There was a documentary on the tube a few days back called “How Evil Are You,” which had movie director Eli Roth (“Hostel” flicks and other bits of horror) trying to find out just how evil regular schmoes are. He had himself tested with an FMRI machine… shown alternating Horrible Evil Images and Neutral Non-Evil Images, the scientists examined how his brain reacted to such things and determined that he was about halfway to psychotic.
He also filmed a re-run of the historic Milgram Study. If you’ve never heard of it, I heartily recommend you read up on it (such as at Wikipedia). It is a simple experiment designed to test how readily a regular schmoe can be talked by An Authority into imposing dangerous levels of physical agony onto a random stranger. And disturbingly, most people will readily submit to authority figures, and bypass their own sense of ethics and just do what they are told. These people are *not* psychopaths… but people will easily bend to the will of psychopaths. And thus we get the Banality of Evil, where regular people assume that the State knows what it’s doing, and willingly go along with things like the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, the Holodomor and so on.
There is, though, another, rather simpler, test. Anyone who takes part in “Knockout King” is a psychopath, and really, really needs to be removed from society.
Unprovoked attacks at heart of ‘Knockout King’
One can only hope these psychos run into the next Bernie Goetz.