"S/he seemed perfectly normal!"
"My lad couldn't have done it; he wouldn't hurt a fly!"
The high incidence of sociopathy in human society has a profound effect on the rest of us who must live on this planet, too, even those of us who have not been clinically traumatized. The individuals who constitute this 4 percent drain our relationships, our bank accounts, our accomplishments, our self-esteem, our very peace on earth.
THE
PSYCHOPATH - The Mask of Sanity
Special
Research Project of the Quantum Future School
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 nonviolent ones, individuals
who are motivated by blood lust and those who have no such appetites.
[...]
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. [...]
Crazy
and frightening - and real, in about 4 percent of the population....
The prevalence
rate for anorexic eating disorders is estimated a 3.43 percent, deemed
to be nearly epidemic, and yet this figure is a fraction lower than
the rate for antisocial personality. The high-profile disorders classed
as schizophrenia occur in only about 1 percent of [the population]
- a mere quarter of the rate of antisocial personality - and the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention say that the rate of colon cancer
in the United States, considered "alarmingly high," is about
40 per 100,000 - one hundred times lower than the rate of antisocial
personality.
The high
incidence of sociopathy in human society has a profound effect on
the rest of us who must live on this planet, too, even those of us
who have not been clinically traumatized. The individuals who constitute
this 4 percent drain our relationships, our bank accounts, our accomplishments,
our self-esteem, our very peace on earth.
Yet surprisingly,
many people know nothing about this disorder, or if they do, they
think only in terms of violent psychopathy - murderers, serial killers,
mass murderers - people who have conspicuously broken the law many
times over, and who, if caught, will be imprisoned, maybe even put
to death by our legal system.
We are
not commonly aware of, nor do we usually identify, the larger number
of nonviolent sociopaths among us, people who often are not blatant
lawbreakers, and against whom our formal legal system provides little
defense.
Most
of us would not imagine any correspondence between conceiving an ethnic
genocide and, say, guiltlessly lying to one's boss about a coworker.
But the psychological correspondence is not only there; it is chilling.
Simple and profound, the link is the absence of the inner mechanism
that beats up on us, emotionally speaking, when we make a choice we
view as immoral, unethical, neglectful, or selfish.
Most
of us feel mildly guilty if we eat the last piece of cake in the kitchen,
let alone what we would feel if we intentionally and methodically
set about to hurt another person.
Those
who have no conscience at all are a group unto themselves, whether
they be homicidal tyrants or merely ruthless social snipers.
The presence
or absence of conscience is a deep human division, arguably more significant
than intelligence, race, or even gender.
What
differentiates a sociopath who lives off the labors of others from
one who occasionally robs convenience stores, or from one who is a
contemporary robber baron - or what makes the difference betwen an
ordinary bully and a sociopathic murderer - is nothing more than social
status, drive, intellect, blood lust, or simple opportunity.
What
distinguishes all of these people from the rest of us is an utterly
empty hole in the psyche, where there should be the most evolved of
all humanizing functions. [Martha Stout, Ph.D., The
Sociopath Next Door] (highly recommended)
For those
of you who are seeking understanding of psychopathy, Hervey Cleckley's
book The Mask of Sanity, the absolutely essential study
of the psychopath who is not necessarily of the criminal type. This book is no longer
available. We have it scanned and our team of researchers spent two weeks
going over the text carefully to eliminate text conversion errors. You
may download the entire book FREE as a PDF from the link at left, top.
(Read A Sample Chapter of The
Mask of Sanity)
"Likeable,"
"Charming," "Intelligent," "Alert," "Impressive," "Confidence-inspiring,"
and "A great success with the ladies": These are the sorts of descriptions
repeatedly used by Cleckley in his famous case-studies of psychopaths. They are
also, of course, "irresponsible," "self-destructive," and the like. These
descriptions highlight the great frustrations and puzzles that surround
the study of psychopathy.
Psychopaths
seem to have in abundance the very traits most desired by normal persons.
The untroubled self-confidence of the psychopath seems almost like an
impossible dream and is generally what "normal" people seek
to acquire when they attend assertiveness training classes. In many instances,
the magnetic attraction of the psychopath for members of the opposite
sex seems almost supernatural.
Cleckley's
seminal hypothesis concerning the psychopath is that he suffers from a
very real mental illness indeed: a profound and incurable affective deficit.
If he really feels anything at all, they are emotions of only the shallowest
kind. He does bizarre and self-destructive things because consequences
that would fill the ordinary man with shame, self-loathing, and embarrassment
simply do not affect the psychopath at all. What to others would be a
disaster is to him merely a fleeting inconvenience.
Cleckley
also gives grounds for the view that psychopathy is quite common in the
community at large. He has collected some cases of psychopaths who generally
function normally in the community as businessmen, doctors, and even psychiatrists.
Some researchers
see criminal psychopathy - often referred to as anti-social personality disorder - as an extreme of a "normal" personality dimension
(or dimensions).
We would characterize criminal psychopaths as "unsuccessful
psychopaths." The implication, of course, is that many psychopaths
may exist in society who cope better than do those who come to
the attention of the judicial and welfare systems.
Harrington goes so
far as to say that the psychopath is the new man being produced by the
evolutionary pressures of modern life. Other researchers criticize this
view, pointing out the real disabilities that the clinical psychopath
also suffers.
The study
of "ambulatory" psychopaths - what we call "The Garden Variety Psychopath"
- has, however, hardly begun. Very little is known about subcriminal
psychopathy. However, some researchers have begun to seriously consider
the idea that it is important to study psychopathy not as an artificial
clinical category but as a general personality trait in the community
at large. In other words, psychopathy is being recognized as a more
or less a different type of human.
One very
interesting aspect of the psychopath is his "hidden life" that
is sometimes not too well hidden. It seems that the psychopath has a regular
need to take a "vacation into filth and degradation" the same
way normal people may take a vacation to a resort where they enjoy beautiful
surroundings and culture. To get a full feeling for this strange "need"
of the psychopath - a need that seems to be evidence that "acting
human" is very stressful to the psychopath - read more of The
Mask of Sanity, chapters 25 and 26.
Also, read Cleckley's
speculations on what was "really wrong" with these people.
He comes very close to suggesting that they are human in every respect
- but that they lack a soul. This lack
of "soul quality" makes them very efficient "machines."
They can be brilliant, write scholarly works, imitate the words of emotion,
but over time, it becomes clear that their words do not match their actions.
They are the type of person who can claim that they are devastated by
grief who then attend a party "to forget." The problem is: they
really DO forget.
Being very
efficient machines, like a computer, they are able to execute very complex
routines designed to elicit from others support for what they want. In
this way, many psychopaths are able to reach very high positions in life.
It is only over time that their associates become aware of the fact that
their climb up the ladder of success is predicated on violating the rights
of others."Even
when they are indifferent to the rights of their associates, they are
often able to inspire feelings of trust and confidence."
The psychopath
Read more at www.cassiopaea.com
recognizes no flaw in his psyche, no need for change.
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