Why would a society persecute people who are antisocial misanthropes (sociopaths, psychopaths, narcissists, and sadists)?

Question

An alternate-historical story is set in a third-world country in 1977 of the Gregorian calendar (the year George Lucas' masterpiece, Star Wars, was released). The country is a Costa Rica pastiche (Costa Rica is the world's only country that considers the simple fact of founding a standing army an unconstitutional thing).

The vast majority of the country's citizens live in extreme poverty.

It possesses one unique feature: the police officers capture, persecute, and kill neurodivergent people who are antisocial misanthropes, this label includes sociopaths, psychopaths, narcissists, and sadists. When I say they kill them, they use radioactivity, because it will give them incurable cancer.

So, I wonder why would a society persecute neurodivergent people, but only those labelled as antisocial misanthropes (at the opposite, other neurodivergent people such as autistic people, attentively deficient people, schizophrenics, and prosocial misanthropes, the last label means empaths, sympaths, echoists, and masochists, are not persecuted).

Answer 1

Antisocial Misanthropes

The country has draconian laws for punishing violent criminals. This is because the people have been genetically modified to abhor violence in all forms. The typical citizen looks like this:

only less furry.

The law says to remove people who wish harm on others. The genetically-modified citizens view these people as monsters. Barely human. The people want want them gone.

In practice only the violent offenders are punished or removed. They are the the most visible after all. There is no active effort to root them out, as the policemen do not want to believe these awful awful people exist.

The policemen still do their job, of course. They go from door to door and ask each household if anyone lives there who wishes harm on others and would like to be arrested.

If it is a normal house the answer is no. There are no Antisocial Misanthropes in residence here. The officer marks it on their clipboard. Then they go to the next house on the street and knock on the door.

If the next house has Antisocial Misanthropes, they simply lie to the police. No officer, I am not an Antisocial Misanthrope. But thank you for asking. My that is a handsome uniform you are wearing. Have a lovely day. The officer marks it on the clipboard.

But why Radiation?

Do you remember when I said the people abhor violence in all forms? That includes violent punishment for criminals. No matter how bad is the criminal, the common citizen will throw up on themself if forced to think about hurting the criminal.

No one will push the button on the electric chair or pull the rope to release the guillotine. They would rather die themselves.

Radiation is used because it is not immediately violent. It does not even hurt. The radiation is delivered over several months.

This form of execution is deemed acceptable because the person's own body is what kills them. They have already done harm. They are already doomed. But at least we have not doomed another person.

Despite this, the people who push the radiation button have the highest rates PTSD of any profession in the country.

Answer 2

Ok, I'll be the guy who asks.... Why not just the obvious answer?

Every society persecutes people who are a threat to it like rapists and murderers. The reason is the natural one: self-preservation and common sense.

Why do you need an answer other than this?

You ask why would society stands in opposition to the 'antisocial' but not the 'prosocial' – well the answer is right there in the words.

Answer 3

It's not personal, it's cultural.

From the help center, there's a link to worldbuilding cultures, that leads here: How can I make the cultural evolution of my world believable? You might give that a look, for starters. It's not exactly your question but may help you flesh out what you really need to do.

Because what you need to do is define how the culture came to the conclusion that this was a good idea. We could ask, "What makes antisocial misanthropes harmful to society", but my suspicion is "they aren't (necessarily)" and that therefore giving them cancer is a pretty dramatic overreaction and that therefore it is less like a good, logically based idea and a lot more like "what makes a society burn witches at the stake", with the answer being something along the lines of "sometimes cultures adopt really bad ideas, because reasons".

The "reasons" are what you need to come up with -- the history of how they got here.

What change occurred? What did people react to? How might the first attempts at addressing the problem have failed? How did it snowball into this? Perhaps there was a series of incidents, seized on by religious or political authority figures, and they floated the idea that antisocial misanthropes are the entire problem. You see similar thinking with gun control. The crimes were committed with guns, therefore the guns are the problem, no need to look further than that! Cultural ideas can be a bit knee-jerk in nature, and the solutions can be superficial, which is what I think happened to your world. Maybe it even started with gun control and, having failed to curb the problems, is currently at misanthrope control.

If you can decide how your culture developed to this stage, you can also use that as a guideline to figure out what comes next.

Answer 4

The police are the biggest psychopathic sadists of all.

And it is by hard work and mostly luck that they get to be police. They are interested in wiping out others like them or more accurately irradiating them. Which has not worked out that well because a fair number of cops are living with cancer because before they were cops they got the radiation. It is not very strategic but neuodivrergent does not mean smarter.

As for why attention deficit folks get the treatment it is because the cops are sadists. They get after gingers too.

Answer 5

Haters gonna hate

In our own real world history, people have been victims of state-sanctioned violence for:

• Being left-handed
• Being black, native american, jewish etc. Just pick an ethnicity (this one doesn't even need a link)
• Coming from, or having acestors from an enemy country
• Having the wrong accent

Etc, etc.

There are many vile reasons why people will hate a group. Sometimes it allows another group to take advantage of the victims, such as seizing possessions or making them slaves. Sometimes the hatred makes a portion of the population forget about real problems, such as when the sex life of an antropomorphic piece of chocolate matters more than unchecked national debt.

---

Now, being a sadist or a psycopath makes you dangerous. There is good reason to want to treat those people. Radiation might be used instead of psichology due to ignorance. Remember, people used to lick radioactive paint to make clocks, and radioactive water was sold as a medicine in the US.

I would dare say that sociopaths may also be dangerous on a case by case. Sociopathy is a broad term and it might be that someone just wants to be left alone. The term may also be misused a lot. But it has happened before. There was a time when people could be arrested and tortured for interrogation if the state suspected they were communists. If you didn't go to church and didn't have a social life your neighbours might accuse you. You could either be a communist or just an introvert.

As for narcissistic people... well, these are really only dangerous when they have a lot of power (such as money, influence, or charisma) and some form of megalomaniac complex to go with it. State might be playing a better-safe-than-sorry stance in case that hobo who believes himself to be a reincarnation of Jesus wins the lottery.