The Sociopath Next Door (25 page)

There is no global consistency in the intellectual process of moral reasoning itself, in how we think through moral dilemmas and decide what specifically to do. But is there a unity in our emotional reaction to the moral struggle between good and evil, a near-universal seventh sense that can be relied on to ignore all of our differences and borders?

And if so, how does it feel?

The Universal Bond

As I begin to write the final section of this chapter on the origins of conscience, it is the morning of September 11, 2003. I usually like quiet while I work, but this morning I have turned on a television in the other room so that I can hear the voices of the children at the site of the former World Trade Towers as they read the names, one by one, of the people who perished there. Earlier this morning, I sent my daughter off to school, just as I did on the morning of September 11 two years ago. The difference is that two years ago, between the time I sent her to school and the time she came home, the whole world had changed.

I notice how easily the flood of emotion still comes, though two years have gone by since then.

Of all the unexpected reactions a person can have during a catastrophe, one of the more surprising ones for me was feeling suddenly and very consciously linked to all the people I had ever known in my life, from childhood on, everyone who had ever been important to me even for a little while, anyone for whom I had ever felt affection. In the days after September 11, 2001, I remembered people I had not seen or even thought about for years or, in some cases, decades. I saw their faces in my mind with almost unnerving clarity. I had no idea where many of these people were, so long had it been since they were in my life, but I wanted, helplessly, to pick up the phone and call all of them. I wanted to ask them how they were—my high-school writing teacher long ago in North Carolina, a roommate from college, the softhearted proprietor of a grocery where I used to shop in Philadelphia, who would give away food to those who could not afford it and then enjoin his other customers to secrecy. Were they okay? Those whom I could call, I called. No one even found this strange. We simply checked in with one another.

Moral reasoning—the way we think about moral dilemmas—is anything but consistent and universal. It varies with age and with gender. It differs from one culture to the next, and most likely from one region or even one household to the next. For example, what I think about terrorism and what we should do about it will probably be slightly different from what my neighbor thinks, and will almost certainly be different from the beliefs of people who are removed from me by oceans and continents. But in a kind of human miracle, one thing remains constant for nearly all of us—with some notable exceptions—and that is our profound attachment to other human beings. Emotional attachment is part of most of us, down to the very molecules that design our bodies and our brains, and sometimes we are powerfully reminded of it. Beginning in our genes and spiraling outward to all of our cultures, beliefs, and many religions, it is the shadow of the whisper of the beginning of an understanding that we are all one. And whatever its origins, this is the essence of conscience.

TEN

bernie's choice:
why conscience is better

Happiness is when what you think, what you say,
and what you do are in harmony.

—Mahatma Gandhi

I
f you could be completely free of conscience—no moral scruples and no guilt at all—what do you think you would do with your life?

When I ask people this question, as I often have, the typical response is, “Oh wow,” or “Oh my goodness,” followed by a silence during which they wrinkle their faces in mental effort, as if someone had asked them a question in a language they only half-understood. Then most people grin or laugh, seemingly embarrassed by the authority of conscience in their lives, and reply with some version of, “I don't really know what I'd do, but I'm sure it wouldn't be what I'm doing now.”

After “Oh wow” and a brief pause, one especially imaginative person chuckled and said, “Maybe I'd be the dictator of a small country or something.” He said this as if such an ambition would have been smarter and more impressive than the socially valuable professional career he had in fact pursued.

Would it be smarter not to have a conscience? Would we be happier? We know that groups of people would end up in trouble—whole nations of sociopaths, everyone out for himself or herself alone. But realistically, on a personal level, would you or I, as individuals, be happier and better off if we could shed the limitations of conscience? It would certainly seem so at times. Dishonest people hold positions of power, and corporate thieves purchase Gulfstreams and yachts, while we work responsibly and make “sensible” car payments. But what is the truth of the matter? From a psychological point of view, do sociopaths really have better lives than we do, or is having a conscience somehow the happier fate?

In an ironically utilitarian way, from the beginning, we were selected by nature to be social, sharing creatures, our very brains wired for emotional connectedness with one another, and for a sense of conscience. Or rather, all but a few of us took this path. Profiting from a different but equally businesslike selection process, a few evolved as rogues, apathetic to their brother and sister human beings, with emotionally disconnected brains that hatched thoroughly selfish agendas. Judging from the vantage of the twenty-first century, and looking through the eyes of psychology, which of these two ancient factions, the socially conscientious or the sociopathic, can we say got human nature's better deal?

The Losing Side of Winning

It would be difficult to refute the observation that people who are completely unhampered by conscience sometimes achieve power and wealth, at least for a while. Too many chapters in the human history book, from its first lines to its most contemporary entries, are organized around the stupendous successes of military invaders, conquerors, robber barons, and empire builders. Such individuals are either too long dead or too privileged to be formally evaluated in the fashion a clinical psychologist would like. But given certain of their well-known and highly documented behaviors, we assume, even without knowing their scores on the Pd scale, that a fair number of them would not be found to possess any intervening sense of obligation based in emotional attachment to others. In other words, some of them were, and are, sociopaths.

To make matters worse, brutal conquerors and empire builders are usually held in awe by their contemporaries, and during their lifetimes they are often seen as role models for the entire human race. No doubt countless thirteenth-century Mongol boys were put to bed with tales of the indomitable Genghis Khan, and one wonders which of the modern heroes we tout to our own children will ultimately be remembered by history as motivated by ruthless self-interest.

Sexual conquest also is served rather well by the absence of conscience. To illustrate this point using the offspring of the same famous tyrant, Genghis Khan's eldest son, Tushi Khan, is said to have sired forty sons via his birthright to pick from the most beautiful women of the conquered. The remainder of the vanquished, along with their sons, were routinely slaughtered. One of Genghis's many grandsons, Kublai Khan, founder of the Yuan dynasty, had twenty-two legitimate sons, and added thirty virgins to his harem every year. And as of the time I write these words, virtually identical Y chromosomes are carried by almost 8 percent of the men living in the region of the former Mongol Empire, 16 million of them. Geneticists believe this means that some 16 million people living in the twenty-first century are stamped with Genghis Khan's thirteenth-century legacy of genocide and rape.

Genghis Khan was exceptional among sociopathic tyrants in that he did not die a violent or an ignominious death. Instead, he fell off a horse during a hunt, in 1227. By far most perpetrators of genocide and mass rape eventually take their own lives or are killed, often by enraged followers who have had enough. Caligula was assassinated by one of his own guards. Hitler is believed to have put a pistol in his mouth, and his body is said to have been cremated with diesel fuel. Mussolini was shot and his body hung by its heels in a public square. Romania's Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife, Elena, were killed by a firing squad in 1989, on Christmas Day. Cambodia's Pol Pot died in a two-room hut, held prisoner by former associates, his body burned under a pile of garbage and rubber tires.

Global sociopaths most typically come to no good end, and this sharply downward tendency is displayed by the more local ones as well. In the final analysis, sociopathy appears to be a losing game, regardless of its scale. Hannah's father, for example, lost everything that should have been precious to him. By the time he was fifty, he had forfeited his job, his position in the community, his beautiful wife, and his loving daughter, all for the exhilaration of being a minor player in the heroin game, and in the end, he is likely to die from a bullet to his own head, from the gun of some other small-time criminal. Luke, my patient Sydney's deadbeat ex, also lost everything that was valuable—his wife, his son, and even his swimming pool. Super Skip, though he blithely deems himself to be too unassailable and too smart to be brought down by the likes of the Securities and Exchange Commission, probably will prove to be neither when the SEC finally sets upon him in earnest. “Dr.” Doreen Littlefield, even with a mind fully sharp enough to pursue a real Ph.D., will instead migrate as a fake to more and more obscure locations, playing the same tedious games with the decent people she envies, until she runs out of places to hide. By the time she is fifty, her travels and her unchecked covetousness will have emptied her bank account and pinched her face into that of a bored seventy-year-old.

A list of such dreary endings could go on and on. Contrary to what seems to be a rather popular belief, acting ruthlessly does not, in the end, bring you more than your fair share of the good things in life. Quite the opposite, one might even say that, for the extraordinarily patient observer, one technique to determine whether or not a questionable person is a genuine sociopath is to wait until the end of her life and witness whether or not she has ruined herself, partially or maybe even completely. Does she really possess what you would love to have in your life, or, instead, is she isolated, burned-out, and bored? Is it perhaps stunning the way the mighty have fallen?

Since we began to record wars, occupations, and projects of genocide, historians have often remarked that a certain type of catastrophic, amoral villain seems to be born over and over into the human race. No sooner are we rid of one than another appears somewhere else on the planet. From the point of view of population genetics, there is probably some truth to this legend. And since we do not understand these people, since their psychology is so alien to most of us, we often do not recognize or stop them until after they have damaged humanity in unfathomable ways. But, as Gandhi pointed out with such wonder and relief, “in the end, they always fall—think of it, always!”

The same phenomenon occurs on smaller scales too. Ordinary people without conscience visit pain on their families and communities, but in the end, they tend to self-destruct. Small-time sociopaths would survive long enough to dominate some of the others on our imaginary desert island, maybe promulgate some genes, but at the end of the day, they would probably be hung up by their heels.

Part of the reason for this eventual failure is obvious, especially in cases where infamous despots such as Mussolini or Pol Pot have been killed and mutilated by angry ex-followers. If you oppress, rob, murder, and rape enough people, eventually some of them will gang up on you and take their revenge. We can see this in the much less epic story of Doreen Littlefield as well. The odds were always against her, and finally she just happened to make the wrong person mad. But there are additional reasons, less obvious, for the long-term failure of living without a conscience, reasons that are endemic to the psychology of sociopathy rather than the rage of other people.

And the first of these is boredom, plain and simple.

Is That All There Is?

Though we all know what boredom is, most normal adults do not experience sheer boredom very often. We are stressed, rushed, and worried, but we are seldom purely bored—in part because we are so stressed, rushed, and worried. Time without anything we must attend to usually feels like a breather, not like monotony. To get a feel for what sheer boredom is like, we must hearken back to childhood. Children and adolescents are frequently bored, so bored they can hardly even stand it. Their perfectly normal developmental need for constant stimulation, for exploring and ongoing learning, is often thwarted in a world of long trips, rainy afternoons, and study halls. In childhood, boredom can be excruciating, like a chronic spiritual headache, or a powerful thirst with no beverage to be had. It can hurt so bad that the poor kid feels like yelling out loud, or throwing something noisy at a wall. Extreme boredom is arguably a form of pain.

Lucky for us, adults do not have the same need for constant stimulation. Despite our stresses, we tend to live within a fairly manageable window of arousal, neither unbearably overstimulated nor understimulated—except for sociopaths. People who are sociopaths report that they crave extra stimulation almost continually. Some use the word
addicted
, as in
addicted
to thrills,
addicted
to risk. Such addictions occur because the best (maybe the only) consistent cure for understimulation is our emotional life, so much so that in many psychology texts, the terms
arousal
and
emotional response
are used almost interchangeably. We are stimulated by our meaningful ties to, negotiations with, and happy and unhappy moments alongside other people, and sociopaths do not have this emotional life to live. They do not experience the sometimes harrowing, sometimes thrilling, ever-present arousal that unavoidably attends genuine attachments to other people.