No limits

The man pictured above is a pimp in Portland, Oregon. He was. He now faces a one hundred year prison term. He caught a man trying to leave a hotel without paying the pimp's 18-year-old prostitute. He beat up the prostitute and stomped on the face of the john. During his trial he yelled obscenities at the judge, jurors, and prosecutor. A psychologist examined him and found him to be a social psychopath. The psychologist testified that it is 100% likely the man will commit more crimes. Nine deputies attended the hearing.

He wasn't finished. Having time on his hands, he filed a lawsuit against Nike for $100 million, saying that Nike was negligent because they did not have a warning label telling customers that the shoes could become dangerous weapons.

Is American culture a breeding ground for sociopaths?

Martha Stout writes,

the prevalence of sociopathy in the United States seems to be increasing. The 1991 Epidemiologic Catchment Area study, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, reported that in the fifteen years preceding the study, the prevalence of antisocial personality disorder had nearly doubled among the young in America, It would be difficult, closing in on impossible, to explain such a dramatically rapid shift in terms of genetics or neurobiology.

Some theorists propose that North American culture, which holds individualism as a central value, tends to foster the development of antisocial behavior, and also to disguise it. In other words, in America, the guiltless manipulation of other people "blends" with social expectations to a much greater degree than it would in China or other more group-centered societies.

Sociopaths do not care about their social world, but they do want, and need, to blend in with it.

Chateau Heartiste writes that

There’s a growing consensus in the social sciences that women swoon uncontrollably for men who possess the suite of psychological traits known colloquially as the Dark Triad.

What is the Dark Triad?

subclinical psychopathy, subclinical narcissism, and Machiavellianism-

Subclinal denotes

a disease that is not severe enough to present definite or readily observable symptoms.

Much more than just a welfare queen

She stole his color t.v.!

That's what one of Linda Taylor's eight husbands told Detective Jack Sherwin. Taylor was the "Welfare Queen" Ronald Reagan talked about when running for president in 1976.

“In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record,” the former California governor declared at a campaign rally in January 1976. “She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.” As soon as he quoted that dollar amount, the crowd gasped.

“If she wanted to be a ho, she could be a ho. If she wanted to be a princess, she could be a princess,”

Josh Levin has written an incredibly exhaustive piece on Taylor in Slate; surely worthy of a Pulitzer Prize.

It took a crew of cops nearly 20 hours to count all the cash. There were coins and bills stuffed in the furniture, sheathed in piles of clothes, and stuffed inside laundry bags, pillowcases, cardboard boxes, and an old foot locker. A deputy superintendent said that it was the biggest haul he’d come across in 23 years on the force. The final tally: $763,223.30.

That description was of money found in the house of a Chicago hustler who ran a policy racket. Taylor tried to get that money when he died.

Levin writes,

For Linda Taylor, people were consumable goods, objects to cultivate, manipulate, and discard. Once she’d extracted something of value—an identity, a check, a life insurance claim—she’d move on to someone else. No matter her circumstances, and no matter her surroundings, there was always a new target.

What kind of person behaves this way? In the 1970s, psychologist Robert Hare developed a checklist to assess a given subject’s personality. The symptoms on Hare’s list read like a catalog of Linda Taylor’s known behaviors and personal characteristics: glib and superficial charm, pathological lying, manipulativeness, lack of empathy, parasitic lifestyle, frequent short-term relationships, and criminal versatility.