Pumpkin Person rating: 7.5 out of 10
Over the weekend I watched this HBO documentary written and directed by Alex Gibney. The film documents the career of Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis who studied murderers. Lewis is one of those older female professionals who comes across as a bit ditzy despite being objectively very intelligent (Yale psychiatrist). One thing I love about older versions of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale IQ tests is that no matter how ditzy an older woman seems, if they say intelligent things (as she does), they’ll do well on the WAIS, because unlike the verbal SAT, the Wechsler verbal subtests give you all the time in the World to express your thoughts. They’ll even do okay on the subtests measuring brute speed like Digit Symbol, because as slow as they move, they are compared to their own age group who is even slower.
Like David Wechsler himself, Lewis was part of the great wave of 20th century New York Jews who revolutionized the fields of psychology and psychiatry. Her mother was obsessed with anti-Semites and understanding how anyone could be as evil as Hitler helped inspire Lewis’s work with serial killers. Like Wechsler, she worked at the legendary Bellevue Hospital.
Lewis became controversial for two reasons: 1) she didn’t believe in the concept of “evil” (which made her hated by the less educated part of society like commenter “Mug of Pee” who believes in the concept). Instead she found that the most bizarre grotesque murderers had brain lesions and endured unspeakable sexual abuse as kids, and 2) she believed in multiple personality disorders (which made her hated by many academic elites). During the documentary, Lewis at times would show inappropriate affect, like giggling when describing a serial killer who would fall asleep after killing women, only to wake up and think “oops I did it again”.
One problem with Lewis’s work is that like so many, she seems to assume being abused in childhood is the cause of later violence, when in reality both the early abuse and later violence could both be the products of violent genes inherited from parents. Perhaps she’s considered this possibility and rebutted it, but it would have been nice to see more clips of Lewis responding to critiques of her ideas.
Lewis notes a contradiction in the legal system which asks jurors to punish criminals more harshly if their crimes are depraved, yet show mercy if the criminal himself has been a victim. It is precisely the most depraved criminals, who according to Lewis, who were the most abused and the most neurologically impaired!
Pumpkin Person 
“Instead she found that the most bizarre grotesque murderers had brain lesions and endured unspeakable sexual abuse as kids”
For some reason people are willing to apologize for serial killers on the basis of “oh but look what happened to him when he was a kid” but you basically never hear this excuse for child molesters themselves
Good point…i feel sorry for chimos
Actually, “sorry for them” is not the best way to put it, but I do them pretty all of them experienced “unspeakable” things as children.
Interesting. I think “evil” might be an extreme (according to certain criteria) manifestation of what would be my understanding of the concept of Ego. Like, being a non-vegan is awfully selfish, but specifically supporting factory farming daily is evil.
Is it really that selfish, though? Veganism is a luxury that was impossible for many (most?) people until very recently.
If the Gatekeepers of Acceptable Opinion allowed us to have honest conversations about resource use and overpopulation, meat-eating wouldn’t be much of a problem.
Environmentalism has to be the most Finkle-thinked issue of them all.
There’re only 2 acceptable starter packs: the “WE NEED RACIAL JUSTICE AND CLIMATE COMMITMENTS NAO11!!!” starter pack and the “BURN BABY BURNNNNN MOAR WALMARTS BIG TRUCKS YEEEAAAAAHHHHH” starter pack.
Veganism is a lifestyle and it takes into account the practical aspects of one’s life. So, everyone ever could have been/can be vegan. You mean “plant-based” and I disagree with your comment re: the past, but indeed maybe things got a bit easier for some societies. They still mostly don’t care to be vegan, apparently. Fake meat, cheese etc are a nice option but not necessary for one to be plant-based. What counts most is that B12 supplements have existed for a long time.
just out of curiosity, what’s your reason for choosing veganism?
@Austin, I just wanted to be hated in a new way..lol. I’ve always loved animals and eating their corpses had felt wrong for a while before I quit meat. Then I realized what buying dairy and eggs meant, themselves or as ingredients in many food products. My feelings motivated me, but I think it’s a moral issue, not a personal one. Thanks for asking!
Another “great” jewish contributions
Or not…
Seems a parallel between jewish nepotism in academia and russian nepotism in figure skating…
The late is easily detectable and understood by anyone. The first would be antissemitism…
Puppy is evil
She is not evil
She is black
Evil doesn’t exist but holocaust???
Evil is equivalent to predactory and or parasitical life strategy but also the alienation about existential truths, it’s to enphasise only on differences than on what is essential, what make us the same.
You have been awfully absent from the comments PP. What makes you abandon us like this? Like, this is just not-okay. Awfully selfish.
Sounds like there’s a lot of covert ethnic activism going on here. Certain People love deploying the “it all goes back to your childhood” excuse.
I wonder if she’d be willing to forgive the El Paso shooter for being pissed off about (preventably) growing up in a shithole that didn’t resemble America.
“One problem with Lewis’s work is that like so many, she seems to assume being abused in childhood is the cause of later violence, when in reality both the early abuse and later violence could both be the products of violent genes inherited from parents. Perhaps she’s considered this possibility and rebutted it, but it would have been nice to see more clips of Lewis responding to critiques of her ideas.“
Said the guy who by his own admission grew up in a super upper class family. I don’t necessarily mean to apologize for serial murderers but you can’t just judge people whose life experiences have been unfathomably worse than yours.
Although millions of people are horribly abused and/or brain-damaged and yet don’t become serial killers. I wonder if there are any common traits of serial killers which wouldn’t give mostly false positives if used to screen for potential ones in the general population. This reminds me of those Bayes theorem paradoxes where a 99% accurate test nonetheless usually gives incorrect results.
But hardcore heritability people argue family environment has zero effect on later adult behavior. Even Flynn argued that, at least for IQ.
And those people probably weren’t molested when they were 3
For the most part, I agree, variation within the basically “normal” range of family environment has little effect on IQ or other personality traits. But we’re generally not dealing with the normal range when we’re talking about serial killers.
Jayman disagrees with you. See his comments in reply to mine in the comment section:
https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/taming-the-tiger-mom-and-tackling-the-parenting-myth/
Well not all brain damage is equal in severity or type, obviously.
No one with an IQ above 90 thinks severe brain damage will not cause enormous psychological effects.
What is Jaymans IQ plumpkin
All of these comments including PP’s sound insane AND crazy. One comment is about how the publisher of this blog is not evil but rather black another is absurdly defending the Holocaust and then Austins comments are just pure filth.
How does one gain access to a computer with all this primitiveness is my general question. Maybe someone can answer it.
I removed the Holocaust comment. I think what he was trying to say is that the Nazis were not psychopaths per se. Psychopathy expert James Fallon made the same point:
Surprisingly, Hitler does not rank as a psychopath. Fallon says that Hitler and Nazi leaders were simply doing their job, citing Hannah Arendt who famously called it “the banality of evil.”
The first paragraph of that article gave me probable cause to not read the remainder:
“Psychopaths make up 1 to 2 percent of the American population. That’s around 6,278,000 psychopaths who live among us and use intimidation and manipulation to lord over others. In any organization of at least 35 people, one will be a psychopath.”
A fair coin has a 1/2 chance of landing on heads. Therefore, if I flip 2 coins, at least 1 will land on heads.
1-2% of properly diagnosed as such isnt??
They clearly showed psychopathic tendencies in regards to having little to no remorse over the MILLIONS who died. They might not be clinically fit to be regarded as psychopaths but their workings were indeed psychopathic and some of the most evil stuff in history.
Trying to wipe away an entire people and culture is just profound evil. It may be rational from an ethnocentric standpoint but its by far one of the most if not the most evil thing a group of people can do to another. On the individual level killing someone requires a certain degree of psychopathy so the guards and all others implicated in the direct deaths of Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust are just plain disturbing and actually counter Mug’s point that those who carried it out could indeed live decent lives since killing someone relies heavily on the premise that that killer can kill at any time for almost any motive without heavy conscience-rendering repercussions. My two cents at least.
By that logic, basically every civilization in pre-modern history was composed exclusively of psychopaths. Look at the ancient Near East.
Thats the point [redacted by pp, dec 30, 2020]. Clearly every civilization was psychopathic. Humans are certainly psychopaths just like our primate ancestors but there is a key distinction that we have much more control over acting on these urges.