“Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money.
They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with.
Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
Imagine, if you can, not having a conscience.
You feel no guilt or remorse no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, irresponsible,
or immoral action that you engage in.
In other words you’re psychological makeup is radically different from the majority of
people.
You’re completely free from internal restraints and more interestingly nobody else seems to
know that this is the case.
With enough intelligence and planning you could get everything that you’ve ever wanted
and do anything at all.
What is your dream life?
How would you live if you had no limits?
Believe it or not this type of person exists.
We call them sociopaths.
In fact as of the writing of today’s book: The Sociopath Next Door about 4% or 1 in every
25 people in the United States are sociopathic.
This is based on the American Psychiatric Association’s standards for antisocial personality
disorder.
The characteristics of someone who suffers from antisocial personality disorder are a
failure to conform to social norms, deceitfulness and manipulativeness, impulsivity or a failure
to plan ahead, irritability or aggressiveness, reckless disregard for the safety of your
self or others, consistent irresponsibility, and a lack of remorse after having hurt, mistreated,
or stolen from another person.
According to the standards a person could have antisocial personality disorder if they
possess at least 3 of the 7 characteristics.
Other characteristics that are commonly associated with sociopaths are a superficial charm, a
greater than normal need for stimulation, a lack of conscience, and a shallowness of
emotion, which we will touch on again later.
But one of the more interesting things I learned from this book is that not all sociopaths
are violent.
In fact the vast majority of them are non-violent.
They may steal without remorse, they may undermine us from behind closed doors at the office,
they may seduce their victims into a loveless marriage but most are not violent.
Now I opened the video with a quote from Alfred partly because I just watched the Dark Knight
for the first time a few days ago and it’s been on my mind a lot and also because the
Joker character was quite clearly sociopathic.
And partly because we have no idea where someone like the Joker could possibly come from.
And the same holds true for real life.
We don't really know what causes sociopathy.
Some experts believed that it's passed on genetically and while that may be partially
true, personality traits such as empathy, which of course the sociopath lacks, only
has a heritability rating of 35-50% according to several heritability studies.
So genetics may play a part in the equation, but at most, it's only half of the equation.
Other experts believe that the way that the sociopath is nurtured from a young age plays
a vital role in it.
I mean wouldn't it make sense that a child who suffered through tons of abuse from a
young age would have a higher probability of showing sociopathic traits than a child
that had a wonderful childhood?
Well, maybe, but unlike many other psychological conditions like substance abuse, depression,
and chronic anxiety childhood abuse seems to play almost no role in the development
of sociopathy.
In fact there is a fair amount of evidence that suggests that sociopaths are less influenced
by their quality of family life and other early experiences than the rest of us are.
Another possible factor that experts have proposed is the effect that culture has on
the sociopathic.
According to the statistics sociopathy is relatively uncommon in certain East Asian
countries like Taiwan, Japan and China.
Only about a tenth of a percent or 1 in 1,000 people in Taiwan suffer from antisocial personality
disorder compared to the 4% of the US population.
Although similar to the nature and nurture arguments there is only limited amounts of
solid evidence to support the culture argument.
Again, the fact of the matter is, we don't truly know what causes sociopathy.
But we do know that sociopaths exist and that they can cause us tremendous psychological
harm.
So that begs the question, how can you tell if someone is a sociopath?
Unfortunately, and I hate to keep coming back to this, it's just the nature of the world
we live in.
But there is no full-proof strategy for figuring out if someone is a sociopath.
But when trying to figure out who to trust, or who not to trust in this case there is
one thing that you should definitely watch out for.
And that is the pity play.
It is arguably the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people.
Because we tend to do a lot more for people who we feel sympathetic towards than those
we feel no sympathy for.
And while these feelings are often used for good, I mean it's what gets us to help those
deserving people who have just fallen on hard times.
It is also the feeling that the sociopath wants to get out of us because it allows them
to continue playing their game.
So again not a perfect strategy but certainly something to keep an eye out for if you're
concerned about whether or not you can trust someone you're getting close to.
Now I want to bring you back to the questions I asked at the beginning of the video.
What do you want most?
What is your dream life?
Is it to have money, power, a home on a beach somewhere?
Or maybe the freedom to do whatever you want?
How would you live if you had no limits?
And if you had the choice, would you get rid of your conscience in order to get your dream
life?
Now I think that most of us would answer no to that question.
While there may be that rare moment where it would be tempting to act ruthlessly in
order to get what we want, most of us wouldn’t do it in the end.
The guilt we’d feel for hurting others just so that we could get what we wanted a little
faster would be too costly.
In the end conscience usually wins out.
And we should be thankful for that because there’s actually a reason beyond the moral
ones that we would never want to choose the path of a highly successful sociopath, assuming
we actually had the option in the first place.
You know how I said that a sociopath’s psychological makeup is radically different than our own?
Well, as it turns out, the same is true at a neurobiological level.
Several studies have proven that a sociopath’s cerebral cortex actually reacts differently
than most people’s to emotional stimuli.
For most of us, our brains will recognize words with emotional weight like love faster
than words that don’t have any emotional weight like “look,” and this also extends
to other things like facial expressions.
This is shown in the electrical activity of our brain.
But, instead of seeing their electrical levels spike when presented with emotional words
or other stimuli, the sociopath’s brain shows increased blood flow to the temporal
lobes.
Basically what this these findings suggest is that sociopathy is more than just the absence
of conscience and a list of characteristics.
It’s also the inability to process an emotional experience.
This is that shallowness of emotion that I mentioned early.
And I ask you… what good is all the money, power and freedom if, on a fundamental level,
you can’t even enjoy it?
So that was the Sociopath Next Door.
If you learned something and liked what you saw here be sure to subscribe, I’ll be back
next week for part 3 of my review of Robert Greene’s book “Mastery.”
But until then, thanks for watching and have a great day.