The Sociopaths Among Us #1: Introducing Nancy's New Series
Description
Hello Smokies. My very limited* skill set includes writing, baking, and sussing out con artists, sociopaths and others who use people for their own duplicitous ends. I’ve already given you 40+ Pie Talks (all accessible here!) and now move onto the less savory area of expertise… which required me just now to stop typing and handle, for the hundredth-plus time, a person in my life engaging in pointless maneuvering in order to make himself appear “in command!” or whatever he thinks he is doing.
* I did build this fire pit three days ago
Is it tiresome dealing with people with various sociopathic disorders? Yes. I say this after years of employing various parries to safeguard myself and my loved ones, to good effect. Others do not have the fortitude, funds and/or face a more skilled operative, resulting in bewilderment, annoyance, danger. Seriously, it is not fun.
There are many common traits among people with sociopathic disorders. One is a lack of conscience, which sounds broad and hard to parse. Below is a more specific list, for Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which, when I showed it to my daughter several years ago, said, “Oh my god, it’s _____.”
It’s not hard to see how bad things can happen when you are taken in by the sociopath. Harder to imagine is what they get out of it, or hope to get out of it. In my experience, it’s the pleasure of getting one over on you. In her seminal work, The Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout expounds on this pleasure:
“And this is power, especially when the people you manipulate are superior to you in some way. Most invigorating of all is to bring down people who are smarter or more accomplished than you, or perhaps classier, or more attractive or popular or morally admirable. This is not only good fun, it is existential vengeance.”
Alas, the hit of satisfaction is all but certainly evanescent. How can it not be? If you’re not doing actual work — writing a book, scaling a mountain, conscientiously raising your children — any “good fun” is a tissue, you need the next hit of trying to humiliate or embarrass someone, or, in the case of the violent sociopath, the next mutilation or murder.
As I note in this slightly rambling first episode, I am starting the series close to home. In future episodes, I will hone on on famous sociopaths I’ve met and written about, including literary hoaxer Laura Albert (aka, JT. LeRoy) and serial killer John Wayne Gacy. I will also cover cultural figures who’ve made careers luring people into their orbit in what at first appears to be tantalizing inclusion or salvation and nearly always ends in tears, bankruptcy, disillusion, even death. It cannot mathematically happen any other way, the sociopath having no tools other than cunning; he is not the one building anything, you are, and as soon as he tires of using you, you will be the one left holding the bag. The sociopath will think this is funny, if you thinks about it at all, which he won’t. Which can be extremely frustrating to the people he has duped. Often, they are too humiliated to admit what’s happened, and round and round we go.
I wound up telling a story earlier today about a sociopath I know…
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