Famous sociopaths? Gabriele d'Annunzio

From a reader:

Sociopath song?:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ge53QaDpKQ

Historical sociopath?:

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-sex-obsessed-poet-who-invented-fascism

From the link, headlined under "THE SEX-OBSESSED POET WHO INVENTED FASCISM":

D'Annunzio was a thrill-seeking megalomaniac best described as a cross between the Marquis de Sade, Aaron Burr, Ayn Rand, and Madonna. He was wildly popular. And he wasn't like anyone who came before him.

“You must create your life, as you'd create a work of art. It's necessary that the life of an intellectual be artwork with him as the subject. True superiority is all here. At all costs, you must preserve liberty, to the point of intoxication," d’Annunzio writes in Il Piacere, an ambiguously autobiographical novel published in 1889. "The rule for an intellectual is this: own, don't be owned.”

Sociopath like me

I recently got my waterproof iPod replaced under the warranty. They must have given me one that had been returned, because it had all of this music from the band Skillet and its ilk, which I have not really listened to before. Rather than change the music to my own, I've been listening to this music, trying to imagine what life must have been like for this guy (I assume male, statistically), who happened to have gotten this iPod, perhaps for Christmas, then decided he'd rather have something else instead. When I swim laps to his music selected largely by tempo rather than artistry, I feel like a meathead, and it's a nice change of pace.

This happened to me once years ago when I had bought a used ipod from a friend of a friend (a Brooklyn hipster before anyone knew what that was). I would wander the streets of my city listening to Sufjan Stevens, Xiu Xiu, and Neko Case. It was so fascinating to me to make that the soundtrack of my life for those months. For one, my music taste was for once very of the moment. For two, it happens to be very easy to to get concert tickets for up and coming acts before they've made it national, which was fun to see these artists in very intimate settings. But I also just felt like I was peeking into the head of this particular guy. The songs he chose to exclude from albums told me as much about him as the ones chose to include. (Also, the experience made me wonder, does absolutely everyone have a Michael Jackson song tucked away on a laptop or MP3 player somewhere?_

You learn a lot from people by stepping into their shoes for a little bit. I know there is a mix of people who read this blog: some who identify as sociopaths, some with other diagnoses, some who love/hate a sociopath, and some who are just curious. This invitation is probably most directed to the curious.

People have often opined to me that sociopaths are hated because the particular individual does bad things, not because the diagnosis itself maligned and misunderstood. In my own personal experience, this doesn't ring true -- there seems to be quiet a bit of pejorative force to the label/diagnosis. (I had a long holiday conversation with a cousin whom I hadn't seen in a couple years. He told me how he spent a long weekend worrying about how I might try to kill him or his children, finally deciding that it was not too likely.)

So here's the invitation: pretend to be a sociopath. Do like the guy in Black Like Me. Act otherwise completely like yourself but with this additional label. I'm curious to see what people think about what it feels like to have people see you through the lens of that label.

And as a parting gift, this classic from Bobby Caldwell who was advised to disguise his whiteness.

Sociopath quote of the day: principles

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

-- Oscar Wilde

Interview with a seducee (part 4)

(continued from here)

I didn't think too much about it when I got home. I remember thinking just one or two times thinking about the whole night in general and remember afterward telling people that I hadn't been talking to you anymore, but it was specifically, it was really when we were going to get those cables. You had driven and we were in the parking garage area and we had to get into an elevator to get into the store, which I found odd. All of the sudden there was a lightness and a comfort between us, and maybe it was a newfound comfort in someone that you've kissed or shared enough conversation or time in one day that we're able to coexist in the same store or the same location with a lightness as opposed to all of the awkwardness of times past, that was very refreshing and exciting.

We were talking about this person you were dating long distance and also this other person who you told me about with whom you felt there was something going on there, something less than a relationship so far but that person was going to go to see you play and was either more interested in you than you wanted, but essentially you were sharing with me the parameters of having to balance three people at the same time and that that was a little bit more, perhaps, than you had anticipated at the time. I remember distinctly feeling at the time that I was no better or worse than them and certainly wasn't competitive with them. I either stand on my own or I don't. I wasn't taken aback in any way by the idea that you were either dating other people or you weren't, it was more the fact of the matter. But I remember, just by the way you were characterizing those people, thinking about how I would be characterized and thought of myself in terms of an explanation to someone else through your words and cautioned myself when I noticed even just standing in the elevator that I wanted to be physical with you, to touch you, kiss you, push you against the wall and kiss you, and show that physical sexual aggressiveness because of an intensity I was feeling. I knew that had to be controlled because whatever feelings I was having had to be tempered by the fact that it didn't appear that there was anything sustainable about whatever this was.

[regarding different sides of m.e.] I wouldn't say you seem like you have been different persons, I realize I have said that a lot in this narrative, but for me it's more those first impressions that you take from someone -- all those assessments that we make about people based in that blink and we roll from there and they either end up proving or disproving initial theories. I don't feel like you morphed into some different person or character so much that I had made different assumptions about you, and that's not even to say that your actions in one particular instance proved or disproved those assumptions, it just felt as if it was an out of character experience based on those assumptions. I don't know if the narrative sounded negative, I hope it didn't. I tried to be honest about what I felt in the situation, but I wouldn't be talking to you tonight if I thought that you had been disingenuous with me and showed all these different characteristics that had you as angry, liar, etc. If I thought those were actual aspects of your personality, I don't think I would still be in contact with you.

My biggest frustration with you is openness, transparency. I wish you would be more open with me, even if it was blunt or harsh. I guess because you don't tell me everything I assume there are lots of bad things that you aren't telling me; I feel like you are holding things back, calculating. You're just more reserved about things, I guess. That's probably smart, to approach things that way, be more protective of yourself. And I'm the opposite, this verbal diarrhea thing. At first, I probably should have never been as open to you, but by now I'm convinced that we've shared enough experiences, whether you can add them up on one hand or not, that I do have an idea of who you are. I don't have a problem sharing myself with you. I can't ask that you return that, but I feel that particularly where it feels the most confusing is that there was such an awkwardness about that email and us being together, there were these awkward moments for me and I guess I think that nothing is ever entirely clear but I just wish that this was a little more clear. Can't that just be the case? I just remember you saying things like "I thought about what it would be like to date you," and what goes through my mind when I hear that is that you've thought about the possibly of (1) dating and being with someone like me and (2) whether that would be a secret relationship, because I think of you as a plotting and calculating person, because you wouldn't go through any decision making process blind, so I was trying to think about what you would even think about to make that sort of statement to me.

You know, I still wonder why. Why the manipulation?

Sociopath quote: hiding in plain sight

Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them.

-- Niccolò Machiavelli

Interview with a seducee (part 3)

Then I just remember, what really sticks out is then at some point we were getting physical, I'm not sure, maybe it was on my bed or on my couch the first time, the second time it was on your bed. The second time was lot better. The first time you kept laughing it at me, well I interpreted it as laughing at me, which made me think I was bad, which is not something I normally think. That is not the way most people respond to me, otherwise that would have been enough to send me home crying for weeks. In retrospect it seemed like you were laughing at some situational awkwardness, I'm not sure entirely, but there was something that was worthy of a lot of laughter which also broke up an intensity, which made me realize how not gay you seem. With other people, kissing people seems to produce some sort of bodily physical chemistry reaction that makes it more intense over time, not more humorous over time, which led me to believe that we were in a sketch comedy, not a porno scene. The second time, I felt like things had massively improved, or that I was much more satisfied. There was a softer intimacy, this cute laying next to each other in bed holding your calloused hands as you ripped off pieces and chunks of dead skin that had started to peel away at the tips of your fingers.

Well before that there was some discussion about being punched or physical violence and strangulation. I don't know if it had segued from a conversation about different forms of bestiality or the control which partners have in sexual positions or just a conversation about physical violence. somehow we ended up on the topic of punching me, which you seemed to be all the more excited about doing, and I seemed to be all the more excited about having done to me. We were sitting in your car sitting behind another car waiting to exit to go back into your house. I think you slapped me first, and I think I was asking for it. I'm not sure. I mean, I know I asked for it. I'm not sure if you slapped me. And I'm pretty sure that whatever you did, it felt good, or good in a weird way, which made me think that it was quasi sexual in terms of relieving sexual tension, which was a relief to me that all of this build up could be relieved in this painful release, which made it seem appropriate. On the other hand, I didn't know you all that well, and we were in a dark car, and you're physically hurting me.

It was when you turned over and strangled me that I felt both that sensation of feeling out of control and feeling adored at the same time. I think I felt out of control because I knew that you were strong enough to really hurt me if you wanted to and I wondered if, how much, if I really tried I could stop you in that moment, but I also trusted that you wouldn't hurt me, and that made me feel adored. After which I felt physical pain, it had hurt my throat, whatever soft tissue we have around the delicate structure of our neck, and so I, obviously having never felt anything like that before, I felt very very small and I really wanted to be held and coddled in that moment, and that made me feel very distant from you because I felt like you wouldn't be able to give me that, emotionally or physically. Even if you would have been able to give me a hug, I felt like I needed to be held by someone who wanted to hold me and cared because I felt hurt. It was a physical hurt but there was definitely an emotional attachment to it, the same way that as a child you might want to look for your mom after getting hurt. That's when I realized that I was sitting in a dark car with a person who I had gone to a show with once, who I had dinner with twice, and who worked briefly in our office.

Interview with a seductee (part 2)

(cont.)

We hung out at the ballet a few weeks later. We went to that restaurant that looked like it came out of a kitsch catalogue and then we went to the show and you were going to go to a bbq with family and/or get ice cream and I set off for home, but it was otherwise a good conversational day compared to the one before. You noted that I seemed calmer with you, but also noted my incredible inability to understand you. I kept saying, that's your type of thing, and you would say, no no no, you don't get me at all, but much calmer and easy going this time around without that added pressure of being at my house.

And then I didn't talk to you. And then I was sitting in an airport in Miami months later with my current fling leaning against my arm in our layover to San Pedro Belize, I opened up my email (thanks to you getting the office interns to show me how), and happened upon a very interesting read from you. The word that stuck out the most from that particular email was the four letter word love and its frequent use. The heartfelt passion with which that email was written seemed to be from a different human. It invoked thoughts for me of an infatuation of an ex lover, not someone who had been a short term co-worker who had come over to dinner once and awkwardly discussed my personality disorders for me and my inability to communicate. So reading through it, there was some shock to be had. Honestly I read it as being very truthful, as being... the picture behind the font of the email in my mind was this delicate soul that had hidden behind everything, a facade of intelligence and background and family and had realized that this was what true love was and had to express it and let it shine through. Not only was this interpretation gratifying as a major ego boost, but it was also shocking from my prior experiences with this person, it was alarming to my current paramour who is leaning on my shoulder catching glimpses of the word love, tidbits of affection and nuances of the email with a sideways glance. I think I briefly typed out a response without responding later. In Belize, a day later, we had our first fight in four months of dating because my companion had silently, passively aggressively brewed for 24 hours, insulted that I hadn't discussed already how it was that i was going to extinguish the small flame you had for me by saying I was already taken. Because I had been asked, "what are you going to do with this" and I had replied honestly and confusedly "I don't know," we had to discuss in detail why i didn't know what I was going to do. Thus began the portrayal of you as someone who was oddly infatuated with me, but my interest in you was an intellectual pursuit and search for a dialogue that was otherwise missing in my current relationship. I still don't really understand fully -- why you wrote what you did, but it was effective at getting my attention because it certainly was shocking and surprising and exciting to read because ... I don't think for me there are many times in my lifetime that i will open up an email and read some of the things that you wrote in it. Whether they were just meant to pull me back into an odd conversation about my personal defects and how you could fix them, it was still a successful endeavor because it worked, I still came running back ready to hear about what was wrong with me.

Interview with a seductee (part 1)

I interviewed a seduction target to get the backstory. (I discussed this admittedly clumsy and mistake riddled seduction first here, then here, and finally here):

You came into the office for your little stint. You kept walking by my door, kept walking by my window. Then you would come sit down in my chair and you definitely sat in it with a very territorial type comfort and I would talk nonstop in a verbal diahrrea that only showed my sense of discomfort with the entire situation and more appropriately you. I really remember my interactions with other people about you. People seemed to notice that you had come around in talking to me. I remember one or more person asking about you, who you are, what your deal was, where you were coming from, whether you liked me, aka what was your sexuality. Because even though it was decidedly confirmed that you were trendy and hip, it was unconfirmed whether you were gay or not, so it became my duty to find out, not just for their sake but equally for mine. Then we went to lunch I think, I remember it being somewhat awkward. I drove. We went to the mexican restaurant. You didn't eat your food. You ordered it. You didn't eat it. I thought that was strange, that you had ordered it, not eaten it, and not taken it with you. But we had an interesting conversation about nothing and then we talked about the only thing that mattered to me, which was trying to find out which gender you were into. It started with something like whether you had been to a particular gay club, which you had been. I had determined that that had meant that you were either gay or bisexual, which meant that the possibility that you and I were pretty much in love was certain. And then you would go on cigarette breaks with me and we would talk about life's mysteries.

I like the way the way that you stand, by the way. When we were standing outside, I really like the way you stand. I don't know if it was a proximate distance thing or a confidence, standing at attention, straight back thing, but there was something.

Then we made plans to have dinner, which essentially was to have dinner at my place without many more specifics, but we set a date within that week. You were only working there for a week, and I was leaving on a trip, so it couldn't have been much longer than a couple days after the lunch that we arranged to have a dinner together. When discussing this with my cohorts, they had decided that we were going on a date, and since you were coming to my house it was more a date plus something else, which put me in the uncomfortable position of deciding whether or not I wanted this something else from you, despite the fact that we had not actually established what you sexuality was. Luckily for me, my house is always tidy, but I don't have any groceries, so when you and I had arranged to have the dinner, I was going to have to go buy it that day, this all felt like a lot of hoopla and I didn't know if I wanted to pursue this. This led to me backing out and you sitting there in my office staring at me. I tried to explain myself, which was met with by your cold stare of unacceptance, to my shock. I was waiting for you to go "of course, can't wait to try it sometime later or soon," or some other agreement for letting me off the hook easily, but you seemed that much more annoyed that I was not only trying to get out of it, but trying to explain why I was trying to get out of it. You said that this was a negative attribute of my personality. Then, feeling much worse about the whole arrangement than before, I reneged on my attempt to get out of dinner and instead went back to having dinner with you and decided that I would just have to leave work early to get dinner supplies. After dinner, you're just laying on my floor, there were a lot of silent pauses. The entire time I felt like you were so brilliantly twisted and of wild thoughts that I was both enamored by you but felt that I had to prove myself to you and not bore you with small talk. You said that normal conversation with normal people was about things like what is your favorite color, and I seemed to ask all of these either very direct or indirect questions. It didn't flow like having a cup of coffee and catching up the way that good siblings or even new acquaintances would laugh at shared experiences. We were two awkward ducks in a mucky murky pond. It was very strange to me the interaction. You flew out the door and I had no idea what had just happened. I saw you at work for the next three days and after that...

Targeted altruism

Or, a rose by any other name... from Superfreakonomics:

Some of [Gary] Becker's most compelling early research concerned altruism. He argued, for instance, that the same person who might be purely selfish in business could be exceedingly altruistic among people he knew -- although, importantly (Becker is an economist, after all), he predicted that altruism even within a family would have a strategic element.

Summers empirically demonstrated Becker's point. Using data from a U.S. government longitudinal study, they showed that an elderly parent in a retirement home is more likely to be visited by his grown children if they are expecting a sizable inheritance.

But wait, you say: maybe the offspring of wealthy families are simply more caring toward their elderly parents?

A reasonable conjecture -- in which case you'd expect an only child of wealthy parents to be especially dutiful. But the data show no increase in retirement- home visits if a wealthy family has only one grown child; there need to be at least two. This suggests that the visits increase because of competition between siblings for the parent's estate. 

This illustrates an interesting problem in defining altruism not just as good acts, but good acts done selflessly:

How can we know whether an act is altruistic or self- serving? If you help rebuild a neighbor's barn, is it because you're a moral person or because you know your own barn might burn down someday? When a donor gives millions to his alma mater, is it because he cares about the pursuit of knowledge or because he gets his name plastered on the football stadium?

Sorting out such things in the real world is extremely hard. While it is easy to observe actions, it is much harder to understand the intentions behind an action.

After an interesting discussion of several lab experiments, researchers conclude that true altruism (if it exists as all) is elusive as a unicorn or Nessie:

If John List's research proves anything, it's that a question like "Are people innately altruistic?" is the wrong kind of question to ask. People aren't "good" or "bad." People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated -- for good or ill -- if only you find the right levers.

Narcissism = lack of self awareness

From The Mirror Effect by Drs. Drew Pinsky and S. Mark Young:

The key to understanding the narcissism myth is not that he fell in love with himself, but that he failed to recognize himself in his own reflection. In other words, true narcissists are not self-aware.

A real narcissist is dissociated from his or her true self; he feels haunted by chronic feelings of loneliness, emptiness, and self-loathing and seeks to replace that disconnection with a sense of worth and importance fueled by others.

Narcissism is also marked by a profound lack of empathy, a fundamental inability to understand and connect with the feelings of others. Taken together, these are the traits psychologists measure in diagnosing what's known as narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

Sociopath quote of the day: onlookers

“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”

-- Henry Louis Mencken

Soul searching

A reader asks: "How is it that sociopaths can 'see' someone's soul or see people as they truly are? How come the rest of society doesn't see the person for who they really are?" My response:

That is such a good question. I feel that you probably only notice the sociopath's ability to see because it is such an unusual perspective, everybody else's perceptive abilities are so familiar to you that they have become emotional background noise (Von Restorff effect?). As a thought experiment, stop and listen to all of the noise around you. Try to identify the source of all the noise you hear, whether street noise, other people, television, radio, automobile noises, wind, etc. You never pay attention to this noise, never even notice it is there most of the time because you are so used to it. You only notice things that are out of the ordinary.

I think a similar thing happens with empaths reading people. You are probably very used to other empaths seeing things about you that you never told them, e.g. when people see your face and realize that you are sad, when people don't stand too close to you because they realize you need your personal space, when people don't either scream at you or whisper at you. With all these behaviors, other empaths are seeing parts of who you truly are and acting accordingly.

Sociopaths see things that you never told them too, just not always the same things a typical empath would see. First, sociopaths have a very different focus, different expectations about the world and the people in it. While you and everyone else are doing emotional sleight of hand meant to distract the average observer from certain harsh truths, e.g. you no longer love your spouse, or hate your boss, or are having an affair, or can't stand your children, the sociopath remains undistracted. It's like telling a joke to a kid with autism -- your attempts at subterfuge will simply not always have the same effects on a sociopath as they have on empaths. Second, sociopaths are students of human interactions, closely studying others so they can pick up on the right social cues to blend in, imitate normal behavior, etc. The truth is that the more you pay attention to something, the more aware you will be. I am a musician, and I can listen to a recording and tell exactly what is going on, who is playing what, even the way the music was mixed in the studio. You could learn that too, if you practiced as much as a musician does.

I think this is what you are referring to when you say that sociopaths seem to be able to see a person's soul or see people as they truly are. Or maybe it is more of an extraordinary bias in which you honestly don't expect a sociopath to understand anything, so when they do they seem very clever? I don't actually know, these are just my guesses.

Conversation with a friend

Friend: You think much of yourself.

M.E.: I think about myself a lot, if that's what you mean...

Passing

I just watched a film about a young Jewish woman who "passes" in occupied France during the Second World War. It reminded me of a time that I was helping two elderly Holocaust survivors fill out forms for restitution funds. I had been instructed that the Germans are great record keepers and very wary of fraud. I had been warned of people being denied their benefits because of very small inconsistencies in documentation, e.g. spring 1941 vs. March 1941. With that in mind, I tried to be as precise as I could with dates. The man's papers seemed to be more or less in order, and he had the identifying tattoo to match. The woman's papers were more confusing. She had dates from a previous claim, but they didn't really make sense with the story she told me. She was in and out of camps, according to her paperwork, and there were other documents that contradicted both what she told me and what her previous forms said. I didn't really know what to do, so I told her I would ask for help. She panicked, grabbed my arm, sat me back down. Pointing to the form with the dates, she said "this isn't me." She told me in her stilted English about how with her blonde hair and blue eyes, no one suspected her of being Jewish. She was able to "pass" for the duration of the war, working as a seamstress. The documents corroborating her time spent in camps she had gotten from another young woman who had died shortly after liberation.

Of course I felt no moral compunction about filling out the forms as necessary for her benefits (i.e. lying). I did wonder, though, was she lucky to have come to me rather than most any other member of the general populace? I'd like to think that anybody else would have done the same as me, but it's hard to know. Arguing in her favor, she must have suffered during the war, if not in the same ways, for the same reasons as those the restitution was meant to help. She probably lived in constant fear of being discovered. Who knows who she had to bribe or befriend to maintain her freedom -- being able to "pass" is not really a passive endeavor. Arguing against her, we don't want to help people who seem to be able to help themselves. We are disgusted with those who seem to game the system, accepting government help rather than seeking employment, being opportunistic about social safety nets, etc. We may even consider her less noble for taking her God given gifts of aryan beauty and making the most of them. But luckily for her, "we" only despise those things when we are unavoidably confronted with them, when we have our faces rubbed in the ugliness of reality, taking away with us the scent of our hypocrisy. As long as she continues to "pass," we may forget she and her kind ever existed, which is all anyone can ever really ask for from society.

Empath vs. sociopath morality

A reader sent me this link to a forum as an explanation of the differences between how empaths and sociopaths see morality.

And, well, the thing about human history and nature is that a split morality is *natural* for us. Empathy within the family/tribe, sociopathic-like behavior to oursiders. Like, every tribe calls themselves "the People". What does that make outsiders? Not-people... And then there's the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments, showing how apparently normal people, socialized in modern societies to have unnaturally large "tribes", can still do atrocious things with a bit of social pressure.

The sociopath doesn't care what he does to other people, or just doesn't respond to them as people. Normal people convince themselves other people aren't people, or deserve it, then do their atrocities.

Another participant responds:

Ah! Someone who truly understands basic human nature!

There is a descending scale of human empathy involved. Stronger loyalty to immediate kin, somewhat less so to clan, somewhat less than that to local social clique, and so on. Building large scale societies requires the creation of an abstract cultural structure (morality, religion, hierarchy, mythology), that gives humans some reason to act towards the success of the larger group instead of the smaller. When two abstract cultural structures compete without violent conflict, we call that peace. When they interact with violence and destruction, we call that war. An abstract cultural structure that can longer bind its members to its own survival is said to be corrupt and decadent.

Assigning members of different human groups a lesser moral status is as natural to humans as breathing. Complete extermination of a group happens less often than other kinds of conflict resolution only because it is rarely cost effective. Too much work, or destructive to your own cultural tropes, or because oppression and enslavement is more profitable than extermination.

Whatever we think of GENOCIDE!, it isn't crazy or even irrational to most people who practice it.

Hitler may have had serious emotional issues, but he was not an original thinker. All the terrible things he did were not the product of his imagination. He only collated ideas that had been floating around Germany for generations. He happened to have the imagination and political skill to weld those ideas into a popular governing philosophy, and didn't become clinically insane until he started losing the war and, along with it, his emotional stability and his grip on reality.

Negative emotions

A reader asks me what sorts of negative emotions I feel: "You've written of loyalty, gratitude, exhilaration (when winning or achieving something), a desire to be in control, etc. I'd like to know more about the other end of the spectrum." My response:

I haven't really thought about this much. One thing that I like about the way my brain works is that it is very easy for me to compartmentalize, so usually I am an optimist, not prone to depression etc. Plus I am very sensitive to pleasure, like I must have too much serotonin or something, but I do sometimes feel down. Some sociopaths are particularly susceptible to depression, or I have a few readers at least who feel debilitating depression.

I was talking with a friend about this and asked what it looks/sounds/feels like when I am allegedly depressed. She said that it just seems like I am frustrated with my inability to think, which I think is accurate. I think when I feel "down," it is usually because my mind has lost some of its functionality, either because I am sick, tired stressed, or the brain is overtaxed. My friend also described her own depression, as a comparator. She said that she puts so much of her identity in how she feels, that when she is feeling poorly, she has a bit of a crisis of identity. I believe that is true for me too. I believe that I put so much of my identity in how I think ("I am how I think") that when my brain is sluggish and not performing up to par, I also have a crisis of identity. Being a sociopath already feels really empty, which I am fine with because I have never experienced anything different (and question whether anything different even exists). So emptiness is something you just have to learn to deal with day to day, like any other chronic illness, but sometimes it flares up or something irritates it, like a sluggish mind. And sometimes it gets really bad, like a crisis of identity, inflamed, and probably the only solution at that point is to (self) medicate it, dull it, quiet the deafening silence of the void, and maybe even that won't help. When it gets really bad, there's a hopelessness in wondering whether I'll ever go back to feeling like myself again. If I never go back to feeling normal, will I still be me? That's a really disturbing concern. I have never, ever have thoughts of suicide, but I do think there are worse things than dying.

Sociopaths = moral nihilists

Our friend Mr. Birdick on another site:

Let me give you a personal anecdote. Once upon a time, I was in the military. During one afternoon lunch period in boot camp, I remember having a small epiphany as I was standing in line waiting to reach the counter. I looked around and saw groups of my fellow inmates… I mean, recruits… sitting at their tables, following the rules handed down to us by our “superiors”. No talking, no horse play, eat quickly. I saw the recruits sneakily having whispered conversations, quietly disobeying those rules. I saw the officers in charge sitting at their table, talking loudly and raucously, enjoying themselves and seeming to revel in their “elevated” position in the hierarchy. I saw the differences in uniform. One group’s uniforms signifying their roles are superiors, the other group’s signifying their roles as inferiors, people who could and would be yelled at, disrespected and ordered about by the superiors. I saw that we all, officer and recruit alike, volunteered to put on these costumes and play these roles. And it hit me that it was all a joke. We were all playing a very elaborate game of make believe for adults. What’s more, I saw that this is how it is everywhere. It wasn’t just boot camp. It was Congress. It was corporate America. It was church. It was family. We are all playing these roles, and what’s more, I saw that we did not have to. It is our fear, among other, less potent motivations, that keeps us locked into the mass absurdity. We believe in rules that have no basis in any other space outside of the human brain. It’s like the rules of Monopoly, the board game. We agree to play by them, but once the game is done, we fold up the board, put the pieces and the cash away, and forget all about the rules that make the game possible. (Obviously I’m not original. This was long before I’d even heard of game theory.) But human society is one game that never, EVER ends. How would you feel if one morning you awoke, walked out of your home to face the day only to discover that everyone appears to be living and dying and killing by the rules of what you were raised to believe was only a board game? For me, the rules, the roles and the beliefs are all part of a game, one that is not real and is not important. But it appears that for most other people, the game is real. It’s all real to them and it all matters, including and especially who they believe themselves to be. Everything appears to hinge of their sense of identity (their roles). It’s so important in fact that they are willing to kill in the name of their rules and roles and make believe society. None of it has to cohere. It does not have to make sense even. It just has to be what they believe is true and right. It is the function of beliefs, not their veracity, that matters most.

That is my subjective experience of society around me. Again, I believe that most people are not being consciously disingenuous. To reiterate, I understand all too well that many people mean it from the depths of their being when they think, feel and believe certain things. All of the above is the very meaning of most people’s lives. But for me, these people I am referring to are like straw dogs, empty suits who confuse emotional depth with reality. They believe that what they think and what they feel is the be all to end all. They do not see the blind biology that makes their beliefs about themselves and their society possible. They most certainly refrain from any kind of sustained introspection. So naturally, they mistake their beliefs and feelings with fact and they surround themselves with others who will agree with them as a means of shoring up those beliefs, their yay-sayers. Why else would the average human ego be so fragile and so in need of constant validation if it were not comprised of mostly opinion, wish fulfillment and patterns of behavior acquired in childhood and repeated in what passes for adulthood? (In other words, hot air.) The smarter ones may see some of this in others but they can never see it in themselves because they believe that they and theirs, among all other groups, have somehow won the belief lottery: their beliefs are of course right and true and honorable! Their families, their religion, their country is what’s right and true and honorable. Their version of love is the real version, the right and true and honorable version. And what threatens a belief, a feeling, a sense of self in constant need of propping up? Other people, with their conflicting beliefs and feelings and senses of self of course, which explains the ubiquitous conflict of all types, found at all levels of society, from the nuclear family all the way up to the captains of industry and heads of state. In the name of love (of “soul mate”, family, country, god, capitalism, communism, etc) they have waged all kinds of war and invented the means with which to destroy every human being on this lovely but insignificant little planet of ours.

Then they have the nerve, the gall to label people who, for one reason or the other find themselves emotionally disconnected from all the above, as pathological. They say they are “chilled” when someone can kill without remorse, even as they support killing in the name of ~fill in the blank with a preposterous reason~. It is truly laughable. Why should I play by their rules when those rules are so often mind numbingly stupid and pointless? Why should I beat myself up or lose sleep at night because I fail to take what I see as one great big walloping delusion seriously?

The above may sound as if I am angry with society. That would be misleading. Right now, at this moment, the most I feel is slightly annoyed at the ludicrousness of it all and at the fact that I am forced to navigate through this miasma of BS just to survive. Otherwise, it is what it is. There is nothing to do but accept it, deal with it, and even from time to time, take advantage of it for my own gain.

"Don'ts" list for dealing with sociopaths

A reader asked for help in dealing with the domineering, allegedly sociopathic mother of his child, how to counteract her behavior, and how to keep his child out from under her dictatorial boot:

There are definitely things you can do to counteract her behavior, although there is a very real chance that you will just end up winning the battles but never the war. Maybe you're fine with that. The issue is that any counteraction measures would be very context specific -- sociopath specific -- and there are certain very effective counteraction measures I can suggest that you might not be good at or might not want to do because you're not that type of person (e.g. evil). It's tricky. I think the only general advice I can give is more about things to never do, because the only thing worse than not gaining ground is losing ground, non?

Things to never do:

1. Accusations. Sociopaths never respond well to accusations, it will always turn into a knockdown fight in which you will be bloodied much more than they ever will be.

2. Recriminations. (see accusations, above).

3. Emotions. Sociopaths generally don't want to hear about how what you feel if what you feel is negative towards them. If you are in anything remotely like a fight, accusation, or recrimination, do not under any circumstances get emotional. The limited exception, as another reader has pointed out, is when the sociopath is feeling wronged by you, is hurt, etc., in which you should show exactly the amount of normal empathy you would show an empath under those circumstances (more on that in another post).

4. Ultimatum or any other power plays. Sociopaths see ultimatums, artificial pressure (e.g. emotional pressure), power plays, etc. as being either threats or games. I don't think you will like the result of either approach.

5. Talk about being "right" or "wrong." Sociopaths don't really believe there is such thing as being right or wrong, there is only more or less powerful.

Don't worry about her hurting your child, she will probably want to alienate him/her from you more than she will want to have him/her trauma bond to you by her inflicting trauma on him. Your child is half her, so will probably grow up disrespecting you too, if you can't hold your own against your partner. If you want what is best for your child, you will get your crap together and become the type of person that demands respect by your very presence, your very being.

Sociopath = pet monster?

A reader relates why she wants to win back her sociopath ex, and asks how:

Looking back I realize in the beginning he was so attentive and "caring" He swept me off my feet with a broom of charm. I don't quite understand him b/c he would go out of his way to help me and he was even trusted by his family mysteriously to take care of his nephew. He was like my soulmate at first, he showed total romance and after awhile we started fighting. My ex made a point to let me know my flaws when we parted ways. The very same flaws my father always nit picked at me for. How strange? Very. It seems like he was quite like my father, he had this way about him that made me feel loved, safe, warm, the same way I felt around my father as a kid. My ex was strangely kind. He admitted he felt nothing at times but he told me he loved me. When we broke up the first time he threw a childlike tantrum childishly accusing my friends of ruining his chances of getting me back. He wanted to fight my male friend who is diagnosed a sociopath, but they had no clue that they were both sociopath. Ah the beautiful irony! They never did fight though. But he swears he hates him still. (I don't doubt it). Why is dating a sociopath like having a pet monster? I need answers! I want him back a year later I find myself wanting more. He's quite addictive. I read in one of your post on sociopathic love that they can become your soulmate and I realize he did just that and with me still waters run deep applies. There are many sides of me I think I discovered through him. I just want him back what should I do?

My response:

Have you ever been to a zoo during feeding time? Some animals are very willing to eat out of a trough like any domesticated animal would, fattening up for the slaughter. Other animals have to be fed in a way that simulates how they would eat in the wild, whether through scavenging or hunting. Sociopaths are like that. They don't like to be spoonfed, so to speak. They would rather starve. This instinct possibly reflects an evolutionary wariness and fear of traps -- if the prey seems too easy, the sociopath will naturally believe that he is being set up; he will not even want to eat, the same way you may be wary of overaggressive salesmen or food that smells off. What does this mean for you? Take a lesson from the zookeepers and figure out how to simulate a plausible hunting/scavenging scenario (whichever your particular sociopath seems to prefer) in which you are the target. How did he first get you? Try to tap into that person you were, try to replicate the feeling of the hunt for him. How you go about doing that will be very context specific to your sociopath, but it is theoretically possible.

Pet predators are like this too, aren't they? Like snakes? I guess that would make sociopaths pet monsters.

Sociopaths = communication skills

I was joking with friends the other night about seduction. We each took turns describing how we would seduce the other, if we wanted. I was impressed with some of the good ideas. For instance (caveat -- not too soon into a relationship or it will ruin the effect), take the person to an event or location, or participate in an activity in which the target is no longer in his/her comfort zone -- culturally, socially, or even related to their sense of physical safety and well-being. With the proper preparation, your target will be forced to rely on you, and will have to trust you to help them navigate the situation successfully. After instilling this sense of unease and reliance in your target and after successful completion of the task, let things take a turn for the very physical. Their adrenaline and fight or flight senses should still be up from the challenge, so things will seem very exciting and intense to them.

As we continued talking, though, it was clear that I differed from most people in thinking that a broken heart is its own reward, whereas other people use seduction more as a means to an end -- a happy, successful, intimate relationship. One person wondered at what would be the point of keeping up a charade indefinitely. What point, indeed. Although I derive a good deal of pleasure from playing games, I know that there are certain things, certain life experiences or levels of trust, that games cannot provide. That doesn't mean that my hard-won skills are useless, though. I like to use the analogy of hitting a golf ball with a strong lateral wind. Your first inclination, before you notice the wind, is to hit the golf ball essentially straight. When you take the wind into consideration, though, you realize that to hit the target you seek, you have to skew the trajectory from the start. The same can be true of good communication. If you know that your listener/audience has certain prejudices or sensitivities, it is foolish to not take these into account. If you are trying to communicate to someone in that situation, you must imagine what your listener is hearing, rather than what you are actually saying. Keep tweaking your intended speech until you have accomplished your true goal in communication -- communicating a particular idea to a particular person, rather than just saying what you mean to say. Yes that is manipulation, but it is also just good communication.