The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout

Author:Martha Stout [Stout, Martha]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Psychopathology, Psychology, Psychopaths, General, Mental Illness, Interpersonal Relations, Social Psychology, Antisocial personality disorders, Personality
ISBN: 9780767915823
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Published: 2006-03-14T10:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

the etiology of guiltlessness: what

causes sociopathy?

Since adolescence I have wondered why so many people take pleasure in humiliating others. Clearly the fact that some are sensitive to the suffering of others proves that the destructive urge to hurt is not a universal aspect of human nature.

—Alice Miller

In many ways, Luke, Doreen, and Skip are very different from one another. Luke favors inertia. He likes to lounge, and to let responsible “friends” and family members take care of everything else. Doreen is envious, and a chronic malcontent. She exerts a great deal of energy trying to make other people look smaller so that she can feel bigger. And Skip would like to run the world, for his own benefit, of course, and as a grandiose form of entertainment. But what these three diversely motivated human beings have in common is that, in the interest of their individual ambitions, they can do anything at all without the slenderest glimmer of guilt. Each of them desires something different, but they all get what they want in exactly the same fashion, which is to say, completely without shame. Skip breaks the law and ruins careers and lives, and he feels nothing. Doreen makes her whole life into a lie, and torments the helpless for the thrill of making her colleagues look bad, and all without the slightest blip of embarrassment or accountability. For someone to take care of him, a rent-free house, and a swimming pool, Luke lovelessly marries a decent woman who wants to have a family, and then steals some of the joy from his son's childhood in an attempt to retain his own childlike dependency. And he makes such decisions without thinking twice, let alone being assailed by guilt.

None of these people has an intervening seventh sense of obligation based in emotional attachments. While, sadly, this commonality among them does not make them extremely rare, it does make them profoundly different from all people who do have conscience. All three are members of a group apart, a human category in which the distinguishing feature—the absence of conscience—cuts across all other personality features and even gender in terms of how individuals perceive their surroundings and go about their lives. Doreen is more like Luke and Skip than she is like any woman in the world who has conscience, and laconic Luke and driven Skip are more like each other than any conscience-bound man or woman of any temperament whatsoever.

What carves this deep and yet strangely invisible dividing line across the human race? Why do some people not have a conscience? What causes sociopathy?

Like so many human characteristics, both physical and psychological, the primary question is that of nature versus nurture. Is the characteristic born in the blood, or is it created by the environment? For most complex psychological features, the answer is, very probably, both. In other words, a predisposition for the characteristic is present at conception, but the environment regulates how it is expressed. This is true both for traits we consider negative and for those we think of as positive.

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