now i know about sociopaths

so i finished reading this one. sociopaths. good stuff. there were some portraits of some chilling people. the author, dr stout, says that 4% of the population in this country are sociopaths and makes the point that there are more sociopaths than people with colon cancer in the united states of america. in east asian countries there are significantly fewer sociopaths, and dr stout says it's because the culture and religion there are based on the interconnectedness of all things, and sociopathy is about thorough disconnection.

now, i'm as individualistic as the next guy, but i'm all for human interconnexion (i like the british spelling).

the segment of the book that i think most affected me was the story of romania. i don't know why i didn't know about the romanian orphans. the former president of romania, ceausesco, was a sociopath. he didn't allow birth control or contraception and hence lots of unwanted kids were born.

lots of these kids were put in institutions where they were fed and kept alive but given virtually no attention. children suffer when they are not touched in loving and parental ways. eventually it became a big thing for other countries to adopt these romanian kids. but the kids were frequently hostile to their adoptive parents because they had never been shown affection and had essentially been made sociopathic. soon romania stopped these adoptions because it was making the country look bad.

this is an oversimplification of dr stout's oversimplification, to be sure, but the crux is that the presidential sociopath created tens of thousands of little sociopaths, a large portion of a generation. quite an achievement.

hitler and pol pot are referenced. oblique references are made to the current situation in our country and in iraq. dr stout never outright says that president bush is a sociopath, but such a conclusion is easily inferred.

quite telling are the narratives dr stout write of amalgams of sociopaths (tales gleaned from her patients - she is a psychologist who specializes in posttraumatic recovery) living smaller lives and wreaking smaller-scale havoc.

odds are we all know a sociopath or two (as 1 in 25 people have the disorder, as she repeats a few times) - though probably not me, because i don't even know 25 people. the book is a bit glib in places and sometimes repetitive, but overall i recommend it. she manages to end it on a cheery note. hope for the future. she advises we all move to east asia. no she doesn't.

now then ... what's next, reading-wise?