Free The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout PhD

in the language of the American Psychiatric Association—is a cornerstone of the antisocial personality diagnosis. Skip illustrated this aspect of his personality when he explained that the employee whose arm he broke had actually broken her own arm when she did not submit to him readily enough. People without conscience provide endless examples of such stunning “I've done nothing wrong” statements. One of the most famous is a quotation from Chicago's sadistic Prohibition gangster, Al Capone: “I am going to St. Petersburg, Florida, tomorrow. Let the worthy citizens of Chicago get their liquor the best they can. I'm sick of the job—it's a thankless one and full of grief. I've been spending the best years of my life as a public benefactor.” Other sociopaths do not bother with such convoluted reasoning, or they are not in commanding-enough positions to have anyone listen to their outrageous logic. Instead, when confronted with a destructive outcome that is clearly their doing, they will say, plain and simple, “I never did that,” and will to all appearances believe their own direct lie. This feature of sociopathy makes self-awareness impossible, and in the end, just as the sociopath has no genuine relationships with other people, he has only a very tenuous one with himself.
    If anything, people without conscience tend to believe their way of being in the world is superior to ours. They often speak of the naïveté of other people and their ridiculous scruples, or of their curiosity about why so many people are unwilling to manipulate others, even in the service of their most important ambitions. Or they theorize that all people are the same—unscrupulous, like them—but are dishonestly playacting something mythical called “conscience.” By this latter proposition, the only straightforward and honest people in the world are they themselves. They are being “real” in a society of phonies.
    Still, I believe that somewhere buried safely away from consciousness, there may be a faint internal murmuring that something is missing, something that other people have. I say this because I have heard sociopaths speak of feeling “empty” or even “hollow.” And I say this because what sociopaths envy, and may seek to destroy as a part of the game, is usually something in the character structure of a person with conscience, and strong characters are often specially targeted by sociopaths. And most of all, I say this because it is human beings who are targeted, rather than the earth itself, or some aspect of the material world. Sociopaths want to play their games with other people. They are not so much interested in challenges from the inanimate. Even the destruction of the World Trade towers was mainly about the people who were in them, and the people who would see and hear about the catastrophe. This simple but crucial observation implies that, in sociopathy, there remains some innate identification with other human beings, a tie with the species itself. However, this thin inborn connection, which enables envy, is one-dimensional and sterile, especially when contrasted with the vast array of complex and highly charged emotional responses most people have to one another and to their fellow human beings as a group.
    If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all. And with the wholesale denial of your true impact on other people, how would you understand who you were? Once again, you would not. Like Super Skip himself, Super Skip's mirror can tell only lies. His glass does not show him the iciness of his soul, and the Skip who spent his childhood summers mutilating bullfrogs by an otherwise-peaceful Virginia lake