The Sociopath Next Door (5 page)

Conscience can motivate us to make seemingly irrational and even self-destructive decisions, from the trivial to the heroic, from missing an 8:00 meeting to remaining silent under torture for the love of one's country. It can drive us in this way only because its fuel is none other than our strongest affections. And witnessing or hearing about an act of conscience, even one as ordinary as feeding a dog, pleases us, because any conscience-bound choice reminds us of the sweet ties that bind. A story about conscience is a story about the connectedness of living things, and in unconscious recognition, we smile at the true nature of the tale. We understand how excruciating Joe's feelings are as he struggles with his conscience, and we smile at Joe and Reebok—because we always smile at lovers.

The History of Conscience

Not everyone has a conscience, this intervening sense of obligation based in our emotional attachments to others. Some people will never experience the exquisite angst that results from letting others down, or hurting them, or depriving them, or even killing them. If the first five senses are the physical ones—sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste—and the “sixth sense” is how we refer to our intuition, then conscience can be numbered seventh at best. It developed later in the evolution of our species and is still far from universal.

To make matters murkier, in the day-to-day course of our lives, we are usually unable to tell the difference between those who possess conscience and those who do not. Could an ambitious young lawyer conceivably have a seventh sense? Yes, conceivably. Could a mother of several young children have a seventh sense? Of course she could. Could a priest, charged with the spiritual welfare of an entire community, be conscience-bound? Let us hope so. Could the powerful political leader of a whole nation of people have a conscience? Certainly.

Or, contrastingly, could any of these people be utterly without conscience? The answer is once again, unnervingly, yes.

The anonymity of “evil” and its maddening refusal to attach itself reliably to any particular societal role, racial group, or physical type has always plagued theologians and, more recently, scientists. Throughout human history, we have tried mightily to pin down “good” and “evil,” and to find some way to account for those in our midst who would seem to be inhabited by the latter. In the fourth century, the Christian scholar Saint Jerome introduced the Greek word
synderesis
to describe the innate God-given ability to sense the difference between good and evil. He interpreted Ezekiel's biblical vision of four living creatures emerging from a cloud “with brightness round about it, and fire flashing forth continually.” Each creature had the body of a man, but each had four different faces. The face in front was human, the face on the right was that of a lion, the left face was that of an ox, and the face in back was an eagle's. In Jerome's interpretation of Ezekiel's dream, the human face represented the rational part of man, the lion reflected the emotions, the ox symbolized the appetites, and the lofty eagle was “that spark of conscience which was not quenched even in the heart of Cain . . . that makes us, too, feel our sinfulness when we are overcome by evil Desire or unbridled Spirit. . . . And yet in some men we see this conscience overthrown and displaced; they have no sense of guilt or shame for their sins.”

Jerome's illustrious contemporary, Augustine of Hippo, agreed with Jerome concerning the nature of conscience. Augustine assured his followers that “men see the moral rules written in the book of light which is called Truth from which all laws are copied.”

But a conspicuous problem remained. Since the Truth—the absolute knowledge of good and evil—is given by God to all human beings, why are all human beings not good? Why do we “see this conscience overthrown and displaced” in some people? And this question remained at the center of the theological discussion about conscience for many centuries. Despite the sticky wicket, the alternative suggestion—the proposal that only some people had conscience—was impossible to make, because it would have meant that by withholding the Truth from a few of His servants, God Himself had created evil in the world and had distributed it, in seeming randomness, among all the types and enterprises of humanity.

A solution to the theological dilemma over conscience seemed to come in the thirteenth century, when Thomas Aquinas proposed a roundabout distinction between
synderesis,
Saint Jerome's infallible God-given knowledge of right and wrong, and
conscientia,
which was comprised of mistake-prone human reason as it struggled to reach decisions about behavior. To make its choices concerning which actions to take, Reason was supplied with perfect information from God, but Reason itself was rather weak. In this system, fallible human decision making, not a lack of conscience, is to blame for wrong decisions and actions. Doing wrong is simply making a mistake. In contrast, according to Aquinas, “Synderesis cannot err; it provides principles which do not vary, just as the laws that govern the physical universe do not vary.”

To apply this view to our contemporary example—when Joe remembers that his dog is without food and water, God-given innate
synderesis
(conscience) immediately informs him that the absolute right action is to return home and take care of the dog.
Conscientia,
a mental debate about how to behave, then takes this Truth into consideration. The fact that Joe does not turn the car around instantaneously but, instead, spends a few minutes deliberating is the result of the natural weakness of human reason. That Joe does make the right decision in the end means, in Aquinas's scheme, that Joe's moral virtues are, through strengthened Reason, developing in the right direction. Had Joe decided to let the dog go hungry and thirsty, his thereby weakened Reason would have been directing his moral virtues to Hell, theologically speaking.

Getting down to theology's brass tacks, according to the early church fathers, (1) the rules of morality are absolute; (2) all people innately know the absolute Truth; and (3) bad behavior is the result of faulty thinking, rather than a lack of
synderesis,
or conscience, and since we all have a conscience, if only human
reason
were perfect, there would be no bad behavior. And indeed, these are the three beliefs about conscience that have been held by much of the world throughout most of modern history. Their influence on the way we think about ourselves and other people, even today, is inestimable. The third belief is especially hard to let go of. Nearly a millennium after Aquinas made his pronouncement about
synderesis,
when someone consistently behaves in ways we find unconscionable, we call on an updated version of the “weak Reason” paradigm. We speculate that the offender has been deprived, or that his mind is disturbed, or that his early background makes him do it. We remain extremely reluctant to propose the more straightforward explanation that either God or nature simply failed to provide him with a conscience.

For several hundred years, discussions about conscience tended to center around the relationship between human reason and divinely given moral knowledge. A few corollary debates were added, most recently the one over
proportionalism,
a divine loophole wherein Reason asks us to do something “bad” in order to bring about something else that is “good”—a “just war,” for example.

But at the beginning of the twentieth century, conscience itself underwent a fundamental transformation, due to the growing acceptance in Europe and the United States of the theories of physician/scientist (and atheist) Sigmund Freud. Freud proposed that in the normal course of development, young children's minds acquired an internalized authority figure, called a
superego,
that would in time replace the actual external authority—the actual external authority being not God but one's own human parents. With his “discovery” of the superego, Freud effectively wrested conscience out of the hands of God and placed it in the anxious clutches of the all-too-human family. This change of address for conscience required some daunting shifts in our centuries-old worldview. Suddenly, our moral guides had feet of clay, and absolute Truth began to submit to the uncertainties of cultural relativism.

Freud's new structural model of the mind did not involve a human part, a lion part, an ox part, and an eagle. Tripartite instead, his vision was of the superego, the ego, and the id. The id was composed of all the sexual and unthinking aggressive instincts we are born with, along with the biological appetites. As such, the id was often in conflict with the demands of a civilized society. In contrast, the ego was the rational, aware part of the mind. It could think logically, make plans, and remember, and because the ego was equipped in these ways, it could interact directly with society and, to varying degrees, get things done for the more primitive id. The superego grew out of the ego as the child incorporated the external rules of his or her parents and of society. The superego eventually became a freestanding force in the developing mind, unilaterally judging and directing the child's behaviors and thoughts. It was the commanding, guilt-brandishing inner voice that said no, even when nobody was around.

The basic concept of superego makes common sense to us. We often observe children internalizing and even enforcing their parents' rules. (Mother frowns and says to her four-year-old daughter, “No shouting in the car.” A few minutes later, the same four-year-old points imperiously at her noisy two-year-old sister and shouts, “No shouting in the car!”) And most of us, as adults, have heard our own superego. Some of us hear it quite often, in fact. It is the voice in our heads that says to us, Idiot! Why'd you do that? or You know, if you don't finish this report tonight, you'll be sorry, or You'd better get your cholesterol checked. And in the story of Joe and Reebok, Joe's decision to miss his meeting could easily have been made by his superego. For purposes of illustration, let us speculate that Joe's pet-withholding father used to say to him when he was four, “No, little Joey, we can't get a dog. A dog is a tremendous responsibility. When you have a dog, you always have to interrupt what you're doing and take care of it.” Joe's adult decision to turn his car around could well have been directed by his superego, which insisted that he fulfill this very dictum.

In a more abstruse manner, Freud himself might have wondered whether Joe's superego had caused Joe to set up his whole morning, unconsciously of course—being in too much of a hurry, forgetting to put out the dog food—such that his father's rule could be “proved,” and Joe “punished” for getting a pet. For in Freudian theory, the superego is not just a voice; it is an operator, a subtle and complex manipulator, a prover of points. It prosecutes, judges, and carries out sentences, and it does all this quite outside of our conscious awareness. While the superego, in the best case, can help the individual get along in society, it can also become the most overbearing and perhaps the most destructive part of his personality. According to psychoanalysts, an especially harsh superego, hammering away inside someone's head, can create a lifelong depression, or even propel its poor victim into suicide.

And so Freud introduced the world to the decidedly secular notion that conscience might need to be repaired in some people, and that through psychoanalysis, one might actually repair it.

In addition—more shocking still—Freud and his followers linked the final establishment of the superego to the child's resolution of the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex, sometimes called the Electra complex in girls, is formed when the young child begins to realize, between the ages of three and five, that he or she will never completely possess the parent of the opposite sex. In prosaic terms, boys must accept that they will not marry their mothers, and girls must accept that they will not marry their fathers. Oedipal struggles, and the resulting feelings of competition, fear, and resentment toward the parent of the same sex, are so powerful and dangerous to the child's family relationships, according to Freud, that they must be thoroughly “repressed” or kept from awareness, and this “repression” is made possible by a drastic strengthening of the young superego. From this point on, should any sexual feelings arise toward the parent of the opposite sex, or any rivalrous feelings toward the parent of the same sex, these feelings will be vanquished by the dreaded, ruthless weapon of the newly fortified superego—immediate, unbearable guilt. In this way, the superego gains its autonomy and its crowning advantage inside the mind of the child. It is a severe taskmaster installed to serve our need to remain a part of the group.

Whatever else one may think of such theorizing, credit must be given to Freud for understanding that our moral sense was not a one-size-fits-all hermetic code, but was instead dynamic, and intricately tied up with essential family and societal bonds. With his writings on the superego, Freud imparted to an awakening scientific world that our usual respect for law and order was not simply imposed on us from the outside. We obey the rules, we honor the virtues, primarily from an internal need that begins in infancy and early childhood to preserve and remain embraced by our families and the larger human society in which we live.

Conscience Versus Superego

Whether or not one believes that superego is an intrapsychic schemer, or that it is, to use Freud's words, “the heir to the Oedipus complex,” superego itself must be acknowledged as a rich and useful concept. As an inner voice acquired through our significant childhood relationships, commenting on our shortcomings and railing against our transgressions, superego is a feature of subjective experience that most people recognize easily. “Don't do that.” “You shouldn't feel that way.” “Be careful; you'll hurt yourself.” “Be nice to your sister.” “Clean up that mess you made.” “You can't afford to buy that.” “Well, that wasn't very smart, was it?” “You've just got to deal with it.” “Stop wasting time.” Superego yammers at us inside our minds every day of our lives. And some people's superegos are rather more insulting than others.