Confessions of a Sociopath (24 page)

I don’t mind some students’ skepticism in the face of my magnetism. They’re law students; we train them to be cynics. As with jurors in a trial, it takes a while to build up a rapport with them. I am aware of their distrust so at first I am very straightforward, efficient, and professional. I don’t want to seem presumptuous. Nor do I want to seem overly available, as if they are on my same level. I am confident and aloof. If someone is acting out of line, I will put them back into their place with a quick, dispassionate put-down. I will correct some slight misunderstanding of theirs or call on them for a particularly thorny question so the class can see them squirm. The class likes this. They don’t like gunners or the teachers who cater to them. Apart from that, there are no power struggles. I have nothing to prove. Their tuition dollars are paying me, and handsomely. They can try to fight me, but in that classroom I am God. I write the test. I give them the grade. If I say something is the law, it is the law. Even so, I show off just enough so that they feel lucky to have me and not someone far less engaging.

My students become interested in me as a person. They develop little crushes on me, which I feed with the selective disclosure of more and more personal information—that I am
a musician, that I have an interesting background in the law filled with high-profile clients whose names modesty prevents me from dropping. I am rarely explicit about anything. I make people work for these personal details about my life, drawing their own conclusions, which makes the information seem all the more authentic and valuable to them.

Now, if I had shown up on the first day of class touting my credentials, talking about my personal life, nurturing people’s crushes, it would have been disastrous. Every once in a while I forget and make a joke too early, show familiarity too soon, and have to immediately back off again with a renewed period of neutrality, but I’ve gotten better. Now it’s like cooking an old familiar recipe, which makes me worry I’ll get bored of it soon.

It seems to me that many people could benefit in their work from this kind of analysis of how to manage people by managing their expectations, how to endear people to you by being respectfully aloof. I don’t get wrapped up in the emotional conflagrations that can undermine a serene workplace, and it seems to me that a lot of leaders fail to deal wisely with problems. Once in church I attended an “air your grievances” meeting. Within minutes people were erupting in angry accusations. Although each person’s grievance wasn’t much on its own, the sheer number of them surprised everyone there. People became incensed that the church leaders remained heedless of all these pressing concerns. Everyone left riled up with grievances that they never knew they had before. I thought this was absolute idiocy. I couldn’t imagine a meeting being run more poorly.

When I have little insurrections in class or any other professional environment, I target the biggest complainers individually. I schedule a meeting or write them a quick e-mail saying things like, “I noticed that you seemed really frustrated
by X.” I let them talk for as long as they need, commiserating with them without necessarily committing to any particular position. I neither justify nor entrench myself in any particular position nor agree with their own position. As part of the commiserating, though, I focus on their feelings: “That must be so exhausting,” or, “I understand, the reading assignments are very demanding.” I try to use words that sound sympathetic but also make the problem sound either surmountable or like something that should be expected from a lawyer in training, or whatever their position or skill set is. I figure that most people just need to vent, but I am also trying to subtly shame them. I say things like, “Law is hard, that’s why you’ll get paid the big bucks,” implying that the student is being a crybaby and should toughen up.

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:

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 initial 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.