I keep trying to find some kind of leftist who claims to have antisocial personality disorder, and the only person I have found so far was on a random leftist discord who acknowledged they might instead be an egregiously misdiagnosed autistic person. I have checked the words "antisocial" and "ASPD" through search on this site, and nobody has ever mentioned personally having ASPD.

Google is unusually useless at the task, too. The most relevant things are articles pertaining to the Soviet and Cuban practices of detaining and imprisoning people who are deemed to be "antisocial." After some digging, I found the usual anticommunist talking point about Stalin and Mao being worse than Hitler or something, tacking on a baseless claim that Stalin and Mao may have been antisocial. No meaningful info.

There's no difficulty at all in finding antisocial fascists, cops, chefs, capitalists, or CEOs. Why can't I find an antisocial comrade? Is there some part about leftism that is inherently exclusionary towards antisocial people? Is it a problem to be exclusionary towards antisocial people?

If any comrade here has ASPD I would really appreciate hearing your experience.

  • TillieNeuen [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    OK, I was wondering if the "Psychopathy seems to come from an inborn predisposition" part was still considered likely or if had turned out to just be a correlation that ended up being ultimately meaningless. I think it's interesting to think about what changes we could make to society and the environment children are raised in that would lead to more good outcomes with psychopaths, basically changing the stereotype that psychopath=murderer in the making. I feel like I'm having a hard time expressing what I'm thinking here. I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm thinking about what it would mean to make a society where someone who can't feel empathy would still have lots of good material reasons to engage in prosocial behavior. Not a dog eat dog world, but one where cooperation is rewarded, that kind of thing.

      • TillieNeuen [she/her]
        ·
        3 years ago

        That is so cool. The message I had received before I read about that scientist was definitely that psychopaths are fundamentally broken people, and I hated thinking that. Like, all my friends were watching Dexter and I refused because I'd heard that his dad realized he would inevitably grow up to be a serial killer, so he decided to train him to hunt other serial killers. The thought that some poor kid would just be doomed to be a serial killer no matter what was something that I just could not get on board with, not even in fiction. It's great to think about your friend's theory that psychopathy might be curable in adulthood as well. If we had a justice system that made any kind of sense, that would surely be part of it. Anyway, that article made me think of psychopaths as not being uniquely dangerous, but instead as being uniquely in danger of being damaged by our alienated society. It's been on my mind off and on for years, whenever something even tangentially related comes up. And you taught me more tonight, so thanks for that.

          • TillieNeuen [she/her]
            ·
            3 years ago

            Yeah, and acquaintance called me anti-science for not believing the premise when the show came up in conversation, but I was pretty much like, well, go ahead and call me irrational since I have no proof that it's wrong, but I refuse to believe that a person is doomed to a life of crime just because they happened to be born with a certain kind of brain. It's nice to know my blind faith was justified, lol.