It could be anyone, argues Ms. Stout, an American psychologist at Harvard: your boss, your co-worker, your friend, your father. According to the the Mclean Hospital, in a random sampling of 25 people that you know,odds are that lineup will include a sociopath. When the condition was first diagnosed, it was called Guiltlessness, an accurate summation of a neurological pathology which liberates its sufferers from the burden of a conscience. No guilt, no shame, no remorse, no compassion... Without these emotions, one cannot experience empathy. And if one cannot experience empathy, then one cannot experience humility. It's difficult, it turns out, to have humility when ones worldview is reduced to the strong versus the weak, the superior versus the inferior, the smart versus the thick.
Ms. Stout does a wonderful job frightening the reader half to death by describing, in vivid, eerie detail, the powers of a sociopath. Unencumbered by debilitating emotions, they are free to manipulate those around them in the cruellest and most brazen of ways. And they do love to manipulate. Rather than suppress their desire to compete, the absence of a conscience turns sociopaths hyper-competitive, driven by a need to demonstrate their superiority. They will use anyone necessary to achieve their ascendance because, to them, superiority is all that matters. Ms. Stout fills in her description of Sociopathy and its role in our society with disturbing portrayals of personal cases in which she has offered therapy to the victims of Sociopathy, men and women so twisted round in knots by their tormenters that they often don't even believe that they've been victimized. To think that such powerful and unchained minds operate throughout society, at every level of government, business, education, finance, sends a chill down the spine.
How true are Ms. Stout's claims? Reading her account of sociopaths leaves one with the strong impression that civilization should have long ago collapsed under the weight of millions of crushed personalities, that the perniciousness of this mental illness is a rampant and untreated malignancy that's metastasized through society. And yet we're all still here, notionally healthy, many of us the fortunate beneficiaries of loyal families. So where's the damage? Ms. Stout argues that the perpetrators are, of course, largely confined to very specific circles of society, positions of high power which convey upon the sociopath the legitimacy they crave. But of course, there's no way to prove this. All humans manipulate. Even if sociopaths are better at it than we are, thanks to their ruthlessness, how much better? How much better does one have to be to be considered a sociopath? These questions make it difficult to measure their impact, let alone put a hard number on how many of them breathe our air and operate our institutions.
This is a powerful and unnerving book, filled with real examples of damage done to good people by sociopaths.. To the extent that it raises awareness of this cruel condition, Ms. Stout has done good here, discussing at various points ways to both recognize and cope with a sociopath. But she does seem to suffer from an affliction common to authors of non-fiction, a tendency to over-inflate the importance of their subject matter. This is almost inevitable when we consider how much time must be invested to research their subjects. Nonetheless, it is an ailment to which Ms. Stout is not immune. This is good and edifying work, but I wonder if the world is just a bit more sane than Ms. Stout would have us believe. (3/5 Stars)
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