Is sociopathy a real thing? (part 3)

From the reader:


On another subject, I totally agree with the conception of sociopathy being some sort of a nuance of character. There are smart people and dumb people, strong spirited and weak spirited, beautiful on the outside, ugly on the outside and so on. But it all happens on the inside and even if somebody is labeled as a sociopath or borderline or anything, you can only say that that's their way to deal with life. It's all about adapting to the environment with the brain and body that has been given to you. 

I also think that the primary attraction on your blog is not the fact that it's about "SOCIOPATHS", the whole ambiguous thing around it. It's because you manage to bring particularities that you notice within yourself together in a bundle and people relate to that. When you say, I noticed this very weird thing about myself and I think that this might be the cause, I am blind to actually notice it, but I perceived through other senses, That is great, I mean, it brings joy to see that someone somewhere is having the same sort of more uncommon struggle that you are having at that moment. And I notice people trying to not show their emotions around your comment section and be all cool and stuff because they want to belong there. They feel lonely and they want to belong. I don't know whether it's sociopathy that we're dealing with here, but it's certainly a thing that only a bunch of people relate to somehow. 

I know cause when I first started reading your blog I felt the same kind of lost and it helped me keep it all together. I knew those things about myself. I knew that I was noticing things and that I wasn't like everybody else and I wasn't crazy. If I actually took the time to explain, people would understand but after that I always felt too vulnerable and open and so I started keeping to myself. And it was the same kind of thing that you are bringing with your posts. That sense that somehow you don't belong around but you can shut up about it and be taken as normal and use whatever is making you different to your advantage to get things, Not some things that you always wanted or stuff because I get the sense that that kind of craving that other people have for "whatever" never occurred in us, but whatever floats your boat at a certain moment. That's just great. 

On a somewhat related note, dear reader, I have been reading an interesting New Yorker article about the television show Portlandia, where they discuss the phenomenon of the urban hipster and how people will go out of their way to play up small differences to distinguish themselves from others in what Freud termed the narcissism of small differences.  Sometimes I suspect the SociopathWorld community of this, myself included.  It's easy to lose perspective about how much we actually share in common with every other human on this planet in a race to make ourselves as distinct as possible from people and beliefs that we may not respect.  

But this isn't to say that there aren't real differences between people too.  I guess it's what makes the development of "standards" like the DSM-5 so controversial.