About book The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus The Rest Of Us (2006)
Somehow or other this review lost it's original story. I don't know how, so I'm putting it in. Not so much because it is a review of the book (it isn't) but because I never want to forget it, I want to set it down. Living next door to a sociopath is terrible, one of the worst things you an imagine. I want to remember it properly and this was the story. The part of the review that remains is the end story that led up to the finale as it were, that I wrote at the time it was happening. So I've left it at the bottom.***I can't remember exactly what I wrote but essentially the neighbour had lived in the building when it was two apartments, the landlady had built two more upstairs and that pissed her off. She told the landlady the builder was stealing materials. The apartments are set in quite a lot of land and require a gardener, the neighbour wanted to arrange that and also the letting and collecting of rents as the landlady lives on another island. She wanted there to be a high turnover of tenants so she scratched cars, picked locks or otherwise got into apartments, disconnected the gas, drained the cisterns, complained about them etc. People left. She pretended to be my friend for a year or so because her best friend was a very long-time good friend of mine. When I had to leave my apartment (because the landlord wanted to rebuild it), she found me this place. She told terrible lies about her life, maybe I was meant to know she was lying, maybe not. Because of that she popped my car tyres - three times in a week once, which led the tyre lady who fixes them to do it for free, interfered with the radiator and scratched the car. She did a lot of stuff in my place and around it. She killed my cat.The mistakes she made were that the builder, who was my next door neighbour at the time, is a very decent person and he was building it up for free for the landlady because her husband had died and she needed security and the families were very close. So the builder couldn't steal what was his! The neighbour knew none of this.The second mistake she made was that I lived next door to the builder for fifteen years so they knew me. They knew I wasn't a troublemaker. The third mistake was that although the policeman who dealt with it, and who was a friend, couldn't devise a method to catch her. She disconnected the electricity when she bust into my house so the cameras didn't work. Although he couldn't do it, he did support me and on the day when he was away that her boyfriend threatened me and my son with the rock, and he phoned the police station to complain, he got an officer whose father and my grandmother were close friends. He said the right things... And that was the end of that. Then the update. Terrible story eh? Two and a half years of that. Oh and my close friend doesn't speak to me. She said that the (ex) neighbour wouldn't stand for her still being friends with me so... sorrry. There you go. Our kids grew up together.***Original review with a lot missing, hence the story aboveI'm on page 50 of The Sociopath Next Door. Its like my mind goes blank faced with any kind of self-help book. Perhaps, even with my appalling criminal neighbour I'm beyond redemption. I cannot finish this book. Hell, I can hardly start it. Its sitting in my kitchen window so if the psychopathic neighbour decides to break in again she will see it :-) I'm giving it another go.Missing bit***I wrote this when it was happening Update: My only way of annoying my neighbour (I'm neither a criminal nor a psychopath) was revving up my jeep outside her window for a minute or two and it drove her insane. :-) Eventually her boyfriend came out and threatened to throw a rock through the windscreen and when my son objected to his behaviour he picked up a bigger rock and told him he would fuck-him up if he went to the police. We had the police up within the hour. A stupid man he phoned the landlady to complain and she told him that since he didn't live there or pay rent there he had no right to complain. The landlady then phoned the neighbour who presumed I had complained, the boyfriend not having wanted to confess his ignominous dismissal by the landlady, and said it was all a lie, I had made it up. She also quite gratuiously told the landlady that the only reason she had taken my cat was that I put it in the back of her car and it woke up eight miles later and scratched hell out of the boyfriend so they threw it out of the car! (Anyone with a cat knows the cat would have scratched them to death by the bottom of the drive). The landlady said that it was the boyfriend, not me, who had phoned her and that she was a liar and gave her notice to leave.That was back in November. She's still there. Hides her car and pulls her blinds down in case a lawyer comes to serve her papers. The landlady says she has a lawyer but since she lives on a different island she hardly ever comes over to see what is going on. I don't care, the neighbour is so frightened she hides behind her pulled-down blinds and restricts her mischief to keying mine and another neighbour's vehicles. I could live with it.It took more than a year for the landlady and lawyers to get her out. Since then I've had nice neighbours. Original review was written 28 April 2009, but most of the story was missing, so I rewrote it 5 August 2013
This is a good, though somewhat light (being intended for the pop-psych crowd) description of just what a sociopath is, what makes them tick, how to recognize them, and how to avoid them. It's not full of gruesome crimes or case studies, because Stout's key message is that sociopaths, for the most part, are not psychotic serial killers. They are seemingly ordinary people who can live ordinary lives fooling most everyone around them. And if you do realize that someone is a sociopath, there isn't much you can do about it if they aren't actually doing anything criminal. Sociopaths all play dominance games and view other people -- even their own families -- as objects to be manipulated and used, so the only thing you can do is disengage, even if the sociopath is your own parent or child. The scariest and most heartbreaking thing about them is that they are completely incurable.Stout's lengthy explanation of conscience is sometimes interesting, though full of a lot of speculation, blending as she does viewpoints from every field from religion and mysticism to evolutionary psychology. She tries to address questions like "What causes sociopaths?" and "What evolutionary advantage could there be in having no conscience?" (and conversely, "What evolutionary advantage is there in having a conscience?"), but like anything treading the murky waters of evpsych, it's mostly speculation. The fact is that (according to Stout) 1 in 25 Americans is a sociopath, and this crosses all economic and social strata. Contrary to what you might assume, sociopaths don't seem to be produced by abusive or traumatic childhoods. She tries hard to argue that sociopathy is a combination of innate and environmental factors, and clearly there is no gene for sociopathy, but it does seem to be the case that sociopaths are pretty much born, not made. If there is any way to detect early warning signs that a young child might have sociopathic tendencies and correct it before it's too late, psychology does not yet seem to have figured it out.Stout claims (without a lot of evidence, I thought) that sociopathy is more common in Western society. Obviously sociopaths have always existed in every society, but she argues that Western society encourages sociopathic behavior by giving rewards to "winners" even if they win through ruthless and unscrupulous means. I find this questionable; not that sociopaths can rise high in the political or business world (obviously they can) but that any other society is better at filtering out people without a conscience. There's plenty of ruthlessness and corruption in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and even small tribal societies, so I really doubt sociopaths thrive less there than here in the U.S.Stout ends the book with an attempt at a reassuring message that sociopaths really don't win in the end; that they mostly live hollow lives of perpetual unfulfillment and can never even appreciate what they are missing. This may be true, but I suspect a lot of sociopaths feel pretty darn self-fulfilled when they get what they want. Nice guys may not always finish last, but if you're competing with a sociopath, it's going to be an ugly race, and the evidence around us suggests we are competing with a lot of them.
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***NO SPOILERS***Two aspects of this book are noticeably fitting from the start: its cover design and its title. The cover’s zoomed-in focus on three pairs of eyes has significance that's unclear until many pages in, a significance that no doubt will startle and intrigue. As for the title, it might sound somewhat melodramatic, but it underscores one of Stout’s most important points; if there’s one thing she wanted to make very clear it’s that sociopaths (sometimes called “psychopaths”; psychiatrists seem divided on whether these terms are one and the same), are veritable experts at hiding in plain sight; the majority are not crazed shadowy figures lurking in alleyways. They’re more charming and charismatic than the average person, and they take exorbitant pride in fooling everyone around them by lying, manipulating, feigning the empathy they naturally lack, and “playing the pity card.” People like reading about people. Stout knew this and smartly interspersed her narrative with captivating non-fictional anecdotes (and the occasional fictional anecdote) to illustrate her to-the-point explanations about this terrifying disorder. Such a set-up keeps interest high while making the subject very accessible to the lay reader; this is not a tedious psychiatric work that feels like homework to read. Stout’s book probably is ideal to read, in addition to (and preferably after), Dr. Robert Hare’s more academic Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. Hare, being the foremost expert in the field of psychopathy, approaches the subject even more thoroughly, but Stout’s book is direct and gripping from page one. Readers searching for a quality book about sociopathy will be pleased with this choice. Final verdict: A must-read-now that will change the way readers view the world around them. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License
—Caroline
I read this book last month to help me be able to identify people who will try to hurt me.That sounds paranoid!I deal with the near-public on an almost continuous public, however, and that "public" quickly becomes the group of folks I deal with every day of the week. I have to work with them closely, I have to try to teach them, and I end up living with them in my head for those seven days of the week. It's not the best thing for me to do, but it is what happens. They pop up in my mind. At the end of all this, they get to decide if I gave them a product that was worth their money: Am I a good professor? Would they buy the product again? Unfortunately, some of these people are callous. They don't care whether how they treat others in my class or me is beautiful, ugly, hurtful, responsible...in short, they don't care about anyone else.I do not believe they are all sociopaths, but they verge on it - they head towards this lack of civility as so many of us do in this city that is losing its civility.This book seriously helped me. It helped me watch out for the signs of true sociopathic behavior. It helped me be able to not worry about whether I care about these people. It helped me come up with a plan for how to deal with one of them if I end up having to work with one.It helped, also, sort through the various kinds of sociopaths. They are not all murdering, drooling, Dr. Hydes. Instead, they charm, are witty, and they do everything they can to make you do exactly what they want. Since the simply do not care what you actually feel about them, so long as you do what they want, they act without regard for how you might feel. They count on your doing the "right" thing, the "caring" thing. If you do the thing that protects yourself, they don't care about that, either.They can be next door, they can be at work, they can ruin your life. It's a great book, and it ultimately helped me feel much better about my own choices of caring, which I had not expected. Her argument about why it's wonderful to NOT be a sociopath is a jewel.
—Tracy
If given the opportunity to read a text about sociopathy and its prevalence, don't bother reading Stout's work. Instead, read "Without Conscience" by the psychologist Hare. Hare's work on sociopathy is notable in the field, and after reading it, you will be shocked to notice that entire sections of "The Sociopath Next Door" appear to be lifted from "Without Conscience," slightly reworded, and placed into the text. "The Sociopath Next Door" is still an interesting book, but it is at best a 'see spot run' version of Hare's only slightly longer book.
—Matthew
