Deviance

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[...] the Eskimos have a word, kunlangeta, which means “his mind knows what to do but he does not do it.” This is an abstract term for the breaking of many rules when awareness of the rules is not in question.

It might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women - someone who does not pay attention to reprimands and who is always being brought to the elders for punishment. One Eskimo among the 499 on their island was called kunlangeta.

When asked what would have happened to such a person traditionally, an Eskimo said that probably “somebody would have pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking”.

The Yorubas have a similarly abstract word, arankan, which means a person who always goes his own way regardless of others, who is uncooperative, full of malice, and bullheaded.

There are parallels between kunlangeta and arankan and our concept “psychopath” - someone who consistently violates the norms of society in multiple ways. Also some of the specific acts of wrongdoing which Eskimos and Yorubas recognise might in our society be called evidence of “personality disorders.” In Western psychiatry, this term refers to sexual deviations, excessive use of drugs or alcohol, and a variety of behaviours that primarily cause trouble for other people rather than for the doer.

It is of considerable interest that kunlangeta and arankan are not behaviours that the shamans and healers are believed to be able to cure or change. As a matter of fact, when I pressed this point with the Yoruba healers they specifically denied that these patterns are illness.

[Jane M. Murphy]
'Psychiatric Labeling in Cross-Cultural Perspective', Science, Vol 191, p. 1026

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Psychopathy

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Psychopathy is a personality disorder described by [various] personality traits and behaviors [...] Psychopaths are without conscience and incapable of empathy, guilt, or loyalty to anyone but themselves.

In the journal Psychology, Crime, and Law, researchers Board and Fritzon administered a self-report personality inventory to a sample of British senior business managers and executives. They concluded that the prevalence of histrionic, narcissistic, and compulsive personality disorders was relatively high, and that many of the traits exhibited were consistent with psychopathy: superficial charm, insincerity, egocentricity, manipulativeness, grandiosity, lack of empathy, exploitativeness, independence, rigidity, stubbornness, and dictatorial tendencies.

We now know that some organizations actively seek out and recruit individuals with at least a moderate dose of psychopathic features.

Some executives have said to us, “Many of the traits you describe to us seem to be valued by our company. Why shouldn’t companies hire psychopaths to fill some jobs?” A proper, scientific answer is that more research is needed to determine the impact of various doses of psychopathic characteristics on the performance of different types of jobs.

The “optimal” number and severity of such characteristics presumably is higher for some jobs (such as stock promoter, politician, law enforcement, used-car salespeople, mercenaries, and lawyers) than for others (such as social workers, teachers, nurses, and ministers).

[Paul Babiak & Robert D. Hare]
'Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work'



We believe there is no evidence that any treatments yet applied to psychopaths have been shown to be effective in reducing violence or crime. In fact, some treatments that are effective for other offenders are actually harmful for psychopaths in that they appear to promote recidivism.

We believe that the reason for these findings is that psychopaths are fundamentally different from other offenders and that there is nothing “wrong” with them in the manner of a deficit or impairment that therapy can “fix.”

Instead, they exhibit an evolutionarily viable life strategy that involves lying, cheating, and manipulating others.

[Kevin S. Douglas,  Gina M. Vincent & John F. Edens]
'Risk for Criminal Recidivism: The Role of Psychopathy'


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Going to extremes

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But it’s better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing […] the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode.

We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think.

Note the way ‘up close and personal’ profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life–outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what’s obvious, that most of this straining is farce.

It’s farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very small […]

[Tennis player Michael] Joyce is, in other words, a complete man, though in a grotesquely limited way […] Already, for Joyce, at twenty-two, it’s too late for anything else; he’s invested too much, is in too deep. I think he’s both lucky and unlucky. He will say he is happy and mean it. Wish him well.

[David Foster Wallace]
'The String Theory'


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Convergence

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I do this research in east Africa, and every now and then I’ve gone to […] Mount Kenya which is […] an equatorial glacial mountain. If you go up about fifteen-thousand feet almost everything is dead from the cold, and there’s basically only about four or five different types of plant up there. Only a small number [of plants] survive in that environment, and each one of them is very bizarre and distinctive looking. In some way or other, that’s what it takes to survive up there.

I have this friend who does research up in the Andes […], a glacial equatorial mountain on the other side of the globe. One day I’m sitting around and looking at some of his pictures [from this mountain] and suddenly I say “that’s the exact same plant [that I found in Mount Kenya]! How can that plant be over there?”

They are completely unrelated plants - taxonomically of no connection whatsoever - but what they have done is converge onto the same shape. In some mysterious way, if you’re going to be a plant growing on the equator at about fifteen-thousand feet there’s only about four or five different ways of appearing [..] and of surviving an environment like that. There is massive convergence.

[Robert Sapolsky]
'22. Emergence and Complexity'


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