Psychopaths in Society

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?