I love the freedom from conscience and guilt. What useless baggage! No. I don't envy empaths. Did you know Kevin Dutton had some scientist perform some procedure that changed his brain for about half an hour to resemble that of a psychopath. They targetted an area of the brain, I guess the amygdala, through his mouth. He wrote, in The Wisdom of Psychopaths, page 157.
It isn't long before I start to notice a fuzzier, more pervasive, more existential difference. Prior to the experiment, I'd been curious about the timescale: how long it would take me to begin to feel the rush. Now I had the answer: about ten to fifteen minutes. The same amount of time, I guess, that it would take most people to get a buzz out of a beer or a glass of wine.
The effects aren't entirely dissimilar. An easy, airy confidence. A transcentental loosening of inhibition. The inchoate stirrings of a subjective moral swagger: the somehow strangely spiritual, realization that hell, who gives a shit anyway?
There is, however, one notable exception. One glaring, unmistakable difference between this and the effects of alcohol. The lack of attendant sluggishness. The preservation-in fact, I'd even say enhancement-of attentional acuity and sharpness. An insuperable feeling of heightened, polished awareness.
Now why would anyone feel badly about such a consciousness. I have had friends tell me they wished they were psychopaths. But some psychologists really mess us over, like Hare, for example. His book, Without Conscience, addresses himself entirely to non-psychopaths as if there are none of us in the room.