Why Sociopaths Make Poor (Fictional) Villains

As I have noted before, it has become common in certain quarters to assume evil people are sociopaths or psychopaths (I think they're pretty much the same thing), especially those in high places. This is something I object to for a variety of reasons (it seems to me to be a convenient way of "Othering" people one doesn't like and avoiding facing the reality of human fallibility), but one problem is that it reduces complex (albeit wicked) people into caricatures.

This io9 article written by a psychologist goes into a lot of detail about the symptoms and signs of psychopathy. Among others, psychopaths are not capable of normal emotions. They're also quite shallow emotionally. This article states they might intellectually understand the concept of sadness, but they won't feel it. The article states that Sherlock, for all his claims to be a sociopath, is not a cold, calculating machine focused only on his own gratification. Specifically, he is capable of emotional attachments, something psychopaths simply are not. This TVTropes page discusses how most fictional villains aren't actually sociopaths because real sociopaths are real-life "flat characters."

Here are some villains, both real-life and fictional, that from what I know of them don't appear to be sociopathic and are all the more complex characters for it.

Loki-The villain Loki from the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been referred to as a sociopath and in terms of bad behavior, he's done a lot--the attempted genocide of the Frost Giants, the attack on New York City that killed many thousands of people, etc. However, he has entirely too many emotional attachments. The driving force of his antics in the first movie is trying to please and/or show himself worthy of his adoptive father Odin. He sabotages Thor's coronation not (necessarily) because he wants the throne for himself but because he thinks Thor would be a poor king (and at this point in Thor's personal development, he'd be right). In the second film, when Odin calls him onto the carpet for his attack on Earth, he says he wanted to rule humans as a benevolent god--like Odin himself rules Asgard. The second film also shows how attached Loki is to his mother Frigga, including his total meltdown when he learns she was killed by the Dark Elves. He also throws Jane Foster out of the way when one of the Dark Elves throws a vortex grenade at her, even though she'd slapped him earlier. This shows he cares enough for Thor to save his love interest even if he doesn't care for the squishy mortal Jane (and he might--note the "I like her" comment after she slaps him). He's also too emotionally "deep" to be a sociopath--go to the TVTropes page for the first film, his character page, and the page for the second film and you'll see all sorts of explorations of his character.

Most importantly, Loki is supposed to be a tragic figure. If he was never "good" to start with, he can't fall into evil and make the audience sad.

Khan Noonien Singh-The greatest Original Series villain of them all, he was a dictator on Earth who fled into space and upon being defrosted in "Space Seed," nearly took over the Enterprise and was only undone by the treachery of the Starfleet officer he'd seduced. In Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khanhe successfully took control of a Federation ship and seriously damaged the Enterprise, killing Scotty's nephew (the relationship is made clear in a deleted scene that's included in some DVD releases) and eventually no less than Mr. Spock. A pretty bad dude? Yes. However, when Kirk exiles him he was a remarkably good sport about it rather than lashing out as some kind of psychotic man-child. He accepts the presence of Lt. McGivers among them despite her ruining his plan (and according to some sources killed other Augments to make sure she was respected) and it was her death that drove him to such vengeance against Kirk. Many of the Enterprise crew admired him as "the best of tyrants" even though they knew they had to beat him. The Wikipedia article lists a bunch of positive traits uncharacteristic of a psychopath (I'm thinking primarily the "not threatened by the success of others" and encouraging other people), with the exception of the whole "lack of regard for the rights of others" part. Obviously that's not good, but that makes him a villain, not (necessarily) a psychopath. The Wikipedia article also describes him as possessing many of the same traits as Kirk, but in much larger helpings. A "Dark Kirk" is a lot more interesting than some emotionally-shallow monstrosity any day.

Adolf Hitler-We all know just how monstrous Hitler was--not only did he start WWII (in Europe) and kill six million Jews and six million others in the Holocaust, but his intention was to turn the Slavic peoples into helots for the German Spartans at a planned cost, according to my high school history textbook, of fifty million Slavic lives. Heck, just look at Generalplan Ost, something so hellacious that many people defend Stalin's industrialization-through-forced-labor-and-famine as the most viable alternative. However, this wicked man still had some very human traits. This article here corroborates Hitler's devotion to his mother (and how normal he was as a teen--he doesn't display obvious-in-hindsight warning signs like Eric Harris here), something that extended to some degree of protection for his mother's Jewish doctor later. His mistress Eva Braun's two suicide attempts seem to be motivated by a desire to get Hitler's attention--if he weren't capable of emotional attachments, that wouldn't have worked (as it did the first time). Seriously, from a purely pragmatic perspective why bother with someone that unstable? For all his many sins he must've had some legitimate feeling for her.

Darth Vader-On the issue of emotional attachments alone, Vader cannot be a psychopath or sociopath. He was quite attached to his mother and his first major crime -- the massacre of the Sand People tribe in Episode II -- was in reaction to her death. One could imagine a sociopath punishing someone for harming HIS kin, but his guilty feelings in which he confesses his sins to Padme look genuine rather than some kind of act to get her sympathy. A legitimate psychopath (at least a smart one) would keep it secret or, if he figured he'd be exposed, be "honest" but downplay it. In the third film, his devotion to Padme was what Palpatine (who credibly can be described as a psychopath) played on to corrupt him. If we're going to be playing armchair shrink, some psychologists have suggested he had borderline personality disorder. However, this article has been written in rebuttal. And he feels quite a bit of guilt over Padme's death--see this image here from this comic. Psychopaths can't feel guilt, period. And before his fall into evil, he was notably loyal to his friends.

Josef Stalin-Stalin, the dictator of the Soviet Union, presided over the mass starvation of Ukraine to export grain to fund industrial projects, his control-freak attitudes toward foreign Communists contributed to the rise of Hitler, and his paranoia-fueled purges crippled Soviet espionage efforts in the United States and the Soviet military on the eve of Barbarossa. Even though the opening of the Soviet archives reduced the number of his victims, his body count ranges from three million to 20 million. However, for all his wickedness, his mother recounted that he was a sensitive child. He was totally wrecked by his first wife's death, to the point his friends feared he would commit suicide, and however odious he was to his sons he was kind to his daughter. He also semi-adopted the son of a deceased friend. He also seems to have been at least a decent poet. An exceedingly wicked man, yes, but hardly a shallow one or one incapable of emotional attachments. This article here (which is about a book) attributes Stalin's horrors to his zealous adherence to Marxism-Leninism--basically he became evil because of the politics he adopted.

Genghis Khan-Genghis Khan founded the Mongol Empire, a realm that despite uniting most of Eurasia in a zone of free trade and travel required a ludicrous degree of brutality. The Mongols killed so many people it may have affected the Earth's climate. However, as a young man his wife Borte was kidnapped by rivals, raped, and soon after her rescue gave birth to a son of questionable paternity. Many men in the pre-modern era would have committed infanticide at this point and possibly even killed the mother as well. To his credit, Temujin did neither. Furthermore, when the paternity issue came up when it came time to decide his succession, Temujin seems to love all of his sons, is upset when they're fighting, and points out how hurtful their behavior would be to Borte. Despite the atrocities inflicted both personally and on his orders, this is a man capable of forming emotional attachments, so he can't be a psychopath.

Eric von Shrakenberg-Here we're getting a bit obscure, but he's one of the major characters of S.M. Stirling's Draka series. The books follow him from his youth in the Domination's military during WWII in which he's under a cloud for helping his illegitimate daughter with a serf concubine (one he was very attached to, to a degree his landholding family found quite unhealthy) escape to the United States all the way to his becoming the Archon of the Domination. Along the way he seeks to reform the Draka slave system and consents to more extreme proposals for super-weapons, secret wars in space, etc. only to horse-trade for his reforms and for defensive purposes. Although he's the one who pulls the trigger on a nuclear war that kills 1/3 of the human race, his hand is forced by the rash actions of his niece and he orders it only because he knows if he refuses, he'll be killed and someone else will do it. He even remarks that all his life he's sought to free his people from "a way of life based on death" but in order to do this, he'll have to inflict more killing than any human who ever lived. Afterward, with the Domination victorious, he allows the Alliance for Democracy's starship to escape the solar system and grants (limited) Citizenship to the Alliance survivors in space as well as telling his niece he's going to be handing out Citizenship liberally, "as many as I can swing."

Although by any objective standard he's the worst murderer in human history, he's a very sympathetic, thoughtful character, not a heartless monster. That's what makes him all the more tragic--the man who would abolish the slave system (or at least reform it drastically) if he could is forced by circumstances and his own sense of duty to commit genocide on a scale undreamed of in order to extend this system over the overwhelming majority of humankind.

Bernie Madoff-Madoff is routinely considered a corporate psychopath (think the book Snakes in Suits)and given how unbelievably destructive his crimes were, it's easy to see how this account is credible. However, something that clashes with that portrayal was his taking all of the blame for the Ponzi scheme on himself. Psychopaths routinely blame others for their problems and refuse to take responsibility. He was pretty obviously trying to shield his family and associates from the blame--not surprising considering how other people were part of the plan--but the fact he was willing to protect others rather than sell them out to save himself is fairly telling. He was greedy, selfish, dishonest, and generally slimy--but his taking responsibility for his actions undermines the idea that he is a psychopath.

Magneto-This gets tricky due to all the retcons and the abominably out-of-character moment in the the second X-Men filmwhen he decides to kill all ordinary humans. However, in the comics, between his escape from the concentration camp and his daughter being killed by an angry mob frightened by his mutant powers (something I remember very vividly in a flashback scene in a comic I read a child), he lived a fairly normal, loving family life. No abuse, no affairs, no secret serial killing while maintaining an upstanding facade, none of that. This biography here describes how his creators never intended for him to be a "bad guy" per se and he's described as "charismatic, noble, and wise." When he thinks he nearly killed the young Kitty Pryde, it horrifies him so much he renounces his terrorist ways for a time and later even becomes a teacher at Xavier's school, returning to villainy only after a series of murders of mutants. There's a line I remember from one of the comics in which Xavier points out Magneto refraining from some particularly large act of villainy and says that Magneto knew that going through with this would make him a Hitler, something a Holocaust survivor would not want to be.

This is not to say that there aren't psychopathic villains, both fictional or historical. However much I object to using "psychopath" as some kind of post-Christian attempt to pathologize moral failings or even political disagreements, I'm not such a fool to ignore the obvious physical evidence for it. Prominent Nazi Reinhard Heydrich seemed like a totally amoral killing machine, with the only "complicated" aspect to him being his self-loathing over possible Jewish ancestry. Palpatine and Columbine mastermind Eric Harris I've already mentioned. The sadistic degenerate Ariel Castro seems to fit as well.

However, if I were writing a villain, I wouldn't use them for models and neither should you. The ones I listed above are much better examples. They're deeper, more complicated character rather than two-dimensional monsters. And if you can write them well enough that at least some readers will take their side over the protagonist, Internet fan controversies raise awareness and thus sell more books. :)

Social Justice Warriors and How "Punitive Medicine" Might Come to the United States

I came across this article by Andrew Todd and although I agree with his macro-point that people who threaten women who disagree with them with rape need to be stopped, one part I did disagree with. See below:

“Social Justice Warriors” is a term used often by these sort of people, and it’s a term whose pejorative use perplexes me, because aside from the source of its invention, it sounds like a really badass thing to be. I’d much rather label myself a Social Justice Warrior than a warrior for...whatever it is that these people are warriors for. Social justice is such an inherently positive thing - literally everyone benefits from greater equality - that it’s impossible to see its enemies as anything but sociopathic. Hatred of Social Justice Warriors can be seen as a broader hatred of social justice itself.

Apparently Mr. Todd can't distinguish between people opposed to the cause of social justice (i.e. people who are racists, sexists, etc) and people opposed to the actions and attitudes of belligerent Internet left-wingers. And furthermore, he claims that people who are racists, sexists, etc. aren't simply immoral people, but sociopaths. Assuming the notion held by some Internet left-wingers that right-wingers have something congenitally wrong with them is true (it's not), that doesn't explain why left-wingers have come out against SJWs like this gentleman has here.

Let the record state that I am strongly opposed to racism, sexism, sending rape threats, and all the various a-hole things that take up most of Mr. Todd's denunciation. Those people deserve every ounce of opprobrium that can be rained down on them--and legal action too. Let's see how tough they are when they get charged with terroristic threats and get put in the cooler with really bad dudes.

However, I've criticized the SJWs myself a fair bit because of their propensity for swearing and many occasions when their claims get ridiculous--claiming J.K. Rowling is some kind of creepy Calvinist, which strikes me as quite absurd given the amount of criticism she's received from conservative Christians. Being a blowhard is so essential to these people they've invented a term that makes calling them out for their incivility immoral--"tone policing."

Obviously one should not ignore legitimate evidence just because the person presenting said evidence is a tool--Hitler and Stalin claimed the other was evil and they were both right--but I've seen people being complete jerks and claiming people are objecting to their behavior because they want minorities to shut up, not because they're jerks. Just because someone is a supporter of an ostensibly good cause doesn't mean that anybody opposed to that person is opposed to the cause itself--I'm a Christian, but I don't interpret attacks on individual Christians or organizations that misbehave as attacks on Christianity or Jesus.

Furthermore, accusing people with disagreeable views of being mentally ill is the first step down a very dangerous road. The kind of road that ends with the Soviet psychiatric gulag. Although I remember seeing some idiot on FreeRepublic claiming the Clintons and Obama were clinical narcissists, it seems to be more common on the (secular) left because they believe people are inherently good--so therefore when the reality of human evil becomes too obvious, they decide evil people aren't really people. See this article on sociopathy on Richard Dawkins' old website, for example. Or this one about the Virginia Tech shooter. In real life, I've got one friend who said "sociopath" is the scientific term for evil, another who said it's okay to love fictional psychopaths (including Loki from the Marvel films, who based on his attachment to his mother Frigga is not a clinical psychopath however much a murderous jerk he is) but one should avoid them in real life, and a third (a vocal member of the skeptic movement) who said that one of my Wastelands-verse characters is a psychopath even though, speaking as his creator, he's not.

(For the record, I toned his actions down a bit from that version of the story. If you're a writer and your reader misinterprets your character, odds are it's your fault for not defining him or her clearly enough.)

The "evil people are sociopaths" meme is something I first noticed a lot of on the site DemocraticUnderground, where people liked to claim various prominent Republicans were psychopaths and sociopaths (presumably the corporate variety chronicled in Snakes in Suits as opposed to the stereotypical mad ax-murderer). An entire pseudo-science called "ponerology" has been invented to justify this type of thing. Here's an example of ponerology being applied politically, to the point of conspiracy theory if you take the bit at the end about "PSYCHOPATHS RULE THE WORLD" into account. Here's another example of ponerology-as-ideology.

You say these people are isolated individuals (most of whom are limited to certain quarters of the Internet) who have no real power, right? Well, for starters every one who can vote has a small amount of power and once you get enough voters, then you're talking the potential for something truly dangerous. Once notions of un-persons and that certain political views are a sign of being an un-person get traction--and it wasn't long ago that a shadow of this passed over the political landscape--watch out. And before you say, "It can't happen here," well look at what's being discussed in Britain. Or what actually has happened in New York. Or the prominence of eugenics in the United States not all that long ago. The prevalence of the "bad people are sociopaths, not regular people who have made poor or immoral decisions" meme could represent a wider cultural trend, especially as Christianity, with its notions of universal human sin and that anyone can repent of their wickedness even late in their lives, declines in influence in the United States.

And politically, what happens when older left-wing leaders die and these people replace them in positions of leadership?

I imagine someone will accuse me of indulging in the slippery slope fallacy, and I concede that A doesn't necessarily lead to B and so on. However, if I were some obscurantist, I would have denied the existence of personality disorders as a whole, despite objective evidence for them. I could mimic the young-earth crowd and try to use religion to trump science (see Romans 2:15, which implies everyone has a conscience, something psychopaths/sociopaths don't have) and claim that the notion of personality disorders will inevitably lead to psychiatric abuses, the mistreatment of the children of criminals due to their supposedly defective heredity, etc. (fallacy of appeal to consequences), much like how the young-earthers claim belief in evolution leads to racism. My main concern is not popular prejudice (although I certainly object to that), but the political implications.

Ideas have consequences. If an idea is able to spread unchallenged and people believe it--and those people can vote--it is quite likely that laws will be made to reflect that. The notion that sex offenders cannot be rehabilitated, for example, led to those laws in New York, even though it may not be true.

Some Thoughts on a Crossover Between "Space: Above and Beyond" and "Battlestar Galactica"

http://www.alternatehistory.net/Discussion/showthread.php?t=155109

A member of my message-board whose handle is robertp6165 has started writing a crossover between Space Above and Beyond and the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica.  The basis scenario is that when Racetrack's Raptor's jump-drive malfunctions, it takes her to the Lion's Head Nebula--one of the guideposts of the Thirteenth Tribe's journey from Kobol to Earth.  "New Caprica" is never found, Baltar never becomes the Colonial president, and the Colonial survivors encounter the Wild Card squadron from SAAB.

(He said the "trainwreck" of Seasons Three and Four never happens as a result.  I liked some elements of those seasons, but the macro-plot and Final Five stuff was immensely irritating.)

Robert wanted to stick with the more extreme variant of the Chariots of the Gods theory that inspired the original Battlestar, the notion that humans are not native to Earth and there are other human civilizations out there.

(If I remember correctly, the more "normal" COG theory is that aliens visited ancient Earth and helped bring about early civilization, which isn't nearly so much of a clash with what science has discovered about our genetic kinship with Earth life even if it is extremely unlikely.  The "we're not from here" version, however, is easily-disproven garbage.)

Back when I was active on the Sci-Fi Channel's Battlestar forum, I was among those who wanted the Colonials to find an advanced Earth, perhaps one where humans lived in harmony with artificial intelligences, and that Kobol had been settled from Earth.  Given the timeframes involved (I think the settlement of the Twelve Colonies from Kobol was 3,000 years before the series began), it would have to take place many thousands of years in the future for this to work.

However, when I was younger, I was really into cryptozoology (literally the study of unknown animals, it's basically stuff like Bigfoot).  Among the many books in the 0000 section of the library, where Bigfoot, UFOs, conspiracy theories, etc. lurked, was a book claiming there had been an advanced civilization in ancient India that developed nuclear technology and bombed itself out of existence.  The book cited some alleged fused glass, the sort that's found as a result of nuclear explosions, and some other anomalous odds and ends.

Here's a Google search that has some links elaborating on this theory, since I cannot remember the book I found and it's probably out of print anyway:

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=nuclear+war+in+ancient+india&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Dean Koontz's novel Twilight Eyes has a similar concept--there was an ancient advanced civilization on Earth that literally bombed itself back into the Stone Age, only with this one, the perpetrators were "goblins"--genetically-engineered shape-shifting soldiers bred for war that got out of control and into positions of power.

Robert's scenario involved a war between the Twelve Tribes that founded the Twelve Colonies and a Thirteenth Tribe that objected to the former's enslavement of the Cylons and joined them in revolt as the cause of the original Exodus from Kobol.

For a back-story more consistent with what science has discovered, I suggested a mishmash of the India scenario and the Twilight Eyes scenario.  Basically, there was an advanced civilization centered on India thousands of year ago that developed artificial intelligence and treated them like uppity machines rather than thinking beings.  These early "Cylons" revolted, aided by humans who objected to the situation, and the resulting war devastated Earth.  Many of the survivors left Earth and settled Kobol (which side did this isn't really important), while those that remained behind had their civilization collapse and had to build their way back up again, to the point we ended up with the scenario depicted in SAAB.  Given one of the dangers of nuclear war is radiation-induced sterility and/or birth defects, the group that left Earth could have collected human populations not immediately affected by the war, which would explain the racial diversity of the Twelve Colonies rather than all of them being Indian.

Robert said he wanted to stick with the original back-story and suggested that the Panspermia theory used in the show to explain the origin of the alien Chigs--basically bacteria from Earth were blown clear by the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs and ended up on their planet, leading to an entire ecosystem evolving--could be used to explain the genetic kinship between humans-from-another-planet and Earth life.  Basically, all life on Earth originated on Kobol and a celestial event similar to what brought Earth life to the Chigs' world brought Kobolian life here.

It's Robert's story and it's better written than some other examples of SAAB/BSG fan-fiction that someone linked to in the thread, so I'm not going to complain too much.  However, I think I might use the "nuclear war in ancient India" scenario if I wanted to have a story with an advanced human culture from outer space in our present-day or near-future.

Hmm...a friend of mine is writing a book involving an advanced human culture from deep space.  I think I'll send him this when I'm done.  And maybe I'll see if I can get hold of SAAB DVDs--apparently it was a really good show.