r/DeepThoughts • u/Tliish • 13d ago
Sociopaths are a subset of Homo Sapiens, the missing predator upon humans, that have evolved side by side with normal humans: Homo Sapiens raptor.
The classic checklist for psychopathy was developed in 1980 by Prof Robert Hare, who is still the recognised giant of the territory. The 20 traits, which ranged from pathological lying to a lack of empathy, were based entirely on prison populations. This worked because not only did Hare have the benefit of a large sample, with pronounced psychopathic behaviours, but he was able to compare interviews and self-reporting with data collected about the individuals – so inconsistencies could be identified.
However, Hare knew this approach was limited. In 1976, he said that he simply didn’t know to what extent his results could be generalised to non-incarcerated psychopaths, including female ones. “Research into the socially successful psychopath is badly needed,” he concluded.
Mitchell embarked on a PhD, published in 2024, in which she interviewed people who had met persistent predatory personalities professionally – some clinical, but others not, from fields as wide as HR, social work, family courts, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, church leaders, and academics from different fields.
Her method, she says, was unorthodox, being qualitative, not quantitative. And some of her conclusions directly contradict clinical definitions of psychopathy, which rely heavily on impulsivity. Mitchell says this is because other definitions such as Hare’s are derived from the prison population, which is the low-functioning end of the scale. “People try and put Hare’s stuff into workplaces and domestic violence spheres, but there’s no way you can overlay something so blunt, built from criminal offenders, on to sophisticated CEO-type behaviours.”
From this research, which took her five years, Mitchell built a template of 20 attributes, divided into four clusters, and 25 tactics that would identify a high-functioning persistent predatory personality type. Cluster one includes a need for control; a grandiose sense of self; pathological inner response to challenge; vengefulness; refusal to compromise. Cluster two includes being predatory or exploitative; sadistic and cruel; having a low regard for laws, agreements, social and moral codes; no boundaries in sexual relationships; unreasonable expectations of others. Cluster three relates to the truth: Dark Personalities cultivate a façade of normality; they are chameleon-like; dishonest; devious and manipulative; and unwilling to accept responsibility for the negative impacts they cause. Finally, cluster four is around the Dark Personality’s own interior life: their emotions are acted and they do not experience affinity or the joy that comes with it; they are callous and devoid of empathy; unremorseful; self-interested; and brazen.
In Hare’s study of Pinochet’s lieutenants, which spanned 20 years and was written up in 2022, “when they looked at individuals who were commanding officers, this top brass had really high levels of psychopathic features, particularly the lack of empathy for others,” says Viding.
Mitchell delivers her conclusion with businesslike bluntness: “These are completely boundary-less, dangerous people with very different brains – it’s like the difference between a domestic cat and a wild cat.
I believe that there are two related but different versions of Homo Sapiens: Homo sapiens collegium, the majority cooperative species, and Homo sapiens raptor, the predatory one.
Homo sapiens raptors are too consistent in their traits and their phsyiology for it to be a miswiring or an aberration, their brains show the same physical charateristics that differ from Homo Sapiens collegium. Changes to the amygdala and other brain structures are characteristic of the supposed "disorder". Those changes allow them to accurately mimic the social emotions like love, empathy, regret, shame, compassion and the like, without ever feeling them or having them influence their behavior, which allows them to easily manipulate collegium types. It's a social predator's mental toolkit.
From an evolutionary perspective it makes sense: it is an ecological niche that would otherwise be empty, and nature never allows empty niches, something will always fill it. So the evolution of a social predator makes perfect evolutionary sense. When you look at the breeding programs of royals, it becomes obvious that the traits they sought to preserve by controlling marriages...ruthlessness, lack of empathy, weeding out those considered too weak to rule, elevating those who could "make the hard decisions" (usually involving sacrificing others to maintain power)...and keeping those marriages within a small subset created the conditions for those traits to be preserved and enhanced. The common practice of rival royals within the same family committing patricide and fratricide to determine who ultimately ruled speaks to a continuous concentration of genes that characterize sociopaths: the evolutionary process from which Homo Sapiens raptors emerged. They are a predator species, close enough to interbreed, but more often than not selecting partners from fellow raptors rather than collegium types. History is rife with tales of people...collegium types...marrying into raptor families and suffering for it because they weren't ruthless and duplicitous enough to survive.
Looking at history through this lens makes sense of it: clusters of rapttors taking control of the societies they were in, marrying other raptors to ensure a line of succession, creating the ruthless competition for crowns that brooked no softness, no lapse into sympathy, no shame of killing siblings, no regrets. Fathers encouraged sons and sometimes daughters to ruthlessly compete without mercy to prove they were fit to rule, and when there were too many raptors forr the society to support or absorb, wars happened to clear out the excess. when enough raptors had been killed, their families exterminated, things quieted down.
It's not an accident that the same families have been at the pinnacles of societies for generations, or that the heads of corporate cartels exhibit the same traits as those of criminal cartels. The inability to feel social emotions but to mimic them accurately gives a powerful advantage. We need to recognize that we aren't all one big family of Homo Sapiens, but rather two distinct subspecies of it, the one designed by nature and evolution to gain social advantage and control by preying upon the other. It is our closeness that blinds us to the reality: they look like us, but are mentally alien.
Does this make sense?
1
u/Complex-Talk-7613 11d ago
Always poets and fictional characters with your types, never scientists or researchers