But a conscience seems to be more than that. If you had to define it, you might call it the sum of our inhibitions. It's what keeps us from doing bad things. (I'm using the word "bad" because it's such an all-encompassing, vague term.) But how exactly does a "conscience" keep us from doing those things?
Part of it is fear -- fear of reprisals from wronged people, but also the fear of having to experience the three unpleasant emotions mentioned in the first paragraph. (But fear of reprisals shouldn't be overlooked; remember, sociopaths generally don't feel fear the same way.)
Part of "a conscience" is the ability to put oneself into other's shoes, knowing how they would feel should you wrong them.
Some of it seems to be tied into not thinking that you're better than you are. All of us are guilty of overestimating ourselves at times; but some of us are consistently guilty.
Another element of a conscience is awareness -- and therefore avoidance -- of your own possible hypocrisy. Anybody who criticizes others for doing exactly as he does probably has a pretty weak "conscience."
A conscience is really just a matter of instincts. You could describe it as the part of your mind which regulates your comfort zone -- or more specifically, your discomfort zone. The less comfortable you are when you're doing something you know you shouldn't be, the more of a "conscience" you have.
And the easier it is for you to justify your own actions, the less of one you have.
If you feel perfectly comfortable buttering up a distant relative in hopes he'll remember you in his will, then you may have less of a "conscience." If you are reluctantly going along with the plan only because, say, your wife is pushing you to, then you have more of one.
Discomfort zones, instincts, and hypocrisy: these terms are easier to relate to than that nebulous, intangible concept known as a "conscience."
And when they feel schadenfreude, or envy, or resentment, or even hate, it makes them doubt themselves. But those emotions are universal: everybody feels them from time to time. And it's not how we feel, but how we act, that's evidence of a conscience.
The word "conscience" is nothing more than a metaphor for a broad collection of instincts steering one in the general direction of the Golden Rule.
Your "conscience" is simply you. To think of it as being as a separate entity, like Jiminy Cricket, is misleading.
But people who lack what's called a "conscience," because they lack one, tend to think that it's an actual thing, and that if they claim its existence, it will prove their goodness. So these are the people who who talk about their conscience the most.
One of the things that give sociopaths away is their attempts to appear normal -- or even better than normal. What betrays them is that their act is always a little overdone. So they say things like "my conscience is clear," as if their conscience is a tangible part of them with absolute authority over what they can and cannot do.
I once knew a sociopath who would occasionally say, "Hey, I'm the guy who's gotta look at himself in the mirror the next day" -- as if this rendered him incapable of doing anything immoral. Obviously, "looking in the mirror" is a metaphor, just like "a conscience" is. But because that sort of thing never troubled him, he figured that it was the actual physical act of seeing one's own reflected image that bothered normal people.
So, like all those sociopaths who blather on about their consciences, he gave himself away with his words.
Posts
38 comments:
Having a conscience is a good thing, especially in a crowded world.Can you imagine the mayhem that would occur if people did just want their animal instincts became conscious.
Even a Catholic(or most religions)upbringing or education cannot stop mayhem and destruction from occurring.
For you consideration;
Richard Church, football high school hero and champion from Woodstock Illinois high school Marion Central Catholic.
Kills his (ex)girl friends parents and tries to kill the girlfriend and her brother.
So, he was educated at Catholic schools where Catholics claim that they will develop a conscience against evil but he goes and kills two people and almost kills four.
In his defence it is claimed he consumed alcohol and other drugs so therefore his conscience was compromised.A sad story.Some people should not use alcohol and drugs but who's to stop them as this person was 19 years old and about six feet and one hundred and eighty or ninety pounds. A big kid.
Google; Richard Church Woodstock
Europeasant --
Just Googled Church and read the account of the murders in the Chicago Tribune. Yeah, pretty grisly. No school, religious or otherwise, can instill a conscience; that's only something that parents can instill. I'm not even exactly sure what Church's diagnosis would be; the easy assumption is sociopath (i.e. no conscience) but from the nature of the crime it almost sounds as if he has borderline personality disorder, or something else that would cause him to completely lose control like that.
Yes, you're right, the fact that people have consciences -- and, just inhibitions in general -- is a necessary component for a society to function and stay civilized. Otherwise, it all just becomes a big prison, at least with people acting as they do in prison yards.
Let the battle between conscience and free will, commence.
Or is it the battle between nature and nurture?
Maybe Church came from the "Recessive Devil Gene"?
Well known but a few times in our past we saw evil and it stared us in the face.
the kicker on that post was really good...it would make a good "reveal" in a script or a play, the non-psychopath characters would stare at each other and realize LITTLE PAL is actually a monster, wordlessly, following the line-of-thought you describe
====GUINEA HENWEED
Europeasant --
There's plenty of evil in the world, what with 3% or so of the population sociopathic. That battle you're referring to is always being fought.
GUINEA HENWEED --
Thanks. No creativity involved on my part, just a little observation. I listened to him say it several times.
I'd like to take credit but, well, you know, my conscience wouldn't allow me to.
Your post triggered the thought that a conscientious person is someone whose conscience drives him to perform a task as well as he possibly can. A conscientious objector's conscience stops him from taking a life on the battlefield, even in self-defense. I hadn't made the conscience / conscientious connection before.
Mark --
Neither had I, until you just pointed it out.
Ah! Good question.
Isn't conscience the sum of our cultural upbringing. In some cultures cannibalism
was the norm. Or in some cultures it is right thing to stone an adulteress. While
not long ago having slaves and trading in humans was perfectly okay. When societal
norms change gradually there is a shift in our conscience. To be honest as I grow
older there has been a big shift in my conscience. Once upon a time my conscience
would not allow me to return meanness with meanness but now I no longer have that
on my conscience.
Sherie
Sherie --
I actually make a point of trying to return meanness with meanness these days, just so I don't stew afterwards.
I think how a "conscience" is expressed varies with cultural norms, but I don't think that the presence or absence of a "conscience" -- i.e, exactly where one stands on the sociopathic scale, is a function of one's culture. For instance, there's a remarkable similarity to how serial killers act in different eras and different cultures; instincts are universal.
A common motif in older narrative fiction is the depiction of a character who commits an evil deed and who then is so overcome with remorse that his conscience drives him insane. An obvious example is Lord Macbeth.
I tend to take this as a moral lesson with little basis in reality. Moralists would hope that those who do evil will be tortured by their consciences. If you warn school children they'll be tortured by guilt and even go insane for inflicting a grievous harm on someone, it might inhibit some of them from doing bad things. But I think these moral lessons are all a pious lie with the noble aim of making a more law-abiding, harmonious society.
Mark --
Yes, I remember that. those stories were written back before people understood sociopathy. Back when serial killers were thought to be "crazy."
Agree about the pious lie. There are still a lot of people who think this way. I think i said this in another comment recently so forgive me for repeating myself, but every now and then you'll hear a death penalty opponent say something along the lines of, "Oh, I'd rather he spent his life in jail so he can think about what he did," as if some sociopath is going to be so overcome with feelings of guilt that it will make his life a living hell. It's an awfully naive point of view.
I never really thought deeply about good, evil, one's conscience, etc. until my awful encounter with a sociopath. After doing my own research on the subject of sociopathy (and later other mental health illnesses), I became more aware of the reality that there truly are evil, rotten people on our planet, people who lack a conscience.
- birdie
Birdie --
No question about that, though the point of this post was simply that a "conscience" is such a nebulous concept that the only people who are comfortable talking about their own are those who don't have them.
John -- I love this post. Your succinct definition of conscience as a collection of instincts geared to the Golden Rule is the best one I've yet come across. It still begs the question of where those 'instincts' come from. And no, I am not buying the evolutionarily adaptive altruism argument. In humans, it really goes beyond evolutionary fitness. The Golden Rule principle is something really uniquely human -- which is why sociopaths are often likened to animals, especially reptiles. At least I liken them to such.
Ambivalent Misanthrope --
Thank you very much.
Yes, it does beg the question of what *causes* some to have those instincts. After your nice compliment, I hate to disagree with you, but there is a certain amount of evolutionary adaptation built in there. If we do favors for others, they are more inclined to return the favor, and nobody is unaware of that. And there's the whole sibling/offspring/cousin/second cousin thing whereby we're in fact helping our own genes by helping those mostly closely related to us.
Yes, I've always liked the barnyard animal comparison. Sociopaths simply don't have the qualms and inhibitions that plague the rest of us, so are capable of having sex in front of other people, eating a sandwich right after murdering someone, etc -- sort of like an animal would do. The reptile thing is a little more metaphorical, i.e., reptiles are cold-blooded, as are sociopaths, metaphorically.
John -- I knew youd disagree with me on the sourcing of the Golden Rule. :-). While it's a persuasive scientific argument for why we help each other out, it doesn't explain why we feel that impulse towards other species (if we're not sociopaths). I'm pretty sure that if I came across an animal being tortured, severely beaten, etc., I'd feel an immediate and visceral need to intervene and rescue you it. If I was absolutely helpless in the situation, I'd feel a gut-wrenching horror on the amimal's behalf. But from an evolutionary perspective, I should be built to feel fairly indifferent about the scene. (And I'm not even particularly sentimental about animals, by the way).
As regards your second point: does that mean that all men who've indulged their fantasy of a threesome are sociopaths? :-)
Ambivalent Misanthrope --
It seems a lot of white women's (Asians and blacks are mostly immune) maternal instinct extends to other species. It's why they go crazy over a cute little puppy, or kitten, or baby seal, etc. I don't know if this is because Europeans have more maternal instinct, or it's simply less discriminating. It's an admirable instinct, btw, and one I don't have.
No, I wasn't thinking of threesomes so much, though I suppose that would be a step in that direction. I'm thinking of how Pancho Villa used to rape girls in front of their fathers (who would be tied up for the occasion), or of how some men would just have sex in front of their children (there was some famous serial killer -- Peewee Gaskins? -- who witnessed his father do that. (I just looked him up in Wiki after writing that last sentence and there was no reference to that in the "early life" section, but I think I read that somewhere.) Or another example, guys who participate in gang rapes.
A threesome is slightly different because all three people are theoretically participating. I was talking about having sex in front of non-participants.
John -- But we are talking the Golden Rule, not a misplaced maternal instinct, so I'm talking about intervening to stop an animal's suffering, not cooing over its cuteness. And on that score, there have been plenty of real, tough men -- of any race -- who have been moved to act. Obviously it's a much weaker impulse than the one you'd feel to protect your child -- yet it's there sufficiently frequently enough to be considered common among 'normal' people. Sociopaths so often torture animals precisely because they don't feel any kind of internal revulsion towards such a deed.
And OMG!! About Pancho Villa. I'm Ambivlant Misanthrope for a reason....
Ambivalent Misanthrope --
But the maternal instinct expresses itself in more ways than just cooing over cuteness; it's a very protective instinct, as well.
Sociopaths don't just torture because they feel no revulsion, but also because they enjoy it, it makes them feel more alive, and it relieves the pressure they feel internally somehow. I've heard about a couple of sociopaths who have said that when they killed, they felt a sense of relief, and almost peace.
I was going to write a sociopath alert about Pancho Villa at one point, but never got around to it. Very bad guy.
What really are instincts. How does a sociopath get his insticts to kill. From your earlier posts you have stressed that the root cause of sociopathy is failure to bond with a caring person before age two. The Harlow monkey experiments clearly show how twisted one can get if the right nuture is missing. So when one sees a homeless person begging for help most of the time we turn a blind eye - is it due to lack of conscience or blunted instincts.
Sherie
I couldn't help but see Hillary Clinton in a lot of this. She writes books to claim her conscience is clear and everything she's done is just and for the greater good when in fact her entire life has been about her and no one else. Yes, she raised a daughter (or did the assistants she hired raise her?) and I feel bad for Chelsea having two sociopath parents. I don't feel bad for her as an adult, she's worth a reported $15 million and as adults we're accountable for our own decisions.
You mentioned Pancho Villa. I'd like to see that sometime as my great grandfather served in Weslaco, TX, in the US Army to fight that guy and his horde.
A few years back my wife went on a short trip and after getting on the highway near our home we were being passed by several other cars. She asked why I didn't speed like "everyone else" and I responded that (because I'm a cop) that I stop people for speeding on that same road for speeding, I don't want to be a hypocrite. As a cop I still drive near the posted speed limits when in my patrol vehicle. I can tell it aggravates many drivers but a majority of them aren't. I try to be a good example instead of being the stereotype.
Sherie --
Good point, natural instincts are separate from upbringing. It's sort of as if when we're born we have certain potentials, but for some of them to be realized, the right nurturing has to be there.
As far as ignoring homeless people, I'd emphasize that refraining from helping is not the same as actively hurting. And that's what separates most people from sociopaths, not the fact that our hearts don't bleed for every stranger we see. (Plus there's the matter of how much money one has, how often one sees homeless people, what one's experiences with the homeless people have been, etc.)
Not Dave --
Hillary Clinton has no "conscience," there's no question about that. And yes, she's lacking any sort of seeming awareness of her own hypocrisy, any sense of the Golden Rule when it came to the Arkansas State Troopers, Secret Service men, and State Department security detail guarding her. She was utterly corrupt, and can never admit fault. Chelsea presents the classic dilemna: do we feel sorry for her of having two sociopathic parents, or do we just look at the incredibly entitled, spoiled, dishonest woman she herself has become. When you look at Mary Bell's life, it's easy to feel sorry for her, too, when you read about what happened to her as a little girl. But then when you look at the monster she became, the sympathy somehow vanishes. (And most serial killers have similar stories, if not quite as extreme.)
I'm not sure why I didn't write a post on Pancho Villa. It may be that I couldn't find a good source for that story about how he raped girls while their fathers were forced to watch. I just looked him up again, and found that story, but it was on a message board. I may look harder later. I looked at about five articles just now, and they did agree that he "married" several women in order to get them into bed, but that as soon as the deed was done he had his men take all the municipal records of the marriage, so that he was no longer officially married to them. And they also agreed that he committed rape on at least several occasions. And it seems he had little self-control, either with women or over his own temper. But some of the articles said that he did have integrity, in his own way, and that he refrained from grabbing more power even when the opportunity presented itself. Also, Porfirio Diaz was unquestionably corrupt and did deserve overthrowing, though that has little bearing on the question of Villa's personality.
Your not wanting to be a hypocrite by speeding is, of black of a better word, your "conscience" at work. But that's a good example of what distinguishes most people from sociopaths.
I guess I mostly think of it in the past tense ie somebody did something wrong and it bothers them...this means they have a conscience. So its closely linked to the ability to feel remorse and have a moral compass- sense of right and wrong. But yeah, its kind of a weird concept, doesn't quite seem like a real, singular thing and its not really a concept I use to navigate life. Does it even have direct correlates in other, unrelated languages?
Nice observation about sociopaths overusing it to appear normal.
Steven --
Thank you. Yeah, it's always bothered my "conscience" that I'm unaware of any part of me resembling what is supposed to be a "conscience."
Good question about whether other languages have a similar word. (I don't know the answer to that, but it would be telling if they don't.)
This is random but have you ever addressed the psychology of porn stars?...it seems like a fair few of them might be sociopaths.
Steven --
I haven't, but that's a good question. Being able to get an erection and keep it in front of a lot of people would be impossible for most guys, so what is it about male porn actors that allows them to do that? You're probably right, there probably are a fair number of them who are sociopathic.
That said, these days there are drugs you can take which help with that, so the utter lack of inhibitions might not be quite as necessary as it used to be. I've heard that there are some male porn actors who will inject (yes, with a needle) Viagra right into their penises. (Yikes.)
I was thinking more about female porn stars but I like how your mind went straight to cocks.
hehe jk
Steven --
Nothing lamer than a straightforward reply to a joke, but here goes: actually, I thought of both, but women don't have to get the equivalent of erections to "perform," so they can just fake it. You can't fake a hard on. So the psychological dividing line between porn actors and other men has to be a little starker than the dividing line between porn actresses and other women.
I was thinking more in terms of the shamelessness of everyone you know being able to watch videos of you having sex and also not caring about the social stigma, which is greater for women. Also, the likelihood of some kind of unstable family background.
I don't know how big the crew is for a pro shoot, probably quite big but I'd imagine it wouldn't be too difficult if it was a small affair.
Steven --
True, the social stigma is greater for women. I've always thought of porn actresses as basically prostitutes, since they're having sex for money, and the old cliche about prostitutes -- at least those who voluntarily enter the profession -- is that they come from "broken" homes. "Broken," in their case, probably usually meaning a lot more than just a divorce.
there is a nice Scottish saying " a conscience that never did him any harm" which I think sums up what a conscience is.
Hey John...did you happen to catch 20/20 last night? They did a show about this "doctor", Leon Jacob, who got busted for trying to hire a hit man to kill 2 people: his ex as well as his current gf's ex...
What struck me was his total lack of self-awareness in his interview. Quite frankly, I suspected by his words and mannerisms that he was an Aspie. He's obviously a narcissist, but his lack of social skills makes me think, "Aspergers".
Fled --
No, I didn't see the show, but I just watched d couple minutes of this video --
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWiMHqX5WAU
On Youtube, plus this other Youtube video --
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66nofBgMYL4
To be honest, he strikes me as a sociopath. He was successfully manipulative with all of these beautiful women, which an Aspie would not be able to do. And his willingness to hire a hitman is pretty telling in that regard, too.
Whenever someone is rude or doesn't hold back, act's like a mischevious jerk (think Dr. House) to others, I shake my head slightly when people say of him or her "what a terrible person...because he wanted to do that in the first place".
We have to admit, we all have temptations. The fault is really in not controlling yourself.
If a guy says out loud "damn girl, you have one nice ass!" in public, he is an ass. But many guys who sees a pretty girl will find her attractive. Yet the reprimanding I would see nowadays are "how dare such nasty thoughts arise within you to begin with because they never did in me!" types.
It's a type of hypocrisy to think you are so better inside because you somehow never felt tempted or had an intrusive thought (which is impossible). The real essence of a conscience is deciding to not do something whether or not you feel the desire as you said.
With autism, yes an autistic person can be rude or brutally upfront. But the problem is a lack of a filter or awareness. It's not like normal people never had similar thoughts that they just knew to hold back.
-Ga
Ga --
Yes, honesty is highly correlated with conscience. And hypocrisy is negatively correlated with honesty. But there's also a slight qualitative difference in why people hold back. Some do because they have no brakes on their personalities, no inhibitions, and that's actually positively correlated with sociopathy, since sociopaths tend to be impulsive. But there are also people who measure their words and never say the wrong thing and are very slick, and those people are often quite dishonest (and sometimes, even sociopathic). So it's all sorta complicated.
A conscience is that God given element within each person, that knows right from wrong. It's purpose is there to guide us in life. There are instances where it is compromised and thereby made ineffective. It can be destroyed by sociopathic parent(s)/caregivers or by an individual who continually chooses to do that which is wrong - the conscience becomes DULL, loses it's ping. The person then has and/or develops a reprobate mind.
- Susan
Post a Comment