AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

Sociopaths or psychopaths—the two terms are largely interchangeable—have long been familiar to readers of Western literature. From Shakespeare’s Iago to Camus’s Meursault, these men and women are not merely villains, but villains lacking any moral compass. Rather than being victims of derangement who cannot tell the difference between right and wrong, they are self-interested and calculating creatures who recognize the difference, but simply do not care. During my career as a psychiatrist in New York City, including time spent working in a state forensic facility, I have come to know a number of individuals who wear what the late Hervey M. Cleckley, once the world’s foremost authority on sociopathy, termed “The Mask of Sanity,” yet at their cores proved incapable of feeling empathy or compassion for their fellow human beings. What follows is an effort to capture as authentically as possible the mind-set of one such miscreant.

Too often, literature encourages us to imagine these amoral villains as dwelling along the margins of society, clinging to the lowest rungs of the economic ladder like Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov. Only recently, especially as a result of the exposure of gross misdeeds in the financial services industry and of large-scale Ponzi schemes, has the public become aware that many amoral individuals lurk in the highest echelons of power, be it business, law, and even in medicine. They are all around us, smiling and perpetrating evil.