How do I identify a sociopath?

There is a simple way to identify psychopaths. Most people aren’t familiar with it because they instinctively avoid getting into the position needed to “test” for socio-psychopathy, since it involves making ourselves emotionally vulnerable.

First, a note about the terms.

“Sociopath” and “psychopath” are two different ways of identifying the same thing.

Sociopath implies using social norms and mores and a person’s ability to function in socially acceptable ways to tell the difference between “normal” and “pathological”. I don’t much use the term, because in a psychopathic society, normal, healthy people would test out as pathological as far as authorities in that society would be concerned. For example someone who wanted to protect potential victims of ethnic cleansing probably would be considered sociopaths in a society controlled and indoctrinated by racists.

I prefer to think and talk in terms of psychopathy because it gets to the real issue. If a person is a healthy, functional individual, their psyche (i.e., neurochemistry and neurocircuitry) is the opposite of pathological. If a person is psychopathic in a psychopathic society, they might well rise to pinnacles of success as defined by that society, so they wouldn’t be called sociopaths even though they’re still psychopaths. And a psychopath in a relatively healthy society can learn to function in acceptable ways, i.e., neurotypical ways. In fact, they’re very good at this kind of daily acting. The fact that they can detach from personal traits, preferences and habits that might run afoul of the PC Police makes them great at fitting in, precisely because they’re psychopathic.

So here’s a reliable way to detect psychopaths. It was inspired from a saying attributed to Jesus:

Do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.

So, toss out a pearl you don’t mind (too much) possibly getting trampled and see what the reaction is. In practical terms:

  1. Share a mildly risky, personal, emotional truth about yourself, then look for signs of empathy.
  2. Notice what the person’s attention instinctively latches onto— the “pearl” or you.
  3. Feed any indications of psychopathy and see if the person takes the bait, tramples the pearl, and makes any move toward tearing into you.

This can all be done in a very low-risk way, verbally. It’s like they say about trading stocks or currencies: Only invest money you can afford to lose. Except in this case the valuables are emotional. Besides, you don’t lose the pearl and any trampling that happens won’t damage it—can’t even touch it, in fact. It’s still yours. Although it smarts a bit, you can just pick that pearl back up and put it safe in its little drawer of the heart and walk on, none the worse for the wear but quite a bit wiser.

All but the most sophisticated psychopaths can be “outed” this way.

Will this method help you answer the question whether the person would qualify as clinically psychopathic? No, but that’s probably not your purpose. They are psychopathic enough to notice it, which means psychopathic enough to affect you negatively. You might not want to have anything to do with them, or you might want to limit your contact. If that’s not possible, say it’s an ex-partner and kids so you have no choice but to deal with the person, at least now you’re well advised to put on gloves and Kevlar before stepping into the arena with them once again.

An empathetic person will try to relate to you when you share something intimate with them. They’ll try to mirror, sympathize, and understand your feelings so they can understand you. Most importantly, they will immediately make you the focus of their attention in a way that feels like understanding, or at least that signals they want to understand. They won’t forget you in order to focus on the pearl.

Feelings are key. A psychopath’s affective psyche is to some degree non-functional. In order to appear normal, they have to fake it. So look at their eyes. There’s a difference between a friend’s eyes and a predator’s eyes and yet again a reptile’s eyes. The closer you get to the feeling like you’re looking at predatory or reptilian eyes—think how it feels looking into a shark’s eyes—the closer they are to being a psychopath as far as you can see, which is the best that any of us can do. (It’s not all and only about their eyes, but it’s the best place to start because it’s really hard to fake the eyes.)

Mere absence of empathy, focusing on something other than you and how you feel, such as events, details, facts, concepts, principles that apply to the situation or people in the story, etc., doesn’t prove psychopathy, but it’s consistent with psychopathy. At least, given it would be healthy for a person hearing what you just confided to empathize with you, you could say that lack of empathy is at least mildly psychopathic.

On the other hand, if the person reacts negatively toward what you confided, especially if the person reacts negatively toward you as a person because of what you confided, putting you down, dissing you, or any other belittling, degrading, offensive, abusive reaction, you are dealing with some form of psychopath.

I realize that’s not what most people mean by “psychopath” these days because, like they do with violence, physical and sexual abuse, authoritarianism, and a host of other essentially repugnant human behaviors and attitudes, they assume that some of it is inevitable and must be tolerated. (I don’t accept that cynicism, with the result that I’ve gotten quite competent in recognizing and dealing with psychopaths, although I haven’t yet had to deal with serial killers or the like. But I have dealt with the next closest thing: cult leaders.) From this cynical standpoint, their question becomes where to draw the “this far but no further” line beyond which it’s “too much”, but short of which pejorative labels aren’t appropriate.

Notice that as long as we maintain that kind of cynical tolerance for problematic behaviors, we’ve effectively condoned the problem in perpetuity as long as it’s not “too much”.

This really makes no sense. Poison is still poison, caustic acid is still caustic acid, and shit it still shit regardless how much or how concentrated they are or are not.

Psychopathy is still a dysfunctional condition that results from damage to cognitive and especially to affective neurochemistry and neurocircuitry, regardless how severe or widespread the damage is. A little dysfunction is still dysfunction. A little damage is still damage. Genetic propensity toward psychological dysfunction is far rarer than psychic damage inflicted by trauma, especially traumatic abuse—which in this authoritarian, punishment-oriented society is quite common.

This means there’s some psychopath in all of us, and there’s some healthy psyche in a psychopath. It’s a good way to look at it, because it introduces hope for us all.

There’s a step four, which isn’t really a step so much as a follow-up: Give it time. If you can, that is. If not, err on the side of caution using this rule: Healthy, empathetic people are obvious because you can feel it. If you have a question about a person, it’s a good question. If you happen to be wrong and doubt an empathetic, healthy person, you don’t have to worry. They won’t fault you because, of course, they’ll understand and empathize. If someone does fault you for doubting or questioning them, you probably want to stay away from them anyway, psychopath or not.

As you see how a person handles your pearls, it will become clear what they’re really about. If doubt still remains, though, there is a dead giveaway that hinges on commitment. It’s a great litmus test to cap off this method.

If you don’t make commitments before you’re comfortable making them, you won’t get into trouble very often. The problem is that it’s easy to induce us to commit prematurely, whether it’s commitment to a person, a belief, an organization, a regime, and whether it’s commitment of our minds, hearts, property, money, time, work, energy, or even our bodies.

All con schemes revolve around getting you to commit prematurely. So the simple way to keep from getting burned is to never commit until you’re sure you want to and don’t feel compelled to. That’s sometimes hard to do—which the con artist well knows and loves—but it really doesn’t take too much practice to get the hang of it.

If a person wants you to commit and sees you’re not ready, they’ll either respect where you’re at or they’ll try to push you. Someone who is genuinely on your side and cares for you will do the opposite of push: They’ll defend your right to remain noncommittal. If no one has your back and will advocate for you, you can still advocate for yourself. We sometimes call this “holding boundaries”.

Establish a boundary for yourself: No one is welcome to induce you to commit prematurely. If someone tries to violate that boundary, the question whether they’re a psychopath or not becomes secondary, because you probably should extricate yourself from them regardless and not wait around to figure out their state of mental health.

On the other hand, if someone does not push you to commit prematurely, the question whether or not they’re a psychopath becomes less important, because then they pose no real threat to you even if they are a psychopath.

So always refuse to commit prematurely, i.e., before you’re ready and comfortable. In other words, never commit because you’re being told to commit or made to believe you should or must commit or get scared into making a commitment.

A favorite of con artists (and salespeople, but what’s the difference, lol?) is the “snooze you lose” gambit. Fear of loss easily induces us to commit before it’s wise to. By maintaining your commitment boundary you’ll either aggravate con-artist-could-be-psychopaths, thus exposing them, or they’ll decide you’re not worth the pain and move on. Win-win!

Are sociopaths with high IQ more likely to be high-functioning?

Yes.

  1. Sociopaths with high IQ’s and that come from good families where they are taught cognitive empathy become surgeons, lawyers, and bankers.
  2. Sociopaths with high IQ’s from abusive families and low socioeconomic status become mafia leaders, high end drug dealers, etc.
  3. Sociopaths with low IQ’s and abusive poor families become violent, often end up in prison.
  4. Sociopaths with low IQ’s and good families but working class backgrounds become police officers, join the military, or remain underemployed.
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Mary Trump’s Book Shows How Donald Trump Gets Away With It

The problem with a fraud as big as this president is that once you start collaborating with him, it’s impossible to get out.

Too Much and Never EnoughMary Trump’s devastating indictment of how the Trump family created, as her subtitle characterizes him, “the world’s most dangerous man,” hits bookstores this week. Its publication coincides with—as she predicted—record-shattering COVID-19 cases, a fragile economy, and a half-formed government plan to open schools this fall at any cost. By now you have doubtless ingested the greatest hits of her family gossip: Donald Trump

  • ogled his own niece in a bathing suit and
  • sought to fill one of his books with hit lists of “ugly” women who had rebuffed him; Donald Trump
  • paid someone to take his SATs;
  • Maryanne Trump Barry, a retired federal appeals court judge, once described her brother as a “clown” with no principles; Donald Trump
  • was a vicious bully even as a child;
  • Freddy Trump—the author’s father—died alone in a hospital while Donald went to a movie.

The details are new, and graphic, yes, but very little about it is surprising: The president is a lifelong liar and cheater, propped up by a father who was as relentless in his need for success as Donald Trump was to earn his approval. Check please.

But not quite. What is new and surprising is also that Mary Trump, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, has given us a granular portrait of Trump’s profound impairment: She says that her uncle has all nine clinical criteria for narcissism, although she insists that this diagnosis is only the tip of the psychological iceberg—he may also suffer from antisocial personality disorder, sociopathy, and/or dependent personality disorder, along with an undiagnosed learning disability that likely interferes with his ability to process information. I leave it to the mental health experts to determine whether some or all of that is accurate. But what Mary Trump surely adds to the growing canon of the “Trump is unwell” book club is not limited to family gossip or mental health diagnostics: At bottom, Too Much and Never Enough may be the first book that stipulates, in its first pages, that the president is irreparably damaged, and then turns a clinician’s lens on the rest of us, the voters, the enablers, the flatterers, the hangers-on, and the worshippers. It is here that Mary Trump’s book makes perhaps the most enduring contribution to the teetering piles of books that have offered too little too late, even while telling us that which we already knew. Because Mary Trump begins from the assumption that other analysis tends to end with: Donald Trump is lethally dangerous, stunningly incoherent, and pathologically incapable of caring about anyone but himself. So, what Mary Trump wants to know is: What the hell is wrong with everyone around him? As she writes in her prologue, “there’s been very little effort to understand not only why he became what he is but how he’s consistently failed up despite his glaring lack of fitness.”

The book is thus actually styled as an indictment not of Donald Trump but of Trump’s enablers. The epigraph is from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and it’s emphatically not about Donald John Trump at all: “If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.” Mary Trump

  1. blames Fred Trump for Donald Trump’s pathology, although she doesn’t claim that her uncle is a tragic victim of abuse. She blames
  2. his family that propped him up (also her family, it should be noted), and then in concentric and expanding circles,
  3. the media that failed to scrutinize him,
  4. the banks that pretended he was the financial genius he was not,
  5. the Republican Party, and
  6. the “claque of loyalists” in the White House who continue to lie for him and to him in order to feed his insatiable ego and self-delusion. Even the phrase “too much and never enough” is perhaps deliberately borrowed from the language of addiction, and what Mary Trump describes here is not just her uncle’s addiction to adulation, fame, money, and success, but a nation’s—or some part of a nation’s—unfathomable addiction to him.

The bulk of the book focuses on the tale of Mary and her brother Fritz’s abandonment by the rest of the Trump clan. Her father, Freddy, the scion and namesake, failed to be the storybook heir to her grandfather’s real estate empire, instead collapsing into a tragic black hole of alcoholism, illness, and despair. Donald Trump, Freddy’s younger brother, not only helped push Freddy down but also stepped on his sinking shoulders on his way into the empty, Freddy-shaped space to become his father’s successor. And as Freddy’s parents and three other siblings altered their lives and priorities in order to orbit around Donald, Mary and her brother were eventually written out of the wills, the empire, and the family story, as payback for their father’s perceived weakness and failures. This is all tragic in its own right, but it also makes Mary, who has been let down by the so-called adults in the room almost since her infancy, perfectly positioned to explain and translate what happens to otherwise high-functioning adults—

  1. her aunt Maryanne, a competent federal judge;
  2. the lawyers and accountants tasked with fulfilling Donald’s whims and hiding his failings;
  3. the sycophants and Republicans and evangelical Christians who support his campaign unquestioningly; and
  4. the officials who now populate the Senate, the Cabinet, and the Oval Office.

All of them appear to be reasonably mentally sound. Yet they all cover for Donald, at the expense of real suffering and genuine human loss, just as the Trump clan ignored Freddy’s disintegration and death. Mary Trump’s childhood trauma has become America’s trauma, and she really wants to know how that came to be. Again.

The section of the book that has garnered the most attention is likely Mary’s claim that Trump cannot be evaluated for pathologies because he is “in the West Wing, essentially institutionalized” and that he has in fact “been institutionalized for most of his adult life. So there is no way to know how he would thrive, or even survive, on his own in the real world.” We are not used to seeing entities like the White House described in this way—a “very expensive and well-guarded padded cell”—as a means of protection for the broken man inside rather than as a platform from which a leader can change the world. And her ultimate point is that even a shattered psyche, buffered from the real world, can still do irreparable damage to it. But the most interesting assessments she offers are reserved for those inside the “institutions,” the people who might have saved us and certainly have not, from

  1. the nuclear family, to
  2. the Trump businesses, to
  3. New York’s bankers and powerful elites, to
  4. Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo, and Jared Kushner.

They all knew and know that the emperor has no clothes, even as they devote their last shreds of dignity to effusive praise of his ermine trim and jaunty crown.

Mary Trump seems to answer the question of why they do this in a section late in the book about Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump. In describing Fred’s growing realizing that his fair-haired boy, Donald, was a fraud, Mary explains that, yes, Fred himself was a master at fattening his wallet with taxpayer funds, committing tax fraud to benefit his children. (Mary admits she was the one who leaked the family tax information to the New York Times in 2018 for its blockbuster story.) But as it became clear that Donald had no real business acumen—as his Atlantic City casinos cratered and his father unlawfully poured secret funds into saving them—Mary realized that Fred also depended on the glittery tabloid success at which Donald excelled. Fred continued to prop up his son’s smoke-and-mirrors empire because, as Mary writes, “Fred had become so invested in the fantasy of Donald’s success that he and Donald were inextricably linked. Facing reality would have required acknowledging his own responsibility, which he would never do. He had gone all in, and although any rational person would have folded, Fred was determined to double down.”

Mary Trump’s words there could just as easily be true for

  1. John Kelly,
  2. Kellyanne Conway,
  3. John Bolton,
  4. Mitch McConnell,
  5. Susan Collins, or
  6. Melania Trump.

And as Mary Trump is quick to observe, the sheer stuck-ness of his enablers means that Trump never, ever learns his lesson. Being cosseted, lied to, defended, and puffed up means that Donald Trump knows that, “no matter what happens, no matter how much damage he leaves in his wake, he will be OK.” He fails up, in other words, because everyone around him, psychologically normal beings all, ends up so enmeshed with his delusions that they must do anything necessary to protect them. Trump’s superpower isn’t great vision or great leadership but rather that he is so tiny. Taking him on for transactional purposes may seem like not that big a deal at first, but the moment you put him in your pocket, you become his slave. It is impossible to escape his orbit without having to admit a spectacular failure in moral and strategic judgment, which almost no one can stomach. Donald Trump’s emptiness is simply a mirror of the emptiness of everyone who propped him up. It’s that reflection that becomes unendurable. This pattern, as Mary writes, “guaranteed a cascade of increasingly consequential failures that would ultimately render all of us collateral damage.” Nobody, not even Mary, who signed on briefly to ghostwrite one of his books, ends up just a little bit beholden to Donald Trump and that includes his rapturous supporters who still queue up, maskless, to look upon his greatness. As she concludes, his sociopathy “reminds me that Donald isn’t really the problem at all.” That makes hers something other than the 15th book about the fathoms-deep pathologies of Donald Trump: It is the first real reckoning with all those who “caused the darkness.”

Mary Trump is, among other things, a brisk and gifted writer, and she is a fact witness to, and also a victim of, a family that elevated a mediocre and vicious man, at the expense of justice, fairness, and truth. Her real beef is not with her uncle Donald, who has always been exactly as we have long known him to be; that’s why a smattering of new details about his business failures and meanness were never really the point of this book. We’ve read that book before. The perspective of this book is made possible exactly because Mary Trump was one of the first children to be written out of the will, cast out of the family, and denied the support and love that should have been hers, as a result of her father’s perceived failures. It is this—because she was ousted rather than being forced to remove herself—that allows her to see clearly why everyone else stuck around. And what she reveals is a devastating indictment of all the alleged adults who stick around Donald Trump, who came together to fail America, to leave vulnerable populations to fend for themselves, and who continue to lie and spin to pacify his ego. They do it because they can’t admit the payoff is never coming, and to save themselves from the embarrassment of having to admit they were catastrophically wrong.