Confessions of a Sociopath (33 page)

We met at church, of course. I wouldn’t preface him with
intelligent
, as I did my other hopefuls. He does not represent a source of genetic wealth to me, but I have also become less interested in raising a brood of supergeniuses. Even if I started now, I would probably only be able to eke out two or three children anyway, and so it’s not as important. He is clever, though, and handy. He is blue-collar in a middle-class way that seems to have gone extinct sometime in the late 1980s, the start of the diaspora of American manufacturing jobs. His hands are refreshingly rough in mine, in a way that most readers of this book will likely not have ever experienced. I like that we are from different classes, but it might bother him sometimes.

Recently I have been thinking about the proper role of manipulation in a relationship. I have always said that everyone wants to be seduced. With this current relationship, I performed the seduction perfectly. To use a baseball analogy, it’s been my no-hitter. It was not easy and it was not always clear that it would turn out so well. (I almost think that, because I felt no expectations about the relationship, I felt no
performance pressure, so I performed nearly perfectly.) I’d tell you about it, but like a baseball no-hitter, the story of a perfect seduction is actually sort of boring.

But now that I have a relationship that seems like it could last, and I am interested in exploring that option, do I keep seducing him? I have already gotten more real, more true to myself, as the relationship has progressed. I wonder if I should step back in and “fix,” seduce, or manipulate when the situation warrants it. But sometimes it backfires: Some people would feel betrayed if they ever did find out that they were being “managed,” and I tend to respect people less in proportion to the amount that I manipulate them. Mutual understanding, however, usually means the other person is getting better at pleasing me. It is not clear to me how this relationship management is different from what people mean when they say love takes work. Why are my seductions and manipulations in the service of maintaining our good relationship seen as betrayal, but all the marriage therapists and self-help books teach people how to better communicate or get what they want out of a relationship? And yet there is something different to my paramours. Somehow they can just sense it and it bothers them in ways they can’t quite name. And eventually they all decide that there is something a little off about me, and they leave.

Love always finds ways to disappoint. Or I find ways to disappoint love. You can kiss and touch and promise. You can give away all of your Matchbox cars and your metallic pencils, and it’s still not enough. At a point, there is nothing you can do to make someone love you, nothing you can do to make your love better or lasting, but you want it, search for it, and make every effort to sustain it regardless. There was nothing Morgan could do once I was done with her. And there was nothing
I could do with the boy whom I loved in the Midwest, who played with guns, built houses, and barely knew how to use a checkbook. I wanted to marry him and make babies with him. I wanted to sit next to him for as long as I could for the rest of my life. I had little desire to manipulate him, because he gave me everything I wanted without my trying to wrestle it from him. I did not seek power over him, because I had all the power I wanted. I think he loved me. And I had no desire to break his heart. But I think I still might have.

Though my dream of birthing a large brood of supergeniuses is no longer feasible, I still take seriously the Mormon doctrine to multiply and replenish the earth. I like children. They’re still figuring out the world, so they don’t have many expectations of me, and I’m able to behave more authentically around them; I don’t have to work on keeping my mask up the way I do with adults. As much as anyone else, I like the idea of raising little people whom I could influence and shape, though I rarely think of it in terms of producing “good” men and women. There will always be another generation of sociopaths. Children are being born every day with a genetic predisposition to feel no guilt, no remorse, no empathy. And is that really so bad?

There is nothing keeping a young sociopath from being a great, high-achieving, functional member of society. I excel at many things, I have meaningful relationships with people, and I have a very full life. I also suffered a lot to get where I am, and most sociopaths have similar stories; as I was learning to manage my impulses and redirect my desires, I fought
with family, alienated friends, and lost out on opportunities I should have pursued. Luckily for me, my parents managed to do a lot of things right in raising me, and I love them for that. It could have gone very badly, I think, and I appreciate the fact that it didn’t.

To early sociopath researcher James Prichard, originator of the term “moral insanity,” no one was born evil; bad people were born good but cultivated in error in an unending cycle of well-intentioned human folly. And for decades, researchers thought that children were blank slates to be written on, for good or ill. But we’re now aware that these traits are likely encoded into people like me from birth. Knowing that I carry my sociopathy in my genes, I often think about the kind of child that I would have. Like pregnant women who have nightmares of birthing half-goat babies, I dream of nucleotide chains replicating into the future with indifference. My genetic code will ensure that it lives on, sociopathy and all.

I once visited Tulane medical school and their collection of fetuses and embryos, fifty specimens in jars preserved in a milky yellow liquid, both the bodies and the means of their preservation relics from the nineteenth century. Approximately half of the specimens demonstrated normal gestational progression, but the other half represented abnormalities, the diagnoses for which were scrawled on yellowed, crinkly note cards—for example, encephalitis for one large-headed baby or ectrodactyly for one with lobster-claw hands. Babies with no specific diagnosis were labeled, simply, “monster.” Some were double-headed monsters or four-legged monsters, but miscellaneous monsters they were.

John Steinbeck wrote of monsters in his novel
East of Eden:

Steinbeck identifies the sociopath Cathy as such a monster. Of her, he writes:

I remember such inspections as a child—the reluctant attraction, the fascinated repulsion. It’s easy to question some of the parenting choices my own mother and father made, but I believe they took their newborn monster and did the best they could with her. They must have felt this simultaneous love and horror, even while I lay bundled in their arms.

From the cradle to the grave, Cathy’s project was to exploit people, manipulate them and insinuate herself into their lives with the sole purpose of spreading poison, madness, and despair around her. I understand her impulse, and I’ve traveled
on her road from time to time. But something in me has made other choices—love most paramount among them—that I imagine must be owed to my parents.

My genetic heritage has made me question whether or not I should ever have children. I worry that they too will be monsters, regardless of how many legs or heads they will have when they are born. I worry that they will be like me, and I worry even more that they will not be like me. I don’t know how I could be an appropriate parent to an empathetic child, how I would be able to love and respect it. I have one sister, a tearful, hugging woman, whom I regard with a great deal of disdain. What would I do with a child that needed constant emotional suckling? Maybe I would just be distant—almost certainly, I would be bored.

If I had a sociopathic child, though, I think I could do a good job rearing him or her. I believe my parents did a remarkably good job with me, whether they meant to or not. They set up an ongoing competition for love and scarce resources like time and money among their five children, an active game with relatively straightforward, consistent rules and obvious consequences. They had clear favorites. In fact, on many a weekend afternoon, my siblings would stave off boredom by discussing the relative strengths and weaknesses of each sibling and how they corresponded with the affections of our parents, e.g., Dad likes Scott because Scott will surf with him, but ultimately likes Jim better because Jim indulges his flights of fantasy. It was clear to all how Scott could move up in the rankings by, for instance, supporting my dad’s magical thinking—he just didn’t care to do so for whatever reason.

I understood my parents’ favoritism as a clearly defined meritocracy—a consistent system under which I could learn to operate. I bought into the game and actively participated
because I felt like I could play well against my competitor siblings. I did not know all the rules or triggers, but I could learn them, and it was an ongoing challenge because I was not otherwise naturally inclined to care what my parents thought of me. My mother cleaved to the children who showed emotional and musical sensitivities that would encourage and affirm her own, while my father preferred the ones who exhibited innate intelligence sufficient to recognize his intellect but not so great that they questioned his authority. I would always go surfing and skiing with my dad because he would buy me the proper accoutrements—wetsuits, surfboards, surf racks, skis, boots, gloves, poles, and gas for my car—while my sister Kathleen was having to borrow dance shoes and scrounge rides from her friends. My mother always had dreams of our singing together like the Partridge Family, then later upgraded her dreams to a family jazz combo like the Marsalis family. My father always dreamed that we would be like the guitar-playing cool kids he used to envy in high school. I chose to play drums because it fit both of their dreams perfectly, enough that they found the money to buy me a drum set while my sister had to stay home from camp for lack of funds. My parents weren’t consistent in terms of providing emotional or financial support for me and my siblings, but their unremitting self-interest made them very predictable; this single vector dominated their every behavior toward us. Getting what we wanted was only a matter of how to appeal to their particular brands of self-interest.

The worst thing that my parents could have done (for me) was to behave in inconsistent ways, or to show us too much mercy. As a child, all I understood was cause and effect. If I felt like I or my siblings could break the rules and still get away with it by crying on cue, then I would have done that instead of
following them. I was as amenable to conditioning as laboratory rats, learning to push the levers that gave me treats and to stop pushing levers that yielded nothing.

I think that sociopaths (particularly young ones) actually feel happier and thrive better in a world of clearly defined boundaries; when rules are consistently enforced, the child will just start to take them as a given. I certainly did. I think simple cause-and-effect rules with clear, predictable outcomes for compliance or violation encourage the young sociopath to think of life as an interesting puzzle that can be gamed. As long as the young sociopath believes that she can acquire some advantage through skillful planning and execution (and finds some level of success, which I feel is almost a given), she will stay committed to the structure of the game you have set up. It’s why sociopaths can be ruthless businessmen fiercely defending the principles of capitalism.

My favorite teacher had an entirely meritocratic system in which we could opt out of class time. She had replaced a very popular teacher in our sixth-grade pre-algebra class midyear. I didn’t like the popular teacher; he had pandered too much to students and often played favorites. My new teacher initially struggled to gain the trust of the class. Pre-algebra was the most advanced math class for our grade and our school was in a particularly nice part of town, so everyone was very smart and entitled. The smartest and most demanding of the children (including me) complained that she was going too slow. In a creative solution, she started giving short quizzes in the first five minutes of class. If you received a perfect score on the quiz, you got to go outside on the grass patch just outside the classroom door and work on your homework instead of staying inside for the lecture. Every day I would arrive a few minutes before class, glancing through the material for the day
so I could get a perfect score. Out of the eighty school days left in the year, I only had to stay in for a few lectures, typically due to some small arithmetic error. Those were always very difficult days for me, but I also understood that those were the rules and my teacher applied them exactly and without exception. It felt like a game, and it was a game I liked to play because I outplayed my classmates. The fact that sometimes I lost just meant that it was not an easy game. It was challenging enough to keep my attention and consistent enough to keep my trust.

But if I were confronted with a system in which one lever might sometimes get a shock and sometimes get a treat, I would probably choose not to engage with the system at all, stealing my treats from the other rats instead. The worst thing that parents can do is to be inconsistent. It makes the child sociopath think that the game is rigged; in that case, it doesn’t matter what he does, except to the extent that he can out-cheat the cheater (typically the parent). Providing me a system defined by clear incentives, my parents laid out a way for me to gain positive benefits while exercising my sociopathic traits. I didn’t have to rely on the soft intangibles of empathy or emotion to get what I needed.