Nov

1

The question arises, "who can you trust as you get along in life" and "how can you teach your kids or your wife to take care of their financial lives when you are gone" and "how many spouses and family have been victimized when the person that controls considerable wealth is seduced by a much younger and more sexual personage with the intention of relieving him and the family of their wealth"?

an anonymous commenter writes in: 

My friend recommended The Sociopath Next Door a few days ago. Here is a great quote:

"Maybe you are someone who craves money and power, and though you have no vestige of conscience, you do have a magnificent IQ. You have the driving nature and the intellectual capacity to pursue tremendous wealth and influence, and you are in no way moved by the nagging voice of conscience that prevents other people from doing everything and anything they have to do to succeed. You choose business, politics, the law, banking, or international development, or any of a broad array of other power professions, and you pursue your career with a cold passion that tolerates none of the usual moral or legal incumbrances. When it is expedient, you doctor the accounting and shred the evidence, you stab your employees and your clients (or your constituency) in the back, marry for money, tell lethal premeditated lies to people who trust you, attempt to ruin colleagues who are powerful or eloquent, and simply steamroll over groups who are dependent and voiceless. And all of this you do with the exquisite freedom that results from having no conscience whatsoever. You become unimaginably, unassailably, and maybe even globally successful. Why not? With your big brain, and no conscience to rein in your schemes, you can do anything at all."

Ken's book suggests 1 in 25 have the personality type. Sociopath's seem to be an overweight in the business sphere. And Sociopath's organizations echo their personality traits. Thus identifying them would seem to be essential. Unfortunately, there's the chicken and egg issue: by the time you have foreknowledge, it's often too late.

The only ready indicators I've felt: a general feeling that somethings not quite right when you meet them; something about the eyes that is a bit vacant (but as distinct from meeting an introvert).

But I do not claim any success in this measure.

I think the Rockefeller approach of cheating your own sons perhaps has sense. Similarly, I think you need to meet some truly ruthless people to get a sense of them. You might seemingly want to protect children from these sorts of experiences, but perhaps it ultimately costs more later? Unfortunately, ruthless people are not always in ready supply until you are on the battlefield, so to speak.

Jeff Watson writes:

The sociopaths in the S&P pit in the late 80's were legendary. Any
time I would get a trade down, even my own firm's broker stole from me.
He was busted for it in 1989.

Kim Zussman writes: 

We trust friends and family based on incomplete information, or empirically based on a sample of trials from which we conclude trust or not. This is true because we can never get into minds of others to understand their true motives and intentions (and even if we could, their motives may be indecipherable as they are invisible to themselves).

Thus it is logical, when presented with unexpected criminal evidence, to question the original basis of friendship or kinship.

Put another way, when should countervailing evidence out-weigh personal connection?


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2 Comments so far

  1. Ed on November 1, 2012 11:12 am

    Subtract the IQ part and it all makes more sense.

    The basic description is otherwise of the standard criminal mentality.

    Give the same traits to a person with an 70-85 IQ, and you have the typical petty thief/violent personality that clogs up our legal system and commits the majority of crime. This person lacks the “sociopaths” motivation only because advanced scheming is out of their range, as they are unable to think far beyond range of the moment concerns and as such usually hatch pathetic, destined to fail schemes whenever they try.

    So, I would say the sociopath is simply a criminal personality with above-average intelligence.

  2. Bill Fallon on November 2, 2012 6:30 pm

    I have met a few in my business life and I have found more often than not the most able liars and crooks are adept at clearing their consciences, if that’s the correct word, with overdone attendance to religion. They feel its OK to break contracts if God tells them to.

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