Confessions of a Sociopath (23 page)

In my own work life, I’ve found that my need for constant stimulation means I am excited rather than stressed when deadlines approach. My desire to win whatever game I play makes me ruthlessly efficient, and my unflinching confidence that I will win inspires others to follow me. I am logical and decisive, a natural leader, particularly in crises where others panic or fall apart. I can get angry in a flash, but it is also over in a flash, which allows failing members of my team to realize that while failure will not be tolerated, no one is holding grudges. Now that I have learned to steer my inclinations
along useful paths, I am a natural leader and a success in my professional exploits, not in spite of my sociopathic tendencies, but because of them. Commenters on the blog have attested to similar experiences:

Another commenter suggested that sociopathic managers “want to out-do each other. They don’t care about their colleagues or praising someone else at their level. They are self centered. But they get the job done and that’s all that really matters and if they are high up the ladder it’s unlikely they will be confronted with the way they run their ship.”

Sociopathic traits can and do manifest themselves in malignant ways. But particularly in the field of business, one reader suggests, sociopaths might actually create less discord than empaths do:

In fact, when corporations or managers mix business with their personal feelings or sense of morality, it can often lead to decidedly negative results, like the backlash against corporations such as Chick-fil-A for their anti-gay-marriage stances and the lawsuits from shareholders against corporate officers for having the corporation support political causes that are unrelated to the company’s business. As another reader put it:

No, at least when it comes to business, cash is king. This doesn’t mean that corporations can’t do good things. As one reader pointed out, “corporations, like sociopaths, can choose to act in a benevolent manner out of their own best interest—and often do.”

I love money. It’s so impersonal. In a world where everyone
likes to win, money is frequently how the score is kept. I don’t like spending it, necessarily; I don’t get much pleasure from buying or owning things. Money doesn’t matter to me in itself. But the acquisition of money is a game I like very much. It seems that other people care about money more than almost anything else in the world, and because they care about it so much, they will fight hard for it—against me or anybody else. They’re just as committed to winning as I am, which makes the game very fun.

Sometimes all you need is a different perspective to win, particularly in something like the stock market. As Sir Isaac Newton famously confessed after losing a small fortune in the stock market in the early 1700s, “I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.”

I have an incredibly green thumb for money, particularly in the stock market. I fully funded my retirement by the time I was thirty years old. Since I started investing seriously in 2004, I have averaged a 9.5 percent return in the stock market—257 percent better than the 3.7 percent average returns of the S & P 500 over the same period. Beating the market this soundly and consistently is unheard of and many argue it is impossible (or due solely to luck). In 2011, only one out of five mutual fund managers beat the S & P 500, and only a handful of individuals have managed to do so with any regularity. I do it every year. I am not trading on better knowledge. In fact, I am a relatively unsophisticated investor. Instead, I am trading on a special vision. When I look at the world, the flaws or vulnerabilities in people and the social institutions that they’ve made jump out to me, as if they were highlighted for me and only me to see.

Sharks see in black-and-white. Scientists have suggested that contrast against background may be more helpful than
color for predators in detecting potential prey, helping them to focus on crucial spatial relationships rather than extraneous details. I’m color-blind in a way that makes mass hysteria seem particularly striking in contrast to normal, expected behavior. My lack of empathy means I don’t get caught up in other people’s panic. It gives me a unique perspective. And in the financial world, being able to think opposite the pack is all you need.

Traders laud the “contrarian” mentality. Warren Buffett said: “Be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy.” Easier said than done for the vast majority of stock traders. And when I’m trading stocks, those are the people I am up against. On every stock trade there is someone who wants to sell and someone who wants to buy, at least at a particular price. Each tends to think the other is an idiot. In simple terms, the person who is selling thinks that she is getting out just in time while the person buying thinks that he is about to make good money.

Because the actual transaction is faceless, I can’t practice my usual people-reading skills or manipulation, but I don’t need to. The truth is that the market doesn’t really reflect some magical perfect valuation of a stock under the efficient market hypothesis. It reflects the mass consensus of how actual individual investors value the stock. It is the sum total of everyone’s hopes and fears about what a company is capable of doing. Preying on people’s hopes and fears is my métier, even en masse. It’s how I played my jurors. There’s a desperation to both hope and fear that becomes obvious once you’ve learned to spot it. With my color-blind eyes, I see these features more starkly than anything else.

And you only need to see this desperation in a few people to know that it has reached a critical mass of people. Joseph Kennedy said that he knew it was time to pull out of the
market before the stock market crash of 1929 when even his shoe-shine boy was giving him stock tips. Joseph Kennedy may not have been a sociopath, but he certainly acted like one. In a 1963
Life
magazine feature on him, Kennedy was described as having the sociopathic traits of being able to mix well “in all kinds of company, against every background,” from the very highest of the social elite to the “theatrical unknowns” inhabiting Greenwich Village. “Only the keenest observer” would realize that Kennedy was actually allied with none of these groups—“he belonged to no world but his own.” Kennedy was no doubt aided in his stock market exploits by this ability to be both one of the crowd and completely independent. In fact, Kennedy was described by a broker whom he shared an office with as a man who “had the ideal temperament for speculation” because he “possessed a passion for facts, a complete lack of sentiment and a marvelous sense of timing.” I may not be as talented as Joseph Kennedy, but I also am blessed with a complete lack of sentiment.

Kennedy and I are not the only cool heads that have been drawn to the stock market. An estimate that 10 percent of Wall Street employees are psychopaths was being casually thrown around the media in 2012, but the research so far doesn’t confirm that number. A 2010 study by Dr. Robert Hare of psychopathy among corporate professionals found that about 4 percent met the threshold for clinical psychopathy, versus about 1 percent for the general population, though as Hare has said, “we do not know the prevalence of psychopathy among those who work on Wall Street. It may be even
higher
than 10%, on the assumption that psychopathic entrepreneurs and risk-takers tend to gravitate toward financial watering-holes, particularly those that are enormously lucrative and poorly regulated.”

While the fall of Enron and the banking collapse of 2008 are sometimes blamed on sociopathic behavior, it’s not clear whether the ringleaders were actually sociopaths or not. On the one hand there are some pretty sociopathic-sounding quotes from Enroners talking about cutting off power to Grandma so they could squeeze more money out of the state of California. On the other hand: (1) most Enroners didn’t necessarily break the law but were careful to stay within the letter of the law, and (2) they did what they were supposed to do—make lots of money for the company, even if it involves manipulating markets in unethical ways. Some have suggested that the only reason that most Enroners may not have technically engaged in unlawful behavior was because they used their money to eliminate or change the regulations that they didn’t like. The rise and fall of Enron was shocking to people because it exposed the face of corporate hubris and amorality. A sociopath would be well at home at a corporation like Enron. A sociopath might also do something as reckless and risky as being a whistle-blower. In a lot of ways sociopaths and corporations are like the weather: Sometimes rain is a blessing and sometimes it is a curse. The most people can do is hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

I might have been a good lawyer but I gave up practice a few years ago, because it got boring, and I realized I am not very interested in helping people or corporations. I would much rather indoctrinate them, which is why I became a law professor. I was lucky to stumble upon law teaching as an option—one of my friends was a professor and encouraged me to send letters to schools in case they had any emergency teaching needs. And it turns out that I love teaching: the lifestyle, the pay, the power, and most of all the autonomy. Every year a new crop of students arrives to be charmed. I have a small
cadre of legal “nemeses” that I play one-sided games with—other academics in my field whom I disagree with or don’t like. My scholarship often focuses on ruining theirs. People are often surprised to learn that I teach less than six hours a week, less than eight months out of the year. In many ways it’s a dream job for someone inherently lazy and unable to do grunt work like me, but eventually I’m sure I’ll get bored of it too. After I do, I don’t know what, but I’m sure things will work out. They always do.

As an academic, I work in an institutional setting organized within idiosyncratic parameters. For instance, law professors are the most formal of academics in that they are expected to wear business attire, given the formality of dress that their students will be expected to adopt upon entering their profession; however, they are also less often expected to abide by community norms, since their role is to challenge existing legal regimes. In other words, you should wear a suit, not be one. Some of the biggest legal academic superstars bring their dogs with them to work and some of the biggest losers wear power ties. This is the kind of environment in which I thrive because I am used to both trying to conform and never managing to conform completely.

My students love this charming quirkiness I exude. I am unusually attentive to their needs. My first few years I performed extensive market research, subtly surveying my students on hundreds of topics until my teaching had as much mass appeal as a Big Mac. I always get exceptional teaching evaluations that cite my thoughtfulness and my apparent lack of ego. I am described as witty and never condescending. Even better, I am entertaining—making jokes and livening up dry material with videos or group work. By my second year at my first teaching job, my class enrollment doubled as students
raved about my ability to make even the most esoteric subject relatable. It helps that I am, according to one of my teaching evaluations, a “stone cold fox.” Not true, but I am well aware of the research that attractive people get treated far better and are perceived as being far more competent than ugly people. Consequently, I dress carefully for class. I shop for clothes that are both conservative and sexy, like a three-piece skirt suit with a vest that fits more like a bustier and a knee-length cigarette skirt cut to fit a pinup model. If I wear a pantsuit, I’ll sometimes push the gender lines by wearing suspenders and a tie. To the men, I am an object of desire—a ready-made “hot teacher” fantasy. For the women I am a whip-smart, successful role model, who also has an eye for fashion and is not afraid to say the word
tampon
in class. All of this is a carefully calculated persona meant to appeal to the greatest percentage of the student population possible.

Of course this could all go horribly wrong, and sometimes does. Sometimes I overplay the sex appeal. I had one student accuse me of pandering to the male students. The truth is that many new students are suspicious of my easy charm and what is starting to seem like a cult of personality built around me. This can be a serious danger with sociopaths in the workplace. One blog reader told a similar story: