I have a tremendous amount of empathy and sadness for Goebbels' children. They were completely innocent and blameless. I only felt a few shreds of sadness for their parents here and there...at certain moments in the film, and hardly at all for Mr Goebbels...a bit more for his wife, though, misguided though she was.

McGrath - The interesting thing, I think, is that most sociopaths are in fact capable of showing empathy for someone...just not for very many people around them! They may, for instance, love their dog...or their children...or their personal friends...or their mother or father...or their brother...or their favorite singer... or their country...or certain of their employees, etc (Hitler was quite kind and decent to some of the people who worked for him, while he was not to others...he could be sentimental about some people, and utterly ruthless toward others.

So perhaps a sociopath is not someone incapable of showing empathy...but merely someone who doesn't show it nearly as often as an emotionally healthy person would. He withholds empathy most of the time.

And a saint, on the other hand, would show it to everyone, no matter what the circumstances were.

As you mentioned, Kat, this was the nature of Joan of Arc as portrayed in Mark Twain's magnificent book, and it was one of the things that allowed her to be such an extraordinary leader in a time of national crisis. It is also reputed to have been the nature of Jesus, and that's probably why he so impressed the people who encountered him. He truly cared about them. That's rare.

Most of us lie in that fuzzy middle ground somewhere between the apparent opposites of the saint and the sociopath. We care a certain amount of the time and to a certain extent...enough to be considered "normal" or "acceptable" by other people. The sociopath so seldom cares about anyone else that he becomes abnormal and unacceptable in the eyes of society.

One who was like that, for example, was Babyface Nelson, a man whose violent and miserable childhood had turned him by his teens into a monster who seemed to enjoy killing and brutalizing people merely for its own sake. He finally died riddled with machine gun bullets after gunning down 2 pursuing federal agents in a similar fashion. I wonder if he ever cared for anyone? If so, no one knows who it might have been.