The Sociopath Next Door Page 5

  There were so many frogs in that lake. He could spend hours at a time killing them, and still it looked as if there were hundreds and hundreds of them left for tomorrow. But by the end of that first summer, Skip had decided that he could do better. He was tired of stabbing the frogs. It would be so great to blow them up, to have something that would make the fat little squirmers explode, and toward this end he had a really good plan. He knew plenty of older boys back home, and one in particular he knew took a family trip to South Carolina during spring break every April. Skip had heard that fireworks were for sale and easy to get in South Carolina. With a little bribe from Skip, his friend Tim would buy him some fireworks there and smuggle them home in the bottom of his suitcase. Tim would be scared to do it, but with a pep talk from Skip, and enough money, he would. Next summer, Skip would have not scissors but fireworks!

  Finding cash around the house was no problem, and the plan worked like a charm. That April, he came up with two hundred dollars for a fireworks variety pack called “Star-Spangled Banner,” which he had seen in a gun magazine, and another one hundred dollars to sweeten the deal for Tim. And when Skip finally got his hands on the package, it was a beautiful thing. He had chosen “Star-Spangled Banner” because it contained the largest number of devices small enough to fit, or almost fit, into the mouth of a bullfrog. There was a supply of tiny Roman candles; and some “Lady Fingers,” which were slim little red firecrackers; and a bunch of one-inch shells called “Wizards”; and his favorite, some two-inch shells in a box labeled “Mortal Destruction,” which had a skull and crossbones blazoned on the front.

  That summer, he shoved the devices, one by one, into the mouths of the captured frogs, ignited them, and threw the frogs high into the air over the lake. Or sometimes he would put the ignited frog down, run off, and watch from a distance as the animal exploded on the ground. The displays were magnificent—blood, goo, lights, sometimes a big noise and those colorful flowerlike shapes. So wonderful were the results that soon he began to crave an audience for his genius. One afternoon, he enticed his six-year-old sister, Claire, down to the lake, let her help him capture one of the frogs, and then before her eyes, made an airborne explosion of it. Claire screamed hysterically and ran as fast as her legs would carry her back to the house.

  The family's stately “cottage” sat about half a mile from the lake, beyond a serene stand of hundred-foot hemlocks. This was not so far away that Skip's parents had not heard explosive noises, and they imagined that Skipper must be setting off fireworks by the lake. But they had long since realized that he was not the sort of child who could be controlled, and that they needed to choose their battles very carefully. The fireworks issue was not one they chose to deal with, not even when six-year-old Claire came running in to tell her mother that Skipper was blowing up frogs. Skip's mother turned up the record player in the library as loud as it would go, and Claire tried to hide her cat, Emily.

  Super Skip

  Skip is sociopathic. He has no conscience—no intervening sense of obligation based in emotional attachments to others—and his later life, which we will get to in a moment, provides an instructive example of what an intelligent adult without a conscience can look like.

  Just as it is difficult to imagine how we would feel if we had no conscience at all, so it is very hard to use one's imagination to construct an accurate picture of such a person. Amoral and uncaring, does he end up isolated on the edges of society? Does he constantly threaten and snarl and quite possibly drool, devoid as he is of such a fundamental human characteristic? One might easily imagine that Skip grew up to be a killer. In the end, perhaps he murdered his parents for their money. Maybe he wound up dead himself, or in the bowels of a maximum-security prison. Sounds likely, but nothing of the kind actually happened. Skip is still alive, he has never killed anyone, not directly at least, and—so far—he has not seen the inside of any prison. To the contrary, though he has not yet inherited his parents' money, he has become successful and richer than a king. And if you met him now, encountered him as a stranger in a restaurant or on the street, he would look like any other well-groomed middle-aged fellow in a pricey business suit.

  How could this possibly be? Did he have a recovery? Did he get better? No. In truth, he got worse. He became Super Skip.

  With passing, if not stellar, grades, his charm, and his family's influence, Skip did indeed get into that good boarding school in Massachusetts, and his family breathed a sigh of relief, both for his acceptance by the school and for his relative absence from their lives. His teachers still found him charismatic, but his mother and sister had learned that he was manipulative and spooky. Claire would sometimes speak of “Skipper's weird eyes,” and her mother would give her a defeated look that said, I don't want to talk about it. Most everyone else saw only a handsome young face.

  When college came around, Skip was accepted into his father's alma mater (and his grandfather's before that), where he became legendary as a party boy and a ladies' man. Graduating with his customary C average, he entered an MBA program at a less prestigious institution, because he had figured out that the business world was a place where he might master the game easily and amuse himself using his natural skills. His grades got no better, but his lifelong ability to charm people and get them to do what he wanted became more refined.

  When he was twenty-six, he joined the Arika Corporation, a company that made blasting, drilling, and loading equipment for metal-ore mines. He had intense blue eyes and a stunning smile at all the right moments, and to his new employers he seemed almost magically talented at motivating sales representatives and influencing contacts. For his part, Skip had discovered that manipulating educated adults was no harder than it had been to convince his young friend Tim to buy fireworks in South Carolina, and of course lying, in increasingly elegant ways, came as easily as breathing. Even better, chronically bored Skip relished the pressures of fast-track risk taking and was more than willing to take the big chances that no one else would. Before his third anniversary at the company, he had gone after the copper in Chile and the gold in South Africa, eventually making Arika into the world's third-largest vendor of both shaft and open-pit mining equipment. Arika's founder, whom Skip privately viewed as a fool, was so enchanted with Skip that he gave him a new Ferrari GTB as a “corporate gift.”

  When he was thirty, Skip married Juliette, the lovely, soft-spoken twenty-three-year-old daughter of a celebrated billionaire who had made his fortune in oil exploration. Skip made sure that Juliette's father saw him as the brilliant, ambitious son he had never had. Skip saw his billionaire father-in-law as what he was, a ticket to just about everything. And, quite accurately, he saw his new wife, Juliette, as a sweet, repressed gentlewoman who would thoroughly accept her role as wife and social coordinator, and who would pretend not to know that Skip's life remained just as devoid of personal responsibility and full of random sexual encounters as it had ever been. She would be attractive and respectable on his arm, and she would keep her mouth shut.

  A week before the wedding, Skip's mother, already feeling closer to Juliette than to Skip, wearily inquired of her son, “This marriage . . . Do you really need to do this to her life?” Skip started to ignore her, as he usually did. But then he was apparently struck by something funny, and he replied to her protest with an ear-to-ear grin. “We both know she'll never know what hit her,” he said. Skip's mother looked confused for a moment, and then she shuddered.

  Married, socially ensconced, and bringing in close to $80 million a year for Arika, Skip was made president of its international division and a member of the board before his thirty-sixth birthday. By this time, he and Juliette had two little girls, completing his public disguise as a family man. His contributions to the business came with a certain price, but nothing that could not be handled in a cost-efficient manner. Employees sometimes complained that he was “insulting” or “vicious,” and Arika was sued when a secretary claimed he had broken her arm while trying to for
ce her to sit in his lap. The case was settled out of court with fifty thousand dollars and a gag order for the secretary. Fifty thousand dollars was nothing to the company, relatively speaking. He was “Super Skip,” and his employer understood that he was well worth the upkeep.

  Of the incident, Skip later remarked privately, “She's insane. She broke her own arm. She struggled with me, the stupid bitch. Why the hell did she put up such a fight?”

  After the secretary, there were additional charges of sexual misconduct, but Skip was so valuable to the organization that each time a problem came up, Arika simply disbursed another check to make sure it went away. The other board members began to refer to him as their “company prima donna.” As the years passed, he received grants of more than 1 million shares, making him the second-largest individual shareholder, after Arika's founder. And in 2001, at the age of fifty-one, Skip took over as chief executive.

  More recently, some of his problems have become slightly less manageable, but with his usual arrogance, Skip is confident he will land on his feet—perhaps a little too confident. In 2003, he was accused of fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission. He denied the charge, of course, and at present the decision of the SEC is pending.

  Playing the Game

  No, Skip was not consigned to the edges of society, he does not drool, and he is not (yet) in prison. In fact, he is rich and, in many circles, respected—or at least feared, which masquerades brilliantly as respect. So what is wrong with this picture? Or perhaps the question should be: What is the worst part of this picture, the central flaw in Skip's life that makes him into a tragedy despite his success, and into the maker of tragedies for so many others? It is this: Skip has no emotional attachments to other people, none at all. He is cold as ice.

  His mother is there to be ignored, or sometimes baited. His sister is there to be tormented. Other women are sexual plunder and nothing more. He has been waiting since childhood for his father to do only one thing—to die and leave his money to Skip. His employees are there to be manipulated and used, as his friends have always been. His wife and even his children are meant for the eyes of the world. They are camouflage. Skip is intellectually gifted, and he is fabulous at the gamesmanship of business. But by far his most impressive talent is his ability to conceal from nearly everyone the true emptiness of his heart—and to command the passive silence of those few who do know.

  Most of us are irrationally influenced by appearance, and Skipper has always looked good. He knows just how to smile. He is charming, and we can readily imagine him showering flattery on the boss who gave him the Ferrari, meanwhile thinking him the fool, and underneath it all being incapable of gratitude toward anyone. He lies artfully and constantly, with absolutely no sense of guilt that might give him away in body language or facial expression. He uses sexuality as manipulation and hides his emotional vacancy behind various respectable roles—corporate superstar, son-in-law, husband, father—which are nearly impenetrable disguises.

  And if the charm and the sexuality and the role playing somehow fail, Skip uses fear, a sure winner. His iciness is fundamentally scary. Robert Hare writes, “Many people find it difficult to deal with the intense, emotionless, or ‘predatory' stare of the psychopath,” and for some of the more sensitive people in his life, Skip's intense blue eyes, the ones his sister sees as “weird,” may well be those of the dispassionate hunter gazing at his psychological prey. If so, the result will probably be silence.

  For even if you know about him, know what his heart is like, and have caught on to his modus operandi, how will you call him out? Whom can you possibly tell, and what will you say? “He's a liar”? “He's crazy”? “He raped me in his office”? “He's got spooky eyes”? “He used to kill frogs”? But this is a leader of the community, in an Armani suit. This is Juliette's beloved husband, and the father of two. This man is the CEO of the Arika Corporation, for goodness sake! Just what are you accusing him of, and what proof do you have? Who is going to sound crazier—chief executive Skip, or his accuser? And sealing his invulnerability, there are those who need Skip to be around for one reason or another, including people who are wealthy and powerful. Are they going to care what you say?

  In his unassailability, and in many other ways, Skip is an exemplary sociopath. He has, in the words of the American Psychiatric Association, “a greater than normal need for stimulation,” and so he often takes big risks, and he guiltlessly charms others into taking them, too. He has a history of undocumented childhood “behavior problems,” obscured by his parents' social privilege. He is deceitful and manipulative. He can be impulsively aggressive with “a reckless disregard for the safety of others,” as he was with the employee whose arm he broke, and with the other women whose stories will never be heard. Perhaps the only classic “symptom” Skip does not exhibit is substance abuse. The closest he ever comes to that is one too many scotches after dinner. Otherwise, the picture is complete. He is not genuinely interested in bonding with anyone, he is consistently irresponsible, and he has no remorse.

  And so how does all of this turn in his mind? What makes him tick? What exactly does Skip want?

  Most of us have other people to motivate us and to populate our desires. People drive our wishes and our dreams. People who live with us, people who are far away, beloved people who have died, aggravating people who will not leave, places made sentimental by whom we knew there, even our pets—these fill our hearts and our thoughts. Even the most introverted among us is defined by her relationships, and preoccupied with reactions to and feelings about, antipathies and affections for, other people. Emotional intrigue, romance, nurturing, rejection, and reunion comprise nearly all of our literature and song. We are overwhelmingly relational creatures, and this is true all the way back to our primate ancestors. Jane Goodall says the chimpanzees she observed in Gombe “have a rich repertoire of behaviours that serve to maintain or restore social harmony. . . . The embracing, kissing, patting and holding of hands that serve as greetings after separation . . . The long, peaceful sessions of relaxed social grooming. The sharing of food. The concern for the sick or wounded.” And so without our primordial attachments to others, what would we be?

  Evidently, we would be the players of a game, one that resembled a giant chess match, with our fellow human beings as the rooks, the knights, and the pawns. For this is the essence of sociopathic behavior and desire. The only thing Skip really wants—the only thing left—is to win.

  Skip does not spend any time searching for someone to love. He cannot love. He does not worry about friends or family members who may be sick or in trouble, because he cannot worry about other people. He cares nothing for others, and so he cannot enjoy telling his parents or his wife about his many successes in the business world. He can have dinner with whomever he pleases, but he cannot share the moment with anyone at all. And when his children were born, he was not scared, but neither was he excited. He can derive no real joy from being with them, or from watching them grow up.

  But there is one thing Skip can do, and he does this one thing better than almost anyone else: Skip is brilliant at winning. He can dominate. He can bend others to his will. When he was a boy, the frogs died when he decided they should die, his sister screamed when he wanted her to, and now he has gone on to bigger and better games. In a world where people struggle just to make a living, Skip convinced others to make him rich before he was thirty. He can make fools of his well-educated employers and even his billionaire father-in-law. He can cause these otherwise-sophisticated people to jump, and then laugh at them behind their backs. He influences large financial decisions on an international playing field, can turn most such arrangements to his own advantage, and no one protests. Or if someone does complain, he can cut that person off at the knees with just a well-placed word or two. He can frighten people, assault them, break an arm, ruin a career, and his wealthy colleagues will fall all over themselves making sure he never pays the penalties any ordinary person would pay. He believe
s he can have any woman he wants, and manipulate any man he comes across, including, most recently, everyone at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

  He is Super Skip. Strategies and payoffs are the only thrills he knows, and he has spent his entire life getting better at the game. For Skip, the game is everything, and though he is too shrewd to say so, he thinks the rest of us are naïve and stupid for not playing it his way. And this is exactly what happens to the human mind when emotional attachment and conscience are missing. Life is reduced to a contest, and other human beings seem to be nothing more than game pieces, to be moved about, used as shields, or ejected.

  Of course, few individuals equal Skip in the level of his IQ or in his physical appearance. By definition, most people, including sociopaths, are average in intelligence and looks, and the games that average sociopaths play are not in the same elite league as Super Skip's global competitions. Many contemporary psychologists, myself included, recall first learning about psychopathy from an educational movie on the subject, viewed when we were college students in the 1970s. The nebbishy case study in the movie is remembered as “Stamp Man,” because he devoted his whole life to the unlikely project of stealing postage stamps from United States post offices. He was not interested in possessing the stamps, or in selling them for cash. His only ambition was to execute a simple break-in at night and then find a spot a little distance from the post office he had just robbed, where he could watch the frenzy of the first employees to enter the building in the morning, followed by the emergency arrival of the police. Skinny, pale, and mouselike, the man interviewed in the movie was anything but scary. His intelligence was average at most, and he could never have played Skip's grand international game, with its masterful strategies and billionaire opponents. But he could play his own game, and psychologically, his simple stamp-stealing game was surprisingly similar to Skip's corporate one.