Coupla posts back, I mentioned Chesterton and lunatics, and the need to treat madmen as special cases where the Law is concerned.
I've just been spending way too much of my time reading (so far, about the first half of) a trilogy by Meredith L. Patterson (parts 1, 2, 3) on the need for organizations to have some way to deal with sociopaths in their ranks, and the difficulties involved; at about the halfway mark, the Chesterton special-case connection sprang to mind.
But, in this situation, the special case can become much more insidious, as there isn't (as in the case of legitimately-diagnosed madmen) a bright line between the special case and the general. It's dealing with a pattern of behavior, with no one event crossing any clear line.
A criminal-law (if indeed it can be called a law) example is the crime of structuring financial transactions. A series of perfectly legal transactions becomes criminal simply by fitting a pattern, where the criteria for the pattern match are kept secret from the public lest more people engage in the heinous crime of carefully complying with the law.
A further caveat in dealing with sociopaths in organizations is that a moderately-clever sociopath may preëmptively lay charges against victims before they become accusers. On the other side of things, someone who attains a high profile may become the target of false (indeed, fantastical) accusations, and a false accuser (who may be a sociopath) may badger others into seeming to support the tale.
So, yes: organizations do need to have some way of dealing with these people... but great care is needed in determining the true nature of the problem.
And now, back to reading. Maybe she addresses this stuff in the second half.
Comments