Linda’s Reviews > The Sociopath Next Door > Status Update

Always the tone of pained surprise about American culture being individualistic, from Harvard eggheads. Who encouraged antisocial behavior? Maybe Carl Rogers (champion of bring ‘our true authentic selves’) and Abraham Maslow with his hierarchy leading to self-actualization of potential, and ACT, Modern Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ‘live by yr own core values’?

“Quite unlike sociopaths, children…afflicted with attachment disorders are seldom charming or interpersonally clever. On the contrary, these unfortunate individuals are typically somewhat off-putting, nor do they make any great efforts to ‘fake’ being normal. They are isolates. Their emotional presentation is flat and uninviting, or sometimes directly hostile” or swing between indifference and neediness.

Narcissists may feel strongly but they don’t have the ability to walk in someone else’s emotional shoes’ “a failure not of conscience but of empathy”.

So sociopaths feel no obligation and their minds work harder when on an assignment involving emotional words because their EQ is impaired… but they react strongly to negative stimuli (frustration may spark rage). They may experience a rush from a predatory ‘win’ of cat and mouse “as a moment of glee”.

“Sociopaths sometimes exhibit brief, intense enthusiasms - hobbies, projects, involvements with people - that are without commitment or follow-up. These interests appear to begin abruptly and for no reason, and to end the same way.”

“As obvious as the nose on one’s face, and just as difficult to see without the help of a mirror, the explanation is that good people will let pathetic individuals get by with murder, so to speak, and therefore any sociopath wishing to continue with his game…should play repeatedly for none other than pity.”

How do you tell an untrustworthy person? “the pity play”, “an appeal to our sympathy” is a universal behavioral trait of unscrupulous people. I’d agree with that. And yet that’s hard to distinguish when everyone wants to be a victim for the sympathy it generates.

“To admit that some people literally have no conscience is not technically the same as saying that some human beings are evil, but it is disturbingly close. And good people want very much not to believe in the personification of evil.” Again, which industry pushed very hard to eradicate this ‘outmoded’ way of thinking? Psychology and psychiatry.

“Obedience to apparent authority is a knee-jerk reaction in most people quite without training, and to sensitize this reflex is to make our children hypervulnerable to any aggressive or sociopathic ‘authority’ who may come along later in our lives.” Not quite. Teach them to discern ‘apparent’ from real authority, rather than questioning every authority because they have no standards of assessment.

“Many people without conscience will behave self-destructively simply for the purposes of the game.” Makes sense in a way, if they can’t see downstream consequences for others, they won’t really see consequences for themselves either.