Report not released yet–but maybe they have it already. They were supposed to be such good hackers?
>>5876539 lb
In 1997 the neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried wrote an article in the medical journal The Lancet titled ‘Syndrome E’ . The E stands for Evil. With Syndrome E, Fried identified a cluster of 10 neuropsychological symptoms that are often present in perpetrators of evil acts:
1. Repetition: the aggression is repeated compulsively.
2. Obsessive ideation: with ideas that justify their aggression and underlie missions of ethnic cleansing - for instance that all Westerners, or all Muslims, or all Jews, are evil.
3. Perseveration: circumstances have no impact on the perpetrator’s behaviour, who perseveres even if the action is self-destructive.
4.Diminished affective reactivity: the perpetrator has no emotional affect.
5.Hyperarousal: the elation experienced by the perpetrator is a high induced by repetition, and a function of the number of victims.
6.Intact language, memory and problem-solving skills: the syndrome has no impact on higher cognitive abilities.
7.Rapid habituation: the perpetrator becomes desensitised to the violence.
8.Compartmentalisation: the violence can take place in parallel to an ordinary, affectionate family life.
9.Environmental dependency: the context, especially identification with a group and obedience to an authority, determines what actions are possible.
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Group contagion: belonging to the group enables the action, each member mapping his behaviour on the other.
Sociopaths and psychopaths are a separate category.
Under given circumstances, 70 per cent of a population can take part in crimes as part of a group.
(see Stanford prison experiment)
Hannah Arendt coined her expression ‘the banality of evil’ in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), she meant that the people responsible for actions that led to mass murder can be ordinary, obeying orders for banal reasons, such as not losing their jobs. The very notion of ordinariness was tested by social psychologists. In 1971, the prison experiment by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University played with this notion that ‘ordinary students’ could turn into abusive mock ‘prison guards’
As the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has shown, it takes brainwashing and coercion to dull our emotional response and to overcome our reticence to cross the line beyond which ‘habituation’ sets in – the Syndrome E symptom whereby the repetition of the act makes it easier to perform.
Observers at the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague note frequently the absence of remorse displayed by perpetrators. The clinical psychologist Françoise Sironi, who assesses perpetrators for the ICC and treats them and their victims, has directly seen what Lifton called the ‘murder of the self’ at work – notably with Kang Kek Iew, the man known as ‘Duch’, who proudly created and directed the Khmer Rouge S-21 centre for torture and extermination in Cambodia. Duch was one of those who felt absolutely no remorse. His sole identity was his role, dutifully kept up for fear of losing himself and falling into impotence. He did not comprehend what Sironi meant when she asked him: ‘What happened to your conscience?’ The very question was gibberish to him.
Along with what Fried calls this ‘catastrophic’ desensitisation to emotional cues, cognitive functions remain intact – another Syndrome E symptom. A torturer knows exactly how to hurt, in full recognition of the victim’s pain. He – usually he – has the cognitive capacity, necessary but not sufficient for empathy, to understand the victim’s experience. He just does not care about the other’s pain except instrumentally. Further, he does not care that he does not care. Finally, he does not care that caring does, in fact, matter. The emotionally inflected judgment that underlies the moral sense is gone.
The neuroscientist Trevor Robbins at the University of Cambridge has studied ‘pharmacoterrorism’, and how, for instance, the amphetamine Captagon – used, inter alia, by ISIS members – affects dopamine function, depletes serotonin in the OFC, and leads to rigid, psychopathic-like behaviour, increasing aggression and leading to the perseverance that Fried lists among the Syndrome E symptoms. It shuts off social attachment, and disables all emotional feeling (empathy included), a condition called alexithymia.
https://aeon.co/essays/is-neuroscience-getting-closer-to-explaining-evil-behaviour