My whole deal is, it's fine to judge people according to their actions, but what's currently happening with sociopaths is, if you come out as a diagnosis with a sociopath, you're not just being judged according to your actions, you're being judged according to the way your brain is wired. To your predispositions. You know it's like suddenly we don't trust you to do anything, whereas before you revealed that you had this diagnosis we gave you, you know, complete freedom basically like everybody else does to do whatever you want.
Rob Kall: Okay, now Robert Hare, who's written a number of books on sociopathy, on psychopaths, psychopathy. Probably his best selling one is Snakes in Suits, but in his other book, one of his other books, he talks about the idea of testing people who are coming up for parole. He advised that, if you want to protect yourself, you want to assess somebody in terms of whether they're a sociopath or not, cause what if you parole them, then they do some damage and then they are assessed and found to be a sociopath? But the other side of that is if somebody up for parole is assessed a socio, as being a psychopath, they're not going to get parole.
M.E. Thomas: Right.
Rob Kall: So, that's, it's an interesting situation there. Now in my discussions with the editors at my website, they really feel that the idea of identifying sociopaths and then doing something to them because of that, just doesn't sound fair. They, they talk about minority report, and McCarthyism, and I agree with them. On the other hand, just in terms of partial financial costs, it's a half a trillion dollars a year, not including the pain and suffering that they cause. So I'm going to ask you again, are there any other things that you can think of that could be done? If there was, if there were ten billion dollars invested in understanding sociopaths, like we spend money on cancer and heart disease, what kind of fund, where would that funding go to help society? To help sociopaths? Another question that's raised is, how is society influencing sociopaths? I'm hearing from you that you think it's a lot about the brain, and not so much about nurture. Although Robert Hare suggests that the difference between a psychopath and a sociopath, is more psychopaths are born, sociopaths have the nurture element too. And just to mention, you were tested, and it was found that you're a psychopath as well as a sociopath right?
M.E. Thomas: I don't think that my psychologist doing the diagnosing distinguished between the two. There are people who think that there's a difference, and I don't think, he sort of thought, I think he used, he definitely used Hare's own test, the PCLR. At least the screening version. And he used a couple other diagnostic tests, and they all kind of are trying to get at these general traits. I don't know if they're specific enough though to say whether somebody's a sociopath or psychopath.
Rob Kall: But you showed up on the Hare test, scoring high enough to be a psychopath, based on his test.
M.E. Thomas: Right. Yup.
Rob Kall: Yeah. Okay. We're getting near the end. Do you have heroes?
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