Everyone is a sociopath

Editor’s note: Steve Becker has a very dry sense of humor, and the following post is written tongue-in-cheek. If you have a humorous story about a sociopath, feel free to add it as a comment.

Well, thanks to the Investigation Discovery Channel, the latest estimates are that 85% of the general population is sociopathic, and likely to commit a horrific, calculated exploitation of another human being within the next three weeks.

Even leading researchers on psychopathy laud this cable channel (which, admittedly, is absolutely riveting) for getting their own estimates properly realigned. Only in the last two months, just on my street alone, two of my neighbors killed a spouse (one for insurance money, the other for the chance to be with someone else); two other neighbors, separately, kidnapped and tortured hitchhikers over a two-day period, during which both missed their kids’ respective travel soccer tournaments; my neighbor across the street, a great friend, is now believed to be a suspect in eight abduction/missing children cases since 2010; and the identical twins of another neighbor, three houses down, are believed to be responsible for the serial mutilation of dozens of dogs in the area since 2011 (they are 19, and my principal babysitters since 2009; and, because it’s so damned hard to find babysitters these days, they will remain my babysitters because apparently, at least as best i know to this point, they just mutilate and savage dogs).

And let me tell you something else–the street I live on is filled with relatively “normal” people. I’m told that what happens in my “neck of the woods” is nothing compared to the psychopathic crimes being perpetrated at a newly estimated rate of every 12 minutes around the corner, on my friends’ streets. They want to move to MY block.

Last month, my best friend learned that his wife of 16 years, a strikingly stable, well-adjusted individual (I still regard her as such), while mixing herself screw-drivers at night, was mixing him vodka-anti-freezes. He lies in critical condition at Overlook Hospital in Summit, NJ, but his wife is still a great neighbor and, admirably, visits him daily in the CCU unit (albeit one assumes she is scoping out chances to slip him some extra poison to finish him off.)  Last week, when I visited my buddy in the hospital I warned him firmly to beware his wife’s visits, but he’s in a coma, so I doubt he heard me.

It’s gotten to the point where I, myself, have become a bit paranoid. Recently I went to my internist, feeling weak and lethargic, just not myself, and asked him, “Could it be antifreeze, doc?,” to which he replied, “Well, how much antifreeze have you been drinking, Steve? More than a glass a night?”

Ha ha. He’s so funny. A real rip.

Anyway, it’s all very sobering. It seems you really can’t trust anyone anymore, not your neighbors, friends, kids, spouses, family, co-workers, not even yourself. Everyone, or almost everyone, it seems, thanks to the disconcerting revelations of ID Discovery,  is a sociopath.

(This article is copyrighted (c) 2013 by Steve Becker, LCSW.)