Sociopath, They Say. (Vs. Shane, Jake Paul, Logan Paul)
03 October 2018 [link youtube]
Youtube Automatic Transcription
if you guys have seen this channel
before you know I really do politics I don't deal with psychology except when I deal with the politics of psychology or the psychology of politics and these two things do overlap in a really dynamic and interesting way one reason being that both in politics and in psychology we have to separate carefully the problem from the perception of the problem whichever problem we happen to be dealing with we have to deal with very carefully what is the problem itself and then how did this come to be noticed how did this come to be perceived how did this come to be defined who is it that perceives it as a problem and who is it that perceives it as something normal or even as positive is not a problem at all and these things may come back to cultural values they may come back to very complex and difficult to to pin down factors now in talking about sociopathy and talking about people being sociopaths in talking about people having antisocial personality disorder who perceives something like empathy who perceives compassion and who fails to perceive it you guys probably know and if you don't know you need don't need to look into the the particular example there's been a lot of talk lately about a certain young man not feeling sad when he went to someone's funeral wealth is funeral and whether or not this is a symptom of being a sociopath this kind of thing I've been to many funerals in my life and it's some of them I felt more upset than others for reasons that are completely rational have to do with how old the person was when they died the situation the circumstances their death whether their death was a surprise or not and how I felt about it what it what it meant in my life obviously from a selfish perspective how upsetting this is to me is gonna change with my situation my relationship with the person so and so forth but you know you'd have to be crazy so we're talking about here you'd have to be crazy to pretend that the sudden death of a 12 year old and accident is equivalent to someone dying when they're 80 years old and they already maybe they already knew five years in advance that they had a disease that was progressing and they talked everyone let everyone know in advance that we're gonna die and it didn't come as any as any surprise at all so we can't look at this as a simple checkmark on a list do you or do you not have this this symptom for being a sociopath do you or do you not appropriately feel empathy compassion or have you know in my own life I remember very clearly two funerals I went to and which I was not saddened or aggrieved but the person's death but what I was was emotionally available for the people who were grieving so those two funerals the way was perceived by other people there was very very different well you'll see what I have to say just a moment in one case my grandmother was utterly shattered by the death of her husband the death of her second husband it was not my grandfather and most of the other people that funeral were just kind of self-absorbed and distracted and they weren't spending any time with her they weren't spending any time with my grandmother now I wasn't upset or sad basically because he died at a very very old age didn't come as a surprise etc I had a good relationship with him also it wasn't the situation that he died and I was left feeling oh if only I had apologized for something there wasn't any kind of sense of unfinished business but everyone else including my own father notably they were kind of walking around in a stupor at that funeral I remember the different attitudes of people there and I really sat with my grandmother and talked to her and listened to her and I was comforting to her frankly just because I could be you know I I really wasn't consumed by her or distracted with you know my own my own grief in any way and I can remember or maybe two people at the funeral kind of shaming me kind of saying something negative about me because I wasn't weeping and I wasn't crying I wasn't distraught in the way that they were I remember one other person things look very strange to defend me this other kind of cousin of mine saying oh well you know everyone grieves in their own way and after the funeral was over a couple days later or something I remember my grandmother then went out of her way to really say you know this guy this was the one guy who really comforted me this was the one guy was really compassionate and empathetic and really helped me out when I was falling apart wasn't so much at the funeral it was after sort of reception social event after funeral and something similar happened not that not that long later there was another funeral for someone who was maybe like my great-uncle a pretty distant relation where again my aunt I really started spent time with her and was kind of solid for her and there for her in a way that as it happened at that funeral so nobody else was for whatever come and I remember her really she thanked me directly and she said you know she really recognized know so in this situation I mean at either funeral how do people perceive me how do people perceive the problem and what is the problem is the problem that I'm not weeping at my my grandfather's funeral is it a problem is it a problem or is it something positive and I took it as a positive opportunity to kind of be there for and comfort my grandmother does that make me more compassionate or less compassionate than someone who's just weeping and sobbing and consumed with their own grief or someone who's just in a more self-centered way feeling stunned and off-balance and inarticulate and doesn't know what to say and just feels vulnerable and afraid some people are just afraid of death or just freaked out and they aren't they aren't playing that role I played for my grandmother um maybe judgments of good and bad maybe judgements of sane and insane selfish and selfless sociopath and being generous a spirit maybe those judgments are actually really inappropriate and really counterproductive in this context and I mention it because I'd like you to consider that they may be inappropriate and counterproductive in every context so I'm going to read for you quickly what I think is the the main plank the core of the formal psychiatric definition of antisocial personality disorder what is now in popular culture referred to as as being a sociopath and I think we can reflect on that a little bit but I mean the main light motif I want to come back to you hear again and again is this question of what is the problem and who perceives the problem who perceives something and defines it and it judges it as compassion or as a lack of compassion if we say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder how can we fail to recognize that being compassionate is a similar aesthetic judgment and is a similar you know culturally loaded judgment at at my grandfather's funeral was I being the most compassionate person or was I being the least compassionate person maybe both maybe it's maybe it's a stupid and deeply flawed question so this is from the text of the dsm-5 criteria for antisocial personality disorder this is not ancient history this is I believe the most recent revision from April 2012 and I got this text from University website from the Department of Psychology in a formal academic institution so I believe this is correct text this is not from Wikipedia however by all means if you have any concerns read the full text yourself I'm not gonna read every word of this for obvious reasons but it opens by saying to diagnose antisocial personality disorder the following criteria must be met and then the headings and subheadings are grouped in a peculiar way we open with four criteria which are the four critera I'm going to read and then the the article does continue through BCD through a series of other personality traits that I'm not I'm not going to discuss here so again I'm not reading the entire definition to you but it opens what I think is the most fundamental and broad definition of what this personality disorder is supposed to be a so you must have in order these criteria you must have heard of you diagnose this you must have a significant impairments in personality functioning manifest by one impairments in self functioning such as a or B to follow a impairments of identity such as ego centrism self-esteem derived from personal gain power or pleasure period B self Direction meaning an impairment in self Direction goal-setting based on personal gratification absence of pro-social internal standards associated with failure to conform to lawful or culturally normative ethical behavior period all right so I'm gonna continue pause umm self-esteem derived from personal gain what percentage of people on earth experience self-esteem derived from personal gain is it is it 50 percent is that 80 percent is it 90 percent how broadly or how narrowly do we define personal gain if I do something charitable if I hand out sacks of rice to starving people and help the poor I may experience that as a form of pleasure power personal gain there are people who are egocentric who are engaged in research trying to find the cure for cancer or handing out sacks of rice to starving people I may gain self esteem and a sense of pleasure gaining power from studying languages studying philosophy studying books so this is incredibly broad incredibly flexible and it's it's not really clear in what sense anyone should perceive this as a problem under any circumstances now again I just want to contrast this to something I have my own biases here if if you replaced the word personal gain with gambling all of a sudden all of a sudden I'm convinced this is a psychological problem I think I think there's something really wrong with you if you're a compulsive gambler frankly I don't even understand casual gambling or occasional gambling but that's my bias like I recognize that I'm prejudiced what kind of prejudice when you have to have to perceive the pursuit of any kind of personal gain in the sense as as problematic you know again I've obviously this is not the full definition but I'm starting by highlighting just how subjective and culturally conditioned the perception of this problem is if you come from a deeply Christian Western European cultural tradition maybe you really do see this part of the definition of antisocial personality disorder maybe this really makes a lot of sense to you that you think it's natural for people to be self-abnegation and humble and to not be motivated by a sense of self esteem derive from personal gain but even from a Buddhist perspective even from a Japanese cultural perspective or something this is this is pretty hyper what do you mean or is there something implicit here and how you define some of these these terms goal-setting based on personal gratification again obviously quoting this at a context but you here we are reading in context goal-setting based on personal gratification is that always a bad thing I mean again if you replaced the term personal gratification with gambling in a casino all of a sudden I'm biased in favor of this but personal gratification could be anything personal gratification can be charity work it can be finding the cure for cancer it can be leading a movement for civil rights of an oppressed group of people personal gratification can mean a lot of things and you know even if it doesn't even if maybe somebody is somewhat shallow and stupid and their idea of personal gratification is is somewhat humble maybe my role as if I'm in the role of a psychotherapist or something maybe I have to sympathize with whatever the personal gratification is that rules their life to some extent and I've already admitted to you I have trouble sympathizing with someone who's a gambler or compulsive gambler you know for example I don't I don't regard all these things equally now again in part of sorry so paragraph be there one bead it also just stated failure to conform to lawful or culturally normative ethical behavior Saudi Arabia if you don't know anything about Saudi Arabia just go to youtube now and look at what life is like in Saudi Arabia if I lived in Saudi Arabia this would be true of myself right I would fail to conform to lawful culturally normative ethical behavior in Saudi Arabia communist countries fascist countries Nazi Germany take whatever extreme example you want or take a very normal mundane example of a country in the real world very often people have legitimate reasons not to conform to lawful culturally normative ethical behavior in the society they live in and those may be deeply held they may be carefully considered or they may be irrational and spontaneous maybe you're a homosexual who grew up in a Muslim majority society and you may not have a lot of philosophical depth in your sense of rebellion against those norms all you know is you can't conform you're not comfortable being part of this culture for example being a gay person in Southey Saudi Arabia we can fill in the blank so again these are very subjective judgments they're very much culturally relative judgments okay symbol on paragraph 2 a paragraph 2 impairments in interpersonal functioning a or be a empathy lack of concern for feelings needs or suffering of others lack of remorse after hurting or mistreating another period and a paragraph we've one more paragraph to go here this is something that's objectively perceived or miss perceived in such a dynamic and difficult to account for way you guys may not know this about me I was a scholar of Buddhism for 10 years many years I had many many conversations with people in which from my perspective I was showing empathy I was really making the effort to put them on game in terms of modern slang let's try to put someone on game and they perceived me as having no empathy that they perceive me as being cruel as having lack of concern for their feelings needs or suffering of having no remorse so here's situation I could give a million examples and I knew other scholars of Buddhism who really felt the same way I did a great example is professor Richard Gombrich many people thought Richard Gombrich was a monster because of the way he treated students the way he treated younger people with PhDs and this kind of thing but I had sympathy for his situation and he had sympathy from behind we had some real interesting conversations so say I have a conversation I've already studied Buddhism for so many years and I'm talking to a young person who has faith in this religion and I'm really trying to tell them this ancient scripture this ancient piece of paper that's written in a language you don't really understand maybe it's a language you just started studying or what language you haven't said oh it's an ancient Buddhist scripture translated into English by a very biased translator I'm trying to put you on game and let you know you're wrong what you believe about this you have been misled to some extent and to some extent you're engaging in wishful thinking and misleading yourself am I being empathetic am i being compassionate or my behaving at do I have is this a symptom of antisocial personality disorder No many many of our interactions especially in the workplace really are this loaded in this complex I don't you can be a tax attorney and you can be saying hey I really know what this piece of paper means and you don't you've misinterpreted it or you don't have my experience you don't but and I'm trying to let you know there's something that matters here you can work in a real estate you can work in taxes you can work in a million if you could be in construction you can be saying so and look you work in construction you think you know how to use this piece of equipment safely but I see what you're doing and you don't so when you have that kind of intervention with someone are you showing concern or are you showing lack of concern who makes that subjective judgment and even worse if you have the confessional set up of one therapist and one patient there were no other witnesses there were no facts there there's no appeal to the other side of the story one person gets to tell their story from one side and the therapist is supposed to come to these kinds of conclusions so I remember one one young woman she had a PhD so she wasn't that young uh she had a PhD and she talked to me about Buddhism but his philosophy and some related things and I know she broke down weeping about it probably repeatedly I had the conversation I had with her I was just putting her on game and I mean I know in one case because my wife at the time now my ex-wife you know witnessed her breaking down crying talking about this advice given nobody else's fiction for that advice and my ex-wife told me you know when this this woman was crying but my ex-wife said to her like I know how you feel but but aisel aisel is really being honest not many people are gonna be honest with you not many people gonna tell you what he's really like he's trying to help well you know he's pink Arthur he's telling you you know what the problem is so I mean again this is a really simple story but that woman who broke down weeping because my advice if she goes and sits down with her psychotherapist and gives a one side of the counter this and you can be in legal situations maybe she goes and sits down the university authorities or she system with the police and she tries to tell them that I have antisocial personality disorder she can present this in a way where the problem is that I have no concern no empathy no you know that she can present this in this manner and maybe the reality is the exact opposite maybe it's an imperfect mix of the two or maybe the questions were asking are framing this with a set of criteria that are wildly spurious to what it is we're actually trying to what we're trying to measure when we're trying to gauge if you bring the wrong instrument to measure this you're going to get measurements that make no sense right you're get conflicting and contradictory data coming out of using in a relevant measurement for what it is you're you're trying to measure alright and now we come to the fourth and final part of this first general thrust of the definition of antisocial personality disorder to be number two Section B intimacy intimacy is an impairment in interpersonal functioning the incapacity for mutually intimate relationships comma as exploitation is a primary means of relating to others including by deceit and coercion semicolon use of dominance or intimidation to control others now here for the first time in this article in this entry in the DSM I think we actually have the definition of a disorder and I would say that the most fundamental underlying problem here is that this document is not written by one person this is written by committee many many people participated in this and probably what they really need to do is take that that part I just read you and make it the primary definition or the whole make it the the essential criterion that separates this from the range of normal behavior goal-setting self esteem derived from gain and the stuff these are not hard criteria for a disorder but here at last we have a that could I think in different cultures and from different cultural perspectives and including the subjective perspective of the person who may have the disorder the here we have something that is truly disordered and it's something you that you might want to go to a therapist and try to get help for now I'm gonna read this again with changing one word for clarification those plain incapacity for mutually intimate relationships because exploitation is a primary means of relating to others , including by deceit and coercion use of dominance or intimidation to control others so the only word of change there they have the cut the the misleading word as AAS in English and really I think the word they need is because instead of as because that's what's being implied here so if that is your situation in life that suddenly puts this whole question outside of the miasma of merely subjective and culturally normative judgments we can make say oh so you have a problem your problem is you can't have intimate relationships because these are the other things that dominate life and maybe maybe there's some way you can improve this aspect of your character or this you know this this rut you're stuck in as a human being by talking about it with a therapist maybe when I was discussing this with my girlfriend before filming the video we were both reflecting on the extent to which these definitions are imperfect and fundamentally unscientific something my girlfriend said you know contrasting this definition the 2012 definition to the earlier definitions of the same condition familiy a few years ago DSM 4 DSM 3 you can see how radically the concept has changed the depth at the scientific definition of this disease are disorders age and she said well this is ridiculous compared to you know a real medically real verifiable condition like diabetes you know the definition of diabetes is not going to change that much from one manual to the next we see this being totally random from the ground up and my girlfriend asked me a very good question she said why do we need to create these definitions anyway what is the point of you know what is the point of defining and categorizing people in this way and I jumped answer I said there is one reason there is just one very good reason and the reason is so that you can help them if it is possible to take this definition and link it to the experience of therapists experience of people and reaching out to talking to working through these problems people and helping them if there is some etiology to this type of behavior or this type of whatever want to say personality problem characteristic rut and if therapists have the experience of talking to people with these problems and helping them through them and either I mean it nobody's going to talk about them being cured but maybe they can discipline themselves in some way where they improve on their ability to have intimate relationships and maybe they just do some crazy BDSM stuff on Saturdays and Sundays maybe they manage to become more aware of their tendency to be deceitful and coercive and they can talk they can tune that out or tone that you know maybe they can change if there is some potential for helping people or talking through the problems making people more aware of them and helping people tell themselves that and that alone is the justification for why we medicalize what our ultimate lee in no way medical or scientific disorders okay guys thank you for joining me in this discussion of quote unquote sociopathy you know in the last year I've done a lot of research into the state of psychiatry and psychotherapy that I didn't think I'd be doing partly because different people in my life have prompted me again and again to do more research on antidepressants the use of prescription psychiatric medication and I've seen the extent to which we really are looking at a set of aesthetic moral judgments hi Lisa objective highly culturally relative moral judgments that have come to be regarded as scientific facts and it is now through social media including here on YouTube that I think people are starting to wake up to just how outrageous that is and how genuinely dangerous the consequences of that mode of thinking can be science is not dangerous scientism is dangerous and it's scientism that grows out of the combination of ignorance and frankly moral self-righteousness that you know psychiatric judgments perhaps more than any other province of the sciences you know they invite us to make these kinds of judgments these kinds of judgments that all revolve around the self-centered ego of delusion of oh I would never do that that would never happen to me I could never imagine myself being in that situation because I'm not a sociopath I don't have this disorder I don't have this personality trait that somehow separates humanity into two different categories those who are capable of evil and those who are incapable of evil and it is much more humbling and indeed much more empathetic to look at these other people and to to imagine yourself even if it's just as a thought of your size and really think through the extent to which you are capable of that same evil or you are capable of making those same errors and there is no simple medical or scientific fact that separates the perpetrator from the person who has not thus perpetrated the lines we draw our ethical and they are elective and they are ultimately aesthetic the difference between sane and insane is never going to be like the difference between someone who is diabetic and someone who was not diabetic it's going to be much more like the difference between great poetry bad poetry it's going to rely on judgments that are very difficult to verify just like the judgments I offered as examples my behavior at that funeral and so on that may be perceived by one person as the pinnacle of compassion and may be perceived by someone else as utterly lacking in that same thing
before you know I really do politics I don't deal with psychology except when I deal with the politics of psychology or the psychology of politics and these two things do overlap in a really dynamic and interesting way one reason being that both in politics and in psychology we have to separate carefully the problem from the perception of the problem whichever problem we happen to be dealing with we have to deal with very carefully what is the problem itself and then how did this come to be noticed how did this come to be perceived how did this come to be defined who is it that perceives it as a problem and who is it that perceives it as something normal or even as positive is not a problem at all and these things may come back to cultural values they may come back to very complex and difficult to to pin down factors now in talking about sociopathy and talking about people being sociopaths in talking about people having antisocial personality disorder who perceives something like empathy who perceives compassion and who fails to perceive it you guys probably know and if you don't know you need don't need to look into the the particular example there's been a lot of talk lately about a certain young man not feeling sad when he went to someone's funeral wealth is funeral and whether or not this is a symptom of being a sociopath this kind of thing I've been to many funerals in my life and it's some of them I felt more upset than others for reasons that are completely rational have to do with how old the person was when they died the situation the circumstances their death whether their death was a surprise or not and how I felt about it what it what it meant in my life obviously from a selfish perspective how upsetting this is to me is gonna change with my situation my relationship with the person so and so forth but you know you'd have to be crazy so we're talking about here you'd have to be crazy to pretend that the sudden death of a 12 year old and accident is equivalent to someone dying when they're 80 years old and they already maybe they already knew five years in advance that they had a disease that was progressing and they talked everyone let everyone know in advance that we're gonna die and it didn't come as any as any surprise at all so we can't look at this as a simple checkmark on a list do you or do you not have this this symptom for being a sociopath do you or do you not appropriately feel empathy compassion or have you know in my own life I remember very clearly two funerals I went to and which I was not saddened or aggrieved but the person's death but what I was was emotionally available for the people who were grieving so those two funerals the way was perceived by other people there was very very different well you'll see what I have to say just a moment in one case my grandmother was utterly shattered by the death of her husband the death of her second husband it was not my grandfather and most of the other people that funeral were just kind of self-absorbed and distracted and they weren't spending any time with her they weren't spending any time with my grandmother now I wasn't upset or sad basically because he died at a very very old age didn't come as a surprise etc I had a good relationship with him also it wasn't the situation that he died and I was left feeling oh if only I had apologized for something there wasn't any kind of sense of unfinished business but everyone else including my own father notably they were kind of walking around in a stupor at that funeral I remember the different attitudes of people there and I really sat with my grandmother and talked to her and listened to her and I was comforting to her frankly just because I could be you know I I really wasn't consumed by her or distracted with you know my own my own grief in any way and I can remember or maybe two people at the funeral kind of shaming me kind of saying something negative about me because I wasn't weeping and I wasn't crying I wasn't distraught in the way that they were I remember one other person things look very strange to defend me this other kind of cousin of mine saying oh well you know everyone grieves in their own way and after the funeral was over a couple days later or something I remember my grandmother then went out of her way to really say you know this guy this was the one guy who really comforted me this was the one guy was really compassionate and empathetic and really helped me out when I was falling apart wasn't so much at the funeral it was after sort of reception social event after funeral and something similar happened not that not that long later there was another funeral for someone who was maybe like my great-uncle a pretty distant relation where again my aunt I really started spent time with her and was kind of solid for her and there for her in a way that as it happened at that funeral so nobody else was for whatever come and I remember her really she thanked me directly and she said you know she really recognized know so in this situation I mean at either funeral how do people perceive me how do people perceive the problem and what is the problem is the problem that I'm not weeping at my my grandfather's funeral is it a problem is it a problem or is it something positive and I took it as a positive opportunity to kind of be there for and comfort my grandmother does that make me more compassionate or less compassionate than someone who's just weeping and sobbing and consumed with their own grief or someone who's just in a more self-centered way feeling stunned and off-balance and inarticulate and doesn't know what to say and just feels vulnerable and afraid some people are just afraid of death or just freaked out and they aren't they aren't playing that role I played for my grandmother um maybe judgments of good and bad maybe judgements of sane and insane selfish and selfless sociopath and being generous a spirit maybe those judgments are actually really inappropriate and really counterproductive in this context and I mention it because I'd like you to consider that they may be inappropriate and counterproductive in every context so I'm going to read for you quickly what I think is the the main plank the core of the formal psychiatric definition of antisocial personality disorder what is now in popular culture referred to as as being a sociopath and I think we can reflect on that a little bit but I mean the main light motif I want to come back to you hear again and again is this question of what is the problem and who perceives the problem who perceives something and defines it and it judges it as compassion or as a lack of compassion if we say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder how can we fail to recognize that being compassionate is a similar aesthetic judgment and is a similar you know culturally loaded judgment at at my grandfather's funeral was I being the most compassionate person or was I being the least compassionate person maybe both maybe it's maybe it's a stupid and deeply flawed question so this is from the text of the dsm-5 criteria for antisocial personality disorder this is not ancient history this is I believe the most recent revision from April 2012 and I got this text from University website from the Department of Psychology in a formal academic institution so I believe this is correct text this is not from Wikipedia however by all means if you have any concerns read the full text yourself I'm not gonna read every word of this for obvious reasons but it opens by saying to diagnose antisocial personality disorder the following criteria must be met and then the headings and subheadings are grouped in a peculiar way we open with four criteria which are the four critera I'm going to read and then the the article does continue through BCD through a series of other personality traits that I'm not I'm not going to discuss here so again I'm not reading the entire definition to you but it opens what I think is the most fundamental and broad definition of what this personality disorder is supposed to be a so you must have in order these criteria you must have heard of you diagnose this you must have a significant impairments in personality functioning manifest by one impairments in self functioning such as a or B to follow a impairments of identity such as ego centrism self-esteem derived from personal gain power or pleasure period B self Direction meaning an impairment in self Direction goal-setting based on personal gratification absence of pro-social internal standards associated with failure to conform to lawful or culturally normative ethical behavior period all right so I'm gonna continue pause umm self-esteem derived from personal gain what percentage of people on earth experience self-esteem derived from personal gain is it is it 50 percent is that 80 percent is it 90 percent how broadly or how narrowly do we define personal gain if I do something charitable if I hand out sacks of rice to starving people and help the poor I may experience that as a form of pleasure power personal gain there are people who are egocentric who are engaged in research trying to find the cure for cancer or handing out sacks of rice to starving people I may gain self esteem and a sense of pleasure gaining power from studying languages studying philosophy studying books so this is incredibly broad incredibly flexible and it's it's not really clear in what sense anyone should perceive this as a problem under any circumstances now again I just want to contrast this to something I have my own biases here if if you replaced the word personal gain with gambling all of a sudden all of a sudden I'm convinced this is a psychological problem I think I think there's something really wrong with you if you're a compulsive gambler frankly I don't even understand casual gambling or occasional gambling but that's my bias like I recognize that I'm prejudiced what kind of prejudice when you have to have to perceive the pursuit of any kind of personal gain in the sense as as problematic you know again I've obviously this is not the full definition but I'm starting by highlighting just how subjective and culturally conditioned the perception of this problem is if you come from a deeply Christian Western European cultural tradition maybe you really do see this part of the definition of antisocial personality disorder maybe this really makes a lot of sense to you that you think it's natural for people to be self-abnegation and humble and to not be motivated by a sense of self esteem derive from personal gain but even from a Buddhist perspective even from a Japanese cultural perspective or something this is this is pretty hyper what do you mean or is there something implicit here and how you define some of these these terms goal-setting based on personal gratification again obviously quoting this at a context but you here we are reading in context goal-setting based on personal gratification is that always a bad thing I mean again if you replaced the term personal gratification with gambling in a casino all of a sudden I'm biased in favor of this but personal gratification could be anything personal gratification can be charity work it can be finding the cure for cancer it can be leading a movement for civil rights of an oppressed group of people personal gratification can mean a lot of things and you know even if it doesn't even if maybe somebody is somewhat shallow and stupid and their idea of personal gratification is is somewhat humble maybe my role as if I'm in the role of a psychotherapist or something maybe I have to sympathize with whatever the personal gratification is that rules their life to some extent and I've already admitted to you I have trouble sympathizing with someone who's a gambler or compulsive gambler you know for example I don't I don't regard all these things equally now again in part of sorry so paragraph be there one bead it also just stated failure to conform to lawful or culturally normative ethical behavior Saudi Arabia if you don't know anything about Saudi Arabia just go to youtube now and look at what life is like in Saudi Arabia if I lived in Saudi Arabia this would be true of myself right I would fail to conform to lawful culturally normative ethical behavior in Saudi Arabia communist countries fascist countries Nazi Germany take whatever extreme example you want or take a very normal mundane example of a country in the real world very often people have legitimate reasons not to conform to lawful culturally normative ethical behavior in the society they live in and those may be deeply held they may be carefully considered or they may be irrational and spontaneous maybe you're a homosexual who grew up in a Muslim majority society and you may not have a lot of philosophical depth in your sense of rebellion against those norms all you know is you can't conform you're not comfortable being part of this culture for example being a gay person in Southey Saudi Arabia we can fill in the blank so again these are very subjective judgments they're very much culturally relative judgments okay symbol on paragraph 2 a paragraph 2 impairments in interpersonal functioning a or be a empathy lack of concern for feelings needs or suffering of others lack of remorse after hurting or mistreating another period and a paragraph we've one more paragraph to go here this is something that's objectively perceived or miss perceived in such a dynamic and difficult to account for way you guys may not know this about me I was a scholar of Buddhism for 10 years many years I had many many conversations with people in which from my perspective I was showing empathy I was really making the effort to put them on game in terms of modern slang let's try to put someone on game and they perceived me as having no empathy that they perceive me as being cruel as having lack of concern for their feelings needs or suffering of having no remorse so here's situation I could give a million examples and I knew other scholars of Buddhism who really felt the same way I did a great example is professor Richard Gombrich many people thought Richard Gombrich was a monster because of the way he treated students the way he treated younger people with PhDs and this kind of thing but I had sympathy for his situation and he had sympathy from behind we had some real interesting conversations so say I have a conversation I've already studied Buddhism for so many years and I'm talking to a young person who has faith in this religion and I'm really trying to tell them this ancient scripture this ancient piece of paper that's written in a language you don't really understand maybe it's a language you just started studying or what language you haven't said oh it's an ancient Buddhist scripture translated into English by a very biased translator I'm trying to put you on game and let you know you're wrong what you believe about this you have been misled to some extent and to some extent you're engaging in wishful thinking and misleading yourself am I being empathetic am i being compassionate or my behaving at do I have is this a symptom of antisocial personality disorder No many many of our interactions especially in the workplace really are this loaded in this complex I don't you can be a tax attorney and you can be saying hey I really know what this piece of paper means and you don't you've misinterpreted it or you don't have my experience you don't but and I'm trying to let you know there's something that matters here you can work in a real estate you can work in taxes you can work in a million if you could be in construction you can be saying so and look you work in construction you think you know how to use this piece of equipment safely but I see what you're doing and you don't so when you have that kind of intervention with someone are you showing concern or are you showing lack of concern who makes that subjective judgment and even worse if you have the confessional set up of one therapist and one patient there were no other witnesses there were no facts there there's no appeal to the other side of the story one person gets to tell their story from one side and the therapist is supposed to come to these kinds of conclusions so I remember one one young woman she had a PhD so she wasn't that young uh she had a PhD and she talked to me about Buddhism but his philosophy and some related things and I know she broke down weeping about it probably repeatedly I had the conversation I had with her I was just putting her on game and I mean I know in one case because my wife at the time now my ex-wife you know witnessed her breaking down crying talking about this advice given nobody else's fiction for that advice and my ex-wife told me you know when this this woman was crying but my ex-wife said to her like I know how you feel but but aisel aisel is really being honest not many people are gonna be honest with you not many people gonna tell you what he's really like he's trying to help well you know he's pink Arthur he's telling you you know what the problem is so I mean again this is a really simple story but that woman who broke down weeping because my advice if she goes and sits down with her psychotherapist and gives a one side of the counter this and you can be in legal situations maybe she goes and sits down the university authorities or she system with the police and she tries to tell them that I have antisocial personality disorder she can present this in a way where the problem is that I have no concern no empathy no you know that she can present this in this manner and maybe the reality is the exact opposite maybe it's an imperfect mix of the two or maybe the questions were asking are framing this with a set of criteria that are wildly spurious to what it is we're actually trying to what we're trying to measure when we're trying to gauge if you bring the wrong instrument to measure this you're going to get measurements that make no sense right you're get conflicting and contradictory data coming out of using in a relevant measurement for what it is you're you're trying to measure alright and now we come to the fourth and final part of this first general thrust of the definition of antisocial personality disorder to be number two Section B intimacy intimacy is an impairment in interpersonal functioning the incapacity for mutually intimate relationships comma as exploitation is a primary means of relating to others including by deceit and coercion semicolon use of dominance or intimidation to control others now here for the first time in this article in this entry in the DSM I think we actually have the definition of a disorder and I would say that the most fundamental underlying problem here is that this document is not written by one person this is written by committee many many people participated in this and probably what they really need to do is take that that part I just read you and make it the primary definition or the whole make it the the essential criterion that separates this from the range of normal behavior goal-setting self esteem derived from gain and the stuff these are not hard criteria for a disorder but here at last we have a that could I think in different cultures and from different cultural perspectives and including the subjective perspective of the person who may have the disorder the here we have something that is truly disordered and it's something you that you might want to go to a therapist and try to get help for now I'm gonna read this again with changing one word for clarification those plain incapacity for mutually intimate relationships because exploitation is a primary means of relating to others , including by deceit and coercion use of dominance or intimidation to control others so the only word of change there they have the cut the the misleading word as AAS in English and really I think the word they need is because instead of as because that's what's being implied here so if that is your situation in life that suddenly puts this whole question outside of the miasma of merely subjective and culturally normative judgments we can make say oh so you have a problem your problem is you can't have intimate relationships because these are the other things that dominate life and maybe maybe there's some way you can improve this aspect of your character or this you know this this rut you're stuck in as a human being by talking about it with a therapist maybe when I was discussing this with my girlfriend before filming the video we were both reflecting on the extent to which these definitions are imperfect and fundamentally unscientific something my girlfriend said you know contrasting this definition the 2012 definition to the earlier definitions of the same condition familiy a few years ago DSM 4 DSM 3 you can see how radically the concept has changed the depth at the scientific definition of this disease are disorders age and she said well this is ridiculous compared to you know a real medically real verifiable condition like diabetes you know the definition of diabetes is not going to change that much from one manual to the next we see this being totally random from the ground up and my girlfriend asked me a very good question she said why do we need to create these definitions anyway what is the point of you know what is the point of defining and categorizing people in this way and I jumped answer I said there is one reason there is just one very good reason and the reason is so that you can help them if it is possible to take this definition and link it to the experience of therapists experience of people and reaching out to talking to working through these problems people and helping them if there is some etiology to this type of behavior or this type of whatever want to say personality problem characteristic rut and if therapists have the experience of talking to people with these problems and helping them through them and either I mean it nobody's going to talk about them being cured but maybe they can discipline themselves in some way where they improve on their ability to have intimate relationships and maybe they just do some crazy BDSM stuff on Saturdays and Sundays maybe they manage to become more aware of their tendency to be deceitful and coercive and they can talk they can tune that out or tone that you know maybe they can change if there is some potential for helping people or talking through the problems making people more aware of them and helping people tell themselves that and that alone is the justification for why we medicalize what our ultimate lee in no way medical or scientific disorders okay guys thank you for joining me in this discussion of quote unquote sociopathy you know in the last year I've done a lot of research into the state of psychiatry and psychotherapy that I didn't think I'd be doing partly because different people in my life have prompted me again and again to do more research on antidepressants the use of prescription psychiatric medication and I've seen the extent to which we really are looking at a set of aesthetic moral judgments hi Lisa objective highly culturally relative moral judgments that have come to be regarded as scientific facts and it is now through social media including here on YouTube that I think people are starting to wake up to just how outrageous that is and how genuinely dangerous the consequences of that mode of thinking can be science is not dangerous scientism is dangerous and it's scientism that grows out of the combination of ignorance and frankly moral self-righteousness that you know psychiatric judgments perhaps more than any other province of the sciences you know they invite us to make these kinds of judgments these kinds of judgments that all revolve around the self-centered ego of delusion of oh I would never do that that would never happen to me I could never imagine myself being in that situation because I'm not a sociopath I don't have this disorder I don't have this personality trait that somehow separates humanity into two different categories those who are capable of evil and those who are incapable of evil and it is much more humbling and indeed much more empathetic to look at these other people and to to imagine yourself even if it's just as a thought of your size and really think through the extent to which you are capable of that same evil or you are capable of making those same errors and there is no simple medical or scientific fact that separates the perpetrator from the person who has not thus perpetrated the lines we draw our ethical and they are elective and they are ultimately aesthetic the difference between sane and insane is never going to be like the difference between someone who is diabetic and someone who was not diabetic it's going to be much more like the difference between great poetry bad poetry it's going to rely on judgments that are very difficult to verify just like the judgments I offered as examples my behavior at that funeral and so on that may be perceived by one person as the pinnacle of compassion and may be perceived by someone else as utterly lacking in that same thing