Confessions of a Sociopath (2 page)

You would like me if you met me. I am quite confident about that because I have met a statistically significant sample size of the population and they were all susceptible to my charms. I have the kind of smile that is common among television show characters and rare in real life, perfect in its sparkly-teeth dimensions and ability to express pleasant invitation. I’m the sort of date you would love to bring to your ex’s wedding. Fun, exciting, the perfect office escort—your boss’s wife has never met anyone quite so charming. And I’m just the right amount of smart and successful so that your parents would be thrilled if you brought me home.

Do you have an inflated view of yourself? I certainly seem to, don’t I? Sociopaths are known for having egos so full-bodied they could be considered Rubenesque. I exude confidence, much more than my looks or social stature would warrant. I am not very tall but present solidly with broad, strong shoulders and an angular jaw. My friends often remark on my toughness and swagger. But I am just as comfortable in summer dresses as I am in cowboy boots.

Perhaps the most noticeable aspect of my confidence is
the way I sustain eye contact. Some people have called it a “predator stare,” and it appears that most sociopaths have it. Sustained eye contact can seem hostile, and so zoo visitors are frequently advised not to stare at gorillas, lest it be taken as a sign of aggression. Most humans seem to think so, too; otherwise, staring contests wouldn’t present much of a challenge. Sociopaths are different. We are unfazed by uninterrupted eye contact. Our failure to look away politely is often perceived as being confident, aggressive, seductive, or predatory. It can throw people off balance, but often in an exciting way that imitates the unsettling feeling of infatuation.

Ever find yourself using that charm and confidence to get people to do things for you that they otherwise wouldn’t? Some might call it manipulation, but I like to consider it simply using what God gave me. And the word
manipulation
is so ugly. It’s what people say to disavow their own choices. If they end up never regretting their decision, does that mean that no one has manipulated them?

Manipulation is where the traits of a sociopath take a distinct turn for the nefarious in a lot of people’s minds, but I don’t see why. It is just fulfilling an exchange. People want a particular thing—to please you, to feel wanted or needed, to be seen as a good person—and manipulation is just a quick and dirty way to get both people something they want. You might call it seduction. One of my sociopathic friends gave this example. One guy wants to sell a car for $5,000, the second wants to buy it for $10,000. I am aware of the two but neither is aware of the other. I buy the car for $5,000, sell it to the second guy for $10,000, and I make $5,000. It’s called arbitrage and happens on Wall Street (and a lot of other places) every day. We all get what we want, and we’re all happy, as long as the two never connect the dots and never learn more than they
need to. I facilitate their ignorance for the benefit of all, especially myself.

Indeed, I believe that most people who interact with sociopaths are better off than they otherwise would be. Sociopaths are part of the grease making the world go round. We fulfill fantasies, or at least the appearance of fantasies. In fact, we are sometimes the only ones attentive to providing for your deepest wants and needs, the only ones so deeply attuned to them for no ulterior motive immediately discernible by you. We observe our target and strive to become a facsimile of whatever or whoever that person wants—a good employee or boss or lover. It’s not always the case that the facsimile is malicious or ill intentioned. And it makes the target feel good for the course of the transaction and usually ends without harm. Of course everything comes at a price—we wouldn’t be doing it if we weren’t getting something from you, often money or power or simply even the enjoyment of your admiration and desire, but this certainly does not mean that you get nothing out of it. Maybe some might think the price is too high. But the truth is that if you’ve made a deal with the devil, it’s probably because no one else has offered you more favorable terms.

What about morality? Do you approach questions of morality with ambivalence, finding it easy to justify your own or others’ behavior with a reference to “survival of the fittest”? 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. 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. Like many people, I adhere to a religion that gives me moral guidance. 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. Once I helped two elderly Holocaust survivors fill out forms for restitution funds from the German government. They were a couple: a lovely blond woman in her late seventies or early eighties who obviously spent money on her clothes and her face, and an even older man with a shock of white hair on top of his head and the sense of entitlement that you often see in Los Angeles among aging Hollywood stars. His papers seemed to be more or less in order. At one point he even belligerently rolled up his sleeve to reveal a numeric tattoo that matched his paperwork. The woman’s papers were more confusing. She had dates from a previous restitution claim, but they didn’t really make sense when compared with the story she told me. According to her paperwork she was in and out of camps, which seemed unusually inefficient for the Germans. I didn’t really know what to put down on the form, so I stood and told her I would ask for help from the organizers sponsoring the event. She panicked, grabbed my arm, and sat me back down. What followed was a bit difficult to understand, given her old age, likely senility, and bad English. Pointing to one of the forms, she said, “This isn’t me.”

A story of fraud and survival rolled out before me, if not from her actual words then from my own tendency to infer deceit. With her blond hair and blue eyes, no one had suspected her of being Jewish. She was able to “pass” for the duration
of the war as a seamstress and then stole the documents that corroborated her story of time spent in camps from another young woman, who had died shortly after liberation. I think that was the gist, anyway; I made it a point not to ask any questions. I wonder if her husband even knew who she really was. I wonder if it was all a figment of her imagination, or mine.

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?”

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.”