Culture | Psychology
The Myth of the Charming Sociopath
“Those are the Sacrifices Being Made!”
Clearlink’s town hall video from CEO James Clarke is the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to examining myths and misconceptions from the workplace and our everyday lives. Yesterday’s article was about overhyping the value of automation, based on Clarke’s assertion that his employees could be doing eight hours of work in thirty minutes thanks to ChatGPT (his solution was to give them 30–50 times more work — no, that math wouldn’t make sense even if the rest of his claim was correct).
This one, the second of three articles about common myths that his speech brought to light, focuses instead on how the pop-cultural image of the manipulative sociopath measures up against the clinical reality.
Of course, that isn’t to say any particular public figure’s a clinical sociopath. I’m certainly not qualified to diagnose anyone at all, much less someone that I’ve never met based on a snippet of a video. Maybe Clarke’s a good person but a poor communicator who makes a bad impression. Maybe he’s an awful person who doesn’t have any diagnostic excuse, who just made a calculated decision to take the low road. That’s the most statistically likely explanation for cruelty: the psychopathy rate even among convicted felons is just 16%, meaning the remaining 84% have no claim to a personality disorder that denies them a conscience. They just ignore it.
Whether or not he really counts, one of his most infamous remarks is a good example of the mundane reality of psychopathy vs the glamorous media image of it. In praising some examples of his employees’ work ethic, Clarke cites one woman who sold their family dog. “That breaks my heart,” he says, “as someone who has been at the head of the humanization of pets business and other businesses we have built. But, truly, those are the sacrifices being made and I honor you for those sacrifices.”
It’s an odd statement, to say the least. There’s an attempt to acknowledge the feelings involved in the decision, an effort to express empathy, but that expression seems to misunderstand the emotion on a fundamental level and it pivots back to the speaker as quickly as it can, with a perfunctory conclusion that feels like it was lifted from a greeting card.
And there you go. That’s what psychopathy looks like.
Psychopathy, or sociopathy, or antisocial personality disorder (whether they’re three terms for the same thing or should be considered subtle but distinct disorders is an ongoing debate, but it’ll suffice here to consider them the same thing) is, at its core, a cognitive inability to empathize with other people. There’s just no emotional awareness that other people have inner lives, that they aren’t merely a physical phenomenon to be pushed aside like so much furniture. It isn’t really a drive to go out and commit violent acts for their own sake: it’s that there’s no internalized worry about harming others because there are no “others” in such a mindset. The only consideration is the prospect, perhaps, of being sent to prison.
Sigmund Freud gets a lot of flack, but he correctly pointed out a lot of things that, while they seem like common sense today, left his Victorian contemporaries shaken to the core. One of them is that we aren’t born freighted with a sense of empathy or morality: a baby would destroy the world in minutes, he observed, if given the power to do so. But as we learn to communicate with others, we also learn to anticipate their responses and infer the thought processes behind them. We figure out that other people have minds like ours and how we can relate to them.
Children have a natural tendency to anthropomorphize the world, to test the limits of what might be able to think and feel. They draw the Moon with a smiling face; their teddy bear becomes their best friend. That mindset is innately human, and it’s reflected in myths and legends, in our stories about sun chariots and talking animals, about thunder gods whose anger brings a raging storm. We see ourselves reflected in the universe.
Sociopaths never quite internalize that mental process: empathy is always an intellectual exercise akin to solving a word problem in math, never a compassionate instinct. And so their language for expressing empathy is unpracticed and stilted. It often misses the point altogether, because it’s a blind guess at what they think they’re supposed to say.
Faced with the news that a friend’s mother has passed away, the response might be “wow, I’ll bet the funeral costs a lot of money.” There may be a learned awareness, born from lifelong trial and error, that this is a sad occasion and something’s supposed to be said to indicate that, but no understanding of why it’s sad. Everything exists on the surface.
The media myth of the psychopath is that they’re the Big Bad Wolf, charming and brilliant sophisticates who pull off the mask and eat us whole the moment we’re alone and trapped. They’re Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, or Hannibal Lecter, or Dexter. Such characters have less to do with reality than with our primal fears of being deceived, of placing our trust in someone who turns out to be a monster. And there really are people who turn out to be monsters behind closed doors.
But studies have shown that, generally speaking, diagnosed psychopaths aren’t particularly good at hiding that fact from others. They’re trying to speak a language they don’t understand, and, often within a few minutes of in-depth conversation, other people recognize that there’s something off about them. An unreserved willingness to lie in conversation can create superficial charm (which is one of the traits used to diagnose psychopathy), but what renders it superficial is the lack of anything substantial.
I have no idea if Clearlink’s CEO is an example of someone with antisocial personality disorder. Since the National Institute of Health estimates less than 1% of non-institutionalized men in the U.S. are psychopaths, the odds seem pretty low. But responding to the story of a family pet being sold by bragging about heading a pet-welfare organization and commending the worker’s company loyalty certainly helps illustrate the point.
Thank you for reading this completely human writer’s article! Each week I’ll be posting new articles (also written by a human, probably the same human) covering science, philosophy, psychology, pop culture — pretty much anything and everything that I think is interesting and worth talking about.
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