Do Sociopaths Know

Do sociopaths know they’re sociopaths?

Probably not.

It’s a mysterious condition to contemplate. A mysterious state of mind. I would think that some people with this condition would have the curiosity and intelligence to recognize that they fit the definition. And if so, what idoes it make them feel? Would it be like a realization that you lack what it takes to enjoy collecting old shirt buttons? in other words — “yeah, okay, so?” Or would it be like a realization that most people experience 10 kinds of orgasms, but you can only experience one? Even then, would the person be inclined to just snort and shake their head, convinced that 24 people out of 25 are fooling themselves?

I think an intelligent sociopath must know he is different from other people, must know that life is an uphill battle for him because he has to fake so much, has to be a good observer of behavior so that he can imitate a certain amount of normalcy. If so, what is his attitude about that? Does he feel that he is handicapped? Does he think that most people are fools?

Read The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout. The title sold me and also made me stare at my neighbors a lot. Now, even without the book, they think I may be a sociopath. 

LOL. I’m curious about this subject, but maybe too lazy to read a book about it. So the questions just keep piling up. I don’t expect you guys to answer all of them. I expect you to divide them up, and get me my answers that way.

What emotions do these people feel? Are they ever people of high principle, sincere idealism? What are the similarities and differences between this and autism, and is there some overlap in the physical causes?

What are some things, in addition to the joy of other people, that they are numb to?

What explains the fact that many of them (from what I hear) are unusually “charming” — is it one of those coping-driven overcompensations that develop alongside a physical handicap, like upper body strength in a person whose legs don’t work, or sonar-like hearing in a blind person? Is it just want happens when a person isn’t hampered by a fear of social consequences — sort of a license to thrill?

Do they experience raw pleasure from things, “love” them sheerly for the sensations and mental experience they cause (music, food, driving a car, hiking, traveling, awesome sunsets, delightful weather) or do they only have one kind of pleasure: that of a cat tormenting a mouse?

When they watch movies or read novels, is it for them like watching a wildlife documentary or reading a hunting guide or farming guide — in other words, study material, to make them better at coping with and/or making use of people?

Do sociopaths get embarrassed? Do they anthropomorphize? Are they sociopathic from birth? Are there drugs (legal or otherwise) that can make a person non-sociopathic, even for a minute?

Are there any cases of sociopaths becoming normal — e.g. some sort of neurological accident that Oliver Sachs might write about: someone got shot in the head with a nail gun, and when they woke up, all the nurses had a new kind of face, one that wasn’t just a complicated arrangement of shapes and wrinkles to decipher, but faces that radiated something into his body, thoughts almost, as if everyone was suddenly a ventriloquist, throwing their voices into his mind and talking to him from inside himself...

And I wonder if being a sociopath means the person has numbed reception across the whole spectrum of human experience, or just certain parts of it. We’re mammals, social creatures: I can fancy that everything we take an interest in or feel is driven by and sweetened (or soured) by the response of an imaginary audience floating around us, watching us every second, very pleased when we’re good, very disappointed when we’re not. A geologist picking through rocks in the coldest, most barren landscape of the North is enjoying his work partly because he knows that audience is smiling. He doesn’t think of the audience every minute, but every time he does think of it, he knows it’s been in attendance continuously since the last time he gave it a thought.

Does a psychopath have that audience? If not, does he ever have what the rest of us call pleasure, or does he only have something like private gloating? Or does he have a cloud of interested beings around him, but one with different standards?

When he does something sneaky, cruel, dishonest, bloody, maybe they warm his insides with laughter. When he misses an opportunity to hurt someone, maybe they yell names at him. When he goes through a day merely doing his job well, merely being someone no one has a complaint about, merely pulling a person back from being hit by a bus — maybe his audience just yawns. I guess this would be a way of saying the sociopath has a conscience, but a conscience almost from another world.

My understanding is that some do adapt to try and look ‘normal’. They may notice the difference but believe they are superior and view others with contempt. Any feelings at all are directed at self. There is no regard or feeling for others. They may know you have feelings but simply don’t care or can’t care. It’s really bizarre and can’t be explained to non-sociopaths. Hannah Arendt talked about her encounter with it at the Eichmann trial in Banality of Evil. Into That Darkness looks at it in Hans Stangel’s life and Albert Speer, Hitler’s director of Armaments may have been one who knew he was. He reflected on it for years in Spandau and upon release wrote about it in his autobiography. Gitta Sereny did a thorough study on him. Upon release in old age he cheated on the wife who stood by him for decades and played the journalists who interviewed him and maybe even his publishers and agents. Brilliant and an intellectual, and even likable, he didn’t care.

Do you think the Holocaust, Pol Pot, Rwanda, ISIS, Vlad the Impaler, The Golden Horde, etc. can be explained as a harmonic convergence of sociopaths? If one in 25 is close to correct, that would be enough if they were all in the right positions.

Yeah, it makes sense that regimes like those would be attract the worst and brightest. Most governments probably attract and welcome that kind, though maybe not the very worst of the worst. I think people with this condition must be good to have in certain jobs, at certain times, especially when there’s enough civlization and law and public exposure and so forth to keep them in check. 

Not to be facetious, but I’m sure we have a lot of people in our government who are just as ready to perpetrate a holocaust as the people who stepped up to the plate and did it under Hitler. It just stands to reason that the percentages of people of this type would be the same from country to country, decade to decade. Given the right conditions, those people would do their part to bring about unthinkable things in the name of patriotism, or the American Dream, or motherhood, or whatever its says on the banners, and not mind doing it, or thinking about it.

They all think they’re as normal as anyone else.

I believe that would be basically true for most of them, since most people period don’t seem to do much self-reflection. But they must notice that they’re at least a little different, and have something they tell themselves about it. Something like, “Other people are such idiots, always worrying about right and wrong...no one cares about other people, they’re all just faking, same as me...most people are inferior fools: practicality and self-interest are what set me above them.”

There’s the saying, “Everyone thinks they’re one of the good guys.” I believe that’s probably true. But a sociopath wouldn’t mean “good” as “someone who cares about other people and tries to help them.” He would mean something like, “someone who knows better than to really care about other people.”

I think they must feel the rest of us are idiots of some kind. They probably feel about us like most people feel about Trekkies — not “what’s wrong with me for not being a Trekkie,” but “what a bunch of loons.”

Have you seen this on YouTube? James James Fallon: Confessions of a Pro-Social Psychopath

Thanks! Fascinating video. This makes the discussion gnarlier. I guess “sociopath” includes a lot of people we would say are “really into their work” or “fun, but not very warm” or “hot tempered” or “full of bullshit” or “really selfish.” IIn other words, people who aren’t our favorite people, but we’re not afraid of them, either.

In James Fallon’s case he has brain aberrations in two areas typical of sociopaths: 1) under-functioning amygdala [structure that mediates fear response] & 2) lower foward frontal lobe, above eye sockets, where moral & ethical processing occur. For some reason, these did not result in the worse case scenario effect in Fallon. He stated in another article that he was very well loved as a child & had a lot of structure in his life, perhaps the environmental mitigating factors that saved him. The psychological diagnostic label for a true sociopath is antisocial personality disorder.

I went on to read several interviews with James Fallon. He says that he has a large amount of “cognitive empathy” but very little “emotional empathy” — that he’s good at knowing what people feel, but it doesn’t arouse similar feelings in him. Kathy, he does talk about sociopathy between a spectrum. And like Jim says, he believes he was saved from being dangerous to society, and probably from jail as a teenager, by having a very loving family in the crucial first three years of his life. 

He seems to be someone who is sincerely interested in doing good for humanity, but it’s not clear to me that he’s doing it for people. He says several times that being a good person is “the best game” and a way of competing with himself. I admire his honesty, this gift of self-revelation he is giving us. But I don’t think I’d like him. In one interview, a close friend has just died, and the reporter suggests (but isn’t perfectly clear on this point) that Fallon had no emotions about it. Fallon describes himself as someone who is super-competitive even in board games with his children. As someone who has always loved pranking people — making them uncomfortable, making them look foolish. He talks about tricking his brother into joining him on an expedition that could have gotten his brother killed, but not coming clean about the danger until afterwards, and knowing it was inconsiderate of him to have done such a thing. But still without actually feeling bad about it! He says he is very good at flattering people into doing things for him, and though it is something he has challenged himself to stop doing, he doesn’t give any indication that, even now, it bothers him to do it.

Even this guy, a very gregarious and entertaining guy whose life’s work is making the world better for others — even he gives me the chills. He’s a person who doesn’t care when other people feel bad. He knows that they feel bad, he sometimes tries to help them, but he still never cares. I’m shifting my thinking about people like this. I don’t want to just get the chills and call them evil. I think they’re handicapped. Sometimes wonderful contributors to the world as a direct result of that handicap — they can have nerves of steel, they can make the hard choices no one else will, they can be the life of the party, they can have enormous drive to get things done. But they’re living without a heart. That’s make them dangerous, but it also makes them someone with a medical problem.

Well said, in fact, perfectly said, Tom. Behavior management is the best you can hope for with those who truly lack empathy & remorse, and behavior management will only occur if the antisocial personality sees that it’s in his/ her (usually him, statistically) interest. Antisocials & pathological narcissists are the scariest of the disorders. Without psychosis, they are not always easy to identify.

I want to read up next on narcissism. If we summed up a sociopath as someone with no heart, how would you sum up a narcissist?

All sociopaths are narcissists, but not the other way around. A narcissist is always the center of attention, not so sociopaths, if being out of the spotlight is in the sociopath’s interest. Sociopaths can be charming & make it all about you, if that’s in their interest for the moment; narcissists can never make it not about them. Sociopaths are the more cunning & calculating by comparison, narcissists are more blatant.

Thanks. That’ll be my working definition.

Have you worked with people who have these conditions? I wonder what it is like to talk with someone like this when the subject is specifically about their lack of feeling for other people. Do they deny it? Justify it? Laugh it off? Get angry? 

Does it ever make them sad? For example, if someone told me very convincingly that cat urine tastes 20 times as good as the best wine, makes you appear handsome at all times and raises your IQ by 30 points — but only if you are born with a certain gene...if I heard that and believed it, I would be disappointed. I wouldn’t beat myself up for not being born with the cat-urine taste receptor and digestive juices, but I would wish I had been. I wonder if a sociopath, out of sheer self interest and simple logic, ever makes that leap to at least wishing he could care about other people.

I recognize these disorders in my work as a college counselor, but thankfully, I am not a therapist for these types of clinical issues. My counseling work is with the “worried well” for the most part. With the worried well, I do very gratifying work: self-esteem, test anxiety, career counseling, grief, stress management, etc. When I encounter someone in college with borderline, antisocial, or narcissistic personality disorders, I’m in behavior management mode from the outset.