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2008-12-09 00:32:48 UTC
The truth about the Talmud.
A Documented Exposé of Supremacist Rabbinic Hate Literature
http://www.revisionisthistory.org/talmudtruth.html
The Sociopath Nextdoor:
The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us
Who is the devil you know?
Is it your lying, cheating ex-husband?
Your sadistic high school gym teacher?
Your boss who loves to humiliate people in meetings?
The colleague who stole your idea and passed it off as her own?
In the pages of The Sociopath Next Door, you will realize that your ex was
not just misunderstood. Hes a sociopath. And your boss, teacher, and
colleague? They may be sociopaths too.
We are accustomed to think of sociopaths as violent criminals, but in The
Sociopath Next Door, Harvard psychologist Martha Stout reveals that a
shocking 4 percent of ordinary peopleone in twenty-fivehas an often
undetected mental disorder, the chief symptom of which is that that person
possesses no conscience. He or she has no ability whatsoever to feel shame,
guilt, or remorse. One in twenty-five everyday Americans, therefore, is
secretly a sociopath. They could be your colleague, your neighbor, even
family. And they can do literally anything at all and feel absolutely no
guilt.
How do we recognize the remorseless? One of their chief characteristics is a
kind of glow or charisma that makes sociopaths more charming or interesting
than the other people around them. Theyre more spontaneous, more intense,
more complex, or even sexier than everyone else, making them tricky to
identify and leaving us easily seduced. Fundamentally, sociopaths are
different because they cannot love. Sociopaths learn early on to show sham
emotion, but underneath they are indifferent to others suffering. They live
to dominate and thrill to win.
The fact is, we all almost certainly know at least one or more sociopaths
already. Part of the urgency in reading The Sociopath Next Door is the
moment when we suddenly recognize that someone we knowsomeone we worked
for, or were involved with, or voted foris a sociopath. But what do we do
with that knowledge? To arm us against the sociopath, Dr. Stout teaches us
to question authority, suspect flattery, and beware the pity play. Above
all, she writes, when a sociopath is beckoning, do not join the game.
It is the ruthless versus the rest of us, and The Sociopath Next Door will
show you how to recognize and defeat the devil you know.
Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
Minds differ still more than faces.
--Voltaire
Imagine--if you can--not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of
guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the
well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no
struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what
kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken. And pretend
that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden
others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools. Now add to this
strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your
psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone
simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the
fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless. You are not held
back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never
confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins
is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they
seldom even guess at your condition.
In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your
unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is
conveniently invisible to the world. You can do anything at all, and still
your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by
their consciences, will most likely remain undiscovered.
How will you live your life? What will you do with your huge and secret
advantage, and with the corresponding handicap of other people (conscience)?
The answer will depend largely on just what your desires happen to be,
because people are not all the same. Even the profoundly unscrupulous are
not all the same. Some people-- whether they have a conscience or not--
favor the ease of inertia, while others are filled with dreams and wild
ambitions. Some human beings are brilliant and talented, some are
dull-witted, and most, conscience or not, are somewhere in between. There
are violent people and nonviolent ones, individuals who are motivated by
bloodlust and those who have no such appetites.
Maybe you are someone who craves money and power, and though you have no
vestige of conscience, you do have a magnificent IQ. You have the driving
nature and the intellectual capacity to pursue tremendous wealth and
influence, and you are in no way moved by the nagging voice of conscience
that prevents other people from doing everything and anything they have to
do to succeed. You choose business, politics, the law, banking,
international development, or any of a broad array of other power
professions, and you pursue your career with a cold passion that tolerates
none of the usual moral or legal incumbrances. When it is expedient, you
doctor the accounting and shred the evidence, you stab your employees and
your clients (or your constituency) in the back, marry for money, tell
lethal premeditated lies to people who trust you, attempt to ruin colleagues
who are powerful or eloquent, and simply steam-roll over groups who are
dependent and voiceless. And all of this you do with the exquisite freedom
that results from having no conscience whatsoever.
You become unimaginably, unassailably, and maybe even globally successful.
Why not? With your big brain, and no conscience to rein in your schemes, you
can do anything at all.
Or no--let us say you are not quite such a person. You are ambitious, yes,
and in the name of success you are willing to do all manner of things that
people with conscience would never consider, but you are not an
intellectually gifted individual. Your intelligence is above average
perhaps, and people think of you as smart, maybe even very smart. But you
know in your heart of hearts that you do not have the cognitive wherewithal,
or the creativity, to reach the careening heights of power you secretly
dream about, and this makes you resentful of the world at large, and envious
of the people around you.
As this sort of person, you ensconce yourself in a niche, or maybe a series
of niches, in which you can have some amount of control over small numbers
of people. These situations satisfy a little of your desire for power,
although you are chronically aggravated at not having more. It chafes to be
so free of the ridiculous inner voice that inhibits others from achieving
great power, without having enough talent to pursue the ultimate successes
yourself. Sometimes you fall into sulky, rageful moods caused by a
frustration that no one but you understands.
But you do enjoy jobs that afford you a certain undersupervised control over
a few individuals or small groups, preferably people and groups who are
relatively helpless or in some way vulnerable. You are a teacher or a
psychotherapist, a divorce lawyer or a high school coach. Or maybe you are a
consultant of some kind, a broker or a gallery owner or a human services
director. Or maybe you do not have a paid position, and are instead the
president of your condominium association, or a volunteer hospital worker,
or a parent. Whatever your job, you manipulate and bully the people who are
under your thumb, as often and as outrageously as you can without getting
fired or held accountable. You do this for its own sake, even when it serves
no purpose except to give you a thrill. Making people jump means you have
power-- or this is the way you see it-- and bullying provides you with an
adrenaline rush. It is fun.
Maybe you cannot be the CEO of a multinational corporation, but you can
frighten a few people, or cause them to scurry around like chickens, or
steal from them, or--maybe best of all--create situations that cause them to
feel bad about themselves. And this is power, especially when the people you
manipulate are superior to you in some way. Most invigorating of all is to
bring down people who are smarter or more accomplished than you, or perhaps
classier, more attractive or popular or morally admirable. This is not only
good fun--it is existential vengeance. And without a conscience, it is
amazingly easy to do. You quietly lie to the boss or to the bosss boss, cry
some crocodile tears, or sabotage a coworkers project, or gaslight a
patient (or a child), bait people with promises, or provide a little
misinformation that will never be traced back to you.
Or now let us say you are a person who has a proclivity for violence or for
seeing violence done. You can simply murder your coworker, or have her
murdered--or your boss, or your ex-spouse, or your wealthy lovers spouse,
or anyone else who bothers you. You have to be careful, because if you slip
up you may be caught and punished by the system. But you will never be
confronted by your conscience, because you have no conscience. If you decide
to kill, the only difficulties will be the external ones. Nothing inside of
you will ever protest.
Provided you are not forcibly stopped, you can do anything at all. If you
are born at the right time, with some access to family fortune, and you have
a special talent for whipping up other peoples hatred and sense of
deprivation, you can arrange to kill large numbers of unsuspecting people.
With enough money, you can accomplish this from far away, and you can sit
back safely and watch in satisfaction. In fact, terrorism (done from a
distance) is the ideal occupation for a person who is possessed of bloodlust
and no conscience, because if you do it just right, you may be able to make
a whole nation jump. And if that is not power, what is?
Or let us imagine the opposite extreme--you have no interest in power. To
the contrary, you are the sort of person who really does not want much of
anything. Your only real ambition is not to have to exert yourself to get
by. You do not want to work like everyone else does. Without a conscience,
you can nap or pursue your hobbies or watch television or just hang out
somewhere all day long. Living a bit on the fringes, and with some handouts
from relatives and friends, you can do this indefinitely. People may whisper
to each other that you are an underachiever, or that you are depressed, a
sad case, or in contrast, if they get angry, they may grumble that you are
lazy. When they get to know you better, and get really angry, they may
scream at you and call you a loser, a bum. But it will never occur to them
that you literally do not have a conscience, that in such a fundamental way,
your very mind is not the same as theirs.
The panicked feeling of a guilty conscience never squeezes at your heart or
wakes you in the middle of the night. Despite your lifestyle, you never feel
irresponsible, neglectful, or so much as embarrassed, although for the sake
of appearances, sometimes you pretend that you do. For example, if you are a
decent observer of people and what they react to, you may adopt a lifeless
facial expression, say how ashamed of your life you are, and talk about how
rotten you feel. This you do only because it is more convenient to have
people think you are depressed than it is to have them shouting at you all
the time, or insisting that you get a job.
You notice that people who do have a conscience feel guilty when they
harangue someone they believe to be depressed or troubled. As a matter
of fact, to your further advantage, they often feel obliged to take care of
such a person. If, despite your relative poverty, you can manage to get
yourself into a sexual relationship with someone, this person--who does not
suspect what you are really like--may feel particularly obligated. And since
all you want is not to have to work, your financier does not have to be
especially rich, just reliably conscience-bound.
I trust that imagining yourself as any of these people feels insane to you,
because such people are insane, dangerously so. Insane but real--they even
have a label. Many mental health professionals refer to the condition of
little or no conscience as antisocial personality disorder, a
noncorrectable disfigurement of character that is now thought to be present
in about four percent of the population--that is to say, one in twenty-five
people. This condition of missing conscience is called by other names too,
most often sociopathy, or the somewhat more familiar term, psychopathy.
Guiltlessness was in fact the first personality disorder to be recognized by
psychiatry, and terms that have been used at times over the past century
include manie sans délire, psychopathic inferiority, moral insanity,
and moral imbecility.
According to the current bible of psychiatric labels, the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV of the American Psychiatric
Association, the clinical diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder
should be considered when an individual possesses at least three of the
following seven characteristics: (1) failure to conform to social norms; (2)
deceitfulness, manipulativeness; (3) impulsivity, failure to plan ahead; (4)
irritability, aggressiveness; (5) reckless disregard for the safety of self
or others; (6) consistent irresponsibility; (7) lack of remorse after having
hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another person. The presence in an
individual of any three of these symptoms, taken together, is enough to
make many psychiatrists suspect the disorder.
Other researchers and clinicians, many of whom think the APAs definition
describes simple criminality better than true psychopathy or
sociopathy, point to additional documented characteristics of sociopaths
as a group. One of the more frequently observed of these traits is a glib
and superficial charm that allows the true sociopath to seduce other people,
figuratively or literally--a kind of glow or charisma that, initially, can
make the sociopath seem more charming or more interesting than most of the
normal people around him. He or she is more spontaneous, or more intense, or
somehow more complex, or sexier, or more entertaining than everyone else.
Sometimes this sociopathic charisma is accompanied by a grandiose sense of
self-worth that may be compelling at first, but upon closer inspection may
seem odd or perhaps laughable. (Someday the world will realize how special
I am, or You know that after me, no other lover will do.)
In addition, sociopaths have a greater than normal need for stimulation,
which results in their taking frequent social, physical, financial, or legal
risks. Characteristically, they can charm others into attempting dangerous
ventures with them, and as a group they are known for their pathological
lying and conning, and their parasitic relationships with friends.
Regardless of how educated or highly placed as adults, they may have a
history of early behavior problems, sometimes including drug use or recorded
juvenile delinquency, and always including a failure to acknowledge
responsibility for any problems that occurred.
And sociopaths are noted especially for their shallowness of emotion, the
hollow and transient nature of any affectionate feelings they may claim to
have, a certain breathtaking callousness. They have no trace of empathy and
no genuine interest in bonding emotionally with a mate. Once the surface
charm is scraped off, their marriages are loveless, one-sided, and almost
always short-term. If a marriage partner has any value to the sociopath, it
is because the partner is viewed as a possession, one that the sociopath may
feel angry to lose, but never sad or accountable.
All of these characteristics, along with the symptoms listed by the
American Psychiatric Association, are the behavioral manifestations of what
is for most of us an unfathomable psychological condition, the absence of
our essential seventh sense-- conscience.
Crazy, and frightening-- and real, in about four percent of the population.
From the Hardcover edition.
http://www.ebooks.com/ebooks/book_display.asp?IID=210219
A Documented Exposé of Supremacist Rabbinic Hate Literature
http://www.revisionisthistory.org/talmudtruth.html
The Sociopath Nextdoor:
The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us
Who is the devil you know?
Is it your lying, cheating ex-husband?
Your sadistic high school gym teacher?
Your boss who loves to humiliate people in meetings?
The colleague who stole your idea and passed it off as her own?
In the pages of The Sociopath Next Door, you will realize that your ex was
not just misunderstood. Hes a sociopath. And your boss, teacher, and
colleague? They may be sociopaths too.
We are accustomed to think of sociopaths as violent criminals, but in The
Sociopath Next Door, Harvard psychologist Martha Stout reveals that a
shocking 4 percent of ordinary peopleone in twenty-fivehas an often
undetected mental disorder, the chief symptom of which is that that person
possesses no conscience. He or she has no ability whatsoever to feel shame,
guilt, or remorse. One in twenty-five everyday Americans, therefore, is
secretly a sociopath. They could be your colleague, your neighbor, even
family. And they can do literally anything at all and feel absolutely no
guilt.
How do we recognize the remorseless? One of their chief characteristics is a
kind of glow or charisma that makes sociopaths more charming or interesting
than the other people around them. Theyre more spontaneous, more intense,
more complex, or even sexier than everyone else, making them tricky to
identify and leaving us easily seduced. Fundamentally, sociopaths are
different because they cannot love. Sociopaths learn early on to show sham
emotion, but underneath they are indifferent to others suffering. They live
to dominate and thrill to win.
The fact is, we all almost certainly know at least one or more sociopaths
already. Part of the urgency in reading The Sociopath Next Door is the
moment when we suddenly recognize that someone we knowsomeone we worked
for, or were involved with, or voted foris a sociopath. But what do we do
with that knowledge? To arm us against the sociopath, Dr. Stout teaches us
to question authority, suspect flattery, and beware the pity play. Above
all, she writes, when a sociopath is beckoning, do not join the game.
It is the ruthless versus the rest of us, and The Sociopath Next Door will
show you how to recognize and defeat the devil you know.
Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
Minds differ still more than faces.
--Voltaire
Imagine--if you can--not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of
guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the
well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no
struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what
kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken. And pretend
that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden
others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools. Now add to this
strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your
psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone
simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the
fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless. You are not held
back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never
confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins
is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they
seldom even guess at your condition.
In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your
unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is
conveniently invisible to the world. You can do anything at all, and still
your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by
their consciences, will most likely remain undiscovered.
How will you live your life? What will you do with your huge and secret
advantage, and with the corresponding handicap of other people (conscience)?
The answer will depend largely on just what your desires happen to be,
because people are not all the same. Even the profoundly unscrupulous are
not all the same. Some people-- whether they have a conscience or not--
favor the ease of inertia, while others are filled with dreams and wild
ambitions. Some human beings are brilliant and talented, some are
dull-witted, and most, conscience or not, are somewhere in between. There
are violent people and nonviolent ones, individuals who are motivated by
bloodlust and those who have no such appetites.
Maybe you are someone who craves money and power, and though you have no
vestige of conscience, you do have a magnificent IQ. You have the driving
nature and the intellectual capacity to pursue tremendous wealth and
influence, and you are in no way moved by the nagging voice of conscience
that prevents other people from doing everything and anything they have to
do to succeed. You choose business, politics, the law, banking,
international development, or any of a broad array of other power
professions, and you pursue your career with a cold passion that tolerates
none of the usual moral or legal incumbrances. When it is expedient, you
doctor the accounting and shred the evidence, you stab your employees and
your clients (or your constituency) in the back, marry for money, tell
lethal premeditated lies to people who trust you, attempt to ruin colleagues
who are powerful or eloquent, and simply steam-roll over groups who are
dependent and voiceless. And all of this you do with the exquisite freedom
that results from having no conscience whatsoever.
You become unimaginably, unassailably, and maybe even globally successful.
Why not? With your big brain, and no conscience to rein in your schemes, you
can do anything at all.
Or no--let us say you are not quite such a person. You are ambitious, yes,
and in the name of success you are willing to do all manner of things that
people with conscience would never consider, but you are not an
intellectually gifted individual. Your intelligence is above average
perhaps, and people think of you as smart, maybe even very smart. But you
know in your heart of hearts that you do not have the cognitive wherewithal,
or the creativity, to reach the careening heights of power you secretly
dream about, and this makes you resentful of the world at large, and envious
of the people around you.
As this sort of person, you ensconce yourself in a niche, or maybe a series
of niches, in which you can have some amount of control over small numbers
of people. These situations satisfy a little of your desire for power,
although you are chronically aggravated at not having more. It chafes to be
so free of the ridiculous inner voice that inhibits others from achieving
great power, without having enough talent to pursue the ultimate successes
yourself. Sometimes you fall into sulky, rageful moods caused by a
frustration that no one but you understands.
But you do enjoy jobs that afford you a certain undersupervised control over
a few individuals or small groups, preferably people and groups who are
relatively helpless or in some way vulnerable. You are a teacher or a
psychotherapist, a divorce lawyer or a high school coach. Or maybe you are a
consultant of some kind, a broker or a gallery owner or a human services
director. Or maybe you do not have a paid position, and are instead the
president of your condominium association, or a volunteer hospital worker,
or a parent. Whatever your job, you manipulate and bully the people who are
under your thumb, as often and as outrageously as you can without getting
fired or held accountable. You do this for its own sake, even when it serves
no purpose except to give you a thrill. Making people jump means you have
power-- or this is the way you see it-- and bullying provides you with an
adrenaline rush. It is fun.
Maybe you cannot be the CEO of a multinational corporation, but you can
frighten a few people, or cause them to scurry around like chickens, or
steal from them, or--maybe best of all--create situations that cause them to
feel bad about themselves. And this is power, especially when the people you
manipulate are superior to you in some way. Most invigorating of all is to
bring down people who are smarter or more accomplished than you, or perhaps
classier, more attractive or popular or morally admirable. This is not only
good fun--it is existential vengeance. And without a conscience, it is
amazingly easy to do. You quietly lie to the boss or to the bosss boss, cry
some crocodile tears, or sabotage a coworkers project, or gaslight a
patient (or a child), bait people with promises, or provide a little
misinformation that will never be traced back to you.
Or now let us say you are a person who has a proclivity for violence or for
seeing violence done. You can simply murder your coworker, or have her
murdered--or your boss, or your ex-spouse, or your wealthy lovers spouse,
or anyone else who bothers you. You have to be careful, because if you slip
up you may be caught and punished by the system. But you will never be
confronted by your conscience, because you have no conscience. If you decide
to kill, the only difficulties will be the external ones. Nothing inside of
you will ever protest.
Provided you are not forcibly stopped, you can do anything at all. If you
are born at the right time, with some access to family fortune, and you have
a special talent for whipping up other peoples hatred and sense of
deprivation, you can arrange to kill large numbers of unsuspecting people.
With enough money, you can accomplish this from far away, and you can sit
back safely and watch in satisfaction. In fact, terrorism (done from a
distance) is the ideal occupation for a person who is possessed of bloodlust
and no conscience, because if you do it just right, you may be able to make
a whole nation jump. And if that is not power, what is?
Or let us imagine the opposite extreme--you have no interest in power. To
the contrary, you are the sort of person who really does not want much of
anything. Your only real ambition is not to have to exert yourself to get
by. You do not want to work like everyone else does. Without a conscience,
you can nap or pursue your hobbies or watch television or just hang out
somewhere all day long. Living a bit on the fringes, and with some handouts
from relatives and friends, you can do this indefinitely. People may whisper
to each other that you are an underachiever, or that you are depressed, a
sad case, or in contrast, if they get angry, they may grumble that you are
lazy. When they get to know you better, and get really angry, they may
scream at you and call you a loser, a bum. But it will never occur to them
that you literally do not have a conscience, that in such a fundamental way,
your very mind is not the same as theirs.
The panicked feeling of a guilty conscience never squeezes at your heart or
wakes you in the middle of the night. Despite your lifestyle, you never feel
irresponsible, neglectful, or so much as embarrassed, although for the sake
of appearances, sometimes you pretend that you do. For example, if you are a
decent observer of people and what they react to, you may adopt a lifeless
facial expression, say how ashamed of your life you are, and talk about how
rotten you feel. This you do only because it is more convenient to have
people think you are depressed than it is to have them shouting at you all
the time, or insisting that you get a job.
You notice that people who do have a conscience feel guilty when they
harangue someone they believe to be depressed or troubled. As a matter
of fact, to your further advantage, they often feel obliged to take care of
such a person. If, despite your relative poverty, you can manage to get
yourself into a sexual relationship with someone, this person--who does not
suspect what you are really like--may feel particularly obligated. And since
all you want is not to have to work, your financier does not have to be
especially rich, just reliably conscience-bound.
I trust that imagining yourself as any of these people feels insane to you,
because such people are insane, dangerously so. Insane but real--they even
have a label. Many mental health professionals refer to the condition of
little or no conscience as antisocial personality disorder, a
noncorrectable disfigurement of character that is now thought to be present
in about four percent of the population--that is to say, one in twenty-five
people. This condition of missing conscience is called by other names too,
most often sociopathy, or the somewhat more familiar term, psychopathy.
Guiltlessness was in fact the first personality disorder to be recognized by
psychiatry, and terms that have been used at times over the past century
include manie sans délire, psychopathic inferiority, moral insanity,
and moral imbecility.
According to the current bible of psychiatric labels, the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV of the American Psychiatric
Association, the clinical diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder
should be considered when an individual possesses at least three of the
following seven characteristics: (1) failure to conform to social norms; (2)
deceitfulness, manipulativeness; (3) impulsivity, failure to plan ahead; (4)
irritability, aggressiveness; (5) reckless disregard for the safety of self
or others; (6) consistent irresponsibility; (7) lack of remorse after having
hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another person. The presence in an
individual of any three of these symptoms, taken together, is enough to
make many psychiatrists suspect the disorder.
Other researchers and clinicians, many of whom think the APAs definition
describes simple criminality better than true psychopathy or
sociopathy, point to additional documented characteristics of sociopaths
as a group. One of the more frequently observed of these traits is a glib
and superficial charm that allows the true sociopath to seduce other people,
figuratively or literally--a kind of glow or charisma that, initially, can
make the sociopath seem more charming or more interesting than most of the
normal people around him. He or she is more spontaneous, or more intense, or
somehow more complex, or sexier, or more entertaining than everyone else.
Sometimes this sociopathic charisma is accompanied by a grandiose sense of
self-worth that may be compelling at first, but upon closer inspection may
seem odd or perhaps laughable. (Someday the world will realize how special
I am, or You know that after me, no other lover will do.)
In addition, sociopaths have a greater than normal need for stimulation,
which results in their taking frequent social, physical, financial, or legal
risks. Characteristically, they can charm others into attempting dangerous
ventures with them, and as a group they are known for their pathological
lying and conning, and their parasitic relationships with friends.
Regardless of how educated or highly placed as adults, they may have a
history of early behavior problems, sometimes including drug use or recorded
juvenile delinquency, and always including a failure to acknowledge
responsibility for any problems that occurred.
And sociopaths are noted especially for their shallowness of emotion, the
hollow and transient nature of any affectionate feelings they may claim to
have, a certain breathtaking callousness. They have no trace of empathy and
no genuine interest in bonding emotionally with a mate. Once the surface
charm is scraped off, their marriages are loveless, one-sided, and almost
always short-term. If a marriage partner has any value to the sociopath, it
is because the partner is viewed as a possession, one that the sociopath may
feel angry to lose, but never sad or accountable.
All of these characteristics, along with the symptoms listed by the
American Psychiatric Association, are the behavioral manifestations of what
is for most of us an unfathomable psychological condition, the absence of
our essential seventh sense-- conscience.
Crazy, and frightening-- and real, in about four percent of the population.
From the Hardcover edition.
http://www.ebooks.com/ebooks/book_display.asp?IID=210219