This is a conditional truth: there are few people who are so nice to be with as psychopaths. A psychopath tries to manipulate you. He lies to you. He does everything for himself, even if he has to crush you. And he is really charming, when he does this.
The psychopath is like a glass of wine - it is very pleasant if you only know when to stop. You need to be able to back out, go away, hang up and cut off at any moment. And you need to be aware, to think of this at every instance: this is not just a glass of water; this is not a decent person. Keep the distance.
If you get to depend on a psychopath, you are toast.
Kunlangeta is allegedly an Inuit Yupik word for psychopath. It is mentioned by a Jane Murphy in an article in Science from 1976 to illustrate that there are psychopaths in all cultures. It is very easy to make that kind of vocabulary claims for small languages without being contradicted. There are less than 20,000 people speaking any dialect of Yupik, and it is unlikely that many of them are aware of all the clinical symptoms of psychopaths. How many of them will read that article from 1976 and verify or deny the claim? Let's not forget that one of the most ridiculous linguistic claims ever has been made for Inuit languages: that they should have hundreds of words for snow.
The same article claims that arankan is the Yoruba word for psychopath. However, Yoruba is a big language with more than 20 million speakers, and there are actually dictionaries available. The word simply means "malice" or "evil". It is hardly surprising that there is a word for nasty in Yoruba, and that does not prove that there are psychopaths in Nigeria. It is very likely that there are some there as well as elsewhere, but the mere fact that Yoruba has a word for nasty is no proof.
8 comments:
I'd disagree with that. Psychopaths are dead weight whether they wear furs or Armani.
In an environment as harsh as the Arctic your survival depends on fellow tribesmen. You simply can't afford to have these people around sponging off you and stirring things up all the time.
Your outlook as a normal person looking at the behaviour of these people quite literally in the cold light of day naturally becomes almost as dispassionate and utilitarian as a psychopaths. Till one day one of them shags your wife and you invite him on a little fishing trip.
If I've learnt anything from reading O'Hare's books it's that these people follow familiar behaviour patterns and they I'm sure would have been recognized by tribal elders and this extremely useful knowledge surely as useful as any good fishing tip was passed down through the generations.
I'm sure Psychopaths have a name for them in their society just as much and for the same reasons that their language is surely better than ours at things to do with snow and seal hunting.
O'Hare?
Anyhow: Eskimos and snow
Robert D Hare. Author of "Without Conscience" and co author of "Snakes in Suits". Two popular science books on Psychopaths. Oh well we all make mistakes.
Yes I read the article in Wikipedia on Eskimos and their words for snow. The word "kunlangeta" could easily have lost it's meaning over the years since the original research. Words change their meanings all the time.
The Dr recalled the tribesman explaining the kunlangeta psychopaths by their actions, saying that the kunlangeta of his tribe would constantly lie, cheat, steal, not be phased by any punishment etc. I don't understand your issue with that one, maybe you didn't read the entire paper?
I do not deny that the Yupik are likely to have a word that can be applied to psychopaths. What I doubt is that it is a dedicated word that only can be applied to psychopaths. It could be a word that corresponds to "nasty", "unkind", "evil", "baddie" or many other words.
It is like if you were to show a photo of the Empire State Building to a newly discovered tribe in the Amazon, and ask them what it is. If they answer "napata", you could not conclude that they have a word for the Empire State Building or even skyscraper. "Napata" is more likely to mean "building" or "house".
Likewise "kunlangeta" is more likely to mean "baddie" than being the clinical term for "psychopath".
I think that the while it is highly doubtful the Inuits have a word which is cognizant of all of the characteristics of a psychopath we don't. 'Psychopath' is just a term we have chosen to apply to people who display the traits identified by Cleckly and Hare.
Psychopaths have, the evidence suggests, been around since the dawn of mankind and people will have been noticing that they are not quite right since that time; our clinical understanding of them is only recent, but that doesn't mean the intuition of primitive people is wrong.
I imagine the extreme individualism and egoism of psychopaths means that they stick out like a sore thumb in collectivist societies; perhaps accounting for the relatively high number of them in individualistic, industrialised, Western societies. If they do push them off the ice as Jane Murphy claimed they did, perhaps their genes are not expressed so much in collectivist societies (they aren't as adaptive there because, for all of the shagging and stealing you can do, they will get you killed eventually).
In short, as Hare & others have noted, we, as a society, value the extreme selfishness of the psychopath, so they can hide quite well here. They can hide behind the capitalist ethic etc but the truth is of course that they are only paying lip service to it, rules, for them, are made to be broken.
Psychopaths do very well in collectivist societies and organizations; for example, the military, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's USSR, bin Laden's Al Qaeda; Enron, NBC, CBS, Microsoft, Google, NY Times, Washington Post, etc.
There is a spiritual aspect to psychopathy as well. There is the Cain and Abel theory. Abel had the cruel psychopathic DNA in him and he passed it on to future generations. There is the biblical Nephilim theory where the "sons of God" who married "the daughters of men" and had children and gave birth to giants with altered DNA patterns? Plus the theory that if a human refuses to believe and follow God's laws, he/she will be more inclined to be guided by the spirit of the world and by evil spirits, specifically the demonic spirit of Jezabel who makes all psychopaths act in similar ways.
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