Excerpts from new book-THE SOCIOPATH NEXT DOOR. Must read for XJWs

AndersonsInfo

Sociopathic behavior--very interesting topic recently started on "Friends" by "frankiespeakin." Some months ago, one poster said the Watchtower is a sociopathic organization. When I read the new book, THE SOCIOPATH NEXT DOOR, by Martha Stout, Ph. D.O., 2005, ISBN 0-7679-1581-X, I began to see how the organization could be called sociopathic. This book is so fascinating that I copied information which I considered "a keeper." Here are some interesting statements taken from this book. (Lot's of reading, but worth while.) Later on, in another post, I'll post a few of my "inexpert" observations and experiences.

Barbara

THE SOCIOPATH NEXT DOOR

Many mental health professionals refer to the condition of little or no conscience as “antisocial personality disorder,” a noncorrectable disfigurement of character that is now thought to be present in about 4 percent of the population—that is to say, one in twenty-five people. This condition of missing conscience is called by other names, too, most often “sociopathy,” or the somewhat more familiar term, psychopathy. P. 6, par. 1

And sociopaths are noted especially for their shallowness of emotion, the hollow and transient nature of any affectionate feelings they may claim to have, a certain breathtaking callousness. They have no trace of empathy and no genuine interest in bonding emotionally with a mate. Once the surface charm is scraped off, their marriages are loveless, one-sided, and almost always short-term. If a marriage partner has any value to the sociopath, it is because the partner is viewed as a possession, one that the sociopath may feel angry to lose, but never sad or accountable. P. 7, par. 2

Summation: Some actions are based on fear or revulsion, not conscience. The opinions of other people keep us in line, arguable better than anything else. P. 23, Summation

Conscience is not a behavior at all, not some thing that we do or even something that we think or mull over. Conscience is something that we feel. In other words, conscience is neither behavioral nor cognitive. Conscience exists primarily in the realm of “affect,” better known as emotion. P. 24-5, par 4.

Psychologically speaking, conscience is a sense of obligation ultimately based in an emotional attachment to another living creature (often but not always a human being), or to a group of human beings, or even in some cases to humanity as a whole. Conscience does not exist without an emotional bond to someone or something, and in this way conscience is closely allied with the spectrum of emotions we call “love.” This alliance is what gives true conscience its resilience and its astonishing authority over those who have it, and probably also its confusing and frustrating quality. P. 25-6, par. 3

Milgram believed that authority could put conscience to sleep mainly because the obedient person makes an “adjustment of thought,” which is to see himself as not responsible for his own actions. In his mind he is no longer a person who must act in a morally accountable way, but the agent of an external authority to whom he attributes all responsibility and all initiative. This “adjustment of thought” makes it much easier for benign leadership to establish order and control, but by the same psychological mechanism, it has countless times rolled out the red carpet for self-serving, malevolent, and sociopathic “authorities.” P. 63-4, par. 2.

On the other hand, education can sometimes level the perceived legitimacy of an authority figure, and thereby limit unquestioning obedience. With education and knowledge, the individual man be able to hold on to the perception of him- or herself as a legitimate authority. P. 64, par 1.

Some of us may resist a person who looks like we do, but most of us will obey someone who looks like an authority. This finding is of particular concern in an age when our leaders and experts come to us via the magic of television, where nearly anyone can be made to appear patrician and commandingly larger than life. P. 65, par. 1

Sociopaths do not always have a covetous nature—some are very differently motivated—but when lack of conscience and covetousness occur together in the same individual, a fascinating and frightening picture emerges. Since it is simply not possible to steal and have for oneself the most valuable “possessions” of another person—beauty, intelligence, success, a strong character—the covetous sociopath settles for besmirching or damaging enviable qualities in others so that they will not have them, either, or at least not be able to enjoy them as much. As Million says, “Here, the pleasure lies in taking rather than in having.” P. 76, par. 1

The covetous sociopath thinks that life has cheated her somehow, has not given her nearly the same bounty as other people, and so she must even the existential score by robbing people, by secretly causing destruction in other lives. She believes she has been slighted by nature, circumstances, and destiny, and that diminishing other people is her only means of being powerful. Retribution, usually against people who have no idea that they have been targeted, is the most important activity in the covetous sociopath’s life, her highest priority. P. 76, par. 2.

Why are conscience-bound human beings so blind? And why are they so hesitant to defend themselves, and the ideals and people they care about, from the minority of human beings who possess no conscience at all? We think we are imagining things, or exaggerating, or that we ourselves are somehow responsible for the sociopath’s behavior. P. 87, par. 2

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 in danger. P. 98, par 1

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. P. 100-1, par. 3.

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 internnectedness, 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 may people to accept. We have a hard time acknowledging that particular individuals are shameless by their nature, and the rest of us not so. P. 105, par. 1-2

But research has already provided us with a few pointed hints. One important link in the neurobiological-behavioral segment of the chain may consist of altered functioning in the cerebral cortex of the sociopath. Some of the most interesting information about cortical functioning in sociopathy comes to us through studies of how human beings process language. As it turns out, even at the level of electrical activity in the brain, normal people react to emotional words (such as love, hate, cozy, pain, happy, mother) more rapidly and more intensely than to relatively neutral words (table, chair, fifteen, later, etc.) If I am given the task of deciding between words and nonwords, I will recognize terror over lister much faster, in terms of microseconds, than I will choose between window and endock, and my enhanced reaction to the emotional word terror can be measured by recording a tiny electrical reaction, called an “evoked potential,” in my cerebral cortex. Such studies indicate that the brains of normal people attend to, remember, and recognize words that refer to emotional experiences preferentially to emotion-neutral words. Love will be recognized as a word faster than look will be, and a greater evoked potential will result in the brain very much as if love were a more primal and meaningful piece of information than look.

Not so for the sociopathic subjects who have been tested using language-processing tasks. In terms of reaction time and evoked potentials in the cortex, sociopathic subjects in these experiments respond to emotionally charged words no differently from neutral words. In sociopaths, the evoked potentials in the cortex, sociopathic subjects in these experiments respond to emotionally charged words no differently from neutral words. In sociopaths, the evoked potential for sob or kiss is no larger than for one for sat or list, very much as if emotional words were no more meaningful, or deeply coded by their brains, than any other words. P. 124, par. 2 and P. 125, par. 1

Taken together, such studies indicate that sociopathy involves an altered processing of emotional stimuli at the level of the cerebral cortex. Why this altered processing occurs is not yet known, but it is likely to be the result of a heritable neurodevelopmental difference that can be either slightly compensated for, or made much worse, by child-rearing or cultural factors. P. 125, par. 3

Sociopathy is the inability to process emotional experience, including love and caring, except when such experience can be calculated as a coldly intellectual task. P. 125, end of par. 3 which ends on p. 126.

Sociopathy is an aberration in the ability to have and to appreciate real (noncalculated) emotional experience, and therefore to connect with other people within real (noncalculated) relationships. To state the situation concisely, and maybe a little too clearly for comfort: Not to have a moral sense flags an even more profound condition, as does the possession of conscience, because conscience never exists without the ability to love, and sociopathy is ultimately based in lovelessness. P. 126, par. 1

Sociopathy is, at its very essence, ice-cold, like a dispassionate game of chess. In this way, it is different from ordinary duplicitousness, narcissism, and even violence, which are often full of emotional hear. P. 126, par. 3

The only emotions that sociopaths seem to feel genuinely are the so-called “primitive” affective reactions that result from immediate physical pain and pleasure, or from short-term frustrations and successes. Frustration may engender anger or rage in a sociopath. P. 127, par. 1

Narcissism is a failure not of conscience but of empathy, which is the capacity to perceive emotions in others and so react to them appropriately. The poor narcissist cannot see past his own nose, emotionally speaking. Unlike sociopaths, narcissists often are in psychological pain, and may some times seek psychotheraphy. When a narcissist looks for help, one of the underlying issues is usually that, unbeknownst to him, he is alienating his relationships on account of his lack of empathy with others, and is feeling confused, abandoned, and lonely, He misses the people he loves, and is ill-equipped to get them back. Sociopaths, in contrast, do not care about other people, and so do not miss them when they are alienated or gone, except as one might regret the absence of a useful appliance that one had somehow lost. P. 127-8 par. 2 and top of the page 128.

Clinicians and researchers have remarked that where the higher emotions are concerned, sociopaths can “know the words but not the music.” They must learn to appear emotional as you and I would learn a second language, which is to say, by observation, imitation, and practice. And just6 as you or I, with practice, might become fluent in another language, so an intelligent sociopath may become convincingly fluent in “conversational emotion.” Virtually anyone can learn to say “I love you,” or to appear smitten and say the words, “Oh my! What a cute little puppy!” But not all human beings are capable of experiencing the emotion implied by the behavior. Sociopaths never do. P. 128, par. 1

Heritability studies tell us that for sociopathy in particular, biology is half of the story at most. In addition to genetic factors, there are environmental variables that affect the condition of being without conscience, though, as we are about to see, just what these influences are remains somewhat obscure. P. 128, par. 2 and top of pg. 129

Especially since the exposure of the Romanian orphan crisis, psychologists have wondered whether attachment disorder might be the environmental root of sociopathy. The similarities are obvious. Children who suffer from attachment disorder are impulsive and emotionally cold, and are sometimes dangerously violent toward their parents, siblings, playmates, and pets. They tend to steal, vandalize, and start fires, and they often spend time in detention facilities when they are young and in jail when they become adults, just like sociopaths. And children with severe attachment disorders are the only children who are almost as fundamentally scary to us as young sociopaths are. P. 133, par. 1

But the major problem with the equation of attachment disorder and sociopathy, despite the scientifically tempting commonalities of the two, is their persistent and undeniable dissimilarity with respect to the trademark features of sociopathy. Quite unlike sociopaths, children and adults afflicted with attachment disorders are seldom charming or interpersonally clever. On the contrary, these unfortunate individuals are typically somewhat off-putting, nor to they make any great efforts to “fake” being normal. Many are isolates. Their emotional presentation is flat and uninviting, or sometimes directly hostile, and they tend to swing between the distinctly nonseductive extremes of belligerent indifference and unmeetable neediness. None of this allows in any way for the chameleonlike manipulations and con games of the sociopath, with his smiling deceptions and disarming charisma, or for the intermittent success in the material world that the rather sociable sociopath often achieves. P. 133, par. 3 and top of pg. 134.

Many clinicians and parents have reported that sociopathic children refuse to form warm relationships with family members. They tend to pull away, both emotionally and physically. And, of course, so do children with attachment disorders. But very unlike the situation with the sad attachment disorder child, detachment from family is much more likely to be a result of the young sociopath’s way of being in the world than it is to be the cause of it.

And so, in summary, we have some idea of what one of the underlying neurobiological deficits in sociopathy may be. The sociopaths who have been studied reveal a significant aberration in their ability to process emotional information at the level of the cerebral cortex. And from examining heritability studies, we can speculate that the neurobiological underpinnings of the core personality features of sociopathy are as much as 50 percent heritable. The remaining cause, the other 50 percent, are much foggier. Neither childhood maltreatment nor attachment disorder seems to account for the environmental contribution to the loveless, manipulative, and guiltless existence that psychologists call sociopathy. How nongenetic factors affect the development of this profound condition, and they almost certainly do have an effect, is still mainly a puzzle. The question remains: Once a child is born with the limiting neurological glitch, what are the environmental factors that determine whether or not he will go on to display the full-fledged symptoms of sociopathy? And at present, we simply do not know. P. 134-5, par. 2 and top of next page.

It is entirely possible that the environmental influences on sociopathy are more reliably linked with broad cultural characteristics that with any particular child-rearing factors. Indeed, relating the occurrence of sociopathy to cultures has so far been more fruitful for researchers than looking for the answer in specific child-rearing variables. P. 135. par. 1

But perhaps society is the true parent of certain things, and we will eventually find that, as William Ralph Inge said in the early twentieth century, “The proper time to influence the character of a child is about 100 years before he is born.” P. 136, par. 2

Though sociopathy seems to be universal and timeless, there is credible evidence that some cultures contain fewer sociopaths than do other cultures. P. 136. par. 1

Robert Hare writes that he believes “our society is moving in the direction of permitting, reinforcing, and in some instances actually valuing some of the traits listed in the Psychopathy Checklist -— traits such as impulsivity, irresponsibility, lack of remorse.” In this opinion he is joined by theorists who propose that North American culture, which holds individualism as a central value, tends to foster the development of antisocial behavior, and also to disguise it. In other words, in America, the guiltless manipulation of other people “blends” with social expectations to a much greater degree than it would in China or other more group-centered societies. P. 136, par. 2 and top of next page.

EvilForce

Great post!

I have seen these types of behaviors in many Witnoids. Unfortunately I had to struggle to overcome some of these same tendencies myself. I think if I didn't escape being a Dub as early as I did that I would have been permanently scarred and quite likely been a sociopath myself. It took me about 10 years to overcome most of these bad traits. Very sad.

Sunspot

How interesting! So any parallels and levels to wade through, huh?

Thanks for posting this Barbara!

hugs,

Annie

MerryMagdalene

Thanks, Barbara. Good read. I'll have to see if I can get this book through the library system.

A couple things really stood out to me in regard to JWs:

Milgram believed that authority could put conscience to sleep mainly because the obedient person makes an “adjustment of thought,” which is to see himself as not responsible for his own actions. In his mind he is no longer a person who must act in a morally accountable way, but the agent of an external authority to whom he attributes all responsibility and all initiative.

And

Sociopathy is an aberration in the ability to have and to appreciate real (noncalculated) emotional experience, and therefore to connect with other people within real (noncalculated) relationships.

because everything in that organisation is so freakin' calculated.

~Merry

blondie

I began to see how the organization could be called sociopathic

That is interesting. I have always felt that the organization had its own personality, identity, above and beyond that of the individuals in it. That is why no matter who is in charge, things stay the same, because the organizational personality is still in play. The organizational personality wants to maintain its existence no matter what, ethics and morals have no place in the groupthink (I don't know if I'm using that right).

The more things change the more they stay the same. You can rotate out every GB member with another and things will stay the same. I have seen BOE totally changed in two years, and the same old problems still prevail.

Blondie

frankiespeakin

Barbra,

You have selected some very interesting quotes, I definitely look forward to your follow up posts of experiences, and observations.

Now What?

Thanks very much for this Barbara. Was a long read, but you were right, it was worth it. Painful though. As I read this I could easily see in myself how I changed by being part of the org. Everything is so legalistic that it voids what sensible emotion a person does have. And 'reaching out' is really just voluntary assimilating into the sociopathic group think. Amazing. I hate to admit this but I must: In all reality, I actually made an effort to be a sociopath along with the rest. OMG I am glad I am being exposed to this now, whilst I still have time to do something with my life.

Merry, those points jumped out at me too. It really hits home. Deferring responsibility is part of the jw experience. Obey, conform. I feel like I sold my soul

And sociopaths are noted especially for their shallowness of emotion, the hollow and transient nature of any affectionate feelings they may claim to have, a certain breathtaking callousness. They have no trace of empathy and no genuine interest in bonding emotionally with a mate. Once the surface charm is scraped off, their marriages are loveless, one-sided, and almost always short-term. If a marriage partner has any value to the sociopath, it is because the partner is viewed as a possession, one that the sociopath may feel angry to lose, but never sad or accountable. ; ; ; P. 7, par. 2

Summation: Some actions are based on fear or revulsion, not conscience. The opinions of other people keep us in line, arguable better than anything else. P. 23, Summation

We all know of the fake love at the hall. Going door-to-door out of love? Hardly! Cold numbers on a piece of paper was the real motivation after the first year. After the surface charm of being newly baptised wore off, the cong did seem loveless. And I did feel like a possesion many times.

I think I need to get a pet.

sf

hollow and transient nature of any affectionate feelings they may claim to have

Exactly. That "they CLAIM to have"/ possess. Words mean nothing to these types.

We all know of the fake love at the hall. Going door-to-door out of love? Hardly! Cold numbers on a piece of paper was the real motivation after the first year. After the surface charm of being newly baptised wore off, the cong did seem loveless. And I did feel like a possesion many times.

Bingo. And it's coming from a newbie. Welcome.

Either keep your eyes on the prize or you too will die at the hands of jehovah.

THAT is the True Motivation for such claimed love.

sKally

A Paduan

Thanks very much - it's actually what I came here to find - a validation or understanding of what happened - we have never been jws, or had much to do with them, at all. Some jws built and moved next-door, and, well, we were shocked, and certainly were traumatised.

the covetous sociopath settles for besmirching or damaging enviable qualities in others so that they will not have them, either, or at least not be able to enjoy them as much.
Retribution, usually against people who have no idea that they have been targeted, is the most important activity in the covetous sociopath’s life, her highest priority.

Sounds like what happened.

We think we are imagining things, or exaggerating, or that we ourselves are somehow responsible for the sociopath’s behavior.

We have a hard time acknowledging that particular individuals are shameless by their nature, and the rest of us not so.

And that's how we felt - amazing. And it was like no one else understood either, because they also hadn't ever experienced such a vicious and vindictive assailing of the sanctity of their home either - friends even started to look at us funny, like we must be closet whingers. I had accepted that they were simply that evil - black in the heart, but my wife couldn't - she thought we must be 'different' or some type of watered down thing. Friends too couldn't really accept that some people are so shameless - particularly I think because the jws tried so hard to appear 'normal'.

To know who they are is, and was, a distressing thing. It's why I came here.

Scully

I've just started reading this book too. In fact, started a thread about it last night:

Study Finds Education Enhances Personal Conscience & Diminishes Obedience

I was alarmed at the blatantness of the WTS to have the theme for the 2005 District Conventions to be Godly Obedience and at the very same time, the secondary theme was the strong discouragement against education.

Excerpts from new book-THE SOCIOPATH NEXT DOOR. Must read for XJWs

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