Confessions of a Sociopath

by M. E. Thomas

  In criminal law, there are two concepts for wrongs that can be criminalized—malum in se and malum prohibitum. The former are wrongful acts that are wrong in and of themselves, and common examples are murder, theft, and rape. The latter are crimes that are not inherently wrongful, but are prohibited by societies in order to advance a social purpose, usually the optimal ordering or management of the public welfare; examples are driving on the wrong side of the road, breaking a curfew, or selling alcohol without a license. While laws governing malum in se are generally static, those regulating malum prohibitum are necessarily mutable, because they must be calibrated to the changing conditions.

  Of course, the two categories are often difficult to distinguish. There is much debate about the illegal duplication of copyrighted digital media, for instance. Recording companies tend to characterize it as theft, a crime that is inherently bad, while teenagers and legal scholars suggest that it is criminal merely because it is prohibited by the state as an economic regulation.

  In my personal universe, there is almost nothing that constitutes malum in se. I don’t feel that anything is inherently wrongful. But, more important, I am never compelled to refrain from doing something merely because it is wrong—only because doing so would result in undesirable consequences. Thus, evil has no special meaning for me. There is no mystery in it. It is a word to describe a sense of wrongness that I do not feel.

  I don’t have any expectations of egalitarianism or righteousness, so I do not feel a similar sense of disappointment at the existence of evil or despair. I am not moved by signs of want, of beggars or poor starving orphans or slums or anything (although I often donate on little more than a whim). I am not outraged by inequity; in fact I embrace it as I do death. I don’t feel the same sense of entitlement to beneficence that most people do. I do not expect things to go right in the world. I don’t even believe in right. I believe that everything just is. And what is can be quite beautiful.

  I suppose it’s an odd distinction to make between being moved by perceived injustice but not inequity. I guess what I mean is that there is quite a deal of luck and context involved in every aspect of life, and that people cannot therefore expect the same outcomes from the same actions. In contrast, I perceive injustice as someone putting a thumb on the scale, artificially enabling one outcome over another—an intentional interference thwarting the natural course of things. I guess it’s because I don’t mind risk, it actually gives me a thrill, but I have no desire to play a rigged game. If I thought my life was rigged, I don’t know what I’d do, maybe kill myself or others. It’s only because I think I can (and most often do) play the game better than others that it keeps my interest enough to persist in playing it.

  Sociopathy was first identified as an independent mental disorder more than two hundred years ago by the French humanitarian and father of modern psychiatry Philippe Pinel, in his 1806 work A Treatise on Insanity: In Which Are Contained the Principles of a New and More Practical Nosology of Maniacal Disorders Than Has Yet Been Offered to the Public. Pinel developed an interest in psychology after a friend became afflicted with mental illness that resulted in suicide. He was largely responsible for popularizing the “moral” treatment of patients with mental disorders based on prolonged observation and conversation.

  In his treatise, Pinel set out three categories of mental derangement: (1) melancholia or delirium, (2) mania with delirium, and (3) mania without delirium, the last of which described individuals who were impulsive, amoral, violent, and destructive—while remaining competent and rational. Pinel theorized that the patients who suffered mania without delirium had only a certain part of their mental faculties distorted while the rest of their mind—principally, their intellect—remained intact. He wrote of this category of condition: “It may be either continued or intermittent. No sensible change in the functions of the understanding; but perversion of the active faculties, marked by abstract and sanguinary fury, with a blind propensity to acts of violence.”

  Pinel noted his surprise that maniacs could have entirely unaffected intellects. This was contrary to the generally accepted notion at the time that madness was caused by a deficit or derangement of mental reasoning faculties, as proposed by John Locke in his 1690 work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Because one could not think, Locke believed, one could not function in society—the key to sanity was rationality, and without it, a person was lost to insanity or mania. But Pinel found that there was a different kind of madness or mental deficit—a moral one.

  In 1863, British psychologist James Cowles Prichard used the term “moral insanity” to describe people like me, a phrase that fills me with delight. In his work A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind, Prichard acknowledged Pinel’s case studies and noted the existence of “many individuals living at large, and not entirely separated from society, who are affected in a certain degree with this modification of insanity. They are reputed persons of a singular, wayward, and eccentric character.”

  Prichard was a very religious man, and he struggled with the possibility that mental illness could be an affliction of not only the mind but also of the soul—that moral corruption was a sickness that could be medically categorized and clinically treated. While not the first, he was perhaps one of the most vehement critics of sociopaths. It offended him that a person in total control of his mental faculties could not or did not live rightly. Before, his assumption was that to be rational is to be moral. Like Pinel, Prichard was unsettled by the idea that delusion was not necessarily the root of bad behavior, and that doing evil could be—in some ways—perfectly rational.

  Pinel was convinced that the emotional morality experienced by most people is inherently superior to the rational moral decision-making that sociopaths and others have to engage in. I disagree. Everyone uses shortcuts to make decisions; it would be impossible for us to make a fully informed, reasoned decision every time such a decision was necessary. For example, when you’re in the middle of a bar fight, how do you decide whether or not to stab the guy who just punched you in the face? Empaths may use emotional shortcuts (in this case, either “This jerk deserves a shiv in the belly” or “I’d feel too awful if I actually killed the guy”) to make quick decisions about how to act. Sociopaths don’t or can’t, so we come up with other shortcuts.

  Many sociopaths use the shortcut of “anything goes,” or “I am only in it for me.” These sociopaths have decided that the rational way to increase their own benefits in life is to look out only for themselves and ignore the needs or demands of others. While some act entirely on selfish impulse, they are not always free to be out on the streets where you might meet them but are instead in prison. Apart from the most impulsive and violent sociopaths, there is a wide range of self-reflection and deliberation in decision-making. Some sociopaths are capable of reining in their impulses enough to decide that jail time is not to their advantage, so they choose to avoid major violations of the law (e.g., “The satisfaction of killing this jerk isn’t worth the inconvenience of being locked up”). One sociopath from my blog, while realizing that most of what he does is dangerous, wrong, or both, still stated, “I have a line or two I won’t cross for any reason.” But that doesn’t prevent him from committing with clear conscience many smaller infractions or injustices that empaths would find objectionable, for example accounting fraud or emotional abuse.

  Other sociopaths, and I am one of these, have settled on a more “principled” approach to life and act according to religious or ethical beliefs, or, at the minimum, for their self-interest or preservation. We decide on standards of behavior or a code that we can refer to when faced with decisions (“I’ve decided not to kill people, so I won’t stab this jerk”). As one sociopath reader of my blog put it, “To have morals is not important. Having ethics is what is important.” My prosthetic moral compass generally functions well for me, and most of the time my method happens to track what the majority thinks is the moral thing to do. The one thing
that sociopath “codes” tend to have in common, though, is that they don’t fully map with prevailing social norms, those unspoken rules and customs that govern behavior in a group. For instance I know a sociopath who is a drug dealer but has his own standards of conduct when it comes to dealing with his wife (nicely) or his employees (not nicely). Similarly, I am typically not engaged in criminal behavior, but that doesn’t mean I won’t take whatever I need, from things as questionable and disgusting as your underwear to things as useful and valuable as a bike. I almost expect others to do the same. From my experiences and communications with other sociopaths, this rough blend of pure opportunism mixed with a more practical utilitarianism is not uncommon. One blog commenter put it this way:

  I’m an “intelligent” sociopath. I don’t have problems with drugs, I don’t commit crimes, I don’t take pleasure in hurting people, and I don’t typically have relationship problems. I do have a complete lack of empathy. But I consider that an advantage, most of the time. Do I know the difference between right and wrong, and do I want to be good? Sure. One catches more flies with honey than with vinegar. A peaceful and orderly world is a more comfortable world for me to live in. So do I avoid breaking the law because it’s “right”? No, I avoid breaking the law because it makes sense. I suppose if I weren’t gifted with the ability to make a lot of money in a profession doing what I like, I might try and profit by crime. But with my profession, I’d have to really hit the criminal jackpot to make it worth a life of crime. When you’re bad to people, they’re bad back to you. I’m no Christian, but “do unto others as you would want them to do unto you” works.

  But sometimes efficiency does not perfectly align with what most people would consider morally right. One afternoon shortly after I got fired from my law firm job, I took my neighbor’s bicycle so that I could bike to the beach with a friend who was visiting from out of town. The bike was sitting unlocked in the shared underground garage. There was a layer of dust on it and it needed a little air in the tires, but it was there and eminently convenient. I figured that it was unlikely that my neighbor, a stranger to me, would discover it missing. My efficiency-minded self imagined what the transaction would look like if I were to ask her for permission to use the bike: I would explain to her the situation and she would consent, provided I agreed to pay for any damage or loss. I would posit that the bike would be better for the ride because it would work grease through the moving parts. And bikes are meant to be ridden; it was socially wasteful to keep the bike in the garage, unused like that, when people needed bikes to ride. I would have been happy to pay her a rental fee if she wanted me to. This was the story I told myself.

  I did not actually engage in this hypothetical transaction with my neighbor. I thought there was too great a risk that she would not see things my way. People can be very irrational, I reasoned to myself, and sometimes they cannot be trusted to make efficient decisions. She might say no because she has an irrational fear of strangers. There is an information asymmetry in our situation that could distort the way she sees this decision: In her mind, I am an unknown. But, truthfully, I had no intention of stealing the bike. I’d bring it back in just a few hours, better than I found it. But how could I credibly assure her of this? People are too distrusting nowadays.

  Finally, she probably overestimates the value of the bicycle just because it happens to be hers. Maybe she bought it for $100, hoping to bike to the beach every week. In her mind the value of the bike would be emotionally rooted to that $100 sunk cost and her fantasies about a life of ease, even though the bike wouldn’t sell for more than $10 at a garage sale. She and her husband were living a life beyond their means, I had often thought. They both drove Civics from the late 1980s but lived in a nice apartment building with young professionals. She might be upset about the thought of losing something as small as her beat-up old bike because she didn’t have much to start with. It was easy to convince myself that I knew better than her what was best for the bike. Besides, what she didn’t know would not hurt her, and I really didn’t want to bother having the conversation with her.

  In the evening, after I had returned the bike no worse for wear, I heard an angry knock on my door and was subjected to even angrier accusations. Apparently she had come home, shocked to find her bike gone. After looking for it for hours (looking for it? Where? And for hours?) she gave up, only to find it returned to its space in the garage. She had not failed to notice that her husband’s bike remained there, and that my bike was also gone for the exact same period of time. It was clear that the jig was up, so I confessed that I had taken her bike.

  She was taken aback by my untroubled admission. My money offers did nothing but offend her, and she even threatened to call the police, but I told her I thought it was unlikely they’d do much for her. I tried to explain that what I had done was technically not theft because I did not have the requisite mental state of intending to permanently deprive her of her property. At best what I had done was trespass to chattels, and good luck trying to prove actual damages. She stared at me in horror for a moment before threatening to tell the management. I figured that was an empty threat, though, and in any case had been planning on moving somewhere cheaper to live out my unemployment.

  I didn’t mind being caught. It was just a cost of doing business. Of course I wouldn’t have remembered this incident if I had not been caught. Many other similar episodes have filled my life, too routine to recall. But I think it bothers people to see me this way—expressing no sign of remorse upon being caught. When I was a child and would get up to mischief with my siblings, my father used to beat us with a belt, lining us all up to take our turns, in equal parts emotional humiliation and physical intimidation. I never reacted—never cried and never apologized. I never felt the urge and, more important, I never saw the point. Part of it was because I knew he wanted to break me and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. Part of it was that my tears were usually tools of manipulation and punisher-dad was not susceptible to manipulation. All I got was a cold sort of angry where most of my attention was focused on plotting payback. Although I had two older brothers who were much bigger than I was, I frequently got hit the hardest, leaving angry welts across my little buttocks and upper thighs. As an adult, I asked him why he did it. He said that he didn’t remember details, but I must have been risking the lives of my siblings or something sufficiently horrible to warrant that kind of beating. Maybe. But maybe I just didn’t seem affected by the punishments the way he had hoped I would be. My lack of reaction must have seemed like intransigence, which he hoped to break by beating me just a little bit harder.

  My neighbor was similarly put out by my blank-faced recitations of the legal elements of trespass to chattels in response to her obvious distress. It took everything I had learned about people to understand that she wanted apologies rather than remuneration, some compensation for the sense of personal violation that she experienced. It’s difficult for me to comprehend these soft intangibles. It’s not that I do not feel them; it’s just hard for me to predict them in others. But even when I backpedaled and started apologizing, the neighbor was dissatisfied. Like my father, she seemed to sense that I wasn’t sorry for what I did. I didn’t feel any of that godly sorrow that precedes repentance, because I had not strayed, at least not according to my own reasoning. Taking the bike had been worth it.

  This sort of behavior may seem uncouth, but is it really immoral? Prichard’s disgust with sociopaths for being immoral seems largely unwarranted unless you ascribe to his particular brand of morality. Was I really in the wrong by temporarily taking my neighbor’s bike? Only if you think that violation of the personal property of others is immoral. Even the law recognizes that this is not always the case: If you’re stranded in a snowstorm, it would be permissible to break in to someone’s ski cabin and spend the night, as long as you pay for any damage done to the cabin. The justification for this so-called necessity defense is that if you were able to find the owner of the cabin an
d ask them for permission, they would grant it to you. However, you can still use this defense even if you know for a fact that the owner would not grant you permission, for instance because you two are mortal enemies and the cabin owner has made it clear he would not piss on you if you were on fire. The cabin owner can take this position, but the law will not support it because it is unreasonable—and perhaps even immoral! When seen through this lens of reasoning (rather than Prichard’s religious one), perhaps my neighbor was acting improperly by being unreasonable in not allowing me to borrow her unused bike. If I behaved improperly according to societal standards, it was arguably only because I didn’t show the least bit of remorse.

  In contract law, there is a concept called “efficient breach.” Most people assume that it is always “bad” to break a contract, because it essentially constitutes breaking a promise. However, there are some ways in which doing so can be good, or in the language of law and economics, efficient. This occurs when complying with the terms of the contract would result in greater economic loss than simply paying the other party’s damages that have resulted from your nonperformance. For example, I commit to date someone exclusively. Maybe I even marry him. If one of us later finds someone we prefer, it may actually be better for both parties if one or both of us breaks the agreement. If you believe in the value of efficient breaches like I do, then you would never get upset if your partner cheated on you.

  In efficient breaches, it is often the immoral choice that leaves everyone better off. I’ve lived my entire life this way, since long before I ever learned the term in law school. My child self understood the world in terms of choices and consequences, causes and effects. If I wanted to break a rule and was willing to suffer the consequences, I should be allowed to make that choice unhindered.