It’s well-known that men constitute most of the sociopaths among us. A sociopath by definition lacks empathy, a person who has no conscience.
Although childhood trauma and abuse can alter a person’s brain, sociopaths for the most part are born, not made. High-tech imaging has shown that the part of the human brain that triggers an empathetic response in most people is non-functioning (or functions minimally) in sociopaths.
It is estimated that only one percent of humanity are sociopaths, but of those, 75-90% are men. And while there are women who are sociopaths, they tend not to be violent. Sociopathic women share the same traits — pathological lying, for example — as male sociopaths, but their goal generally manifests itself in financial gain.
The young Russian/German woman who conned New York society (depicted in the Netflix series, Inventing Anna) and Elizabeth Holmes, who fleeced investors in her blood analysis company of hundreds of millions of dollars, are examples of female sociopaths.
Sociopathic men also are con artists. Some psychologists have estimated that 10 percent of the men who work on Wall St. are sociopaths such as Bernie Madoff.
But sociopathic men almost exclusively are the serial killers in our society — Ted Bundy and others like him — whose crimes horrify us.
Sociopathic men also are the dictators who have wrought carnage on our planet. Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong-un, and Vladimir Putin readily come to mind.
And when you combine a sociopathic personality with male testosterone, the end result is what we see happening every day in Ukraine.
World events of the past two years have brought to the forefront the strong women who are the heads of their countries — Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, Kaja Kallas of Estonia, Sanna Marin of Finland — and Angela Merkel was the top leader in Europe for 16 years until she recently stepped down.
We are not suggesting that women are better than men, or vice versa.
But in our opinion, it seems reasonable to believe that if all of our world leaders were women, there would be no more wars.