someone were to stick a railroad spike in your head, you could just as easily lose the ability to feel empathy. And people would call you evil, because they can’t understand what it would be like to not feel empathy (or fear - a lot of sociopaths don’t experience fear, either.) Who you are - your thoughts, emotions, memories, values, goals and ideas - all of that is owed exclusively to your particular brain structure and chemistry. We can do some things to make small changes to our brains, like exercise and meditate, but we can’t alter who we are fundamentally without going in there and doing some renovation.
Yes, these are broken people, and I guess for cultural reasons we can call them evil. But I’ve never been apathetic to the suffering of evil. I couldn’t turn down a suffering sociopath any more than I could a suffering child. I don’t want evil people to suffer, I want them to be prevented from harming others. Because I really don’t think they should be punished for what is essentially a physical abnormality.
And yes, I know what a slippery slope I tread.
I knew a man who murdered his four year old son by forcing a mixture of ammonia and cyainde down his throat, and then took the same thing himself. Murder/suicide.
If that doesn’t qualify as evil, I don’t know what does.
I’ve encountered a few people, over the course of my career, who were, if not truly evil, at least seriously conniving and amoral, at best. I can’t say I’ve ever had the misfortune of knowing someone who was murderer / psychopathic-level evil.
I’ve seen factories like that too. Does yours have a bunch of trailers with a meth lab in the middle?
That’s even less likely to be evil than a socipoath. That man probably thought he was doing it for a good reason.
That was my thought, he probably did it from despair. The end result is the same though.
When I read that post my first thought was of a story of a sociopath I read about in a book on sociopathy. He was a successful attorney who was married with kids, and after being indicted on white collar criminal charges and being faced with divorce he planned to murder his wife (I forget his motive for wanting to murder his wife, I think she was testifying against him but I don’t remember). So he made out a list of ways he could deal with the situation with pros and cons in each column
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Let wife live
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Kill wife, let kids live
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Kill wife, kill kids
With (as I said), pros and cons under each category. That is a sociopath, someone who argues the pros and cons of killing their wife and kids like they are comparing the pros and cons of buying a used car.
You know that scene in Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent where Danny wills a parcel of land to Ethan, then Ethan gives him enough money to drink himself to death? I know someone who tried that in real life.
He got as far as making sure the other guy was dead before the cops got him.
The factories are people like this.
According to his criminal record (from public records), he’s been previously busted for Drugs - 1st Degree- Possess 25 Grams or More - Cocaine/Heroin/Meth; Drugs - 1st Degree - Sale - 10 Grams or More-Cocaine/Heroin/Meth w/intent to sell.
His 25 year old son (“Jr”, not the younger son in the article) has been busted for underage drinking, multiple stupid moving violations, open bottle and Riot-3rd Degree-Unlawful Force or Violence; Disorderly Conduct-Offensive/Abusive/Noisy/Obscene.
Then we get the younger son swinging his hockey stick at other kids like a baseball bat, backed up by dad violently assaulting the coach.
Yes I do live with my mother, as her caregiver. No I cannot explain how/why it happened, I certainly didn’t do it intentionally. Thankfully my brother doesn’t live in Ireland and after his last tirade against me he hasn’t visited much. It’s not just me he has a problem with, he has an ex-wife and at least 3 ex-girlfriends (I think it might be as many as 6) all of them left him. But people still speak of him as though he’s a wonderful human being.
A few weeks ago he apparently rang several people and made arrangements to have mother put in full-time residential care. Or he tried to, I’m listed as her net-of-kin so he can’t actually do this, but he’s suddenly decided that she has to go into a home permanently. I’m sure he’s up to no good, but I can’t think what, other than he plans to move mother out of the house, move himself in and via some law or other get the house taken off me. He still seems to be oblivious to the idea that I don’t own the house, mother does.
You may want to speak to an attorney about this just to get your bases covered. Evil people, ignorant of the law, can still be quite annoying.
You win the SDMB.
:eek: :eek: :eek:
This may be true of some drugs, and some people. But both of the weed dealers I’ve met were perfectly nice people - not sociopath-charming, but genuinely kind and centered sorts. Admittedly, neither of them dealt full-time; they both had (well-paid and responsible) day jobs. The dealing was more a favor for friends than anything else.
Yeah, I’ve met some really pretty decent weed dealers.
I’m not sure if I’d quite call him ‘evil’, but one of my great-uncles is pretty well amoral; he pointlessly harassed his elderly neighbours for several years until the guy had a heart attack and died, which my uncle actually found funny. They hadn’t done anything to him, he was just bored.
He also tried to scam his brother, my grandpa, out of quite a large sum of money when he had Alzheimers. When my mother called him out on it, he seriously didn’t seem to think he was doing anything wrong- after all, my Grandpa was going to die soon, so what was he going to spend it on? Surely it was better that his money should go to someone who’d use it!
Oddly though, he’s great to his kids, who all think he’s awesome (kind of the opposite to a lot of sociopaths), and he went a long way out of his way to help out one of my cousins when he’d been out of work for years due to mental illness; gave him a car and an easy job, and a good reference when he left.
My parents have been known to liken him to a mafia boss. I think he’d be a good one.