WEDNESDAY, MAY 28, 201 4

Predator? No, Just a Psychopath.

Predators, as I see it, are not the same as psychopaths.
Psychopaths have a defective
and more or less untrainable
empathetic function. Predators
on the other hand can read
their victims empathetically to
their own advantage. They see
no moral problem in dealing
with their instinctive needs as
predators - just as other
humans generally see no
problem with the necessity of
killing animals to eat.
Psychopaths however just dont see moral rules as
understandable. They learn to mimic the expected
behaviors, but dont feel, either fully or at all, the
emotionally learned responses that otherwise would
govern that morality.
And so we have some psychopaths that are born without
the emotional capacity to read the signals that humans
(among other animals) in a cooperative setting have
evolved to send each other instructively.
And even if there are some psychopaths that can learn to
read the signs, they will lack the capacity to be concerned
with the implied instructions. Essentially, these
psychopaths prefer to use deceptive strategies, not
understanding the mechanics of attaining trust.
Predators however do understand the importance of trust,
and very often will form such trusting bonds with potential
prey in an environment where the need for predatory
strategies has been suspended; where their instinctive
strategies, however, will still be there to depend on if
circumstances change.
Further, predators in predatory groups will trust each
other to obey the rules of predatory society that theyve
been born to learn and understand. And while there can
also be such a thing as a psychopathically oriented group
(nomadic gypsies may be a good example), no such group
comprised solely of psychopathic individuals has been
successfully evolved or developed to my knowledge.
As to fear of immediate consequences, psychopaths, who
could not win the trust of this type of predatory enemy,
would not know how to negotiate their way out of an
immediate threat from this type of adversary. The
expectation of some immediate damage would likely
trigger an instinctive fight or flight response.
But their predators will tend to make more practical use of
the effects of fear. If a fight with a psychopath resulted,
both sides of the conflict would attempt to fearlessly
deceive the other; but the predators, who can generally
read their prey much better than the prey can read them,
would have the advantage - especially where the prey
were psychopathic and unable to use their limited
emotional strategies properly. That psychopath, fearing
the finality of becoming a figurative meal, would likely be
the first to run.
So yes, you can be a predatory psychopath or
a psychopathic predator, but again, the essential
differences remain the same. Predators have functional
purposes while psychopaths must serve dysfunctional
ones.


(And as a PI, I was always a predator as far as my working
strategies were concerned.)

POSTED BY ROY NILES