T_Bone wrote:
I wonder how many of those safeguards are above sea level though, er, consious. They can be ignored at will, by perfectly normal people.
I wonder if this line is even the same or everyone. Are processes that happen mostly consiously in one, occuring unconsiously in most others?
Anyone can act normal, but can anyone be abnormal at will?
You can no more do this than conciously stick your hand in a fire and let it burn. At some point something subconcious kicks in. In the case of your hand, it's an evolved response to prevent you from harm. In the case of impulse action, it's not much different, except the mechanism is more complex. Most people wouldn't even be able to poke another person in the eye, even if they wanted to.
Everyone has dark thoughts - we are killers, after all, with complex and powerful sexual drives. On top of this is an evolved psychological control system, which can be degraded or strengthened by life experiences. Sometimes, for whatever reason, people lose control. They remain conscious, calculating, and intelligent; but they don't have these barriers any more. They know what wrong is, they know what pity is - but they can still do what they do.
There's an old story about how to tell a psychopath apart from a normal person. A woman is at her mother's funeral, and spots an attractive man, who she then loses. If she was a psychopath, she'd kill her father on the off chance that he'd come back. And psychopathia is just one of the less subtle of mental illnesses.
