Have you ever wondered how top athletes do spectacular things or how serial killers or rapists can apparently lose any trace of humanity? In both cases, the secret is the same — psychopathic traits.
They allow us to ignore the humanity in ourselves and each other to reach a certain goal. All of that is OK as long as there is some controlling mechanism in your psyche that will pull you back before you taste true power. Because, if you do, you're never playing by the rules of the society again.
Today, psychopathy is considered an outdated word and is no longer diagnosed in respectable psychological settings, much like hysteria and paranoia. That implies the three have become so pervasive and widely accepted that trying to point out or treat them has become an ultimately self-defeating task. The bar has risen and the pace at which it keeps being raised increases on a daily basis.
In any case, to become successful in any field, you must adopt psychopathic traits, such as ignoring human pleas for mercy or cries for help. If you've ever been out in the public when a child starts crying and the accompanying parents start smacking or ribbing it without protesting or trying to help the child, you've displayed psychopathic traits.
One writer, Lobaczewski, describes psychopathy thus:
Imagine a man coming to his house at night and wanting to enter his kitchen to get something to eat. However, he notices someone has installed a padlock on the door to his kitchen and put an alarm. The audacity! The man gets angry and starts smashing down the door, at which point the alarm triggers. The man smashes the alarm too, busts down the door and sits in his kitchen to eat. This is how a psychopath sees it but any objective observer would see that the house wasn't the man's but of some other person, which came out to object but was struck down and then killed when starting to wail for help.
For psychopaths, cries for help are an annoying alarm that needs to be ignored or silenced as soon as possible. You can see this behavior in the leaked footage of surveillance cameras during attempted rapes, robberies and so on. Psyhopaths are unfazed by the pain others feel and will do whatever it takes to reach their goal, even if it's a candy bar.
Lobaczewski writes that, to paraphrase, psychopaths are cool under pressure, unfazed when called out or criticized and do not yield in the face of overwhelming facts. Confronting a psychopath with the truth does nothing to sway him or her.