APA found to be complicit in CIA torture program

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I am also sure that the psychologists that are employed by these nefarious organizations are VERY well compensated. I hope they feel guilty as hell when they try to sleep at night.

I suspect guilt is not part of their psychological repertoire.

Probably guessing you imagine these individuals as having characteristically low levels of empathy and high levels of sociopathic tendencies. But we tend to exaggerate the profiles in order to make the individual fit our stereotypes of what qualities make a CIA operative.

As (ironically) with many of the current crop of ISIS/ISIL recruits they are probably educated and middle class and think they are serving a worthy cause.

one of my college abnormal psych profs lumped these types in with organized criminals, in that he termed them all to be "dissocial" subtype antisocial personality disorder, which he said was relatively common in places like police departments, armies, corporate boards and other such organizations, it is the "us against them-insider/outsider" mindset. doesn't matter what socio-economic class, it is just agglomerations of people of certain wavelengths [to use an electromagnetic analogy], as it were, each one tunes out all other wavelengths or tries to jam them, one of the two. "my wavelength is better than your wavelength" or "there's not enough room in this sinking boat for the two of us." cooperation only with like types, hostility to all others.

I think we forget human evolution involved hundreds of thousands of years of our ancestors murdering/eating other hominids followed by thousands of years of "civilised" cultures who raped and pillaged. What your professor deemed criminal tendencies or an APD diagnosis is masking our genetic predisposition to revert back to biological programming which is highly aggressive and frightening to the modern western mind.

yes, ultimately humans are hamstrung by their atavistic programming, I wonder if humanity will ever be able to surmount this biological barrier. I forgot to include religions in this.

I think it's natural that if you inherit a hundred thousand years of aggressive and savage behavior then these traits are just lurking beneath the surface as opposed to be being "inherited" like a disorder. On the positive side altruism, fairness and compassion/peaceful tendencies are valued then hopefully over the next few generations they will equip our descendants with the skills to overcome our atavistic urges.

then we gotta get the right ["good"] people to reproduce.

I think kind, diligent and compassionate parenting goes a long way to encourage goodness in future generations. I also believe in a community/civilization that values and respects living things.

Men rape and pillage; womyn do not. A predisposition for such may be arguable in the case of the former, but it has no basis in the case of the latter, so I hope the latter are not part of the "we" that is implied by "our genetic predisposition."

Furthermore, raping and pillaging and violence for purposes of survival are not comparable.

I'm neither surprised or even particularly bothered by it.
It's just the world we live in.......

My earlier point is there is a tendency to "pathologise" deviant behavior. Despite personality traits we are born with, I think most of us have the same genetic predisposition to be cruel and heartless if immoral behavior was either socially acceptable in our own communities or if external pressures forced us to manifest these hidden traits. That there are otherwise educated middle class people who grew up in leafy inner city suburbs of New York, Sydney or Vancouver who choose to join secret organisations whom torture or kill people (CIA, MI5 KGB or ISIS) should not really be surprising given our past generations.

the veneer of civilization is paper-thin.

It's what Christian theologians refer to as original sin, or man's fallen nature. That we are born bad, that it's genetic.

Yes, the theologians probably are (ironically) closer to the truth than Aunt Blabby's college professors in that they encapsulated our predisposition for being "naughty" drawing on the haughty words of the old testament god of Israel. I think modern western society has made the most progress in checks and balances toward a more caring and compassionate society but we still have a long way to go with regard to equal and fair rights for all.

Many Aspies like evolutionary theory, they take it as an excuse for their misanthropic and anti-men/anti-women views, or their aggressions against NTS or what they take as NTs. I strongly disagree with "most of us have the same genetic predisposition to be cruel and heartless". Some might have a genetic disposition (but still much more a certain upbringing, plus some choice), others dont.

We tend to interpret our evolutionary past how it fits our purposes best. Mine is that humankind is basically very cooperative. I dont have the "lonely male hunter" in mind who is killing animals and rivals indiscriminately, but take hunting in the past and present as being a very social event (for daily food supply there are trappers and nomads). That is because I am a) a woman, b) very NT c) had a pretty good upbringing and can therefore think without too much emotional distortion.

I mean look at the new upright walking hypothesis: that men took an upright posture not, because there were no trees left, but because they walked through water, this thesis was developed because some clever person thought that evolution works better the other way around, drawing conclusions from nowadays human beings and their attraction to water and to living close by the water instead of fixing on other species. If you have the desertification thesis of human evolution you are very close to the struggle of life theory and social darwinism, if you have the water thesis of human evolution it is a much more pleasant story. I agree that scarce natural resources can play (and indeed often played and play) an important role in making people more cruel than they are naturally, but that does not mean that "it is in the genes", and even less that it is in the genes of humankind.

Partly some scientists view is distorted, because they take tribes in remote areas as representative. But these tribes are remote for some reason. Sabine Kügler s book "Child of the Jungle" is quite instructive in this aspect.

This is all I have to say about this f**ked-up evolutionary psychology.