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 -
I mean, what I'm about to say is going to sound like the same old, same old, "you can't be moral without religion" but this is what happened. Society has burned through its social capital, and now it's down to the last pennies in the bank.
Imagining this in an American context, I think it starts early with things like 'parents looking for ways to game the school system so you get advantages to get ahead', be that nagging and pressuring teachers to give better grades or saying little Jonathan needs accommodation for his educational needs. Later on, conning doctors to give you Ritalin or similar 'for my ADHD' so you can study harder, focus more, get on with college. Plagiarism in college because everyone does it and only a fool or a loser or a chump doesn't buy their essays online and cheat in exams. That easily extends to "take advantage in every single way you can", be it "fuck the rest of these guys, I want these snacks, and if the company is dumb enough to supply free food, I'm loading up on it to cut down my grocery bills" or the rest of the things you say.
The only thing that matters is winning. That's what you learned as a kid from your parents pushing all they could so you could get into the good college to get the good job. Therapy speak tells you that your own authentic self is what is important and that demands and responsibilities and duties are shackles others impose on you. Guilt is a trap, discard it and be free. Abortion for convenience (not to flog that horse, but we've gone from 'the precious miracle of life' to 'embryos are just clumps of cells and if it interferes with my freedom, it dies'). A myriad of ways in which the old values are now judged repressive. Christianity is abusive, unless we remould it to be what we want, and the liberal churches try that in service to the Zeitgeist and still find their numbers dropping.
We're living off the last scraps of the old morality, and when those are gone, we'll have nothing left. Turns out you do need a society-wide, culturally accepted version of "rights and duties and citizenship and civic lessons" because you can't rely on individuals deciding a code of ethics for themselves. One good atheist may indeed not need religion to be moral, but that's an individual.
And I'm not blaming atheism as such, I'm blaming our human nature which wants the easy way always. Victimless crimes. Insurance will pay for it. Megacorporations are fat on profit, they won't lose out by this. Fifteen Clever Hacks To Improve Your Life. A poor guy does it, it's stealing. You do it, you're just being clever.
I'm not saying religion is the solution, either, but it was what we used as a set of values. We scrapped that, but the values evaporated along with it. It took time, but you cannot pull a plant up by the roots and expect it to keep flourishing. We need something, and it has to be widely accepted and even imposed. "Everyone has their own truth" does not work, for a coherent society. Even if we all adopted Rationalist EA Utilitarianism in the morning (something I am not hugely enthused about), it would be something, some framework of "we are not atomised individuals, yes you are the asshole for stealing the good snacks, yeah in fact we do live in a society and we all need each other".
It isn't religion, or a lack of it. It is trust. We are currently in the transitional phase from a generally high trust society to a generally low trust society. If you trust your neighbor or your mayor or your doctor to do right by you then you don't feel like a sucker for doing right by them.
This country wasn't founded by particularly devout leaders and most of the gentry took a much more rational and considered view of religion and the belief systems of various sects. They would have found 1950's southern baptists laughable superstitious bumpkins, not examples of what an ordered and high trust society should look like.
Regarding your injection of abortion politics into this subject. Benjamin Franklin even gave instructions on how to perform an at home abortion in "Every Man his own Doctor: OR, The Poor Planter's Physician" -- "For this Misfortune, you must purge with Highland Flagg, (commonly called Bellyach Root) a Week before you expect to be out of Order; and repeat the same two Days after; the next Morning drink a Quarter of Pint of Pennyroyal Water, or Decoction, with 12 Drops of Spirits of Harts-horn, and as much again at Night, when you go to Bed. Continue this 9 Days running; and after resting 3 Days, go on with it for 9 more."
Go back further and infanticide was common practice, even in religious societies, so we haven't always even thought of babies as precious, let alone a fetus. Crap, do we have to have a funeral for every missed period that doesn't result in a born child if we are true Christians? Most women have more miscarriages than born children.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2175534-women-have-more-miscarriages-than-live-births-over-their-lifetime/
Cultural homogeneity increases trust. So in that respect religion could help be one of many binders, but anything will do; a great civilization wide cause or mission, an actual visible existential threat (maybe), strong traditions, a founding idea or ideal, brainwashing and harsh punishments for deviation, material abundance and space to pursue success without harming your neighbor (perhaps America's greatest strength for the past 400 years). 96% of Pakistan portends to be devout Muslim. Does that seem like a high trust society to you?
Too many people and too few resources is what causes the death of prosocial behavior in a free society, not giving up on worshiping a deity of some type. It is easy to be kind if helping someone doesn't diminish your situation, especially if you can expect reciprocity because you know them, too many people make everyone a stranger. History is littered with the corpses of 1000 religious societies.
As George Costanza would say - "We're living in a society!"
I think there’s another trend that happened alongside the loss of religion and the rise of the low trust society— the decline of communal activity. In the 1940s and 1950s much of a median person’s leisure time was spent with other people. Dancing, bowling, going to the movies or out to lunch with friends, BBQs and cookouts. Kids had pickup sports, board games, movies, and video game arcades. So if you lived in that era you’d be fairly strongly connected to your community by the mere fact that you spend a lot of time with them. Church played a role as well, going to church in person met even more in-person social time.
The other trend is that really, because most people don’t stay in one place for nearly as long (switching jobs and possibly moving), the ability to form long term, trusting relationships is much lower. You don’t settle in and end up in a new place among new people every five years or so. It’s a nomadic existence to some extent, and thus your willingness to build a community, to build trust, to invest in things that the community needs drops. Why pay taxes to the school district when you’ll be gone long before it’s time to send the kids to school? Why get to know your neighbors when you’re moving in a couple of years anyway? Why be anything beyond cordial with your office mates if they’re now competing with you for the next gig? And for that matter, why not cheat like hell? Why not cheat to get yours, it’s not like you actually care about anyone in this area?
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