I ripped this out of a newpaper and have saved it for more than 10 years. I've typed it out for you:
Not all psychopaths are murderers.
In fact, you’d be surprised how many you know.
It is estimated that there are millions of psychopaths and most live at liberty in our midst. In your lifetime you are likely to know one well, though you may never have labelled them in this way.
They are to be found everywhere, not just in films, on tv and in novels, but among your friends, collegues and family.
Hardly any of these people are serial killers. Most are un- and de-constructive, if relatively harmless, burdens on society. They are that grandiose friend who is bitter at his lack of success, or the wild one who never seemed to grow out of adolescence. They abuse either alcohol or drugs or everyone in their world, are selfish and embarrassingly anti-social – getting into fights, committing minor infringements of the law, such as shoplifting and idiotic motor offences.
But there is also a small and fascinating minority who manage to make a ‘virtue’ of their defective characters – quintessentially, the psychopath’s lack of empathy towards the suffering he causes – and become hugely successful. They are high achievers, and you may run across one in just about any situation: business, academia, the arts or the media.
An element of implacable ruthlessness and heartlessness is essential to scale to the very top in many professions, and these come naturally to the psychopath. Whether you are the fugitive head of a discredited company or an insider from a City institution, an immoral politian or a middle-Eastern dictator, it is far easier to swindle others if you feel no sympathy for them.
The key to the ‘successful’ psychopath’s success is his secrecy about his personae and past deceits.
It isn’t possible to say what causes psychopathy. There may be some genetic element involved, but what seems more certain is that psychopaths are the victims of infant neglect.
Their effect on others is easier to describe. These people leave us feeling ripped off emotionally. In relationships they treat partners as things, as cardboard cut-outs. Their unthinkable level of selfishness is often not recognised untill the damage has been done. At work, they steal our ideas, money and anything that we value (especially the latter, for they value nothing; their envy and destructiveness towards our pleasures know no bounds).
A psychopath destroys almost as many lives as a serial killer by depriving others of their sanity.
Yet for all their ‘successes’, these people are deeply dissatisfied. They live in permanent fear of being exposed as the fakes they know themselves to be. Their inner lives are so barren that, for most of the time, they feel desperate for any kind of human contact. If they seek professional help, they soon realise that nothing and nobody can give it. There are no drugs that can enable them to feel for others.
Doomed to damage and pervert all whom they come into contact with, they are to be avoided at all costs.
Watch out for the high-achieving psychopath. They are all around us and they look just like you and me.
