Epstein: Depravity as Rebellion, Psychopathic Liberty, Defiant Freedom

Psychopaths regard life and its constraints, expectations, and demands as enslavement. The more successful they are, the more shackled and stifled they feel.

The only way to feel completely free, to experience liberty to its maximum is via defiance, contumaciouness, and criminality - with zero consequences. Such antisociality empowers and liberates, is restorative and anxiolytic.

Enactivism is a theory of cognition proposing that minds are not just in the brain but emerge through the dynamic, embodied interaction between an organism and its environment. It argues that organisms "enact" or bring forth their own world, making cognition a form of sense-making rather than just processing information.

Autistic and dereistic thinking are the only exceptions to enactivism. Ways of relating to reality, experience, logic, and to other people. Fantasy-infused thoughts (dereism) or narcissistic and egocentric self-absorption (autistic).

These patients’s illogical and idiosyncratic cognitions derive from an overarching and all-pervasive daydreaming or fantasy life.

They infuse people and events around them with completely subjective meanings. They regard the external world as an extension or projection of the internal one.

Such patients often withdraw completely and retreat into his inner, private realm, unavailable to communicate and interact with others. Examples: autists, narcissists, paranoids, delusional (religious).

Psychopathic conduct has its hallmarks: it is impulsive (abrupt and shocking), antisocial, aggressive, reckless, and dysempathic. It includes elements of novelty- or thrill-seeking and risk-taking. It is often self-defeating or self-destructive.

But these attributes of psychopathic action do not mean that the psychopath is invariably immoral, that he is always in the wrong: even psychopaths are sometimes egregiously mistreated and have the inherent right to rectify and remedy the injustice or to make sure the maltreatment ceases.

The psychopath is distinguished by HOW he (or increasingly, she) does things - not by considerations of ethics and morality.

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