One day this kid will make a reddit account and a few months later he'll be the Hegemon.
If it's that common surely there should be more first-person accounts of it? Or at least interviews with psychopaths?
I remain unconvinced that "psychopath" is actually a real thing, rather than a label we stick on people who are really just plain ol' jerks.
Even reading those, though, I'm not convinced that being a psychopath is a real thing -- that is, a difference from normal human behaviour that is one of kind, not of degree.
He's also a brat who has learned he can get more of a reaction out of adults by acting in a certain way that they find unsettling, thus reinforcing that behaviour. From the sounds of things, his bad behaviour has been getting reinforced by feelings of specialness ever since he got sent to a psychiatrist at the age of three for being a little more bratty than usual.
At this point, being a brat has got him all the way to being profiled in the New York Times, so I doubt there's much hope for him now. He's internalized "I am a kid who misbehaves, misbehavior makes me special".
This was elementary school since he was shipped off to some special place by middle school. He had two really nice brothers who seemed as relieved as the rest of us when he was gone.
As already recommended in this thread, I urge a viewing of "We Need to Talk about Kevin"
Asshole, brat, jerk ... We all might fall in and out of these fugues as we mature. But, very few of us are evil. You do disservice to those trying to understand these conditions (whether biological or environmental) by minimizing them.
Sometimes that leads to people who see sound or taste colors, other times you get people that simply cannot empathize or feel zero remorse.
It's a real thing. Sometimes it's by degrees, the connections are weak or malfunctioning, but sometimes there's never been a connection or anything to connect with. They're damaged by definition compared to the "norm".
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/otl8z/iama_diagnosed_p...
The study showed that psychopaths have reduced connections between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), the part of the brain responsible for sentiments such as empathy and guilt, and the amygdala, which mediates fear and anxiety.
One of the most powerful ways to understand psychology is to see its history, like math's history, as one long attempt to create and refine definitions that let us discuss the field. Except where math is using those definitions to create the field from scratch and the effort is to build up useful systems from the bottom, psychology is trying to understand an incomprehensibly complicated system from the top down and using those definitions to try to break things into comprehensible and consistent pieces in a landscape that is being aggressively fuzzy and resistant to classification.
I do find myself wondering if you have not encountered any apparent interviews or research on psychopaths not because it doesn't exist, but because you've never gone looking for it. There's quite a bit of it. There's still some professional skepticism on the topic of it being something distinct, but that's rather different than the skepticism you seem to be expressing. The phenomena aren't so much what the debate is about as what the best way to slice and dice it up with the definitions are. For them to professionally agree that psychopathy is a real thing carries additional implications beyond just what Merriam-Webster writes in their next dictionary edition, but it's easy for a layman to misread that as an argument about whether the phenomena described by the debated term exists.
So, of course it's a label. But it's used to describe something far more different-than-baseline than just being a plain ol' jerk. In fact, psychopaths are often not jerks at all. "Jerk" is usually used to describe someone openly abrasive and simply randomly hostile, and that's not what a psychopath is. At least, not as an adult. As the article says, they lack emotional empathy but develop a cognitive empathy, and generally learn by adulthood the thing that jerks never do, which is that open hostility really has no advantages to anybody. They learn far, far more subtle manipulation techniques than that. (We all learn how to manipulate; I'm not convinced they are "extra skilled" at that. They simply learn how to do it with one less constraint than most of us.)
Okay, after searching the web I give up. Can you please explain what that is? (I get a general gist from related words but it would be nice to know what you're specifically referring to.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender%27s_Game_(series)
More specifically, a pair of kids (neither of which is the main character) create online pseudonyms ("Locke" and "Demosthenes") and eventually use them to convince the world of their great ideas (that they post in online forums). One of the kids eventually becomes "Hegemon," or the world leader.
By the way, I'd extremely highly recommend "Ender's Game" (the first book). Besides being an utterly awesome book, I even got a friend who "hated" reading to try it, and even he liked it. I mean, it's that good.
I've read it.
(There was someone else who posted before you, but I'm replying here because I thought it would be good to clarify that.)
Thank you all for reminding me of that part of Ender's Game. It's been a while since I've read it. But for what it's worth I did think of that when I saw the reference. I just didn't know that was Peter's title once he ruled earth.
1. http://www.audible.com/pd/ref=sr_1_1?asin=B002V5A12Y&qid...