Book Review: The Sociopath Next Door

The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us by Martha Stout.

I’m adding this to the recommended reading list because Lifetime “true movies” are so often based on the doings of real-life sociopaths. A lot of sociopathic behavior is depicted in stranger danger and stranger-in-the-house movies as well. Lifetime movies rarely serve the sociopath up straight, however, I think because doing so would limit the scope for uplifting or moral themes in crime and thriller movies.

Stout explains that a sociopath is a person who lacks the capacity for empathy with others, and therefore has no conscience. Nobody really knows what causes sociopathy, and it may have some kind of physiological basis—many people who are identified as sociopaths also seem to be more impervious to physical pain and extremes of hot and cold than other people. Since sociopaths make terrible and often abusive parents, it’s difficult to determine whether children of sociopaths are themselves so likely to be sociopaths because of genetics or abusive parenting or some combination of the two.

As I read through this book, I found myself thinking of Asperger’s Syndrome, in which, through some kind of cognitive defect, the sufferer is simply unable to understand the non-verbal cues and mutual understandings that underlie most human interaction. The difference between a sociopath and an Asperger’s sufferer is that a person with Asperger’s has a perfectly normal human desire to connect with other people in loving relationships, but is incapable of decoding other people in a way that makes it possible for them to interact normally with others. Sociopaths in contrast do clearly perceive the layers of empathy and unspoken social and cultural understandings through which human bonds are formed and maintained; they just don’t feel the empathy with others that would make such bonds important or satisfying to them. They’re very good at manipulating them in others to achieve other ends of their own choosing, however.

The sociopath’s lack of concern for the well-being of others makes them ideal criminals, but many are not. As Stout explains, a sociopath might set other goals, like enjoying a sense of power by engaging in manipulative petty tyrannies over a family, a classroom of children, or a group of mental patients, or amassing great wealth and power in the corporate world, or simply coasting through life by manipulating one person into providing them complete financial support in exchange for nothing much. Their goals are as various as anyone’s, it’s the method of achieving them that sets them apart.

Stout’s book is about sociopaths who are not killers, rapists, or thieves, but who are instead the sociopaths next door. The case studies describing how they use their ability to guiltlessly manipulate others in non-dramatic ways that the victim may never cotton onto are pretty fascinating. I had my own Aha! moment about a person in my past who had been damaging in my own life when I read this:

When deciding whom to trust, bear in mind that the combination of consistently bad or egregiously inadequate behavior with frequent plays for your sympathy is as close to a warning mark on a conscienceless person’s forehead as you will ever be given.

Oh. It turns out, I dated Stout’s “Poor Luke,” for a ridiculously long time! (Or, on the other hand, maybe I just like the sociopathy diagnosis because it makes some things not his fault, really. Poor Luke indeed! Oh I’m a sucker alright.)

However, Stout gets into trouble when she wanders out of her field of expertise (psychology) into political science. She repeatedly implies, without much attempting to prove it, that all the wars and suffering in the world have been caused by sociopaths gaining positions of power and misleading the rest of innocent humanity. Whereas I notice even chimpanzees band into groups and kill other groups of chimpanzees in order to take their stuff (see Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee); the ability to exclude other groups of human beings from empathy on the basis of tribe, nation, or race seems to be, for better or worse, a very common and persistent human trait that has nothing to do with a disfunction like sociopathy.

Stout is obviously mostly thinking of Adolf Hitler in these passages, which unfortunately leads her into error in her advice about detecting and resisting sociopaths. When not thinking about Hitler, she notes that a tendency to flout rules and customs is a common symptom of sociopathy. When she IS thinking about Hitler, she claims that resisting authority is key to resisting sociopaths. However, respect for social rules & customs and for political authority are just facets of the same principle, an attentiveness to and willingness to be governed by the approval or disapproval of others. As Christopher Browning illustrates pretty convincingly in Ordinary Men, German citizens went along with Hitler largely because that’s what everyone else around them was doing. (And I would add, everyone else was doing that in the first place because Hitler was in fact the formal head of state, and he was that because he’d been elected to be. The German people committed the fundamental error that led to all the other ones while Hitler had no authority at all, yet.) It’s difficult to imagine any society being able to function where social conformity and respect for authority aren’t pretty much a default: Browning speculates that it’s an evolutionary adaptation that enables human beings to live in groups at all, and is usually a good thing. I think we can also speculate that it’s one social consequence of the human capacity for empathy.

Or, to look at it another way: A political terrorist who gets on an airplane with the intention of blowing it up is certainly “resisting authority.” Fellow passengers who notice him trying to light his shoes on fire and alert a stewardess are certainly obeying authority. At the same time, it’s difficult to imagine a sociopath caring enough about any political agenda to sacrifice his own life for it (sociopaths may pursue political power, but only for the purpose of enjoying it, not because they actually care how society is governed). And a sociopath would be just as happy to sit and watch someone blow himself and innocent others up as to intercede, provided he himself was not at any risk of harm. I don’t think Stout has thought very deeply about the complexities involved in obedience vs. resistance to social or political authority vs. individual conscience.

A lot of the slipshod political analysis seems to be in service to implying that George Bush is a sociopath, and comparing him to Hitler. A little Googling prompted by this not-so-hidden agenda revealed that a friend of Dubya’s mentioned in an interview once that he and the President used to enjoy killing frogs together as boys. Stout constructs one of her fictionalized profiles about a boy who likes to kill frogs and grows up to be politically powerful. However, though Stout is correct that an interest in torturing animals is a symptom of sociopathy, she fails to mention that it is also very common for otherwise normal little boys in groups to goad each other on in doing gross and destructive things (a couple of the actually nicer boys in my class in grade school used to put a lot of quality time into killing insects in the microwave, and then telling girls about what they’d done, for example.) Based on my own reading about individual murderers and psychos, the habit of the murderous sociopath seems to be to pursue this kind of entertainment on his own, and with animals that usually elicit more empathy and emotional bonding from humans than insects or reptiles do (house pets and farm animals, usually). So the Bush-is-a-sociopath thing, which she never comes right out and says anyway, is pretty dodgy. (It’s not even particularly effective, as Bush-bashing goes. If you are of the opinion that he has done great evil in the world, isn’t it much more damning to imagine that he has done so from a position of complete mental health, and therefore total moral responsibility?)

So, ignore the politics, but enjoy the fascinating profiles and case studies, and learn to spot the psychologically realistic Lifetime villains at the same time. There are more of them than you might think!