by M. E. Thomas
By isolating the potential instigators and stealing their thunder, I never give them the chance to speak publicly and gain support. Everyone else is left knowing only about their own particular struggles, assuming that any issue with me or the class may have more to do with their own personal failures than a larger institutional failure. I rely on people’s need to appear smart in other ways. For instance, it’s traditional in law school for lecturers to cold-call on students during class. I don’t like to do this because frequently they’re ill prepared and it wastes time. If I never cold-call, however, the students will pick up on this and stop preparing as thoroughly for class. What I have started doing is e-mailing a student ahead of time that I will call on them for a particular case. To the rest of the class it appears as if I have cold-called on them. The student performs marvelously. The other students can’t help but wonder, Am I the only one who isn’t completely getting this material? So they work harder. The student whom I e-mailed has every incentive to keep the e-mail secret because it makes his performance more impressive. This divide-and-conquer approach to classroom and workplace management has been effective for me on many occasions, and I’m surprised more people don’t adopt it.
I once worked with a bully. She had no position of real authority but had managed to make herself indispensable in the office where I had just started. At first I was lulled by the bully’s seeming good nature and charms; she just seemed nice, asking me about what projects I was involved with, how things were working out. But one of my new coworkers warned me that the only thing she wanted to help me do was fail.
As the bully was saying good night to everyone, I pulled her aside, put my hand on her shoulder, and said, “You know, I have to apologize to you. I made a joke this morning that was in poor taste. You asked how everything was going with my new project and I said, ‘So far so good.’ I didn’t mean to imply that I wasn’t giving the project my full attention and skill. On the contrary, I am one hundred percent dedicated to the success of this project. I think I was just trying to be self-deprecating, but I realize now that the joke fell flat.” My apology caught her off guard.
She started to spill, “Well, it’s true that the last few people in charge of that project got fired, and I was just thinking, maybe … but maybe you’ll be different …” And just like that she showed her hand. She acknowledged that she was aware of what my project was (even though she pretended to have no clue the day before), its history, its importance, and her obvious interest in my failure.
The next day I was all deflection. She asked me a question, and I gave her a nonanswer and asked her questions back, even for the most meaningless of things. “What did you get for lunch?” “Oh you know, same old. What did you get for lunch?”
“What are you working on now?” “Little this, little that. What are you working on?” The terser the answer, the more off-putting it was to her. The bully, now desperate and sensing the shift in power, quickly progressed from “chummy” sideways questions to direct inquiries. “So how did that project turn out yesterday? Did it get approved?” Wouldn’t you like to know.
As one blog commenter said regarding bullying:
[Some] seem to think that sociopaths are the biggest bullies. Any intelligent sociopath should understand that violence and threats are easy, and can backfire horribly if they rely on them. Sociopaths are crowd-pleasers rather than crowd-repressors, bullies make enemies when they gain power, sociopaths make friends.
These tactics may be inspired by a sociopath’s selfish desire to avoid emotional drama and upheaval, but they can benefit any organization.
In addition to the pleasure I take in teaching, one of my favorite activities is attending academic conferences. All of the professional action happens there, so everything about the way I present myself is extremely calculated. First, I am careful to wear something that will draw attention, like jeans and cowboy boots while everyone else is wearing business attire. The cowboy boots both emphasize and explain my strut, and I want to indicate that I’m not interested in being judged by the usual standards. This is important because people look at my name tag to see where I teach. Because I don’t teach at a top-tier school they don’t immediately expect that I will be brilliant, but the truth is that I am. I’ve also found that, in a predominantly male profession, it’s helpful to remember that women are seen as objects. I don’t fight their expectations, I just play with them. They like to be played with and I like to force them to see things my way.
I know they underestimate me but I don’t fight it. My shtick is that I am just the messenger giving straight facts. “But also do you see how X only looks like Y from this angle? If we looked at it from this other angle, doesn’t it look more like X?” I let them see it for themselves. I think it is more convincing. I learned this from my experiences with juries. I’m trying to transplant an idea into their heads. I need to be careful how I present it so they don’t reject it as foreign before it even gets settled.
But I also want it to seem a little like magic, the same way an answer to a riddle seems a little like magic. Of course riddles are not by their nature puzzling, they’re puzzling due to the way they are presented—leaving out vital pieces of information. Riddles have the appearance of being solvable; that’s why people get engaged in guessing and trying to show off. When I present at conferences, I also try to get people engaged in guessing. In fact I specifically ask for shows of hands guessing about the results. When you finally reveal the end of a riddle, it makes you look like a genius, when really it’s because you purposefully presented the issue that way.
One riddle I frequently use in law discussions is the riddle of why the Salt Lake City airport has some of the best smoking facilities of any airport in the United States. The majority of the state population is Mormon. Mormons do not smoke; they believe the body is a temple and that smoking desecrates that temple. I ask people to guess why a state full of nonsmokers would build such convenient smoking facilities in an airport. Everyone thinks this is an answerable question and they are intelligent people so everyone hazards a guess, but no one has yet guessed correctly—just me, after I asked myself the riddle one day pacing the halls of the airport during a weather delay. That makes me the magical keeper of the riddle.
The nice thing about this riddle is that it has a very simple answer: the airport has always been nonsmoking since its construction in the 1960s. LAX, LaGuardia, and many of the other major airports in the United States have smoking accommodations that seem like an afterthought. And they were, because those airports originally allowed smoking throughout the terminals. While the main terminals of those airports were a haze of cigarette smoke in the 1960s, the Salt Lake City airport was originally built to be nonsmoking. To appease smokers in a larger society where indoor public smoking was the norm, the airport was built with easily accessible “smoking rooms” spread throughout the terminals. In this way, a good accommodation for smokers actually arose out of a special awareness on the part of nonsmokers. People like this little twist. It seems to be a parable about the difficulty of predicting unintended consequences or a cautionary tale about how quickly the dominant majority can become an oppressed minority (maybe making special allowances for sociopaths is not so ridiculous an idea?). I like the riddle for its moral ambiguity and for the way it reveals the simplistic complexity of the world.
My legal work is not fake, any more than my answer about the Salt Lake airport is fake. What is manipulative is how I present it. I lead them down a particular path that predestines them to reach only one conclusion—my conclusion. They don’t know where it’s going to end up at the end, and that’s part of the thrill. It almost seems like intellectual magic. Really it’s just effective rhetoric.
As a law professor, my original ideas represent almost the sum total of my worth to my school. I like to say outrageous things and have people challenge me. I like the controversy. The more controversy, the more people will remember my talk. I have an answer for everything. Their i
nitial underestimation draws them out for my attack. They’re used to a world of hiding behind credentials. My point: I am not what you think I am. I want them to hesitate before challenging me again. I want them to be afraid to call my bluff. Law is appearances, and it is rare to have a sure thing, so I make the most of it when I have it.
I know I can’t compete with the oxford-shirt types, or even the types who can rattle off the facts of the last dozen decided Supreme Court opinions. Like everywhere else, there is an old boys’ club of lawyers and judges who want to hire someone who looks and acts just like them—or at least the younger, more virile version of them. They whip out their knowledge of substantive law in a way that makes it seem like they are comparing penis size. I don’t care to engage in legal debates. Most of substantive law is boring, particularly to someone who needs constant stimulation as much as I do. I don’t have that type of brain, nor do I care enough to acquire an encyclopedic knowledge of the law. And I don’t have any interest in keeping up on any current legal issues. This is why I was not well suited to being a practicing lawyer. I can’t make myself do things the way most people can, even very important things that matter a lot to the client. Luckily, as an academic, I have the freedom to learn and teach whatever I want.
Still, I must keep up at least the appearance of competency, which is why, when I am engaged with the old guard of the legal community with my reputation at stake, I am very aware that I must choose my battles. Like the revolutionary army fighting the redcoats, I lure my enemy from their comfort zones and ambush them with my own strengths: reading people, seeing flaws or areas of possible exploitation in a system, and thinking outside of the box. I nod pleasantly at my colleagues until they make a mistake and then engage them on that. It is a little more guerilla warfare than they are used to. Some might say that it is not fighting fair, but I am keenly aware that there will never be a fair fight. Not for people who teach at the school I teach at and can’t manage to remember the names of all nine current Supreme Court justices.
Conferences are also minefields of emotional complexities for me. I dread the cocktail parties and sometimes invent a persona for the evening, allowing me to inhabit yet another role. One of my paramours remarked that this paradox was what drew him to me initially—he wanted to know which one of these personas was the real me. He claims that he could tell there was much more going on in my head than met the eye because although I seemed perfectly pleasant when engaged in conversation with acquaintances, I disengaged much too smoothly for it to have not been thoroughly premeditated—as if I spent the entire conversation with a smile on my face and the thought of escape plots in my head. Unless I am actively trying to convey a particular message or to seduce, I would rather not talk to people. There’s too much risk of my saying something incriminating and no corresponding benefit, so I will just stay silent.
I actually do prepare anecdotes for the purpose of engaging in small talk at social events that I am frequently required to attend, like my riddles. This has proven to be essential in seducing my colleagues and friends, getting through otherwise painfully awkward evenings, and even scoring career points. I have learned that it is important always to have a catalog of at least five personal stories of varying length in order to avoid the impulse to shoehorn unrelated tidbits into existing conversations. Social-event management feels very much like classroom or jury management to me; it’s all about allowing me to present myself to my own best advantage.
As I’ve learned to satisfy my sociopathic tendencies with more productive professional behavior, I’ve also reined in some of my youthful impulsiveness. I was reckless as a young attorney, but always with the sense that the downside would be outbalanced by the benefit. I would do stupid stuff like submit easily verifiable fake reimbursements for pittance sums. I got the law firm to pay for my tennis lessons one summer. I tried to seduce one of the lead partners who was in a very happy relationship with her longtime partner. I successfully seduced one of the more obscure partners, but he didn’t stay spellbound by my charms after I did subpar work for him. I got away with most of it, and no one ever called me out—until I was fired.
But now I have more to lose if things go wrong—more money, a more stable life, a career, a relatively constant set of close associates. All these figures get crunched in my head and make me aware of a million different risks, which added together are not negligible. And that awareness gives me the symptoms of what is probably best described as “anxiety,” even though I used to be completely oblivious to all of it (or didn’t care). Every time I have gotten this far in the past I have quit and started over. The older I get, though, the fewer do-overs I have left.
I may still seem reckless, particularly in circumstances in which people are irrationally afraid and I am relatively unfazed. I still like excitement in my life; I tend to seek out new and potentially dangerous experiences, like a recent bungee-jumping trip I went on with friends. But as I have aged, I have admittedly retreated into more of a life of the mind in which my excitement and thrills come more from mind games or intellectual pursuits where the reward-risk ratio is high. I play fewer games with my colleagues’ emotions, though I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to stop completely, or if it will even be necessary to.
In truth, a lot of lawyering was smoke and mirrors. I play the part that people expect. It’s not like there weren’t bad parts. There were really bad parts. I’m a little bit of a legal idiot, at least when it comes to certain topics. I have terrible fashion sense. My first impulse in a conversation is frequently a bad one. I’ve just learned to fake my way through errors, or outsource my fashion (and moral) decisions, or spin misstatements into clever, sarcastic jokes. Like an actress who is aware that she has a good side and a bad side, I was always careful to put on the right sort of show for the right sort of audience, for lovers and employers and friends. And for a while, I pulled off my performance to general acclaim.
Now, many years later, after this period of self-analysis, I have learned to be basically honest with myself, my family, and a few intimates. But for the sake of getting by—holding a job, having a life—I present a mask of normalcy to the world. It can be lonely. I become restless from pretending to be normal for too long and too hard. But going through the motions of being normal and stable does make them true, to some degree. What’s the difference between acting the part of a good lawyer and being one? What’s the difference between pretending to be a valuable colleague and being one? I’ve come to realize that the scam I was playing as a new lawyer has acquired the weight of reality—it is my life.
Chapter 7
EMOTIONS AND THE FINE ART OF RUINING PEOPLE
When we were children, my sister Kathleen and I read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I didn’t identify with Dorothy and her wish to return to her Kansas home. I wasn’t the heroine who saved her motley band of companions from the forces of evil. Instead, I saw myself in the Tin Woodman, who began life as Nick Chopper, an Ozian logger.
His troubles began when he fell deeply in love with one of the Munchkin girls. The girl’s guardian refused to part with her and made a pact with the Wicked Witch of the East, who bewitched Nick’s ax to harm him. When Nick wielded the ax against a tree, it slipped from his fingers and cut off his leg instead. The next day it cut off the other leg, then both arms, then his head, and then finally split his torso in two. Each time his ax betrayed him, Nick would go to the tinsmith to replace his lost flesh with a tin prosthetic. However, when Nick came for the last replacement, his split torso, the tinsmith forgot to include a prosthetic heart.
Tin Woodman was unperturbed. Without a heart, he no longer cared about whether he could marry his former love; without a heart, he no longer cared about much at all. It was as if the Wicked Witch had given him a gift with her cruel and painful curse. Tin Woodman’s new tin skin was more durable than his old soft flesh, and he shone with brilliance in the daylight. He delighted in the beauty and strength of his newly improved, albeit heartless, self. In chopp
ing up his flesh, she rid him of another and possibly more painful curse of wanting what he could not have, of holding on to the Munchkin girl as the answer to his happiness. I often wonder if, like the Tin Woodman, I was also given a kind of gift—a release from the things that seem to torture others. It is difficult to feel dissatisfaction when you rarely look to others for satisfaction. In some ways my deficits have freed me from wanting and not having that which seemed so essential to them—some purpose or identity in the world, some affirmation of the goodness and rightness of my existence.
The only disadvantage that Tin Woodman could see was that he was susceptible to rust, but he was always careful to bring an oil can with him should the weather happen to turn. But one day, the Tin Woodman was careless and got caught in a rainstorm without his oil can. His joints rusted shut and he could no longer move. He remained frozen for a year before Dorothy discovered him. It was only during that motionless year that he began to realize what he was missing: “It was a terrible thing to undergo, but during the year I stood there I had time to think that the greatest loss I had known was the loss of my heart.”