I'd say the manipulators are the sociopaths and the manipulated are the brainwashed.
I.e., the looters are the sociopaths and the looted are the brainwashed.

Why else would the Texas GOP's platform state that they're against teaching critical thinking skills in public schools?

Read about the authoritarian personality when you have a chance. Sheds light on this.

What if the person is in your family?

How do you know if they can be helped?

sociopaths simply don't have empathy; they are unable to consider the feelings of others (including animals) or care about how the consequences of their actions may adversely effect others. They simply don't give a shit and do whatever they want.

Those who are brainwashed may be misguided but aren't sociopaths.

That's why I think there has got to be a breaking point among a lot of GOP voters. At one point do the lies and manipulations used to control them go to such an extreme that they wake up and say enough?

In the recent past, the few GOP'ers who bucked the 'party line' were pretty much beaten into submission. I think we are starting to see a growing trickle of members who might just break away and start thinking for themselves. Once you get a small but strong group that proclaim themselves to be more moderate, more could develop the strength of character to join them.

If this is even close to possible, we might see the radical tea party disappear through attrition and the repubs might return to a true conservative party.

would be dishonesty, which would be hard to distinguish from a brainwashed person, because the brainwashed would just repeat lies not caring whether they are true or not, not even knowing, because s/he doesn't think. It's all on automatic for the brainwashed. While a sociopath is also programmed automatically by their dysfunction, they may have some awareness of what they are doing, lying and hurting people, but there's ALWAYS a justification, a "reason", that ALWAYS serves themselves in one way or another. Even when it appears to be associated with some "great cause", that too is about self-aggrandizement, or at least relatively temporary ego-inflation.

The conservatives that I know that are nice people don't spend alot of time contemplating or researching the issues,the ones that I know are sociopaths are the ones that are devout,spend alot of time on politics,then still end up conservative.

...separate them from their reinforcment mechanism for a while. Get them off the FOX, off the talk radio guys, off the constant drumbeat.

Once they've had a chance to decompress, anyone whose tune changes, who feels kind of silly for believing some of the things they did, is in the "brainwashed" group.

Those who stay exactly the same are the sociopath cohort.

That sounds like a fabulous idea!

If the corporate media is brainwashing Americans into behaving like sociopaths....we really should think about confronting them and stopping them from using our public airwaves to ruin our nation.

http://occupytvstations.com/

cause I woke up this morning feeling all selfish and greedy, not really caring about anyone else in the world but my own selfish needs....

....and I was asking myself, am I brainwashed or a sociopath?

Thank you so much for clearing that up.

but I think the word sociopath is thrown around so much it makes me wonder if I'm a sociopath. Truthfully, I only met 1 person in my lifetime that I could categorize one without a doubt. Plenty of people have similar tendencies but they have something such as empathy or guilt, shame, fear. Or they don't exhibit bizarre paranoia.

It exactly mirrors what is going on in politics.

I'm just trying to figure it all out.

when you label an entire group as sociopathic it looses meaning.

i think mitt romney is a sociopath.
Serious condition
He is unfit to be president.
Functioonal in everyday life
Very successful in business because normal controls do not exist in him.