283. Urges, Cognition and Psychopathy

Urges, Cognition and Psychopathy

The following are speculations after pondering over the jerk's claim for his convenience in entry 282. 

As mentioned in earlier entries, I think that the human behavior is the result of the relative strength of cognition and instincts.    When the cognition is stronger than the instincts, then the person is able to act rationally, when the instincts are stronger, the person uses the cognition as a powerful tool serving the instincts.   

So far, I had been using this concept on the major instinct of breeding and the auxiliary instincts of sexuality, ingroup-outgroup and hierarchy to acquire resources.   
But I think I can broaden this concept to include the relative strength of hedonistic urges for food, drink, sexual homeostasis and general comfort compared with the strength of cognition.    People, whose cognition is stronger than their hedonistic needs can live in a fair exchange with other people, acknowledging their needs as valid and accepting fair deals.   They can evaluate, that sometimes other things are more important than physical needs and self-control can be very beneficial.   
But those hedonists, whose urges are stronger than their cognition, use whatever intelligence they have as a powerful tool to fulfill as many of their urges for the least price and with the least delay.  

This can also explain the behavior of psychopaths, because it seems obvious to assume that psychopaths are driven by hedonistic urges.  I cannot imagine an ascetic psychopath.  Urges strong enough to override all control and cognition like in an animal are usually physical.  

While their predominant cognition enables people to see themselves as interacting with others for the equal benefit of all, while they can understand justice and the rights of others, the psychopath only has the intelligence to know these things by rote, as methods, but not concerning himself as guidelines for the own behavior.  His urges are so strong, that his knowledge of the rules of social interactions is derailed to only serve his selfish purposes.    

The psychopaths can have the complete knowledge how to make a woman believe in his sincere commitment, he can be able to lure and manipulate a woman to accept a relationship with him.    But his urges are stronger than his cognition, and once he has her under his control, he does not continue to use his knowledge for the benefit of a happy couple.   Instead he now uses, abuses and takes advantage of her by allowing himself every selfish impulse that he has.    

I also had already previously stated my assumption, that the predominant urges and instincts determine the identity and the value system of a person.    Those with a high breeding instinct develop an identity as dedicated parents, a value system based on the glorification of children and an attitude that their purpose in live is procreation.  They take this for granted and some of them are oblivious about how some people do not want to breed.

It seems that this is also the case with a psychopath, whose whole identity is determined by his need for physical pleasures and comforts, and whose value system is based upon taking it for granted to be entitled to the limitless supply of all the pleasures he wants.  The phrase 'at my convenience' of the jerk in entry 282 illustrates this.  For him, a relationship with a woman has to be at his convenience only.   The psychopath is just oblivious, that other people are not commodities, and he has no conscience, no matter, what he does.    He is oblivious, that it is practically impossible to have a relationship, that is equally at the unmodified convenience of both partners.   To be at the convenience of both as a couple, they need to find agreements and compromises.    But when the psychopath insists to get the woman entirely at his convenience, she is a commodity, serving his convenience paying the price of her own disadvantaged position.     

Maybe psychopaths are a kind of relapse to earlier phases of evolution, where even food was so scarce, that only those, who ruthlessly and without a conscience took, what they could get, had a chance to survive and to breed.   But when with agriculture and complexer societies the requirement for survival changed to the ability for mutually beneficial social interactions, cognition evolved to be stronger than the urge to eat all the food and let others starve, and psychopath became obsolete for the survival of the species.   Unfortunately for their victims, too many reappear once in a while as an anomaly.