Here are the thirteen rules:
THIRTEEN RULES FOR DEALING WITH SOCIOPATHS
IN EVERYDAY LIFE
1. The first rule involves the bitter pill of accepting that some people literally have no conscience.
These people do not often look like Charles Manson or a Ferengi bartender. They look like us.
2. In a contest between your instincts and what is implied by the role a person has taken on—educator, doctor, leader, animal lover, humanist, parent—go with your instincts.
Whether you want to be or not, you are a constant observer of human behavior, and your unfiltered impressions, though alarming and seemingly outlandish, may well help you out if you will let them. Your best self understands, without being told, that impressive and moral-sounding labels do not bestow conscience on anyone who did not have it to begin with.
3. When considering a new relationship of any kind, practice the Rule of Threes regarding the claims and promises a person makes, and the responsibilities he or she has. Make the Rule of Threes your personal policy.
One lie, one broken promise, or a single neglected responsibility may be a misunderstanding instead. Two may involve a serious mistake. But three lies says you're dealing with a liar, and deceit is the linchpin of conscienceless behavior. Cut your losses and get out as soon as you can. Leaving, though it may be hard, will be easier now than later, and less costly.
Do not give your money, your work, your secrets, or your affection to a three-timer. Your valuable gifts will be wasted.
4. Question authority.
Once again—trust your own instincts and anxieties, especially those concerning people who claim that dominating others, violence, war, or some other violation of your conscience is the grand solution to some problem. Do this even when, or especially when, everyone around you has completely stopped questioning authority. Recite to yourself what Stanley Milgram taught us about obedience: At least six out of ten people will blindly obey to the bitter end an official-looking authority in their midst.
The good news is that having social support makes people somewhat more likely to challenge authority. Encourage those around you to question, too.
5. Suspect flattery.
Compliments are lovely, especially when they are sincere. In contrast, flattery is extreme and appeals to our egos in unrealistic ways. It is the material of counterfeit charm, and nearly always involves an intent to manipulate. Manipulation through flattery is sometimes innocuous and sometimes sinister. Peek over your massaged ego and remember to suspect flattery.
This “flattery rule” applies on an individual basis, and also at the level of groups and even whole nations. Throughout all of human history and to the present, the call to war has included the flattering claim that one's own forces are about to accomplish a victory that will change the world for the better, a triumph that is morally laudable, justified by its humane outcome, unique in human endeavor, righteous, and worthy of enormous gratitude. Since we began to record the human story, all of our major wars have been framed in this way, on all sides of the conflict, and in all languages the adjective most often applied to the word war is holy. An argument can easily be made that humanity will have peace when nations of people are at last able to see through this masterful flattery.
Just as an individual pumped up on the flattery of a manipulator is likely to behave in foolish ways, exaggerated patriotism that is flattery-fueled is a dangerous thing.
6. If necessary, redefine your concept of respect.
Too often, we mistake fear for respect, and the more fearful we are of someone, the more we view him or her as deserving of our respect.
I have a spotted Bengal cat who was named Muscle Man by my daughter when she was a toddler, because even as a kitten he looked like a professional wrestler. Grown now, he is much larger than most other domestic cats. His formidable claws resemble those of his Asian leopard-cat ancestors, but by temperament, he is gentle and peace-loving. My neighbor has a little calico who visits. Evidently, the calico's predatory charisma is huge, and she is brilliant at directing the evil eye at other cats. Whenever she is within fifty feet, Muscle Man, all fifteen pounds of him to her seven, cringes and crouches in fear and feline deference.
Muscle Man is a splendid cat. He is warm and loving, and he is close to my heart. Nonetheless, I would like to believe that some of his reactions are more primitive than mine. I hope I do not mistake fear for respect, because to do so would be to ensure my own victimization. Let us use our big human brains to overpower our animal tendency to bow to predators, so we can disentangle the reflexive confusion of anxiety and awe. In a perfect world, human respect would be an automatic reaction only to those who are strong, kind, and morally courageous. The person who profits from frightening you is not likely to be any of these.
The resolve to keep respect separate from fear is even more crucial for groups and nations. The politician, small or lofty, who menaces the people with frequent reminders of the possibility of crime, violence, or terrorism, and who then uses their magnified fear to gain allegiance, is more likely to be a successful con artist than a legitimate leader. This too has been true throughout human history.
7. Do not join the game.
Intrigue is a sociopath's tool. Resist the temptation to compete with a seductive sociopath, to outsmart him, psychoanalyze, or even banter with him. In addition to reducing yourself to his level, you would be distracting yourself from what is really important, which is to protect yourself.
8. The best way to protect yourself from a sociopath is to avoid him, to refuse any kind of contact or communication.
Psychologists do not usually like to recommend avoidance, but in this case, I make a very deliberate exception. The only truly effective method for dealing with a sociopath you have identified is to disallow him or her from your life altogether. Sociopaths live completely outside of the social contract, and therefore to include them in relationships or other social arrangements is perilous. Begin this exclusion of them in the context of your own relationships and social life. You will not hurt anyone's feelings. Strange as it seems, and though they may try to pretend otherwise, sociopaths do not have any such feelings to hurt.
You may never be able to make your family and friends understand why you are avoiding a particular individual. Sociopathy is surprisingly difficult to see, and even harder to explain. Avoid him anyway.
If total avoidance is impossible, make plans to come as close as you can to the goal of total avoidance.
9. Question your tendency to pity too easily.
Respect should be reserved for the kind and the morally courageous. Pity is another socially valuable response, and it should be reserved for innocent people who are in genuine pain or who have fallen on misfortune. If, instead, you find yourself often pitying someone who consistently hurts you or other people, and who actively campaigns for your sympathy, the chances are close to 100 percent that you are dealing with a sociopath.
Related to this—I recommend that you severely challenge your need to be polite in absolutely all situations. For normal adults in our culture, being what we think of as “civilized” is like a reflex, and often we find ourselves being automatically decorous even when someone has enraged us, repeatedly lied to us, or figuratively stabbed us in the back. Sociopaths take huge advantage of this automatic courtesy in exploitive situations.
Do not be afraid to be unsmiling and calmly to the point.
10. Do not try to redeem the unredeemable.
Second (third, fourth, and fifth) chances are for people who possess conscience. If you are dealing with a person who has no conscience, know how to swallow hard and cut your losses.
At some point, most of us need to learn the important, if disappointing, life lesson that, no matter how good our intentions, we cannot control the behavior—let alone the character structures—of other people. Learn this fact of human life, and avoid the irony of getting caught up in the same ambition he has—to control.
The sociopath's behavior is not your fault, not in any way whatsoever. It is also not your mission. Your mission is your own life.
11. Never agree, out of pity or for any other reason, to help a sociopath conceal his or her true character.
“Please don't tell,” often spoken tearfully and with great gnashing of teeth, is the trademark plea of thieves, child abusers—and sociopaths. Do not listen to this siren song. Other people deserve to be warned more than sociopaths deserve to have you keep their secrets.
If someone without conscience insists that you “owe” him or her, recall what you are about to read here: “You owe me” has been the standard line of sociopaths for thousands of years, quite literally, and is still so. It is what Rasputin told the empress of Russia. It is what Hannah's father implied to her after her eye-opening conversation with him at the prison.
We tend to experience “You owe me” as a compelling claim, but it is simply not true. Do not listen. Also, ignore the one that goes, “You are just like me.” You are not.
12. Defend your psyche.
Do not allow someone without conscience, or even a string of such people, to convince you that humanity is a failure. Most human beings do possess conscience. Most human beings are able to love.
13. Living well is the best revenge.
Epilogue
I still meet with Hannah occasionally.
Her father was paroled from prison, but she has not seen him, or even spoken with him, in the last six years. This loss, and the reasons for it, remain a source of tremendous sadness for her.
Her mother and father are now divorced, due not to his violent criminal activities, which Hannah's mother and the rest of society still refuse to acknowledge, but to the fact that she found him in bed with a nineteen-year-old former student.
In testimony to her intelligence and her strength, Hannah finished medical school with honors. But she soon discovered the obvious—that being a doctor had been her father's ambition for her, not her own. He had considered this to be the height of prestige.
Against the odds, Hannah has held on to her ability to feel close to people who are loving and trustworthy, and also on to a dry sense of humor. When she left medicine, for example, she told me she had realized that the medical oath, “First, do no harm,” simply did not fit her father at all.
She applied to and was accepted by several law schools. She chose to attend one that offers a specialization in advocacy and human rights.
NINE
the origins of conscience
Why should any animal, off on its own, specified and labeled by all sorts of signals as its individual self, choose to give up its life in aid of someone else?
—Lewis Thomas
Since we have it on excellent authority that nature is red in tooth and claw, why are all human beings not killers like Hannah's father? Why do most of us, most of the time, operate according to a seventh sense that directs us not to kill, even when we might profit in some way from doing so? And lesser transgressions, too: Why do we usually feel guilty when we steal, or lie, or hurt other people?
We have already discussed what causes sociopathy, and so it is only fair to address the twin question: What causes conscience? From a certain point of view, this inquiry is not merely parallel; it is actually the better and more baffling question. Since Darwin published The Origin of Species, in 1859, much of scientific theorizing has considered that all living things, including human beings, have evolved according to the law of natural selection. According to this law, known more popularly as “the law of the jungle,” any characteristic that enhances survival and reproduction (and therefore the continuance of its own genetic components) will tend to remain in the population. If a physical trait or a behavioral tendency bestows this felicitous survival advantage on individuals for countless generations, in many situations and across habitats, it may, incrementally and in the course of time immemorial, become part of the standard genetic blueprint for the species.
According to the law of natural selection, tigers have claws, chameleons change colors, rats avoid open spaces, possums play dead, and apes have big brains because tigers with claws, camouflaged lizards, secretive rodents, playacting possums, and very smart primates tend to survive longer and so make more babies than their peers do. In turn, these babies survive better and reproduce more often than their less fortunate playmates who are not genetically endowed with natural weapons, camouflage techniques, survival-promoting anxiety, theatrical ability, or superior intelligence.
But according to this utterly amoral law of the jungle, of what possible use to the individual members of a predatory species—for human beings are technically predators—are the limitations and interruptions of a powerful moral sense? Imagine, for example, a great white shark with a demanding conscience. How long would she live? What, then, can conceivably be the evolutionary origins of human conscience?
Let us put this extraordinary question another way. Picture people stranded on a small, remote island with limited resources. In the long run, what kind of individual is more likely to survive—an honest, moral person, or someone ruthless like Skip? The kind and empathic Jackie Rubenstein, or Doreen Littlefield? Sydney, or the unremittingly self-involved Luke? Hannah, or Hannah's father? If there were a few others on the island for the survivors to make babies with—and given that sociopathy is at least partially genetically determined—over a great many generations, might we not end up with an island populated mainly by people who possessed no conscience? Then would not this population of sociopaths proceed without a second thought to deplete the island's resources completely, and all die? And if, to the contrary, people with conscience were still to be found on the island, where life was fragile and ruthlessness paid off, what in the natural world could possibly have been fostering their moral sense?
Precisely on account of this seemingly impossible challenge to evolutionary theory, naturalists, sociobiologists, comparative psychologists, and philosophers have long been interested in the origins of unselfishness in humans and in other animals. Whenever we carefully observe the actions of the so-called higher animals, we see an apparently irreconcilable dichotomy between selfish survivalism and intense social interest. And of course, nowhere is this dichotomy more extreme than in the human species. We compete ferociously, and we teach our children to compete. We finance wars and weapons of mass destruction. And we also fund foundations, social welfare programs, and homeless shelters, and try to teach our children—those very same children—to be kind.
Our species has produced both a Napoléon and a Mother Teresa. But according to fundamentalist evolutionary theory, Mother Teresa should never have been born, because neither charity nor a sense of good and evil would seem to have anything at all to do with the law of the jungle. So what is going on here? As David Papineau asked in his New York Times review of Matt Ridley's book The Origins of Virtue, “If nice guys always finished last when our ancestors were scrabbling around for food on the African savanna, why does morality come so naturally to us now?”
And humans are hardly the only animals who can be unselfish. Thomson's gazelles “stot” (leap up and down conspicuously) when they see a predator, decreasing their chances of individual survival but increasing the chances that the herd will get away. Chimpanzees share their meat, and sometimes even their most valued fruit. According to psychobiologist Frans de Waal, a raven will communicate the precious discovery of a carcass with loud calls to the flock, making itself a standout to wolves.
When it comes to surviving, clearly there is a certain conflict of interest between the individual and the herd/community/flock, and arguments concerning the origin of what evolutionary psychologists call “altruistic behaviors” have generally centered around the unit of selection in evolution. Does natural selection “ch
oose” only individuals for survival, or can selection perhaps operate at the level of groups, thus favoring the survival of whole populations over others?
If “survival of the fittest” applies only to the individual as the unit of selection, the evolution of unselfishness is almost impossible to explain, for the same reason that cutthroat Skip, Doreen, Luke, and Hannah's father, as individuals, would indeed be more likely to outlast the rest of us on a desert island. But if the unit of selection is the group as a whole, then a certain amount of altruism can be explained. Quite simply, a group composed of individuals who cooperate and take care of one another is much more likely to survive as a group than a collective of individuals who can only compete with or ignore one another. In terms of survival, the successful group will be the one that is operating to some extent as an entity, rather than the group in which every single individual is looking out for number one, to the exclusion of everyone else.
The Sociopath Next Door Page 17