Free The Runner by David Samuels Page A

the sham and hollowness which cynical
    commentators have immemorially pointed out in life may come from contact in serious issues
    with persons affected in some serious degree by the disorder we are trying to describe. The fake poet who really feels little; the painter who, despite his loftiness, had his eye chiefly on the lucrative fad of his day; the fashionable clergyman who, despite his burning eloquence or his lively castigation of the devil, is primarily concerned with his advancement; the flirt who can readily awaken love but cannot feel love or recognize its absence; parents who, despite smooth convictions that they have only the child’s welfare at heart, actually reject him except as it suits their own petty or selfish aims. . . .

    Sanity, the outward show of understanding and adhering to social norms, was a mask that
    these exiles from a shared humanity could put on when necessary, and throw off when feeling loony, unsettled, or bored. The price of this masquerade was a deep loneliness and an inability to make meaningful and fulfilling contact with others. While the absence of guilt made it possible for Cleckley’s sociopaths to deceive others with ease, the lack of a shared connection with normal human emotion made it difficult for the sociopath to sustain his masquerade for long periods of time. Sooner or later, his shallow acquaintance with socially connected emotions like guilt, love, and loss would land him in jail or a mental hospital.

    Part of the pleasure of reading Cleckley is that sociopaths, and psychopaths, really do
    exist. The other pleasure of reading Cleckley is that the joke is as often on us as it is on them.
    The longer you think about Cleckley’s case histories, the harder it gets to keep friends and co-workers and spouses off the list. Published in 1941, as the world teetered on the brink of madness, Cleckley’s book was less the product of a strict scientific methodology than a kind of inspired backwater guess about the strictly conventional nature of social behavior that would become commonplace after the war in the work of hipster urban sociologists like Erving
    Goff-man, for whom all social behavior might be profitably analyzed using the model of the
    relationship between the con man and his mark.

    I asked Walraven if he thinks that Hogue might have used his education to do some good
    in the world if Princeton University hadn’t thrown him out before he graduated.

    “I don’t think it would have been as simple as, ‘I’m gonna get a house with a white picket
    fence,’ “ he said. “He’d have been one of those involved in one of those other big frauds,
    whether it be Enron or something else.” The reason criminals like Hogue get caught, he said, is not because police officers are so dogged in their investigations, but because the criminals are unable to stop. “I’ve seen people get away with stuff for five years that are committing fraud and embezzlement, and then they get too comfortable,” he said. “This morning I was listening on the radio to a guy who had won the three-hundred-million dollar lottery. You know, he ain’t got a penny left, and he’s still writing bad checks. He had a hundred and ten million dollars that he wasted.” Behind him were boxes filled with papers and three large binders of photographs and stolen property reports related to Hogue that Walraven occasionally consults as we speak in order to refresh his mind about the details of particular cases.

    Walraven estimates that Hogue stole over seven thousand items worth over $100,000. I
    asked the detective why he is pursuing Hogue for an admittedly huge accumulation of essentially victimless crimes—where no one was hurt in any lasting way, where insurance companies
    generally covered the losses, and even Hogue appeared to be baffled as to how he might benefit directly from his actions. Because Telluride is a resort town, he answered, property crimes pose a direct threat to the local economy.