The Sociopath Next Door Read online

  A solution to the theological dilemma over conscience seemed to come in the thirteenth century, when Thomas Aquinas proposed a roundabout distinction between synderesis, Saint Jerome's infallible God-given knowledge of right and wrong, and conscientia, which was comprised of mistake-prone human reason as it struggled to reach decisions about behavior. To make its choices concerning which actions to take, Reason was supplied with perfect information from God, but Reason itself was rather weak. In this system, fallible human decision making, not a lack of conscience, is to blame for wrong decisions and actions. Doing wrong is simply making a mistake. In contrast, according to Aquinas, “Synderesis cannot err; it provides principles which do not vary, just as the laws that govern the physical universe do not vary.”

  To apply this view to our contemporary example—when Joe remembers that his dog is without food and water, God-given innate synderesis (conscience) immediately informs him that the absolute right action is to return home and take care of the dog. Conscientia, a mental debate about how to behave, then takes this Truth into consideration. The fact that Joe does not turn the car around instantaneously but, instead, spends a few minutes deliberating is the result of the natural weakness of human reason. That Joe does make the right decision in the end means, in Aquinas's scheme, that Joe's moral virtues are, through strengthened Reason, developing in the right direction. Had Joe decided to let the dog go hungry and thirsty, his thereby weakened Reason would have been directing his moral virtues to Hell, theologically speaking.

  Getting down to theology's brass tacks, according to the early church fathers, (1) the rules of morality are absolute; (2) all people innately know the absolute Truth; and (3) bad behavior is the result of faulty thinking, rather than a lack of synderesis, or conscience, and since we all have a conscience, if only human reason were perfect, there would be no bad behavior. And indeed, these are the three beliefs about conscience that have been held by much of the world throughout most of modern history. Their influence on the way we think about ourselves and other people, even today, is inestimable. The third belief is especially hard to let go of. Nearly a millennium after Aquinas made his pronouncement about synderesis, when someone consistently behaves in ways we find unconscionable, we call on an updated version of the “weak Reason” paradigm. We speculate that the offender has been deprived, or that his mind is disturbed, or that his early background makes him do it. We remain extremely reluctant to propose the more straightforward explanation that either God or nature simply failed to provide him with a conscience.

  For several hundred years, discussions about conscience tended to center around the relationship between human reason and divinely given moral knowledge. A few corollary debates were added, most recently the one over proportionalism, a divine loophole wherein Reason asks us to do something “bad” in order to bring about something else that is “good”—a “just war,” for example.

  But at the beginning of the twentieth century, conscience itself underwent a fundamental transformation, due to the growing acceptance in Europe and the United States of the theories of physician/scientist (and atheist) Sigmund Freud. Freud proposed that in the normal course of development, young children's minds acquired an internalized authority figure, called a superego, that would in time replace the actual external authority—the actual external authority being not God but one's own human parents. With his “discovery” of the superego, Freud effectively wrested conscience out of the hands of God and placed it in the anxious clutches of the all-too-human family. This change of address for conscience required some daunting shifts in our centuries-old worldview. Suddenly, our moral guides had feet of clay, and absolute Truth began to submit to the uncertainties of cultural relativism.

  Freud's new structural model of the mind did not involve a human part, a lion part, an ox part, and an eagle. Tripartite instead, his vision was of the superego, the ego, and the id. The id was composed of all the sexual and unthinking aggressive instincts we are born with, along with the biological appetites. As such, the id was often in conflict with the demands of a civilized society. In contrast, the ego was the rational, aware part of the mind. It could think logically, make plans, and remember, and because the ego was equipped in these ways, it could interact directly with society and, to varying degrees, get things done for the more primitive id. The superego grew out of the ego as the child incorporated the external rules of his or her parents and of society. The superego eventually became a freestanding force in the developing mind, unilaterally judging and directing the child's behaviors and thoughts. It was the commanding, guilt-brandishing inner voice that said no, even when nobody was around.

  The basic concept of superego makes common sense to us. We often observe children internalizing and even enforcing their parents' rules. (Mother frowns and says to her four-year-old daughter, “No shouting in the car.” A few minutes later, the same four-year-old points imperiously at her noisy two-year-old sister and shouts, “No shouting in the car!”) And most of us, as adults, have heard our own superego. Some of us hear it quite often, in fact. It is the voice in our heads that says to us, Idiot! Why'd you do that? or You know, if you don't finish this report tonight, you'll be sorry, or You'd better get your cholesterol checked. And in the story of Joe and Reebok, Joe's decision to miss his meeting could easily have been made by his superego. For purposes of illustration, let us speculate that Joe's pet-withholding father used to say to him when he was four, “No, little Joey, we can't get a dog. A dog is a tremendous responsibility. When you have a dog, you always have to interrupt what you're doing and take care of it.” Joe's adult decision to turn his car around could well have been directed by his superego, which insisted that he fulfill this very dictum.

  In a more abstruse manner, Freud himself might have wondered whether Joe's superego had caused Joe to set up his whole morning, unconsciously of course—being in too much of a hurry, forgetting to put out the dog food—such that his father's rule could be “proved,” and Joe “punished” for getting a pet. For in Freudian theory, the superego is not just a voice; it is an operator, a subtle and complex manipulator, a prover of points. It prosecutes, judges, and carries out sentences, and it does all this quite outside of our conscious awareness. While the superego, in the best case, can help the individual get along in society, it can also become the most overbearing and perhaps the most destructive part of his personality. According to psychoanalysts, an especially harsh superego, hammering away inside someone's head, can create a lifelong depression, or even propel its poor victim into suicide.

  And so Freud introduced the world to the decidedly secular notion that conscience might need to be repaired in some people, and that through psychoanalysis, one might actually repair it.

  In addition—more shocking still—Freud and his followers linked the final establishment of the superego to the child's resolution of the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex, sometimes called the Electra complex in girls, is formed when the young child begins to realize, between the ages of three and five, that he or she will never completely possess the parent of the opposite sex. In prosaic terms, boys must accept that they will not marry their mothers, and girls must accept that they will not marry their fathers. Oedipal struggles, and the resulting feelings of competition, fear, and resentment toward the parent of the same sex, are so powerful and dangerous to the child's family relationships, according to Freud, that they must be thoroughly “repressed” or kept from awareness, and this “repression” is made possible by a drastic strengthening of the young superego. From this point on, should any sexual feelings arise toward the parent of the opposite sex, or any rivalrous feelings toward the parent of the same sex, these feelings will be vanquished by the dreaded, ruthless weapon of the newly fortified superego—immediate, unbearable guilt. In this way, the superego gains its autonomy and its crowning advantage inside the mind of the child. It is a severe taskmaster installed to serve our need to remain a part of the group.

  Whatever else
one may think of such theorizing, credit must be given to Freud for understanding that our moral sense was not a one-size-fits-all hermetic code, but was instead dynamic, and intricately tied up with essential family and societal bonds. With his writings on the superego, Freud imparted to an awakening scientific world that our usual respect for law and order was not simply imposed on us from the outside. We obey the rules, we honor the virtues, primarily from an internal need that begins in infancy and early childhood to preserve and remain embraced by our families and the larger human society in which we live.

  Conscience Versus Superego

  Whether or not one believes that superego is an intrapsychic schemer, or that it is, to use Freud's words, “the heir to the Oedipus complex,” superego itself must be acknowledged as a rich and useful concept. As an inner voice acquired through our significant childhood relationships, commenting on our shortcomings and railing against our transgressions, superego is a feature of subjective experience that most people recognize easily. “Don't do that.” “You shouldn't feel that way.” “Be careful; you'll hurt yourself.” “Be nice to your sister.” “Clean up that mess you made.” “You can't afford to buy that.” “Well, that wasn't very smart, was it?” “You've just got to deal with it.” “Stop wasting time.” Superego yammers at us inside our minds every day of our lives. And some people's superegos are rather more insulting than others.

  Still, superego is not the same thing as conscience. It may feel like conscience subjectively, and may be one small part of what conscience is, but superego by itself is not conscience. This is because Freud, as he conceptualized the superego, threw out the baby with the bathwater, in a manner of speaking. In ejecting moral absolutism from psychological thought, he counted out something else too. Quite simply, Freud counted out love, and all of the emotions related to love. Though he often stated that children love their parents in addition to fearing them, the superego he wrote about was entirely fear-based. In his view, just as we fear our parents' stern criticisms when we are children, so do we fear the excoriating voice of superego later on. And fear is all. There is no place in the Freudian superego for the conscience-building effects of love, compassion, tenderness, or any of the more positive feelings.

  And conscience, as we have seen in Joe and Reebok, is an intervening sense of obligation based in our emotional attachments to others—all aspects of our emotional attachments—including most especially love, compassion, and tenderness. In fact, the seventh sense, in those individuals who possess it, is primarily love- and compassion-based. We have progressed, over the centuries, from faith in a God-directed synderesis, to a belief in a punitive parental superego, to an understanding that conscience is deeply and affectingly anchored in our ability to care about one another. This second progression—from a judge in the head to a mandate of the heart—involves less cynicism about human nature, more hope for us as a group, and also more personal responsibility and, at times, more personal pain.

  As an illustration, imagine that under some impossibly bizarre set of circumstances, one night you take temporary leave of your senses, sneak over to the house of an especially likable neighbor, and, for no particular reason, murder her cat. Just before daybreak, you recover your senses and realize what you have done. What do you feel? What is the specific nature of your guilty reaction? Unseen behind your living room curtain, you watch your neighbor come out to her front step and discover the cat. She falls to her knees. She scoops up her lifeless pet in her arms. She weeps for a very long time.

  What is the first thing that happens to you? Does a voice inside your head scream, Thou shalt not kill! You'll go to jail for this!—thus reminding you of the consequences to yourself? Or, instead, do you feel instantly sick that you have murdered an animal and made your neighbor cry in grief? In those first moments of watching your stricken neighbor, which reaction is more likely to befall you? It is a telling question. The answer will probably determine what course of action you will take, and also whether you are influenced only by the strident voice of your superego, or by a genuine conscience.

  The same kind of question applies to our old friend Joe. Does he decide to sacrifice his meeting because of the unconscious fear instilled in him in childhood by his father's opinions about dogs, or does he make the sacrifice because he feels awful when he thinks about Reebok's predicament? What directs his choice? Is it pure superego, or is it fully formed conscience? If it is conscience, then Joe's decision to be absent from a scheduled meeting at work is a minor illustration of the fact that, ironically, conscience does not always follow the rules. It places people (and sometimes animals) above codes of conduct and institutional expectations. Fortified with potent emotions, conscience is a glue that holds us together, and it is stickier than it is just. It cherishes humanistic ideals more than laws, and if push comes to shove, conscience may even go to prison. Superego would never do that.

  A strict superego berates us, saying, You're being naughty, or You're inadequate. A strong conscience insists, You must take care of him [or her or it or them], no matter what.

  Fear-based superego stays behind its dark curtain, accusing us and wringing its hands. Conscience propels us outward in the direction of other people, toward conscious action both minor and great. Attachment-based conscience causes the teenage mother to buy the little jar of creamed peas instead of her favorite fingernail polish. Conscience protects the privileges of intimacy, makes friends keep their promises, prevents the angered spouse from striking back. It induces the exhausted doctor to pick up the phone for his frightened patient at three in the morning. It blows whistles against institutions when lives are endangered. It takes to the streets to protest a war. Conscience is what makes the human rights worker risk her very life. When it is combined with surpassing moral courage, it is Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi.

  In small and large ways, genuine conscience changes the world. Rooted in emotional connectedness, it teaches peace and opposes hatred and saves children. It keeps marriages together and cleans up rivers and feeds dogs and gives gentle replies. It makes individual lives better and increases human dignity overall. It is real and compelling, and it would make us crawl out of our skin if we devastated our neighbor.

  The problem, as we are about to see, is that not everybody has it. In fact, 4 percent of all people do not have it. Let us turn now to a discussion of such a person—someone who simply has no conscience—and see what he looks like to us.

  TWO

  ice people: the sociopaths

  Conscience is the window of our spirit, evil is the curtain.

  —Doug Horton

  When Skip was growing up, his family had a vacation cottage by a small lake in the hills of Virginia, where they went for a part of each summer. They vacationed there from the time Skip was eight years old until he went away to high school in Massachusetts. Skip looked forward to his summers in Virginia. There was not a lot to do there, but the one activity he had invented was so much fun that it made up for the general lack of excitement. In fact, sometimes back at grade school in the winter, escaping into his own thoughts while some stupid teacher went on and on about something, he would get a picture of himself playing his game by the warm Virginia lake, and he would chuckle out loud.

  Skip was brilliant and handsome, even as a child. “Brilliant and handsome,” his parents and his parents' friends and even his teachers would remark over and over. And so they could not understand why his grades were so mediocre, or why, when the time came, he seemed to have so little interest in going out on dates. What they did not know was that from the age of eleven, Skip had been out with plenty of girls, but not quite in the way his parents and teachers were imagining. There was always someone, usually an older girl, who was willing to succumb to Skip's flattery and his charming smile. Often the girl would sneak him into her room, but sometimes he and a girl would simply find a secluded spot on a playground or under the bleachers at the softball field. As for his grades, he really w
as extremely smart—he could have made straight A-plusses—but getting C's was completely effortless, and so that was what he did. Occasionally, he would even get a B, which amused him, since he never studied. The teachers liked him, seemed to be almost as vulnerable to his smiles and his compliments as the girls were, and everyone assumed that young Skipper would end up at a good high school and then a decent college, despite his grades.

  His parents had a great deal of money, were “megarich,” as the other kids put it. On several occasions when he was about twelve, Skip sat at the antique rolltop desk his parents had bought for his bedroom, trying to calculate how much money he would get when they died. He based his calculations on some financial records he had stolen from his father's study. The records were confusing and incomplete, but even though he could not arrive at an exact figure, Skip could see clearly that someday he would be quite rich.

  Still, Skip had a problem. He was bored most of the time. The amusements he pursued, even the girls, even fooling the teachers, even thinking about his money, did not keep him energized for longer than half an hour or so. The family wealth held the most promise as an entertainment, but it was not under his control yet—he was still a child. No, the only real relief from boredom was the fun he could have in Virginia. Vacations were a very good time. That first summer, when he was eight, he had simply stabbed the bullfrogs with a scissors, for want of another method. He had discovered that he could take a net from the fishing shed and capture the frogs easily from the mud banks of the lake. He would hold them down on their backs, stab their bulging stomachs, and then turn them back over to watch their stupid jelly eyes go dead as they bled out. Then he would hurl the corpses as far out into the lake as he could, yelling at the dead frogs as they flew, “Too bad for you, you little fuck-face froggy!”