On Psychopaths and Conscience
The limits of narrative.
Writing social commentary at the moment seems a lot like making a detailed analysis of the mythological world of a schizophrenic’s delusions: not worth the effort and unlikely to help the sad case involved. The recent horrific atrocities perpetrated by the Israeli government, including the deliberate wholesale slaughter of hundreds of children at a time by aerial bombardment, and the fact that such genocidal actions worthy of a Hollywood serial killer character not only pass unremarked, but even actively justified by some, shows that the humane race is suffering a moral crisis unseen since the “never again” Holocaust.
There is no justification for the existence of a state that requires the murder of children to exist. None. This is as simple as it gets in the morality department, yet hundreds of pro-Israel commentators see Israel’s existence as somehow “special”, as if the world wouldn’t happily go onwards into the shining future if we didn’t have a bunch of rabid, racist, religious zealots murdering others and stealing their land because of their alleged divine right to do so.
Let’s be clear: if you attempt to hide behind the Bible to justify the murder of children, you are unfit to exist as a human being and should be scheduled for elimination as a useless, insipid parasite.
I’ve recently been re-reading Martha Stout’s excellent work, The Sociopath Next Door in light of the context of current events, and it’s having quite an impact upon me compared to the first time I read it. Although approaching twenty years since Stout first published the book (2005), and science having unmasked quite a few interesting things about psychopaths since then, much of what she has written has stood the test of time.
Her thesis in the book is essentially that 4% of the human race totally lack what the other 96% possess: a functioning conscience, and this deficit results in a broad range of behaviours that are unrestrained by any internal, psychological form of impulse control, leaving behind a trail of interpersonal, societal and inter-societal damage that requires significant human attention, effort and knowledge to repair.
To give you an idea, I’ll post a small quote from the Introduction below:
Guiltlessness is uniquely confusing as a medical concept, too. Quite unlike cancer, anorexia, schizophrenia, depression, or even the other “character disorders,” such as narcissism, sociopathy would seem to have a moral aspect. Sociopaths are almost invariably seen as bad or diabolical, even by (or perhaps especially by) mental health professionals, and the sentiment that these patients are somehow morally offensive and scary comes across vividly in the literature.
Robert Hare, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, has developed an inventory called the Psychopathy Checklist, now accepted as a standard diagnostic instrument for researchers and clinicians worldwide. Of his subjects, Hare, the dispassionate scientist, writes, “Everyone, including the experts, can be taken in, manipulated, conned, and left bewildered by them. A good psychopath can play a concerto on anyone’s heartstrings…. Your best defense is to understand the nature of these human predators.” And Hervey Cleckley, author of the 1941 classic text The Mask of Sanity, makes this complaint of the psychopath: “Beauty and ugliness, except in a very superficial sense, goodness, evil, love, horror, and humor have no actual meaning, no power to move him.”
The argument can easily be made that “sociopathy” and “antisocial personality disorder” and “psychopathy” are misnomers, reflecting an unstable mix of ideas, and that the absence of conscience does not really make sense as a psychiatric category in the first place. In this regard, it is crucial to note that all of the other psychiatric diagnoses (including narcissism) involve some amount of personal distress or misery for the individuals who suffer from them. Sociopathy stands alone as a “disease” that causes no dis-ease for the person who has it, no subjective discomfort. Sociopaths are often quite satisfied with themselves and with their lives, and perhaps for this very reason there is no effective “treatment.” Typically, sociopaths enter therapy only when they have been court-referred, or when there is some secondary gain to be had from being a patient. Wanting to get better is seldom the true issue. All of this begs the question of whether the absence of conscience is a psychiatric disorder or a legal designation - or something else altogether.
Singular in its ability to unnerve even seasoned professionals, the concept of sociopathy comes perilously close to our notions of the soul, of evil versus good, and this association makes the topic difficult to think about clearly. And the unavoidable them-versus-us nature of the problem raises scientific, moral, and political issues that boggle the mind. How does one scientifically study a phenomenon that appears to be, in part, a moral one? Who should receive our professional help and support, the “patients” or the people who must endure them? Since psychological research is generating ways to “diagnose” sociopathy, whom should we test? Should anyone be tested for such a thing in a free society? And if someone has been clearly identified as a sociopath, what, if anything, can society do with that information? No other diagnosis raises such politically and professionally incorrect questions, and sociopathy, with its known relationship to behaviours ranging from spouse battering and rape to serial murder and warmongering, is in some sense the last and most frightening psychological frontier.1
Stout goes on to examine the phenomena both of conscience and lack of it, noting the emotional nature of conscience (and thus its relationship to the right hemisphere of the brain, to bring Iain McGilchrist’s work into the picture2), historical beliefs about the relationship of conscience to ideas of good, evil and morality, and she compares the sense to other psychological theories that seek to explain self-restraint in human behaviour.
Indeed, she calls conscience the “seventh sense” (reserving the sixth for intuition), and it’s an apt and helpful description, which highlights an important difference in the human motivation and behaviour: some actions are taken not due to an inner source of information, such as a profound feeling of connection and the obligations that result, but emerge from a complex mesh of internalised behavioural adaptations parsed in a more cognitive way; a moral exoskeleton, as it has been referred to:
From my discussions of morality with religious traditionalists, I've gleaned that many of them assume that people who do not believe in their firm moral structures - who do not believe in God, or in the Ten Commandments, or in inviolable and absolute rules of moral conduct - must be living lives of sin and debauchery. They cannot understand - and often seem unwilling even to believe - that people like Unitarians might be living the well-ordered lives - as hard-working and law-abiding citizens, as responsible and dedicated family people - that they themselves strive to do.
Outside of a religious context, moral exoskeletons and moral legalism can take on very elaborate and intricate forms, giving us secular examples such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who advanced crippled and incomplete theories of human nature and behaviour under the guise of “science”, raging against a “God” they perceived to be a human political construction of abstract, power-procuring rules; the unrestrained left hemisphere usurping the Master and throwing the baby out completely with the bathwater.
Timothy Ashworth, in his excellent book Paul’s Necessary Sin, differentiates two forms of Christianity: one that is lived according to the Law, and another that is lived according to Faith, and that it is only those Christians that have learned to live by Faith, the “faith of Jesus”, that are effectively “born again” into the Holy Spirit. The Law of the Old Testament is merely a sort of “child minder” that establishes rough parameters for behaviour that the “child” inevitably learns to transgress, suffering the consequences of those transgressions and thus awakening a complex process of moral reasoning that eventually culminates, ideally, in a mature understanding of the role of Faith; an “adulthood in Christ”.
Whether secular or religious, the dominance of left-hemispheric thought that characterises moral absolutism versus the right-hemispheric embrace of the nuance of infinitely novel context seems to exemplify a very subtle distinction in human motivation; one sometimes not easily discerned by obvious outcomes. This distinction is at the heart of what Stout refers to as “conscience”, and in Ashworth’s Faith we can see a process that could be described as learning to Trust one’s own conscience; the ‘higher sense’ that conveys important and relevant information to us about the consequences of our choices atemporally, ie. before we make them.
The 96% Percent Question
So if 96% percent of people actually have a conscience, why do people make so many mistakes and do so many hurtful things? Surely a 4% population of psychopaths can’t be entirely responsible for historical developments such as the Israel-Palestine crisis if 96% of the population would find such things morally abhorrent?
Stout finds three main answers to this question. 1) That physical debilitation or illness can affect an individual’s ability to feel their conscience, 2) That “moral exclusion” can cause us to view some people as non-human, and thus ‘outside’ the perspective of conscience, and 3) That people seem to have an innate obedient response to authority that can suppress their conscience if the authority figure is unethical. In the latter case, she spends some time detailing the context and findings of the infamous Milgram experiment in which volunteers were ordered to ‘shock’ test subjects at progressively higher, even dangerous ‘voltages’, to see at what point innate empathy or conscience would compel the person to stop (spoiler: over 60% of the volunteers never stopped). She also refers to several investigations into the psychological aspects of killing at war, and again found that soldiers would tend not to fire at the enemy when away from the presence of their commanders.
At this point, we might wonder why Mrs Stout even thinks that 96% of people have a conscience if it can be overridden by authority so easily? And what about internalised authorities? For how many of those people will an internalised dogma, conditioned into them during growth, function as an ‘authority’ that effectively suppresses their conscience during moments of moral quandary?
Stout doesn’t completely account for this in the book, although she does touch upon attachment disorder and other ways that otherwise-healthy human beings can have their emotional worlds developmentally distorted.
Perhaps in more general terms, we could say that humans inhabit a ‘spectrum of conscience’, and that only above a certain ‘threshold’ is moral absolutism is a less powerful motivator of behaviour than conscience. Unfortunately, that threshold seems to be rather high. Stout estimates that only 30% of people have consciences that are capable of resisting moral absolutism and authoritative demands.
To paraphrase Stout’s terminology, the spectrum might look something like this:
Sociopaths ←→ Moral absolutists ←→ Moral ‘dilemmists’ ←→ Sociophiles
I’ve used “moral dilemmists” as a general term to describe the many, many sorts of people that have a semi-functional conscience, yet have not really learned to trust their “seventh sense” enough to consistently override the dictates of any learned social imperatives or strong peer pressure, thus are often subject throughout their lives to “moral dilemmas”, or crises of conscience in various situations. “Sociophiles” are those who have learned to integrate the information received by their seventh sense into their behaviour, generally display high levels of harmony and empathy in their social interactions, and tend to have a stimulating and creative effect on the social fabric, which we can directly contrast to the sort of effect manifested by a sociopath3.
Those familiar with Robert Altemeyer’s work on the Authoritarian Personality, may already see where I’m going with this: moral absolutists have a tendency to be “easily swayed” by authoritarian leaders, and thus leadership positions offer the morally unscrupulous a tempting way to get what they want with fewer people asking annoying questions, criticising their behaviour, or directly standing in their way.
Unrestrained Ruthlessness is a Political Problem
And thus we come to the point where sociopathy/psychopathy has macrosocial implications. This is the main subject of ponerology, and the overlap between Stout’s and Lobaczewski’s work is significant. Statistically, Lobaczewski cites prevalence of psychopathy in the population at 6%, with 5% as various forms of developmental or ‘inflicted’ psychopathy, and 1% as genetic or ‘essential’ psychopathy. Stout cites several studies published in mainstream journals that took place between 1988 - 1997 as her source for the 4% figure, and although some of Lobaczewski’s sources were lost in the process of preserving the book, it’s not improbable that the average figure could be as high as 6%, and possibly much higher in specific populations.
Specific figures aside, it’s clear that when one looks beyond the purely linguistic output of a country such as Israel, the symptoms of a massive psychopath infestation can be seen, and that country’s recent actions suggest that creatures utterly without conscience are in control of the levers of government and the military-industrial complex there.
The physical debilitation of that population through years of provably harmful vaccine rollouts, the left-hemispheric moral absolutism of a religio-ethnic-nationalist ideology that declares practitioners ‘God’s chosen people’ and Palestine as ‘their’ land, and the moral exclusion of the Palestinian people from the category of human beings is a recipe for a nation with a conscience atrophied to a fatal degree; unable to restrain even the worst psychopathic excesses.
Such a situation cannot but inevitably put Zionist Israel on the historical path of previous pathocracies, where a solution will be imposed upon them by the rest of the world, less the horror of their condition cause the sort of event of which all people of good conscience once rightly declared, “Never again.”
R.
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Stout, Martha, The Sociopath Next Door, (New York, New York: Broadway Books, 2005 1st ed.), pp. 12-13
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary, (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2019 Expanded ed.), pp. 57-64
My other main criticism of Stout’s work is her choice of the word “sociopath”, when the word “psychopath” was specifically chosen by the pioneers in the field, and expresses a more holistic and essentially descriptive naming of the phenomenon of the absence of conscience, which may have nothing to do with social conditions and be an intrinsically existential, even theological, condition. Even Stout herself, in chapter seven, points out that “sociopathy” may be as much as 50% genetic, and neuroimaging studies point out that “sociopaths” have processing aberrations in the cerebral cortex during word association when compared to normal subjects; differences that likely exist throughout neurodevelopment. Where is the “social” in such a form of neurodevelopment?
“Sociopath” in my opinion, better describes those who have been conditioned to behave psychopathically, and thus may be somewhat responsive to psychological treatment, as opposed to the true psychopath that usually displays symptoms from an early age and is unresponsive to any kind of clinical intervention. Unfortunately, Lobaczewski’s Political Ponerology was not as widely known at the time Stout’s book was published.