Due to misconceptions, I had never considered the possibility that I might be one. I always joked about how I aspire to be a sociopath though, mostly due to the glorified portrayal painted by mainstream media— inhumanly rational, meticulously calculating, incredibly charming and extremely intelligent. Although for the record, self-proclaimed "high-functioning sociopath" Sherlock is really NOT one by clinical definitions. Do a quick Google search and you will find plenty of articles on this, and how the term "sociopath" has been inaccurately applied.
After reading "Confessions of a Sociopath: A life spent hiding in plain sight" by M.E.Thomas, autobiography of a successful female diagnosed with ASPD, my life suddenly made perfect sense to me. I suddenly understood why I did the things I did and feel the way I feel. Reading about her actions and inner thoughts which closely resemble my own was like having my brain dissected and explained. Of course not all sociopaths are the same, but recognizing myself in 80-90% descriptions in the book was eerie, albeit enlightening and liberating.
I'm still not quite willing to put the label on myself. I know I have most of the traits, but I am not sure if I would pass the clinical threshold to qualify as one. After all, the earliest studies on ASPD was based on criminal behaviors and carried out by biased psychologists inclined to believe that people who lack of moral compass and empathy possess a threat to the society. Just the act of classifying a bunch of traits to be indications of an "disorder" itself says enough how "sociopathy" is considered disruptive and in need of interventions/treatments, when in fact human psychology is far more complicated than what is understood by the current medical field. Intelligent sociopaths know how to avoid detection and most likely would go through their lives never getting diagnosed.
I completely agree with this comment from a reader of the book author's blog about the value of professional psychological diagnoses:
As you have diagnosed yourself as such, I am not too worried however much your attempts at diagnoses, you should have already figured out diagnoses are there for the pathetic people who cant understand what these things are. So they make up these diagnoses and things that should be corrected, but if you think about it there is a DSM but no manual for whats normal no manual to counter it. Normalcy is what is socially acceptable and what is "right" to these people. However there is no real right and no real wrong, the only right there is is what us as an individual decide is best for ourselves. There may be sociopaths in psychology, but in reality its just another type of person. There is no real disorder, its a way of being.
What matters to me more is that I know I am different. I've always been, and I've always known, but I never had the answers I sought, until now. If "sociopath" is the term that can give you a mental image closest to what I am, then a sociopath I am.
I don't mind going into details about how my brain processes things and make a long list of all the sociopathic behaviors I've exhibited since I was little, but there's no incentive for me to do so right this moment. I will just insert some paragraphs from her book and her blog, which rings so true as if I could've written them myself. I've patched different sections of the book in a sequence that I think will be most comprehensive.
In my experience, sociopathy exists on a spectrum of severity, from the death row inmate to the ruthless venture capitalist to the calculating cheerleader mom. 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. 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.
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. I am not outraged by inequity. 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. 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. 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.
I realized early on that other people did not treat their lives as if it were a complicated game in which all events, things, and people could be measured with mathematical precision toward achieving their own personal satisfaction and pleasure. Somewhat more recently, I also noticed that other people felt guilt, a special kind of regret that did not arise from negative consequences but from some amorphous moral dictate that had taken root in them from consciousness. They felt bad in a way that I never felt when they hurt others, as if the hurt they had caused was so cosmically connected to the goodness of the universe as to reverberate back to them. These things I had pretended to feel for many years, had attempted assiduously to mimic the manifestations of, but had never actually felt in my life.
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. 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.
People sometimes say that we lack remorse or guilt like it’s a bad thing. They are sure that remorse and guilt are necessary to being a “good” person. But there is probably no universal, and certainly no objective, morality. Despite millennia of arguments among theologians and philosophers, no one can really agree on the contours and parameters of morality. Sociopaths actually know what society considers right and wrong most of the time, they just don’t feel an emotional compulsion to conform their behavior to societal standards. From where I stand, it’s hard to put such faith in something so wildly elastic and changeable, something associated with horrors as diverse as honor killings, “just” wars, and capital punishment. The practice of it is just good sense—it keeps you out of prison and safely hidden in the crowd. But the heart of morality is something I have never understood. My view of morality is instrumental. I abide by conventional dictates when it suits me, and otherwise, I follow my own course with little need for justification.
Scientific research has been conducted to show that sociopaths are particularly non-responsive to negative consequences, and I have found this to be true in my own life. The threat of punishment at home or school only served as a challenge to figure out how to circumvent the consequences when I did what I wanted to do anyway. I didn’t fear the punishment, I just saw it as an inconvenience to work around.
I have trouble navigating my own emotions. It’s not that I don’t feel them. I feel a lot of different emotions, but some of them I don’t recognize or understand. Often it feels like my emotions are without context. It is like I am reading a book one page at a time, but starting with the last page and moving backward. There are clues to help me understand, but there is no linear logic that allows me to infer simple cause-and-effect relationships between the vague discomfort I feel and the recognition that “I am sad because of X.”
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. Once impulse takes control there is no grasp of reality or balance until it’s over and you’re looking down at what you’ve done wondering what the next move is to get away with it. Whereas most people experience impulsivity as hot-headedness, I become coldhearted. When not acting impulsively, almost everything I do is done with purpose.
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. I found my peers, particularly my non-siblings, to be unbearably simpleminded. Unlike them, I was obsessed with learning everything there was to learn about how the world worked, on both micro and macro levels.
Sociopaths typically don’t make small talk about themselves as much as normal people do. They will direct the conversation back to the new acquaintance as much as they can. When I talk to people, the only thing I really care about is getting what I want. This is true of everybody, but I never am trying to get someone’s approval or admiration, unless it is a means to the end. I have no desire to talk. Instead, what I find most useful is collecting a mental dossier about everyone I know. Knowledge is power and if I know even something like where your grandmother is buried, I might be able to use that in the future. Consequently, it typically only makes sense for me to listen. If I’m not listening, I’m probably telling a joke or shamelessly flattering you. I probably would rather not be talking to you at all, but since I am, I might as well be polishing my charm.
I can seem amazingly prescient and insightful, to the point that people proclaim that no one else has ever understood them as well as I do. But the truth is far more complex and hinges on the meaning of understanding. In a way, I don’t understand them at all. I can only make predictions based on the past behavior that they’ve exhibited to me, the same way computers determine whether you’re a bad credit risk based on millions of data points. I am the ultimate empiricist, and not by choice.
I often wish I could just passively watch people without being expected to participate myself, like television. I actually do spend a lot of time in front of the television for this reason, and I am pretty undiscriminating in what I will watch. I like the closed universes and conventional plot devices of television series, knowing that there is nothing for me to do but to passively watch what happens, having no stake in the outcome. I find it easier to identify with characters in movies and books than with people in real life. In movies, you can watch and analyze people freely and without detection. In books, you can listen in on their inner thoughts, take the time to contemplate them, and listen in again if you are so compelled. I have learned more about people from books, television, and movies than I ever have in real life. I have enjoyed people more that way, too.
Are you a sociopath if it is coded in your genes but it’s not expressed in your behavior? Sometimes there is no clear answer to how or why a person’s sociopath genes get triggered. As for myself, I have always felt like I am precariously balanced, neither on the right side nor the wrong side of life but ready at every moment to tip completely to one side or another. I often wonder how different my life would have been if my upbringing were any better or worse than it was.
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.
Most psychologists think that sociopaths cannot love, but that theory seems silly to me. Just because it is a different kind of love, more calculating and self-aware, doesn’t negate its existence. This misconception springs from some illusion that the capacity to love is a form of goodness—that one’s love constitutes an unadulterated gift that arises out of selflessness rather than selfishness. But I do not believe this is true. Love may be blind for empaths, but a sociopath sees your faults clearly and loves you still. The sociopath's piercing eyes are not only unsettling because of their unwavering constancy, but because the sociopath's eyes can pierce through to your very soul, leaving you naked before his gaze. The sociopath's ignorance or disinterest in social norms means that we will not see you as the world sees you but how you truly are. Our understanding of your wants and needs matched with our charm and flexible personality mean that we can and will literally become the man or woman of your dreams. In fact, when I love, my first step is to gather as much information as possible about every aspect of the person's life in order to more closely resemble their ideal mate. I will never put you above myself, but I will readily put you above all others.
There you go. I might share stories of my own in the future, but for now, I am more interested in finding out more about myself and understanding how my brain works, rather than showing you proofs to convince you of my sociopathy. I will be sharing more quotes as I go through her blog posts, and perhaps add some anecdotes that I deem worthy.
May 2018 be a year of astonishing self-discovery. Happy new year, folks.