Who is the devil you know?
Is it your lying, cheating ex-husband?
Your sadistic high school gym teacher?
Your boss who loves to humiliate people in meetings?
The colleague who stole your idea and passed it off as her own?
In the pages of The Sociopath Next Door, you will realize that your ex
was not just misunderstood. He's a sociopath. And your boss, teacher,
and colleague? They may be sociopaths too.
We are accustomed to think of sociopaths as violent criminals, but in
The Sociopath Next Door, Harvard psychologist Martha Stout reveals
that a shocking 4 percent of ordinary people--one in twenty-five--has an
often undetected mental disorder, the chief symptom of which is that
that person possesses no conscience. He or she has no ability whatsoever
to feel shame, guilt, or remorse. One in twenty-five everyday Americans,
therefore, is secretly a sociopath. They could be your colleague, your
neighbor, even family. And they can do literally anything at all and
feel absolutely no guilt. *
*
How do we recognize the remorseless? One of their chief characteristics
is a kind of glow or charisma that makes sociopaths more charming or
interesting than the other people around them. They're more spontaneous,
more intense, more complex, or even sexier than everyone else, making
them tricky to identify and leaving us easily seduced. Fundamentally,
sociopaths are different because they cannot love. Sociopaths learn
early on to show sham emotion, but underneath they are indifferent to
others' suffering. They live to dominate and thrill to win.
The fact is, we all almost certainly know at least one or more
sociopaths already. Part of the urgency in reading The Sociopath Next
Door is the moment when we suddenly recognize that someone we
know--someone we worked for, or were involved with, or voted for--is a
sociopath. But what do we do with that knowledge? To arm us against the
sociopath, Dr. Stout teaches us to question authority, suspect flattery,
and beware the pity play. Above all, she writes, when a sociopath is
beckoning, do not join the game.
It is the ruthless versus the rest of us, and The Sociopath Next Door
will show you how to recognize and defeat the devil you know.
