You know your life has taken a strange turn when you find yourself wondering what it would be like to be a sociopath, and thinking that on some levels, it sounds kind of good.

I mean, sure, they’re the definition of evil. But they seem happy.

Not really, of course. For someone like me, wondering what it is like to be a sociopath, devoid of empathy, is like a person with chronic eyestrain headaches wondering what it would be like to be blind. It might seem nice when you are just thinking about it in the abstract, but the moment you imagine it actually being true, reality sets in and you realize it would be horrible.

Still, I wonder. I wonder if being a sensitive person and being a sociopath are somehow linked, in the same way that light and shadow are linked. I wonder if there are sociopaths out there who got that way because of some intolerable empathic memory or event that was so profoundly disturbing that the only way out of that hell was to isolate and disconnect the entire empathic circuit of the brain.

This is not an unknown phenomenon. Phobias are basically wildly overgeneralized reactions to traumatic incidents. When one person who touches the hot stove might come away thinking “Wow, that hurt like hell, I better not touch a hot stove ever again!”, another, possibly more sensitive or more reactive person, might come away thinking “Stoves are evil! I hate stoves! Stoves just want to hurt people! I won’t go near a stove ever again!”.

So that is one theory of sociopathy. There needs to be many others, because one thing we know about these people is that a lot of them come from perfectly average homes with no known evidence of trauma of any out of the ordinary sort.

It is entirely possible that some people are simply born that way. If so, then we should be able to observe the difference in their minds with modern realtime brain activity imaging via fMRI. This introduces the intriguing and disturbing (so much of modern brain science is both) possibility of there being an objective way to determine if someone is, indeed, a sociopath.

On the one hand, that conceivably could be used as a legal defense. A defense attorney could argue that their client was literally incapable of stopping themselves from doing heinous things and therefore cannot be held legally accountable to them.

And of course, because we have this crazy (hah) legal system that can only think in terms of “innocent” or “guilty”, that could theoretically mean someone is put back on the street on the grounds that they are the kind of person who should not be, under any circumstances, be back on the street.

That’s why I think we need to revitalize the civil commitment process. Yes, in the past it was horribly abused to send away people who were merely inconvenient to the state or to their families, but there has to be a way to declare someone, legally speaking, too crazy to be free.

So maybe it happens due to trauma, maybe some people are simply born with a brain abnormality that makes them unable to care. The third and least likely possibility is that at some point in life, people make a choice. Maybe a conscious choice, maybe an unconscious choice, probably somewhere in between.

They choose how much they care. They make their deal with the world about what is worth caring about and what is not, what circumstances justify a sacrifice of purely selfish concerns in pursuit of moral (empathic) rewards. They draw their circle around themselves, and everything within their circle is their business, and everything else is someone else’s business, in all senses of the word.

And some people choose bigger circles and some people draw smaller circles, and sociopaths draw the smallest ones possible. Theirs is a solipsistic subjective reality in which only they are real, and everyone else is just a shadow, an irritation, or at best, a means to an end.

But have you ever wondered why merely not caring about people would drive them to violence? One answer is, of course, that it doesn’t in most cases. There is significant evidence that there may be a dozen well behaved sociopaths lurking, unknown, for every headline-grabbing low impulse control deviant who does unspeakable things to people.

But I think that, for the ones that do draw attention to themselves, there is a secret to the evil they do beyond their glib and superficial answers as to why they did their misdeeds.

They will say it was out of curiosity, or boredom, or anger, but I think that part of their mind knows something very key is missing and is trying to find a way through that icy cold steel that is their sociopathy, but the only thing it can find that comes close to what it knows it should be feeling is the bludgeoningly strong empathic signals that come from someone else being in extreme pain and fear.

So they are drawn to acts of sadism not merely for some kind of sick thrill, but because it makes them feel… better, somehow.

This, of course, does not justify the acts, it just explains them. I am sure many sociopaths would object to the idea that they hurt people just so they can feel something for once. That would make them sound like a pussy.

To wrap this entry up, I will return to where I started. I know what it would be like if I didn’t care, and it is no good. Like I have said many times before, a guy like me could be a terrible menace without moral restraint. Think Hannibal Lecter crossed with the Joker. The worst villains are always the ones who use great intellect to do harm, and mine is pretty damned big.

I don’t really want to stop caring.

I just want it to be quiet in my head for once. At least for a little while.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.