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Child Sociopaths:
Here is a book begging to be written. I wish I had the time. It's
a story about a kid who becomes a sociopath. His mother and father
are upward-mobile people striving for upper Middle Class. They
are power-monger social-strivers. Both are professionals with
little time for the kid. This kid sees how his perceived world
works through manipulation without any real love. He gets all
kinds of things but no time or attention.
The kid learns to trade on that. His only goal becomes his own short-term satisfaction. He is a chronic liar, a petty thief, and a fantasizing, get-even, plotter. He is a loaner with a raging anger inside. He grows to be a manipulator, becomes an outcast, evolves into a psychopath and goes into a school to murder a bunch of other kids. Does this sound a little familiar?
After the events in Littleton, Rosie O. went goofy. With great emotion and little thought. She leaped in to help polarize a conflict where dialog was already close to impossible. In so doing she ignored the basics of logic. This is not unique to Rosie O. All true believers do it, including members of the NRA.
Just for the record, so you won't be able to choose to misunderstand, I don't like guns and I think the NRA is a dangerous organization. Their crap has nothing to do with the second amendment. It has to do with raw political power. That power comes from the monies and public support of a handful of powerful people and a large minority of true believers. To get the support they need, they must have a lot of prominent dupes. History has shown that Hollywood types make very good dupes. After all, they must believe in fairytales to do what they do.
Even so, beating up on Sellick was a dumb thing.
Rosie has two simplistic premises, both of which are demonstrably
false.
First, that it is possible to eliminate guns from a culture. If Hitler proved one thing, he proved that to be false. Even when he dominated Europe and civilian possession of a firearm was punishable by summary execution, people had guns. When the time came, they got them out an used them.
Second, that guns caused the disaster in Colorado. The disaster in Littleton was the result of insanity not guns. These madmen would have found a way to commit murder with or without guns. Guns were simply the tools of choice. Guns are and always will be available to anyone who really wants them. That is not the real issue. The real issue is to try to understand why we are suddenly producing so many sociopaths and psychopaths. In particular, why are we producing so many child sociopaths and psychopaths?
I would not, but I could have managed to do what they did when I was a youngster. It would have taken more effort to acquire the tools but I could have done it. What's changed is our culture? When I was a kid, a sociopath was a rare entity. Now they are a very large minority. I hope they are a minority. Those kids were identifiable when they were five years old. They did what more and more sociopaths are doing now. They took the final little baby step from sociopath to psychopath. And yes, I think their parents are responsible.
I need to deal with this nonsensical pretense that no one could have predicted this. Those young murderers were psychopaths. Why will no one face up to the fact that psychopaths evolve out of sociopaths and that the sociopath's behavior is usually identifiable in kindergarten?
A sociopath is someone who, due to the conditions of his environment, has systematically suppress his sense of conscience until, for all practical purposes, he has none. I agree that we cannot heal this malfunction at it's advanced stages. What we can do is identify it early, when there is a chance of behavioral modification therapy being effective.
There is a current dilemma about the crimes of young people. We have the question of whether they should be tried as an adult or as a child. I would like to suggest a third category. That being psychopathic monster! If someone commits a crime that is monstrous in nature, they should be tried as a monster, not as an adult or a child. This is the first determination that should be made. Was this crime monstrous in nature? In most of the cases which have come to national attention, the crime was indeed monstrous.
Age and sanity should be irrelevant. A monstrous crime is, by definition, an insane act. We should only have one system for a trial. Double standards are nonsense. The penalty stage may want to take age into account. The trial should not. Either the person is a provable monster or they are not. The evidence should determine that. Nothing else should be considered.
Let's look at another case. I refer to the File's case, which was discussed on 60 minutes recently. Here we have a woman who wants to hold the parents of a kid who murdered her thirteen year old daughter liable. Kind of a product liability case in the extreme. He also beat his brother to death after he was not put immediately into prison.
This may, in my opinion should, come down to the idea of being able to identify aberrant behavior. In other words, being able to identify a sociopath and deal with him before he becomes a psychopath. I think we can. If that is true, the parents are indeed liable.
Unfortunately, a great deal of our community leadership and psychological community wants to pretend that it's not possible. They want to pretend that a rosy cheeked 5 year old cannot be identified as a sociopath. That's cowardly bologna. We know the behavior pattern by heart. We can recognize it. Grade school teachers see it all the time.
The big question is, can we treat it. I think this is the main reason the shrink community tries to deny that we can identify the aberrant community. They are afraid that they cannot treat it. Again I think they are wrong. The only time that it can be treated is at the time when it first manifests. If we wait till the kid commits his first crime, it's already too late and indeed we can't treat it at that stage. Just as in cancer, early detection is imperative.
When it first manifests in a young child we can identify the
cause and remove it. Then we can make behavior modification corrections
in the victim and in fact cure him. Of course we must first acknowledge
that sociopathic behavior does have a cause. I believe we will
always find that cause in the child's environment. We must change
that before the behavior it produces becomes a pattern of behavior,
a habit. Once it becomes a habit, the victim will not want to
change and correction becomes impossible.
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