Of Flavia Corso

Source: Heretically
“The psychopath is someone who is capable of carrying out even terrible gestures without his feelings registering the slightest emotional shock. The heart is not in tune with thought and thought with gesture”
(U. Galimberti, The disturbing guest)
If you think that psychopaths are necessarily serial killers well present in the collective imagination, you are very wrong. The psychopath is not necessarily a murderer; in many cases, on the contrary, it is an individual well inserted within society, apparently gifted with charisma, fascino and know-how, mask that he uses effectively in social contexts in order to hide the total absence of conscience and empathy. Who suffers from psychopathy, he persistently manipulates everyone around him to achieve his own selfish ends. The people the psychopath uses, they are therefore simple tools in his hands, victims for whom he will never feel guilt, shame or remorse. For this natural predator, the end always justifies the means e, almost as if it were a computer rather than a human being, each of his actions is the result of mere calculation based on the achievement of a single objective: personal interest (money, sex, fame and self-gratificationand in general…). The psychopath is an almost amoral individual: on a cognitive level, He knows very well what is right and wrong, good and evil, but without this involving any emotional participation. He understands very well what emotions like love are, the pain, sadness and even empathy, but he can't try them.
Where the emotional element is neglected for the benefit of the exclusively rational one, you are, there can be no good ethics, since reason and feeling together contribute to the development of moral judgment. It is estimated that psychopaths make up 1% of the world's population. This would be reassuring news, if it weren't for their great ability to quickly rise to the top of the social pyramid, using their manipulative skills. Being totally devoid of empathy, Indeed, these subjects will have no qualms about behaving incorrectly towards their peers, just to get to positions of power. We will therefore often find them at the head of large companies, but not by virtue of their actions, but exclusively thanks to their predatory and parasitic nature. The term "Corporate Psychopath" is used by scholars precisely to outline the profile of the corporate psychopath who maneuvers within the working environment, arousing admiration around him, simply because he was disguised as a skilled businessman. To disguise yourself socially, the psychopath mimics the emotional states of normal people by acquiring and reproducing their facial expressions and body language. Act, because he cannot do otherwise. But what are the causes of psychopathic personality?? Research in the field of neuropsychopathology has highlighted how psychopathy is determined by a real brain anomaly: the areas predisposed to the processing of emotional material (parts of the limbic region, the hippocampus and the amygdala) they would not function adequately in the psychopathic brain.
Experts in the field of criminological psychology such as Hare, Babies, Cleckley and Ronson believe that in addition to a lack of empathy and a tendency to manipulate, there are other distinctive features of psychopathy such as pathological lying, boredom, narcissism, irresponsibility and the obsessive need to exercise power and control over others. The psychopath's worldview is Darwinian: on the one hand, there are prey, those who are unable to dominate others and naturally deserve to be submissive; on the other, they are there, the predators who, thirsty for power, they almost feel they have the "divine" right to continue preying, just as John D. implied. Rockefeller when he said "God gave me my money". This is not a new topic; also in the essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber, the psychological tendency is described – which it becomes religion – to consider profit as a sign of divine grace. One might then ask: and if that 1% of psychopaths within the world population corresponded to the famous one 1% of individuals who possess a wealth equal to that of the rest 99%? If current financial capitalism were psychopathic in the true sense of the term? In conclusion, I think many have already thought about it.
Expressions such as "sick society" and "madness of the free market" reveal the awareness that there is actually something wrong in the brains of the great planetary managers, and that we are already dealing with an undeniable fact: the psychopaths in power will never serve the interests of the people, because they are neuroatypical individuals, without conscience and therefore incapable of putting themselves in other people's shoes. This emotional silence makes them unfit to manage public affairs, risking the collapse of the society in which we live. They can be socially useful as soldiers, firefighters, surgeons, and in all those professions where it is necessary to have a cool head and a certain amount of cynicism, ma, as Hare himself states, «at the top of economics and politics they ruin entire societies». The globalization processes implemented by neoliberal elites, far from being the expression of the desire for some form of social justice, they are actually the symptom of an absence of empathy, of the lack of that moral feeling that, parafrasando Adam Smith, moreover, by its very nature it has a field of action limited to those closest to us (ourselves, our family, our Nation). Perhaps it is also for this reason that the psychopaths of high finance hate the "populists"?
Bibliography:
– P. Babies, R. D. Hare, Snakes in Suits. When Psychopaths Go to Work, HarperCollins, New York 2006.
– H. Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity. An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-Called Psychopathic Personality, Mosby, St. Louis 1941.
– R. D. Hare, Psychopathy. Diagnostic evaluation and empirical research, Astrolabe, Roma 2009. J. Ronson, Psychopaths in power. Journey into the dark heart of ambition, Code, Torino 2014.