Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight

Chapter 5 I’M A CHILD OF GOD

I was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I attended church from infancy with my family, and I continue to be a practicing Mormon. Some people will find this hypocritical or will assume that my religious community will shun me if I am discovered to be a sociopath. They cannot fathom how I can negotiate my faith being who I am. But these people misunderstand the essential nature of Mormon beliefs, which is that we are all sons and daughters of a loving God who only wants our eternal progression and happiness. Mormons believe that everyone has the potential to be godlike, to be a creator of worlds. (This makes the LDS church a sociopath’s dream; it’s a belief that’s well suited to my own megalomaniacal sense of divine destiny.) I believe that “everyone” includes me. And because every being is capable of salvation, I can only conclude that my actions are what matter—not my emotional deficits, not my ruthless thoughts, and not my nefarious motivations. My own adherence to the standards of the church, despite their frequent conflict with my nature, is proof that the teachings of the gospel are for everyone—every nation, kindred, tongue, and people. I like the idea that there is a creator of all things, including sociopaths. I like having a check on my behavior, a reason for being a good sociopath. And I like the reward for good behavior—the feeling of elation and otherworldliness inherent in prayer, song, and religious devotion.

The church is especially well suited to me, because its rules and standards are very explicit. Throughout my childhood, I was able to make up for my inability to intuit social norms by following the church’s clear set of expectations and guidelines—from detailed lessons on chastity to small pamphlets with handy bullet-pointed rules about what to wear, whom and how to date, what not to watch or listen to, and how much money to give to the church. I liked that these things were written down. I don’t mean to imply that the Mormon church was actually okay with whatever I did as long as I didn’t drink Coke, was abstinent, and tithed. I’m sure the church meant these things merely as guidelines and not as safe-harbor provisions, but having them stated so explicitly helped me to blend in with everyone else.

I was watching television recently, one of these mystery dramas in which the main story arc over the entire season involves people trying to figure out who killed the main character. After many episodes of intrigue and bad behavior, one of the characters remarks in exasperation, “I’m having a hard time figuring out who’s evil and who’s just naughty.” Is there a distinction between being naughty and being evil? Who deserves mercy, and who is beyond hope?

I never felt like I was evil. I was taught in church that I am a child of God. I also read the Old Testament. There is a story in Kings where God has forty-two children dismembered by she-bears for insulting the prophet Elisha. It was not much of a stretch to believe that that God was my father.

And who doesn’t have flaws? When it counts, most of us think we are basically good people. In Dan Ariely’s book The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, he describes how the gift shop at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was the victim of rampant embezzlement, mainly by elderly volunteers manning an unsecured cash drawer. Interestingly, there wasn’t one person who was stealing tons, but many people stole just a little. Everybody cheats, and if you stay within the realm of what everybody does then you can (apparently) maintain the good image you have of yourself.

In our discussions on religion, my summer intern office mate who diagnosed me would argue that the Christian concept of sin is a state of being, not certain actions. We are all “sinners” and, simultaneously, we are all “saved.” She thinks that evil, “if it has any meaning at all, means more than just ‘I did this right today and I did that wrong today.’ ” According to her, evil doesn’t lie in whether you drink caffeine or whether you do the right number of rosaries. It’s different in quality from the notion of “transgressions.”

Perhaps that is true, and perhaps that is why in the age of “reformed” religion, where the emphasis is more on “saved” than “sinners,” none of those volunteering seniors saw their minor pilfering as evidence of their own inherently evil nature. Where those boundaries lie between being good, being good enough, and being bad is not clear. If modern Lady Justice is blind, it appears it is a selective blindness that is willing to overlook “normal” transgressions that normal people participate in and to readily condemn “abnormal” transgressions that people like me may be predisposed to commit.

I remember one of my first, formative experiences with justice. I have always loved to read. I could spend the entire day reading. When I was young, my parents were always giving us chores to keep us busy and away from the television, but if they saw that I was reading, they would just leave me alone. One summer—I must have been around seven or eight—I would go in the morning with my father to his office, then walk the few blocks to the local library and spend the day there tucked between the stacks.

It was amazing to me that you could check out books for free. It seemed like a scam, and even at that young age I was helplessly attracted to scams. I had gotten to know the librarians, and I tried to convince them that I was such an avid reader, they really should lift the ten-book restriction from my library card. When they told me they couldn’t, I just stole my siblings’ and parents’ cards and loaded up on dozens of books, ostensibly for them. I was so pleased with how well my scheme was going, I lost focus on the reading and fixated on acquiring more and more books. I didn’t want to return them. That would be completely counterproductive. Instead I hoarded them in my room. They were the spoils of my successful intrigue against the unsuspecting librarians, and now there was nothing they could do to stop me.

Maybe a month later, we got several envelopes in the mail from the library addressed to me, my siblings, and my parents. Everyone had overdue library books and the fines were quickly racking up. It didn’t take long for my parents to identify me as the culprit. I hadn’t understood that the library actually had an enforcement provision to get people to comply with their rules.

My parents weren’t mad. I think they just chalked it up to my being so overeager about reading that I had bitten off more than I could chew. They made vague references to how I would have to do chores to earn the money. Doing the dishes one hundred times at fifty cents apiece didn’t appeal to me, and it didn’t seem really right that I should have to do that for what I felt was essentially an honest mistake (honest in the sense that I thought the rules of the game I was playing were one thing and they turned out to be another). I was sure this couldn’t be the end of my scheme, so I tried one more thing.

“Can’t you just write them a check?” I asked my father. I had seen him write checks for things before. I knew what money was, and checks seemed to be something that substituted for money when necessary—like this magical reprieve from having to use cash. My dad had to explain that it’s still your money, but the bank simply keeps it for you. I was stuck. My seven-year-old brain couldn’t think of any other ways to spin this, except maybe to ask for a dollar for every round of dishes. This was just how justice worked: there are rules and consequences, and if you break the rules you suffer the consequences.

When I say this was one of my first experiences with justice, I should explain. I had been punished before, but there was always an element of moral condemnation in punishments that didn’t make sense to me, so I largely just ignored them as being an unpredictable cost of living life as a child. The library book situation was something new. My parents were not mad at me. There was no moral condemnation. And paying a fine seemed a reasonable consequence of not returning the library books on time. If I had to pay fines, everyone had to pay fines, which meant that books would circulate faster and I would have a better shot of checking out some of the more popular and desirable books. This sort of justice made sense to me in a way that moral judgments never did.

I was also fine with justice because I understood the flip side: if you do particular good things, you get particular good rewards. Mormon doctrine has a scripture: “There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world, upon which all blessings are predicated—And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated.” Skeptics may question the objective truthfulness of this statement, but when your parents and everyone else around you believe it is true, it is easy to play the justice card to get justly rewarded for your good exploits.

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.

In criminal law, there are two concepts for wrongs that can be criminalized—malum in se and malum prohibitum. The former are wrongful acts that are wrong in and of themselves, and common examples are murder, theft, and rape. The latter are crimes that are not inherently wrongful, but are prohibited by societies in order to advance a social purpose, usually the optimal ordering or management of the public welfare; examples are driving on the wrong side of the road, breaking a curfew, or selling alcohol without a license. While laws governing malum in se are generally static, those regulating malum prohibitum are necessarily mutable, because they must be calibrated to the changing conditions.

Of course, the two categories are often difficult to distinguish. There is much debate about the illegal duplication of copyrighted digital media, for instance. Recording companies tend to characterize it as theft, a crime that is inherently bad, while teenagers and legal scholars suggest that it is criminal merely because it is prohibited by the state as an economic regulation.

In my personal universe, there is almost nothing that constitutes malum in se. I don’t feel that anything is inherently wrongful. But, more important, I am never compelled to refrain from doing something merely because it is wrong—only because doing so would result in undesirable consequences. Thus, evil has no special meaning for me. There is no mystery in it. It is a word to describe a sense of wrongness that I do not feel.

I don’t have any expectations of egalitarianism or righteousness, so I do not feel a similar sense of disappointment at the existence of evil or despair. I am not moved by signs of want, of beggars or poor starving orphans or slums or anything (although I often donate on little more than a whim). I am not outraged by inequity; in fact I embrace it as I do death. I don’t feel the same sense of entitlement to beneficence that most people do. I do not expect things to go right in the world. I don’t even believe in right. I believe that everything just is. And what is can be quite beautiful.

I suppose it’s an odd distinction to make between being moved by perceived injustice but not inequity. I guess what I mean is that there is quite a deal of luck and context involved in every aspect of life, and that people cannot therefore expect the same outcomes from the same actions. In contrast, I perceive injustice as someone putting a thumb on the scale, artificially enabling one outcome over another—an intentional interference thwarting the natural course of things. I guess it’s because I don’t mind risk, it actually gives me a thrill, but I have no desire to play a rigged game. If I thought my life was rigged, I don’t know what I’d do, maybe kill myself or others. It’s only because I think I can (and most often do) play the game better than others that it keeps my interest enough to persist in playing it.

Sociopathy was first identified as an independent mental disorder more than two hundred years ago by the French humanitarian and father of modern psychiatry Philippe Pinel, in his 1806 work A Treatise on Insanity: In Which Are Contained the Principles of a New and More Practical Nosology of Maniacal Disorders Than Has Yet Been Offered to the Public. Pinel developed an interest in psychology after a friend became afflicted with mental illness that resulted in suicide. He was largely responsible for popularizing the “moral” treatment of patients with mental disorders based on prolonged observation and conversation.

In his treatise, Pinel set out three categories of mental derangement: (1) melancholia or delirium, (2) mania with delirium, and (3) mania without delirium, the last of which described individuals who were impulsive, amoral, violent, and destructive—while remaining competent and rational. Pinel theorized that the patients who suffered mania without delirium had only a certain part of their mental faculties distorted while the rest of their mind—principally, their intellect—remained intact. He wrote of this category of condition: “It may be either continued or intermittent. No sensible change in the functions of the understanding; but perversion of the active faculties, marked by abstract and sanguinary fury, with a blind propensity to acts of violence.”

Pinel noted his surprise that maniacs could have entirely unaffected intellects. This was contrary to the generally accepted notion at the time that madness was caused by a deficit or derangement of mental reasoning faculties, as proposed by John Locke in his 1690 work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Because one could not think, Locke believed, one could not function in society—the key to sanity was rationality, and without it, a person was lost to insanity or mania. But Pinel found that there was a different kind of madness or mental deficit—a moral one.

In 1863, British psychologist James Cowles Prichard used the term “moral insanity” to describe people like me, a phrase that fills me with delight. In his work A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind, Prichard acknowledged Pinel’s case studies and noted the existence of “many individuals living at large, and not entirely separated from society, who are affected in a certain degree with this modification of insanity. They are reputed persons of a singular, wayward, and eccentric character.”

Prichard was a very religious man, and he struggled with the possibility that mental illness could be an affliction of not only the mind but also of the soul—that moral corruption was a sickness that could be medically categorized and clinically treated. While not the first, he was perhaps one of the most vehement critics of sociopaths. It offended him that a person in total control of his mental faculties could not or did not live rightly. Before, his assumption was that to be rational is to be moral. Like Pinel, Prichard was unsettled by the idea that delusion was not necessarily the root of bad behavior, and that doing evil could be—in some ways—perfectly rational.

Pinel was convinced that the emotional morality experienced by most people is inherently superior to the rational moral decision-making that sociopaths and others have to engage in. I disagree. Everyone uses shortcuts to make decisions; it would be impossible for us to make a fully informed, reasoned decision every time such a decision was necessary. For example, when you’re in the middle of a bar fight, how do you decide whether or not to stab the guy who just punched you in the face? Empaths may use emotional shortcuts (in this case, either “This jerk deserves a shiv in the belly” or “I’d feel too awful if I actually killed the guy”) to make quick decisions about how to act. Sociopaths don’t or can’t, so we come up with other shortcuts.

Many sociopaths use the shortcut of “anything goes,” or “I am only in it for me.” These sociopaths have decided that the rational way to increase their own benefits in life is to look out only for themselves and ignore the needs or demands of others. While some act entirely on selfish impulse, they are not always free to be out on the streets where you might meet them but are instead in prison. Apart from the most impulsive and violent sociopaths, there is a wide range of self-reflection and deliberation in decision-making. Some sociopaths are capable of reining in their impulses enough to decide that jail time is not to their advantage, so they choose to avoid major violations of the law (e.g., “The satisfaction of killing this jerk isn’t worth the inconvenience of being locked up”). One sociopath from my blog, while realizing that most of what he does is dangerous, wrong, or both, still stated, “I have a line or two I won’t cross for any reason.” But that doesn’t prevent him from committing with clear conscience many smaller infractions or injustices that empaths would find objectionable, for example accounting fraud or emotional abuse.

Other sociopaths, and I am one of these, have settled on a more “principled” approach to life and act according to religious or ethical beliefs, or, at the minimum, for their self-interest or preservation. We decide on standards of behavior or a code that we can refer to when faced with decisions (“I’ve decided not to kill people, so I won’t stab this jerk”). As one sociopath reader of my blog put it, “To have morals is not important. Having ethics is what is important.” My prosthetic moral compass generally functions well for me, and most of the time my method happens to track what the majority thinks is the moral thing to do. The one thing that sociopath “codes” tend to have in common, though, is that they don’t fully map with prevailing social norms, those unspoken rules and customs that govern behavior in a group. For instance I know a sociopath who is a drug dealer but has his own standards of conduct when it comes to dealing with his wife (nicely) or his employees (not nicely). Similarly, I am typically not engaged in criminal behavior, but that doesn’t mean I won’t take whatever I need, from things as questionable and disgusting as your underwear to things as useful and valuable as a bike. I almost expect others to do the same. From my experiences and communications with other sociopaths, this rough blend of pure opportunism mixed with a more practical utilitarianism is not uncommon. One blog commenter put it this way:

But sometimes efficiency does not perfectly align with what most people would consider morally right. One afternoon shortly after I got fired from my law firm job, I took my neighbor’s bicycle so that I could bike to the beach with a friend who was visiting from out of town. The bike was sitting unlocked in the shared underground garage. There was a layer of dust on it and it needed a little air in the tires, but it was there and eminently convenient. I figured that it was unlikely that my neighbor, a stranger to me, would discover it missing. My efficiency-minded self imagined what the transaction would look like if I were to ask her for permission to use the bike: I would explain to her the situation and she would consent, provided I agreed to pay for any damage or loss. I would posit that the bike would be better for the ride because it would work grease through the moving parts. And bikes are meant to be ridden; it was socially wasteful to keep the bike in the garage, unused like that, when people needed bikes to ride. I would have been happy to pay her a rental fee if she wanted me to. This was the story I told myself.

I did not actually engage in this hypothetical transaction with my neighbor. I thought there was too great a risk that she would not see things my way. People can be very irrational, I reasoned to myself, and sometimes they cannot be trusted to make efficient decisions. She might say no because she has an irrational fear of strangers. There is an information asymmetry in our situation that could distort the way she sees this decision: In her mind, I am an unknown. But, truthfully, I had no intention of stealing the bike. I’d bring it back in just a few hours, better than I found it. But how could I credibly assure her of this? People are too distrusting nowadays.

Finally, she probably overestimates the value of the bicycle just because it happens to be hers. Maybe she bought it for $100, hoping to bike to the beach every week. In her mind the value of the bike would be emotionally rooted to that $100 sunk cost and her fantasies about a life of ease, even though the bike wouldn’t sell for more than $10 at a garage sale. She and her husband were living a life beyond their means, I had often thought. They both drove Civics from the late 1980s but lived in a nice apartment building with young professionals. She might be upset about the thought of losing something as small as her beat-up old bike because she didn’t have much to start with. It was easy to convince myself that I knew better than her what was best for the bike. Besides, what she didn’t know would not hurt her, and I really didn’t want to bother having the conversation with her.

In the evening, after I had returned the bike no worse for wear, I heard an angry knock on my door and was subjected to even angrier accusations. Apparently she had come home, shocked to find her bike gone. After looking for it for hours (looking for it? Where? And for hours?) she gave up, only to find it returned to its space in the garage. She had not failed to notice that her husband’s bike remained there, and that my bike was also gone for the exact same period of time. It was clear that the jig was up, so I confessed that I had taken her bike.

She was taken aback by my untroubled admission. My money offers did nothing but offend her, and she even threatened to call the police, but I told her I thought it was unlikely they’d do much for her. I tried to explain that what I had done was technically not theft because I did not have the requisite mental state of intending to permanently deprive her of her property. At best what I had done was trespass to chattels, and good luck trying to prove actual damages. She stared at me in horror for a moment before threatening to tell the management. I figured that was an empty threat, though, and in any case had been planning on moving somewhere cheaper to live out my unemployment.

I didn’t mind being caught. It was just a cost of doing business. Of course I wouldn’t have remembered this incident if I had not been caught. Many other similar episodes have filled my life, too routine to recall. But I think it bothers people to see me this way—expressing no sign of remorse upon being caught. When I was a child and would get up to mischief with my siblings, my father used to beat us with a belt, lining us all up to take our turns, in equal parts emotional humiliation and physical intimidation. I never reacted—never cried and never apologized. I never felt the urge and, more important, I never saw the point. Part of it was because I knew he wanted to break me and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. Part of it was that my tears were usually tools of manipulation and punisher-dad was not susceptible to manipulation. All I got was a cold sort of angry where most of my attention was focused on plotting payback. Although I had two older brothers who were much bigger than I was, I frequently got hit the hardest, leaving angry welts across my little buttocks and upper thighs. As an adult, I asked him why he did it. He said that he didn’t remember details, but I must have been risking the lives of my siblings or something sufficiently horrible to warrant that kind of beating. Maybe. But maybe I just didn’t seem affected by the punishments the way he had hoped I would be. My lack of reaction must have seemed like intransigence, which he hoped to break by beating me just a little bit harder.

My neighbor was similarly put out by my blank-faced recitations of the legal elements of trespass to chattels in response to her obvious distress. It took everything I had learned about people to understand that she wanted apologies rather than remuneration, some compensation for the sense of personal violation that she experienced. It’s difficult for me to comprehend these soft intangibles. It’s not that I do not feel them; it’s just hard for me to predict them in others. But even when I backpedaled and started apologizing, the neighbor was dissatisfied. Like my father, she seemed to sense that I wasn’t sorry for what I did. I didn’t feel any of that godly sorrow that precedes repentance, because I had not strayed, at least not according to my own reasoning. Taking the bike had been worth it.

This sort of behavior may seem uncouth, but is it really immoral? Prichard’s disgust with sociopaths for being immoral seems largely unwarranted unless you ascribe to his particular brand of morality. Was I really in the wrong by temporarily taking my neighbor’s bike? Only if you think that violation of the personal property of others is immoral. Even the law recognizes that this is not always the case: If you’re stranded in a snowstorm, it would be permissible to break in to someone’s ski cabin and spend the night, as long as you pay for any damage done to the cabin. The justification for this so-called necessity defense is that if you were able to find the owner of the cabin and ask them for permission, they would grant it to you. However, you can still use this defense even if you know for a fact that the owner would not grant you permission, for instance because you two are mortal enemies and the cabin owner has made it clear he would not piss on you if you were on fire. The cabin owner can take this position, but the law will not support it because it is unreasonable—and perhaps even immoral! When seen through this lens of reasoning (rather than Prichard’s religious one), perhaps my neighbor was acting improperly by being unreasonable in not allowing me to borrow her unused bike. If I behaved improperly according to societal standards, it was arguably only because I didn’t show the least bit of remorse.

In contract law, there is a concept called “efficient breach.” Most people assume that it is always “bad” to break a contract, because it essentially constitutes breaking a promise. However, there are some ways in which doing so can be good, or in the language of law and economics, efficient. This occurs when complying with the terms of the contract would result in greater economic loss than simply paying the other party’s damages that have resulted from your nonperformance. For example, I commit to date someone exclusively. Maybe I even marry him. If one of us later finds someone we prefer, it may actually be better for both parties if one or both of us breaks the agreement. If you believe in the value of efficient breaches like I do, then you would never get upset if your partner cheated on you.

In efficient breaches, it is often the immoral choice that leaves everyone better off. I’ve lived my entire life this way, since long before I ever learned the term in law school. My child self understood the world in terms of choices and consequences, causes and effects. If I wanted to break a rule and was willing to suffer the consequences, I should be allowed to make that choice unhindered.

I engage in this kind of self-promoting calculus in almost everything I do, often when the stakes are much higher. When my good friend’s father was diagnosed with cancer, I cut off all contact with her. It sounds like a ruthless thing to do, and it was. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her; in fact, I loved her very much—perhaps too much. But I found I could no longer enjoy any of the benefits she had provided to me—superior advice, interesting conversation—because she was horrible to be around most of the time. I had overinvested and was running many months into the red with no improvement. I found that I could not wear the mask of compassion or selflessness indefinitely without acting out in ways that were hurtful to us both.

And so I cut off all ties and walked away. There were damages on all sides, but I had no other means of mitigating them, so it was an efficient breach. I think she would agree with me, even when I include her hurt and suffering into the equation. That alone would typically make the end of a friendship in this way a net negative. In this situation, though, my abandonment of her was to her benefit, particularly considering that my behavior was only going to get worse—that I was already tapped out in terms of being able to be supportive. I didn’t leave her because I stopped caring for her. I left her because I did care for her very much. It was efficient. Still, the first couple of months apart I was just so relieved. If I was reminded of my friend, it was with gratitude that I was no longer in that unsustainable situation. As the months went by, however, I began to feel the empty space in my life that she used occupy. It was unfortunate. But this too is part of the cost-benefit analysis, when I realize that situations can often turn regrettable even though I do not regret any particular decision.

Of course, there are negative real-world effects of making efficient breaches. In the marketplace, breaking promises decreases confidence and thereby discourages actors from engaging in future contracts. For instance, if you have been divorced too many times, people don’t trust you, and so they don’t want to play the game with you anymore. It’s a problem. No matter how rational I may be in choosing when to follow rules and when to break obligations, it is often insufficient for the people I am dealing with. They want more: more feeling, more attachment, more commitment, more of what they’re used to. At some point, I have to wonder if all of my rational decision-making can make up for my inability to empathize, and I conclude that it doesn’t. People take for granted the empathy with which they were born, and the morality that they somehow internalize. Crying when someone you love cries—I was not born with this shortcut into the hearts of other people. Feeling guilt when you hurt someone you love is an internal safeguard to prevent you from losing them, but I have never been able to learn it. The work-arounds that I have devised for these things often fail me.

Fortunately, however, it is another of my sociopathic traits to persist with optimism and unflinching self-regard, and I’ve learned that few broken things cannot be mended. The angry neighbor never bothered me again. After my friend’s father died, we reconnected and have become friends again. Friends and family have moved on from past hurts and forgiven me. The narrative of the sociopath has been told in the language of pathology, but sometimes I feel like Achilles. In exchange for superhuman might he had a single vulnerability. It was a fair exchange, I think—his demise was extremely improbable.

But I am not completely immune to feeling blue. Of the negative emotions I feel, regret is the saddest and strongest. I acknowledge that much of life is chance and all sorts of bad things might happen to me during life. I’m fine with that. The thing that haunts me more than anything else is the thought that I could unwittingly be the author of my own unhappiness—unhappiness so surprising that it never entered my mind that things could play out that way. It is the ultimate in powerlessness—not just the thought that nothing I do really matters, but that things I do could matter and actually make things worse.

Midway through college I met a girl in the music program who brought my true nature to the surface. We met at an audition for the same part, and even though she was the better musician, I won. She was one of those good-natured people whose infectious laugh rallied friends to her side. She was people-pleasing, serious, and friendly, uncomfortable enough in her own skin that people never envied her, but not so much that they were repulsed. They couldn’t help but like her.

I had always stayed casually close to her so that my reputation would be aligned with hers; I capitalized on her easy likability, making certain that it would rub off on me rather than contrast with my affectations. But maybe this was where I failed. I tried too hard to understand her, as if her delicate balance of coquettishness and earthy charm was something that she had purposefully fabricated and that I could therefore dissect and re-create, but what she had was an accident, an empty convergence of quirks and unforeseen circumstances that she herself could barely describe or detect. She was who she was—it wasn’t an act.

I know this because I secretly pored through her personal letters and journals, trying to understand—to eat up all the insecurities she seeped onto the pages. One day she caught me doing it. She avoided me completely after that, as did everyone else in the program.

No one really talked about it. But my ostracism was especially jarring because ignoring personal boundaries like this was the kind of thing I did all the time. Now they acted as if I was a monster. It was such a trivial, stupid transgression, something I imagine that most everyone has done or wanted to do but was somehow apparently so terrible that shaming me made everyone else a better person. I had violated a moral rule that I didn’t fully understand, and no one wanted to be associated with me.

Without the benefit of social goodwill, I was forced to do everything the hard way, since the trust required for all my secret schemes had been destroyed. It was the best thing that could have happened to me. My actions had finally caught up with me in a way that I could not ignore. Faced with total social isolation, I had no choice but to try to be completely honest with myself.

I started to realize how little I knew about myself or why I did the things I did (and still do). I didn’t like not knowing who I was, so I decided to develop a friendly curiosity about myself. I watched myself for about nine months without judgment or self-manipulation. I wasn’t an ascetic, but I was intent on discovering my true self. My guiding principles during that time were unflinching honesty and acceptance. I thought that if I could garner enough self-knowledge, I could inch myself to happiness or whatever else it was I wanted in life, like a prisoner carving his way out of a concrete wall with a makeshift pick.

At the end of the nine months I had come to a few conclusions. First, I didn’t really have a self at all. I was like an Etch A Sketch, constantly shaking myself up and starting over. And somewhere, somehow, in the last few years, I had come to believe certain things about myself that weren’t really true. For instance, because I often am very charming and outwardly good-natured, I thought that I must be a warmhearted person. Pretending to conform to societal expectations had become so easy that I forgot I was pretending. I read all of these coming-of-age books about people growing up and growing out of childhood quirks and I felt like that is what had happened to me. In reality, I had just lost the self-awareness that I had as a child and even as a teenager. Several things that I had come to believe were mirages, and when I inspected them closer they disappeared, leaving absolutely nothing. I quickly realized that, almost without exception, this was true about everything in my life. All of the stories I had recently been spinning about my life were illusions—gaps occupied by part of my brain to fill in a hole, the same way our brain will sometimes fill in gaps in an optical illusion. I had told myself that I was normal, perhaps just a little too smart, but that my feelings were genuine and typical of a young woman my age. Now I felt like I had woken up from a dream. Without actively spinning stories, I had no self. If I had been Buddhist on my path to seeking Nirvana, this lack of self would have been a huge breakthrough, but I didn’t feel a sense of accomplishment at having achieved that state. Instead I felt the only way anyone can ever feel without a sense of self—free.

Of course I knew that there were things that I did when I was “engaged.” I laughed and plotted. I manipulated a lot, I realized. Manipulation was my default mode of relating with people. Every relationship felt like a dance of giving and taking that I was constantly trying to choreograph, gauging which dance partners would serve my interests best. I liked things like power and excitement. I had no real interest in the content of my activities, just the skill with which I did them. I loved to seduce, not just sexually, but to inhabit someone’s mind so completely, and it was easy—easy to charm. I was a prolific liar, often for no real reason. I was a pleasure seeker, and although I had no real sense of what my self was, I still thought very well of myself. I didn’t need a self to exist. I had a unique role in the world: I was like an enzyme among molecules, catalyzing reactions without being affected myself. Or a virus, looking for a host. I was different from normal people, but I knew that I existed. I acted and interacted. I was largely an illusion, but even an illusion is real in its own way—people experience it, and more important, people respond to it.

I believe that a lot of the sociopath’s traits such as charm, manipulation, lying, promiscuity, chameleonism, mask wearing, and lack of empathy are largely attributable to a very weak sense of self. I believe that all personality disorders share a distorted or abnormal sense of self. The concept of a sociopath having an extremely flexible sense of self is not entirely original to me, but it is not often clearly stated in the scientific literature. I compiled my information from piecing together seemingly disparate elements of the literature on sociopaths in a way that conformed with my own personal experience. Psychologists look at the list of sociopathic traits and think they understand the “what,” but they don’t understand the “how.” I believe the “how,” the origin of many of our observed behaviors, is that we don’t have a rigid sense of self. I believe that this is the predominant defining characteristic of a sociopath.

The person who has gotten closest to identifying this attribute of sociopaths is a professor at California State University–Northridge, Howard Kamler. He argues that “it is not just that [the sociopath] is lacking a strongly identified moral identity, he is likely lacking a strongly identified self identity almost altogether.” When the sociopath feels no sense of remorse, it’s due less to a lack of conscience and more to the fact that the sociopath does not feel that he has betrayed himself: “If a person has no strong sense of self in general, then of course he will probably have no strong sense of lost integrity when he violates life projects which for the rest of us would be central parts of our self identities.” For example, I never get upset when I break up with someone, primarily because I never had any emotional attachment to my status as a “girlfriend.” Similarly, I do not define myself as a successful professional of a certain intellectual or socioeconomic class, so it does not really bother me to be summarily discharged from prestigious positions and remain unemployed for long periods of time living on government payouts and the generosity of friends and family members. I know what I am capable of and that is enough. My particular status in any given moment is insignificant to me except to the degree that I am aware of its significance to others in the way they view me and treat me.

What is it like being self-aware without a self-construct? Much of my self-awareness is the result of indirect observation of the effects I have on people. I know I exist because I see people acknowledging my existence, just as we know that dark matter exists in the universe not because we can see or measure it directly, but because we can see its effects as its invisible gravity distorts the motion of objects around it. Sociopaths are like dark matter in that we typically keep our influence hidden, albeit in plain sight, but you can certainly see our effects. I watch for people’s reactions to me so I am able to understand, “I make people feel scared when I stare at them this way.” My awareness of self is made up of a million of these little observations to paint a picture of myself, like a pointillist portrait.

As a child, my self was easier to define and therefore to ignore: I was a part of my family, a student at my school, a member at my church. I didn’t have to worry about betraying myself with bad behavior, only others; I was used to people looking over my shoulder all the time, so keeping my behavior in check was a constant concern. As an adult I don’t have that same external structure. I make more of my own decisions as an adult, but my actions also have much more permanent and serious consequences. That is why my prosthetic moral compass has been so useful to me, in helping to define me and restrict my behavior; my personal code of efficiency and religion have, for the most part, kept me on the straight and narrow.

While I rarely break the rules, I tend to bend them. Mormons are well known for having dietary restrictions, most famously a prohibition on tobacco, alcohol, and caffeine. I drink green tea and Diet Coke, which seemingly puts me on the wrong side of the law, but I take an originalist interpretation of this provision. The actual language relating to caffeine prohibits “hot drinks,” which presumably does not include ice-cold cola. At the time of the provision’s inception, there was no green tea readily available, so it was unlikely to have been included in the prohibition. Consequently, I have a raging caffeine addiction.

The prohibition on sex before marriage has a much more considerable effect on church members, but it too contains some ambiguity. I’m told that in my grandparents’ generation, the line was drawn at “sexual intercourse,” and apparently people walked right up to that line. My dad once told me a story about how a church leader advised young men to “stay moral, go oral,” although he now denies he ever said it. That loophole has since been tightened up, if not closed, with the prohibition on the potentially broader category of “sexual relations.” With such vague terms, the church appears to be asking its members to interpret the complexity of sexual experience on their own terms. Don’t mind if I do. I find richness in my sex life within the church’s parameters, like a poet who chooses to write in sonnets over free verse.

Mormons are expected to pay a specific percentage of their “increase” to the church as a tithe, but that rule, like most everything, is subject to interpretation. I treat it like paying my taxes: I comply, but I maximize every possible deduction within the letter of the law. Indeed, I have never paid a tremendous amount of attention to the church’s reasons for doing what it does or asserting what it asserts.

Rather than feeling a moral certainty about the rightness of the church and its articles of faith, my affiliation with the church makes sense to me in the language of efficiency. In fact, I have to acknowledge that there is no empirical certainty for the existence or nonexistence of a Creator in the cosmos. I simply proceed as if I could know, and believe. If the church’s tenets by which I have lived are true, then I have invested wisely in my everlasting future. If they are untrue, then I have at least invested wisely in my present life by adhering to a reasonable moral code, with no measurable effect on my uncertain future. I understand my faith as a foundation for living—the infrastructure on which I create a life that provides me with immense pleasures and essential joy.

Even without a religious or ethical code, high-functioning sociopaths eventually learn that they can use their powers for good. Sociopaths cannot willfully blind themselves to exploitable weaknesses in others, but they can choose to use that special vision to be productive rather than destructive. Sometimes in choosing to manipulate or exploit weaknesses in others, you create vulnerabilities in yourself, for example by harming your reputation or feeding an addiction to increasingly outrageous antisocial behavior. Controlling our impulses also allows sociopaths to overcome our isolation by forming long-term, meaningful relationships. Sociopaths who truly seek to cultivate power realize that the greatest power they can acquire is power over themselves.