Famous sociopaths: Benjamin Franklin?

So suggests a reader:

Of course, I read the book, and though I was, myself, a mental health professional, learned a great deal about sociopathy. In my day, before the functional MRI, there was no certainty that it was the functional structure of the brain that determined the behavior. Nor, that despite the 3-4% incidence in the general population, that many, if not most, are socialized, like "M. E." or Jimmy Fallon, and very likely, Benjamin Franklin, for that matter.

Not all sociopaths do evil things. I stated that Franklin might well be one, based on his risk-taking behavior, his disrupted familial relationships, his legendary charm, his promiscuity, and his need to go from one activity to another.

The risky behavior: the man signed the Declaration of Independence, an invitation to hanging. Also, he nearly electrocuted himself during the kite experiment. I'm sure that there were others examples that escape me for the moment.

• Disrupted family: Franklin had a hostile relationship with his son throughout their lives. He was also a very poor husband, and for all practical purposes, he acted as if he were a single man.
• The charm: Thank the lord for this and his genius. He got Louis XV to bankrupt France to support us against Britain during the Revolutionary War. It was the French fleet that bottled up Cornwallis at Yorktown, after all. AND: that bankruptsy was a proximal cause of the French Revolution that transpired just a few short years later.
• The hyperactivity: Again, thank the lord, and his genius, for his myriad inventions. Off the top of my head: a musical instrument that he called the Harmonium, the Franklin stove, bifocal lenses, the harnessing of electricity, etc.
• The promiscuity: His love life is one of legend, continuing well into his old age!

The error is to think that all sociopaths are alike. Sociopaths differ from one another based on the presence or absence of other pathologies such as paranoia (Stalin) or Schizophrenia (Hitler) or combinations thereof. Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg are certainly sociopaths, yet their risky behavior was channeled into developments that have revolutionized our lives! Perhaps, we have advanced to where we are today because of  constructive sociopaths like these! Not every sociopath is a Jeffrey Dahmer or a Pol Pot!

I'm not entirely surprised at the suggestion that Benjamin Franklin could have been a sociopath, especially since studies have shown that entrepreneurs have several sociopathic traits ("The Dark Side of Entrepreneurship").

Sociopath as entrepreneur

One of my mentors just asked me, "What made you who you are." It was meant to be complimentary. The implication was that I am better than a lot of my peers. Particularly my mentor is impressed with how I seem to understand many more aspects of the dilemmas we are working with than some of my colleagues.

I guess you could call it an ability to think abstractly, or an increased awareness of the mechanics--a more intimate knowledge of the behind the scenes action that is motivating so much of what we look at. It allows me to Bayesian update like mad, like an excel spreadsheet with hundreds of inter-working, interdependent formula, but capable of adjusting in an instant based on new information.

My mentor actually calls it "alien." Again, he means it to be complimentary. He subscribes to the theory that great thinkers and entrepreneurs tend to be "aliens," people who are not really part of their culture. Aliens live parallel lives with different mindsets than the majority. They're readily able to think critically about the world around them because it already seems foreign to them. There's no effort in trying to maintain distance or perspective regarding the problem. The distance has always been there. The distance will always be there because that is the way the alien interacts with everything in the world.

My mentor thinks I must be an alien because my smart ideas are not just smart, they're groundbreaking. Even the way I explain my ideas to others is alien. It's like I am trying to translate my ideas into a language that others will be able to understand. The effort I am making to communicate is apparent, like figuring out how to instruct someone to hike from point A to point B when I had just teleported there instantly. My mentor thinks that you simply cannot teach people to think this way. You can open their mind and teach them some tricks, but they will never think fluently this way the same way that an "alien" would. I laughed off his comments, saying that I have plenty of stupid ideas too. "Well I do too," he responded, "we all do. That's part and parcel of risky thinking."

Here's an example of "alien" entrepreneurship, Tony Hseih, head of Zappos. From the NY Times:

At times, Mr. Hsieh comes across as an alien who has studied human beings in order to live among them. That can intimidate those who are not accustomed to his watchful style. “I have been in job interviews with him where you are expecting more, and it can be awkward silences,” said Ned Farra, who manages relationships with other Web sites for Zappos. “He is not afraid of it. It is almost like he is testing you.”

Mr. Hsieh said that he surrounds himself with people who are more outgoing than he is, in part to draw himself out. “My view is that I am more of a mirror of who I am around,” he said. “So if I am around an introverted person that is really awkward. But if I am around an extroverted person I will be whoever they are times point-5.”

***

Outwitting the system is something Mr. Hsieh has honed from a young age. In addition to describing his youthful business ventures (worm farms failed, personalized photo buttons succeeded), “Delivering Happiness” recounts a history of scam artistry. To fool his Taiwanese-born parents into thinking he was practicing piano and violin, he recorded practice sessions and played them back on weekend mornings.

***

Jason Levesque, another Harvard friend who worked at LinkExchange, recalled Mr. Hsieh’s self-effacement. When inviting friends to play a video game, “he was obviously the best at the game, but he would sort of hide that in order to get everyone to play,” Mr. Levesque said.

Like Mr. Zuckerberg’s, Mr. Hsieh’s success has been built in part on his ability to anatomize the way people crave connections with others, and turn those insights into a business plan.

***

Mr. Hsieh, who professes fascination with dating guides like Neil Strauss’s “The Game” and pontificated on his theory of the evolutionary futility of sexual jealousy, said he does not date. “I don’t usually define dating or not dating, together or not together,” said Mr. Hsieh, nursing another tall shaker of wine at the Downtown Cocktail Room. “I prefer to use the term ‘hang out.’ And I hang out with a lot of people, guys and girls. I don’t really have this one person I am dating right now. I am hanging out with multiple people, and some people I hang out with more than others.”

***

“I think of everyone I know in my life, he’s the best at not feeling jealousy,” she added. “But I think he’s human, whether anyone believes that or not.”

This is not the first time I have been called an alien. It is not even the first time that I have been called that with a positive or value neutral connotation. I never know what to say in these situations. I agree with them, obviously, but in terms of explaining to them why I might have grown up with the mentality of an "alien" in a foreign world...? "It's a mystery," I tell them. But it's not. It hasn't been a mystery since I became self-aware, or maybe since I learned of the term "sociopath".