A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

TV’s essential characteristics make it the perfect education for sociopaths, facilitating deceit, acquisitiveness, intransigence, and validating a worldview only loosely tethered to reality. As a breeding ground for dissembling, television almost cannot help itself, because unlike older media, it inherently operates on a minimum of two levels, the visual and audio, sometimes supplemented by a third level of text. These concurrent streams make it easier to achieve multiple meanings, allowing for divergences between what is said, what is seen, and what is meant. Televisual irony trains viewers to hold otherwise inconsistent views simultaneously, and it is no coincidence that in an era where TV is the most profound cultural influence, the trend has been from earnest to ironic. It’s not that television makes lying easier per se, but that television encourages a layered approach to reality in ways that other media do not.