Evil Overlords and their Groupies

[Jim Ferer]

No: HPFGUIDX 24839

Pam:"It always bothers me a bit when I see the clearly psychopathic 
or the antisocial referred to as insane.  But psychopaths are *not* 
insane by clinical or legal standards."

It's just that us laypeople  don't have the precise use of the 
vocabulary that professionals like you have.  A lot of us are 
using "insane" in the layman's sense of "this dude's not OK!"  I 
didn't know the term "successful" psychopath, but it made sense to me 
right away and increased my understanding just by hearing it.

Pam:"The "good" ones are pretty much always charming and definitely 
manipulative.  Voldemort is a frightening character, in part because 
he is not crazy.  For him to be unhinged would detract from his power 
to instill the creeps in me."

Definitely. Same with Lucius, and I agree that Voldemort is probably 
less "successful", since his arrogance, self-absorption, and hatred 
is leading him to gloat over Harry instead of just killing him. 
Lucius wouldn't have hesitated a second, and then gone to dinner 
without another thought.

Pam:"That was my problem with Barty, Jr. and why the whole  Mad-Eye 
thing proved to be ultimately disappointing to me.  When JKR made him 
unhinged, she (IMHO) undermined the masterful portrait she had 
created of a supreme deceiver and  manipulator, willing to do anything
to anybody--no matter how heinous--to achieve his ends; in the end, he
became just another nutty zealot."

This was JKR's best twist yet -- I never suspected a thing -- but the 
denouement could have been better. I thought the "Mad, am I?" bit was 
a little trite, and I agree that when he came unglued it wasn't 
consistent with the deception he'd played all year.  OTOH, it wasn't 
the "Fallacy of the Talking Killer" thing again, because it was 
believable that Barty would want to find out what Harry had seen.  
You could also say the portrait JKR did give us was of how a psycho 
like Voldemort attracts the mentally vulnerable.

Pam:"Big V and Lucius Malfoy (who may be a better psychopath than Big 
V)  have led me to wonder about JKR's conception of the nature of 
evil and its appearance in everyday life. I know we've tackled that 
thread before and we're kinda talking about it again with this whole 
Evil Overlord thing." 

If we can only discuss important points like this once, we ought to 
unsub and let a new group have at it.  Philosophers and theologians 
have spent centuries at it and it's still not settled.  Evil begins 
when humans stop seeing the humanity in others. That's what allows 
human beings to watch other human beings starve, or lets Voldemort 
order 'kill the *spare*,' an entirely irrelevant meat sack.