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Comment by moron4hire | Hacker News Reader

>> But her excuses, or lack of them, riled me and I told her she represented everything that was wrong with the country.

Bold thing to say to a sociopath with a gun.

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Thinking only sociopaths can do really terrible things is likely very wrong. Normal people can decide over some time to switch off empathy, or to work against it. This needs to be understood.

Anger, pain or desperation will make otherwise normal people do some very abnormal things.

Even in the most "civilized" and wealthy of western democracies, 1 week of no food, water and electricity would lead to absolute bedlam.

Three months of that kind of desperation would lead to otherwise normal people killing and robbing strangers. When the crisis abates, they'll be able to rationalize away their behavior because it was necessary.

The most dangerous person in the world is someone with nothing to lose. If you have nothing left to lose then you aren't constrained by worrying about tomorrow.

"An empty stomach has no conscience".

I would argue that neither does a stiff dick.

If you look at Maslov's hierarchy, if you can't fulfill your basic needs at the bottom of the pyramid, you're not really looking for self-actualization.

> Normal people can decide over some time to switch off empathy, or to work against it.

Yes, and all it typically takes to turn off empathy is believing they're doing the right thing against "bad" people.

I don't think there is any evidence to show that sociopathy is only an innate attribute and that it is not learnable. The only definition of sociopathy I can find is based on behavior. So if you act like a sociopath, it doesn't really matter how many nightmares you had on the way to getting there, you're a sociopath.

She was just a mass murderer. I don't see any indications of sociopathy.

I bet most people could be turned to this life given her circumstances and environment.

The two biggest mistakes people tend to repeat are thinking that (1) it can't happen here and (2) if it does happen here I'll be different.

It's our society that is better, not our people.

It'll never go to zero, but in a well-off society you see mental health issues accounting for a lot of crime. In poor or chaotic societies, there is the added element of otherwise normal people forced by circumstance into doing terrible things.

Societies are not on some kind of monotonically increasing slope, they can regress and they can do so with astonishing speed.

Society cannot erase the demons of our nature. At best you achieve a level of control that is fleeting.

She accepted payment from a friend to murder the friend's boyfriend's other girlfriend. Not only that, she decapitated and dismembered the body. Did we read the same article? Having a "just doing a job" attitude about killing other people is sociopathic.

You don't have to be a sociopath to do horrific things. A lot of people are capable of doing the same in the right (wrong) circumstances.

A lot of people don't like to hear that. It's simmilar to when people call Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, etc. "monsters", they weren't monsters, they were human. Humans are capable of some pretty fucked up things

If what she said about killing the first person was correct, she felt remorse. She had a conscious, she just forced herself to ignore it until killing stopped bothering her.

Historical genocides, and massacres show that either there are a lot more latent sociopaths out there than we ever dreamed of, or normal people can become desensitized to killing.

I think this is the kind of stupidity that women actually filter for, not filter against. Because that kind of stupidity can only come with a save and comparatively rich life.

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