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 -
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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