Why We Love Sociopaths

My greatest regret is that I’m not a sociopath. I suspect I’m not alone. I have written before that we live in the age of awkwardness, but This text excerpted from Adam Kotsko’s Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide To Late Capitalist Television, now available from Zero BooksThe New Inquiry Magazine, No. 3, Arguing the Web. a strong case could be made that we live in the age of the sociopath. They are dominant figures on television, for example, and within essentially every television genre. Cartoon shows have been fascinated by sociopathic fathers (with varying degrees of sanity) ever since the writers of The Simpsons realized that Homer was a better central character than Bart. Showing that cartoon children are capable of radical evil as well, Eric Cartman of South Park has been spouting racial invective and hatching evil plots for well over a decade at this point. On the other end of the spectrum, the flagships of high-brow cable drama have almost all been sociopaths of varying stripes: the mafioso Tony Soprano of The Sopranos, the gangsters Stringer Bell and Marlo of The Wire, the seductive imposter Don Draper of Mad Men, and even the serial-killer title character of Dexter. NICE READ