In the Psychopath We Trust

A psychopath is traditionally characterized by someone who has no conscience. This is a clinically recognized condition, but the psychopaths in society often go overlooked as such. While a lack of empathy has certain drawbacks, it can also enable a sort of hyper-intelligence. To have a total moral disregard is a sort of labyrinthian freedom.



The Healer

I was recently watching an episode of House wherein an interesting moral dilemma takes place. To explain it let me first put the show into context: This medical drama is centered around the protagonist, Gregory House. When it comes to diagnostic medicine, besides being a drug addict and a total jerk, House is considered ‘the best.’ Despite his unorthodox approach, and rough exterior, he and his team always solve the case.

In the fifth season episode Teamwork this moral dilemma comes to a climax. Cameron, one of the female doctors, confronts House to tell him she is leaving both him and her husband. She expresses the love she had for both of them, and why it has now faded into pity. Her character represents the moral purity, consistently identifying with the patients at a humanitarian level, whereas House is a moral subjectivist; a pragmatist.

Cameron: “Motives matter. Lives have to come first”
House: “He’s alive, that’s what matters.”
Cameron: “Not to you...”

Camerson is right; House is shown to use the human life as leverage for his own personal aims time and time again. In the end, however, he always saves the patient. He’s the best; and hence the problem for Cameron: the pragmatic good seems to out-weigh a view in which there is an innate value on the human life if it can deliver. House scoffs at her religious proclivities as dogmatic thinking falls short, analytically, to emotionless deduction--and it is emotionless. The true extent of that void is exhibited in his failure to really convincingly love anyone.

Cameron’s leaving is the bitter result of her husband Chase, who also worked under House, killing a ruthless dictator in cold blood (that is, under the guise of medical treatment.) When Chase refuses to leave the hospital as they had previously planned, instead finding purpose in his brand of justice, and even telling Cameron “I’d do it again,” the moral counterargument crystalizes for Cameron. She addresses House in her final soliloquy:

“You ruined him, so that he can’t even see right from wrong; can’t even see the sanctity in a human life anymore. I loved you, I loved Chase. I feel sorry for you both. For what you’ve become, because there is no way back for either of you.”

That is, House has no definitive moral anchor and holds god-like power in his hands. Despite his tremendous capacity to save a life, this is vicarious intent; a flippant miracle. Psychopathic doctors exist, of course, and that is generally how it goes. Once one starts down the slippery slope of subjugating spiritual precepts to the excusatory power of cold reason there is, as Cameron points out, no way back. When you elevate logic above the divine, above all emotion, logic never lets you find a reason to put it back down.

Still, when faced with the decision of which doctor to choose, wouldn’t you want the best?



The Killer

One of the premiere traits of the psychopath is that they are attracted to positions of power, as their locus of being is set irrecoverably within baser desire to manipulate and control. While House gets off on knowing people better than they know themselves, a figure like James Bond gets off on knowing what society needs better than the democratic process knows itself. What were seen as collateral hurt feelings in the diagnostic procession above are replaced here by dead people, innocent or not, as beyond the glamour James Bond is surely a serial killer by definition.

The moral counterweight in the Bond paradigm is not as easy to track down; there is, however, one thing which always seems to remain constant. Through all of the bloodshed, clandestine hacks at democracy, and all the rest of the action sequence antics, the damsel-in-distress not only doesn’t seem to mind this machine, he turns her on. For the damsel, and the audience vicariously, there is the sense in which when you are exposed to the true nature of the cloak and dagger ‘big decisions’, there is an instant infatuation with someone can pull the trigger so unflinchingly. To someone with any shred of compassion this life beyond the thin facade of ‘government’ is simply unthinkable, and the giant who can burden such a load is surely a demi-god, with the right to ravage any self-respecting woman.

It is interesting to note that the psychopathic pragmatism, of course, posits values as subjective and contextual. With that in mind, it seems Bond cannot say he is doing the ‘right’ thing, merely what his orders are. If that is the case then the ‘enemy’ is logically no more evil than he is, just of another geo-political context. To them, Bond is demonic; the grim spectre of death itself.

So long as Bond is fighting on our side, however, he’s as sexy as hell, isn’t he?



The Face

Psychopaths make up a fairly small percent of society, the coherent and noteworthy hyper-ability enabled by a lack of conscience being even fewer among those individuals.

For the most part there is nothing romantic about the Psycho; the sexy veneer is but a haunting evolutionary cologne. They can, and usually are, ruthless, vicious people, despite the romanticized Hollywood portrayals. (The show Dexter, for example is about an admitted psychopath serial killer...who is a cop). When we look at society we see the morality of these exceptions to the rule applied everywhere else. That is, they are becoming less exceptions to the rule and more the norm. Integrity requires a moral constant; the dissolution of moral fibre can largely be attributed to the propensity to translate being pathetic into some iconic justification. That is, by magnifying the nature in which most people are inherently incapable of operating, the general public gains a learned lack of self-worth; it makes them invite the Id to rise up in that place to defend any criticism. Under the facade of an over-exuberant lack of lethargy, the apathy remains: the divide between the general person and an ‘expert’; that is, the sense in which common sense (global) problems are too much of an effort, and require the aid of some high-functioning con-artist.

Insofar as we can say that psychopaths are attracted to positions of power, this is would seem to be the meta-con.

If you place you trust in a psychopath you must do so with the implicit recognition that this person has no emotional investment in your well-being--no conceptual definition of such a thing. That is, these people, in the wider lens, need some form of help. Praising and rewarding spiritual arson as genius, or artistic, does the individual, nor society, any good.