The Sociopath Next Door (8 page)

When sociopathy and blood lust come together in the same person, the result is a dramatic—even a cinematic—nightmare, a horror figure who seems larger than life. But most sociopaths are not mass murderers or serial killers. They are not Pol Pot or Ted Bundy. Instead, most are only life-size, like the rest of us, and can remain unidentified for long periods of time. Most people without conscience are more like Skip or Stamp Man, or the mother who uses her children as tools, or the therapist who deliberately disempowers vulnerable patients, or the seduce-and-manipulate lover, or the business partner who empties the bank account and vanishes, or the charming “friend” who uses people and insists she has not. The methods sociopaths dream up to control others—the schemes contrived to ensure “wins”—are quite various, and only a few of them have to do with physical violence. After all, violence is conspicuous, and unless performed against the utterly powerless, such as children or animals, it is likely to get the perpetrator caught.

In any case, though they are horrifying when they occur, brutal murders are not the likeliest result of consciencelessness. Rather, the
game
is the thing. The prize to be won can run the gamut from world domination to a free lunch, but it is always the same game—controlling, making others jump, “winning.” Evidently, winning in this fashion is all that remains of interpersonal meaning when attachment and conscience are absent. When the value of relationships has been reduced to nearly nothing, dominance is sometimes asserted by murdering people. But more often, it is accomplished by killing frogs, or racking up sexual conquests, or seducing and using friends, or exploiting the copper in Chile, or stealing some postage stamps just to see people scramble.

Do Sociopaths Know They Are Sociopaths?

Do sociopaths understand what they are? Do they have some insight into their nature, or, instead, could they read this book from cover to cover and fail to see themselves reflected? In my work, I am often asked these kinds of questions, especially by people whose lives have been derailed by collisions with sociopaths whom they did not recognize as such until it was too late. I do not know exactly why the issue of insight assumes so much importance, except perhaps for our feeling that if a person gets through life totally without conscience, he or she should at least acknowledge that very fact. We feel that if someone is bad, he should be burdened with the knowledge that he is bad. It seems to us the ultimate in injustice that a person could be evil, by our assessment, and still feel fine about himself.

However, this is exactly what seems to happen. For the most part, people whom we assess as evil tend to see nothing at all wrong with their way of being in the world. Sociopaths are infamous for their refusal to acknowledge responsibility for the decisions they make, or for the outcomes of their decisions. In fact, a refusal to see the results of one's bad behavior as having anything to do with oneself—“consistent irresponsibility” in the language of the American Psychiatric Association—is a cornerstone of the antisocial personality diagnosis. Skip illustrated this aspect of his personality when he explained that the employee whose arm he broke had actually broken her own arm when she did not submit to him readily enough. People without conscience provide endless examples of such stunning “I've done nothing wrong” statements. One of the most famous is a quotation from Chicago's sadistic Prohibition gangster, Al Capone: “I am going to St. Petersburg, Florida, tomorrow. Let the worthy citizens of Chicago get their liquor the best they can. I'm sick of the job—it's a thankless one and full of grief. I've been spending the best years of my life as a public benefactor.” Other sociopaths do not bother with such convoluted reasoning, or they are not in commanding-enough positions to have anyone listen to their outrageous logic. Instead, when confronted with a destructive outcome that is clearly their doing, they will say, plain and simple, “I never did that,” and will to all appearances believe their own direct lie. This feature of sociopathy makes self-awareness impossible, and in the end, just as the sociopath has no genuine relationships with other people, he has only a very tenuous one with himself.

If anything, people without conscience tend to believe their way of being in the world is superior to ours. They often speak of the naïveté of other people and their ridiculous scruples, or of their curiosity about why so many people are unwilling to manipulate others, even in the service of their most important ambitions. Or they theorize that all people are the same—unscrupulous, like them—but are dishonestly playacting something mythical called “conscience.” By this latter proposition, the only straightforward and honest people in the world are they themselves. They are being “real” in a society of phonies.

Still, I believe that somewhere buried safely away from consciousness, there may be a faint internal murmuring that something is missing, something that other people have. I say this because I have heard sociopaths speak of feeling “empty” or even “hollow.” And I say this because what sociopaths envy, and may seek to destroy as a part of the game, is usually something in the character structure of a person with conscience, and strong characters are often specially targeted by sociopaths. And most of all, I say this because it is human beings who are targeted, rather than the earth itself, or some aspect of the material world. Sociopaths want to play their games with other people. They are not so much interested in challenges from the inanimate. Even the destruction of the World Trade towers was mainly about the people who were in them, and the people who would see and hear about the catastrophe. This simple but crucial observation implies that, in sociopathy, there remains some innate identification with other human beings, a tie with the species itself. However, this thin inborn connection, which enables envy, is one-dimensional and sterile, especially when contrasted with the vast array of complex and highly charged emotional responses most people have to one another and to their fellow human beings as a group.

If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all. And with the wholesale denial of your true impact on other people, how would you understand who you were? Once again, you would not. Like Super Skip himself, Super Skip's mirror can tell only lies. His glass does not show him the iciness of his soul, and the Skip who spent his childhood summers mutilating bullfrogs by an otherwise-peaceful Virginia lake will eventually go to his grave not understanding that his life could have been full of meaning and warmth.

THREE

when normal conscience sleeps

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

—Thomas Jefferson

C
onscience is a creator of meaning. As a sense of constraint rooted in our emotional ties to one another, it prevents life from devolving into nothing but a long and essentially boring game of attempted dominance over our fellow human beings, and for every limitation conscience imposes on us, it gives us a moment of connectedness with an
other,
a bridge to someone or something outside of our often meaningless schemes. Considering the ice-cold alternative of being someone like Skip, conscience is devoutly to be wished. So the question arises: In the 96 percent of us who are not sociopathic, does conscience ever change? Does it ever waver or weaken—or die?

The truth is that even a normal person's conscience does not operate on the same level all of the time. One of the simplest reasons for this changeability is the fundamental circumstances of living inside a fallible, need-driven human body. When our bodies are exhausted, sick, or injured, all of our emotional functions, including conscience, can be temporarily compromised.

To illustrate this, as he drives along in his car, let us give attorney Joe, owner of Reebok, a dizzying fever of about 102 degrees. We can see right away that his common sense is faltering, since, sick as he is, he is still trying to get to his meeting at work. But what about his moral sense? As a pitiless virus takes possession of his body, what does Joe do when he remembers that his dog Reebok, whom he loves, has no food? In this version of the story, Joe may barely have enough energy to go through with the plans he has already made, let alone be able to think quickly, prioritize on the spot, and redirect himself, as he does in the nonsick–Joe scenario. Feverish and queasy, now his emotional reaction to Reebok's distress is in direct competition with his own misery. Maybe conscience will still prevail. On the other hand, maybe Joe, weakened by illness, no longer possesses the complete strength of his convictions. Following the course of least resistance, maybe he will just keep driving and try to suffer through his original plans, and Reebok, though not altogether forgotten, will be relegated to an emotional back burner for a while.

This is not really how we want to think about Joe, or about ourselves, but it is interesting, and it is true: Our exalted sense of conscience, the bringer of connection and meaning, can at times be significantly affected by something as totally irrelevant to right versus wrong, as unrelated to our moral sensibilities, as the flu—or a missed night's sleep, or a car crash, or a toothache. Normal conscience never disappears, but when the body is weak, conscience can get very sleepy and unfocused.

An assault to the body is one of two things—the other one being great fear—that elevate continued, wide-awake conscience to an heroic level in our eyes. If a person is acutely ill or seriously injured, or afraid, and yet remains true to his or her emotional attachments, we think of that person as courageous. The classic example is the frontline soldier who, though injured himself, rescues his comrade from enemy fire. That we insist on the concept of courage to describe such acts is our tacit acknowledgment that the voice of conscience is commonly outshouted by substantial pain or fear. And in order to care for Reebok, if Joe were to make an extra drive home even with a fever of 102, we might see his behavior as heroic in a minor way. We would do more than just smile at him sentimentally. We might want to pat him on the back.

Another bodily influence on conscience is, strangely enough, hormones. To relate this impairment of conscience succinctly—according to figures from the National Adoption Information Clearinghouse, 15 to 18 percent of recent births in the United States were “unwanted by the mother” at the time of conception. It is fair to assume that some of these pregnancies resulted from ignorance or genuine accident, but to be sure, hundreds of thousands of brand-new Americans are now living the insecure existence of unwanted children simply because a physical appetite eclipsed their parents' consciences for just a few minutes in each case. When speaking of sexual pressures, we acknowledge how difficult it can be to argue with our biological nature, and we raise instances of sustained conscience to the lofty designation of “virtue.” Noteworthy is that, by this definition, we are often more “virtuous” at forty than we were at twenty, and this “virtue” is achieved merely through aging.

There are tragic biological subversions of conscience, as well. These include the various schizophrenic disorders that sometimes cause individuals to act based on psychotic delusions. When the human brain is impaired in this way, “The voices told me to do it” is not a joke but a horrifying reality, and for the haunted soul whose psychosis waxes and wanes over time, there is the possibility of “waking” from insanity to find that he has acted on a delusional idea against his own conscience and will.

Fortunately, the pressures our bodies bring to bear on conscience are fairly circumscribed. Outside of combat, situations in which we must make crucial moral decisions while we are severely injured do not happen to us every day, or even every year, and for most people, sexual enthrallment is similarly infrequent. Out-of-control paranoid schizophrenia is relatively rare. Even taken together, the biological limitations on our moral sense do not account for very much of the incomprehensibly bad behavior we can read about in our newspapers or see on our televisions any hour of any day. Schizophrenics are unlikely to be organized terrorists. Toothaches do not cause hate crimes. Unprotected sex does not start wars.

So what does?

Moral Exclusion

Each year on the Fourth of July, the little seaside New England town where I live lights a three-story celebratory bonfire on the beach. Pallets of dry wood are nailed together and artfully stacked on top of one another in a towerlike shape that dominates our quaint landscape for several days before the Fourth. The tower is constructed just so, with enough planks of wood and enough space for airflow in between that it can be counted on to flame up quickly. It is ignited as darkness falls, with the volunteer fire department standing by, hoses at the ready, just in case. The atmosphere is festive. The band plays patriotic songs. There are hot dogs and Slurpees and a fireworks display. When the bonfire has burned out completely, the children return to the beach, where the firemen obligingly drench them with their hoses.

All of this has been a town tradition for sixty years, but not being a big fan of massive fires, I have attended it only once, in 2002, when I was encouraged by friends. I was amazed by the numbers of people who had somehow pressed themselves into our tiny corner of the Atlantic coastline, some of them from fifty or more miles away, and I jostled with the crowd to find a spot close enough to see the fire, but far enough away not to get my eyebrows singed, or so I thought. I had been warned that once the fire got going, there would be more heat than I could imagine, and it was already a ninety-degree day. As the sun began to set, there were hoots and shouts and calls for the tower to be torched, and when flame was finally put to wood, there was a collective gasp. The fire immediately began to engulf the wooden structure like the unstoppable force it was, from the sand upward to a night sky that suddenly blazed. And then came the heat. With the feel of a near-solid object, a wall of unbearable, even frightening superheated air rolled outward from the fire in waves of increasing intensity, taking the crowd by surprise and pushing us away en masse. Each time I thought I was far enough away, I had to move back another fifty yards, and then another fifty yards, and then another. My face hurt. I would never have dreamed that a bonfire could make that much heat, not even one that was three stories high.