The Intelligence Factor of Psychopathy

If you've read this blog with any understanding at all then you must know by now what I think about the whole idea of "psychopaths": they don't exist. Psychopaths are the witches of our era. They represent nothing more than an intellectual attempt to rationalize and categorize something about ourselves that we deeply fear and do not understand. But they aren't real, at least not in any sense that they are portrayed by the pseudoscience/religious zealots who call themselves psychologists.

But, I'm not going to go into all the reasons I believe so here. Instead I like to simply expound on an elephant in the room of psychopathy that I hadn't really noticed before now (so well ignored it is).

We all know that studies show that so-called psychopaths are usually very intelligent (albeit, not very highly educated). As a matter of fact, Hervey Cleckley (who wrote THE MASK OF SANITY and is considered the founding father of psychopathy) lists intelligence as the first identifying quality of a psychopath. And yet we know from modern brain science that intelligence is a highly emergent phenomenon that relies extensively on the complex relationships between all parts of the brain, not just the intellectual (e.g. prefrontal cortex) and emotional (e.g. amygdala) regions. So, if psychopaths are highly intelligent, as Cleckley and others observe, then they must also be highly functional - not disfunctional at all, not even some mythical social sense.

There is actually a relatively new book out now about psychopaths (THE WISDOM OF PSYCHOPATHS, by Kevin Dutton) that seems to admit this fact. Though Dutton doesn't go so far as to say that psychopathy is no more than an ideology bounded by fear and ignorance (a good definition for religion by the way), he does admit that our current definition of psychopath needs some serious reworking if it is to hold up to the current findings of scientific studies (and if that sounds familiar, it should, since that is exactly what all religions must do in order to survive; that is, redefine their terms and beliefs to fit the times).

But, Dutton's floundering admissions aside, the only point I'm trying to make here is that if psychopaths are more intelligent than most, then perhaps what psychologists are really trying to categorize is a class of people who see and understand more clearly than most other people, and as a result they behave (antisocially) in a manner CONSISTENT WITH this deeper understanding. Not all intelligent people would share this "deeper understanding" of course. It would be something, like all natural phenomena, that combines state of being (e.g. intelligence) with experience (the most intelligent person in the world might have trouble tying his own shoes, a la Einstein, if he never had to do so as a child).

I'm no scientist (or zealot for that matter), but I think this "elephant" is obvious enough to at least be pointed out.

(J.D. 5-23-2014)