[Question_Assumptions]

Do some web searches on psychopaths. You can find an interesting description of them here (I don't endorse that whole web site, by the way). Researchers estimate that they make up 4% of the population or more and may account for 50% of all violent criminals. This is one of those stories that the press doesn't want to touch because it brings into question two strong liberal beliefs -- that human behavior is a product of nurture not nature (psychopaths actually think differently and react differently in ways that can be measured) and that criminals can be reformed (phychopaths are notorously difficult to reform and reform attempts that focus on compassion and empathy often make them more likely to commit more crimes. Once you've read some descriptions of pyschopaths and how they think, the nutty things that people do in the news makes a lot more sense. It not that everyone is going bad. It's that phsycopaths are very adept at playing a system that tries to be compassionate and understanding yet can't imagine a person with no conscience, no remorse, and no interest in being reformed or changing.

[shoptalk]

I highly recommend a brand new book on the subject, Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend by Barbara Oakley.

(just fyi, from a review) "Beginning her research, Oakley found an astonishing gap. She writes about exploring the authoritative Medline database for information on the physiology and biochemistry of Machiavellianism. "Antisocial personality disorder" turns up 5494 hits. "Borderline personality disorder" generates 3090 "meaningful hits, including hundreds of imaging studies, genetic studies, drug studies, and so on."

However, she continues, "...if I type in 'malignant narcissist'--a term used by world-class psychiatrists...to describe the kind of malevolent, yet high functioning people I'm researching - I get nothing. Zero hits. No medical studies whatsoever."

That discovery was "unsettling" to her, "like hearing that the oncologist about to operate on your father's cancerous liver actually has a fake degree from a diploma mill." The book is a narrative of how Oakley began trying to fill in the scientific details.

Machiavellian behavior, she writes, is probably closely related to borderline personality disorder, so named because it sits on the borderline between psychosis and neurosis. To illustrate its most extreme manifestations, the book devotes entire chapters to Milosevic, The Butcher of the Balkans, and Chairman Mao, The Perfect 'Borderpath', the coined word indicating a particularly evil constellation of borderline personality traits and psychopathic tendencies."