The badly fitting second-hand suit, the soulless eyes, the lying under oath, the deceit toward family and friends — paints the picture of someone whose behavior is shaped by deep psychological and neurological factors rather than just surface-level choices. Let’s break this down through the lenses of neuroscience and psychology:
1. The Suit & the Mask
- A badly fitting suit becomes almost symbolic: trying to wear a role that doesn’t belong to them, attempting to look respectable while the truth leaks through.
- In psychology, this is often linked to the “false self” — a persona crafted to gain approval or to cover up shame, emptiness, or lack of authentic identity.
- Such people often rely on appearances, manipulation, or performance to survive socially, because their inner world is disordered or hollow.
2. The Soulless Eyes
- Eyes are powerful conveyors of emotional truth. When someone’s gaze feels flat, cold, or vacant, it can indicate blunted affect, low empathy, or dissociation.
- Neuroscience tells us that in some individuals — particularly those with psychopathic traits — brain regions involved in empathy and emotional resonance (like the amygdala, anterior insula, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex) show reduced activity.
- This can make them appear “empty” because they are less able to connect with others’ emotions.
3. Compulsive Lying
- Lying repeatedly, even under oath, speaks to pathological lying or pseudologia fantastica.
- Psychologically, this may come from:
- Personality disorders (narcissistic, antisocial, or borderline).
- Defensive strategies to avoid shame, accountability, or loss of control.
- Neurologically, studies suggest habitual liars may have differences in the prefrontal cortex, the region that manages inhibition and moral decision-making. Over time, the brain can even adapt to lying, reducing the stress response and making deception easier.
4. Swearing Oaths While Lying
- The willingness to lie under oath (even invoking sacred or legal consequences) suggests a lack of internalized moral compass.
- In psychology, this ties to moral disengagement — the ability to justify harmful or dishonest actions by minimizing their significance, blaming others, or convincing oneself it’s “not that bad.”
- In extreme cases, this overlaps with psychopathy: superficial charm, lack of guilt, manipulativeness, and disregard for rules.
5. What Kind of Person Is This?
Putting all the elements together, the profile fits someone with highly manipulative, deceptive, and emotionally detached traits. This doesn’t automatically mean they are a “psychopath,” but they may fall along a spectrum of:
- Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD): disregard for truth, law, and others’ rights.
- Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD): false self, lying to protect ego and image, lack of genuine empathy.
- Psychopathic tendencies: charm + emptiness + deceit + no remorse.
Neuroscience shows that their brains may be wired to reduce emotional resonance and guilt, making it easier to exploit others without the usual “red flags” of conscience.
👉 In short: This is the kind of person who wears masks but cannot wear a soul.
Their behavior is not just “bad character,” but often a mix of neurological deficits in empathy, psychological defenses, and ingrained personality pathology.
