The lucky ones in the NYmag article here did many of the things he recommends.
Free PDF here, look for the hard to find “read” button.
https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/psychopathcode/details
The author talks of psychopathy as an "adaptation" and not a "brokenness" in an individual ... but the adaptation so far mentioned is only in the sense of "the relatively small number of psychopaths is adapted to prey on other humans". I suppose that having too many psychopaths would render human trust very frail and would make a society prone to failure (and so be a negative pressure) -- so psychopathy can only occur within limits to be successful.
I wonder though whether there's another use for psychopaths: when a society or humanity at large faces a "bottleneck event" where extinction is very possible, the psychopaths "rise to the occasion" and do all the nasty, non-empathetic, distasteful things that a society needs to survive in those weird situations.
If so, then, ... psychopaths are harmful to individuals and society, until they aren't.
EDIT: actually, there's the brilliant Marlon Brando speech in Apocalypse Now (https://simonamooon.deviantart.com/journal/Apocalypse-Now-Ho...), where he describes bastards with empathy, people who love their families yet are able to perform the unthinkable atrocities [on their family] to win. So these folks are the opposite of psychopaths -- they do terrible things when necessary and doubtless feel the anguish of it.
EDIT: in other words, psychopaths are society's ultimate catastrophic re-insurance, the last resort.
They're not literally parasites or any more/less mutated than the next person whose genes are different from their ancestors.
Hyperbole like this is really destructive and close-minded. Consider if you lived in a world of psychopaths and you were the rare empathetic one. If the greater population openly regarded you as a mutant parasite, would this alienation inspire you to behave in a pro-social way or an anti-social way?
No SNP was significant, nor any single gene. MAO-A (the "warrior gene") is ruled out. However, many genes showed strong association with Anti-Social Personality Disorder, with multiple alleles working together.
My read is that these behavior patterns emerge in certain brain phenotypes, combinations of which were advantageous in antiquity. But much of that genetic information was stored as allele distribution, and we've lost a lot of that data with generations of assortative mating.
The family raise a child who is a psychopath. The child then does what psychopaths do, and the family are in an abusive relationship with the child.
The child can be charming to outsiders etc and can find partners to procreate with.
Can't spot why they would not survive well in the paleolithic.
I tend to think of "social enforcement" as a sort of commons good. It often doesn't benefit the person doing it that much but overall it helps keep everything balanced.
Someone cuts in line? I'm the kind of person who would usually let it go because well, maybe they're having a bad day. And is it actually worth getting worked up about? Say it's an older lady and maybe she's rude but is it worse to get in an argument with her?
There are some people in this world who will really not let that stuff go. I am glad I'm not one of those people but in many ways I am also glad that those people exist, even if I find myself on their bad side once in a while.
I suppose there are some people who would simply call this assertiveness and describe it as an unmitigated positive. But it's really quite exhausting to do on a continuous basis unless you have the personality for it. I think of it as a boundless capacity to "sweat the small stuff" and I am actually glad that some people have it.
This means that I've spent most of my adult life learning not to sweat the small stuff (especially since moving to a major city), but rather focus my energy where either it will actually benefit others, or against someone who is actively taking advantage of me in a harmful way. I have to consciously remind myself that to do otherwise - to confront every line-cutter and litter-dropper - will at best drain me of energy for fights that matter, and at worst, invite trouble I'm not able to handle.
Relevant to the article, I credit this same ability with having helped me escape two emotionally abusive, back-to-back, relationships (both made possible thanks to my otherwise lack of assertiveness in social areas).
I don't think I'd call myself a psychopath, though I share some traits (e.g. low - but not absent - empathy). If my parents hadn't instilled in me a strong sense of morality maybe I would be.
Have you seen Akhtar's SPD profile?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizoid_personality_disorder#...
However, unlike you I couldn't classify myself as a social enforcer.
My Dad was the guy who would call someone out who cut in the queue, or approach somebody who's hogging all the things that he feels should be shared fairly in a social environment, be that the bowling balls in a bowling alley or whatever.
He would ask for things in a restaurant that they weren't capable of providing. One example in recent years was that they forgot to include the tomatoes in his full English breakfast. Rather than accept that the tomatoes would be there in a minute, he asked for a refund on the tomatoes. He wasn't kidding, and made the waitress awkwardly explain it wasn't policy to do that.
He'd ask for discounts on EVERYTHING, no holds barred, everything was up for negotiation. He was a salesman after all...
My Dad was one of 7 kids in a small house in East London. So he learned the hard way to make people respect his wishes.
As such - I endured 100s of toe curling experiences like these between the ages of 6 and 16. Most of them I've managed to block out but as a collective they all still haunt me.
I'm super assertive at work, I'm a Managing Director for a twenty person strong software company so that's no issue.
However, in a social environment it's unlikely I'll call somebody out on queue cutting and I'll go out of my way to be kind and polite to waiting staff in restaurants. Having endured that in my youth I now find those circumstances completely unbearable.
Psychopathy is not the reason behind this scenario. It is in fact a polar opposite of it: in this context, doing horrible things is motivated by belief in a greater good. That is also the problem with Milgram's famous shock experiments: in his own explanation he completely ignored the part where the people willing to apply possibly lethal shocks to people where those goaded into believing it was for the greater good of mankind (that is, they were told the experiment was necessary for a better scientific understanding of the human mind).
I suspect you have very secular Western view of the world. You may want to have a look into Scott Atran's work, who dives deeper into this. This RSA lecture[0] is a fine place to start.
... yeah, that's why I said "So these folks are the opposite of psychopaths".
Referring to someone as a psychopath is quite similar to people calling you a hacker because you majored in computer science then asking you to fix their computer.
Outside of the dramatics, it is true that leaders tend to exhibit typical psychopathic qualities. Things like diminished empathy, cutthroat competitivity, predatorial cleverness, selfish rationality at the cost of emotion, and the ability to project the right mask at the right time are usually needed in high business and politics. At the same time, you can't lump Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates into a group with the high school shooter kids.
It's not really an adaptation considering humans evolved into empathy - psychopathy, physiologically, refers to part of the brain being underdeveloped leading to these characteristics being formed as an individual progresses through life. Of course, it seems like individuals who go through traumatic events or extended drug use often develop at least a subset of these behaviors separately. I'm not a psychologist so I'll stop myself. Either way, it is a much broader picture than you're painting - the humans and the "evolved" psychopaths.
I was playing along with that contention, seems to make sense to me, that perhaps some people just inherit traits or predispositions to lack-of-empathy. I also don't know the psychology or neuroscience, and I imagine there's still some debate -- "is it a neurological disorder, or is it an adaptation?"
Part of what I was trying to argue, if I didn't word it well - is that if you're we can't distinctly tie the list of characteristics we've contrived as being psychopathy to something like a malformed amygdala, and we instead refer to it nebulously as this genetic aberration, we might as well go back to calling people witches as well (which, I suppose our species tends to enjoy looking for).
He was like the little voice of encouragement telling me that I was on the right track.
I hadn't thought of him in a little while and this hit me kind of hard. :(
One of the books that I liked was: In Sheep's Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People and Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows How to Identify and Protect Yourself from Harmful People
In any case Pieter Hintjens is genius!
Sadly Pieter was a genius :(