mind-controlled psychopaths, coming soon to a battlefield near you?

Here’s a fun fact for you. If you zap someone with a powerful enough magnetic field, you could change this person’s behavior and not always for the best. In fact, you could even zap someone into a state of cold, callous sociopathy if you know where to aim, at least for a short while. Yes, the effects do wear off, but it does seem perfectly plausible that the same effect could be easily harnessed and prolonged by a chemical cocktail and we’ve known that behavior can be altered with the right tools. So of course conspiracy theorists around the world were wondering if sinister military officers or politicians with little concern for their fellow humans would start injecting some people with a psychopath-killer-in-a-syringe serum and setting them loose on a battlefield to do unspeakable evil, acting as shock troops before or during an invasion. The answer is twofold. In theory, yes, they could. In practice, the results would vary widely and can easily backfire and we already have plenty of sociopaths available for building a small army of shock troops. Just ask the Pakistani ISI if you’re curious, and while you’re at it, ask how well it’s worked for them…

Basically, the issue here is that there are limits to which you can change someone’s behavior as well as for how long. In the article above, the subject feels less empathetic and inhibited, but his psychopathy only extends to taking more risks in a video game and pocketing an uncollected tip which he promptly pays back after returning to normal. His comparison point is a special forces soldier who had extensive training and whose skills were honed in real wars. This doesn’t tell us much because military training is a major variable that’s overlooked in such stories. How likely is our non-military test subject to injure or kill someone in a real fight? Probably not very, and here is why. If you ever take a martial arts class, you’ll spend the first few weeks apologizing if you do manage to land a punch on your sparring partner and the instructors will yell at you for going far too easy on your blows and tackles. You’ll shy away from jabs and your natural instinct will be to flinch or fall back when attacked, not to calmly stand your ground. Humans are social creatures and they tend to be averse to hurting each other in the vast majority of cases.

True, we can be induced into hurting others with money or threats, and we do know how to train someone not to shy away from fights and to overcome the natural aversion to real violence. But the experimental subject in question appears to have never had any combat training or martial arts background. He may be less averse to getting into a fight because his impulse control was radically lowered, but chances are that he’ll run for it if he picks a fight with someone who’s able to hold his own or when he realizes that he’s about to get hurt. Likewise, he’s unlikely to punch as hard or as accurately as someone who’s had some real training. All in all, he may be a major menace to unwatched tips in a bar and in Grand Theft Auto, but he’s most probably not a threat to flesh and blood humans. His former special forces friend? Absolutely, but he seems to have no need to be zapped into an emotionally detached state and has his impulses pretty well under control. On top of that, were we to just zap or drag a random person into a psychopathic malice, there’s simply no telling whether he would turn on his friends and handlers or not, a chance no evil, self-respecting mastermind of the New World Order would want to take.

And that brings us back to the very real problem of an abundance of psychopaths to do a dirty job for someone willing to pay. Just look at what happened in Afghanistan during and soon after the Soviet occupation. The mujahedeen trained to fight a guerilla war against the Red Army as well as become proxy shock troops for the ISI in a potential war with India, were not given drugs or magnetic bursts to the brain. They were recruited based on their religious convictions, trained to channel their loathing for the occupying infidels into violence, and let loose on Soviet troops. No artificial inducement or neural intervention was even needed. Today they quire regularly turn on their former handlers, kill people who displease them with near impunity and absolutely zero question or moral qualms, and have generally proved to be a far bigger threat and liability than an asymmetric military asset. Considering that real psychopaths are so dangerous, why create an entire army of them with experimental chemicals or magnetic beams? If indiscriminate murder is your goal, fully automated robots are the easiest way to go, not average people or soldiers just out of basic with their impulse control drugged and zapped out of existence…