R.K.: Yeah and, frankly, I read the description to the trip of this place where elephants go when they die and in these caves, and it sounded fascinating but again,
J.F.: It's really unbelievable and when my brother was there, we're sleeping outside in this one open area there on the mountain where you can build a fire but nobody there and there's lions around us and all night long, we had to jump up and down, it was like quest for fire with these lit up embers to chase them away. It was extraordinarily thrilling. And he thought it was thrilling until he found out that the real danger wasn't the animals, it was the virus.
R.K.: Yeah. So I want to, we're coming into the last fifteen minutes of this and so, maybe twenty, and I have developed this thought, this belief, that psychopaths can be pretty damaging to our culture. You mentioned that it probably costs the US alone a half a trillion dollars a year in costs of damage and that is only a partial list that is more concrete. The costs of keeping people in prison, the cost of theft and things like that, and you say that it's probably a lot more than that if you look at a bigger picture. Now I had one guest on who teaches therapists to work with people who have been victims of psychopaths and she estimated that eighty million Americans are, have been victims of psychopaths at any given time. So I came up with this idea that we ought to do something to identify the people who are at greater risk of causing that harm and then come up with strategies to help protect the rest of us and I've gained a lot of resistance to that and I recently interview Mary Ellen O'Toole, who was an FBI psychopath profiler, and she really resisted it. And I'm not trying to say, do something like the Minority Report where you put people in jail or camps or anything but you yourself, at the end of your book advised people that they need to be careful if they know somebody is a psychopath.
J.F.: Oh yeah.
R.K.: And I...have you thought about this? Have you thought about if there are ways to make the world a better place in terms of dealing with the threat that psychopaths have? Even in your family, have you done anything to work so that your family knows better how to handle you? Have you talked with them or have you come up with any solutions? I've got to give you credit because you do describe how you've attempted to go walk through the motions. William James once wrote that if you walk through the motions very often it'll produce the same feeling and that was really interesting to me to see that you've been trying it and getting some good results actually.
J.F.: Yeah. I didn't believe it was possible, that sort of adult plasticity into starting to associate the actual feeling of empathy with the behavior. I'm just starting very simply to see if I can do it. I mean I've got enough of an ego, I say well I can do this, I can beat that. I said well it can't happen, I bet I can do it and my wife and people close to me appreciate the change in behavior, but I've got to think of it every time because I'm not naturally a good guy like that. And so I'm trying to kind of force the situation and I do talk to them about this so, and allow for kids to teach their kids when the time is right on how to look for these predators because I've talked to predators and what they look for in kids and people at parties, or whatever, and how they are predators on them. So yeah, in a personal way done that. On a broader scale, to try to turn this into something useful to society we've put in for a couple of fairly substantial grants with the Human Brain Project in Europe to study the interaction of street violence, bullying especially, in areas where there is generations of it and how that creates the very belligerent sorts of environments and hot spots around the world and to show it biologically. To see if it's true biologically and if it will jump generations so they end up with these very destructive warrior cultures and so we're trying to show that to basically convince belligerent nations and belligerent people and neighborhoods and gangs that they're going to end up just killing themselves. It's self destructive because they don't need you to tell them violence is bad, war is bad, what they need is to tell them they're going to destroy their own people that way. That's the angle that we're trying to go but you've got to show this scientifically with the golden standards. Not just kind of soft psychology which is important by itself, but it won't convince people. So we're putting it together and we're working with the military here and also in Israel to see how we can change the way people are put into situations in extremist warfare and the type of people, if we have to have war to have the right people doing who not only won't destroy themselves in the process but won't be killing completely inappropriately if you have to. So, I don't... and as a libertarian I have a problem with the early testing, not just the testing of kids, but the outing of people with it. So somehow, if we can get, maybe nurses, practical nurses working with families and psychologists to find, to give them signs of early psychopathy, in like a two year old, and then have a kid tested but with privacy. You don't want some kid, especially who is just eccentric, there are a lot of eccentric kids who aren't dangerous to anybody, just a little funny, you know? And they never develop, they're not violent or anything. So this over-interpretation of odd behaviors I think would be very destructive. But there are ways of telling whether a kid is at high risk and then those people early on have got to be shepherded through so they're not bullied, they're not exposed to violence etcetera, but it's only probably 20% of the population that are vulnerable, but to identify them early, two years old let's say by then, then something may be able to be done. But after five, six, seven and certainly puberty almost nothing can be done.
R.K.: So what you're saying is you want to identify them because they're at higher risk and if they can get through those early years without trauma they're going to be less likely to be more hurtful to the rest of the world?
J.F.: Right. And they can use the traits, because it couldn't have been traits that are very powerful to a very good advantage, to leadership, and to discovery and to very good things and not destructively. So let's not get rid of them, but make sure they're not abused, not abandoned. So you've got to look at these very high risk neighborhoods and groups of people to make sure that they, this great harm doesn't come because these things keep going over and over in families in the neighborhoods and we don't want to pinpoint certain areas but that's where it happens. And we've created that and it's in the Gaza, it's in different places in Europe, America, all of the world and we've got to stop tha,t I think, and the way to do it is to have inexpensive testing if you will and identification without violating the rights of the individual and their families.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
