Or rather our strong habit of applying it everywhere.
I’ve recently been floating between a variety of forums dedicated to some of my favorite authors. This is actually somewhat of a new thing to me; I’ve previously avoided places like that on account of the expected high number of idiots and spoilers. The latter of which still keeps me firmly out of any forum about a series until I’ve quite finished it. While I’ve been doing so I’ve come across an oddly high number of similar threads about, of all things, sociopaths and psychopathic behavior.
The first place I came across these in large numbers were the Song of Ice and Fire forums – or at least one of the biggest fan forums at any rate. I wasn’t too surprised to see it there, after all there’s actually a goodly number of characters George Martin wrote that could feasibly have deep set mental issues brought about by traumatizing pasts (Hell, traumatizing presents for that matter), so it made a degree of sense. Where it started getting odd was when I spotted it in Jim Butcher’s forums, a number of Discworld ones, and even a few quieter forums still bumbling about concerning Edding’s work.
My first assumption was there must have been some phase of trolling that existed purely on fan sites that I dodged by largely ignoring said sites. Then I started actually skimming through the threads. Unsurprisingly the first posts are by and large a big collection of usually tenuously collected facts about some character in the story and how it ‘definitively’ proves said person is exhibiting the behavior of a sociopath. What’s shocking is it’s not just a first post bravely made by some troll seconds before he leaps out of the wave of flames that are returned by the inevitable fan base, but actually an ongoing argument. A surprising number of people seem to genuinely believe a large portion of modern characters are indeed mentally unstable.
Admittedly a lot of this seems to be people confusing actions taken under extreme stress or without time for extensive moral consideration as proof that a character is insane. It’s fairly clear that a chunk of it comes from misinformation about what makes a sociopathic person. I’m not too surprised at that. To be blunt; people are stupid. Even with things like google and wikipedia a click away a depressingly large number of individuals will just guess at shit and claim it as fact anyways. No, what shocks me is the prevalence of this type of discussion.
The closest I’ve got to an explanation is that this is some bizarre extension of what might be summed up as the habit of people being ‘arm-chair psychiatrist’. Since that term isn’t exactly universally known, I’ll elaborate. It’s the annoying and near omni-present tendency for people who learn virtually anything about psychology or sociology to immediately begin diagnosis everything around them, including themselves. Blame it on the human ability to perceive patterns. It’s perfectly natural and I’m not exaggerating when I say pretty much everyone does it. I don’t have anything like a statistic to point at, but I’d wager its well over 90%. It’s gotten to such a point that every course I’ve gone to about such things usually has the professor make note of this phenomenon. I have the worrisome feeling that since shows like Criminal Minds and, hell, more or less the entire Law & Order collection have gotten so popular this is beginning to happen to everyone. The knowledge that there’s a million little phrases and terms to explain the behavior of more or less everything anyone ever does just seems to fill us with the need to label shit. It doesn’t mean that these things can’t be labeled, or that they’re even wrong, it’s just when you have a vastly incomplete knowledge base of these things it’s generally okay to assume you’re going to suck at using said labels.
But still. But still. You know, we do anyways.
I’m left asking myself if there’s some sort of hidden reward or goal for those who meticulously and often erroneously build cases to prove mental illnesses. I can’t personally see what it might be though. It’s the internet, it isn’t known for having civilized conclusions to arguments.
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