Eric S. Raymond@esrtweet• 11 months ago

I'm hearing chatter about Frieren, an anime series in which demons are absolutely evil creatures that have learned to emulate having empathy and morals as a lure for prey. It seems there are people who have trouble with this, finding it overly fantastic. I worry that such people will become victims, because creatures almost exactly like Frieren's demons exist in the real world. They're called "psychopaths". Most human beings have brain circuitry that's designed to empathize with other humans and make them capable of forming trust networks. Humans are social animals, etc. etc. In some humans, this circuitry is damaged. People who are damaged in this way are capable of shocking cruelty and instant violence. Think Hannibal Lecter, a vivid fictional portrait of criminal psychopathy that is dramatized but not inaccurate. There really are creatures like that in the world. Lecter was modeled on a Mexican surgeon named Alfredo Ballí Treviño who committed multiple grisly murders. Fortunately, there aren't very many Lecters, because the kinds of things that give you minimal brain damage knocking out your social and moral circuitry also tend to lower your IQ. Low-grade vicious thugs are more common, with their capacity to do damage sharply limited by their stupidity. These two kinds of psychopaths aren't exactly like the demons in Frieren, though. I haven't seen this anime myself, but my understanding is that there's a lot of emphasis on the demons' ability to fake having normal human empathetic and moral responses. Neither a low-grade street thug nor a Hannibal Lecter is very good at that, but there's a third kind of psychopath that is. A psychopath who can convincingly fake having empathy and morals is a very dangerous creature, an exact real world analog of Frieren's demons. These creatures can kill by the millions, and often have. We call them "politicians".