Emotions.... Do they rule us, or do we rule them? An interview with a sociopath

Bundy as a high school senior

As discussed in our most recent introduction to the topic of emotions, the concept of our reason as an element of control is only a momentual perception. In fact, emotions have a much larger impact on us than reason, despite their lack of precision and accuarcy. Thus, reason is something that we actively pursue, thinking of it as the most effective way to make our way through the day whilst achieving the most profitable result. At this point, the emotions jump in, generally interfering with reason or differing our perception of our reasoning. For the majority of humans, this is the norm, for we in the intercourse of our life, we learn how to deal with emotions and how to manage a life in some sort of symbiosis with them. Yet, this is a hasty generalization, for there are the ones who are not able to emphazise as the majority of our society. These individuals are generally classified as either psycho- or sociopaths, depending upon the state that the mind is in. A psychopath by definition is a human who suffers under a personality disorder characterized by enduring antisocial behaviour, diminished empathy and remorse or bold behaviour. Psychopathy is divided into criminal psychopathy and Cleckleyan psychopathy; the first is the more prominent these days, since we hear of murderers showing the so-called triarchic symptoms, being boldness (low fear including stress-tolerance, toleration of unfamilarity and danger, and high self-confidence and social assertiveness), disinhibition (poor impulse control including problems with planning and foresight, lacking affect and urge control, demand for immediate gratification, and poor behavioural restraints), and meanness (lacking empathy and close attachments with others, disdain of close attachments, use of cruelty to engain empowerment, exploitative tendencies, defiance of authority, and destructive excitement-seeking). Thus, we can generally conclude that a psychopath is a human being not able to find the balance between accepting his emotions and dealing with them, but being overwhelmed by them and allowing desires - often referred to as compulsions - to take over. The most extreme examples of psychopaths are usually  serial killers such as the man known as Ted Bundy. Born into a "strong christian family", Bundy had a regular childhood, except for a factor which he referred to as "the trigger to his compulsions", this being violent pornography that he picked up from trash barrels. Soon, he would realize as an adolescent that he did not understand the concept of interpersonal relationships, cutting off himself from everyone and thus isolating himself. In the course of being a serial killer, Ted Bundy killed, decapitated and disgraced (after their death) assumingly thirty people; however it is not confirmed for though this was the number he agreed upon, yet he himself said he could not recall every murder that he commited. In his very final interview, mere hours before his execution, he said that he would feel truly sorry for the relatives of the victims, and even seemed emotionally touched by what he had done, stating that he would feel remorse every time after commiting a murder, yet incapable of stopping the compulsions that raged within him. Bundy personifies the struggle of overcoming one's own emotions - unstable and constantly on the edge of gaining power over these compulsions, yet falling back and succumbing to them. Before his execution, he stated that it was not an execution, but a suicide because he had made peace with the world and would await the judgement that would come after. Consequently, we can conclude that Bundy either was a brilliant actor, for he seemed rather clear and very analytical in his interviews, or he was in fact telling the truth all along.
Another famous example of a subvariant of psychopathy is the so called sociopathy. Bluntly described, a sociopath distinguishes himself from a psychopath in being emotionally blank, not able to empathize at all, whereas a psychopath can to a certain extent. However, a sociopath, who is in a general state of neutrality, suffers under extremely intense emotions, for he perceives them way stronger than the average human, and only on a limited amount of occasions. A research has given the result that ninety percent of all sociopaths show the triarchic symptoms to the extreme, thus proving that suffering under sociopathy is not only a subcategory of psychopathy, but takes it even further. A psychopath could, enough training and education provided, manage to gain control (only if he is not beyond the measure of therapy, which is quite rare). For a sociopath, there is no such chance since it is something that is not controllable, since they can not understand even such a simple thing as a smile. They do not possess the innate understanding for emotions, and it is incredibly difficult for them to integrate themselves into our society.
Consequently, we can come to the conclusion that our emotions do in fact rule over us, and in some rare cases go beyond what we think them capable of. I used this rather extreme example to show that through factors, be they genetical, environmental or biochemical in nature, our capability of dealing with emotions and keeping them in check can be vastly disrupted.



Jonas Dollwet