The Sociopath Next Door (15 page)

But what about those of us who are already grown, we who have had decades of practice in ignoring our own instincts? How can we avoid being gaslighted, and allow ourselves to recognize the people around us who have no conscience? This is the concern addressed in the next chapter. It is an interesting question with a rather surprising answer.

SIX

how to recognize the remorseless

In the desert, an old monk had once advised a traveler, the voices of God and the Devil are scarcely distinguishable.

—Loren Eiseley

I
n my practice, one of the questions I am asked most often is, “How can I tell whom to trust?” Since my patients are survivors of psychological trauma, most of whom have been devastated by other human beings, this is not a surprising concern for them to have. On the other hand, my feeling is that this issue is a pressing one for most of us, even those who have not endured severe trauma, and that we all try very hard to assess the level of conscience that exists, or not, in other people. We are especially interested in the conscience quotient of the people we have close relationships with, and when we meet an attractive new person, we often invest considerable mental energy in suspiciousness over, guesses about, and wishful thinking concerning this question.

The untrustworthy do not wear special shirts, or marks on their foreheads, and the fact that we must often make crucial decisions about other people based on not much more than guesswork leads us to irrational strategies that readily become lifelong superstitions. “Don't trust anyone over thirty,” “Never trust a man,” “Never trust a woman,” “Never trust anyone” are the most popular examples. We want a clear rule, even a sweeping one, because knowing whom to be wary of is so important to us, but these wide-brush strategies are ineffective, and, worse, they tend to produce anxiety and unhappiness in our lives.

Apart from knowing someone well for many years, there is no foolproof decision rule or litmus test for trustworthiness, and it is extremely important to acknowledge this fact, unnerving though it may be. Uncertainty in this regard is simply a part of the human condition, and I have never known anyone who got around it completely, except by the most extraordinary luck. Furthermore, to imagine there is an effective method—a method that one has thus far been unable to figure out—is to beat up on oneself in a way that is demeaning and unfair.

When it comes to trusting other people, we all make mistakes. Some of these mistakes are larger than others.

Having said this, when people ask me about trust, I reply that there is bad news and good news. The bad news is that there truly are individuals who have no conscience, and these individuals are not to be trusted at all. Perhaps an average of four people in a random group of one hundred are limited in this way. The good news—the very good news—is that at least ninety-six people out of a hundred are bound by the constraints of conscience, and can therefore be counted on to behave according to a reasonably high baseline of decency and responsibility—to behave, in other words, more or less as well as you and I do. And to my mind, this second fact is a great deal more compelling than the first. It means, astonishingly, that to a certain standard of prosocial behavior, our interpersonal world should be about ninety-six percent safe.

And so why does the world seem to be so terribly unsafe? How do we explain the six o'clock news, or even our own personal bad experiences? What is going on here? Could it conceivably be that a mere 4 percent of the population is responsible for nearly all of the human disasters that occur in the world, and in our individual lives? This is an arresting question, one that offers to overhaul many of our assumptions about human society. So I will repeat that the phenomenon of conscience is overwhelmingly powerful, persistent, and prosocial. Unless under the spell of a psychotic delusion, extreme rage, inescapable deprivation, drugs, or a destructive authority figure, a person who is conscience-bound does not—in some sense he
cannot
—kill or rape in cold blood, torture another person, steal someone's life savings, trick someone into a loveless relationship as sport, or willfully abandon his own child.

Could you?

When we see people doing such things, either in the news or in our own lives, who are they? On the rare occasion, they are formally insane, or under the pressure of some radical emotion. Sometimes they are members of a group that is desperately deprived, or they are substance abusers, or the followers of a malevolent leader. But most often they are none of these. Rather, most often, they are people who have no conscience. They are sociopaths.

Certainly the very worst of the unthinkable deeds we read about in our newspapers and tacitly ascribe to “human nature”—though the events shock us as normal human beings—are not reflective of normal human nature at all, and we insult and demoralize ourselves when we assume so. Mainstream human nature, though far from perfect, is very much governed by a disciplining sense of interconnectedness, and the genuine horrors we see on television, and sometimes endure in our personal lives, do not reflect typical humankind. Instead, they are made possible by something quite alien to our nature—the cold and complete absence of conscience.

This is, I think, somewhat difficult for many people to accept. We have a hard time acknowledging that particular individuals are shameless by their nature, and the rest of us not so, due in part to what I refer to as the “shadow theory” of human nature. Shadow theory—the simple and probably accurate notion that we all have a “shadow side” not necessarily apparent from our usual behavior—maintains in its most extreme form that anything doable or feelable by one human being is potentially doable or feelable by all. In other words, under certain circumstances (though they are circumstances we are hard-pressed to imagine) anyone at all could be, for example, a death-camp commandant. Ironically, good and kindhearted people are often the most willing to subscribe to this theory in the radical form that proposes they could, in some bizarre situation, be mass murderers. It feels more democratic and less condemnatory (and somehow less alarming) to believe that everyone is a little shady than to accept that a few human beings live in a permanent and absolute moral nighttime. To admit that some people literally have no conscience is not technically the same as saying that some human beings are evil, but it is disturbingly close. And good people want very much not to believe in the personification of evil.

Of course, though not everyone could be a death-camp commandant, many if not most people are capable of overlooking the horrific activities of such a person, owing to the viscosity of psychological denial, moral exclusion, and blind obedience to authority. Asked about our sense that we are not safe in our own world, Albert Einstein once said, “The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.”

To do something about shameless people, we must first identify them. So, in our individual lives, how do we recognize the one person out of (more or less) twenty-five who has no conscience and who is potentially dangerous to our resources and our well-being? Deciding whether or not someone is trustworthy usually requires knowing that person well for a long time, and in the case of identifying a sociopath, much better and longer than one would have allowed had the sociopath been wearing a mark on his forehead at the outset. This harrowing dilemma is simply a part of the human condition. But even given the familiarity requirement, the pressing question remains, “How can I tell whom to trust?”—or more to the point, whom
not
to trust.

After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.

I first learned this when I was still a graduate student in psychology and had the opportunity to interview a court-referred patient the system had already identified as a “psychopath.” He was not violent, preferring instead to swindle people out of their money with elaborate investment scams. Intrigued by this individual and what could possibly motivate him—I was young enough to think he was a rare sort of person—I asked, “What is important to you in your life? What do you want more than anything else?” I thought he might say “getting money,” or “staying out of jail,” which were the activities to which he devoted most of his time. Instead, without a moment's hesitation, he replied, “Oh, that's easy. What I like better than anything else is when people feel sorry for me. The thing I really want more than anything else out of life is people's pity.”

I was astonished, and more than a little put off. I think I would have liked him better if he had said “staying out of jail,” or even “getting money.” Also, I was mystified. Why would this man—why would anyone—wish to be pitied, let alone wish to be pitied above all other ambitions? I could not imagine. But now, after twenty-five years of listening to victims, I realize there is an excellent reason for the sociopathic fondness for pity. As obvious as the nose on one's face, and just as difficult to see without the help of a mirror, the explanation is that good people will let pathetic individuals get by with murder, so to speak, and therefore any sociopath wishing to continue with his game, whatever it happens to be, should play repeatedly for none other than pity.

More than admiration—more even than fear—pity from good people is carte blanche. When we pity, we are, at least for the moment, defenseless, and like so many of the other essentially positive human characteristics that bind us together in groups—social and professional roles, sexual bonds, regard for the compassionate and the creative, respect for our leaders—our emotional vulnerability when we pity is used against us by those who have no conscience. Most of us would agree that giving special dispensation to someone who is incapable of feeling guilt is a bad idea, but often, when an individual presents himself as pathetic, we do so nonetheless.

Pity and sympathy are forces for good when they are reactions to deserving people who have fallen on misfortune. But when these sentiments are wrested out of us by the undeserving, by people whose behavior is consistently antisocial, this is a sure sign that something is wrong, a potentially useful danger signal that we often overlook. Perhaps the most easily recognized example is the battered wife whose sociopathic husband beats her routinely and then sits at the kitchen table, head in his hands, moaning that he cannot control himself and that he is a poor wretch whom she must find it in her heart to forgive. There are countless other examples, a seemingly endless variety, some even more flagrant than the violent spouse and some almost subliminal. And for those of us who do have conscience, such situations, no matter how brazen, seem to present us emotionally with a kind of embedded figure puzzle, in which the background design (the appeal for pity) continually overcomes our perceptions of the more important embedded picture (the antisocial behavior).

In long retrospect, sociopathic appeals for pity are preposterous and chilling. Skip implied that he deserved sympathy because he had broken someone's arm. Doreen Littlefield represented herself as a poor overworked soul who was too sensitive to witness her patients' pain. From prison, a lovely and endearing Barbara Graham explained to reporters that society was preventing her from taking proper care of her children. And as for the likes of the aforementioned death-camp official—in the 1945 interrogations that preceded the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, testimony from actual death-camp guards included their descriptions of how awful it was to be in charge of the crematoriums, on account of the smell. In interviews highlighted by British historian Richard Overy, the guards complained that it was difficult for them to eat their sandwiches at work.

Sociopaths have no regard whatsoever for the social contract, but they do know how to use it to their advantage. And all in all, I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.

When deciding whom to trust, bear in mind that the combination of consistently bad or egregiously inadequate behavior with frequent plays for your pity is as close to a warning mark on a conscienceless person's forehead as you will ever be given. A person whose behavior includes both of these features is not necessarily a mass murderer, or even violent at all, but is still probably not someone you should closely befriend, take on as your business partner, ask to take care of your children, or marry.

Poor Luke

What about the most precious component of the social contract? What about love? Here is one woman's quiet calamity, a story that will never be on the six o'clock news.

My patient Sydney was not pretty. At forty-five, she had dirty blond hair that was turning gray and a round motherly body that had never been glamorous. But she owned a fine intellect and a long list of academic and professional accomplishments. At a university in her home state of Florida, she had been promoted to an associate professorship in epidemiology before she was thirty. She studied the population effects of substances used in indigenous medicines, and before her marriage she had traveled extensively in Malaysia, South America, and the Caribbean. When she moved from Florida to Massachusetts, she became a consultant to an ethnopharmacology group based in Cambridge. But I liked her most for her gentle demeanor and the thoughtful, introspective approach she took to her life. One of the things I remember best about her was the soft warmth of her speaking voice during the brief fifteen therapy sessions we had together.