This was a super interesting one for me because I've tried to be less ethnocentric about my view of psychopathy, but with the language barrier and travel restrictions, it's been hard to connect meaningfully with any Asian psychopaths, and bonus a female Asian psychopath. Here's the description from the YouTube video:
M.E. Thomas of Confessions of a Sociopath interviews an East Asian woman in her 20's about why it may be easier to "mask" psychopathy in Asian than western cultures.
1. There's no real word or sense of meaning regarding psychopath in East Asian cultures.
2. The social norms are all explicit and easy to follow.
3. Public displays of negative emotions are frowned upon as being a burden on the rest of the community, i.e. they require the listener or observer to respond empathetically, which is considered a little rude, too individualistic, and a burden on the community.
We also talk about animal experiments, narcissistic parents, guilt vs. shame, and public shaming and community centric punishments in American law and East Asian culture.
This was interesting and like the discussion we had about, the practice of killing rather than risk having seriously injured someone, points to a very different idea of psychopathy depending on the prevailing culture.
ReplyDeleteThis discussion also raised for me the idea of history. I feel safe in saying a sociopathic stance on say a personal slight or aggressive act would be seen as normal in the middle ages or even "wild west". Now that maybe because sociopaths are so associated (incorrectly with spree killers). In any case being seen as sociopathic is different depending on culture and times you live in.
Jon Ronson in his book So You've Been Publicly Shamed: "The common assumption is that public punishments died out in the new great metropolises because they’d been judged useless. Everyone was too busy being industrious to bother to trail some transgressor through the city crowds like some volunteer scarlet letter. But according to the documents I found, that wasn’t it at all. They didn’t fizzle out because they were ineffective. They were stopped because they were far too brutal.”
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