Introduction: The Problem of Psychopaths and Sociopaths
There is a difficult question that any religious faith committed to goodness eventually has to confront: What do we do when we encounter a person who appears to have little or no capacity for genuine empathy, remorse, or moral concern for others? It is relatively easy to teach kindness, forgiveness, generosity and trust when dealing with basically decent and good-natured people. It is much harder to know how those virtues should operate when dealing with someone who is manipulative, predatory, ruthless, or apparently incapable of responding to kindness in the way a decent person would.
Modern psychology has given us concepts such as psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder. However, these concepts were entirely unknown to the people who wrote the Miqra, or to Yeshua and the people of the first century. Ancient people could observe that some individuals were exceptionally cruel, deceitful, callous or manipulative, but they would not have been able to investigate the neurological and psychological factors that might contribute to such behaviour. We should therefore not try to force modern psychiatric diagnoses into ancient texts.
Nevertheless, ancient people would still have been able to observe the actions of such people. Consequently, the Miqra and the teachings of Yeshua contain surprisingly relevant wisdom about dealing with people whose character is persistently destructive, abusive and manipulative.
My Personal Interest in the subject
This question is not merely theoretical for me. Between 2010 and 2012, I experienced prolonged psychological bullying from a manager who was well-known to be a clinical psychopath. He knew that I had Asperger’s Syndrome, and knew that certain allowances had been agreed by the company to accommodate my difficulties. Nevertheless, he deliberately exploited my vulnerabilities, and enjoyed doing it. On several occasions I overheard him boasting to fellow managers about what he was doing to me. The psychological abuse continued until I suffered a nervous breakdown and had to leave my employment; I was diagnosed with Complex PTSD. I have not been able to work since, and the effects of what happened have remained with me.
As a victim of that experience, I wanted to understand psychopathy on something nearing an academic level: how it manifests itself, how such people manipulate others, how they select and exploit vulnerabilities, and – most importantly – how an ordinary person like you and me can avoid becoming their victim.
As a Talmidi, however, there was an additional question: How can someone who is committed to goodness, righteousness and holiness protect themselves against a person who is willing to exploit those very virtues? How can we resist manipulation without becoming manipulative or abusive ourselves? How can we defend ourselves without becoming cruel? And how can a faith dedicated to sacredness prevent a ruthless person from taking advantage of its kindness, and eventually using the community for their self-serving and destructive purposes?
I believe that the Miqra and Yeshua provide some important principles for answering these questions.
Did Yeshua recognise that some people are profoundly wicked by nature?
Yeshua obviously did not possess the modern psychiatric concept of psychopathy or sociopathy. We should therefore be careful not to claim that he was describing a clinical disorder when he spoke about wicked people. Nevertheless, Yeshua clearly recognised that some people’s moral character could be deeply corrupt.
In one of his best-known teachings, Yeshua said, “A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit” (Mt 7:18). The point is not simply that people occasionally do good or evil things. Yeshua used the metaphor of a tree producing poisonous fruit to describe an underlying personality flaw that produces a characteristic kind of behaviour. Similarly, he said, “The good person out of the storehouse of good in their heart brings forth good, and the evil person out of the storehouse of evil in their heart brings forth evil; because from the abundance of plenty in the heart, so the mouth speaks” (Lk 6:45, Mt 12:34-35).
In Mk 7:21–23, Yeshua describes various forms of wrongdoing as coming from within a person: evil thoughts, deceit, violence, theft, greed, envy, pride and foolishness. His teaching therefore allows us to recognise that evil can be deeply rooted in a person’s character. Not every harmful act is simply an isolated mistake. Some people habitually produce destructive and toxic “fruit”, because something is profoundly wrong with the character producing it.
That does not amount to a doctrine about certain people who are biologically “born evil”. Nor does it allow us to diagnose historical individuals as psychopaths. But it does mean that the Miqra and Yeshua do not require us to adopt an unrealistically optimistic view of human nature.
Just because there are some people who were born psychopaths, either because they possess a certain gene, or because that is how their brain is structured, it does not mean that we should ever excuse their evil, look the other way, and let them loose on society. We would never consider dropping safeguards to protect human society against Ebola, Smallpox or Bubonic Plague – we do not excuse these dangerous and virulent diseases just because that is the way they are by nature. In the same manner, just because some psychopaths were born that way, does not mean that we should not protect ourselves against them.
Love does not mean allowing yourself to be exploited
This is particularly important, because Yeshua’s command to love one’s enemies can easily be misunderstood and misapplied.
“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Mt 5:44) is one of the most demanding ethical teachings attributed to Yeshua. But nowhere does this require us to pretend that a dangerous person is safe, that a manipulator is trustworthy, or that an abuser should be given unlimited access to their victims.
Indeed, Yeshua gives his disciples an unusually revealing instruction when he sends them out into the world: “Be cunning as serpents and innocent as doves” (Mt 10:16).
Shrewdness and wisdom belong together with innocence and goodness. Innocence without wisdom can make a person exploitable. Wisdom without innocence can make a person cynical and manipulative. Yeshua’s ideal is neither naïvety nor ruthlessness, but innocence protected by wise discernment.
That distinction is vital when dealing with someone who deliberately takes advantage of other people’s goodness.
Refusing to be manipulated does not make a person unloving. Likewise, establishing firm boundaries is not a failure of forgiveness. And protecting vulnerable people from an abusive individual is an act of true compassion, even when it requires completely cutting off access to the community. There is a danger that people who believe in the absolute goodness of every human being, end up laying innocent people open to being abused by psychopaths, and consequently, fail to protect their victims.
Love concerns the moral disposition with which we treat another person. Trust is a judgement about whether that person has demonstrated that they are trustworthy. The two things are not identical.
“Do not throw your pearls before swine”
One of Yeshua’s most striking teachings in this regard occurs in Mt 7:6 –
“Do not give what is holy to dogs, nor throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn to tear you apart.”
Whatever the precise historical references to “dogs” and “swine” may have been, the principle is unmistakable. There are circumstances in which giving something precious to someone who is incapable of appreciating it is not virtuous. It can be foolish and even dangerous.
This is an important corrective to the idea that goodness requires us to give everyone unlimited access to ourselves. The precept of being open and innocent to everyone, does not work with psychopaths or sociopaths. Goodness encourages people born with a good nature to return to goodness; it does not have any effect on psychopaths – I’ve tried it myself, with devastating and irreparable consequences.
If someone repeatedly demonstrates that they will take kindness and use it as an opportunity for exploitation and abuse, then continuing to provide them with opportunities to exploit us is not kindness. It is a failure to apply wisdom.
The same applies to a community. A religious fellowship may possess things that are precious: trust, compassion, authority, confidential information, money, influence, access to vulnerable people, and the goodwill of its members. These things should not automatically be placed into the hands of just anyone who claims to admire the religion’s values.
Applying any positive ethic without also applying wisdom is a failure of the trust that YHVH has placed in us. If a holy community – which is meant to represent the values of YHVH, and how YHVH cannot be touched by or influenced by evil, ends up actually being corrupted and destroyed by evil, we have failed in the wisdom that YHVH has entrusted to us.
The Miqra does not tell us to understand the wicked before protecting the innocent
The Miqra is generally much more concerned with what people do than with diagnosing the psychological causes of their behaviour.
I often hear or read of people criticising certain laws in the Torah, saying, “We don’t need such laws; we are all good people, and our goodness is enough. The laws of the Torah are oppressive, and are completely unnecessary”. These are people who have never ever met a psychopath, or been abused by one. They don’t realise that many laws in the Torah are actually designed to protect them, not oppress them.
The Torah does not require a religious society to determine whether a violent person became violent because of upbringing, temperament, trauma, inborn neurological abnormalities, or some other cause before taking action. It establishes laws dealing with violence, murder, restitution, culpability and protection of the innocent.
This is an important principle even today. We may want to understand why someone behaves destructively, without any moral concern for others, and psychological understanding can certainly be valuable. But understanding the cause of dangerous or cruel behaviour is not a prerequisite for protecting its victims.
If someone displays a proven pattern of dangerous behaviour, the community has a responsibility to respond to the demonstrated danger.
That response need not be motivated by hatred. Indeed, hatred is precisely what the righteous person should avoid. But refusing hatred does not mean refusing justice.
The Book of Proverbs advises the wise person to keep away from destructive people
The wisdom literature is particularly direct about this topic.
Proverbs says: “Do not enter the path of the wicked, and do not walk in the way of evil people. Avoid it; do not travel on it; turn away from it and pass on” (Prov 4:14–15).
That is remarkably different from the idea that we should remain indefinitely in close proximity to a destructive person, in the naïve hope that our goodness will eventually transform them (because it won’t, believe me).
Sometimes the only wise response is distance.
The biblical concept of compassion therefore cannot be reduced to constant availability. A person can wish another human being well, while deciding that they should not have access to their private life, their finances, their children, their spouse, their organisation, or their position of authority.
There is nothing inherently unloving about saying, “You are not safe to have any responsibility with the things I value or love.”
Forgiveness is not the same as Trust
This distinction deserves particular emphasis.
Some people are changed by being forgiven. Others are incapable of changing. Wisdom therefore requires that a distinction be made in the nature and purpose of forgiveness in the two cases.
Forgiveness of a person who is inherently good, and whose sin was a lapse in the heat of the moment, or a temporary error in judgment, will mean that restoration of trust is possible – restoration of the former relationship might even be desirable. None of this is possible with a proud psychopath whose sin was wilful and intentional, whose misdeeds were eagerly enjoyed, and whose mind is irredeemably inclined towards evil. Forgiveness in such a case serves quite a different purpose – it helps the one doing the forgiving, rather than the one being forgiven. We have to learn to make this distinction if we wish to apply Yeshua’s concept of forgiveness with wisdom.
I forgave my abuser long ago. It was a moment of release and pure relief. I felt that I was regaining my freedom – it was breaking the shackles which bound me to the past.
However, it needs to be stated that none of this made what happened acceptable, nor could it ever erase the event from my memory – a reality my ongoing PTSD reminds me daily. Reconciliation with my abuser remained completely off the table, because restoring any relationship would have been entirely irresponsible, and dangerous to my mental health. Rebuilding trust or giving into his demands was equally impossible; doing so would only have enabled and encouraged his behaviour. Ultimately, forgiveness did not require me to abandon my pursuit of justice either.
Forgiveness gave me the strength to relinquish the hold he had over me, because I refused to let his actions cause me further harm. By choosing this path, I denied him the power to dictate my emotions, my reactions, or the values I practice. Forgiveness meant he no longer had the power to change who I am – I will not let him destroy what YHVH has so carefully built up within me.
Forgiveness means refusing to let another person’s wrongdoing fill us with hatred or a desire for revenge. In so doing, we voluntarily relinquish our personal drive to retaliate. However, forgiving someone does not magically restore trust, which can only be rebuilt through demonstrated character.
If someone has lied repeatedly, manipulated people again and again, and systematically abused positions of authority, showing no desire to ever stop, it would be irrational and illogical to declare that trust has been restored, merely because we have forgiven them.
The Miqra itself does not teach that wrongdoing simply disappears because forgiveness has occurred. Consequences remain important. A person can repent and be forgiven, while still having to face consequences for what they have done.
This gives us a useful principle: mercy can leave the door to repentance open, without removing the safeguards necessary to protect other people.
What if someone really cannot be rehabilitated?
This is perhaps the most difficult question for a religious person who always tries to seek what is good.
Suppose a person displays extremely severe psychopathic characteristics. Suppose they appear to understand moral rules on an intellectual level, but do not genuinely care about the suffering of others, or about the harm they do. Suppose they manipulate people habitually and take delight in it, and show little remorse; they purposefully exploit weakness whenever they see it, enjoy doing it, and persistently return to destructive behaviours despite attempts at correction.
What should we do?
I do not believe that either the Miqra or Yeshua requires us to gamble the safety of innocent or vulnerable people, on the possibility that such an individual might eventually change.
We can always leave repentance open as a possibility, without assuming that repentance will occur any time soon, or indeed at all.
This is an important biblical balance. The Miqra regularly calls the wicked person to turn from wickedness. Ezekiel 18 is particularly emphatic that a wicked person who turns away from wrongdoing can change the moral direction of their life.
However, that does not mean that society must continually expose innocent or vulnerable people to a dangerous person while waiting for that repentance.
Hope for repentance, and protection from danger, can exist simultaneously.
Yeshua’s image of the wolf
Yeshua’s imagery of wolves is also illuminating.
He warns about wolves in sheep’s clothing (Mt 7:15), and tells his apostles that he is sending them out “like sheep among wolves” (Mt 10:16). He seems to be aware of a certain type of evil person who is outwardly like an innocent sheep, “but inwardly they are ravening wolves”.
A wolf is not simply a badly behaved sheep. It is a predator. Psychologists often describe psychopaths as predators who deliberately prey on their own species.
The sheep do not become morally superior by pretending that the wolf is harmless. Nor do they need to hate the wolf. They need to recognise the predator and stay away from it in order to stay safe.
That seems to me to capture something profoundly important about dealing with unapologetically manipulative, predatory people. There is a difference between saying:
“This person is evil, therefore I hate them.”
and saying:
“This person’s behaviour is dangerous, therefore I will not give them an opportunity to harm other people.”
The second is not hatred. It is wise discernment.
How can a Talmidi Congregation protect itself?
This becomes particularly important for a small religious community. A faith committed to kindness and trust can actually be unusually vulnerable to someone who understands how to imitate kindness while pursuing power and control.
A manipulative person may discover that religious people are reluctant to challenge them, because they fear being judgmental. They may discover that manipulative appeals to forgiveness can be used to prevent their accountability (the organisation of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Australia discovered this at severe cost to themselves). Psychopaths discover that accusations of “unkindness” can silence people who raise legitimate concerns. They may learn which members are lonely, vulnerable, inexperienced or desperate for approval, and then use those vulnerabilities to gain influence.
A holy Congregation therefore needs structures in place, that do not rely upon the assumption that everyone is capable of being equally good.
This does not mean abandoning trust. It means recognising that a community should not make its security dependent upon the assumption that every single person who joins it will behave honourably.
Authority should therefore be accountable. Important decisions should not depend entirely upon one person’s judgement. Financial arrangements should be transparent. Confidentiality should have clear limits where safeguarding is concerned. Positions of authority should be subject to appropriate scrutiny. Serious allegations should be investigated rather than automatically dismissed in the name of forgiveness. People should be able to raise concerns without being treated as disloyal merely for doing so (this last point was the undoing of JW’s in Australia).
Most importantly, no individual should become indispensable to the community.
A person who gradually makes themselves the only person who understands the finances, the only person who has access to important information, the only person capable of performing a particular function, or the only person who can supposedly resolve disputes, is accumulating power. Even if that person is perfectly decent, the structure itself is unhealthy, and open to abuse. If the person who takes up those rôles is manipulative, the danger becomes considerably greater.
A healthy community therefore distributes responsibility.
Kindness must have boundaries to protect the vulnerable
This is where the Talmidi emphasis upon righteousness, kindness and holiness needs to be accompanied by wisdom.
We should certainly help people who need help. We should forgive. We should be generous. We should listen to people who are suffering. We should not become suspicious of everyone merely because some people are manipulative.
But kindness is not an open invitation for ongoing harm. Generosity does not mean allowing someone unlimited access to communal resources. Forgiveness does not mean restoring someone to a position where they can cause further harm. Empathy does not require us to accept another person’s interpretation of reality, when there is evidence that they are manipulating us. And humility does not mean refusing to recognise our own vulnerability, or the danger that exists.
There is a particular danger here for people who are deeply committed to goodness, from people who inherently couldn’t care less about goodness. We can become so concerned about ourselves becoming cruel, that we become incapable of saying no to cruelty inflicted on us.
That is not holiness. A community that is incapable of resisting being influenced or destroyed by evil, is not demonstrating holiness. YHVH is holy, because YHVH cannot be affected, influenced, or corrupted by evil. A holy community which represents YHVH has to show the same resilience and incorruptibility. The quintessential nature of YHVH’s Holiness, is that it is able to obliterate evil – no evil is able to approach YHVH’s Holiness without being destroyed into non-existence.
We must not become what we oppose
There is another danger at the opposite extreme.
Having been manipulated by a ruthless person, one might conclude that goodness itself is the problem. One might decide that the only way to survive evil is to become harder, more vicious, more manipulative, and more ruthless than the people who have taken advantage of us.
But that would mean allowing the wicked person to determine our character. This would mean that evil has won; it wins by causing us to abandon the values that make us who we are. The goal is not to become a wolf because we have encountered wolves. It is to become wise sheep.
We should learn to recognise manipulation without manipulating others. We should establish boundaries without becoming vindictive. We should protect ourselves without seeking revenge. We should become discerning without becoming cynical. We should become difficult to exploit without becoming difficult to love.
That is a much harder form of strength, but it is also much closer to the teachings of Yeshua, and to the ethics of YHVH whose principles he taught.
Conclusion: Goodness needs Wisdom
Some people think that being a good person means lowering all your defences. A psychopath merely sees that as an invitation to exploit and abuse. It is a welcome sign to the fox to come right into the chicken coop.
Many good religious people, regrettably, do not know how God wishes us to deal with absolute, irreformable evil. Some respond by being kind to evil, thinking the evil person will change; some try the other extreme, and respond with evil in return. The wise path that YHVH calls us to – the discerning and holy path that reflects YHVH’s own Holiness – is the middle way, the narrow path that few religious people find, the narrow gate that few religious people are able to walk through.
One of the lessons I have drawn from my own personal experience, is that goodness without wise discernment can become a vulnerability that an evil person eagerly exploits.
That does not mean that goodness itself was a mistake. It means that goodness needs wisdom to protect it.
The Miqra does not require us to become naïve. Time and again, Proverbs praises wisdom and discernment. Yeshua does not tell his disciples to wander through the world assuming everyone is trustworthy (“He who is trustworthy over a little, is trustworthy over much, but he who is dishonest in a little, will be dishonest in greater things”, Lk 16:10). He tells his followers to be innocent and wise. The two virtues belong together.
A Talmidi community should therefore aspire to be a community in which kindness is exercised with strength rather than weakness; forgiveness is generous but not gullible; trust is given wisely rather than indiscriminately; authority is accountable; and protection of the vulnerable is regarded as part of righteousness, rather than as the Achilles’ Heel of compassion.
We should leave the door open for repentance. But we should not leave the door open to repeated abuse – to do so would be to fail the victim and fail God.
We should refuse to hate the wicked. But we should not refuse to recognise wickedness.
We should forgive those who harm us. But we should not confuse forgiveness with permission to harm us again.
And when someone demonstrates that they are dangerous, protecting the innocent is itself an act of supreme love, an act which mirrors divine love.
The biblical ethic is therefore neither sentimental nor cynical. It does not tell us that everyone is harmless, nor does it tell us that some people should simply be regarded as monsters. It asks something more difficult of us:
Remain good without becoming naïve. Remain compassionate without becoming exploitable. Remain forgiving without abandoning justice or misapplying trust. Remain innocent without surrendering wisdom.
That is how a community devoted to holiness can protect itself from evil without allowing evil to dictate to us how to behave.
Other articles:
If you are interested in reading more on this approach to coupling kindness with wise discernment, I have written this article on: The Way of Kindness and Empathy – Its Use and Abuse.