Recorded at her execution, Bloody Babs's last words were, “Good people are always so sure they're right.” This assertion was delivered calmly, almost with an air of sympathy, and as an effective gaslighting technique, it was a fairly good line. It caused many to doubt their own sense of reality concerning Graham, and refocused the public's attention on her role as an attractive mother of three young children, rather than on her grisly behavior. After her death, she became the subject of emotional debate, and even today, against the weight of considerable evidence, there are those who maintain that Graham was innocent. Out of the public's self-doubt sprang two films about her, both entitled I Want to Live! The first starred Susan Hayward, who won an Oscar for her performance, and a 1983 television remake featured Lindsay Wagner. In both versions, Graham, the sadistic murderess, was portrayed as a poignantly misunderstood woman who was framed.
Barbara Graham's last words—“Good people are always so sure they're right”—had a gaslighting effect precisely because the truth is quite the opposite. In fact, one of the more striking characteristics of good people is that they are almost never completely sure they are right. Good people question themselves constantly, reflexively, and subject their decisions and actions to the exacting scrutiny of an intervening sense of obligation rooted in their attachments to other people. The self-questioning of conscience seldom admits absolute certainty into the mind, and even when it does, certainty feels treacherous to us, as if it may trick us into punishing someone unjustly, or performing some other unconscionable act. Even legally, we speak of “beyond a reasonable doubt” rather than of complete certainty. In the end, Barbara Graham understood us far better than we understood her, and her parting remark pushed an irrational but very sensitive psychological button in the conscience-bound people who survived her—the fear that they had made a decision based on too much certainty.
Adding to our insecurity, most of us comprehend instinctively that there are shades of good and bad, rather than absolute categories. We know in our hearts there is no such thing as a person who is 100 percent good, and so we assume there must be no such thing as a person who is 100 percent bad. And perhaps philosophically—and certainly theologically—this is true. After all, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the devil himself is a fallen angel. Probably there are no absolutely good human beings and no utterly bad ones. However—psychologically speaking, there definitely are people who possess an intervening sense of constraint based in emotional attachments, and other people who have no such sense. And to fail to understand this is to place people of conscience, and all the Mabel Monahans of the world, in danger.
How Do We Keep the Blinders Off?
My daughter's fifth-grade class had a field trip, and I was one of the chaperones. We went to see a play called Freedom Train, about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. On the noisy bus ride back to school, one of the boys was picking on another boy, poking him and pulling his hair. The quiet boy being poked was developmentally delayed, friendless, I am told, and did not have a clue how to defend himself. Even before one of the adults could intervene, a petite girl seated just behind the two boys tapped the tormentor on the shoulder and said, “That's really mean. Quit it.”
The person who recognized this antisocial behavior and publicly objected to it was ten years old and all of four feet tall. The boy she had spoken to stuck his tongue out at her and leapt over to another bus seat to be with one of his pals. She watched him go and then calmly resumed the game of rock-paper-scissors she had been playing with the girl next to her.
What happens to us while we are growing up? Why do adults stop saying “Quit it” to the bullies? The grown-up bullies are more powerful, but then, so are we. Will this healthy little girl behave with the same kind of dignity and self-assurance when she is thirty years old and a foot and a half taller? Will she be another Harriet Tubman, albeit with a different cause? Sadly, given our present child-rearing practices, the odds are against it.
We raise our children, especially girls, to ignore their spontaneous reactions—we teach them not to rock the societal boat—and this is a good and necessary lesson when the spontaneous reaction involved would be to strike out violently with fists or words, or to steal an attractive item from a store, or to insult a stranger in a supermarket line. But another kind of spontaneous reaction, equally suppressed by our conflict-avoidant society, is the “Ick!” reaction, the natural sense of moral outrage. By the time she is thirty, the valiant little girl's “Ick!”—her tendency to respond, to rock the boat, when someone's actions are “really mean”—may have been excised from her behavior, and perhaps from her very mind.
In their book Women's Anger: Clinical and Developmental Perspectives, gender psychologists Deborah Cox, Sally Stabb, and Karin Bruckner document the ways girls and women perceive social responses to their outrage. Cox, Stabb, and Bruckner write that “the majority of interactions they [girls and women] describe involve rejection of either the anger, the girl or woman, or both. This takes the form of either direct attack through criticism or defensive response, or more passive rejection such as withdrawal and minimization of the girl's or woman's concerns and feelings.” And based on her studies of adolescent girls, educator Lyn Mikel Brown maintains that idealized femininity can dangerously endorse “silence over outspokenness.”
To keep the blinders off our life-enhancing seventh sense, as with most improvements in the human condition, we must start with our children. A part of healthy conscience is being able to confront consciencelessness. When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting to the point of not defending herself or other people, that she must not rock the boat for any reason, you are not strengthening her prosocial sense; you are damaging it—and the first person she will stop protecting is herself. Cox, Stabb, and Bruckner argue emphatically that “the requirement to suppress outrage at the other robs the woman of an opportunity to develop this kind of autonomy.” Instead, as Lyn Mikel Brown has said, we need to suggest “the possibility, even under the most oppressive conditions, for creative refusal and resistance.”
Do not set her up to be gaslighted. When she observes that someone who is being really mean is being really mean, tell her she is right and that it is okay to say so out loud. Jackie Rubenstein chose to believe her patient Dennis, and not to believe her dangerous colleague Doreen Littlefield. It was a good, moral choice. She said, effectively, “That's really mean. Quit it,” though saying so out loud caused her to be viewed as a troublemaker by many of the less insightful people around her.
As for the boys—in Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, leading child psychologists Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson record their concern about the frequency with which “vulnerable fathers turn to time-honored defensive responses to maintain the fiction that ‘father knows best.'” Parents, especially fathers, typically teach their sons to obey authority no matter what, and given the wrong cultural and political circumstances, circumstances that have occurred with morbid regularity throughout history, this is a lesson that may well come with a suicide clause. That parents wish to foster a certain respect for legitimate authority is understandable, and probably important for the functioning of society as we know it. But to drill children in reflexive, no-questions-asked obedience is to beat a horse that is more than half-dead already. Obedience to apparent authority is a knee-jerk reaction in most people quite without training, and to sensitize this reflex is to make our children hypervulnerable to any aggressive or sociopathic “authority” who may come along later in their lives.
To everyone's detriment, obedience and the higher values of patriotism and duty can become indistinguishable motivations. Enhanced in this way, reflexive obedience can consume the individual before he even has a chance to wonder whether he himself might be the best authority when it comes to his own life and his own country, and long before he can ask questions such as “Do I and my countrymen real
ly want to fight and perhaps die for this external ‘authority's' self-interest?”
Still, I believe we may now be standing at the edge of a modern possibility thousands of years in the making. In the past, for stark reasons of survival, human beings truly needed their children not to upset any hard-won applecarts, not to question things too much, not to disobey orders. Life was physically hard and precarious, and children who challenged our authority might all too easily end up as dead children. And so, until recent centuries, we raised humans for whom moral outrage was an extreme luxury, and to whom the questioning of authority felt life-threatening. In this way, generation after generation, we were unwittingly set up for sociopathic takeovers. But now, for most of us in the developed world, survival conditions no longer hold. We can stop. We can let our children question things. And when they are grown, they can, without doubting their own senses, look the grown-up bullies in the eye and say, “That's really mean. Quit it.”
But what about those of us who are already grown, we who have had decades of practice in ignoring our own instincts? How can we avoid being gaslighted, and allow ourselves to recognize the people around us who have no conscience? This is the concern addressed in the next chapter. It is an interesting question with a rather surprising answer.
The_Sociopath_Next_Door
SIX
how to recognize the remorseless
In the desert, an old monk had once advised a traveler, the voices of God and the Devil are scarcely distinguishable.
—Loren Eiseley
In my practice, one of the questions I am asked most often is, “How can I tell whom to trust?” Since my patients are survivors of psychological trauma, most of whom have been devastated by other human beings, this is not a surprising concern for them to have. On the other hand, my feeling is that this issue is a pressing one for most of us, even those who have not endured severe trauma, and that we all try very hard to assess the level of conscience that exists, or not, in other people. We are especially interested in the conscience quotient of the people we have close relationships with, and when we meet an attractive new person, we often invest considerable mental energy in suspiciousness over, guesses about, and wishful thinking concerning this question.
The untrustworthy do not wear special shirts, or marks on their foreheads, and the fact that we must often make crucial decisions about other people based on not much more than guesswork leads us to irrational strategies that readily become lifelong superstitions. “Don't trust anyone over thirty,” “Never trust a man,” “Never trust a woman,” “Never trust anyone” are the most popular examples. We want a clear rule, even a sweeping one, because knowing whom to be wary of is so important to us, but these wide-brush strategies are ineffective, and, worse, they tend to produce anxiety and unhappiness in our lives.
Apart from knowing someone well for many years, there is no foolproof decision rule or litmus test for trustworthiness, and it is extremely important to acknowledge this fact, unnerving though it may be. Uncertainty in this regard is simply a part of the human condition, and I have never known anyone who got around it completely, except by the most extraordinary luck. Furthermore, to imagine there is an effective method—a method that one has thus far been unable to figure out—is to beat up on oneself in a way that is demeaning and unfair.
When it comes to trusting other people, we all make mistakes. Some of these mistakes are larger than others.
Having said this, when people ask me about trust, I reply that there is bad news and good news. The bad news is that there truly are individuals who have no conscience, and these individuals are not to be trusted at all. Perhaps an average of four people in a random group of one hundred are limited in this way. The good news—the very good news—is that at least ninety-six people out of a hundred are bound by the constraints of conscience, and can therefore be counted on to behave according to a reasonably high baseline of decency and responsibility—to behave, in other words, more or less as well as you and I do. And to my mind, this second fact is a great deal more compelling than the first. It means, astonishingly, that to a certain standard of prosocial behavior, our interpersonal world should be about ninety-six percent safe.
And so why does the world seem to be so terribly unsafe? How do we explain the six o'clock news, or even our own personal bad experiences? What is going on here? Could it conceivably be that a mere 4 percent of the population is responsible for nearly all of the human disasters that occur in the world, and in our individual lives? This is an arresting question, one that offers to overhaul many of our assumptions about human society. So I will repeat that the phenomenon of conscience is overwhelmingly powerful, persistent, and prosocial. Unless under the spell of a psychotic delusion, extreme rage, inescapable deprivation, drugs, or a destructive authority figure, a person who is conscience-bound does not—in some sense he cannot—kill or rape in cold blood, torture another person, steal someone's life savings, trick someone into a loveless relationship as sport, or willfully abandon his own child.
Could you?
When we see people doing such things, either in the news or in our own lives, who are they? On the rare occasion, they are formally insane, or under the pressure of some radical emotion. Sometimes they are members of a group that is desperately deprived, or they are substance abusers, or the followers of a malevolent leader. But most often they are none of these. Rather, most often, they are people who have no conscience. They are sociopaths.
Certainly the very worst of the unthinkable deeds we read about in our newspapers and tacitly ascribe to “human nature”—though the events shock us as normal human beings—are not reflective of normal human nature at all, and we insult and demoralize ourselves when we assume so. Mainstream human nature, though far from perfect, is very much governed by a disciplining sense of interconnectedness, and the genuine horrors we see on television, and sometimes endure in our personal lives, do not reflect typical humankind. Instead, they are made possible by something quite alien to our nature—the cold and complete absence of conscience.
This is, I think, somewhat difficult for many people to accept. We have a hard time acknowledging that particular individuals are shameless by their nature, and the rest of us not so, due in part to what I refer to as the “shadow theory” of human nature. Shadow theory—the simple and probably accurate notion that we all have a “shadow side” not necessarily apparent from our usual behavior—maintains in its most extreme form that anything doable or feelable by one human being is potentially doable or feelable by all. In other words, under certain circumstances (though they are circumstances we are hard-pressed to imagine) anyone at all could be, for example, a death-camp commandant. Ironically, good and kindhearted people are often the most willing to subscribe to this theory in the radical form that proposes they could, in some bizarre situation, be mass murderers. It feels more democratic and less condemnatory (and somehow less alarming) to believe that everyone is a little shady than to accept that a few human beings live in a permanent and absolute moral nighttime. To admit that some people literally have no conscience is not technically the same as saying that some human beings are evil, but it is disturbingly close. And good people want very much not to believe in the personification of evil.
Of course, though not everyone could be a death-camp commandant, many if not most people are capable of overlooking the horrific activities of such a person, owing to the viscosity of psychological denial, moral exclusion, and blind obedience to authority. Asked about our sense that we are not safe in our own world, Albert Einstein once said, “The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.”
To do something about shameless people, we must first identify them. So, in our individual lives, how do we recognize the one person out of (more or less) twenty-five who has no conscience and who is potentially dangerous to our resources and our well-being? Deciding whether or not someone is trustworthy us
ually requires knowing that person well for a long time, and in the case of identifying a sociopath, much better and longer than one would have allowed had the sociopath been wearing a mark on his forehead at the outset. This harrowing dilemma is simply a part of the human condition. But even given the familiarity requirement, the pressing question remains, “How can I tell whom to trust?”—or more to the point, whom not to trust.
After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.
I first learned this when I was still a graduate student in psychology and had the opportunity to interview a court-referred patient the system had already identified as a “psychopath.” He was not violent, preferring instead to swindle people out of their money with elaborate investment scams. Intrigued by this individual and what could possibly motivate him—I was young enough to think he was a rare sort of person—I asked, “What is important to you in your life? What do you want more than anything else?” I thought he might say “getting money,” or “staying out of jail,” which were the activities to which he devoted most of his time. Instead, without a moment's hesitation, he replied, “Oh, that's easy. What I like better than anything else is when people feel sorry for me. The thing I really want more than anything else out of life is people's pity.”
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