The Word Sociopath

Words like "toxic" and "narcissist" are regularly used, at least on social media, in situations where they are so conceptually out of place that only the stupidity of a non-rationalist would ever lead someone to believe that they are in any way relevant.  Most people who use them will either do one of two things: defend someone who is toxic or narcissistic, perhaps by denying that they truly are these things, or assume that someone who might not necessarily have these qualities actually does certainly have them.  As usual, the usage of such words by non-rationalists is to trivialize them, dismiss them, or slanderously use them, all without ever even understanding the concept itself or rationalistically assessing people and scenarios to see if it genuinely applies to them.

Another word like this is sociopath.  A sociopath is someone who had a conscience and gradually or abruptly lost this subjective set of moral emotions (conscience is not moral obligation itself or philosophical proof that morality exists, no matter what the world's intellectually incompetent masses desperately want to be true), as opposed to a psychopath, who never had a conscience to begin with, even if they acted as if they possessed one to fit in with others or manipulate them.  A person can know if he himself or she herself is a sociopath by looking to the absolute certainty of introspection and reason.  If they have moral emotions like specifically moral feelings about an action, they are not a sociopath, no matter how weak or sporadic those feelings are.  If they do not have moral feelings, they are a sociopath, no matter how kind, thoughtful, and outwardly or inwardly inviting and gentle they are.

Only a superficial, irrational person would think anything more or less than genuine introspection in light of rationalistic understanding of conscience proves to someone that they are a sociopath.  However, this does not prove to anyone else that one is a sociopath; they, unless they are secretly telepathic, could only see outward behaviors, expressions, and words.  Likewise, I cannot know if other people are sociopaths, but I can know that someone could "seem" like a sociopath without actually being one and that someone could seem to not be a sociopath while actually being one.  No one is a sociopath just because they are unkind, cold, withdrawn, selfish, or even genuinely cruel, even if some of these things could be expressions of sociopathy in some cases, so calling someone a sociopath is very unlikely to be an accurate usage of the term.

The thorough cultural misconception of sociopathy as necessitating the presence of malice, selfishness, moral apathy, and general cruelty stops many people from realizing that a person could be born without a conscience or lose it and still care deeply about moral obligations, even though no one can prove they do or do not exist and can only discover the probabilistic evidence for moral obligations.  Of course, this is far more abstract than the typical person is rational enough to understand at present, and thus the trend of calling people sociopaths based on even the most casual interactions persists despite the fact that the only person someone could prove is or is not a sociopath is their own self.  To speak as if anything in conflict with this is true is idiotic.

The word sociopath will be misused as long as non-rationalists predictably make assumptions about a person and about what concepts like sociopathy are, which is extremely unlikely to change.  It is far more appealing and easy for fools to hurl words like sociopathy without ever realizing the true nature of the concept behind the word, one's inability to know if anyone but oneself is a sociopath, and the ultimate irrelevance of sociopathy or conscience to a person's rationality and moral character.  If some insect of a philosopher wants to believe that someone is a sociopath for some unrelated reason and actually assumes that anyone without a conscience must be evil, then with every slanderous or irrelevant use of the word sociopath, and more importantly, with every misconception behind their use of words, they have only made themselves a goddamn fool who cannot deserve to be treated as an intelligent being.