Ocean to my shark

From a reader:

I read the entire thing yesterday. It was fascinating. I'm not a sociopath or psychopath - I took the test and ridiculously low. I actually wouldn't mind being just a little bit sociopathic; I care way too much about the stuff that doesn't bother sociopaths at all, which is a big part of why I'm interested. 

Anyway, I'm really interested in atypical neurology; as I've tried to understand other people and myself, I've learned that part of the reason people are different is that their brains genuinely process things differently. So my reading brought me to Kevin Dutton's books, and then to yours. By the way, if you haven't read his more recent book, The Good Psychopath's Guide to Success, I highly recommend it. One thing I like about his books is that he acknowledges that neural atypicalness doesn't automatically doom people to evil or uncontrolled violence, that there's a lot of other factors.

This is actually important to me partly on account of fictional characters; I get probably too involved in some of my favorite fictional worlds. After Thor 2 came out last fall I got dragged into a six-month flame war on tumblr because I and a few others pointed out that the supposed villain's actual behavior isn't any worse than that of the supposed hero - actually, it's much better; he kills fewer people and with better reasons. And the way the supposed good guys in that movie treat their enemies is horrifying; a limit on how cruel you are to your enemies is supposed to be one of the distinctions between the good guys and bad guys, but a lot of the people who flamed us for this seemed to figure the whole point is that once you label someone as a bad guy, anything you want to do to them is okay. It's just like people saying that we ought to put sociopaths on islands or something. And while I'm not a sociopath, I am a misfit, and gay, and converted to Judaism a few years ago, so I am all too aware of the danger in such thinking.

We got some sympathy from some Harry Potter fans, because the fans of that series have been arguing fiercely for years about Slytherin. Are Slytherins just evil by nature, or is it just that people distrust their habits of manipulation and opportunism? And what kind of society labels a fourth of its population as evil at the age of 11 and then treats them all like dirt for the rest of their lives? And while I don't think all the Slytherin characters are sociopaths, I also think most sociopaths would be sorted into Slytherin.

As I've read these books on socipathy, I've realized that some people I've known were probably sociopaths. Most of them weren't violent, but they were skilled at manipulating and were emotionally detached from a very young age. I am terrible at manipulating people, so people who are good at it intrigue me. Some of the sociopaths I've known have harmed me, but empaths have caused me a lot more pain and damage because they couldn't or wouldn't control their emotional impulses. I'm inclined to think the world could use a few benign sociopaths, like you and some of those Kevin Dutton writes about.

I think it was really brave of you to tell your story, and I'm sorry you had to stop teaching because of it. I don't think that was right at all when you didn't do anything. I think we can hope people are starting to understand neural atypicality more and that law-abiding sociopaths won't continue to be condemned for what they are instead of what they do. Maybe.

You might like to read the novel The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten. It's a spoof of Twilight, in which Bella (Bonnie is her name in this version) is the sociopath and she seduces Edward because she likes the idea of being immortal. She's not a benign sociopath - she's killed people, for one thing - but from what I've read, the book seems to have accurately captured the sociopath way of looking at things. There's one line where she scoffs at the label "antisocial": "I love society. It's like the ocean to my shark."