BLOG 9: We
are afraid of psychopaths because they have no qualms about hurting other
people. Discuss
Psychopaths
are people with an antisocial personality disorder that lack the ability to
feel remorse and sympathy. They are egocentric, charmers and do not have
meaningful personal relationships with others. Since psychopaths cannot
sympathize and feel for other human beings, they lack one of the basic human
emotions which cause people to fear psychopaths.
The main
reason that people do not commit crimes is because they understand how the
person receiving the crime would feel. However, if a person does not feel in
the first place, the crime, in their mind, would be considered okay and never
understand why they should not commit that crime and continue doing it. For
instance, murder is a crime that many people do not commit because they can
sympathize and feel the pain a victim is going through. However, these emotions
are gone in a psychopath and they do not feel bad or guilty over the murder.
They do not second guess and are ruthless and are unpredictable because society
does not know what they will do next. Psychopaths lack a moral compass and,
without proper and right morals, they are capable of harming people.
This easiness
to hurt other people evokes fear of psychopaths because society does not know
when a psychopath will finally say “no, this is unfair to this person” or “no, I
should not do this” since they lack sympathy. Humans rely on other human beings’
ability to sympathize and feel for another and second guess their decision, but
when that is shut off, they are capable of anything because they feel no guilt.
They are
like robots, without any emotions and, therefore, can do anything and are unpredictable.
This unpredictability is another factor that scares society because they can
harm a person without any motive and they act totally normal, making it hardier
to link them to the crime. Additionally, psychopaths are charming and deceitful
liars that blend extremely well in society therefore, they are hard to detect
and diagnosising psychopathic behavior is difficult.
Furthermore,
society portrays psychopaths as crazy, murderous predators in the media which
also enforces a dangerous mindset of psychopaths in people’s minds.
With such
limited information on psychopaths, difficulty diagnosising the behavior and
the lack of feeling guilt and sympathizing, psychopaths evoke fear in society. If
you knew a person who did not feel any emotion about killing a person, wouldn’t
you want to stay as far away from that person as possible?