The book’s title reads like a desperate appeal to fans of the true crime, horror and screwball comedy genres. But I suspect (and Amazon.com seems to confirm) that Stout has found a far wider audience than that, because her book speaks to a need that runs disturbingly deep. It is a need that combines the modern faith in scientific and medical language with a primitive elevation of such emotions as disgust and fear — and all of it in the service of untrammeled egotism.
Reading through the work of Stout’s fellow self-help gurus, one vacillates between amusement and depression (though usually settling on depression). Websites on office life detail how to navigate among the “Five Types of Co-Worker” on your way to the top. Elsewhere, you can learn “How to Spot a Loser,” how not to be an AFC (short for “Average Frustrated Chump”) and how to “defend yourself” against EDs (short for “Energy Drainers”). Watch out, too, for “Toxic People,” who may well be lurking inside your own home.
This brand of self-help has natural allure in today’s world. Not only does its classificatory approach appropriate the form (and, in the case of “The Sociopath Next Door,” the content) of scientific and medical discourse; it also carefully conforms to the core tenets of meritocracy and the dogma of political correctness. Anyone, regardless of race or class, can be an ED; toxicity is not limited to men or women, blacks, whites or Jews. Crucially, it is superficially anodyne, aimed at minimizing conflict. You’re not being told to hurt anyone, just to avoid them.
How pleasing, too, to be told what we already know: that each of us is a basically decent person who lives in a world teeming with not-so-decent people, a ruthless world that requires us to “wise up” and cut certain people out of our lives, however compassionate we may want to be. In such a world, there is no choice but to make things cut and dried, to be rational about those around us in pursuit of whatever goals we may have. This is the story we tell ourselves, but if we look closer another picture emerges: The very failings that we have officially relegated to the dustbin of history — the fear of the Other, the disdain for the seemingly inferior, the ruthless use of human beings as means to an end — may be returning in the safe guise of individual preference and personal empowerment.
For those who worry about social cohesion, about a strong civic culture, this is cause for deep concern. It is hard enough to live in a fast-paced world in which so many of those we encounter are strangers, people whose interactions with us are often limited to the economic sphere. Do we really need to populate the world with more projections of our anxieties about it?
For those to whom phrases like the “fabric of society” reek of horse manure — and I sympathize — this atavistic trend is still worthy of attention, particularly in its managerial, instrumentalizing attitude toward human beings. It is worth asking, for instance, whether there is a profound difference between the “primitive” Machiguenga tribe’s official practice of killing defective babies and the very private abortion of 90% of American fetuses diagnosed with Down Syndrome. It is also worth pondering the ways in which the very fears exploited by Stout and others manifest themselves in attitudes about immigration and race, about our “neighbors” to the south and in inner cities — attitudes held explicitly by the unenlightened and perhaps implicitly by those who can afford the luxury of maintaining a neighborly distance.
The subtitle of “The Sociopath Next Door” is “The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us.” It is time, I think, for the culture of self-help — apparently devoid of any sense of irony — to give way to a culture of self-consciousness. Perhaps then we can proclaim, combining equal parts cynicism and compassion, that the “ruthless” and the “rest of us” may not be so different after all.
Andrew Saraf is a history major from Chevy Chase, Md. He can be reached at asaraf@princeton.edu.
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