excerpts from the book
The Sociopath Next Door
The Ruthless Versus
the Rest of Us
by Martha Stout, 2005, paperback
p2
Maybe you are someone who craves money and power, and though you
have no vestige of conscience, you do have a magnificent IQ. You
have the driving nature and the intellectual capacity to pursue
tremendous wealth and influence, and you are in no way moved by
the nagging voice of conscience that prevents other people from
doing everything and anything they have to do to succeed. You
choose business, politics, the la, banking, or international development,
or any of a broad array of other power professions, and you pursue
your career with a cold passion that tolerates none of the usual
moral or legal encumbrances.
... And all of this you do with the exquisite
freedom that results from having no conscience whatsoever.
... You become unimaginably, unassailably,
and maybe even globally successful. Why not? With your big brain,
and no conscience to rein in your schemes, you can do anything
at all.
p4
If you are born at the right time, with some access to family
fortune, and you have a special talent for whipping up other people's
hatred and sense of deprivation, you can arrange to kill large
numbers of unsuspecting people. With enough money, you can accomplish
this from far away, and you can sit back safely and watch in satisfaction.
In fact, terrorism (done from a distance) is the ideal occupation
for a person who is possessed of blood lust and no conscience,
because if you do it just right, you may be able to make a whole
nation jump. And if that is not power, what is?
p25
Conscience is something that we feel... Conscience exists primarily
in the realm of "affect," better known as emotion.
p25
Psychologically speaking, conscience is a sense of obligation
ultimately based in an emotional attachment to another living
creature (often but not always a human being), or to a group of
human beings, or even in some cases to humanity as a whole. Conscience
does not exist without an emotional bond to someone or something,
and in this way conscience is closely allied with the spectrum
of emotions we call "love." This alliance is what gives
true conscience its resilience and its astonishing authority over
those who have it.
p26
Conscience [is a] sense of obligation based in our emotional attachments
to others.
p26
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.
p59
Why do we continue to allow leaders who are motivated by self-interest,
or by their own psychological issues from the past, to fan bitterness
and political crisis into armed confrontation and war?
p60
Where the disabling of conscience by authority is concerned, there
is something even more effective, something more elemental than
objectifying the "others," more cloying and miserable
than a sense of helplessness, and evidently more difficult to
conquer than fear itself. Very simply, we are programmed to obey
authority even against our own consciences.
p60
In 1961 and 1962, in New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University professor
Stanley Milgram designed and filmed one of the most astonishing
psychological experiments ever conducted.
Yale University professor Stanley Milgram
Of all moral principles, the one that
comes closest to being universally accepted is this: one should
not inflict suffering on a helpless person who is neither harmful
nor threatening to oneself. This principle is the counterforce
we shall set in opposition to obedience.
p63
Yale University professor Stanley Milgram
A substantial proportion of people do
what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act
and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive
that the command comes from a legitimate authority.
p63
[Yale University professor Stanley] Milgram believed that authority
could put conscience to sleep mainly because the obedient person
makes an "adjustment of thought," which is to see himself
as not responsible for his own actions. In his mind, he is no
longer a person who must act in a morally accountable way, but
the agent of an external authority to whom he attributes all responsibility
and all initiative. This "adjustment of thought" makes
it much easier for benign leadership to establish order and control,
but by the same psychological mechanism, it has countless times
rolled out the red carpet for self-serving, malevolent, and sociopathic
"authorities."
p63
[Yale University professor Stanley] Milgram believed that authority
could put conscience to sleep mainly because the obedient person
makes an "adjustment of thought," which is to see himself
as not responsible for his own actions. In his mind, he is no
longer a person who must act in a morally accountable way, but
the agent of an external authority to whom he attributes all responsibility
and all initiative. This "adjustment of thought" makes
it much easier for benign leadership to establish order and control,
p63
In [a] permutation of his experiment [Yale University professor
Stanley] Milgram posed an "ordinary man," rather than
a scientist, as the person who ordered the subjects to administer
shocks. When an "ordinary man" was in charge, instead
of a man in a white lab coat, obedience on the part of the subjects
dropped from 62.5 percent to 20 percent.
p63
Military experts now know that to make men kill with any kind
of reliability, commands must be given by authorities who are
present with the troops.
p67
Psychology can provide the military with techniques to make killers
out of nonkillers, and the military is using these procedures.
p67
Because its essence is killing, war is the ultimate contest between
conscience and authority. Our seventh sense demands that we not
take life, and when authority overrules conscience and a soldier
is induced to kill in combat, he is very likely to suffer post-traumatic
stress disorder immediately and for the remainder of his life.
p106
Albert Einstein
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.
p107
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.
p122
Studies on twins have shown that personality features determined
by questionnaires (such as extraversion, neuroticism, authoritarianism,
empathy, and so forth) have a heritability of between 35 and 50
percent. In other words, twin studies indicate that most measurable
aspects of our personalities are 35 to 50 percent innate.
p123
The Texas Adoption Project reports that [on the Psychopathic Deviant
scale] individuals resemble their birth mothers, whom they have
never met, significantly more than they do the adoptive parents
who raised them. From this research, a heritability estimate
of 54 percent can be derived, and interestingly, this "Psychopathic
Deviate" figure is consistent with the heritability estimates
- 35 to 50 percent - generally found in studies of other, more
neutral personality characteristics (extraversion, empathy, and
so forth).
p123
A person's tendency to possess certain sociopathic characteristics
is partially born in the blood, perhaps as much as 50 percent
so... Before they were even born, at the very moment of conception
[some individuals] were already somewhat predisposed to become
deceitful, reckless, faithless, and remorseless.
p126
Sociopathy is an aberration in the ability to have and to appreciate
real (noncalculated) emotional experience, and therefore to connect
with other people within real (noncalculated) relationships...
Conscience never exists without the ability to love, and sociopathy
is ultimately based in lovelessness.
p126
Conscience never exists without the ability to love, and sociopathy
is ultimately based in lovelessness.
p126
An obligation of any kind is something one feels toward beings,
or toward a group of beings, who matter emotionally. And to a
sociopath, we simply do not matter.
p127
Narcissism is a failure not of conscience but of empathy, which
is the capacity to perceive emotions in others and so react to
them appropriately.
p127
Sociopaths do not care about other people.
p131
As was discovered in the United States in the ultrahygienic orphanages
of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, infants who are
not touched at all, for purposes of antiseptic perfection, are
prone to die quite literally. Succumbing mysteriously to a condition
then referred to as marasmus, a Greek word that means "wasting
away" - a disorder now called "nonorganic failure to
thrive" - nearly all of the untouched babies in these orphanages
perished. In the intervening hundred years, developmental psychologists
and pediatricians have learned that it is crucially important
to hold, cuddle, talk to, and caress babies, and that the consequences
of not doing so at all are heartbreaking.
p136
Sociopathy would appear to be relatively rare in certain East
Asian countries, notably Japan and China. Studies conducted in
both rural and urban areas of Taiwan have found a remarkably low
prevalence of antisocial personality disorder, ranging from 0.03
percent to 0.14 percent, which is not none but is impressively
less than the Western world's approximate average of 4 percent,
which translates to one in twenty-five people.
p136
The prevalence of sociopathy in the United States seems to be
increasing. The 1991 Epidemiologic Catchment Area study, sponsored
by the National Institute of Mental Health, reported that in the
fifteen years preceding the study, the prevalence of antisocial
personality disorder had nearly doubled among the young in America.
p136
Cultural influences play a very important role in the development
(or not) of sociopathy in any given population.
p136
Robert Hare writes that he believes "our society is moving
in the direction of permitting, reinforcing, and in some instances
actually valuing some of the traits listed in the Psychopathy
Checklist - traits such a impulsivity, irresponsibility, lack
of remorse". In his opinion he is joined by theorists who
propose that North American culture, which holds individualism
as a central value, tends to foster the development of antisocial
behavior, and also to disguise it. In other words, in America,
the guiltless manipulation of other people "blends"
with social expectations to a much greater degree than it would
in China or other more group-centered societies.
p136
Robert Hare
Our society is moving in the direction
of permitting, reinforcing, and in some instances actually valuing
some of the traits listed in the Psychopathy Checklist - traits
such a impulsivity, irresponsibility, lack of remorse.
p137
In contrast with our extreme emphasis on individualism and personal
control, certain cultures, many in East Asia, dwell theologically
on the interrelatedness of all living things. Interestingly, this
value is also the basis of conscience.
p137
A Western family by itself cannot redeem a born sociopath. There
are too many other voices in the larger society implying that
his approach to the world is correct.
p138
Sociopaths can kill without experiencing anguish; thus, people
who have no conscience make excellent, unambivalent warriors.
And nearly all societies make war.
... Sociopaths are fearless and superior
warriors, snipers, undercover assassins, special operatives, vigilantes,
and hand-to-hand specialists, because they experience no horror
while killing (or while ordering killing) and no guilt after the
deed is done.
... A person who can look another person
in the eye and calmly shoot him dead is unusual, and in war, valuable.
p138
Sociopaths can kill without experiencing anguish; thus, people
who have no conscience make excellent, unambivalent warriors.
And nearly all societies make war.
p139
Sociopaths are fearless and superior warriors, snipers, undercover
assassins, special operatives, vigilantes, and hand-to-hand specialists,
because they experience no horror while killing (or while ordering
killing) and no guilt after the deed is done.
... A person who can look another person
in the eye and calmly shoot him dead is unusual, and in war, valuable.
p139
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman writes in his book "On Killing"
Whether called sociopaths, sheepdogs,
warriors, or heroes, they are there, they are a distinct minority,
and in times of danger a nation needs them desperately.
p157
Yale professor Stanley Mi!gram taught us about obedience: At least
six out of ten people will blindly obey to the bitter end an official-looking
authority in their midst.
p158
Throughout all of human history and to the present, the call to
war has included the flattering claim that one's own forces are
about to accomplish a victory that will change the world for the
better, a triumph that is morally laudable, justified by its humane
outcome, unique in human endeavor, righteous, and worthy of enormous
gratitude. Since we began to record the human story, all of our
major wars have been framed in this way, on all sides of the conflict,
and in all languages the adjective most often applied to the word
war is holy. An argument can easily be made that humanity will
have peace when nations of people are at last able to see through
this masterful flattery.
Just as an individual pumped up on the
flattery of a manipulator is likely to behave in foolish ways,
exaggerated patriotism that is flattery-fueled is a dangerous
thing.
p158
Too often, we mistake fear for respect, and the more fearful we
are of someone, the more we view him or her as deserving of our
respect.
p159
The politician, small or lofty, who menaces the people with frequent
reminders of the possibility of crime, violence, or terrorism,
and who then uses their magnified fear to gain allegiance, is
more likely to be a successful con artist than a legitimate leader.
This too has been true throughout human history.
p181
Mahatma Gandhi
Happiness is when what you think, what
you say, and what you do are in harmony.
p188
What is meaningful in life to the sociopath is winning and domination.
p211
There is the Goiden Rule, which is humankind's most ancient ethic
of reciprocity, and perhaps the most succinct and clearly operationalized
moral philosophy ever conceived. Confucius was merely recording
an even older Chinese saying when he wrote, "Do not do to
others what you would not want done to you," and when Jesus
said, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,"
he was referring to an already time-honored Jewish proverb that
instructed, "What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow
man. This is the law: all the rest is commentary." The Mahabharata
tells followers of Hinduism, "This is the sum of the Dharma:
Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you."
And in indigenous traditions as well-the Yoruba of Nigeria say,
"One going to take a pointed stick to pinch a baby bird should
first try it on himself to feel how it hurts." And the Lakota
religious leader Black Elk taught, "All things are our relatives;
what we do to everything, we do to ourselves. All is really One."
p211
Confucius
Do not do to others what you would not
want done to you.
p211
Jesus
Do unto others as you would have them
do unto you.
p211
The Mahabharata tells followers of Hinduism
This is the sum of the Dharma: Do naught
unto others which would cause you pain if done to you.
p211
the Yoruba of Nigeria say
One going to take a pointed stick to pinch
a baby bird should first try it on himself to feel how it hurts.
p211
the Lakota religious leader Black Elk taught
All things are our relatives; what we
do to everything, we do to ourselves. All is really One.
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