Not sociopath, just smart?

From a reader:

Your blog has resonated with me for a while now. Despite not being a sociopath, getting an intuitive understanding of the illusion of free will can tend to make you more like one. Your recent post sort of illustrated the blind fact that was sitting in front of my face, why I, a fairly normal empathetic person, has no problem with manipulating people, especially if its benign.

When you see all of human desire, behavior and nature as a mechanism, even the most romanticized, idealized sensibilities start to become nothing more than  mechanisms.

At first, this might make someone depressed, as their idealistic illusions of meaning and purpose start to disintegrate. But, another thought can arise - that depression itself, that sense of emptiness, it's just a mechanism too.

Once you get there, you can start plugging into your instincts more rationally. Books like The Art of Seduction and 48 Laws of Power resonate with me. They wouldn't have in the past. My personality has become more Machiavellian, at least in the sense that I am much more keen on evaluating actions in terms of their consequences instead of ideals.

M.E.:

You sound like my friend. She sort of insists that I became the way I became because I was smart and so I naturally saw everything in terms of gears and levers to be manipulated to get what I wanted. I think it's because that's how she feels. She is probably currently in the depression state, because I think you're right, it's hard for meaning to exist at the same time that you are aware that everything can be reduced to simple mechanics. She has taken it a step further than just the belief that everything is simple mechanics, so it's even worse. Since she was a child, she's believed that she is *so* smart and *so* good at manipulating the gears and levers of people and the world that she fears that she controls everything, which because she's an empath, makes her constantly worry that she will mess everything up.

But when she says these things to me, I understand how different I am from her. Because it's not that seeing things in terms of gears and levers as a little kid made me a sociopath, it's being sociopathic made made me see the world in terms of gears and levers. So I never used to worry about things like meaning, because I never had it and then lost it. It was only after I tried to be less sociopathic that the question of meaning became a real issue for me.