The psychopath in your carriage

Psychopathy is not fully understood and is variously defined depending on which medical text you read. The Wikipedia describes a psychopath as a person who “has no concern for the feelings of others and a complete disregard for any sense of social obligation”. Let’s just take another close look at those key characteristics:

“No concern for the feelings of others and a complete disregard for any sense of social obligation.”

I am going to argue here that many people in society – not just a few, but many – exhibit these character traits to a significant degree. They walk among us and we tolerate them every day, yet we consider them “normal”. It is time we stopped granting them this honour, even as they threaten to become the statistical norm, and instead consider them abnormal and indeed to some degree psychopathic. If we don’t like their behaviour, we should “out” it for what it is, and we should start applying some social pressure to change it.

Who do I accuse? That’s the scary thing. I am not talking about killers, rapists and the like. I am not even going to need to discuss people who callously and misguidedly manipulate others in relationships, as in the film Closer. I need only discuss everyday people who commit more trivial crimes, but moral crimes nonetheless, making society worse for everybody around them – and invariably get away with it.

I’m talking about:

• People who have loud public mobile phone conversations as if there is no-one else in the carriage, while listeners cringe around them. The listeners never opted to hear these usually boring calls, and should of course be considered, but these days increasingly rarely are.
• People who fail to even recognise the existence of others as they walk down pavements in the formation of a human wall.
• People who blow their smoke into your path without the slightest care.
• People who remain mute towards their customers having been thanked at three different points during a transaction.
• People who slump down next to you in your tube carriage and treat it like a fast food restaurant.
• People who cause you to have to turn on your iPod quietly to drown out theirs which is so intrusively loud.
• People who have loud conversations and, especially, use vulgar language, without any regard for the fact it might be offensive to those around them.

The kind of people most of us living in London encounter every day and who make our lives just that little bit worse.

There are now armies of these people – they threaten to out-number us. It’s time we fought back. They are not just rude – that would suggest some kind of intention on their part. No, more seriously, they lack the capacity to empathise with their fellow human beings. They do not even know they are being rude.

It seems to the rest of us (and we feel like a rapidly decreasing number) that these ignorant people have important parts of their personalities missing. They sometimes seem otherwise normal – so how can they possibly behave like that, we wonder? Are they not embarrassed, or ashamed at all? They are clearly not, and in this sense precisely they exhibit the two key psychopathic traits mentioned. These are people who are unable to relate as rounded human beings to others around them. They lack the normal checks and balances of social behaviour. They view strangers who do not fall into their personal sphere of acquaintance (and who they assume will be of no use to them) as objects, not as people the same as they are. They have not the slightest care for what you think.

It’s true that any considerate strangers are not the same as they are, of course, they are superior in at least one way, and they need to unite, because the fact is that seemingly small issues like these eat away at the fabric of society and weaken it considerably. They erode mutual respect and lead to increased frustration and hostility. When we feel we are being insulted by everyone around us it divides us, it doesn’t draw us together.

So, what should the civilised among us do about these others whom we currently quietly tolerate… these people, so common now, who feel no obligation to treat others around them with basic respect? At the moment their reign is strong. They capitalise and free-ride on our moral economy and often go unchallenged. They do lose out through their ignorant behaviour, but they do not know. They cause us to lose out too though – and we know.

Psychopaths are generally thought to be incurable. But although these people exhibit at least two typical traits of psychopaths, they probably rarely possess the full range. They may be treatable through societal pressure.

It was Edmund Burke who said all that is necessary for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing, and he was right. The “tolerance” of which we British are so proud is a double-edged sword which must be wielded with care. Too much tolerance can be a bad thing, and can become part of the problem. Our sense of tolerance is becoming a moral shortcoming, and for our own sakes we need to take it in hand. (Likewise, we must resist political correctness and its pernicious but ubiquitous partner in crime, moral relativism.)

So, if you care about the state of society, show this article to other people. In public places, if it seems safe to do so, openly ask people to stop being so rude. Or openly move carriage. If you see someone else have the courage to object to another person’s rudeness, do not remain silent. That makes you part of the problem. Lend support, lend agreement, immediately. There is safety in numbers, and only the tolerance of the civilised has made the ignorant so safe – a tolerance which now being abused (in much the same way as we have previously seen our tolerance of religious fundamentalists abused to such terrible effect).

Things only change when people start acting in numbers, when they are not defeatist and they start applying pressure. Let’s start applying pressure on this issue and reclaim our right to a civilised environment, one without a person with psychopathic traits in every carriage. If we do not take any action, if we continue to take it lying down, we have no right to complain as we see respect for others – the most important feature of our society – continue to disintegrate around us.