Is Everything About A Psychopathic Personality Necessarily Bad?

It's hard or impossible for most of us to see redeeming qualities in a brutal dictator or a serial killer. The success of a Saddam Hussein or a Ted Bundy is not accidental, however, and there are certain professions in which a lack of empathy for others is actually, within limits, a positive characteristic. Here are some examples.

1. Surgeons.

The most effective surgeons, particularly the most effective neurosurgeons, can't be in the least way squeamish about blood and suffering.

The doctor who wields a surgical knife may have many personality traits in common with the thug who wields a knife in a mugging. There is some evidence that innovative surgeons, however, tend to be empathetic. The pioneer of heart transplant surgery Dr. Christiaan Barnard, for example, nearly flunked out of medical school because he could not deal with cadavers.

2. Military officers.

It's a fact of war that commanding officers sometimes knowingly order their troops to certain death, and must do so to win battles and win wars. Modern military technology minimizes this necessity, and the military training academies (at least in the USA) have taken to turning out deeply reflective, "kinder and gentler" military officers, but a degree of psychopathy is involved in any military command.

3. Medical examiners.

Medical examiners take the bodies of naked strangers, saw out their brains and their vital organs, and find cause of death. An excessively warm and empathetic personality precludes performance of the job.

4. Political leaders.

Chaotic countries seem to attract strong-arm leadership, and probably not without reason. The ability to make hard choices, and not care what people think, pays off in the leadership of a country.

5. Butchers.

Most modern people in Europe and North America have never had to swing an ax and chop off the head of a chicken, followed by pulling out guts and plucking feathers, just to make dinner. We let professional butchers take care of the processing of our meat supply. Most butchers, however, manage to compartmentalize their lack of empathy to their professional activities.

Neurological researchers believe that antisocial personalities involving a lack of empathy can be explained in brain function. In the scan of a brain of an empathetic person making a moral decision, the screen lights up as brain messages are spread from the amygdala to the medial orbitofrontal cortex. In the scan of a brain of a psychopath making an ethical decision, there isn't any lighting up of the screen from these parts of the brain.

Psychopathic personality may be hard-wired into the brain--or the result of an absence of brain circuits, as the case may be. 

But it's a fact of life, and the best way for most of us to deal with it, if we don't have it, may be at a distance.