by M. E. Thomas
In any case, I felt no moral compunction about helping her fill out the forms. It was not my job to question her story, only to help her tell it. I was glad to do it, actually. I admired her. In the course of my travels, I had visited several Holocaust sites and been through the Anne Frank Achterhuis more times than I would have preferred. Visiting these places, I was always struck by the enormous passivity of most of the people involved: the neighbors, the townspeople, the camp guards, the fellow prisoners.
Looking at the old woman, I could not help but recognize myself. A kindred spirit. She knew what it meant to be a survivor at all costs. An elaborate identity theft to rise from oppression. I could only hope to do so well in my own life.
She was probably lucky to have been assigned to me rather than some other volunteer. It’s hard to know if someone else with a firmer moral compass might have asked more questions and availed themselves of more, and thus potentially incriminating, information. A compassionate person might think that she must have suffered during the war, if not in the same ways then for the same reasons as those the restitution was meant to help. She probably lived in constant fear of being discovered. Who knows whom she had to bribe, befriend, or seduce to maintain her freedom? But yet another might not want to help someone who helped herself by breaking the rules. Shouldn’t we be disgusted with those who game the system, accept government money when they’re not entitled to it, and are opportunistic about social safety nets? There might even be some judgment about her choice to capitalize on her Aryan looks to avoid suffering alongside her kin. But luckily for her there was no moral conundrum for me, and I sent them both on their way in time to catch a nice lunch.
Are you good at making decisions on the fly, sometimes to the consternation of your friends and family? Sociopaths are known for being spontaneous. I get restless; I find it hard to focus on one project for a particular length of time or to keep a job for more than a few years. Sociopaths tend to crave stimulation and are easily bored, so we tend to make snap decisions. The darker side of impulsivity is that we can become fixated on an impulse to the exclusion of all else, unable to listen to reason. Whereas most people experience impulsivity as hot-headedness, I become coldhearted.
I have never killed anyone, but I have certainly wanted to, as I am sure most people have. I have rarely wanted to kill those close to me; more often it has been a chance encounter with someone who caused me consternation. Once while visiting Washington, DC, for a law conference, a metro worker tried to shame me about using an escalator that was closed. He asked in thickly accented English, “Didn’t you see the yellow gate?”
ME: Yellow gate?
HIM: The gate! I just put the gate up and you had to walk around it!
Silence. My face is blank.
HIM: That’s trespassing! Don’t you know it is wrong to trespass! The escalator was closed, you broke the law!
I stare at him silently.
HIM: [visibly rattled at my lack of reaction] Well, next time, you don’t trespass, okay?
It was not okay. People often say, in explaining their horrible actions, that they “just snapped.” I know that feeling well. I stood there for a moment, letting my rage reach that decision-making part of my brain, and I suddenly became filled with a sense of calm purpose. I blinked my eyes and set my jaw. I started following him. Adrenaline started flowing. My mouth tasted metallic. I fought to keep my peripheral vision in focus, hyperaware of everything around me, trying to predict the movement and behavior of the crowd. I was unfamiliar with the city, a new user of the metro, and it was just before rush hour. I was hoping that he would walk into some deserted hallway or sneak away through a hidden, unlocked door where I would find him alone, waiting. I felt so sure of myself, so focused on this one thing I felt I had to do. An image sprang to my mind of my hands wrapped around his neck, my thumbs digging deeply into his throat, his life slipping away from him under my unrelenting grasp. How right that would feel.
It seems odd thinking about this now. I weigh less than 130 pounds; he probably weighed 160. I have strong hands from being a musician, but I wonder if they would be strong enough to squeeze the breath out of him in his last moments of life. Is it truly so easy to extinguish a life? When it came down to it, I couldn’t even manage to drown a baby opossum. I had been caught in a fit of megalomaniacal fantasy, but in the end it didn’t matter anyway. I lost him in the crowd, and just as quickly as it had arisen in me, my murderous rage dissipated.
I have wondered since, what would have happened to me had I not lost sight of him? I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to actually kill him, but I am also relatively certain I would have assaulted him. Would he have struggled? Would I have been hurt? Would police have been involved? What could I possibly have said or done to get myself off the hook? I often wonder about this and dozens of similar incidents. I realize that one day I may do something very bad. How would I react in such a situation? Would I be able to put on a sufficient show of remorse? Or would I be revealed to be a faker?
From my own observations, I have found that a sociopath’s need for stimulation plays out in very person-specific ways. I’m not surprised that some sociopaths would fill this need via criminal or violent acts, particularly if these were the opportunities that regularly presented themselves. It also seems perfectly plausible that others would feed their need for stimulation via other more legitimate routes, pursuing careers in firefighting or espionage or duking it out in the boardrooms of corporate America. My thought is that sociopaths who grow up poor among drug dealers are likely to become sociopathic drug dealers; sociopaths who grow up in the middle and upper classes are likely to become sociopathic surgeons and executives.
Have you succeeded in rapidly climbing the corporate ladder in a competitive field like business, finance, or law? If charm, arrogance, cunning, callousness, and hyper-rationality are considered sociopathic traits, it’s probably no surprise that many sociopaths end up as successful corporate types. In fact, as one CNN reporter opined: “Squint at the symptoms of psychopathy, and in a different light they can appear as simple office politics or entrepreneurial prowess.” Dr. Robert Hare, one of the foremost researchers on sociopathy, believes that a sociopath is four times more likely to be at the top of the corporate ladder than in the janitor’s closet, due to the close match between the personality traits of sociopaths and the unusual demands of high-powered jobs.
Al Dunlap, former CEO of Sunbeam and Scott Paper, was famous as a turnaround artist and downsizer until he was investigated for accounting fraud by the SEC. In the book The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, Dunlap admits to having many of the traits of a psychopath, but he redefines those traits as crucial to being a business leader. For instance, in his mind, “manipulation” can be translated to the ability to inspire and lead others. Overblown confidence is necessary to survive the hard knocks of business: “You’ve got to like yourself if you’re going to be a success.” Not to mention, due to our inability to empathize, sociopaths are perfect for all the dirty work that no one else has the stomach for, such as firing and downsizing. In fact, that ruthlessness in personnel decisions is how Dunlap earned his nickname—“Chainsaw Al.”
Easily distracted? That’s situational awareness. Constantly in need of stimulation and love playing games? These characteristics promote risk taking, which in business often equals reward. If you combine a propensity for manipulation, dishonesty, callousness, arrogance, poor impulse control, and the rest of the sociopathic traits, you could end up with a socially dangerous individual or the next big-thinking entrepreneur. Robert Hare says that the biggest tip-off to identifying a “successful sociopath” is a “predatory spirit,” just the kind that businesses seem to love. It seems that where we do not crash and burn, we have the potential to achieve dizzying amounts of success.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of you recognize yourselves in these descriptions. It is statistically very probable that some people reading this book are sociopaths and have never re
alized it. If this is you, welcome home.
• • •
Being a sociopath doesn’t define me. In a lot of ways I am ordinary. These days I lead a quiet, middle-class life in a medium-size city that looks like any number of cities across America. I accomplish errands at various strip malls on the weekends. I work more than I should, and I have trouble sleeping.
When not acting impulsively, almost everything I do is done with purpose. Things like physical appearance are most easy to manipulate. My nails are immaculately manicured and my eyebrows perfectly groomed. These days I allow my dark hair to grow just past my shoulders. It is soft and unfussy in subtle compliance with the strictures of fashion. The pleasant ordinariness of my hair brushing lightly against my eyelashes functions to neutralize the intensity of my eyes, which are shiny and flecked by jagged-edged shards of amber, as if something shattered when they first opened to the world. They are probing and merciless.
I should say something about my intelligence, which I believe to be one of the most difficult topics to navigate. While people may be forced to acknowledge their inferior physical appearances, they rarely do so in regards to their intellect, the hidden and variable nature of which allows for rampant self-deception. Even your regular junior high dropout likes to think that he could have been Steve Jobs had he chosen computer programming over meth addiction.
I think I am pretty realistic about my intelligence. I am probably smarter than you, dear reader, but I know that in the rare instance this will not be true. I accept that there are many more kinds of intelligence than just raw brainpower (which of course I have in spades), but I do not necessarily respect them all. Rather, I believe that true, worthwhile intelligence is characterized by an innate and superior awareness of surroundings and an ability and desire to learn. This type is rare in the general populace. I was very young when I realized I was smarter than most everyone else, and I felt at once victorious and isolated.
It is not always clear what sets people like me apart from other members of society. Sociopathy cannot be diagnosed based solely on a person’s behavior but must focus on their internal motivations. Take for instance my story about drowning an opossum. It is not, in itself, a sociopathic act. Killing a small, cute animal might be cruel or sadistic, which is not necessarily sociopathic. In my case, it was merely expedient. It was an act of dispassion.
In letting the baby opossum die a slow and horrible death, I didn’t feel morally justified. I didn’t think about having to justify myself at all. I didn’t feel sad or happy about it. I took no pleasure in its suffering; I did not give it a thought. I didn’t feel anything other than a desire to solve my problem in the simplest way possible. I was concerned only for myself. There wasn’t much chance that the baby would cause much harm if I saved it, but there was no upside for me if I did. And at some point, there was no point in finishing the job of killing it; the pool was probably already contaminated by the opossum releasing its bodily wastes in the throes of death. It was just easier to cancel my plans and wait for the inevitable approach of death.
Instead of acts, I believe that what really distinguish a sociopath conceptually from everyone else are our compulsions, our motivations, and the narratives we tell ourselves about our inner lives. Sociopaths don’t include elements of guilt or moral responsibility in their mental stories, only self-interest and self-preservation. I don’t assign moral values to my choices, just cost-benefit. And indeed, sociopaths are without exception obsessed with power, playing and winning games, appeasing their boredom, and seeking pleasure. My story lines focus on how smart I am or how well I play a situation.
Similarly, I like to imagine that I have “ruined people” or seduced someone to the point of being irreparably mine. The stories I tell myself to explain my actions are self-aggrandizing. I spend a lot of time spinning reality in my head to make me seem more clever and powerful than reality would suggest. (Sociopaths are highly immune to depression, and this ability to tell ourselves wonderful stories about how attractive, smart, and wily we are, and to believe them, surely helps.) The only situation in which I may feel shame or embarrassment is when I have been outplayed. I am never embarrassed that someone may be thinking something bad about me, as long as I have conceived of some gambit in which I have fooled or outmaneuvered them.
Normal people feel emotions that I simply don’t. For them, emotions like guilt serve as convenient shortcuts, telling people when they’re crossing societal or moral boundaries that they’re better off observing. But guilt is not absolutely necessary to live within social acceptability. And it certainly isn’t the only thing that prevents people from murdering, stealing, and lying. Indeed, guilt is often unsuccessful at preventing these actions. It follows, then, that the lack of guilt does not make sociopaths criminals. We have alternative means of keeping ourselves in line. In fact, because guilt does not drive our decision-making, we experience fewer emotional prejudices and more freedom of thought and action. For instance, I felt no need to insert myself and exercise my own moral judgment regarding the old lady who may or may not have survived the internment camps. I would like to think I was better able to help her in her unique situation because of my emotional distance. Recent research suggests that emotions and gut reactions play a dominant role in forming moral judgments and that rationalization of those emotions only follows. The human brain is a belief factory, and part of its job is to rationally justify moral feelings. Rational decision-making is not fail-proof, but neither is guilt and remorse. Neither sociopaths nor the empathic—“empaths”—have a monopoly on bad behavior.
There seems to me to be something wrong with requiring people to pretend to feel remorse. Is it any wonder then that sociopaths are known as being liars? There is really no other option for them, when to show their true feelings (or lack thereof) or to express their true thoughts would get them extra jail time, cause them to be branded as an antisocial, or any number of other negative consequences, simply because they do not share the same worldview as the majority.
Living in a world of empaths makes me vividly aware of how I am different. In John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden, he describes a sociopathic character, Cathy:
Even as a child she had some quality that made people look at her, then look away, then look back at her, troubled at something foreign. Something looked out of her eyes, and was never there when one looked again. She moved quietly and talked little, but she could enter no room without causing everyone to turn toward her.
Like Cathy, there has always been something foreign seeming about me. As a sociopath friend of mine put it: “People, no matter how stupid, can’t put their finger on it, but somehow know I’m not quite right.”
Sometimes it feels like I am in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers and any slipup or indication that I am different will draw suspicion. I mimic the way other people interact with others, not to trick them, but so I can hide among them. I hide because I fear that if I am discovered there will be unpredictable negative consequences as part of being affiliated with a disorder plagued by pejorative connotations. I don’t want to end up fired from my job or kept away from children or institutionalized just because other people can’t understand me. I hide because society has made it almost impossible to do otherwise.
Have I earned your hostility?
I’m not necessarily a sadist. I intentionally hurt people sometimes, but don’t we all? It seems like the greatest harm is often inflicted through passion—the angry ex-husband who won’t let anyone have his wife if he can’t, the armed zealot willing to die and kill for his cause, the father who loves his daughter just a little too much. There’s no danger of this kind of explosive excess of ardor from me.
Even so, I often try to soften my edges around people with whom I share the closest relationships. I actively shield them from realizing that I am meticulously calibrating their value to me at all times, because I know that they are hurt by such things. The consequences of their hurt often result in discomfort to me
in the form of withheld privileges or retracted social favors—friends and even family are only so forgiving of bad behavior before they start to withdraw—so I have trained myself to behave with “sensitivity” to their feelings like most of you do, by holding my tongue or indulging their harebrained ideas about themselves and the world. Of course I am ruthless with my enemies, but that is also a very common human quality.
A few years ago, I suffered a series of setbacks. It was a time of loss and introspection, and it was then that I realized that the “sociopath” label explained the pattern of thought that was at the root of many of my problems. A friend had casually diagnosed me years earlier but I hadn’t thought about it since. This time I took it seriously. I started looking for answers and browsing the basic information that was available on the Internet and in popular science magazines. I was appalled that all of it reeked of a particular bias. There were some amusing blogs written by victims of con artists, but there weren’t any sociopaths writing about their perspectives online. I saw an opportunity for offering a different perspective that coincided with my own interests at the time. I figured that if I existed, there must be others like me—other sociopaths who didn’t make their impact in a world of crime but out in the business and professional world. I wanted to shape the dialogue to reflect my point of view. I wanted to expand the discussion of sociopaths beyond the traditional study of incarcerated criminals. The entrepreneur in me also thought there could be some benefit from being the first to do it and doing it well, so in 2008 I started writing a blog called SociopathWorld.com, which I intended as an online community for people who identify as sociopaths, as well as people who love and hate them.