Thursday, June 11, 2009

Fearmongering called out

Reader D. Birdick shares a pretty charming book review of one of the more alarmist of pop sociopath "literature":
Hey, how goes it?

I came across this review of Martha Stout's book The Sociopath Next Door on Amazon that I thought you might find amusing and even a bit insightful:

Dark Mechanicus JSG "Black Ops Teep"
Welcome to my World!

Yep, many have called me a sociopath in my day. Only one of them, however, got to say something after that, and that was only because the gun jammed.

Ha! Ha! Kidding. Martha Stout has put together this slender little tome, packed with pop science and plenty of white desert-like margins, that sets out to let you know that:

1)Four percent of the population exhibits sociopathic qualities. For the mathematically challenged---that is, pretty much 96% of the population---that means 1 out of 25.

Think about that statistic for a minute.Take an office with 25 people, and chances are Herbie the Courier Guy or Roald (you know, Roald, the guy with glasses and the shaky sweaty hands, the Quiet One. Roald. Sheesh) has invested in some XP-142 Night Vision goggles and a serrated knife, and, um, a GPS device that might lead him to your front door.

At 2 in the morning. Just so we're clear.

2) These sociopath guys, like the Wu-Tang Clan, ain't nothing to mess with. No sir. They can't love. They don't feel emotion. They're Republican. They're corporate chieftains. They ride in the Lear, the Limo, the Maybach. They invented War. They smear cats with napalm, then duct tape them to the underside of your car, right by the rear exhaust, with a tricked-out bic lighter just waiting for ignition.

Sorry, I made that last one up. But you get the general gist of the book.

"Sociopath Next Door" is simply not scholarly, and verges on dangerous. Sociopath is a pop-term, like psycho, like axe-murderer, like boogeyman, El Diablo, or Janet Reno, with about the same level of erudition & exactness. It's jarring to see the term used so callously. Isn't it dangerous to fling terms and profiles, particularly ones as crudely formed and ill-defined as this, in what is essentially piece of pulp pop-science?

"Sociopath" even tries to put together a home-made psycho alarm for the Gentle Reader, the better to ferret out whether weird Mr. Fishbein, the crazy coot who lies next door, lies awake on his bed at nights dressed only in a giant plastic baggy whispering to his AK-47 and plotting your demise. Guess what should set off alarm bells & unleash the hounds?

That's right: someone who asks for pity. For mercy. For clemency. A pity-junky, according to this book, is a ravening sociopath probably plotting to get you fired, pour acid on your car, and eat your firstborn child with some fava beans and a fine chianti.

"Sociopath" also spends some time talking about the supposed human superstition against killing: according to her, people really kill only when supervised by (you guessed it!) a drooling sociopath. The irony here: the author indicates one means by which men make their subjects kill is by de-humanizing the Other: using language to demonize, to turn the Outsider, the Pariah, the Unclean (usually some target ethnic or religious group), into an "It".

It's a fair point.. But skim her book, and simply replace sociopath with any ethnic epithet and take a look at how it reads. Avoid the devilish sociopaths. They don't feel. They're not human. They have cold blood. They're killers. Four percent of the planet is responsible for all the rape, the killing, the torture, and the endless popularity of David Hasselhoff.

Hasn't this book demonized sociopaths as brutally, as unfairly, as unjustly, as anything any Monster of History did with their fave victim class? Where's the Love for the American Psycho? Are we not also Human? Cut* us, do we not bleed? Cut us twice, do we not make you bleed more?

But what "Sociopath" edges away from is the really interesting question here: what if sociopathy is not a malady? What if it's evolution? What if the guy who doesn't get all weepy over "Beaches" is really Humanity New New Thing, the silver-suited astropath who will transcend this miserable mortal coil and help us defeat the Ichthyoid Nasties from Betelgeuse 14?

In the meantime, using the book's 'method' for spotting psychos is about as useful as playing spin the bottle. Intuition, instinct, and your own experience probably cuts the mustard, and you don't have to waste your money on this one-way ticket to Paranoia. Granted, instinct isn't perfect.

But it sure beats fretting over whether your trip next door to borrow the lawnmower should include a can of mace, a sawed-off 12 gauge, and kevlar body armor.

JSG

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Am I a sociopath? (part 6)

My long response:
Sorry I haven't written back sooner. I have been thinking a lot about what you wrote, though. Your story has reminded me so much of my own, and you are hitting this self-recognition point right about the same age that I did. I didn't start hitting my first rough patches in life or in interactions with others until my late teens, early twenties. Like you, whenever I had problems, I would doubt myself, wonder whether maybe things needed to change, maybe I needed to see the world a little differently -- but stuff would calm down and I was pretty Burkean about things -- if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I really had a skewed view of the world, too. I was so self-deceived. I felt like I was two people: I was the person I pretended to be, and I was the person I feared I was. I would snap back and forth between the two like Jekyll and Hyde. When I was trying to be good, by playing by the rules, I would be Jekyll, when things weren't going my way or I felt that other people were "cheating," I turned into Hyde. It's funny, by avoiding who we are as sociopaths, by trying to ignore or avoid our natural tendencies to manipulate and wear masks, we become even more manipulative and masked. We try to be something we are not, try to convince others that we are something we are not, we think our "emotional" reactions to things are justified and act accordingly, when really they are just Jekyll-crazy claims that we take as if they came from honest-Hyde. Do you know what I mean? It's one thing to hear voices telling us to kill people and realize that it is a hallucination, a side effect of a malfunctioning brain. It is quite another thing to hear the voice and think it is god telling us what we need to do. When we pretend that we aren't sociopaths, we take information and perceptions we receive with our sociopath brain and interpret it under what we think are empath rules. What we end up with is a ticking time bomb of self-deception and totally misguided beliefs and irrational behavior -- we literally act like we are crazy.

As a concrete and personal example of what I'm talking about, although I was widely respected and accomplished as a teenager, I never had close friends through my teenage years. After a long period of time in isolation due to my studies, I realized how important human interaction was compared to academic or professional achievements . When I reentered society, I put a huge emphasis on personal relationships, particularly friendship and camaraderie, but in what I see now as a very sterile, selfish way. Because of my natural skills, it was very easy to make friends -- I could be whatever they wanted. Plus I seemed to have everything and, despite that, still wanted to be their friend. People were flattered, but mere months in the friendship I would tire of things being always about them. Their faults would bother me, I would be mean, they would react poorly, things would escalate to the point of me flipping a switch to a total remorseless, vengeance-minded sociopath. I would pour out the wrath, and the other person would never be the same. I felt bad whenever this happened. I tried to figure out what went wrong, but always through my same lenses of self-deception. Kind of like your experience: "I've always reached a point of terror and confusion, and then I'd force everything to the back of my mind and go on trying to be a normal person." I would always go back to the same way of doing things, the same way of thinking. But I was increasingly afraid of myself, what I could do to people -- what I did do to people. I felt out of control. I started warning friends to watch out for me. The pattern continued until I had my own personal version of scorched earth. I retreated from society again and really tried to figure out this time what was happening, who I was. This time I was truly open to any real possibility.

What I came up with at the time was that I was different, I was special. Or perhaps more accurately, I had special powers and abilities, and that made me different. I felt like the proverbial superhero myth, originated with tales of the gods. Like Superman, like Heracles, (like Harry Potter even?), like so many other people born with talents for writing, theatre, dance, music, I seemed normal at first, indistinguishable from anyone else, really. But I wasn't -- I had a gift. That's how I thought of it back then. Just as I would think it was a waste if Bach had never written a note, Dickens had never written a line, etc. etc., I knew I had a responsibility to magnify my talents. Maybe this sounds grandiose or narcissistic, but it helped me to accept myself at the time, helped me reform good habits of dealing with myself and others. And it is true. The world needs people like us. We fulfill a very special function -- we have been evolutionary selected over millenia. And we are rare. That makes us very powerful, and yes, very special. Hating sociopaths is like hating a wildfire. We may seem destructive, but we pave the way for growth and renewal by rebooting the land back to a more pure state.

I would write more, answer questions from your earlier emails, but not now. Soon. But keep me informed. I am very happy for you.

Best,
M.E.

Monday, June 8, 2009

Am I a sociopath? (part 5)

Our questioning reader:
Hello again.

This will be the last message I send unless you see fit to send a reply. I've done a lot of thinking over the past couple days, and I do believe I'm a sociopath. While I often seek out the affection and acceptance of others, I never truly feel anything in return. If they reject me, and I feel hurt, it's only at being denied something I want. I do have a lot of the symptoms associated with aspergers syndrome; however, people with AS do seem to have a sense of right and wrong, along with affection for others. I'm quite indifferent to anything that happens to anyone other than myself, unless it happens to me. Even my family members mean very little to me, and I usually only contact them to alleviate boredom, maintain appearances, or get their help with something.

I think the bulk of my confusion was caused by my desire to be liked and accepted. I wanted to believe that I was a normal human being, not a beast who deserved to be treated poorly. These desires, along with the anxiety I felt, served not only as motivators for my self-deception, but also as a mechanism for denial. Surely, a sociopath wouldn't have such intense reactions to such things.

Reading your site, and quite a few others, has really started to opened my eyes. I'm beginning to see that Sociopaths aren't the heartless creatures portrayed by the media. We do have feelings, even if we aren't capable of genuine affection, empathy, guilt, or remorse. As such, having them doesn't necessarily preclude a person from being a sociopath, nor does being a sociopath mean that we must take pleasure in causing pain for others.

I think I'm starting to realize that it's okay to be what most would consider fake, because my desires and methods are what truly define me, and my masks are a part of that. Whether I've wanted to or not, for the past five years, I've been finding traits I admire in people and consciously adding them to my repertoire, albeit not as successfully as the type of sociopath you see in the movies. It's all I knew how to do. I think my failures are almost certainly due to a conflict between my natural inclinations toward manipulation and my fear of being a subhuman husk.

In the process, I feel I've also been denying myself the core of my potential: sheer tenacity.

Today, I allowed myself to put on masks which I didn't try to believe in myself. It felt so natural. It felt so liberating. It didn't leave me feeling drained like trying to mix assimilated personality traits with constant honesty and identity checks. I feel like I have a lot of catching up to do before I can do this consistently and effectively, but it was such a relief to do it at all. It made me feel at peace.

I'd like to apologize for the confused emails I sent you before. This struggle to understand myself has been raging for several years now, on and off. I've always reached a point of terror and confusion, and then I'd force everything to the back of my mind and go on trying to be a normal person. This time, I've reached what I believe to be a conclusion, and it's largely due to what I've read on your site.

I no longer fear myself.
I don't feel so alone.
I no longer feel defective.

Thank you.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Am I a sociopath? (part 4)

Our questioning reader writes again:
I'm sorry for emailing you so much, but I've never had the opportunity to speak with someone about these things without the fear of being judged. It's been eating at me for about 5 years, ever since I started realizing that there was something wrong with my emotional and moral circuitry. It's been extremely confusing for me, and I'm not sure how to cope with it.

I'm sure it must sound quite crazy.

After reading information at WrongPlanet and on your Site... though I have many of the symptoms of Aspergers, I find myself identifying more readily with things I've read here.

There's a side of me that I've struggled to repress ever since I became aware of it. When I was younger, I used to take pleasure in causing pain to people who I felt had wronged me. Even offending my ego was enough to set me off. I won't get into the things I did, because that's really not important, but what is important was the general lack of remorse I felt. It was always their fault. Their deserved what happened to them. They should have expected it. That kind of thinking.

But I did feel emotions. I just felt whatever emotions I needed to feel at the time. If I needed someone to feel sorry for me, I'd get very sad and start crying. If I needed someone to take my side in something, I'd feel victimized. The feelings were very shallow, but they were there none-the-less.

I don't feel that any more. Ever since I became aware of it, I haven't been able to allow myself to feel much of anything. I suffer terrible social anxiety now, and I never used to. I feel like I have to watch everything I say or do, and it's debilitating. The worst part is I can see how easy it would be to fit in if I could just bring myself to actively put on a show instead of relying on passive defense techniques... but I just can't do it. I'm afraid that I'll lose a part of myself that I won't be able to get back. I'm afraid of being hollow.

I want so badly for this quest to understand myself to stop. To end. Without worrying that I'll completely lose myself. I look in the mirror, and I see someone who is capable of anything.

It's so confusing, and it leads me in so many different directions. It's inconsistent. It makes me feel insane, but only when I'm thinking about myself. I just don't understand why I can't understand my own identity.

Constantly watching myself is debilitating. It's making life very tough. Keeping myself honest is very tough. My natural inclination in any situation is just to say whatever I need to say, but I struggle to speak with absolute honesty. I struggle not to magically become whatever a person needs me to become just to get close to them. When I'm around other people, I almost can't function, because so much of my focus is spent gauging my reactions and scrutinizing my thoughts. Am I being honest? Should I really say this? I usually wind up at a loss for words, or being brutally honest about everything... which makes it hard to have a sense of humor until I can "figure out" someone else's sense of humor.

Again, I apologize for all of this. I'm just hoping you can help me to understand myself, or give me some advice. I honestly don't know what's wrong with me. I just know that something most definitely is, and I'm afraid to settle on anything--especially sociopathy.

Am I a sociopath? (part 3)

I'm going to publish the responses from our questioning reader in roughly the same time sequence that I received them and responded so you can get an idea of his thought process, which may be very familiar to a lot of you:
One other diagnosis I'm considering is Aspergers Syndrome. Everything I said in my last email is true, but I lack the ability to blend in socially that I've read most sociopaths have. I'm oblivious to non-verbal communication, and there are many quirks that set me apart from those you might consider normal. I may simply share the emotional detachment, and a few other traits, with sociopaths.

Honestly, I'm very confused. I would see a professional, but I have a problem with authority figures even though I find myself seeking some kind of validation. I'm not sure I could be honest with doctor, even if I tried--even if I thought I was being honest. As I said, looking into myself isn't something I'm very good at.

About being a sociopath... do you experience no emotions at all? This isn't how life feels to me. It feels to me like my emotions are filtered to the point of being beyond my comprehension, like an engine silently powering all of the logical mechanisms in my personality. To be honest with you, I didn't even recognize them until a phase of drug abuse cracked my ego. Coincidentally, it was the first time I realized I could be wrong and recognized that rationally, I wasn't the smartest person on the planet.

Anyway, that was several years ago, and I've come to recognize the existence of my emotions, but I can't embrace or express them because they're quite terrifying. They're very primitive... very simple and extremely powerful. To me, this doesn't really fit with what I've read about sociopaths. It seems like it may be a) an autism spectrum disorder or b) some kind of developmental disability. I find it hard to believe that a true sociopath could be made aware of his own feelings through drug abuse, though I suppose anything is possible. What's your take on this?

Thank you for your response. I'm glad you took the time to make one.
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