The Sociopath Next Door

Recently, I was in Barnes & Noble looking for something interesting to read. I usually find a book and then search for it on Amazon to see if it’s an ebook, and download that for a fraction of the cost for a print book. But when I plucked The Sociopath Next Door off the shelf and opened it, I experienced an odd synchro. The first chapter was called The Seventh Sense, the title of one of my novels. I turned to the introduction.

“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 immortal action you’ve taken.”

Okay, I thought. The author, Martha Stout, is describing the antagonists in many of my novels. I need to buy this book. And I did.

You can read this book from cover to cover in a single sitting, if you’re so inclined, if you don’t mind being inundated with some heavy duty stuff about sociopaths. I have been leafing through it, reading a chapter here and there at the gym, at night, while eating a meal. As loath as I am to admit it, I think Stout is really onto something with her material.

The character she describes is the antagonist in countless mysteries and thrillers, in movies, and in real life. Think: Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono (Hillside Stranglers). But clinical psychologist Martha Stout points out that 1 in 25 of every American is a sociopath. This person could be your spouse, neighbor, friend, sibling, or kid.

Many years ago, I worked as a librarian and Spanish teacher in a minimum security youthful offender facility. One of the inmates who frequented the library was a 15-year-old kid who was doing three years for raping and murdering a four-year-old girl. Yes, you read that correctly. Three years. His sentence was short because he was underage and was adjudicated as a juvenile. Both of his parents were psychologists.

Roland and I used to sit around in my office talking about books and music and the world outside. One day, I asked him to tell me about the crime that had landed him in prison. At first, he claimed he was too high to remember anything. But as I pressed him with questions, he became somewhat agitated and then admitted that the girl was there and he was there, so why not? He raped and strangled her because he could. No remorse.

Roland was a sociopath.

At some point during the three years I worked at this prison, an inmate in solitary hung himself. It was later discovered that he committed suicide because he had been raped by the prison’s assistant superintendent, who was bringing inmates on outside patrol to his trailer for sex. This perpetrator, a short, cigar-smoking ha-ha sort of guy, was asked to resign and did and collected his pension and was never charged with anything.

He was also a sociopath.

“About one in twenty-five individuals are sociopaths, meaning, essentially, that they do not have a conscience,” writes Stout. “It is not that this group fails to grasp the difference between good and bad; it is that the distinction fails to limit their behavior. The intellectual difference between right and wrong does not bring on the emotional sirens and flashing blue lights, or the fear of God, that it does for the rest of us. Without the slightest blip of guilt or remorse, one in twenty-five people can do anything at all.”

In the days before email and the Internet, I published a novel called Dark Fields, about a female serial killer. Despite what Hollywood and fiction would have you believe, serial killers are rare. There are more men than women, but when a serial killer is female, she is probably more brutal than her male counterpart. A few months after the book came out, I received a fan letter from a female serial killer who was currently doing time.

She was a sociopath.

Stout’s book is a fascinating and profound look inside the mind of a sociopath and helped me sculpt the antagonist in my novel. Her conclusion: “One way or another, a life without conscience is a failed life.”

So what or who is the antithesis of the sociopath? Gandhi? Okay, great. I can buy that. But on a personal level, what does it mean? How are any of us are like Gandhi? It seems that most of us have a moral code, but what is it in man that produces a Bundy? A Son of Sam? What is it that corrupts some humans from the inside out? That deems torture of our fellow human beings as OK? That glorifies war? What is it in man that produces a Gandhi? A Dalai Lama?A Hitler? A Mussolini?

Quite often, the ending sentences or paragraphs in a novel or book have an important message to convey, just as the beginning does. I love Stout’s concluding paragraphs:

For most of us, conscience is so ordinary, so daily, and so spontaneous that we do not even notice it. But conscience is also much larger than we are. It is one side of a confrontation between an ancient faction of amoral self-interest that has always been doomed, both psychologically and spiritually, and a circle of moral minds just as ageless.

Stout says she votes for the people with conscience, for the ones who are loving and committed, for the generous and gentle souls. They are people who have been gone for hundreds of years and the baby who will be born tomorrow. They come from every nation, culture, and religion. They are the more aware and focused members of our species. And they are, and always have been, our hope.