Rob Kall: -b ut my
understanding is that there are also people who are higher functioning
sociopaths.
Donald Black: Absolutely.
Rob Kall: I'm very
interested in those people who don't get arrested, people who don't function in
a violent way, but they do it in a way that perhaps hurts a lot more
people. What about wealthy people, what
about powerful people, what about people who manage to navigate socially
without being violent? And I assume that
you don't have to be violent to be a sociopath.
You could be a colluder.
Donald Black: That's a
wonderful question, and you're absolutely correct. Not everyone who's anti-social is
violent. But there is this issue of low
socioeconomic status: low income, low educational level, and all of those
things are highly correlated with anti-social personality disorder. Now, does low social status cause anti-social
personality disorder? No, but in fact
people who are anti-social tend not to finish their education, they have
unstable personal lives, they get divorced, have many relationships, they get
fired from jobs. So all of that
reinforces low income positions.
Now, there are some people who rise above
that. You'll find sociopaths at all
levels of society. There's no reason why
people at even the upper ends of the income level can't be sociopaths, and in
fact there probably are many, proportionately less than at the lower ends of
the income spectrum. For example,
someone can grow up in a wealthy family, and despite their anti-social
personality they get a good education, maybe through family connections get a
good job so they have a decent income, and yet they are anti-social: regularly
committing crimes (perhaps white-collar crimes and not violent crimes), abusing
a spouse quietly at home so no one knows.
But I do highlight these cases in my book - you
know, the white-collar criminal. And
there are many that we read about in the news.
Now I'm not sure that Bernie Madoff is a typical sociopath. His behavior is anti-social. He certainly had plenty of money, access to
the very upper levels of society, and yet what he did was commit a horrible
financial crime that robbed many people of their life savings. There are plenty of examples throughout
history of just that sort of behavior.
Now, is he an anti-social? I
would say: probably technically not, because there's no evidence that he had
this pattern of childhood misbehavior.
Rob Kall: How would
you know that, though? This is not
something that somebody would necessarily study; how do you know that he didn't
torture animals, or was mean to people, or cheated in school ..
Donald Black: That's a
good point. I don't know that; but there
have been biographies written about him, and I've certainly read profiles of
him, and I've never seen any journalist or biographer point out these
things. Whereas, for example, I
mentioned Saddam Hussein earlier - who, again, was at the upper level of his
society (because he is president for life, basically), and yet his history of
misbehavior, including animal cruelty, is very well-documented. So we do know that some people like that do
have well-documented histories of childhood misbehavior.
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