Dealing with the Sociopaths Among Us

RFP Staff

♦ How many persons do you know who lack a conscience or guilt?  Who among those in your life recognize they have no true empathy or emotional attachments to others?

“People fake a lot of human interactions, but I feel like I fake them all, and I fake them very well,” says Dexter Morgan in the first episode of Dexter, a popular TV series on Showtime in which a sociopath hunts and kills serial killers. Dexter’s narration gives the audience an inside view of someone without guilt and any real emotional connection to others. His emptiness is dark and safely packaged in fiction.  Separated by the television, his story seems remote.

Most of us have run into sociopaths in our lives. Harvard Psychologist Martha Stout cites data that reveals 1 out of 25 people is likely to be a sociopath. What are they like? Who are they?

A sociopath is someone who displays exaggerated antisocial behavior and who lacks a conscience. They can cleverly disguise themselves as those in the kindest of roles and often enjoy positions in which they can exert power over others.  For decades, psychologists debated the true difference between a sociopath and a psychopath, but in her book The Sociopath Next Door (2005), Stout details Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD) and lays out a map of sociopathy that reveals the sociopaths in our lives and how to deal with them. APD is not always identified as a criminal disorder, according to Stout. In her introduction, Stout asks her readers to imagine what it is like to be a sociopath: [excerpted from the Internet Archive]

Imagine – if you can – not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members.  Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken.  And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.  Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs.  Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless.  You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness.  The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience that they seldom even guess at your condition.

In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world.  You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences, will most likely remain undiscovered.

How will you live your life?  What will you do with your huge and secret advantage, and with the corresponding handicap of other people (conscience)?  The answer will depend largely on just what your desires happen to be, because people are not all the same.  Even the profoundly unscrupulous are not all the same.  Some people – whether they have a conscience or not – favor the ease of inertia, while others are filled with dreams and wild ambitions.  Some human beings are brilliant and talented, some are dull-witted, and most, conscience or not, are somewhere in between.  There are violent people and non-violent ones, individuals who are motivated by blood lust and those who have no such appetites.

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 law, 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.  When it is expedient, you doctor the accounting and shred the evidence, you stab your employees and your clients (or your constituency) in the back, marry for money, tell lethal premeditated lies to people who trust you, attempt to ruin colleagues who are powerful or eloquent, and simply steamroll over groups who are dependent and voiceless.  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.

Or no – let us say you are not quite such a person.  You are ambitious, yes, and in the name of success you are willing to do all manner of things that people with conscience would never consider, but you are not an intellectually gifted individual.  Your intelligence is above average perhaps, and people think of you as smart, maybe even very smart.  But you know in your heart of hearts that you do not have the cognitive wherewithal, or the creativity, to reach the careening heights of power you secretly dream about, and this makes you resentful of the world at large, and envious of the people around you.

As this sort of person, you ensconce yourself in a niche, or maybe a series of niches, in which you can have some amount of control over small numbers of people.  These situations satisfy a little of your desire for power, although you are chronically aggravated at not having more.  It chafes to be so free of the ridiculous inner voices that inhibit others from achieving great power, without having enough talent to pursue the ultimate successes yourself.  Sometimes you fall into sulky, rageful moods caused by a frustration that no one but you understands.

But you do enjoy jobs that afford you a certain undersupervised control over a few individuals or small groups, preferably people and groups who are relatively helpless or in some way vulnerable.  You are a teacher or a psychotherapist, a divorce lawyer or a high school coach.  Or maybe you are a consultant of some kind, a broker or a gallery owner or a human services director.  Or maybe you do not have a paid position and are instead the president of your condominium association, or a volunteer hospital worker, or a parent.  Whatever your job, you manipulate and bully the people who are under your thumb, as often and as outrageously as you can without getting fired or held accountable.  You do this for its own sake, even when it serves no purpose except to give you a thrill.  Making people jump means you have power – or this is the way you see it – and bullying provides you with an adrenaline rush.  It is fun.

Maybe you cannot be a CEO of a multinational corporation, but you can frighten a few people, or cause them to scurry around like chickens, or steal from them, or – maybe, best of all – create situations that cause them to feel bad about themselves.  And this is power, especially when the people you manipulate are superior to you in some way.  Most invigorating of all is to bring down people who are smarter or more accomplished than you, or perhaps classier, more attractive or popular or morally admirable.  This is not only good fun; it is existential vengeance.  And without a conscience, it is amazingly easy to do.  You quietly lie to the boss or to the boss’s boss, cry some crocodile tears, or sabotage a coworker’s project, or gaslight a patient (or child), bait people with promises, or provide a little misinformation that will never be traced back to you.

Or now let us say you are a person who has a proclivity for violence or for seeing violence done.  You simply murder your coworker, or have her murdered – or your boss, or your ex-spouse, or your wealthy lover’s spouse, or anyone else who bothers you.  You have to be careful, because if you slip up, you may be caught and punished by the system.  But you will never be confronted by your conscience, because you have no conscience.  If you decide to kill, the only difficulties will be the external ones.  Nothing inside you will ever protest.

Provided you are not forcibly stopped, you can do anything at all.  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?

Or let us imagine the opposite extreme:  You have no interest in power.  To the contrary, you are the sort of person who really does not want much of anything.  Your only real ambition is not to have to exert yourself to get by.  You do not want to work like everyone else does.  Without a conscience, you can nap or pursue your hobbies or watch television or just hang out somewhere all day long.  Living a bit on the fringes, and with some handouts from relatives and friends, you can do this indefinitely.  People may whisper to one another that you are an underachiever, or that you are depressed, a sad case, or, in contrast, if they get angry, they may grumble that you are lazy.  When they get to know you better, and get really angry, they may scream at you and call you a loser, a bum.  But it will never occur to them that you literally do not have a conscience, that in such a fundamental way, your very mind is not the same as theirs.

The panicked feeling of a guilty conscience never squeezes at your heart or wakes you in the night.  Despite your lifestyle, you never feel irresponsible, neglectful or so much as embarrassed, although for the sake of appearances, sometimes you pretend that you do.  For example, if you are a decent observer of people and what they react to, you may adopt a lifeless facial expression, say how ashamed of your life you are, and talk about how rotten you feel.  This you do only because it is more convenient to have people think you are depressed than it is to have them shouting at you all the time, or insisting that you get a job.

You notice that people who do have a conscience feel guilty when they harangue someone they believe to be “depressed” or “troubled.”  As a matter of fact, to you further advantage, they often feel obliged to take care of such a person.  If, despite your relative poverty, you can manage to get yourself into a sexual relationship with someone, this person – who does not suspect what you are really like – may feel particularly obligated.  And since all you want is not to have to work, your financier does not have to be especially rich, just relatively conscience-bound.

I trust that imagining yourself as any of these people feels insane to you, because such people are insane, dangerously so.  Insane but real – they even have a label.  Many mental health professionals refer to the condition of little or no conscience as “anti-social personality disorder,” a non-correctable disfigurement of character that is now thought to be present in about 4 percent of the population – that is to say, one in twenty-five people. 

It becomes clear as we read that we do know sociopaths and they are often in positions that give them power to do us harm, totaling up to 4% of our public servants and officials. Perhaps more. Psychologists tend to call the most alluring and dangerous of the these people psychopaths because of their paradoxical combination of heightened charm and lack of empathy or conscience, according to Scott Bohn, Ph.D in his article “How to tell a Sociopath from a Psychopath”. Are some such positions more likely to be attractive to psychopaths? It seems like a natural calling for a psychopath.

If you have been keeping count of the sociopaths in your life, you may have begun to wonder how to handle relationships with such folks. That is unless you are one. If so, skip to the bottom of the page. Stout gives over a dozen pointers to the rest of us on how to deal with a sociopath, adapted below.

Dealing with Sociopaths in Everyday Life 

1. Accept the bitter pill that some people literally do not have a conscience. And they do not look like Charles Manson.
2. Go with your instincts. This will require you to distinguish between your instincts and what is implied by the role a person has taken on — educator, doctor, leader, animal lover, humanist, even parent. The role a person plays does not mean he or she has a conscience.
3. Apply the rule of threes when considering a new relationship of any kind. One lie, one broken promise, or a single neglected responsibility may be a misunderstanding instead. Two may involve a serious mistake. But three lies says you’re dealing with a liar, and deceit is the linchpin of conscienceless behavior. Cut your losses and get out as soon as you can. Leaving, though it may be hard, will be easier now than later, and less costly. Do not give your money, your work, your secrets, or your affection to a three-timer.
4. Question authority. Do this even when, or especially when, everyone around you has completely stopped questioning authority. Recite to yourself what Stanley Milgram taught us about obedience: “At least six out of ten people will blindly obey a present, official-looking authority to the bitter end.” The good news is that having social support makes people somewhat more likely to challenge authority. Encourage those around you to question, too.
5. Suspect flattery. Compliments are lovely, especially when they are sincere. In contrast, flattery is extreme and appeals to our egos in unrealistic ways. It is the material of counterfeit charm, and nearly always involves an intent to manipulate. Manipulation through flattery is sometimes innocuous and sometimes sinister. Peek over your massaged ego and remember to suspect flattery.
6. If necessary, redefine your concept of respect. 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. Victimization is not respect. Keep respect separate from fear.
7. Do not join the game. Intrigue is a sociopath’s tool. Resist the temptation to compete with a seductive sociopath, to outsmart him, psychoanalyze, or even banter with him. In addition to reducing yourself to his level, you would be distracting yourself from what is really important, which is to protect yourself.
8. The best way to protect yourself from a sociopath is to avoid him. Refuse any kind of contact or communication. The only truly effective method for dealing with a sociopath you have identified is to disallow him or her from your life altogether. Sociopaths live completely outside of the social contract, and therefore to include them in relationships or other social arrangements is perilous. You may never be able to make your family and friends understand why you are avoiding a particular individual. Sociopathy is surprisingly difficult to see, and even harder to explain. Avoid him anyway. If total avoidance is impossible, make plans to come as close as you can to the goal of total avoidance.
9. Question your tendency to pity too easily. Respect should be reserved for the kind and the morally courageous. Pity is another socially valuable response, and it should be reserved for innocent people who are in genuine pain or who have fallen on misfortune. If, instead, you find yourself often pitying someone who consistently hurts you or other people, and who actively campaigns for your sympathy, the chances are close to 100 percent that you are dealing with a sociopath.
10. Challenge your need to be polite in absolutely all situations. For normal adults in our culture, being what we think of as “civilized” is like a reflex, and often we find ourselves being automatically decorous even when someone has enraged us, repeatedly lied to us, or figuratively stabbed us in the back. Sociopaths take huge advantage of this automatic courtesy in exploitive situations. Do not be afraid to be unsmiling and speak calmly.
11. Do not try to redeem the unredeemable. Second (third, fourth, and fifth) chances are for people who possess conscience. If you are dealing with a person who has no conscience, know how to swallow hard and cut your losses. Help only those who truly want to be helped. This likely does not include the person who has no conscience. Your mission is your own life.
12. Never agree, out of pity or for any other reason, to help a sociopath conceal his or her true character. “Please don’t tell,” often spoken is the trademark plea of thieves, child abusers — and sociopaths. Other people deserve to be warned more than sociopaths deserve to have you keep their secrets. “You owe me” has been the standard line of sociopaths for thousands of years, quite literally, and is still so. Also, ignore the one that goes, “You are just like me.” You are not.
13. Defend your psyche. Do not allow someone without conscience, or even a string of such people, to convince you that humanity is a failure. Most human beings do possess conscience. Most human beings are able to love.
14. Living well is the best revenge. Enjoy your life. That is your victory.

If you have no conscience, have you read this far? You might consider taking a psychopathy quiz by clicking here. That is, if you are that honest with yourself. The rest of us will be working on number 14.

The Snakes-in-Suits Syndrome: White Collar Psychopaths in Business and Politics:

http://rowanfreepress.com/2014/04/23/the-snakes-in-suits-syndrome-white-collar-psychopaths-in-politics-and-business/