Confessions of a Sociopath (21 page)

As in poker, many people have unconscious tells or little changes in behavior or demeanor that let me know the strength or weakness of the hand they’ve been dealt in life. Tells having to do with class usually work well. I don’t believe I
have ever encountered a person without some kind of readable insecurities about their class or socioeconomic status. And these self-doubts pervade every aspect of a person’s life, from how to hold chopsticks in a sushi restaurant to whether to say hello to your mailman. In such circumstances, I can establish a favorable power dynamic by showing just the slightest disapproval couched in an easy, generous tolerance. It’s a kind of gently condescending noblesse oblige.

I had been assigned to work for a senior associate named Jane in one of the firm’s satellite offices, so I only saw her once every few weeks. In law firms, you are supposed to treat a person who is a couple years senior to you as if she is the ultimate authority in everything you do in your life, and Jane took this hierarchy pretty seriously. You could tell that she had never enjoyed such power in any other social sphere. Her pale white skin, mottled with age, poor diet, and middling hygiene, was evidence of a lifetime spent outside the social elite. But you could also tell she had tried to cultivate her own brand of brittle class privilege, albeit poorly. Jane had obtained—in answer to all of her dreams and as a result of her unimpeachable assiduousness—a modicum of power in her office, having satisfactorily worked for one of the more powerful attorneys at the firm. She wanted so much to wear her power well but she was clumsy with it—heavy-handed in certain circumstances and a pushover in others. You could tell that she was self-consciously aware of it, which made her a particularly entertaining blend of ostensible power and self-doubt.

I was not, perhaps, her best associate. As much as anyone I have ever encountered, Jane believed that I was undeserving of all that I had accomplished. Whereas she had taken so much effort to dress appropriately (ill-fitting beige suits with shoulder pads), I wore flip-flops and T-shirts at every
semi-reasonable opportunity. While she regularly billed as many hours as humanly possible, I exploited our firm’s nonexistent vacation policy by taking three-day weekends and weeks-long vacations abroad. People were implicitly expected not to take vacations, but I had my own lifelong policy of following only explicit rules, and then only because they’re easiest to prove against me. She could sense that I flouted this and other unspoken rules with little consequence by a quick look at my time sheets and my less-than-formal office attire. It wasn’t that she hated me; she just didn’t know what to do with me. To her, I was walking injustice. It disgusted her, but if I had sold my soul to the devil, she wanted to get his business card and contact information.

I had driven to her office for a meeting, and we met in the lobby by coincidence as she was coming back from lunch. We walked together to the elevator, and when it opened, there were two tall, handsome men already inside. One was French, and both apparently worked at a venture capital firm that shared the building with our firm. You could tell by looking at them that they received multimillion-dollar bonuses and likely arrived via one of the Lotuses or Maseratis regularly parked in the underground garage. Lawyers might be wealthy, but they are almost without exception surrounded by far greater wealth.

The two were in the midst of a discussion about the symphony that they had attended the night before, which I had also happened to attend. I didn’t go to the symphony all the time; a friend had happened to have some extra tickets. I casually asked them about it, and their eyes lit up.

“So lucky to have met you! Perhaps you can settle a disagreement between my friend and me,” the Frenchman said. “My friend thinks that it was Rachmaninoff’s second piano
concerto that was performed last night, but I think it was his third. Do you recall?”

I didn’t miss a beat. “It was his second. It was incredible, wasn’t it?” I actually could not recall, and it turned out to have been his third. Of course, it hardly mattered what the right answer was.

The two men thanked me profusely as they left the elevator, leaving Jane and me to travel up to her office in enough silence for her to contemplate the dimensions of my intellectual and social superiority. It was the kind of elite encounter she hoped she would one day have when she was just a nerdy teenager clasping on to her dog-eared copy of
Mansfield Park
—that she would attend symphonies and be able to speak intelligently about them to handsome strangers. She had envisioned that matriculation at a highly ranked university and employment at a prestigious law firm would make such a moment possible for her, but it wasn’t hers. It was mine.

Jane was a little jittery by the time we got back to her office, a combination of caffeine at lunch and worry that she had wasted her life. We were supposed to talk about the project I was working on for her, but instead we talked about her life choices from about the age of eighteen, her worries and insecurities about her job and her body, her attraction to women despite being engaged to a man for several years, and other things that I can’t bother to remember. After the elevator, I knew I had her—which is to say that I knew that whenever she saw me, her heart would flutter; she would worry about all of the secret vulnerabilities she had exposed to me and wonder what it would be like to undress me, or to slap me across the face. I know that for a long time I haunted her dreams, and that even now, years later, I could make her hands tremble just by flashing her a smile. Of course power
is its own reward, but with this particular dynamic between us established, I was able to leverage a brief cancer scare and outpatient procedure into a three-week paid vacation. Which is also a form of reward.

I think that sociopathy gives me a natural competitive advantage, a unique way of thinking that is hardwired into my brain. I have an almost invincible confidence in my own abilities. I am hyper-observant of the flow of influence and power in a group. And I never panic in the face of crisis. I bet there are a lot of things about which people would want to be a little sociopathic. It frees me from the fear of public speaking or the possibility of becoming an emotional eater. Sometimes it is not clear to me whether I have fear or emotions, but I know they don’t affect me the way they do others.

In the book
The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success
, Kevin Dutton argues that there is a thin line between a Hannibal Lecter–type killer and the brilliant surgeon who lacks empathy. Sociopaths are primed for success because they are fearless, confident, charismatic, ruthless, and focused—qualities that define them as sociopaths but are also “tailor-made for success in the twenty-first century.” I used those traits to climb the social ladder from misfit kid to talented musician to high-flying legal student to well-compensated attorney—and who knows where else they will take me in the future?

Sociopaths also think fast on their feet. Recent research suggests that sociopath brains learn in a chaotic way, similar to brains with attention deficit disorder, namely by breaking up the information into small fragments and storing it randomly in both hemispheres of the brain. Perhaps due to this
odd storage system, the sociopath’s corpus callosum, that bundle of nerve fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain, is longer and skinnier than in an average brain. Consequently, the rate at which information is transmitted between hemispheres in a sociopath’s brain is abnormally high.

Of course, researchers almost never credit the sociopath brain as having any advantage over an empath brain, despite the demonstrated greater efficiency in transmitting information between brain hemispheres. Instead this efficiency is vaguely insinuated as the cause for the sociopath’s “less remorse, fewer emotions and less social connectedness—the classic hallmarks of a psychopath.” Normal people, even scientists, won’t ever admit that a sociopath’s brain might actually be better in any way. Every single article I have seen that even comes close to discussing some of the advantages of the sociopathic brain eventually backs off and makes some pat conclusion about how broken we are. In fact, the title of an article about the sociopath’s corpus callosum is “Out of Order.” But there are two meanings to that phrase, and I think one of them applies to this sort of bias thinly masked as science.

While I have to admit that I am not exceptional at multitasking (and, really, most people aren’t), I have a genius for clear-minded focus. With me, my attention is always on one thing at a time, and I toggle rapidly through thoughts in a way that makes it sometimes seem that I have ADD. Despite this appearance, I am excellent at directing all my attention onto a single focus, particularly when driven to it by adrenaline. This can be very bad, like the time I became entirely fixated on killing that DC metro worker who hassled me for walking on a broken escalator. It can also be great in clutch situations, because I am able to tune out all of the white noise that might distract other people, the daily petty worries or insecurities
that might plague other competitors. I can achieve a relaxed calmness in even the most frenetic situations. I believe that my lack of nerves is the reason why I performed so well on standardized tests in school. I don’t remember a time when I scored outside the ninety-ninth percentile. During a mock trial competition, the judge remarked, “At one point I wanted to go back there and check to make sure you still had a pulse. You seemed as cool as a cucumber.”

During the California bar exam, people were literally crying from the stress. The convention center where the exam was given looked like a disaster relief center, with people sprawled out on any available floor space, in a desperate attempt to recall everything they had memorized over the past eight or more weeks, the contents of their backpacks and briefcases spewed out around them. I had spent those weeks vacationing in Mexico, making a cross-country road trip, and teaching my nieces and nephews how to swim. Despite being woefully underprepared by many standards, I was able to maintain calm and to focus enough to maximize the legal knowledge I did have. I passed while many of my equally intelligent and better-prepared friends failed. Psychologists have described this single-mindedness as “flow” and have opined that champion athletes, master musicians, and other performers function at their best when focused in this way. Through this hyperfocus, I was able, with minimal work, to achieve a level of performance in school and my career that others would have to spend many times the number of hours preparing for, simply because I was able to marshal the exact mental resources I needed in the moment.

But other activities require a broader focus, including things as simple as walking efficiently through an airport, engaging in a conversation with more than one person, playing
poker, or navigating office politics during a staff meeting. For these things, I have gradually learned to expand my hyperfocus to include multiple, varied targets via what free divers call “attention deconcentration.” I’ve heard another practitioner refer to something similar as “situational awareness.” Unlike meditation, which seeks to eliminate all thought, attention deconcentration focuses the user on everything all at once, feeling everything simultaneously. According to free diver Natalia Molchanova, “What you do to start learning is you focus on the edges, not the center of things, as if you were looking at a screen.” She mentions that people who are subject to persistent stress factors where quick decision-making is necessary can find it useful to diffuse their attention and blunt their “emotional reaction in critical situations [where it] can lead to the wrong decisions and panic.” When I get closest to achieving deconcentration, I am so hyperaware of all sensory inputs that I reach a total-body experience that one might call ecstasy. It’s very pleasurable. And useful, particularly in combating unwanted impulses by forcing myself to see the bigger picture, which makes a single impulse seem so inconsequential in comparison. Hyperfocus achieved a similar effect by keeping me so engaged in one activity that I was blind to other temptations. Attention games became one of the best ways for me to finally liberate myself from the tyranny of my impulses and finally acquire some measure of social and professional stability.

I lived for a long time as an undiagnosed sociopath, trying as best I could to figure out ways to cope with my differences to succeed and to pass as normal in the wider world. But I wasn’t doing a great job pulling it off. I was stretching the
patience of the partners at my law firm. Ultimately, I was fired for shirking my work assignments. My relationships with friends and lovers were dissolving before my eyes. As I began my period of self-analysis and began investigating what it means to be a sociopath, I realized that though I had brought a lot of suffering on myself and people close to me, there was nothing objectively damning about having these traits. If I could figure out how to direct them in useful and productive directions, I could be true to myself and still live a satisfying life that minimized the harm I did to myself and others. It was time to take control of my life. The obvious starting place was my career.

Despite my laziness and general disinterest, I actually was a great lawyer when I was trying. After I lost my corporate job, I worked for a short while as a prosecutor in the misdemeanor department of the district attorney’s office. My sociopathic traits make me a particularly excellent trial attorney, as compared to, for instance, an attorney who must learn and adhere to typeface requirements for court documents or carefully cull through millions of documents redacting minutiae. I’m cool under pressure. I charm and manipulate. I feel no guilt or compunction, which is a handy thing to have in such a dirty business.

In law there are a million and one mistakes you can make, particularly when approaching a trial, particularly as a prosecutor. Prosecutors bear the highest legal burden of proof and ethics and face disbarment or other disciplinary action for errors. Despite this, misdemeanor prosecutors almost always have to walk into trial with cases they’ve never worked on before. It’s like buying a foreclosed home at auction sight unseen—it could be a steal or a nightmare. All you can do is bluff and hope that if there is an issue, you’ll be able to
scramble through it. No problem. At least for someone like me. The thing with sociopaths is that we are largely unaffected by fear. It’s not because I am certain I’ll do a terrific job, although historically that has been true. With my intelligence, quick-wittedness, and level head I’m pretty sure that even if I don’t impress the judge I’ll at least put on a good show.