The Sociopath Next Door (26 page)

Laboratory experiments using electric shocks and loud noises have found that even the physiological reactions (sweating, racing heart, and so forth) normally associated with anxious anticipation and learned fear are far less pronounced in sociopaths. For adequate stimulation, sociopaths have only their games of domination, and these games get old and stale very quickly. Like drugs, the games have to be done over and over, larger and better, and depending on the resources and talents of the particular sociopath, this may not be possible. And so in sociopathy, the pain of boredom can be nearly constant.

The inclination to dilute boredom chemically for a while is part of the reason sociopaths tend to be alcohol and drug abusers. A major comorbidity study published in 1990 in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
estimates that as many as 75 percent of sociopaths are dependent on alcohol, and 50 percent abuse other drugs. And so sociopaths are often addicts in the usual sense, in addition to being figuratively addicted to risk. With its “peak experiences” and its dangers, the drug culture holds more than one form of appeal for the conscienceless, and the drug culture is where many sociopaths feel most at home.

Another study, published in 1993 in the
American Journal of Psychiatry
, found that 18 percent of intravenous-drug abusers diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder were HIV-positive, while only 8 percent of intravenous-drug abusers without antisocial personality disorder tested positive for HIV. The higher odds ratio of HIV infection among sociopaths is presumably due to their greater risk-taking behaviors.

These statistics bring us back to a question I posed in the first chapter: Is the absence of conscience an adaptive condition, or is it a mental disorder? One operational definition of mental disorder is any psychological condition that causes substantial “life disruption,” which is to say, serious and unusual limitations in a person's ability to function as well as might be expected given that person's overall health and level of intelligence. Common sense tells us that the
presence
of any of the recognized mental disorders—major depression, chronic anxiety, paranoia, and so forth—would likely cause woeful “life disruption.” But what about the
absence
of something we usually regard as a strictly moral trait? What about the absence of conscience? We know that sociopaths almost never seek treatment, but do they suffer “life disruption” nonetheless?

A way of approaching this issue is to consider what is meaningful in life to the sociopath—winning and domination—and then to ponder the following odd question: Why are all sociopaths
not
in positions of great power? Given their focused motivation, and granted the freedom of action that results from having no conscience whatsoever, they should all be formidable national leaders or international CEOs, or at least high-ranking professionals or dictators of small countries. Why do they
not
win all the time?

For they do not. Instead, most of them are obscure people, and limited to dominating their young children, or a depressed spouse, or perhaps a few employees or coworkers. Not an insignificant number of them are in jail, like Hannah's father, or in danger for their careers or their lives. Very few are fabulously wealthy like Skip. Even fewer are famous. Having never made much of a mark on the world, the majority are on a downward life course, and by late middle age will be burned out completely. They can rob and torment us temporarily, yes, but they are, in effect, failed lives.

From a psychologist's point of view, even the ones in prestigious positions, even the ones with famous names are failed lives. For most of us, happiness comes through the ability to love, to conduct our lives according to our higher values (most of the time), and to feel reasonably contented within ourselves. Sociopaths cannot love, by definition they do not
have
higher values, and they almost never feel comfortable in their own skins. They are loveless, amoral, and chronically bored, even the few who become rich and powerful.

And they are uncomfortable in their skins for more reasons than boredom. The absolute self-involvement of sociopathy creates an individual consciousness that is aware of every little ache and twitch in the body, every passing sensation in the head and chest, and ears that orient with acute personalized concern to every radio and television report about everything from bedbugs to ricin. Because his concerns and awareness are geared exclusively toward himself, the person without conscience sometimes lives in a torment of hypochondriacal reactions that would make even the most fretful anxiety neurotic appear rational. Getting a paper cut is a major event, and a cold sore is the beginning of the end.

Perhaps the most famous historical example of the sociopath's obsession with his body is Adolf Hitler, who was a lifelong hypochondriac with an overpowering fear of developing cancer. In an attempt to keep cancer at bay, and to cure a long list of other imaginary health problems, he swallowed “remedies” formulated specially by his favorite personal physician, Dr. Theodore Morell. Many of these tablets contained hallucinogenic toxins. In this way, Hitler gradually poisoned himself into actual illness. Most likely on account of this, a tremor (a real one) in his right hand became conspicuous, and by mid-1944, he was disallowing photographs.

Sociopaths sometimes use their hypochondriasis as a strategy to get out of doing work. One moment they are fine, but then it is time to pay the bills or look for a job or help a friend move to a new apartment, and suddenly they have chest pains or a limp. And imaginary medical concerns and infirmities often secure special treatment, such as the one last chair in an overcrowded room.

In general, there is an aversion to sustained effort and organized projects of work, and, of course, this preference for ease is extremely self-limiting where success in the real world is concerned. Getting up every single morning and working for a long succession of hours is almost never considered. Sociopaths feel that the easy scheme, the one-shot deal, or the clever ambush is much to be preferred over day-to-day commitment to a job, a long-term goal, or a plan. Even when sociopaths are found in high-status jobs, these positions tend to be those in which the amount of actual hard work done (or not) can be easily obscured, or where others can be manipulated into being the real workers. In such settings, a smart sociopath can sometimes keep things going with an occasional splashy performance, or by schmoozing and being charming, or by being intimidating. She poses herself as the absentee supervisor, or the “rainmaker,” or the invaluable “high-strung genius.” She requires frequent vacations, or sabbaticals in which her actual activities are somewhat mysterious. Sustained work, the true key to lasting success—keeping one's nose to the grindstone, tolerating tedium, seeing to the details—is a little too close to responsibility.

Sadly, this same self-limiting factor tends to apply even to sociopaths who are born with special gifts and talents. The kind of intense commitment and daily work required to develop and promote one's art, one's music, or any other creative project is typically impossible for a sociopath. If success can be acquired fortuitously, with only episodic input, then perhaps. But if the art requires a prolonged personal investment, it is lost. In the end, a person without conscience has the same relationship to her own gifts as she does to other people. She does not take care of them.

And sociopathy is almost always a solo routine, another strategy that may sometimes work temporarily but not often in the long run. For the obvious reason of unremitting self-interest, people without conscience make lousy team players. The sociopath is out for himself alone. When he deals with another person, or with a group of people, he attempts to do so by lies, flattery, and the creation of fear. These approaches to success are far weaker and more short-lived than are genuine relating, leadership, and personal involvement, and goals that might have been reached in a partnership, or in a sustained group effort, are usually scuttled by the sociopath's exclusive concern with himself. This path to ultimate failure is typically taken by infamous tyrants, as well as by countless less publicized sociopathic employers, coworkers, and spouses.

When the thrill of manipulating other people takes over, as it does in sociopathy, all other objectives are eclipsed, and the resulting “life disruption,” though of a different sort, can be just as severe as the limitations imposed by major depression, chronic anxiety, paranoia, and other mental illnesses. And the emotional bankruptcy of sociopathy means that the sociopath is forever deprived of an authentic emotional intelligence, a capacity for understanding how people work that is an irreplaceable guide for living in the human world. Like Doreen, who actually believes she can increase her personal power by diminishing others, like Skip, who imagines himself permanently immune to society and its rules, like the defeated dictator who is bewildered because the hate-filled mob composed of “his people” will not allow him to negotiate, a person without conscience, even a smart one, tends to be a shortsighted and surprisingly naïve individual who eventually expires of boredom, financial ruin, or a bullet.

Extreme Conscience

Still, the most compelling reason for desiring to have conscience, rather than wishing to be free of it, is not the list of ruinous disadvantages that accrue to sociopathy. No, the best part of possessing a moral sense is the deep and beautiful gift that comes to us inside, and
only
inside, the wrappings of conscience.
The ability to love
comes bundled up in conscience, just as our spirits are bundled up in our bodies. Conscience is the embodiment of love, imbued into our very biology. It lives in the part of the brain that reacts emotionally, and in their favor, when the ones we love need our attention, our help, or even our sacrifice. We have already seen that when someone's mind is not equipped to love, he can have no genuine conscience either, since conscience is an intervening sense of responsibility based in our emotional attachments to others. Now we turn this psychological equation around. The other truth is that should a person have no conscience, he could never truly love. When an imperative sense of responsibility is subtracted from love, all that is left is a thin, tertiary thing—a will to possess, which is not love at all.

Just after September 11, 2001, even as an especially dark and aggressive chapter in our history began, my psychologist friend Bernie told me without hesitation that he would choose conscience over the apparent expediency of being without conscience, but that he could not articulate why. I believe Bernie's intuitive preference was due to the inextricable link between conscience and the ability to love, and that if given the choice between all the power, fame, and money in the world and the privilege of loving his own children, Bernie would choose the latter in a heartbeat. In part, this is because Bernie is a good person. Also, this is because Bernie is a good psychologist, and he knows something about what actually makes people happy.

There is the will to possess and to dominate, and then there is love. Whether or not he could express his reasons at that moment, in choosing conscience, Bernie the psychologist effectively chose love, and this does not surprise me. Dominating can constitute a temporary thrill, but it does not make people happy. Loving does.

But is it not possible to have
too much
conscience? Are there not psychologists who have said that, far from happiness, people can be tyrannized and driven into serious depression by their consciences?

Yes and no. Freud observed that an overactive superego could bully its owner into depression and possibly even suicide. But superego, that yammering disciplinary voice internalized from our early experiences, is not conscience. Neither is something that psychologists call “unhealthy shame,” which is not really shame, in the sense of a reaction to having committed bad deeds, so much as it is the irrational belief, instilled by negative messages in childhood, that one's whole self is somehow bad, repellent, worthless. Even a little unhealthy shame is too much, but unhealthy shame is hardly normal conscience, which is an intervening sense of responsibility and not an intrusive feeling of worthlessness and calamity. When contemporary psychologists say that too much conscience is toxic, their vocabulary is careless. They are referring instead to unhealthy shame, or to a strident superego working overtime.

Conscience, our seventh sense, is a different phenomenon altogether. It is a feeling of obligation based in love. So the question lingers: Is extreme conscience debilitating or elevating?

To understand what a great deal of conscience does to the psyche, we can observe the lives and the happiness level of people who have developed their innate sense of conscience into an especially powerful emotional muscle. Each one of us might name different individuals as our moral heroes, from historical or public figures to people we have known personally who have impressed us with their moral commitment. In a systematic study of such people, Anne Colby of Radcliffe's Henry Murray Research Center and William Damon of Brown University's Department of Education made choices of their own. Concerned about what they perceived as our current scarcity of moral leadership, Colby and Damon selected twenty-three individuals whom they considered to be “moral exemplars,” eleven men and twelve women whose moral commitment has resulted in signal contributions in many areas, including civil rights and civil liberties, the reduction of poverty and hunger, religious freedom, environmental protection, and peace. These twenty-three people are diverse in terms of race, religion, socioeconomic status, and specific goals, but all have one thing in common: an extraordinarily powerful sense of conscience, an “overdeveloped” sense that they are responsible for the welfare of their fellow human beings. They represent, from a psychologist's vantage point, the diametric emotional and mental opposite of the sociopaths we have been discussing.