Sociopath quote: self-justification

"Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons."

Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic Magazine

Soft sociopathic traits

A lot emails that I receive from people describing their sociopathic traits strike me as being not quite placeable (nothing inconsistent with the diagnosis, but nothing really suggesting it either). This one seems to share a remarkable number of the "soft" sociopathic traits -- not quite in any textbook or diagnostic criterion, they are still traits that show up remarkably frequently in the sociopaths I have come to know. These soft traits include things like sexual fluidity, the particular instrumental way that charm is used, the obliviousness to certain things and hyper awareness at others.  From a reader:

As I’m sure since the subsequent publication of your book you receive these types of emails and attempts at correspondence daily, I will attempt to make this little stab at conversation short and sweet. Just a footnote here, I have no desire to exploit you and this is not an attempt to parallel our experiences. I suppose I am contacting you to relay some experiences of mine and perhaps receive some feedback.

My friend recently proposed the term, “sociopath” to me in passing conversation. I laughed off his name calling because I reasoned with myself: I grew up in a loving, stable environment, I have always had friends and significant others and I’ve always been keenly aware of my significance to them. I am not some brooding psychopath. I will admit here that I was unaware of the difference between “psycho” and “socio” and incorrectly found them mutually exclusive. However, the term “sociopath” sizzled in my brain for quite some time and I decided to delve into studying this alleged “disorder” and try to either self-diagnose or abandon the subject completely if it wasn't applicable to me. I reevaluated nearly every memory I can tap into and here’s just a sample of the conclusions I've come to:

By the age of 18, I had been arrested for assault, theft, and possession of criminal tools, vandalism, and a negligible complicity charge. At the various times of these altercations, I always was able to weasel my way out of the worst possible consequences. In my family’s eyes, I was a merely a victim of circumstance of hanging around the “wrong crowd” or being “scared, anxious” to be going away to college. At the time I think I believed those explanations myself. I have been in several altercations and what I refer to as “battles” with my family members often resulting in periods of estrangement with them.

Each one of my relationships throughout high school and my young adult life ended with a bang. The first ended in me cheating and spreading a rumor that my boyfriend had essentially taken advantage of me sexually. The second ended in cheating on my part as well and in a fiery battle with her parents that ended in a restraining order against me. The third was almost identical to the second. During these relationships, I would always befriend my significant other’s circle of friends and more often than not they all ended up liking me more than my girlfriend/boyfriend. I never felt particularly attached to my boyfriends or girlfriends, I always felt like, “well, I’m young, I don’t have to care about them or take these relationships seriously.” I have always identified as a bisexual. I like the differences between sexes and have never been able to adequately identify with one or the other. I am sexually fluid. This has always stirred confusion with those who have been in relationships with me and I've often heard they feel threatened by everyone around me, male or female.

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I was considered above average. I was and still am an avid reader and consider myself to be fluent in many musical instruments. I excelled in every activity I tried, guitar, drums, English, horseback riding, swimming, and softball. Music became somewhat of an obsession for me and I have become integrated in an underground community of musicians. I won several awards in academics and was able to attain a generous scholarship to a school I couldn’t otherwise afford. My family is exceedingly proud of me and I have always known I was the “favorite” to my various grandparents, aunts, and uncles.

I began waitressing at a small diner at the age of 16. I charmed my way into the hearts of many customers who still contact me after transferring to a different store several hours away. I consider myself to be the ideal employee, by befriending upper management and kissing a little ass I am mostly free to do as I please without consequence. However, I have managed to get approximately 5 people fired and dozens written up.  

You’re probably wondering why I failed to pick up on these things earlier or even realize how “abnormal” I am. The only explanation I can come up with is that maybe that’s just how the emotional and physical world naturally occurs in my mind. My “normal” is just maybe a variance on the society’s perceived notion of normalcy. I could go on forever but again, I am lazy. I realized rather quickly how much I assume the role of “sociopath” by textbook definition and although I have statistically come into contact with many sociopaths, you are the only one I have found to be formally diagnosed and have a way to contact.

The Dark Side of Emotional IQ?

Daniel Goleman popularized the term emotional intelligence in his book "Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More Than IQ". Apparently people are just now realizing that emotional intelligence is basically a prerequisite for effective manipulation and emotional deceit? Adam Grant writes for The Atlantic about "The Dark Side of Emotional Intelligence":

In some jobs, being in touch with emotions is essential. In others, it seems to be a detriment. And like any skill, being able to read people can be used for good or evil.

Since the 1995 publication of Daniel Goleman’s bestseller, emotional intelligence has been touted by leaders, policymakers, and educators as the solution to a wide range of social problems. If we can teach our children to manage emotions, the argument goes, we’ll have less bullying and more cooperation. If we can cultivate emotional intelligence among leaders and doctors, we’ll have more caring workplaces and more compassionate healthcare. As a result, emotional intelligence is now taught widely in secondary schools, business schools, and medical schools.

Emotional intelligence is important, but the unbridled enthusiasm has obscured a dark side. New evidence shows that when people hone their emotional skills, they become better at manipulating others. When you’re good at controlling your own emotions, you can disguise your true feelings. When you know what others are feeling, you can tug at their heartstrings and motivate them to act against their own best interests.

[…]

Shining a light on this dark side of emotional intelligence is one mission of a research team led by University College London professor Martin Kilduff. According to these experts, emotional intelligence helps people disguise one set of emotions while expressing another for personal gain. Emotionally intelligent people “intentionally shape their emotions to fabricate favorable impressions of themselves,” Professor Kilduff’s team writes. “The strategic disguise of one’s own emotions and the manipulation of others’ emotions for strategic ends are behaviors evident not only on Shakespeare’s stage but also in the offices and corridors where power and influence are traded.”

Dark side? Saying emotional intelligence has a dark side because it makes you better at influencing people to act and choose in ways that they might not otherwise have chosen is sort of like saying intelligence has a dark side because frequently people who make smart choices also happen to foreclose opportunities for other people. Not everything in life is a zero sum game, but often when there are winners there are also losers, e.g. most stock trades. And isn't the ability to persuade and even manipulate people one of the carrots for learning emotional intelligence in the first place? The same way that the ability to earn more and engage in more of life is an incentive to cultivate ones' other intelligences? Are we trying to defang nature?

Contradictions

An interesting reaction to the book is that it has contradictions. The most popular one is that I say that I was not the victim of abuse but then describe a less than idyllic childhood. Perhaps a close second is that I say that I have average looks yet consider my own breasts to be remarkably beautiful. Or maybe another is that I say I don't necessarily think anybody is better than anybody else, but I happen to be smarter than most people.

To me these things aren't contradictions. I never felt like the victim of abuse. Although I have sometimes played the role of victim (provoking my father, trying to get teachers fired or get better educational/job opportunities, etc.), perhaps due to my self-delusion/megalomania about being powerful and being someone who acts rather than be acted upon, or perhaps due to an inability to really feel bad about bad consequences that happen to me, I have never been able to actually identify with victimhood. I love my breasts, but I know that objectively I am average looking (I feel like men should understand this concept well, I feel like I have almost never known a man who wasn't infatuated with his genitalia). And I just happen to be smarter than most people -- that is exactly what it means to score in the 99th percentile on tests measuring intelligence (at least speaking of the type(s) of intelligence that these tests are meant to measure, and I acknowledge even in the book that there are a variety of different ways to be intelligent). Being smarter than most people is a fact about me the same way that my height and weight are facts. If I were exceptionally tall or fat, I would acknowledge those things about myself too without making any normative judgment that being tall makes me better or being fat makes me worse. I know people tend to think that smarter = better, but I have seen enough incompetent geniuses to not hold this opinion myself.

But I think people's negative reactions to seeming contradictions suggests something about people's discomfort with ambiguity. From Joss Whedon's recent graduation address to Wesleyan University:

[Our culture] is not long on contradiction or ambiguity. … It likes things to be simple, it likes things to be pigeonholed—good or bad, black or white, blue or red. And we’re not that. We’re more interesting than that. And the way that we go into the world understanding is to have these contradictions in ourselves and see them in other people and not judge them for it. To know that, in a world where debate has kind of fallen away and given way to shouting and bullying, that the best thing is not just the idea of honest debate, the best thing is losing the debate, because it means that you learn something and you changed your position. The only way really to understand your position and its worth is to understand the opposite.

That doesn’t mean the crazy guy on the radio who is spewing hate, it means the decent human truths of all the people who feel the need to listen to that guy. You are connected to those people. They’re connected to him. You can’t get away from it. This connection is part of contradiction. It is the tension I was talking about. This tension isn’t about two opposite points, it’s about the line in between them, and it’s being stretched by them. We need to acknowledge and honor that tension, and the connection that that tension is a part of. Our connection not just to the people we love, but to everybody, including people we can’t stand and wish weren’t around. The connection we have is part of what defines us on such a basic level.

I liked this a lot. Some of the most black and white thinkers use sources that are anything but, e.g. the ultra-religious using scriptural texts that portray a God of seeming contradictions (both kind and vengeful, both forgiving and damning) to justify making their own black and white assessments of certain things as being pure evil and others being unassailable good. A little like the junk science you see in sociopath research. The Joss Whedon quote also reminded me of one of my favorite twitter quotes:

"What is this "good" versus "evil" bullshit? There are no such animals in the real world. We do not live in a comic book for Christ's sake."
— M.E. (@sociopathworld) July 28, 2013

UPDATE: I think this article about being gay and Catholic is very interesting and relevant to any discussion of seeming contradictions and how there are many ways to live a life consistent with what you believe, despite what everyone else might think.

Book appendix (part 3)

From an interview with a friend:


I like talking to you because you are like a stockpile of knowledge with the capability to process important components of that knowledge and to assimilate them into an intelligent decision—the best decision.  Whereas I feel like I might fall on to decision that is fourth best, even though I have been exposed to the same data.  But I have forgotten that information in the meantime, and am unable to pull it forward when the time to make the decision arises.  And you even take into account my personal preferences.  I don’t know how, I guess because you know me now.  But something I find very humorous is that when I start explaining emotionally frustrating things to you, maybe about my marriage, and you’ll say “That’s because he __________” and I am always wondering why you have so much insight into my emotional life.  Insight that I didn’t have—like I am still hashing through the ideas emotionally and haven’t been able to reach any conclusion, but you have been able to reach a conclusion by just listening to me for a minute.  Sometimes I discount your conclusions, I will be honest.  At those times I generally conclude that you didn’t input the right information.  Other times I will be surprised at how spot on you are.  It seems like you know my husband better than I know him. I’m always surprised with your assessments of people, because you can kind of sum them up, taking this vast amount of data—a person—and you break it down into the important bits for that output.  You tell me, “well of course that is what happened because of these few things.”  

Also, you’re blatantly honest.  At first I was scared and there were moments in this house in which I was afraid that you would provoke fights in social situations. Then I started finding the humor in it.  Now sometimes I will use it to find out things I really want to know by just asking you, although I can still get angry at some of the things you say.  Overall, though, it is refreshing, and I have a much harder time getting offended at anything you say than I used to.  Even now telling you these things, it’s odd because I think now you will understand me so much better and when I come to you with another emotional problem you will say, “Oh, it’s because of this,” or “something something something” and I will feel ok.  

When I come to you with an emotional problem though, I don’t feel like you give empathy or emotional support.  Sometimes you will say, “that’s just because your husband's a retard, sorry.”  So maybe that is empathy.  Maybe it is refreshing to hear that it comes down to something that isn’t emotional—that my problems aren’t fundamentally an emotional issue, but something separate that can be intellectualized.  It takes out the sting in the hurt.  

I remember one time you were talking to me in the car and you said something like, “I don’t think I want to marry a guy who is as intelligent as me.”  And I asked you, “someone more like me.”  You said “no, not really.”  And I thought, oh ok, smarter than me then.  

I think you’re a better computer than I am.  If you had learned all of the stuff that I learned in college, I think you could do so much better with it than I can.  But that’s alright, I supposed I have other skills.  You’re like a data processor, but better because you can also process emotional inputs.  You can’t ask Google why my husband did something.  It’s like the best thing—kind of like a fun toy.

Attachment/connection

From a sociopath reader:

First of all let me start by saying I am a sociopath. I have been diagnosed but I kept it to myself because people will act differently if they know. There doesn't seem to be any benefits of being diagnosed with exception of the availability of so-called "help". Something which is useless.

I'm smart, very smart. I've been IQ tested by 4 different tests and I've averaged at 167. I breeze through my studies. Although this seems fun I find it rather frustrating. I enjoy puzzles. They interest me. When I say puzzles I don't mean Sunday crosswords and sudoku, I mean people puzzles. For example, if someone is upset then I find it fun to search for the reason why they are upset. Average puzzles are facile.

I want to know what your take on sociopathic connection and attachment to other people is.
I know this girl. We go to college together. She's not that smart but what draws me to her is that she is very similar to me. She's attractive and has a kind of free personality. For the past couple of years we have had what she describes as a "love-hate relationship". We've never dated but we have hooked up. We've fought a lot but I always win as I'm much more intelligent than her. 

I am very attached to her and I *feel* very close to her. I don't like her per se but I think there's a connection. As much as I like her ("like" denoting attachment), whenever we talk meaningfully I find that I never disclose real personal information such as my non-existent emotions.
She interests me.

She is different. She is the only person who I can't easily read. Everybody else is so easy to discern yet I find her puzzling nature very enlightening. While I spend my life searching for distractions, she serves as the best one. I am intrigued by her. 

I believe she has Histrionic Personality Disorder, based on 4 years of evidence to support this. Especially the attention-seeking and dramatic emotions. She is constantly changing which I think is intriguing. Usually I can discern people fairly well but with her it's different.

I feel very protective over her and if anyone (I'm an exception to this, hypocritically) hurts her then I will lose it. I rarely get angry and so I will calmly deal with it. 

I'm just wondering what you think of this. Maybe I should try to act more 'not-sociopathic' around her although she kind of likes that I'm different. She knows that something is up with me but she just doesn't realise what I am capable of or exactly what I am. I would never physically hurt her by the way.


My response:

I think people are the most interesting distraction too. It's like that short story, "The Most Dangerous Game." Would you be sad if she rejected you? Said she hated you? Told everyone your secrets or otherwise exposed you to the world? And if she would and could do those things, is that part of the reason why you find her engaging? I think your answers lie less in an examination of her character or even the nature of your relationship and more in exploring what exactly you get from her now and what you might hope to get from her in the future.

Self-medication

I've been thinking recently about things that have helped me without me intending or even realizing it. I'll give you an example of what I mean. I used to watch the television show House. He would always ask the person if there was anything about their life that changed. Sometimes the change was a healthier change, like stop drinking so much. But a frequent plot point of the show was that the patient had been unwittingly self-medicating an underlying condition, so when there was a lifestyle change (even to a seemingly more healthy habit), that triggered a flare up of the underlying condition.

There are a lot of things that, albeit indirectly, have helped me immensely in terms of maintaining decent mental health and behavior control:

• I'm a musician. I didn't choose to be a musician. Music did not initially appeal to me, nor did I have a natural talent for it. At one point I wanted to stop music studies to focus on other things that I was better at. My parents refused. I went through the motions for a couple more years until I finally achieved a level of fluency that allowed me to understand and later communicate musically, connecting with people in an unmediated way that I had never experienced in normal social interactions. I have since studied music seriously, which was probably the first hard thing I made myself do. I learned a lot then about my limitations and how to incentivize myself or trick myself into doing things I normally would not. I still play. The abstract logic of music is very good for my mental health and the social aspect of music makes me be nicer to people. Music, to me, is humanity's most redeeming feature and has made me interested in the stability of the human race because a destabilized society means no more music generation. 
• I have a low sugar diet. A lot of food makes me sick, so I mainly eat the same things over and over again, mostly protein and fiber. This also happens to be the most stable diet for mental health -- no sugar spikes, no twinkie-defense, no need.
• Being a woman. I've never really had my megalomaniac fantasies indulged that much because I'm a woman. Men do not consider women a viable threat and women often look down on other women. So even though I felt like I could do absolutely anything, I never had anyone echoing that sentiment, which has forced me to be a little more realistic than I otherwise may have been. Also experiencing hormal swings has taught me that I can feel things that aren't real (emotional hallucinations). And girls are sort of evil with each other, so I could get my kicks through emotional manipulation and not through other riskier behavior.
• Being Mormon. Yes, there is the moral code, but I think some of the more important things about growing up Mormon for me were the endless primary lessons trying to get us to understand our emotions, the emotions of other people (e.g. he hit me, which made me mad, so I hit him back, and now he's sad). and that we can control our emotions ("turn your frown upside down"). I got the sort of "this is a happy face, this other one is a frowny face" explicit emotional instruction that I feel is largely lacking in a lot of formal education nowadays, with our focus on mathematics and reading. And I had to learn to interact with all ages, races, and backgrounds of people.
• Writing in a journal. My religion encouraged it and my narcissism wanted to document the early life of a genius (actual entries in my childhood journal). The side benefit was that it forced me to contemplate who I was and to realize some of the consequences of my behavior.
• Being smart. There are an infinite number of ways this has affected my life, but for now let me just say that being perceived as being smart allowed me to get away with all sorts of things I otherwise would not have. Teachers gave me the benefit of the doubt, even when I was caught redhanded. I was given all of the social goodwill of a "good kid" simply because I scored so well on tests. 

There are other things that I feel lucky for -- a middle class upbringing with its de-emphasis on material goods, self-interested neglectful parents who largely left me alone, a superficial but straightforward culture which largely prized surface attributes and accomplishments that made it easy for me to mimic, and being a middle child who benefited from watching the failures of older siblings and was in a prime position to be a powerbroker, both between siblings and between parents and children.  

So when people ask me things like how do I maintain my life like I do, I don't know. The answer is complicated. I don't really expect people to learn a musical instrument or convert to Mormonism. But I don't know what else to say besides, it couldn't hurt?

Truly smart?

A reader who identifies as sociopath sent me this passage from a teenage journal:

What makes someone smart, truly smart, in my opinion is someone who is self-aware. Someone who recognizes their place in the world and who recognizes the place of others. They see things as they are. A smart person realizes they're smart but can fool the rest of the world into believing that they are just like them. By doing so, they can feed off and learn from these people. They do not need to harm them but merely take in as much as they can in order to survive in the best, most logical, and beneficial way. I guess it's like using resources, but a different kind of resources, not tangible ones that anybody can see or use, and they are able to do so without a soul figuring out what they are doing. That is being smart.

Famous sociopaths: Louise Nevelson

American sculptress Louise Nevelson (1899-1988): "I knew I was going to become somebody very special. No . . . that I was somebody very special." The article notes that the actress who was playing Nevelson was able to "suggest Nevelson's chilliness as much as her charm, her dead heart as well as the life of her mind."

Taming artificial intelligence

This was an interesting article by David Deutsch in Aeon Magazine about artificial general intelligence (AGI). There were a lot of things he touched upon that would seem relevant to this audience, like how little we know about how our brains work, the nature of self-awareness, our sense of self and sense of purpose and the origins of both, etc. One of the most interesting parts, though, was when he addresses some of the "scary" things about creating a machine with artificial general intelligence, particularly regarding some peoples' concerns about the AGI being more powerful than we are and how it would choose to use that power. He addressed it in a very open-minded and enlightened way:


Some people are wondering whether we should welcome our new robot overlords. Some hope to learn how we can rig their programming to make them constitutionally unable to harm humans (as in Isaac Asimov’s ‘laws of robotics’), or to prevent them from acquiring the theory that the universe should be converted into paper clips (as imagined by Nick Bostrom). None of these are the real problem. It has always been the case that a single exceptionally creative person can be thousands of times as productive — economically, intellectually or whatever — as most people; and that such a person could do enormous harm were he to turn his powers to evil instead of good.

These phenomena have nothing to do with AGIs. The battle between good and evil ideas is as old as our species and will continue regardless of the hardware on which it is running. The issue is: we want the intelligences with (morally) good ideas always to defeat the evil intelligences, biological and artificial; but we are fallible, and our own conception of ‘good’ needs continual improvement. How should society be organised so as to promote that improvement? ‘Enslave all intelligence’ would be a catastrophically wrong answer, and ‘enslave all intelligence that doesn’t look like us’ would not be much better.

The parallel is not exact between AGIs and sociopaths, and of course his solution is a non-solution. He doesn't even manage to really define what he means by evil, except with a quick parenthetical allusion to morality. Maybe the machines would have a more workable form of "morality"? But it's an interesting question: Is there anything so special about our morality that we would try to indoctrinate AGIs to it? Is there enough logic to human morality that they would accept it? If so, then we don't really need to use the word "morality," do we? We could just appeal to their logic. Same with sociopaths. If morality is really such a universal "good" (pardon all of the quotes), then can't we also appeal to a sociopath's logic? Or sense of self preservation? Or even the sociopaths self-interest regarding living in a relatively stable society in which most people are engaged in societal profitable endeavours that also benefit the sociopath in indirect ways? Civilization is vulnerable, but in a lot of ways it is robust. I behave in a civilized way because it works, it reaps rewards. (Not that AGIs would necessarily experience those side-effects as "rewards," which is I guess why people are so concerned.)

By the way, I have a friend who is an exceptionally creative person who is capable of being a thousand times more productive as most people. And that is a scary thought to me, that she had so much power, so I can empathize with people who fear sociopaths.

Famous sociopaths: Gesualdo

Having studied music, I was a little familiar with the madrigals of the late renaissance composer Don Carlo Gesualdo, but somehow missed his backstory as a psychopathic murderer until I stumbled upon this New Yorker article, which unfortunately is not available in its full text.  Here are selections from the abstract:

On the night of October 16, 1590, a palace apartment near Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, in Naples, was the scene of a double murder so extravagantly vicious that people are still sifting through the evidence, more than four centuries later. The most reliable account of the crime comes from a delegation of Neapolitan officials, who inspected the apartment the following day. On the floor of the bedroom, they found the body of Don Fabrizio Carafa, the Duke of Andria, whom a contemporary described as a “model of beauty,” one of the handsomest young men of his time. The officials’ report stated that the Duke was wearing only “a woman’s nightdress with fringes at the bottom, with ruffs of black silk.” The corpse was “covered with blood and pierced with many wounds,” 

Lying on the bed was the body of Donna Maria d’Avalos, the famously alluring wife of Don Carlo Gesualdo, the Prince of Venosa. Her throat had been cut and her nightshirt was drenched in blood. Interviews with eyewitnesses left no doubt about who was responsible for the murders. Gesualdo had been seen entering the apartment with three men, shouting, “Kill that scoundrel, along with this harlot!” The report ended with the observation that Gesualdo had left town. 

A prince being a prince, there matters rested. Yet Gesualdo paid a posthumous price for the killings. In the decades after his death, he became a semi-mythical, even vampiric figure, about whom ever more lurid tales were told. 

Gesualdo also wrote music, publishing six books of madrigals and three books of sacred pieces. He turned out to be one of the most complexly imaginative composers of the late Renaissance, indeed of all musical history. The works of his mature period—he died in 1613, at the age of forty-seven—bend the rules of harmony to a degree that remained unmatched until the advent of Wagner. There have been no fewer than eleven operatic works on the subject of Gesualdo’s life, not to mention a fantastical 1995 pseudo-documentary, by Werner Herzog, called “Death for Five Voices.” 

The origins of “Gesualdo fever” are not hard to discern. The lingering question is whether it is the life or the work that perpetuates the phenomenon. If Gesualdo had not committed such shocking acts, we might not pay such close attention to his music. But if he had not written such shocking music we would not care so much about his deeds.

Although, as the article notes, some scholars "reject[] the picture of Gesualdo as a 'violent psychopath'," he certainly has plenty to recommend him as one.  I know that these sorts of guesses about whether or not a historical figure was a sociopath are as ridiculous as the aspie's claiming that half the famous scientists from history had Asperger's.  But, I find Gesualdo to be a particularly fun historical candidate for sociopathy not just because of how well it explains his violence and flouting moral conventions, but also how well it explains the experimental aspects of his music, which have managed to sound utterly modern and cutting age in every time period.   The article continues from the above quoted selections in the abstract:

Many bloodier crimes have been forgotten; it's the nexus of high art and foul play that catches our fancy.  As with Gesualdo's contemporary Caravaggio, who killed a man by stabbing him near the groin, we wonder whether the violence of the art and the violence of the man emanated from the same demoniac source.  

Emotion + Apathy = ?

Sociopaths do a lot of heartless everything.  What would you call one who can't tolerate wrong doing, to the point where they get very upset?  A reader writes:

I'd like to hear your opinion and the opinion of your readers on something I've been realizing lately. It seems to me that I am a very unique person, and anomaly. I seem to be a borderline sociopath, capable of feeling at both ends of the emotional spectrum. I've always been extremely intelligent, viewing the world in countless ways and expressing opinions that often earn contempt from my peers, simply because they are too narrow minded to understand my views. As such, have had trouble connecting to people around me, with most of my friends being simply people who pass the time. I've always thought that people were insufferable, cruel idiots, and yet, I am genuinely charismatic and enjoy the company of people. (The ones I can tolerate, anyway) I've only ever met one person who I thought of as my equal, and she was just as intelligent as me, which I found strange, as I thought that anyone with my level of intelligence would naturally be a logical sociopath, but she wasn't even close to one. 

When I am around people I care about, I am one of the nicest people in the world, and will go out of my way to help them, so long as my own needs are met first. However, when I'm around people I hate, or I here about criminals in the news, I am filled with a burning rage, and often fantasize about torturing and killing these people. If I ever had to kill someone for the right reason, I don't think I'd hesitate or feel even a shred of remorse. I have very strong morals, but I'm also flexible with some opportunistic actions, and I don't believe that any action is inherently evil. Rather, it is the circumstances and intent behind the action that are relevant. 

I believe that sociopathy is human nature, as all children act like sociopaths before they are taught to care for others, and while my mother made attempts to teach me empathy, my logic took over and made me ask "Why care for those who don't show me the same respect?" I don't go out of my way to manipulate people, but when I find it necessary, it is usually fun. I have my own very strong personality and I don't act with different ones as most sociopaths do, but I have a great understanding of the human mind and how to manipulate it. It just seems that, while the main focus seems to be total, emotionless sociopaths, I have an almost perfect balance of emotion and apathy, and I was wondering if anyone has ever encountered something like this before? And what do you think?

M.E.: This is interesting. I think a lot of people who are very smart naturally gravitate towards a more open minded, amoral, even pseudo sociopathic mindset. There are exceptions of course, like your intelligent friend. I think the thing that makes me least think you are a sociopath is that you want to kill criminals that you hear about on television. Why would you have such a strong reaction, if not moral outrage?

Reader:

I agree. If I were truly a sociopath, I wouldn't have such a strong reaction to crimes and immoral actions. It seems to me, then, that borderline sociopathy is a natural by-product of intelligence. In a situation like mine, it seems like it would be incorrect to even label it as a mental abonormality; rather, it is just another worldview that the common, narrow-minded empath would label and 'wrong,' as uneducated societies have always done to those who are different.