I.
Profile of Patric Gagne, sociopath. Caucasian, 48, married, two children, dirty blonde hair. Occupation: therapist, writer. What makes one a sociopath?
Traits may include lack of remorse, deceitfulness and a disregard for the feelings of others as well as right and wrong.
Sounds pretty bad.
But that only tells part of the story. The part that’s missing is you can be a sociopath and have a healthy relationship. You can be a sociopath and be educated. That’s a very uncomfortable reality for some people. People want to believe that all sociopaths are monsters and that all monsters are easy to spot.
I’m relieved sociopaths can still get degrees. What’s the subjective experience like?
Just because I don’t care about someone else’s pain, so to speak, doesn’t mean I want to cause more of it. I enjoy living in this society. I understand that there are rules. I choose to follow those rules because I understand the benefits of this world, this house where I get to live, this relationship I get to have. That is different from people who follow the rules because they have to, they should, they want to be a good person. None of those apply to me. I want to live in a world where things function properly. If I create messes, my life will become messy. I think [transgression] feels good because it feels free. To do something bad, it’s like, I don’t give a [expletive]. The consequences — be it internal guilt or getting thrown in jail — happen after. In this moment, I’m going to do this because it feels [expletive] great to just not care. That is what the sociopath experience is almost all the time.
II.
Lately I keep hearing about ethically questionable things my acquaintances do. Examples:
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Driving in the bus lane to beat traffic.
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Buying 5 TVs to take advantage of a sale, then returning four of them immediately.
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Buying furniture from IKEA, using it, then returning it before the 180 day policy expires.
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Using the carpool lane when driving alone.
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Avoiding road tolls with illicit methods.
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Raiding the office snack room and hoarding the best snacks for themselves, or even stocking their pantry at home.
I’m not going to browbeat these people to get them to admit that this stuff is wrong and antisocial. It’s not exactly the crime of the century. Depending on how well I know the person, sometimes I gently ask them why they think this is acceptable. The responses I get range from non-sequitur rationalizations (“I overpaid my taxes, why should I pay bridge tolls?”) to rules-lawyering (“if it’s not forbidden, why shouldn’t I?”) to blackpills (“it’s like India here, every man for himself”) to blank stares and changes of topic.
The people I’m talking about are high functioning. They have careers, relationships, educations. They make good money. The sociopath at least understands that there are rules that have to be followed, but Gagne’s understanding of “neurotypicals” doesn’t match what I see (maybe I don’t know enough affluent white female liberals?). I see people who see no connection at all between rules and benefits. I see people who don’t feel that they have to follow the rules, or even that being a good person entails following the rules. I see people who will do just about anything that gets them ahead if they can’t immediately see the harm. The notion that actions may have diffuse costs, that abusing policies makes things worse for people who follow the rules, that your coworkers might want to eat those snacks, is the furthest thing from their mind. They view these considerations with something between ignorance and contempt - you’re just a sucker if you aren’t looking out for #1.
But sociopaths use it out of necessity, and that’s a really important distinction. My decision to mask [adopting prosocial mannerisms] is not because I have some dark ulterior motive. It’s because you guys are interesting to me. Neurotypical emotions are so colorful and complex. In order for me to engage with you, you have to feel comfortable with me. In order for you to feel comfortable with me, I have to mask. I find that people are unnerved by me when I’m not masking… The bottom line is that I want you to feel comfortable, so I engage. I smile. I mirror. It’s not nefarious; it’s necessary.
Has it always been this way? I am not sure. I think that things have gotten worse. It seems that more people are adopting the perspective that they should just loot all the value they can out of the systems around them, systems that aren’t perfect (why do we W-2 employees need to jump through these tax hoops again?) but make our way of life possible. Burning trust and social capital by mainlining the remorseless sociopathic experience is not long-term sustainable. The people are the same as they used to be, but the mask is slipping, whether that means there’s more of this behavior or people feel emboldened to speak out about it.
III.
Borges wrote a meta-fictional review of a book about how a knave got a glimpse of preternatural goodness in some scum-of-the-earth son-of-a-bitch and realized that he must have witnessed a glimpse, a shard of a great man.
All at once - with the miraculous consternation of Robinson Crusoe faced with the human footprint in the sand - he perceives some mitigation in this infamy: a tenderness, an exaltation, a silence in one of the abhorrent men. "It was asif a more complex interlocutor had joined the dialogue." He knows that the vile man conversing with him is incapable of this momentaneous decorum; from this fact he concludes that the other, for the moment, is the reflection of a friend, or of the friend of a friend. Rethinking the problem he arrives at a mysterious conviction:some place in the world there is a man from whom this clarity emanates; some place in the world there is a man who is this clarity. The student resolves to dedicate his life to finding him.
Even a man of the ‘vilest class’ can reflect a kind of holiness. Isn’t it possible that the mild-mannered white collar transgressors around me are reflecting a kind of damnation? Did these small-time bastards pick up their tendencies from some glancing contact, a ‘faint trace’ of a scowl or word in someone more pathological?
Gagne again:
I think, inherently, neurotypicals are fascinated by sociopathy because it’s a relatable disorder. Everybody has that darkness in them. Everybody has those thoughts that they shoo away because of guilt. If more conversations between neurotypical and so-called neurodivergents were to occur, it would benefit both… I was sitting across from a man at a dinner party — this was like two years ago — and my diagnosis came up, and 30 seconds afterward he said, “You know, I have thoughts of killing my wife a lot.” Not to normalize that, but I was like, Tell me about that. And he goes: “I’ve really thought about it. I’ve reached out to people about hiring somebody to kill her.”
“The line separating good and evil passes… through every human heart.” There has to be a way to beat back the darkness and grow the ‘bridgehead of good.’ To refuse to reflect the damned darkness of the guiltless sociopathic id, in ways big and small.
But as for myself, with no clear villains to tilt with, perhaps the best I can do is to keep my mouth shut. Borges has the last word:
After rereading, I am apprehensive lest I have not sufficiently underlined the book's virtues. It contains some very civilized expressions: for example, a certain argument in the nineteenth chapter in which one feels a presentiment that one of the antagonistsis a friend of Al-Mu'tasim when he will not refute the sophisms of his opponent "so as not to be right in a triumphal fashion."
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Notes -
Some of your examples only negatively affect the very wealthy, and so are morally permissible in Western thought, both in folklore (Robin Hood) and in religion (parable of the unjust steward).
A key difference between sociopaths and the petty rule violator is that a sociopath may betray you even if you’re in a genuine community with him. Americans don’t belong to a community of those who use highways, they only share an economy, and this only occasionally, and the highway is also shared with his class enemies. What’s more, there’s uncertainty about what is law and what is norm: perhaps in his community it is considered normative to drive in the bus lane, it just happens to be against the law. And we obviously lack the pride and homogenity of the Japanese, which enables them to turn conformity into a civic virtue.
The question becomes difficult. How do you get a rag-tag group of stressed humans to obey petty rules under the threat of rare, intermittent monetary fines? Or, how do you get them to care about absolute strangers so much that they obey small rules? I am not sure if you can. Humans are not designed to do that, our sphere of identification and sympathy is not designed to spread to absolutely everyone.
I don't think any of my examples affect only the very rich.
This proves too much, littering while driving would be beyond the pale even among this group (even though it also just beshits the highway for others). At the same time, stealing snacks from the break room affects not just your coworkers writ large but the people you see every day. If that's not a community I don't know what to tell you.
The TV and IKEA examples only affect the pocket of the owners and investors, who make a lot of money. The employees are unaffected. I would argue that road tolls, while not affecting only the wealthy, are immoral, and that the costs should be taken from the wealthy owners and investors of corporations/cities whose goods are being trucked on the roads.
But nature is valued itself as something innocent and fragile. Literring is bad because it harms nature. Nature is a totally different cognitive space from social contract kind of stuff. It has a semi-divine status in the American imagination (rightfully).
These are white collar people, right? The employees should file a complaint to the multimillionaire C-Suite that they want more snacks. I agree that for a small business this would be pretty immoral. But the break room is also used by just random people you will never meet who work at the company, right?
Until the return policy is nerfed because you can't make money with shit like this, or the prices are increased to compensate.
In fact it is not a road toll but a single toll lane on a road, so it's even more indefensible. Of course, the corporations pay a great deal of tax despite accounting for a small portion of road congestion.
We're not talking about half dome, we're talking about a ten lane megafreeway. Nature has nothing to do with it.
The demand for snacks is effectively infinite. Anything that can't be eaten can be taken home, given to friends, etc.
There's a break room on every floor and there's not that many people per floor. I know most of the people on my floor personally or by reputation.
Prices can’t increase more than a consumer is willing to pay, and return policies have always had profit in mind (unless there’s a law / regulation). If you’re telling me that consumers would be willing to pay at a higher point, then it would be priced at that already. If you’re telling me that the price would need to rise as otherwise the business would go bankrupt, that’s disproven by the huge investor/corporate profits which would suffer before bankruptcy. If you’re telling me that every business would increase their price-per-TV in unison in order to maximize corporate profit rather than competing over lowering prices, then that’s a good reason to steal from the businesses. Whether GameStop is raking in the profits by being the foremost video game retailer, or whether they are a tiny retailer with hardly any profit at all due to online purchases, the consumer is paying essentially the same for essentially the same service. The difference is simply that the leadership once made a lot of money, and now they don’t — the service is identical. And their return policy has always sucked, because they can get away with it. Let us let the consumer get away with things too!
Road wear is why we have tolls, that’s largely caused by trucking and next by employees going to work. Surely the party which reaps the resources from both of these should be the party paying for the road wear. It would be pretty silly if an entry employer had to pay the same for road wear as the CEO of Amazon, when the CEO reaps the most profit of the economic economy which results in road wear
Nature, uh, finds a way. Like wind. I can say at least for myself, I am literally okay with thievery but would never think about leaving a cigarette butt anywhere outside, even on a city street. For me at least, it’s the sanctity of nature. I can’t speak for others, so maybe you’re right that they have a different motive
The employees should form some sort of demand organization for the implementation of receiving tokens for their labor, which can be redeemed for food items, and perhaps for other items too. They can then decide amongst themselves the proper balance of corporate pay to token maximization, by electing or bargaining with the leadership of the company. Given that the employees are motivated by token maximization themselves, this would naturally lead to a company which profit-maximizes without sacrificizing any employee benefit/quality of life / tokens. Until such a day, I do believe that the employees should be stealing snacks, even hoarding them, and staplers and other stationary on occasion too.
I would consider it immoral then to steal snacks from them, then, yes
I'm telling you that the market price of a TV includes the costs of making and selling the TV. If you increase the costs of selling the TV, perhaps by increasing the return rate by 10x, prices indeed will rise. It's bizarre to use this as justification for theft, unless you think that for some reason TVs should be sold below cost.
The goal of the toll lanes (as stated by the state DoT) is to reduce congestion.
Yeah, it'll be real great when instead of free snacks you have to put your 'demand token' (aka dollar) into the vending machine to get a bag of chips. This is exactly the bizarre mental gymnastics I'm talking about in this post - selfishly hoarding the free snacks is not a good thing, no matter how many paragraphs are written in justification.
Forgot to reply to this, but this is false:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-occupancy_toll_lane
It's not false.
https://dot.ca.gov/programs/traffic-operations/hov
I'm not interested in arguing about whether or not they achieve this goal. The point is that they have nothing to do with road wear and griping about Jeff bezos and his 18 wheelers is a non-sequitur.
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If you’re thinking something like, “BestBuy competes with Walmart over lowered TV prices, when both of these companies face theft they will be forced to increase prices in proportion to the theft; the price of TVs is already as low as it can be, so theft causes an increase in prices”. But I don’t think this is true. If we had a real competition between BestBuy and Walmart, we wouldn’t see as much profit as we see going to the top. It would be a race to the bottom for both prices and C-Suite/Investor profit. I think these companies actually have pseudo-monopolies in their locations, because consumers are unwilling to travel very far for purchases or to spend a lot of mental energy doing cost-saving arithmetic. This is different from your local bodega and coffee shop where a person can walk down the street to a better competitor and where the daily cost of items are more salient.
It’s more likely to me that the cost for TVs is set according to whatever price the consumer will not grumble over, rather than some magical “best possible price”. The price right now is fixed at “as high as possible for the consumer to not decide against buying a TV”. If this is true, theft actually can’t increase prices, because the consumer will opt against buying a TV if it is any higher. If they attempt to increase prices, they would simply lose profit, because the American consumer can just stick to his old TV, or stick to his computer.
If you’re saying, “Walmart will decide against doing business if its profits suffer too much”, I would again point at GameStop as evidence that this isn’t so. Or just the fact that, provided you can make more than the median wage selling TVs, someone will be out there selling TVs.
So, the consumer stealing from BestBuy is a lot like a free peasant stealing from his lord who has a monopoly over his land. The consumer can’t be assed to travel very far because he’s stressed and has too many commitments, just like the peasant can’t be assed to travel hundreds of miles by foot to possibly get a better deal with his peasantry.
How do you know how much profit "should" go to the top? If Walmart fired its CEO, it could cut prices by 0.003%, or pay out 0.008 pennies per share to each shareholder. That would have almost no impact on prices or returns, but having a shitty CEO would assuredly tank the business.
It's already current year plus nine, nobody is going to Walmart to buy a TV irl. People are buying them online (my return abusing friend included). I also just checked and there's 6 best buys and 7 Walmarts within 20 miles of my house. So much for a monopoly.
Best buy's profit margin is a measly 7%. I can get better profits parking money in an index fund. The market for TVs is extremely competitive and the price has accordingly fallen many multiples while quality is unbelievably better than before. You are making an evidence-free assertion.
You haven't provided a single shred of evidence for this, but I am getting the feeling that it's really more of a question of vibes and further engagement is unlikely to be productive.
Let me just say that yes, you can rationalize just about anything, and I mentioned several rationalizations that people have offered me in the OP. You are always the easiest person to fool, and you should be very cautious about conclusions which just happen to benefit your pocketbook and pretend that there's no knock-on effects.
The top is not just CEO pay, it’s the total C-Suite pay and investor pay. Walmart is actually not as egregious in its CEO pay package. In 2019 at least, more people bought TVs in store than online. See here.
That’s huge. That’s 7.5 billion. What is failing in our hypothetically competitive economic system where a middle man — who simply takes technology from Korea and shows it to people in America — can generate 7.5 billion in profit? With its founder being worth more than 2 billion? Are you telling me that if most of that money went to consumers or employees, Best Buy would do a worse job? I don’t think so.
The reason Best Buy can turn so much profit is the same reason McDonald’s can increase prices and turn profit, or Coca Cola can be so profitable when there are cheaper alternatives: the idea of a rational consumer with infinite time / willpower / reasoning is a myth. The consumer will go to Best Buy and be sapped into a bad deal, giving Best Buy more money. Or they will google a list of top TVs which the Best Buy / Samsung marketing have manipulated. The store design and location will be decided by PhDs in consumer psychology to maximize the chance of consumer irrationality. The Amazon top lists will be manipulated.
It’s silly but also dangerous to believe on faith that a consumer is (or even can) make a rational purchasing decision for something like a TV. The majority of people do not have the knowledge to know whether they are making the most efficient economic choice. And this is how large corporations can produce so much profit, by taking advantage of the insane informational asymmetry at play. (Consider Apple earphones for a moment.) Best Buy knows everything about consumer behavior and TVs; the consumer knows nothing about his own behavioral biases or TVs. This is not a fight fair, someone will walk away with a better deal. So why would you reward such antisocial behavior? I say let your friends steal as much as they want from Best Buy, the top do not deserve the money.
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