Curiouser and Curiouser

V’s recent entry Oh Look! A Castle! is a beautiful/gross foray into the psychological metaphor of people and a drippy taco. It encapsulated really well some questions I’ve been pondering about a few people I know/think about way too much. Now here comes this New York Times article, For the Worst of Us, the Diagnosis May Be 'Evil', which has me saying, “Hmm,” even louder in my head.

Take a look at this excerpt:

“As part of an extensive, in-depth interview, a trained examiner rates the offender on a 20-item personality test. The items include glibness and superficial charm, grandiose self-worth, pathological lying, proneness to boredom and emotional vacuity. The subjects earn zero points if the description is not applicable, two points if it is highly applicable, and one if it is somewhat or sometimes true.”

See, now that just sounds like these characters I know, unfortunately. But then you get to this:

“Last April, Canadian and American researchers reported in a brain-imaging study that psychopaths processed certain abstract words - grace, future, power, for example - differently from nonpsychopaths.”

Still sounds about right. Then there’s this:

“Broken homes and childhood trauma are common among brutal killers; so is malignant narcissism, a personality type characterized not only by grandiosity but by fantasies of unlimited power and success, a deep sense of entitlement, and a need for excessive admiration.”

Take away the fact that no one I know has killed anyone (yet, that I know of), and the rest just sounds blandly familiar. I’m not in the mood to talk degrees of mental disorders, so let’s just stop here and say that I think I am friends with psychopaths. Either that, or some drippy tacos.