The Sociopath Next Door (6 page)

Still, superego is not the same thing as conscience. It may feel like conscience subjectively, and may be one small part of what conscience is, but superego by itself is not conscience. This is because Freud, as he conceptualized the superego, threw out the baby with the bathwater, in a manner of speaking. In ejecting moral absolutism from psychological thought, he counted out something else too. Quite simply, Freud counted out love, and all of the emotions related to love. Though he often stated that children love their parents in addition to fearing them, the superego he wrote about was entirely fear-based. In his view, just as we fear our parents' stern criticisms when we are children, so do we fear the excoriating voice of superego later on. And fear is all. There is no place in the Freudian superego for the conscience-building effects of love, compassion, tenderness, or any of the more positive feelings.

And conscience, as we have seen in Joe and Reebok, is an intervening sense of obligation based in our emotional attachments to others—all aspects of our emotional attachments—including most especially love, compassion, and tenderness. In fact, the seventh sense, in those individuals who possess it, is primarily love- and compassion-based. We have progressed, over the centuries, from faith in a God-directed
synderesis,
to a belief in a punitive parental superego, to an understanding that conscience is deeply and affectingly anchored in our ability to care about one another. This second progression—from a judge in the head to a mandate of the heart—involves less cynicism about human nature, more hope for us as a group, and also more personal responsibility and, at times, more personal pain.

As an illustration, imagine that under some impossibly bizarre set of circumstances, one night you take temporary leave of your senses, sneak over to the house of an especially likable neighbor, and, for no particular reason, murder her cat. Just before daybreak, you recover your senses and realize what you have done. What do you feel? What is the specific nature of your guilty reaction? Unseen behind your living room curtain, you watch your neighbor come out to her front step and discover the cat. She falls to her knees. She scoops up her lifeless pet in her arms. She weeps for a very long time.

What is the first thing that happens to you? Does a voice inside your head scream, Thou shalt not kill! You'll go to jail for this!—thus reminding you of the consequences to yourself? Or, instead, do you feel instantly sick that you have murdered an animal and made your neighbor cry in grief? In those first moments of watching your stricken neighbor, which reaction is more likely to befall you? It is a telling question. The answer will probably determine what course of action you will take, and also whether you are influenced only by the strident voice of your superego, or by a genuine conscience.

The same kind of question applies to our old friend Joe. Does he decide to sacrifice his meeting because of the unconscious fear instilled in him in childhood by his father's opinions about dogs, or does he make the sacrifice because he feels awful when he thinks about Reebok's predicament? What directs his choice? Is it pure superego, or is it fully formed conscience? If it is conscience, then Joe's decision to be absent from a scheduled meeting at work is a minor illustration of the fact that, ironically, conscience does not always follow the rules. It places people (and sometimes animals) above codes of conduct and institutional expectations. Fortified with potent emotions, conscience is a glue that holds us together, and it is stickier than it is just. It cherishes humanistic ideals more than laws, and if push comes to shove, conscience may even go to prison. Superego would never do that.

A strict superego berates us, saying, You're being naughty, or You're inadequate. A strong conscience insists, You must take care of him [or her or it or them], no matter what.

Fear-based superego stays behind its dark curtain, accusing us and wringing its hands. Conscience propels us outward in the direction of other people, toward conscious action both minor and great. Attachment-based conscience causes the teenage mother to buy the little jar of creamed peas instead of her favorite fingernail polish. Conscience protects the privileges of intimacy, makes friends keep their promises, prevents the angered spouse from striking back. It induces the exhausted doctor to pick up the phone for his frightened patient at three in the morning. It blows whistles against institutions when lives are endangered. It takes to the streets to protest a war. Conscience is what makes the human rights worker risk her very life. When it is combined with surpassing moral courage, it is Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi.

In small and large ways, genuine conscience changes the world. Rooted in emotional connectedness, it teaches peace and opposes hatred and saves children. It keeps marriages together and cleans up rivers and feeds dogs and gives gentle replies. It makes individual lives better and increases human dignity overall. It is real and compelling, and it would make us crawl out of our skin if we devastated our neighbor.

The problem, as we are about to see, is that not everybody has it. In fact, 4 percent of all people do not have it. Let us turn now to a discussion of such a person—someone who simply has no conscience—and see what he looks like to us.

TWO

ice people: the sociopaths

Conscience is the window of our spirit, evil is the curtain.

—Doug Horton

W
hen Skip was growing up, his family had a vacation cottage by a small lake in the hills of Virginia, where they went for a part of each summer. They vacationed there from the time Skip was eight years old until he went away to high school in Massachusetts. Skip looked forward to his summers in Virginia. There was not a lot to do there, but the one activity he had invented was so much fun that it made up for the general lack of excitement. In fact, sometimes back at grade school in the winter, escaping into his own thoughts while some stupid teacher went on and on about something, he would get a picture of himself playing his game by the warm Virginia lake, and he would chuckle out loud.

Skip was brilliant and handsome, even as a child. “Brilliant and handsome,” his parents and his parents' friends and even his teachers would remark over and over. And so they could not understand why his grades were so mediocre, or why, when the time came, he seemed to have so little interest in going out on dates. What they did not know was that from the age of eleven, Skip had been out with plenty of girls, but not quite in the way his parents and teachers were imagining. There was always someone, usually an older girl, who was willing to succumb to Skip's flattery and his charming smile. Often the girl would sneak him into her room, but sometimes he and a girl would simply find a secluded spot on a playground or under the bleachers at the softball field. As for his grades, he really was extremely smart—he could have made straight
A
-plusses—but getting
C
's was completely effortless, and so that was what he did. Occasionally, he would even get a
B,
which amused him, since he never studied. The teachers liked him, seemed to be almost as vulnerable to his smiles and his compliments as the girls were, and everyone assumed that young Skipper would end up at a good high school and then a decent college, despite his grades.

His parents had a great deal of money, were “megarich,” as the other kids put it. On several occasions when he was about twelve, Skip sat at the antique rolltop desk his parents had bought for his bedroom, trying to calculate how much money he would get when they died. He based his calculations on some financial records he had stolen from his father's study. The records were confusing and incomplete, but even though he could not arrive at an exact figure, Skip could see clearly that someday he would be quite rich.

Still, Skip had a problem. He was bored most of the time. The amusements he pursued, even the girls, even fooling the teachers, even thinking about his money, did not keep him energized for longer than half an hour or so. The family wealth held the most promise as an entertainment, but it was not under his control yet—he was still a child. No, the only real relief from boredom was the fun he could have in Virginia. Vacations were a very good time. That first summer, when he was eight, he had simply stabbed the bullfrogs with a scissors, for want of another method. He had discovered that he could take a net from the fishing shed and capture the frogs easily from the mud banks of the lake. He would hold them down on their backs, stab their bulging stomachs, and then turn them back over to watch their stupid jelly eyes go dead as they bled out. Then he would hurl the corpses as far out into the lake as he could, yelling at the dead frogs as they flew, “Too bad for you, you little fuck-face froggy!”

There were so many frogs in that lake. He could spend hours at a time killing them, and still it looked as if there were hundreds and hundreds of them left for tomorrow. But by the end of that first summer, Skip had decided that he could do better. He was tired of stabbing the frogs. It would be so great to blow them up, to have something that would make the fat little squirmers explode, and toward this end he had a really good plan. He knew plenty of older boys back home, and one in particular he knew took a family trip to South Carolina during spring break every April. Skip had heard that fireworks were for sale and easy to get in South Carolina. With a little bribe from Skip, his friend Tim would buy him some fireworks there and smuggle them home in the bottom of his suitcase. Tim would be scared to do it, but with a pep talk from Skip, and enough money, he would. Next summer, Skip would have not scissors but fireworks!

Finding cash around the house was no problem, and the plan worked like a charm. That April, he came up with two hundred dollars for a fireworks variety pack called “Star-Spangled Banner,” which he had seen in a gun magazine, and another one hundred dollars to sweeten the deal for Tim. And when Skip finally got his hands on the package, it was a beautiful thing. He had chosen “Star-Spangled Banner” because it contained the largest number of devices small enough to fit, or almost fit, into the mouth of a bullfrog. There was a supply of tiny Roman candles; and some “Lady Fingers,” which were slim little red firecrackers; and a bunch of one-inch shells called “Wizards”; and his favorite, some two-inch shells in a box labeled “Mortal Destruction,” which had a skull and crossbones blazoned on the front.

That summer, he shoved the devices, one by one, into the mouths of the captured frogs, ignited them, and threw the frogs high into the air over the lake. Or sometimes he would put the ignited frog down, run off, and watch from a distance as the animal exploded on the ground. The displays were magnificent—blood, goo, lights, sometimes a big noise and those colorful flowerlike shapes. So wonderful were the results that soon he began to crave an audience for his genius. One afternoon, he enticed his six-year-old sister, Claire, down to the lake, let her help him capture one of the frogs, and then before her eyes, made an airborne explosion of it. Claire screamed hysterically and ran as fast as her legs would carry her back to the house.

The family's stately “cottage” sat about half a mile from the lake, beyond a serene stand of hundred-foot hemlocks. This was not so far away that Skip's parents had not heard explosive noises, and they imagined that Skipper must be setting off fireworks by the lake. But they had long since realized that he was not the sort of child who could be controlled, and that they needed to choose their battles very carefully. The fireworks issue was not one they chose to deal with, not even when six-year-old Claire came running in to tell her mother that Skipper was blowing up frogs. Skip's mother turned up the record player in the library as loud as it would go, and Claire tried to hide her cat, Emily.

Super Skip

Skip is sociopathic. He has no conscience—no intervening sense of obligation based in emotional attachments to others—and his later life, which we will get to in a moment, provides an instructive example of what an intelligent adult without a conscience can look like.

Just as it is difficult to imagine how we would feel if we had no conscience at all, so it is very hard to use one's imagination to construct an accurate picture of such a person. Amoral and uncaring, does he end up isolated on the edges of society? Does he constantly threaten and snarl and quite possibly drool, devoid as he is of such a fundamental human characteristic? One might easily imagine that Skip grew up to be a killer. In the end, perhaps he murdered his parents for their money. Maybe he wound up dead himself, or in the bowels of a maximum-security prison. Sounds likely, but nothing of the kind actually happened. Skip is still alive, he has never killed anyone, not directly at least, and—so far—he has not seen the inside of any prison. To the contrary, though he has not yet inherited his parents' money, he has become successful and richer than a king. And if you met him now, encountered him as a stranger in a restaurant or on the street, he would look like any other well-groomed middle-aged fellow in a pricey business suit.

How could this possibly be? Did he have a recovery? Did he get better? No. In truth, he got worse. He became Super Skip.

With passing, if not stellar, grades, his charm, and his family's influence, Skip did indeed get into that good boarding school in Massachusetts, and his family breathed a sigh of relief, both for his acceptance by the school and for his relative absence from their lives. His teachers still found him charismatic, but his mother and sister had learned that he was manipulative and spooky. Claire would sometimes speak of “Skipper's weird eyes,” and her mother would give her a defeated look that said, I don't want to talk about it. Most everyone else saw only a handsome young face.

When college came around, Skip was accepted into his father's alma mater (and his grandfather's before that), where he became legendary as a party boy and a ladies' man. Graduating with his customary
C
average, he entered an MBA program at a less prestigious institution, because he had figured out that the business world was a place where he might master the game easily and amuse himself using his natural skills. His grades got no better, but his lifelong ability to charm people and get them to do what he wanted became more refined.