Editor’s note: A reader who identified himself as a sociopath recently posted this comment on the Lovefraud Blog, and sent it to me in an email. I am posting this piece because it provides a good description of how sociopaths view themselves, and explains why they are quite comfortable taking advantage of the rest of us. Be sure to read the question I asked him, and his response, at the end.
We are uniquely gifted
“Sociopath” is a misleading word: it implies a disorder, something wrong and unnatural with the person, and this couldn’t be further from the truth. We, the people you refer to as sociopaths, have nothing wrong with us. We are instead, the uniquely gifted. Our gifts have been mischaracterized and maligned and it’s time someone set the record straight.
What the experts call superficial charm, I call having a natural ability to win friends and influence people. What experts call manipulative and conning, I call an affinity for persuasion based upon an innate ability to pinpoint others personality strengths and weaknesses. What the experts decry as a lack of compassion, I call pragmatism and clarity. What experts call a “problem with authority”, I call embracing personal power and celebrating the independent spirit. What experts call “delusions of grandeur”, I call self confidence and optimism. What experts call “shallow emotional affect,” I call freedom from the tyranny of irrational emotions. And finally, while the experts say that guiltlessness is a disorder (because it is the lack of guilt that separates the sociopath, psychopath and Machiavellian from the general population), I say it is the enhanced ability to do the things that build civilizations and keep societies going, the very things that the guilt afflicted shy away from. It is no coincidence that our lack of guilt so often comes with abnormally high intelligence and charisma.
We are born to lead and many of our traits support this conclusion. We are born knowing this and the rest of you know it when you see us. It is these very traits that make us necessary for the survival and success of the human species, especially since the dawn of civilization. It’s why you elect us, follow us, and often give your very lives by our command. Though we are found disproportionally in prisons we are found with even greater frequency in your governments, your corporations, your military. Who else but someone devoid of conscience could order thousands of soldiers to die, regardless of how noble the cause? Who can fire hundreds of workers to save a company from bankruptcy and then sleep peacefully that night? Who can so elegantly tell the lies that must be told, to protect the very people to whom the lies are told? It takes one of us to make those calls, the calls that the rest of humanity cannot make.
And yet a distressing number of us become the very thing you fear us all to be; criminals and abusers. This creates a cycle of ignorance, as all the “sociopaths” identified by the news are killers or wife-beaters, and so we identify this collection of gifts as evil, as pathological, and thus those of us in our proper roles feel the need to disguise ourselves for fear of being labeled evil. A similar cycle of ignorance has kept homosexuals oppressed for decades; homosexuality has been associated with child molesters and perverts, drug use and disease, and it was called “evil” for this.
We are not evil; you simply do not recognize the “good” ones as the same phenomena. Google “sociopath” and all you find are ways to recover from contact with a sociopath, information advising you to run from relationships with sociopaths, and misinformation that will claim that “sociopaths cannot feel love” or that we “cannot think of others as human beings” or that we are “parasitic”.
It is very distressing to discover, for a child who has always known that he was different, that he is a monster… that he is doomed to live a loveless life and become a criminal, that he will never be able to hold a job or raise a family. Indeed, one must wonder how often do one of us accepts the mischaracterization of our abilities and instincts as things to be repressed and rejected due to ignorance? How often do the young among our frequently demonized minority discover what he is, buys into the paranoid misinformation and simply does what he is expected to do, withholding from society the very qualities it needs and secretly wants to maintain itself and imprisoning himself in a state of confusion and needless pain as a result?
What is the so called sociopath? A sociopath is one of your potential leaders, labeled by the fearful and unreasoning masses as something sick and evil. “Sociopath” is a negative label which only serves to further alienate people who simply need to be allowed to embrace their gifts. Getting rid of this misleading term should be the first step towards fully understanding who we are and the role we play in this world. We are not the embodiment of a pathology. On the contrary; we are instead the uniquely gifted.
Editor’s note: I sent the author this question: “How do you justify lying and deception?” His reply:
Justify? Did you forget the “no guilt, no remorse” part already? We have no need to justify the lying, as we don’t see anything inherently wrong with it. Deception is merely a means to an end. Nor is it necessarily malevolent. We simply act in our own self-interest. We know what we want and the easiest way to get it. It’s a gift.
“I’m a complete asshole. It’s just who I am. I’m going to keep lying and cheating and stealing, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love you with all my heart.”
Oh yes! As if the “love” cancels out the “A-hole” aspect.
Clair,
Ah, yes, those pesky boundaries. I know now that his first act of betrayal would have been the last had I had the proper boundaries. “Better Boundaries – Owning and Treasuring Your Life” by Jan Black and Greg Enns is a GREAT read on this topic.
survivor3,
Thank you for the book recommendation. I’m starting to think that boundaries are one of the most important things in life. W/o them, we are mush.
I truly believe that book was the final kick in the pants I needed to turn things around and take control of my life again…..well, maybe in some ways for the first time. We all have to accept responsibility for why we let them take advantage of us to ensure it will never happen again. There are reasons that I was a perfect target for him, and this book made it perfectly clear what those reasons were.
Clair here is an article I wrote on “beware the tyranny of the weak” and it is sort of along this line.
http://www.lovefraud.com/blog/2011/11/25/beware-the-tyranny-of-the-weak/
Oh, yes, we fall for that shiat! Again and again I did, but NOOOOO more! Well, I try not but sometimes stumble, but I’m working on it! One day at a time, that is all we can do.
Thanks Oxy 🙂
I think the spath’s favorite holiday is the Ides of March. How perfect.
Ah yes, “beware the Ides of March” Old Julius should have listened. LOL
I’ve read the original post, but not the thread the followed it. So apologies if I’m just repeating what other people have said.
The LoveFraud blog is a healing place for people who have come out on the losing end of relationships with people who apparently didn’t care about the collateral damage when they pursued their own objectives. As the bearers of collateral damage, we are angry and dealing with a lot personal drama as we try to understand what happened to us and to recover from it.
So in posting this declaration on LoveFraud, this person, if he is intelligent, must have expected the most of the responses would come from people who, justifiably, are angry and suspicious of his motives, not to mention cynical about the “greatness” of the achievements of people like him if they required so many people to be hurt. (After all the cost of what we call civilization was wars driven by greed or intolerance, slave labor that continues today in the form of great masses of people including many in poverty supporting the concentration of wealth among a sort of aristocracy, and an institutionalized lack of compassion that values property rights over human rights.)
But if we put all that aside, and take what he says at face value, I have to admit that a lot of it sounds like what I’ve written about here on LoveFraud as the way that personal empowerment plays out in a life. At times, it is necessary to make the objective more important that the relationship, if we’re ever going to accomplish anything. At times, we do have to stop putting other people’s good ahead of our own, if we’re going to maintain personal integrity. The fact that we are ultimately responsible for ourselves and the product of our lives means that we have to be self-centered and selfish enough to think about what is right for us, and deal with the obstacles in our path.
In fact, what he is describing is pretty much that state of mind and process. And, as it stands, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with it.
However, what is wrong with the writer is what is missing from the self-description, which is the other side of a full-spectrum human. The connectivity.
Where is the interest in or expression of attachment, and its influence on his thinking, goals and behavior? Where is any indication of the capacity to love? Or to be part of something that has more scope, more awareness, more human contributors (peer contributors, not the “little people”), more intrinsic morality or spiritual base, and yes, even more power than he can summon. To what does he answer other than his own pride and ambition?
As some of you may recall, I regard sociopathy as an attachment disorder. And in this sense, he is describing himself as having well-developed strengths in the absence of the ability to create emotional attachments to other people. Attachments force us to develop other skills that are anathema to people who have developed without attachments or with only traumatic attachments. Relationships require a lot of balancing of integrity and compromise. They require authenticity in communications, which is based on internal honesty and a full spectrum of feelings. They require feeling things that are uncomfortable without shutting down and running away. And feeling those feelings, we are also forced to learn how to manage them in terms of how and when we act on them, and also what they teach us about ourselves.
I don’t see any of this in this letter. I just see a guy on a coke-head ride toward the “achievements” that justify the collateral damage, because he and his achievements are more important and sexier and are justified by history books that are written by the winners. And he, naturally, is identifying with the winners. Because it’s a lot more comfortable than taking a good hard look at what his life really looks like, and why he’s acting as a PR agent for sociopaths at Collateral Damage Central when, by the way he describes himself, he should be out commandeering a few thousand poor people to build a pyramid somewhere that needs more civilization.
As a lot of people have written before, we have an advantage in healing from being too far on the relationship-oriented side of the personality spectrum, because we can always become more independent and empowered. It doesn’t often work the other way around. Which means that we have a lot better chance of achieving a full-spectrum personality — one that experiences both the “independent” strengths of vision and the drive to achieve, as well as the connected gifts of the ability to care, love and commit to something larger than ourselves.
This guy is what he is. Great as far as it goes, but if the letter accurately reflects what he is, an over-developed half a person. If he’s managed to be proud of that, good for him. As I’m sure other people have already noted, it doesn’t make him attractive as a friend or lover, boss or guru.
Thank you for dropping by, but we’re actually more interested in ourselves right now.
Also to the writer of that post, if you are aware of what you’re missing in life and want to work on yourself a bit, there’s a book — Humanizing the Narcissistic Style, by Stephen M. Johnson — that might give you some ideas. That fact that you came here at all suggests that you want to engage with the other side of things. If what you said about yourself is true, you’re really not ready for a peer discussion with a “feeler.” But you can earn it with some work, if you choose.
Kathleen
Just love your posts.
STJ
xxx