On the streets, in our workplaces, seemingly under our beds - Harvard Medical Professor Martha Stout's The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless vs. the Rest of Us sends the reader into a state of frightening paranoia when she mentions that one in 25.4 percent of people are actually a sociopath. A sociopath, as Stout states, is a person devoid of conscience, therefore a person who does not care about the suffering of others, who only cares about himself. She goes on to tell us that because the rate of sociopaths in our society is so high, we must have already encountered hundreds of them without knowing it, due to the elusive and enigmatic nature of this psychological illness. However, a rational thinker can clearly see the flaws in the views propagated by Stout. Stout states that virtually everyone who has been mean to us in life, a cheating ex-husband, a humiliating boss, a sadistic gym teacher, are in fact sociopaths without a conscience. She never puts forward a single counterargument that these people might have such characteristics because of our own personal patterns and perceptions. It could have been us who pushed our husbands into the arms of another woman, it could have been us who constantly made mistakes for the boss to point out, it could have been us who wouldn't shut up during gym, thus requiring a lot of rounds performed. We can infer that calling someone a sociopath is just a method of blaming another for our own failings, which seems much more likely than the millions of sociopaths Stout suggests. Rather than the content, it is the manner in which it is presented that poses a major problem. Take, for example, the fact that even though the introduction to sociopaths occurs in the chapter...... middle of paper......doesn't work without an element of cruelty and a need to win. Can a capitalist be called a sociopath? In my opinion, I believe that although this non-fiction novel sheds some light on the nature and behaviors of sociopaths, it is not a myopic, in-depth study worth delving into. invest in faith. Furthermore, it does not answer a simple and major question: what future for these “monsters”? Will the population of sociopaths grow exponentially, until they are the ones who have to destroy us because we are a minority? Or are their numbers decreasing due to social awareness of this disease? Is sociopathy purely biological in nature or does this personality disorder also stem from personal experience or something else? In short, this book raises more questions than answers, leading to a disappointing and unfinished search for truth...