Sociopath

A sociopath is a person with an antisocial personality disorder, exhibiting antisocial behavior that usually is the result of social and environmental factors in the person's early life.

Quotes

• We desperately need a sociopath test for all politicians. We have the technology to find out if people lack empathy. If they do, they should be banned from running for office, serving on corporate boards, or having any kind of authority.
  • Lee Camp, Twitter, (12 July 2020)

• Greed is not good. Being rapacious doesn't make you a capitalist, it makes you a sociopath. And in an economy as dependent upon cooperation at scale as ours, sociopathy is as bad for business as it is for society.... Neoliberal economic theory has sold itself to you as unchangeable natural law, when in fact it's social norms and constructed narratives based on pseudoscience. If we truly want a more equitable, more prosperous and more sustainable economy, if we want high-functioning democracies and civil society, we must have a new economics.
  • Nick Hanauer in The dirty secret of capitalism -- and a new way forward Ted Talk, (July 2019)

• They say sociopaths are dangerous because they know the subtleties of social interaction better than most people and they use this knowledge to use and exploit people. Well, it seems to me people with Asperger's are the opposite of sociopaths.
  • Alexei Maxim Russell, from Trueman Bradley - Aspie Detective.

• There's a very specific formula for creating a monster. It starts with chronic, unrelenting abuse. There's got to be societal notification and then passing on. The child eventually believes that what's being done is societally sanctioned. And after a while, empathy – which we have to learn, we're not born with it – cracks and dies. He feels only his own pain. There's your predatory sociopath.
  • Andrew Vachss, "Unleashing the Criminal Mind", San Francisco Examiner, (July 12, 1990).

See also

• mental health
• mental illness