Caligula
I personally think that drug abuse can strip away all the usual boundaries that allow society to function.
The figures for personality defects and sociapathic faults in UK prisons are striking, with around 80% of male prisoners having 3 or more personality disorders. My own experience with them is that this seems to reduce over time, its as if they eventually learn to fit in to society in some way - but by then they are almost always going to be over 35 - though not all of them do learn.
The majority of offenders in prison are there for drug related offences, and the overwhelming majority of all offenders started their offending careers in their mid to late teens.
I think if you want to find a case for a famous psychopath/sociopath, there will be signs of it in these years, add some indulgence by society - through family ties and position or through some oppressive cause and you have the environment for them to thrive.
Stalin deeply dispised/hated this son. However, from what I read about his family, it wasn’t exactly great to be related to Stalin anyway.
Kim Jong Il?
I don’t know. Surely feeling loyalty to his family doesn’t discount the possibility of him being a sociopath. He severely abused his wife and while his wife says he never hit his children that may be because he didn’t want to feel like his father.
Shit even this guy had a family.
Sociopaths can express feelings of regret, loyalty, shame, whatever when it serves thir purpose. They just don’t feel them.
Ted Bundy was definiately a sociopath.
I’ve know several ‘Antisocial Personality Disorder’-type sociopaths. They weren’t killers, but they definately didn’t object to bending, breaking, or running roughshod over every rule that stood in their way, so long as they thought hey could get away with it. All were intensely charming, amoral, and effectively abusive, though none actually went quite far enough to do anything actionable. They gamed the systems they were in for all they were worth, and were rather impressively successful, because of that behavior. No one that worked with them for long liked them, but they got results, and they could charm superiors and outside contacts like no one’s business, so long as those superioirs were only rarely in contact.
I conclude from those experiences that, at least in some envirnments, there is some functional benefit to being an Antisocial Personality Disorder-type of asshole.
You know, I always wonder about that. How can we know they don’t feel these things? Oh, perhaps some will claim they don’t, at least some of the time - but if a person consistently says "Yes, I feel ashamed of X,"isn’t that a fairly difficult claim to disprove?
Dick Cheney, Joseph McCarthy, George Armstrong Custer
Sounds like not an (x)opath at all but a pure sadist - someone who feels and needs others’ pain. Not even for a joke or thrills - which is (x)opathic indifference - but simply to go on living.
No. If you knew one, you’d know. My half-brother is my cite.
Read the tale of Kevin Coe. Better yet, read Jack Olsen’s book “Son.”
According to Coe, he is 100% innocent and everyone who testified against him is lying.
Psychopaths are generally very good mimics of human behavior and have often learned how to express remorse, but even the best mimics will break character once in a while. They’ve learned what responses are appropriate to show to certain questions or situations, but lack the insight to understand why those responses are the appropriate ones. A full blown psychopath not only dosen’t feel guilt or empathy the same way you or I do, they don’t even fully understand it abstractly, and eventually that lack of understanding will show itself. A psychopath may matter of factly describe a horrible crime until they see someone looking ill, which gives them the social cue to show some remorse: “Yeah, that was pretty bad, I feel horrible. I must have been temporarily insane.” Ted Bundy admitted that he didn’t really understand social cues or social interaction early on in his life when he said, “I didn’t know what made things tick. I didn’t know what made people want to be friends. I didn’t know what made people attractive to one another. I didn’t know what underlay social interactions.” If you or I were to say this it would probably just be an indicator of normal adolescent awkwardness, but coming from him it’s a possible sign that his understanding of social cues was warped by a fundamental lack of understanding.
Usually a psychopath (especially in a correctional setting) will have a pretty well rehearsed answer when asked if they feel remorse for something they’ve done: “Oh, certainly, I lie awake most nights racked with guilt for the things I’ve done, how those poor victims must have suffered, my poor mother, etc.”, but that on further inquiry that expressed remorse will be indirectly or directly contradicted by other things he says, or by a failure to really appreciate the consequences of his actions, or by questioning involving remorse over things he’s done in other areas of his life, or by examining his records to see if what he says is consistent with what he does, and so on. Sometimes this can be as simple as rephrasing the question to avoid buzzwords that the person has learned to repsond to. A person may say they feel a great deal of remorse and empathy, but later when asked if they feel bad for their victims respond “No, why should I? They shouldn’t have screwed with me.” As dumb as that sounds, that’s a real example. Records may also show things like how the person has made the exact same expression of remorse every time they are caught committing the exact same crime.
A psychopath may describe themselves as a gentle, civic minded person and twenty minutes later laugh uncontrollably as they tell about the time they beat and hospitalized someone who owed them money, or may say that they stay out of trouble in prison by showing everybody respect and attending regular church services while forgetting that they just told you fifteen minutes ago about the time that they tried to kill a guard. A psychopath may say they feel sorry for a victim, then later say they did him a favor by killing him because his career was going nowhere. Bundy expressed sorrow for the families of the victims of his crimes even while he denied them - he’d tell the press that he felt terrible that any parent should have to go though that and that he hoped the real killer was caught soon, yet later when discussing the impact of serial murder in general with an interviewer he’d say something like “So what’s one less? What’s one less person on the face of the planet?” or do something like describe himself as “the coldest son of a bitch you’ll ever meet” when asked about the possibility of him helping to locate the bodies of victims. Statements like that aren’t the only indicators of psychopathy, but when they’re coupled with other factors like early juvenile delinquency, lack of affect, impulsivity, manipulativeness, an exaggerated sensne of self worth, etc., a pretty clear picture can start to emerge.
My understanding is true blue sociopaths (not people with sociopathic tendencies or who fit on a continuum, but who are truly sociopathic.) have problems in their brain wiring, and as a result they cannot feel either empathy or anxiety. As a result all the emotions that stem from those 2 feelings (compassion, remorse, guilt, love, fear, terror) are totally foreign to them.
Also my understanding is it really doesn’t matter how you raise someone, if your brain is miswired you are a sociopath. Kuklinski was an asshole, but had he been raised in a decent home I doubt he would’ve been as capable of evil. True sociopaths have no empathy or fear no matter if you abuse them or love them.
Our office Ron, who was definitely wired wrong, had a favorite apology: “I’m sorry if you feel I’ve hurt you in some way.” He said this to me in a meeting after he had told a bold faced lie about me, and three people backed me up that he was lying.
Not historical famous, but an extremely interesting insight on psychopaths nonetheless:
They do the same thing the rest of us do if we’re missing some abilities that normal people have, in other words. I can’t read nonverbal communication. But I’ve learned to make eye contact with people when I’m conversing with them. I don’t get any additional information from the eye contact, but I’ve learned that other people expect it.
Aileen Wuornos.
I’ve not seen the film “Monster”, but have seen the distrubingly revealing documentary *Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer *(2003) by Nick Bromfield.
IMO, judging by her own actions and words and general affect as seen in this presentation, she had all the characteristics of both a sociopath and a psychopath, including but not limited to:
Sense of entitlement
delusions of grandeur/extreme self-consciousness and centeredness and self-servingness
remorselessness
blaming others (society, parents, victims, police, etc…)
instumental violence
emotional disconnect and difficulty with “proper” affect
extreme anger towards society/humanity in general
The film is a case study in what to look for in such people, although not all with these characteristics are as obvious.
And the fact that his DNA was found in the vagina of one his victims, well, well it must be a false positive. Or maybe it was planted. That’s it! That SOB district attorney must have planted it there.
This guy is psychopathy personified (text link, video link)