by M. E. Thomas
I have never identified with the little bird, trapped by fear and an instinct for passivity, the wide-eyed victim of circumstance. I have never pined for an Eden of peace on earth and goodwill toward men. I am the rat, and I will take every advantage I can without apology or excuse. And there are others like me.
Some of the most amoral and manipulative people I met in my life I knew in law school—rats who gamed the system with little regard for others at a level of meticulousness baffling even to me. They calculated every event or encounter to optimize their advantage, even when the advantages were so trivial as to mean having a slightly better breakfast. Many of them seemed capable of committing massacre, grand theft, or real destruction, had a sufficient motivating desire struck them to do so. I don’t know how many of them were diagnosable sociopaths, but clinical research and my own experience lead me to believe the rate was much higher than in the general population. Many, however, were the most interesting people I have known, and not so dangerous, really. Sociopaths are unlikely to be zealots; we can’t be bothered to take up causes outside of ourselves.
The law school environment made everyone a little more sociopathic, since we were encouraged to view our successes in a zero-sum game measured by precise numbers. At the end of every semester in law schools across the nation, grades are collated and detailed rankings published. Rankings among my classmates had a direct relationship to our career prospects—it was as if everyone was walking around with a number above his head, and you could see it flittering there like a train station signboard, knowing that each adjustment around you reflected a change in the number above your own head.
Of course, I gamed the system perfectly. I had three years, two semesters a year, for a total of six semesters, each of which had a different impact on my résumé: possible first-year summer internships, whether I got on law review, the paid internship during our second summer, the last hope to improve my GPA before federal court judicial clerkship applications were due. I made Excel spreadsheets. I determined the odds. I chose classes and teachers on the basis of whether I knew I’d get an A. I used the school’s generous policy of allowing law students to take undergraduate courses pass/fail to pad my class schedule with such fluff as Jazz Improvisation, Music Ethnology, and Introduction to Film. While some of my classmates were learning about the intricacies of federal jurisdiction, I was relaxing in a classroom while two try-hards were locked in a heated debate over whether Tuvan throat singers were misogynistic. And the best part about it was that there was nothing wrong with what I did. That’s the beauty of numbers—there are no points awarded or taken away for being seen as either nice or ruthless, at least when grading is anonymous like ours was.
I look better on paper than I do in real life. On paper I have all the hallmarks of success. But in my real life, things have often come to me the hard way. I don’t mean in the usual character-building way; I mean the untidy and indirect way that sometimes requires me to be extra resourceful and handily unabashed.
I am absolutely shameless when it comes to asking for, pushing for, and ultimately inducing people to give me what I want, whatever it takes. At BYU, I played in all of the top music ensembles and performed in the closing ceremonies for the winter Olympics. These bullet points on my résumé look impressive as long as you don’t know that they were substantially the result of coercion. How? Through well-placed allegations of gender discrimination in my department with the university administration, an easy claim to make when all the music administrators were men. In law school I used the back door to get onto the prestigious editorial board of the student-edited law review, via a program designed to solicit more participation from women and minorities. From that subsidiary program, I campaigned vigorously and successfully to get elected to the editorial board, based again on the gender divide. To graduate with honors, I argued one of my professors into raising my grade. To get my first internship, I practically begged the interviewer during my sendoff handshake. I looked deeply into her eyes, beseechingly, earnestly, and said, “I really want this job.”
I loved being perceived as smart and successful. And I didn’t care if I had to do ugly things in front of a few people to get there. A few scattered looks of disgust and heads shaking in disappointment hardly mattered to me. It mattered much more that I had the right little asterisks and icons in graduation ceremony programs indicating my various honors. I am not ashamed to admit that seeing them still gives me pleasure.
When I graduated from law school, I landed a prestige-whore’s job (and we lawyers are all prestige whores) with a fancy firm in Los Angeles, making ridiculous amounts of money. I pre-spent my first months’ salary on a wardrobe that would make me look like a high-flying, style-conscious Los Angeleno, but once I was actually sitting behind my desk I just wasn’t that interested in doing any of the work. I realize now that I was all about the form and disregarded the substance.
The thing that allowed me to survive this way as long as I did was that I didn’t feel insecure about my backdoor methods. If anything, I was proud of them. I felt entitled to what I got. And why not? I had won every indicator of success in life through whatever means necessary—my test scores were consistently at the top of the charts, and my résumé was perfect. My career trajectory was astonishing, especially because it felt like a scam, and I loved to play that kind of game. When I was young, it was not enough for me to get A’s on all my tests. That part was easy. What thrilled me was the risk of figuring out just how little I could study and still pull off the A. It was like this with being an attorney. I had no real desire to be one, only to playact as one. And really, to the extent that everything in the industry was a scam, I was just one pretender among many.
I loved the subtle and not-so-subtle power games that played out in my office. I became a connoisseur of insecurities and used that knowledge to manipulate junior associates and senior partners alike, in big and small ways. The insecurities of high-powered attorneys are especially delicious, acute, and ever-so-finely grained. They have the usual things, like penis size, body image, and age, but the other, more obscure things are far more interesting.
For instance, there was a partner in the office next to mine who was strangely insecure about the fact that he had six children. He wasn’t motivated by a religious commandment to multiply, so he felt like he had to explain himself. He cornered me during the office Christmas party, drunk on appletinis, and all I had to do was grin and be gracious while he confessed his sin of having too many children among urban professionals. Then he suggested that I coauthor his latest treatise. I didn’t take him up on the offer back in the office on Monday, but the feeling that he had revealed too much lingered.
Everyone has defenses to protect themselves from hurt, stratagems to disguise their weaknesses and to avoid potential exploitation. The girl who grew up in the trailer park wears only Christian Louboutin shoes and Hermès scarves. The Nazi’s grandson works at the multicultural soup kitchen. The kid who grew up with learning disabilities spends his adulthood earning PhDs from the very best universities. The thing about these defenses, however, is that they work only if they are invisible. If they are somehow exposed, if another person can see them, then you might as well be naked, or standing stock-still waiting to be eaten. There is something so excruciating about being seen—really, truly seen—because people not only see the trailer trash in you, but they also see the striving heart that wishes it wasn’t.
As in poker, many people have unconscious tells or little changes in behavior or demeanor that let me know the strength or weakness of the hand they’ve been dealt in life. Tells having to do with class usually work well. I don’t believe I have ever encountered a person without some kind of readable insecurities about their class or socioeconomic status. And these self-doubts pervade every aspect of a person’s life, from how to hold chopsticks in a sushi restaurant to whether to say hello to your mailman. In such circumstances, I can establish a favorable power dynamic by showing just the slightest di
sapproval couched in an easy, generous tolerance. It’s a kind of gently condescending noblesse oblige.
I had been assigned to work for a senior associate named Jane in one of the firm’s satellite offices, so I only saw her once every few weeks. In law firms, you are supposed to treat a person who is a couple years senior to you as if she is the ultimate authority in everything you do in your life, and Jane took this hierarchy pretty seriously. You could tell that she had never enjoyed such power in any other social sphere. Her pale white skin, mottled with age, poor diet, and middling hygiene, was evidence of a lifetime spent outside the social elite. But you could also tell she had tried to cultivate her own brand of brittle class privilege, albeit poorly. Jane had obtained—in answer to all of her dreams and as a result of her unimpeachable assiduousness—a modicum of power in her office, having satisfactorily worked for one of the more powerful attorneys at the firm. She wanted so much to wear her power well but she was clumsy with it—heavy-handed in certain circumstances and a pushover in others. You could tell that she was self-consciously aware of it, which made her a particularly entertaining blend of ostensible power and self-doubt.
I was not, perhaps, her best associate. As much as anyone I have ever encountered, Jane believed that I was undeserving of all that I had accomplished. Whereas she had taken so much effort to dress appropriately (ill-fitting beige suits with shoulder pads), I wore flip-flops and T-shirts at every semi-reasonable opportunity. While she regularly billed as many hours as humanly possible, I exploited our firm’s nonexistent vacation policy by taking three-day weekends and weeks-long vacations abroad. People were implicitly expected not to take vacations, but I had my own lifelong policy of following only explicit rules, and then only because they’re easiest to prove against me. She could sense that I flouted this and other unspoken rules with little consequence by a quick look at my time sheets and my less-than-formal office attire. It wasn’t that she hated me; she just didn’t know what to do with me. To her, I was walking injustice. It disgusted her, but if I had sold my soul to the devil, she wanted to get his business card and contact information.
I had driven to her office for a meeting, and we met in the lobby by coincidence as she was coming back from lunch. We walked together to the elevator, and when it opened, there were two tall, handsome men already inside. One was French, and both apparently worked at a venture capital firm that shared the building with our firm. You could tell by looking at them that they received multimillion-dollar bonuses and likely arrived via one of the Lotuses or Maseratis regularly parked in the underground garage. Lawyers might be wealthy, but they are almost without exception surrounded by far greater wealth.
The two were in the midst of a discussion about the symphony that they had attended the night before, which I had also happened to attend. I didn’t go to the symphony all the time; a friend had happened to have some extra tickets. I casually asked them about it, and their eyes lit up.
“So lucky to have met you! Perhaps you can settle a disagreement between my friend and me,” the Frenchman said. “My friend thinks that it was Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto that was performed last night, but I think it was his third. Do you recall?”
I didn’t miss a beat. “It was his second. It was incredible, wasn’t it?” I actually could not recall, and it turned out to have been his third. Of course, it hardly mattered what the right answer was.
The two men thanked me profusely as they left the elevator, leaving Jane and me to travel up to her office in enough silence for her to contemplate the dimensions of my intellectual and social superiority. It was the kind of elite encounter she hoped she would one day have when she was just a nerdy teenager clasping on to her dog-eared copy of Mansfield Park—that she would attend symphonies and be able to speak intelligently about them to handsome strangers. She had envisioned that matriculation at a highly ranked university and employment at a prestigious law firm would make such a moment possible for her, but it wasn’t hers. It was mine.
Jane was a little jittery by the time we got back to her office, a combination of caffeine at lunch and worry that she had wasted her life. We were supposed to talk about the project I was working on for her, but instead we talked about her life choices from about the age of eighteen, her worries and insecurities about her job and her body, her attraction to women despite being engaged to a man for several years, and other things that I can’t bother to remember. After the elevator, I knew I had her—which is to say that I knew that whenever she saw me, her heart would flutter; she would worry about all of the secret vulnerabilities she had exposed to me and wonder what it would be like to undress me, or to slap me across the face. I know that for a long time I haunted her dreams, and that even now, years later, I could make her hands tremble just by flashing her a smile. Of course power is its own reward, but with this particular dynamic between us established, I was able to leverage a brief cancer scare and outpatient procedure into a three-week paid vacation. Which is also a form of reward.
I think that sociopathy gives me a natural competitive advantage, a unique way of thinking that is hardwired into my brain. I have an almost invincible confidence in my own abilities. I am hyper-observant of the flow of influence and power in a group. And I never panic in the face of crisis. I bet there are a lot of things about which people would want to be a little sociopathic. It frees me from the fear of public speaking or the possibility of becoming an emotional eater. Sometimes it is not clear to me whether I have fear or emotions, but I know they don’t affect me the way they do others.
In the book The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success, Kevin Dutton argues that there is a thin line between a Hannibal Lecter–type killer and the brilliant surgeon who lacks empathy. Sociopaths are primed for success because they are fearless, confident, charismatic, ruthless, and focused—qualities that define them as sociopaths but are also “tailor-made for success in the twenty-first century.” I used those traits to climb the social ladder from misfit kid to talented musician to high-flying legal student to well-compensated attorney—and who knows where else they will take me in the future?
Sociopaths also think fast on their feet. Recent research suggests that sociopath brains learn in a chaotic way, similar to brains with attention deficit disorder, namely by breaking up the information into small fragments and storing it randomly in both hemispheres of the brain. Perhaps due to this odd storage system, the sociopath’s corpus callosum, that bundle of nerve fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain, is longer and skinnier than in an average brain. Consequently, the rate at which information is transmitted between hemispheres in a sociopath’s brain is abnormally high.
Of course, researchers almost never credit the sociopath brain as having any advantage over an empath brain, despite the demonstrated greater efficiency in transmitting information between brain hemispheres. Instead this efficiency is vaguely insinuated as the cause for the sociopath’s “less remorse, fewer emotions and less social connectedness—the classic hallmarks of a psychopath.” Normal people, even scientists, won’t ever admit that a sociopath’s brain might actually be better in any way. Every single article I have seen that even comes close to discussing some of the advantages of the sociopathic brain eventually backs off and makes some pat conclusion about how broken we are. In fact, the title of an article about the sociopath’s corpus callosum is “Out of Order.” But there are two meanings to that phrase, and I think one of them applies to this sort of bias thinly masked as science.
While I have to admit that I am not exceptional at multitasking (and, really, most people aren’t), I have a genius for clear-minded focus. With me, my attention is always on one thing at a time, and I toggle rapidly through thoughts in a way that makes it sometimes seem that I have ADD. Despite this appearance, I am excellent at directing all my attention onto a single focus, particularly when driven to it by adrenaline. This can be very bad, like the time I became entirely fixate
d on killing that DC metro worker who hassled me for walking on a broken escalator. It can also be great in clutch situations, because I am able to tune out all of the white noise that might distract other people, the daily petty worries or insecurities that might plague other competitors. I can achieve a relaxed calmness in even the most frenetic situations. I believe that my lack of nerves is the reason why I performed so well on standardized tests in school. I don’t remember a time when I scored outside the ninety-ninth percentile. During a mock trial competition, the judge remarked, “At one point I wanted to go back there and check to make sure you still had a pulse. You seemed as cool as a cucumber.”
During the California bar exam, people were literally crying from the stress. The convention center where the exam was given looked like a disaster relief center, with people sprawled out on any available floor space, in a desperate attempt to recall everything they had memorized over the past eight or more weeks, the contents of their backpacks and briefcases spewed out around them. I had spent those weeks vacationing in Mexico, making a cross-country road trip, and teaching my nieces and nephews how to swim. Despite being woefully underprepared by many standards, I was able to maintain calm and to focus enough to maximize the legal knowledge I did have. I passed while many of my equally intelligent and better-prepared friends failed. Psychologists have described this single-mindedness as “flow” and have opined that champion athletes, master musicians, and other performers function at their best when focused in this way. Through this hyperfocus, I was able, with minimal work, to achieve a level of performance in school and my career that others would have to spend many times the number of hours preparing for, simply because I was able to marshal the exact mental resources I needed in the moment.
But other activities require a broader focus, including things as simple as walking efficiently through an airport, engaging in a conversation with more than one person, playing poker, or navigating office politics during a staff meeting. For these things, I have gradually learned to expand my hyperfocus to include multiple, varied targets via what free divers call “attention deconcentration.” I’ve heard another practitioner refer to something similar as “situational awareness.” Unlike meditation, which seeks to eliminate all thought, attention deconcentration focuses the user on everything all at once, feeling everything simultaneously. According to free diver Natalia Molchanova, “What you do to start learning is you focus on the edges, not the center of things, as if you were looking at a screen.” She mentions that people who are subject to persistent stress factors where quick decision-making is necessary can find it useful to diffuse their attention and blunt their “emotional reaction in critical situations [where it] can lead to the wrong decisions and panic.” When I get closest to achieving deconcentration, I am so hyperaware of all sensory inputs that I reach a total-body experience that one might call ecstasy. It’s very pleasurable. And useful, particularly in combating unwanted impulses by forcing myself to see the bigger picture, which makes a single impulse seem so inconsequential in comparison. Hyperfocus achieved a similar effect by keeping me so engaged in one activity that I was blind to other temptations. Attention games became one of the best ways for me to finally liberate myself from the tyranny of my impulses and finally acquire some measure of social and professional stability.