How much “obedience” do you think is optimum for the individual? Even for society? If sociopaths are over-represented in leadership positions, maybe this is a feature and not a bug: the last thing you want is a principled leader when the struggle is to the death against an equally matched opponent except the opponent is less principled.
A hypothesis that could be tested is that “healthy” obedience to social norms appears as a matter of degree, that too much of it is as restrictive to what roles the individual can play in society as is too little of it, and that a society with a mix of levels of “obedience” is more effective at competing against other societies with a less varied range of obedience, either all followers or all psychopaths.
That psychopathy behaves as much like a disease as does, say, homosexuality is telling us something. Perhaps that we have similar reasons for classifying either one as a disease. (And to recap, homosexuality used to be classed as a disease albeit with few or no successful treatments and few or no comorbidities, but is no longer classified as such.)
Obviously modern society needs to protect itself against psychopaths in many micro cases, this can be done most effectively when we have a better understanding of what psychopathy is and what it is not,.
How much “obedience” do you think is optimum for the individual? Even for society? If sociopaths are over-represented in leadership positions, maybe this is a feature and not a bug: the last thing you want is a principled leader when the struggle is to the death against an equally matched opponent except the opponent is less principled.
A hypothesis that could be tested is that “healthy” obedience to social norms appears as a matter of degree, that too much of it is as restrictive to what roles the individual can play in society as is too little of it, and that a society with a mix of levels of “obedience” is more effective at competing against other societies with a less varied range of obedience, either all followers or all psychopaths.
That psychopathy behaves as much like a disease as does, say, homosexuality is telling us something. Perhaps that we have similar reasons for classifying either one as a disease. (And to recap, homosexuality used to be classed as a disease albeit with few or no successful treatments and few or no comorbidities, but is no longer classified as such.)
Obviously modern society needs to protect itself against psychopaths in many micro cases, this can be done most effectively when we have a better understanding of what psychopathy is and what it is not,.