So they say life is about balance. Good and evil, yin and yang, order and chaos. It is also said that evolution breeds things to fit their environment.

I was having a conversation with a couple of friends and the issue of sociopathy came up (namely that someone was a sociopath) and what the difference was between sociopathy and psychopathy. It came down to a psychopath is someone who has trouble relating to human emotions and morality  (though they can abide by a moral code of their own creation), while the sociopath understands these things yet feels that they either don’t apply to him/her and are tools to be used to help the sociopath get what they want.

Now, most people consider the balance involving those things to be along the lines of the opposite of a sociopath is a person who is giving and caring naturally, a humanitarian if you will. The opposite of the psychopath is someone who understand and abides by human morality and who understands emotions, an empath.

But what if sociopaths and psychopaths actually are the balance to each other. Or more appropriately, what is the psychopath is evolution’s way of providing a defense against the sociopath. When faced with the humanitarian or the empath, the sociopath’s mastery of manipulation allows them to take control and use the generous nature of others to profit. They are so gifted at the skills of lying and manipulation, of twisting human emotions and working the moral systems of others, that most people can’t “beat” the sociopath’s games.

However, the psychopath is the perfect foil to the sociopath. The psychopath’s emotions work differently than others, so they don’t have the same emotional triggers that normal people do. They also do not “grasp” the moral code of society that the sociopath can so easily bend to his will. They do not care about what can be proven as “Truth” and “lies” in relation to the situation (as any who have dealt with sociopaths will know, they cannot be “caught in a lie” because they can twist things so beautifully that by the end of it you’re apologizing to them for a false accusation, or other are insisting you apologize, regardless of what hard physical evidence you have) The psychopath, is in essence, a monster that cannot be reasoned with the same way that a normal human can be. So the psychopath who has “triggered” that a sociopath is his enemy is the perfect hunter. He will not care about how other people will feel about him, or how the sociopath feels about him. He doesn’t care about the moral systems that the sociopath has manipulated into armor. All the psychopath knows is that there is an enemy that must be crushed.

Just a thought…