Confessions of a Sociopath (17 page)

The effect of this belief on my home life cannot be overstated. For the most part positive justice in my family operated as consistently as a gumball machine. If I put money in, I got a gumball. I would just find the highest reward-to-work ratio (to the point where it seemed like a scam) and engage in those activities over and over again, undeterred by boredom. Unlike my siblings, who seemed to have natural preferences for doing one thing over another, I just went where the money was, in a cold cost-benefit determination. For instance, my brother Jim hated to practice the piano, even though he was the most musically talented. To incentivize him, my mother offered to pay us five cents for every time we played through a particular song that we were learning. I had no natural love of music, but would sit at the piano for hours, my fingers mechanically pounding away at the keys while my mind imagined how I would spend the money.

Mormons are equally big on mercy. Every spring and fall we would gather around our television and watch a satellite broadcast of the semiannual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, with speakers chosen from the general officers of the church. One of my
favorite speakers was (now president of the church) Thomas Monson. He would always tell these entertaining stories about widows and orphans and the tender mercies of God. The message was clear—God loves widows and orphans, and he loves me just as much.

What about the sinners? In the Mormon world that isn’t much of a problem. Everyone is a sinner. In fact people talk about it all of the time, in veiled references to “whatever trials and temptations we might have in this life.” I remember looking side to side during church at those references, imagining double lives filled with sordid affairs and violence. I never felt that I was outside the norm for sinning. I still don’t.

Everybody slips up because we’re not perfect; that’s what mercy is for. The problem is when you keep making the same mistakes, which I largely do not. One could say that by repeatedly manipulating, “ruining,” and crushing people, I’m consistently violating the idea of doing unto others as I would have them do unto me. The thing is that I have no problem with others trying to ruin me back. In my mind, it’s just business, not personal. We’re all competing for power. Would I be upset if I had a sandwich shop and someone opened up a sandwich shop across the street? I might be annoyed, but I wouldn’t take it personally. I don’t have hate in my heart for these people. I may wish them ill, but it’s not because I harbor ill will against them. They just happen to be players in my game and controlling others is how I validate my own sense of self-worth. Perhaps, one might argue, by trying to control other people I’m depriving them of their own power, dignity, and independence. I do not see this as a moral issue. People can still choose: either to submit to my control or to face whatever consequences there may be. Maybe God thinks this way too. Maybe this is why he sometimes kills children to make a point.

The biggest stumbling block I have faced with my Mormon faith is the idea of “godly sorrow.” The Bible makes a distinction between godly sorrow and worldly sorrow. As a child I was taught that while worldly sorrow meant being sad you got caught, godly sorrow meant you were sorry you had strayed. Godly sorrow would change your future behavior: “that ye sorrowed after a godly sort, what carefulness it wrought in you.” Godly sorrow is supposed to be a precursor to repentance, which of course is the key to invoking God’s mercy. My problem is I don’t think I have ever felt godly sorrow. When I do bad things, I can worry about the spiritual consequences and the possibility of a karmic backlash, the same way that I might worry when I am double-parked and concerned that I am about to get my car ticketed or towed. Is that enough, I wonder?

In many ways, my religion has been a handy tool in explaining my eccentricities, a good cover under which my sociopathic traits could be submerged. I’ve become accustomed to hiding in plain sight. I could say amoral things because my goodness was presumed. I could act in antisocial ways because my religious upbringing could be blamed for making me awkward around people outside of my community. Among Mormons, I took advantage of their innocence and mandated tolerance of the we’re-all-God’s-children variety:

There is a reason that Salt Lake City is the fraud capital
of the world: Mormons are unusually willing to see the best in everyone despite evidence to the contrary.

After high school, I attended Brigham Young University. Those students were even more trusting than the average Mormon and there were myriad opportunities for scamming. I started stealing from the lost and found. I would say I lost a common book like the freshman biology textbook, then take it upstairs to the bookstore to sell. Or I would see an unlocked bike that had been in the same place for a few days, figure it was unlikely to be missed, and take it. Finders keepers, right?

I didn’t do these things to be antisocial—I don’t even consider them to be antisocial. I did them because they helped me feel like the world still made sense. It bothered me how careful people were with one another in Utah. It was inefficient. Drivers would pull up to a four-way stop and become paralyzed with indecision. On the one hand, the rules of the road said that the first to pull up to the stop sign should go first. But people would not always follow this rule, instead treating it like it was some moral question that had to be contemplated anew every time. Sitting there frustrated while people kept waving their hands for other people to go first, I tried to imagine what must have been going through their heads. Perhaps something like: I may be first in time, but how do I know that they aren’t first in need? And just because I have the right of way in this situation does not mean I should exercise it unrighteously. The result was snarled intersections, as predictability was sacrificed for godliness. People were trying to out-“good” each other to the point of absurdity. It was unnatural. And it’s not godlike, I thought. A god would not give up an advantage for no reason. A god would cultivate his power, just like I do.

The whole thing made me feel off-kilter. On the one hand, they were some of the sweetest, most loving people I had ever
encountered. One semester I took a New Testament class (every BYU student is required to take fourteen credits of religion to graduate). Out of the blue the professor asked, “What would you do if I came up and did this to you?” and then very violently nearly struck a student in the face. Unprompted and without thought, the student turned his face to the side, offering up his other cheek as well. I was shocked. I knew this was a literal interpretation of scripture, but was this taking things too far? It struck me suddenly that my targets might be the same people, that when I stole their books they turned the other cheek and let me steal their bikes too. Were they brainwashed victims? Was I evil? Or were we simply two opposing sides, each necessary to achieve a certain balance?

Mormon scripture teaches that there must be opposition in all things; if not there could be neither righteousness nor wickedness, holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad, and without it “there is no God.” The biggest “opposition” in the Mormon faith is Lucifer, who became Satan, and who has a rather interesting and detailed backstory. Born a spirit child of God in the premortal world, he is our spiritual brother and was considered one of the brightest stars in heaven until he rebelled and became our necessary opposition. This was great for God, because his plan needed a villain: “man could not act for himself save it should be that he was enticed by the one or the other.” And what about Lucifer? When I first heard this story in Sunday school I thought that Lucifer was almost a too-convenient patsy in God’s plan. Did God trick Lucifer into rebelling? Maybe make some deal with him under the table? Or maybe God created Lucifer specifically for this purpose? Mormon scripture says “there is a God, and he hath created all things, both things to act and things to be acted upon.” Was Lucifer created to act instead of be acted upon? Was I?

I started an elaborate shoplifting scheme from the BYU convenience stores. One of my friends told me about a sack lunch program that was woefully unsupervised. Over the course of a semester or two I took over a thousand dollars in merchandise. At first I consumed or hoarded the goods, like I did with the library books when I was young. Eventually I started giving the stuff away in fits of well-calculated generosity. I didn’t do it for money (I was on a full scholarship) or even for the thrill of doing something sinful, because I didn’t really see it as being sinful. It wasn’t the thrill of being caught either, because I never considered that I might get caught. I didn’t think at all about it at the time, but now, wondering why I did it, it was like all of the goodness of my fellow BYU students created this vacuum and I was sucked in. We were all part of a food chain and because they had already chosen their own roles at the bottom of the food chain—to be acted upon—the only spaces that were left were at the top, to act. I never questioned the rightness or wrongness of it, the same way a shark would never question the morality of hunting for its prey. I didn’t create the food-chain power dynamic; God did. And I didn’t ask to be at the top; it was as if I was made that way.

The reality is that I have nothing of what people refer to as a conscience or remorse. The concept of morality, when defined as an emotional understanding of right and wrong, goes right over my head like an inside joke of which I am not a part. Consequently, I have only the slightest interest in it and no special insight into evil, or no more than a certain level of self-awareness would reveal to any of us. Still, I often wonder what life would be like to feel that things were right or wrong, to have an internal compass to direct me to my moral north. I wonder what life would be like to always be “feeling” certain
ways about things, to have conviction, which is apparently how many people experience the world.

Jean Decety, a neurobiologist at the University of Chicago who specializes in social cognition and empathy, has established that moral awareness is initially emotional. Young children in particular have a very strong negative emotional response to social situations that are unfair or hurtful, but the emotional moral judgment of the child evolves as an adult to be tempered by the “dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortex—areas of the brain that allow people to reflect on the values linked to outcomes and actions.” So while children assume that every bad act is malicious, adults are able to apply moral reasoning, recognize and discount accidents, and find nuance in levels of maliciousness.

Decety is studying neurological mechanisms to determine why the brains of sociopaths and other people with antisocial personality disorders don’t generate those negative feelings of discomfort or disgust when faced with immoral acts. It makes sense to me that sociopaths would have a comparatively blunted sense of morality if they either do not feel this emotional impetus or feel it less than empaths do, which is certainly the case with me—while I feel worry when I act badly, I have never felt anything as extreme as moral outrage. Evolution has shaped our emotional responses to reinforce activities that are to our advantage, like loving and caring for our children or fearing and fleeing from the sounds of a predator sneaking up on us. Having a gut instinct that told me how to be a moral person might be evolutionarily handy. On the other hand, emotional moral judgment also enables people to do really horrible things to each other, like lynching or “honor” killings, and justify them by calling them “moral.”

Because sociopaths don’t experience morality emotionally,
I would argue that we are freed to be more rational and more tolerant. There is something to be said for the impartiality of pure reason—religion-created mass hysteria among the supposedly mentally healthy populace has resulted in much worse damage and carnage in the world than anything sociopaths have caused. (Although I imagine that there may sometimes be sociopaths at the head of it all, whipping up the masses to do their bidding.) This idea is explored in Hannah Arendt’s book
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
, a book suggesting that the bulk of the horrors of the early half of the twentieth century were done not by sociopaths like me, but by empaths who had allowed themselves to be manipulated by appeals to their emotion.

Similarly, the suggestion that we need to experience guilt in order to behave in a moral way is patently false and offensive in the same way that equating atheism with moral indifference is. Although hardwired emotional moral compasses typically help people to do what is good and avoid what is bad, there should be other reasons that people would do good things besides a sense of morality. It is rational for me to obey the law, because I do not want to go to jail; it is rational for me not to harm or injure other people, because a society in which everyone acted harmfully would inevitably cause me harm too. If there are legitimate, rational reasons for the moral choices we should make, we should be capable of choosing the right without relying purely on gut instinct. If there are not rational reasons for our moral choices, why should we continue to make them?

While I don’t think sociopaths have any sort of moral urge to do good things, I think they can and do act morally in the context of pursuing their own advantage. A good analogy would be a corporation. There are a lot of corporations that do things
that you like, maybe even good things, like produce vaccines or electric cars, although the primary motivation is to make a profit. But just because you are trying to make a profit doesn’t mean you can’t do it by doing things you like, or that you are good at, or that comport with the way you see the world, or want the world to see in you. In fact, behaving morally and well might smooth the path for you to pursue your own interest. Society functions better when we treat each other well, and you will personally do better if society is in good working order.