By ADAM KOTSKO
My greatest regret is that I’m not a sociopath. I suspect
I’m not alone. I have written before that we live in the age of awkwardness,
but a strong case could be made that we live in the age of the sociopath.
They are dominant figures on television, for example, and within essentially
every television genre. Cartoon shows have been fascinated by sociopathic
fathers (with varying degrees of sanity) ever since the writers of The
Simpsons realized that Homer was a better central character than Bart.
Showing that cartoon children are capable of radical evil as well, Eric Cartman
of South Park has been spouting racial invective and hatching evil plots
for well over a decade at this point. On the other end of the spectrum, the
flagships of high-brow cable drama have almost all been sociopaths of varying
stripes: the mafioso Tony Soprano of The Sopranos, the gangsters Stringer
Bell and Marlo of The Wire, the seductive imposter Don Draper of Mad
Men, and even the serial-killer title character of Dexter. In between, one
might name the various reality show contestants betraying each other in their
attempt to avoid being “voted off the island”; Dr. House, who seeks a diagnosis
with complete indifference and even hostility toward his patients’ feelings;
the womanizing character played by Charlie Sheen on the sitcom Two and a
Half Men; Glenn Close’s evil, plotting lawyer in Damages; the invincible
badass Jack Bauer who will stop at nothing in his sociopathic devotion to
stopping terrorism in 24—and of course the various sociopathic pursuers of
profit, whether in business or in politics, who populate the evening news.
On a certain level, this trend may not seem like anything
new. It seems as though most cultures have lionized ruthless individuals who
make their own rules, even if they ultimately feel constrained to punish them
for their self-assertion as well. Yet there is something new going on in this
entertainment trend that goes beyond the understandable desire to fantasize
about living without the restrictions of society. The fantasy sociopath is
somehow outside social norms—largely bereft of human sympathy, for instance,
and generally amoral—and yet is simultaneously a master manipulator, who can
instrumentalize social norms to get what he or she wants.
It is this social mastery that sets the contemporary fantasy
sociopath apart from both the psychopath and the real-life sociopath. While
many of the characters named above are ruthless killers, they are generally not
psychopathic or “crazy” in the sense of seeking destruction for its own sake,
nor do they generally have some kind of uncontrollable compulsion to struggle
with. Indeed, they are usually much more in control of their actions than the
normal “sane” person and much more capable of creating long-term plans with
clear and achievable goals.
This level of control also sets them apart from a more
clinical definition of sociopathy. I do not wish to delve into the DSM or any
other authority in the field of psychology, where the usefulness of sociopathy
as a diagnostic category is in any case disputed. Yet as I understand it,
real-life sociopaths are pitiable creatures indeed. Often victims of severe
abuse, they are bereft of all human connection, unable to tell truth from lies,
charming and manipulative for a few minutes at most but with no real ability to
formulate meaningful goals. The contemporary fantasy of sociopathy picks and
chooses from those characteristics, emphasizing the lack of moral intuition,
human empathy, and emotional connection. Far from being the obstacles they
would be in real life, these characteristics are what enable the fantasy
sociopath to be so amazingly successful.
It is curious to think that power would stem so directly
from a lack of social connection. After all, we live in a world where we are
constantly exhorted to “network,” to live by the maxim that “it’s all about who
you know.” Yet the link between power and disconnection is a persistent pattern
in recent entertainment, sometimes displayed in the most cartoonish possible
way. Take, for instance, Matt Damon’s character in the various Bourne movies
(The Bourne Identity,The Bourne Supremacy, and The Bourne Ultimatum— soon
to be followed, as Damon has joked, by The Bourne Redundancy). In the
first film, Jason Bourne is fished out of the ocean with no idea of who he is.
As the story unfolds, he finds that he is unexpectedly the master of everything
he tries to do: from hand-to-hand combat, to stunt driving, to speaking
apparently every language on earth. His skills apply interpersonally as well,
as the very first woman he meets (Franka Potente) becomes his partner in crime
and then lover.
The narrative explanation for Bourne’s near superhero status
is an elite CIA training program. Yet that training is directly tied to
Bourne’s amnesia, as the program’s goal is to create the ultimate “sleeper”
agents. The program culminates with a thorough brainwashing, after which the agents
don’t remember they’re agents until their programming is triggered by some
signal. The life the CIA sets up for the agent is, in true sociopathic style,
only an act that can be left behind at any time. What’s more, a later film
reveals that Bourne’s trainers only regarded him as truly ready to work once
they had induced him to kill in cold blood someone he believed to be an
innocent man. Lack of social ties and ruthless amorality thus fit together
seamlessly with virtual superpowers in this movie.
The pattern isn’t limited to superheroes. For instance, Don
Draper of Mad Men, arguably the most iconic and exemplary contemporary TV
sociopath, becomes a powerful ad executive who appears to do little but drink
all day and wait for random flashes of inspiration. And as if securing a wife
who looks like Grace Kelly isn’t enough, he repeatedly seduces interesting,
substantial women, because for most of the series’ run, the standard route of
seducing naïve young secretaries is simply beneath him. What enabled this
miraculous rise? Stealing the identity of a man who has literally just died in
front of him and then abandoning his family!
Many of these sociopathic characters are, of course,
“psychologically complex,” particularly in shows with high-brow ambitions. Don
Draper is never sure what he wants, though he nearly always gets it, and Tony
Soprano famously seeks out therapy to help him deal with the stress of being a
mob boss. Dexter gets a voiceover where he muses about what it must be like to
feel sympathy or happiness or sadness, while House is subjected to endless
amateur psychoanalysis by his friends and co-workers, distraught about how he
can be so rude and cynical.
It is hard to believe, however, that the exploration of the
dark side of the human psyche for its own sake is behind the appeal of these
sociopathic characters. What, then, is going on in this trend? My hypothesis is
that the sociopaths we watch on TV allow us to indulge in a kind of thought
experiment, based on the question: “What if I really and truly did not give a
fuck about anyone?” And the answer they provide? “Then I would be powerful and
free.”
In order to get at why this thought experiment would be
appealing, and even more why this somewhat counter-intuitive answer would be
compelling, I believe it will be helpful to take a detour through awkwardness.
At first glance, the TV sociopath appears to be nearly the
opposite of the awkward character. I’ve previously defined awkwardness as the
feeling of anxiety that accompanies the violation or absence of a clear social
norm. It could happen when someone commits a social faux pas, such as telling a
racist joke (what I’ve called “everyday awkwardness”), or it could occur in
situations where there are no real social expectations to speak of—for instance,
in cross-cultural encounters where one cannot appeal to a third “meta-culture”
to mediate the interaction (what I’ve called “radical awkwardness”). In both
cases, we are thrown into a situation in which we don’t know what to do. At the
same time, however, this violation or lack of social norms doesn’t simply
dissolve the social bond. Instead, awkwardness is a particularly powerful
social experience, in which we feel the presence of others much more
acutely—and more than that, awkwardness spreads, making even innocent
bystanders feel somehow caught up in the awkward feeling. This “raw” feeling of
social connection can be so anxiety-producing, in fact, that I have even
hypothesized that awkwardness comes first and social norms are an attempt to
cope with it.
In contrast to the sociopath, then, whose lack of social
connection makes him or her a master manipulator of social norms, people caught
up in awkwardness are rendered powerless by the intensity of their social
connection. Thus we might say that at second glance, the TV sociopath is the
exact opposite of the awkward character—the correspondence is too perfect to
ignore.
To understand why this connection might exist, I’d like to
look more closely at my distinction between the violation and the lack of a
social norm. The distinction between these two situations is not hard and fast,
because in many cases, it’s not clear how to react to the violation of a social
norm. Many social norms function as straightforward commandments—for example,
“thou shalt not take cuts in line”—but fail to prescribe a punishment or
designate an agent who is qualified to administer it. As a result, when someone
does take cuts, there seems to be nothing anyone can do.
In fact, the person who does decide to confront the offender
may well come out looking like the asshole in the situation, because in many
cultural settings there is a strong bias against unnecessary confrontation. The
awkward person sits and fumes, or else confronts the cutter and quickly
retreats. If we could define something like the everyday sociopath, it would be
the person who is not only callous enough to take cuts in the first place, but
is able to manipulate social expectations to shame the person who calls out the
violation.
The transition to the fantasy of TV sociopathy comes when
the awkward person shifts from “I hate that guy” to “I wish I were that guy.”
In everyday settings, this shift is unlikely. Even if the line is unbearably
long, most well-adjusted people would prefer not to disobey their ingrained social
instincts and, if confronted with a queue-jumper, would console themselves with
the thought that at least they are not such inconsiderate people, etc. Similar
patterns repeat themselves in other areas of life—a man may wish, for instance,
that he were a suave seducer, but at bottom he feels that the seducer is really
a douche bag. Even though envy is probably inevitable, a feeling of moral
superiority is normally enough to stave off outright admiration of the everyday
sociopath.
In order to get from the everyday sociopath to the fantasy
sociopath, we need to think in terms of my third class of awkwardness, which
I’ve called cultural awkwardness, but perhaps should have called culture-wide
awkwardness. Falling in between the types of awkwardness stemming from a
violation and a lack of a social norm, cultural awkwardness arises in a
situation where social norms are in the process of breaking down. Just as it’s
easier to criticize than to create, a social order in a state of cultural
awkwardness is perfectly capable of telling us what we’re doing wrong—but it
has no convincing account of what it would look like to do things right. My
favorite encapsulation of this Kafkaesque logic remains a quote from Gene
Hackman’s character in Royal Tenenbaums: “It’s certainly frowned upon, but
then what isn’t these days?”
In Awkwardness, I argued that the proper response to
our culture-wide awkwardness is simply to embrace rather than try to avoid
awkwardness. After all, if the social bond of awkwardness is more intense than
our norm-governed social interactions, it also has the potential to be more
meaningful and enjoyable. Such a strategy sacrifices comfort and
predictability, but it’s not clear that comfort and predictability in our
interactions are always desirable anyway.
What our cultural fascination with the fantasy sociopath
points toward, however, is the fact that the social order doesn’t exist simply
to provide comfort and predictability in interpersonal interactions. One would
hope that it might also deliver some form of justice or fairness. The failure
to deliver on that front is much more serious and consequential than the
failure to allay our social anxieties, though the pattern is similar in both
cases. In a society that is breaking down, the no-win situation of someone
flagrantly cutting in line repeats itself over and over, on an ever grander
scale, until the people who destroyed the world economy walk away with hundreds
of millions of dollars in “bonuses” and we’re all reduced to the pathetic
stance of fuming about how much we hate that asshole—and the asshole also has
the help of a worldwide media empire (not to mention an increasingly
militarized police force) to shout us down if we gather up the courage to
complain.
At that point, the compensation of moral superiority no
longer suffices. We recognize our weakness and patheticness and project its
opposite onto our conquerors. If we feel very acutely the force of social
pressure, they feel nothing. If we are bound by guilt and obligation, they are
completely amoral. And if we don’t have any idea what to do about the
situation, they always know exactly what to do. If only I didn’t give a fuck
about anyone or anything, we think—then I would be powerful and free. Then I
would be the one with millions of dollars, with the powerful and prestigious
job, with more sexual opportunities than I know what to do with. In short
order, it even comes to seem that only such people can get ahead.
This interpretation has much to recommend it. The people who
run our world do a lot of terrible things, and the highest level of contrition
they display is seldom more than a token gesture—in fact, officials regularly
“take full responsibility” for things without suffering any apparent
consequences at all. It takes a special kind of person to order the invasion of
a country with no provocation, to cut social programs that millions rely on in
order to meet the demands of bondholders, or to deprive people of their
livelihood because a set of numbers isn’t adding up in the right way. One can
easily argue that the various managers and administrators who control our lives
are overpaid, but the callousness they routinely display really does represent
a rare skill set. I know that I couldn’t cope with the guilt if I behaved like
them—right?
Yet perhaps I could. Perhaps the problem isn’t that we’re
being ruled by sociopathic monsters, but rather by people who are just as
susceptible to social forces as the rest of us. One might think here of the
frequently observed phenomenon of people being perfectly nice one-on-one, but
obnoxious and unbearable when part of a group—something often associated with
gender-segregated adolescent groups.
Individual members of a fraternity or sports team, for
example, might be uncomfortable with the way they are expected to behave toward
women—they might have a less constrained view of who counts as “attractive” or
be uncomfortable with hook-up culture—but they conform in order to avoid
getting made fun of by the other guys. And why will those other guys make fun
of them? Because they will be made fun of if they take the non-conformist’s
side. The dynamic whereby these young men have to continually prove that
they’re “real men” or else face ostracization doesn’t require any individual
young man to be a bad person going in.
And though the addition of a genuinely
malicious person might exacerbate the problem, the dynamic is basically
self-sustaining without the need for any external “evil” inputs.
Similar dynamics obviously happen in the corporate and
political worlds as well, particularly in light of how insular those social
circles can be. A politician must be willing to make “tough choices”—and
somehow that tough choice is always somehow related to piling further burdens
on the already disadvantaged. Of course no one wants to be a bleeding heart, or
an idealist, or a wimp, and so no one seriously pushes back. Yet all these
spineless conformists style themselves, à la John McCain, as straight-shooting
mavericks who aren’t afraid to tell it like it is.
For every average Joe saying to himself, “I wish I was like
Tony Soprano,” then, there’s a member of the ruling class saying to himself,
“You know, I am kind of like Tony Soprano—it’s not always pretty, but I do what
needs to be done.” What both fail to recognize is that Tony Soprano’s actions
are no more admirable or necessary than the decision to exclude some poor
schlub from the in-group on the playground. More fundamentally, both fail to
recognize that what is going on is a social phenomenon, a dynamic that exceeds
and largely determines the actions of the individuals involved—not a matter of
some people simply being more callous or amoral (though some people certainly
are) or being more clear-eyed and realistic (as few of us really are in any
serious way).
The fantasy of the sociopath, then, represents an attempt to
escape from the inescapably social nature of human experience. The sociopath is
an individual who transcends the social, who is not bound by it in any
gut-level way and who can therefore use it purely as a tool. The two elements
of the fantasy sociopath may not make for a psychologically plausible human
being, but they are related in a rigorously consistent way.
Indulging in the fantasy of the sociopath is thus the
precise opposite of the strategy of indulging in the primordial social
experience of awkwardness. Both approaches, however, respond to the same
underlying reality, which is a social order that is breaking down, making
impossible demands while failing to deliver on its promises.
