M. Thomas: Confessions of a Sociopath

If I had a sociopathic child, though, I think I could do a good job rearing him or her. I believe my parents did a remarkably good job with me, whether they meant to or not. They set up an ongoing competition for love and scarce resources like time and money among their five children, an active game with relatively straightforward, consistent rules and obvious consequences. They had clear favorites. In fact, on many a weekend afternoon, my siblings would stave off boredom by discussing the relative strengths and weaknesses of each sibling and how they corresponded with the affections of our parents, e.g., Dad likes Scott because Scott will surf with him, but ultimately likes Jim better because Jim indulges his flights of fantasy. It was clear to all how Scott could move up in the rankings by, for instance, supporting my dad’s magical thinking—he just didn’t care to do so for whatever reason.

I understood my parents’ favoritism as a clearly defined meritocracy—a consistent system under which I could learn to operate. I bought into the game and actively participated because I felt like I could play well against my competitor siblings. I did not know all the rules or triggers, but I could learn them, and it was an ongoing challenge because I was not otherwise naturally inclined to care what my parents thought of me. My mother cleaved to the children who showed emotional and musical sensitivities that would encourage and affirm her own, while my father preferred the ones who exhibited innate intelligence sufficient to recognize his intellect but not so great that they questioned his authority. I would always go surfing and skiing with my dad because he would buy me the proper accoutrements—wetsuits, surfboards, surf racks, skis, boots, gloves, poles, and gas for my car—while my sister Kathleen was having to borrow dance shoes and scrounge rides from her friends. My mother always had dreams of our singing together like the Partridge Family, then later upgraded her dreams to a family jazz combo like the Marsalis family. My father always dreamed that we would be like the guitar-playing cool kids he used to envy in high school. I chose to play drums because it fit both of their dreams perfectly, enough that they found the money to buy me a drum set while my sister had to stay home from camp for lack of funds. My parents weren’t consistent in terms of providing emotional or financial support for me and my siblings, but their unremitting self-interest made them very predictable; this single vector dominated their every behavior toward us. Getting what we wanted was only a matter of how to appeal to their particular brands of self-interest.

The worst thing that my parents could have done (for me) was to behave in inconsistent ways, or to show us too much mercy. As a child, all I understood was cause and effect. If I felt like I or my siblings could break the rules and still get away with it by crying on cue, then I would have done that instead of following them. I was as amenable to conditioning as laboratory rats, learning to push the levers that gave me treats and to stop pushing levers that yielded nothing.

I think that sociopaths (particularly young ones) actually feel happier and thrive better in a world of clearly defined boundaries; when rules are consistently enforced, the child will just start to take them as a given. I certainly did. I think simple cause-and-effect rules with clear, predictable outcomes for compliance or violation encourage the young sociopath to think of life as an interesting puzzle that can be gamed. As long as the young sociopath believes that she can acquire some advantage through skillful planning and execution (and finds some level of success, which I feel is almost a given), she will stay committed to the structure of the game you have set up. It’s why sociopaths can be ruthless businessmen fiercely defending the principles of capitalism.

My favorite teacher had an entirely meritocratic system in which we could opt out of class time. She had replaced a very popular teacher in our sixth-grade pre-algebra class midyear. I didn’t like the popular teacher; he had pandered too much to students and often played favorites. My new teacher initially struggled to gain the trust of the class. Pre-algebra was the most advanced math class for our grade and our school was in a particularly nice part of town, so everyone was very smart and entitled. The smartest and most demanding of the children (including me) complained that she was going too slow. In a creative solution, she started giving short quizzes in the first five minutes of class. If you received a perfect score on the quiz, you got to go outside on the grass patch just outside the classroom door and work on your homework instead of staying inside for the lecture. Every day I would arrive a few minutes before class, glancing through the material for the day so I could get a perfect score. Out of the eighty school days left in the year, I only had to stay in for a few lectures, typically due to some small arithmetic error. Those were always very difficult days for me, but I also understood that those were the rules and my teacher applied them exactly and without exception. It felt like a game, and it was a game I liked to play because I outplayed my classmates. The fact that sometimes I lost just meant that it was not an easy game. It was challenging enough to keep my attention and consistent enough to keep my trust.

But if I were confronted with a system in which one lever might sometimes get a shock and sometimes get a treat, I would probably choose not to engage with the system at all, stealing my treats from the other rats instead. The worst thing that parents can do is to be inconsistent. It makes the child sociopath think that the game is rigged; in that case, it doesn’t matter what he does, except to the extent that he can out-cheat the cheater (typically the parent). Providing me a system defined by clear incentives, my parents laid out a way for me to gain positive benefits while exercising my sociopathic traits. I didn’t have to rely on the soft intangibles of empathy or emotion to get what I needed.

In raising my child, it would be natural for me to follow in my parents’ incredibly self-interested footsteps by only fostering those interests in my children that appealed to my own vanity. But there is predictability and honesty to this approach that I believe actually sets up children to thrive in the real world.

And I think that children often prefer emotional detachment from adults in response to their tantrums as opposed to emotional coddling. There’s something reasonable and stable seeming about my emotionlessness to children. Especially when children are self-aware enough to acknowledge that there are emotions they can’t control (and I think most children are aware of this as soon as they begin acknowledging the emotional worlds of others). It’s very calming to have someone not reacting emotionally at all.

My three-year-old niece had a meltdown in church the other day so I took her outside. I knew it was just because she was tired (all of her cousins had slept in the same room as part of a holiday weekend’s festivities), maybe a little overexcited with all of the activity and relatives, and maybe a little annoyed about the arrival of her new baby sister. So I just walked with her until she stopped crying, then sat on a curb playing with ants. I didn’t talk to her about her feelings or even mention the meltdown. When she got tired of the ants, she insisted we go back into church. I let her boss me around. It was a subtle sign to her that I still took her seriously, even after the tantrum. And then finally after we had settled ourselves into the pew again she asked me to scratch her back, after having acted aloof to me all weekend, and wanted me to go to her Sunday school class with her (I told her I was too tall to fit in the small chairs).