Knowledge vs. Understanding

One thing I hear a lot from people is that sociopaths know right and wrong, i.e. if you asked them to say what is the right thing to do in a particular situation, they'd more than likely give you the "right" answer. Consequently, the argument goes, sociopaths are responsible for all of their actions to the same degree as a normal person. I've tried to use the analogy before of how most children understand the "right" answer regarding stealing, hitting, not waiting their turn, not sharing, etc. but that we don't expect them to have the same capacity to behave well as we would a neurotypical adult. I think this difference between knowing something and understanding something was illustrated well in this video.



On the positive side, just like this guy learning how to ride the messed up bike, I think that sociopaths can learn to perspective take (which is basically empathy) and to learn to think more of others and other "good" behavior (or behavior which promotes "good" actions). I actually think the bike analogy is really good because like the hard wiring we have regarding riding a bike, the sociopath got hard wired at a very early age -- hard wiring that is very difficult to ignore or bypass. Just as the man describes needing to concentrate the whole time while riding the messed up bike and if anything should happen to distract him, he crashes, even a sociopath that has learned the "good" behavior mentioned above will likely socially or morally "crash" if there are too many other things taking up his or her cognitive load. I do think with practice the sociopath can get better and better, like learning a foreign language, but we should not expect sociopaths to just understanding good behavior automatically, just like we shouldn't expect a normal person to understand how to ride the messed up bike automatically. 

Context is everything

A little related to the last post, Mormon small children around the world were given this interesting pseudo ethical (but mostly practical) dilemma recently:

Ask the children to imagine that they are alone on a raft in the middle of the ocean. They discover that they must lighten their load because the raft is riding low in the water. They must throw overboard all but two items of their supplies. From the following list, ask them to choose the two items they will keep:

Life jacket

First aid kit

Chest filled with gold

Fishing pole, fishing tackle, and bait

Case of one dozen bottles of fresh water

Two-way radio

Box of emergency flares

Large can of shark repellent

At this point you may be wondering what the moral punchline is going to be. For me, I thought for sure it was going to be about getting rid of the chest filled with gold (by the way, the relative weights of a chest of gold and life jacket do not seem equivalent)? Or maybe something more of a stretch, like the importance of having a two way radio to God or something?

For some reason the answer was unexpected to me.

List the choices on the chalkboard, and ask the children to explain the reasons for their choices. The choices in this activity should pose a dilemma. Point out that choosing would be difficult because they would not know what would happen in the future: they might sink and need the life jacket, become thirsty and need the water to drink, become hungry and need the fishing pole, encounter sharks and need the repellent, need the radio to seek help, get hurt and need the first-aid kit, need the flares for a nighttime rescue, or get rescued in the next few hours and wish they had kept the treasure.

I thought it was an interesting illustration about how the value of things depends on context, and how I was sort of ignorant to assume that there would just be a set hierarchy of usefulness to nonusefulness based on the limited information given. Maybe you were like me and your brain raced to figure out what the "right" answer would be too, given what you think you know about survival. Like many of you likely prioritized water over food (fishing pole), because you can survive longer without food than water. But I've read Unbroken, so I know that there's actually a decent chance of getting fresh water from the rain, which would naturally collect in the bottom of a typical raft. And if the two way radio was in range of help, it makes most sense to keep that. Who cares if you get a little thirsty or hungry in the few hours that it might take to be rescued. Also, who cares if you're hungry or thirsty if sharks come right away, so in some ways shark repellant is most necessary. But if the whole idea is either to facilitate speedy rescue or to survive until rescue comes or you've drifted to safety, it's really not clear what would be more valuable without more context. But still my mind had an impulse to think that there was a "right" answer, or at least "righter". I was surprised that the punchline was -- it depends.

But I think I also can understand a little better now the perspective of people who think that there's really no use for sociopaths in the world, such that we can and should just eradicate them all. Those people must feel the same way about sociopaths as the way I almost instinctively felt about the chest of gold in the raft. Because the gold seems to me to be so obviously useless to that situation, I would have probably thrown out the gold without a second thought. But the lesson makes a good point -- what if you were rescued in a few hours. You'd wish you hadn't.

I think it's similar with sociopaths. Some people might see the world in a particular way that would make sociopaths seem an obvious detriment with no countervailing benefit and almost just automatically think it would be best to get rid of them. But sociopaths can be extremely useful in certain contexts, e.g. life or death situations where something dangerous or morally questionable needs to get done quickly and effectively -- war, espionage, natural or man made disaster, but even smaller things like car accidents, impending street violence, taking risks in business, having the mental fortitude to try something and not be afraid of failure. Sociopaths are like the gold, or maybe more like the flares, in the sense that they don't seem as immediately useful as we've been conditioned to see the other items, but sociopaths would truly be your tool of choice in certain situations.

And unlike this survival hypothetical, there's no reason to want to go around killing sociopaths (or even preventing them from being born through genetic screening or whatever). Because unlike the survival hypo, we can keep everyone in the boat. And you know the old saying, better to have something and not want it than to want something and not have it. 

Change and pure evil

A reader sent me this article in the Scientific Article about evil and about people who have a belief that some things are pure evil (70% responded as such in a recent study). All of it's worth reading, but let me include the essential part of the argument:

Evil has been defined as taking pleasure in the intentional inflicting of harm on innocent others, and ever since World War II social psychologists have been fascinated by the topic. Many of the formative thinkers in the field — Kurt Lewin, Stanley Milgram , Solomon Asch — were inspired by their experiences with, and observations of, what appeared to most people at the time to be the indisputable incarnation of pure evil. But what many saw as a clear demonstration of unredeemable and deep-seated malice, these researchers interpreted as more, in the words of Hannah Arendt, banal. From Milgram’s famous studies of obedience to Zimbardo’s prison study, psychologists have argued for the roots of evil actions in quite ordinary psychological causes. This grounding of evil in ordinary, as opposed to extraordinary, phenomena have led some to describe the notion of “pure evil” as a myth. A misguided understanding of human nature deriving both from specific socio-cultural traditions as well as a general tendency to understand others’ behavior as a product solely of their essence, their soul, as opposed to a more complicated combination of environmental and individual forces.

The issue of whether “pure evil” exists, however, is separate from what happens to our judgments and our behavior when we believe in its existence. It is this question to which several researchers have recently begun to turn. How can we measure people’s belief in pure evil (BPE) and what consequences does such a belief have on our responses to wrong-doers?

According to this research, one of the central features of BPE is evil’s perceived immutability. Evil people are born evil – they cannot change. Two judgments follow from this perspective: 1) evil people cannot be rehabilitated, and 2) the eradication of evil requires only the eradication of all the evil people. Following this logic, the researchers tested the hypothesis that there would be a relationship between BPE and the desire to aggress towards and punish wrong-doers.

Researchers have found support for this hypothesis across several papers containing multiple studies, and employing diverse methodologies. BPE predicts such effects as: harsher punishments for crimes (e.g. murder, assault, theft), stronger reported support for the death penalty, and decreased support for criminal rehabilitation. Follow-up studies corroborate these findings, showing that BPE also predicts the degree to which participants perceive the world to be dangerous and vile, the perceived need for preemptive military aggression to solve conflicts, and reported support for torture.

Regardless of whether the devil actually exists, belief in the power of human evil seems to have significant and important consequences for how we approach solving problems of real-world wrongdoing. When we see people’s antisocial behavior as the product of an enduring and powerful malice, we see few options beyond a comprehensive and immediate assault on the perpetrators. They cannot be helped, and any attempts to do so would be a waste of time and resources.

But if we accept the message from decades of social psychological research, that at least some instances of violence and malice are not the result of “pure evil” — that otherwise decent individuals can, under certain circumstances, be compelled to commit horrible acts, even atrocities — then the results of these studies serve as an important cautionary tale. The longer we cling to strong beliefs about the existence of pure evil, the more aggressive and antisocial we become.  And we may be aggressing towards individuals who are, in fact, “redeemable.”  Individuals who are not intrinsically and immutably motivated by the desire to intentionally cause harm to others. That may be the greatest trick the devil has ever pulled.

Until recently, most researchers believed that sociopathy is not treatable (see some of the articles on treatment at this site hosted by the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy). In fact, when you read some of the articles or see interviews with particularly some of the earlier scientific researchers involved with sociopaths (Hare?), it seems pretty clear that some of them have a belief in pure evil, so it's easy to see how sociopaths got labeled "irredeemable" initially.

The possibility of treatment and change has been one that I've been thinking a lot about, now that I (through therapy and the process of writing and promoting the book) finally feel like I have come to terms with myself in a way that both acknowledges and accepts my sociopathic tendencies, while not allowing them to hamper or restrict the way that I want to live my life. Less and less does my identity center around being sociopathic. I may never be normal, but I am forming a sense of self and learning how to identify and experience my emotions in a way that I never thought would be possible even a year ago. Because I still feel like I am in transition, I've been hesitant to speak too much about it or about anything related to sociopathy. But it does sort of bother me that part of that hesitancy is the concern that people will not receive the news well -- that I will be thought of as a sell-out by other sociopathically minded individuals or that I will be further derided as delusional or a fraud for having ever understood the term "sociopath" to describe me. This is too bad. I wish it were possible for us to believe that someone might have been a validly diagnosed sociopath but still was able to make lasting changes, possibly to the point where she could no longer be diagnosed as such anymore. I have my own personal reasons/biases for wanting to believe that story, but I also think in general it's one that we should try to believe in because it is one of hope and redemption instead of hopeless submission either to the evil inside us or to the evil outside us. But I'm not sure that's where we're at right now, unfortunately. 

How do you cope?

From a reader:

I have recently come across your blog and it's given me a new perspective. It's interesting, many of your readers seem to be very high-functioning. This is not the case with me. I've had some trouble since early on being a "functional member of society", ergo I can't hold down a job, my family hates me, and I'm quite the drifter. Now don't be fooled, this does not much upset me. 

I found your blog after my psychiatrist (after some time of "therapy") informed me that I qualify for a diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. He also told me that I have a few antisocial traits, but barely don't qualify for a diagnosis of ASPD, the closest official variant of sociopathy. Now after I received this diagnosis, I was really put off because I can't stand narcissists, so I did some digging on NPD with antisocial traits, ended up reading "Mask of Sanity" and your very own enlightening book, "Confessions of a Sociopath." I don't believe in self-diagnosis, but I believe I would fit more into Dr. Robert Hare's depiction of psychopathy.

Realness

I actually really like the Velveteen Rabbit story, also the Little Prince, which both touch on this idea of there being a "realness" that is particularly "real".

From a reader:

I found your book incredibly thought provoking. As someone who considers himself the functional opposite of a sociopath, I read it out of a curiosity and desire to understand the mental processes of someone so different from myself. Though I study psychology and consider myself fairly open-minded about different mental states, I did have some stigma surrounding sociopathy simply because of the sensationalized media portrayal that I have grown up with. My perspective was certainly challenged.

            I have never read a book that felt like such an interactive experience. You were up front about your manipulation, but I still found myself constantly challenging and questioning your intentions, determined not to let you get the best of me. Just when I would start to feel superiority for your callousness, you would express vulnerability. Just when I started to sense weakness, you reminded me of my own. In the end I accepted defeat in largely seeing your point of view, but I did so in a way that felt satisfying. I realized that, though it was all very calculated, that didn’t mean your intentions couldn’t be genuine.

What struck me most were not the differences, but the similarities between your cognition and my own. This makes me think that, in some ways (but certainly not all), emotional sensitivity acts as a buffer to disguise the empath’s selfish actions, allowing personal justification. It simply provides an extra step that allows me to feel as if my actions are not entirely performed out of self-interest. For example, when I sense weakness in a person, I make it my goal to try and help them in this regard. I speak with them directly and admit my own vulnerabilities, I emphasize their strengths and I compliment them in front of others. I pride myself on being the type of person that will continue paying attention to the original speaker if they are interrupted in a group conversation, or open my body to allow someone into a circle. Though this may make me feel like a ‘good person’, it is all about manipulating how others see me, in turn bolstering my self-perception.

I know that I am an empath because when someone else is in visible pain, it bothers me deeply. As a child I would get deeply upset when a character would be injured or die in a movie. But none of this is selfless. I feel inclined to help somebody in pain because I have the ability to see their pain as my own. In helping them feel better, I help myself feel better. I have no delusions about this, it just seems that, for better or worse, my self-interest better lines up with conventional conceptions of ‘moral goodness’.

These similarities that I felt to your cognition make me wonder how much of it is actually a result of your sociopathy (I know that you were consciously making a generalized distinction in order to highlight your point).  I feel that much of the likeness can be explained by other traits, such as situational awareness and introspection. All people act selfishly, but amazingly some people have very little awareness of it at all. I think I was finding familiarity in your knack for logically articulating your thought process. So it seems like, as a generous over simplification, sociopathy is ‘normal’ cognition without the added step of emotional processing. This emotional processing certainly has downfalls (you were very clear about this), but the upsides are what I find myself curious about.

What I really want to ask is whether you experience moments of heightened or superior consciousness—moments that feel entirely genuine. I am not quite sure how to articulate these moments, other than to call them more ‘real’ than the rest of life. Many of them come in the form of human connection, which it seems you probably don’t experience in the same way (though you hinted a bit at something like this in regards to your niece). This can take the form of a communal experience, an absorbing conversation, or even simply eye contact that evokes a powerful sense of mutual understanding, if only for a second. It can happen in other ways too. For me it might be coming over the top of a hill and seeing the sun through the trees, laying in bed and being utterly absorbed into the beauty of a song, or looking out in wonder over a city at night. You spoke of ‘epiphanies’ in your book, but these are not quite the same. I can only describe it as a powerful welling up of nondescript positive emotion, often taking me by surprise. I am very curious if you ever feel anything that can relate to that. Or, if you say that you can ‘tune in’ to certain emotions, maybe you can create it intentionally? For me, these moments make the downfalls of empathic life completely worth it.

I know you must be a very busy woman, but I would be very curious as to whether you could relate to these moments of ‘realness’ for lack of a better term.

M.E.:

I have moments when I feel, what I call "raw", as if more of me is exposed -- like a wire stripped of its insulation. I'm not sure if that is similar. I also have moments of ecstasy that give me shivers, like beautiful music or art. There are also moments of intense connection that I feel with people, e.g. if I have seduced them. Do these sound like what you're describing?

Reader:

Yes, that actually doesn't sound too far off. It sounds like maybe your experiences are no less intense, but maybe a bit less specific in terms of a clearly defined emotion? Maybe your brain still produces these emotions in response to your experiences, but the deficit is in the connection between your emotional centers and your frontal cortex. Anyways, thanks so much for responding, and feel free to use whatever you like on your blog! I would be honored.

Why I started the blog, and why I continue

The percentage of my personality that my disorder represents is not actually that significant (does anyone walk around thinking "I'm a sociopath" besides fictional character Dexter?). Maybe it's 15%? What do I mean by that? Well, if I was a jigsaw puzzle, let's say, and the puzzle was a small deserted island, the kind that you always see in political style cartoons with two guys stranded on a desert island with a lone palm tree, then maybe the sociopathy is the lone palm tree. It is not the defining feature of the puzzle, although it is part of the defining feature. And how many pieces are devoted to the palm tree? Maybe about 15%. Some of those pieces are completely palm tree, and some of those pieces are mainly island and just a little bit of palm tree, or mostly sky and just a small sliver of palm frond. Add up all those percentages of palm tree against the total picture, though, and you have approximately 15% palm tree.

When I write on this particular blog I almost always write about the palm tree. Sometimes the piece is entirely palm tree. Sometimes there is just a sliver of palm tree, mostly something else. And every one in a while I will talk about the island and sky, inasmuch as I think they inform qualities about the palm tree.

Taking the analogy just a little further, if I think of my life as the process of assembling this jigsaw puzzle (understanding who I am), I tend to focus on one area until I reach an impasse, then focus on another. Or I focus one one part until another part compels my attention. When I first started this blog, I had just been fired from a very high profile and lucrative job for behavior that I believe stems from my more sociopathic characteristics. I had just had several relationships end on very poor terms, isolating me from many more sub relationships. I was having problems with my family, with my personal life, my work life had just gone to hell. I started looking for answers, so became re-interested in a casual diagnosis a friend had made of me years before as a sociopath. As I started doing some browsing of what was out there in terms of basic information, I was appalled that all of it reeked of a particular bias. I saw an opportunity for offering a different perspective that coincided with my own interests at the time, so I started the blog.

This was the not the only time of deep self-introspection for me. My first prolonged one was at University the first time my life really went completely to hell. I didn't have the label sociopath at the time to identify with, but after a long period of unflinching honesty and self-analysis I knew that I was a very manipulative, cunning person, who was unable to connect to anyone on more than a superficial level, obsessed with power, and willing to do anything to get ahead, among other things. To the extent that those things were negatively impacting my life, I tried to tame and control them.

The pattern here is this: I am doing fine, great actually, I get carried away and my life goes to hell, I take a step back and look at who I am, I gradually get better until I am doing fine, then great. Right now I am right at the point of doing great. I've had a couple of recent professional coups and all other parts of my life are growing and expanding. I'm less interested in the palm tree because that's not where the action is. Then again, part of me believes that the reason why I am doing so well is that the blog forces me to constantly consider those potentially destructive aspects of my personality -- to not get caught up in the here and now that I lose sight of the big picture. In an effort to stay focused on that, I'm both going to continue to write new material that I find interesting, but will also repost some older posts that I like and think deserve more attention.

Q&A Tomorrow

When the book came out a year ago (by the way, the paperback came out last week), I promised a Q&A that I never got around to doing in the ensuing fallout. I've been thinking about going on a hiatus for the summer or otherwise being less active on this site, or at least maybe trying that out. But before that, I wanted to do another Q&A. So I'm going to be around tomorrow periodically checking the comments section throughout the day and answering questions that people may have.

To get us in the mood, some Q&A I did with a reader recently:

1) You have attributed your ability to see inconsistencies (in belief systems and behaviors) to your sociopathy. Don't you think that may have more to do with your native intelligence than your personality disorder? I, too, score in the 99th percentile on shit, and I often see inconsistencies in political platforms, news reports, stories friends tell me, etc. I'm also about as empath as you can get.

I do think some of it is intelligence, but also when I used to hang around very smart law professors all of the time, it was also apparent that my different worldview made me see certain things that they wouldn't unless pointed out to them and vice versa.

2) I frequent a few recovery sites for people who have been involved with psychopaths. People often post what "their" psychopaths have said. What struck me about most psychopath apologies is that they often allude to shared blame. Something like: "I'm sorry things turned out the way they did", not "I'm sorry I hurt you." My ex was very fond of citing "miscommunication" as the cause for all of his interpersonal problems, for example. 

It seems to me that the perfect manipulation would be an imitation of a sincere apology, and sincere apologies involve taking responsibility for one's actions. If you really wanted to manipulate someone into sleeping with you again, giving you money, etc., you would say something like, "I take full responsibility for what I did. It was wrong. You didn't deserve that." And then proceed to ask for what you really want. 

Why wouldn't sociopaths imitate a sincere apology? Why is there always a hint of self-justification, which weakens the manipulation significantly?

In fact, why would any truly amoral antisocial person feel the need to justify themselves or their existence? Presumably a desire for self-justification falls on a spectrum, just like anything else. I suppose sociopaths' unwillingness to claim responsibility for their destruction of others reflects their belief that victims are complicit in their destruction. But why wouldn't they even seem to take responsibility

I think the sociopaths are usually being a little sincere in their apologies when they're mixed like that. Sometimes I give insincere apologies, and you're right, they are profuse and over the top and I accept all blame.

3) On the topic of self-justification, you mentioned recently that sociopaths' ruination of others can paradoxically improve their targets. This sounds like disordered thinking to me.

Destroying victims' boundaries and making them feel bad about who they are can make them realize their own worth and, to a lesser extent, rectify their flaws. Sure. But you can achieve the same goal by being kind to someone, becoming their close friend, and then gently suggesting that they improve themselves in a certain way. Sure, it stings a little when a friend tells you that you're not perfect. Once the sting is over, you feel grateful to this friend who helped you understand yourself and improve. It seems to me that there are better, less destructive ways of accomplishing what sociopaths accomplish, and that the ability to "reset" people's character ought not to serve as justification for the widespread destruction.

Targets have told me that, but I do agree it seems a bit of a paradox. Maybe see this.

4) Would you say that the following statements reflect how many sociopaths think?

You have said that sociopaths often see empaths as hypocrites. Empaths have moral codes but do not always follow them, and sometimes (often?) the codes themselves are flawed. For their inconsistencies, empaths deserve to be violated in every possible way - physically, emotionally, and mentally. (You may not feel that way, but that is certainly how my mega-psycho ex thinks.)

This, to me, exemplifies disordered thinking. It also amounts to what is, essentially, a stringent moral code - a strange circumstance for a group of people who call themselves "amoral".
This morality places consistency as the highest good and hypocrisy (really, imperfection) as deserving of severe punishment. (The term "punishment" implies morality, as well. If there really is no good or evil, then there ought to be no justice.)

Consistency is not the highest virtue. You can't say, "I am superior because I am consistently a hedonistic nihilist." One commenter on your blog suggested that, instead of framing this discussion in terms of absolute right and absolute wrong, we should view society as an organism and the actions of individuals as damaging or strengthening that organism. Empaths overall do way more to strengthen the organism. Sociopaths, intentionally or unintentionally, leave severe emotional damage wherever they go. And you yourself have admitted that sociopaths need society. They need the organism, but they often try to justify their damage to its members by citing empaths' "hypocrisy".

Isn't it better to be a "good" person most of the time than a "bad" person all of the time? And by "good", I mean good for something - for society. You yourself have said that sociopaths can do "pro-social" things (your blog being a prime example). If sociopaths think that society's norms are bullshit, who are they to mete out punishment according to their own simplistic sense of right and wrong?

I don't think sociopaths need to see empaths as hypocrites to justify their treatment of them. They were going to treat them that way no matter what, but hey, also they noticed that they're hypocrites. They're basically unrelated in the sociopath's mind, although it makes for good deflection when the sociopath is confronted about his behavior.

5) You talk extensively about your flexible sense of self, yet your writing voice is very consistent. You always sound like "you". How is this possible?

Also, you frequently associate empaths' strong sense of self with "Harry Potter" syndrome. The fascinating thing is that "sense of self" is actually a totally misleading phrase. I don't really have a strong sense of who I am. In fact, my association with a psychopath revealed myself to me in ways I had not anticipated. I cannot act, for example, to save my soul. I hate lying; it makes me uncomfortable. This is a good thing because I can't lie, either. Any time I try to act out of character, it is utterly unconvincing, but at the same time, I'm not really sure what my character looks like. I'm not looking for any sort of external validation of my self (a la Harry Potter) because I'm not really sure who I am or even how I appear to other people. What I'm trying to say here is that I have a self, not a sense of self.  That's why the Harry Potter thing doesn't really ring true, from my perspective.

I feel like I am me the same way that an operating system is a distinct entity. I have an iphone. It operates in particular ways. But I am not that particular model of iphone or version of the operating system. I'm not what I look like or act like in a particular moment. I don't identify with any of my output, only the way I think and process things.

You're not sure of who you are, but wouldn't it be great if someone came up to you and told you exactly who you were? Gave you an identity and said, without a doubt this is you and what you should be doing?

Also, about whether sociopaths are a net gain or loss to society.