The Sociopath Next Door - Martha Stout

Moving right from art, sex, and money to a nonfiction book on abnormal psychology isn't necessarily the easiest task, but then again, there's about six months of downtime in between. Martha Stout's The Sociopath Next Door is another book that simply demanded coming home from the book store. This book is both world-view changing and impossible to put down. From the story of Super Skip, the frog exploding thirteen year-old turned middle-age super-CEO to the story of a heroin-dealing, murderous high school principal to the man who simply married a woman because she had a pool and a steady job, the book is filled with true stories of the 4% of the human species that simply has no conscience. If you're generally of the view that everyone is a good person deep down somewhere, this book will challenge that preconception (which is obviously a bit frightening) with 25 years of hands on research and experience dealing with sociopaths and their victims.

Sociopath is written by Martha Stout, a PhD with 25 years of experience on the staff at the Harvard Medical School. Her career has been spent largely dealing with those who's lives were torn apart by others without remorse as well as working with a number of sociopaths forced into treatment. The stories are both fascinating and appalling, as it is largely impossible to put oneself into the shoes of most of of these characters (the guy who liked the pool maybe?). More importantly, they are simply eye-opening. 4% of the population is no small number, and many of these people are respected members of their communities in positions of power. The fact that we are likely interacting with the conscienceless on a regular basis causes serious pause and suggests the need for real caution, even if the other 96% have fully functioning consciences. Much of the seemingly senseless suffering in the world seems more fathomable when you consider the idea that a small minority of the population operates truly without empathy or remorse and is focused solely on 'winning,' however they've defined it. Not only this, but they view the rest of us as fools for playing by the rules, written or unwritten. Couple this with the fact that the one thing that will override the average person's moral compunction is simply deference to authority (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) and Stout makes a powerful case for how evil is able to operate on a grand scale throughout our history. Throw in a wealth of information on identifying and protecting oneself from those who operate outside the rule of morality and you have a must-read. Sure it's chilling and it doesn't help one's faith in the uniform goodness of humanity, but I'd rather be informed than live without having heard what she has to say.