Why I Am Not a Sociopath

What You Should Be Reading V: Native Son (#66), Dracula (#86) To Kill a Mockingbird (#12) Sociopath

Or am I? No, probably not. Too worried.

This is “What You Should Be Reading V,” but you don’t need one, two, three, and four to understand. The project is that I’m reading what I haven’t read of the 100 best books ever, according to a (much longer) composite list.

This title makes me laugh because Why I Am Not a Christian (#3138 on the list) by Bertrand Russell is a major book of irreligion and it has been borrowed by authors of many ex-faiths. My title flips the way the construction works, but if you read it Russell’s way it suggests that sociopathy is something one can decide doesn’t go with the drapes.

Russell gave Christianity a voice in his version, so “Why I Am Not a Psychopath” suggests my having weighed psychopathy as a way forward. (It has some attractions and serious deficits, to my mind.) Or am I mounting a defense? The truest reading, though still mostly a joke, is Here’s how I have decided that I’m not a sociopath, suggesting that I’d been concerned.

Here’s the thing, and I’m not speaking clinically but poetically, we’re all partial sociopaths if and when we feel that life is trying to starve us out. Nobody talks about this. Human feelings of morality are wondrous, but they are somewhat conditional on a baseline of being okay. Right?

When people get miserable and feel the world wasn’t made such that they can access it, well, people sometimes want to “blow it all up.” In this blow-it-up mood, the person doesn’t recognize normal morality and likely stops caring about, say, literacy rates or the fate of the whale. Clinically speaking, despair is not narcissistic, but we can recognize that it doesn’t have the energy for anyone else. Maybe despair is narcissistic as in self-centered; maybe its opposite is connection. I’m no stranger to despair.

So part of you can say you don’t care about anything anymore while another part of you is still fretting like a live pike on land over whether the grocer took your chummy remark the right way, and that second part kind of suggests you’re not a sociopath.

I read Patric Gagne’s Sociopath, 2024, and enjoyed it tremendously. It was remarkable to be in the head of someone who doesn’t care. She was young when she started a long-lived habit of breaking into houses when the people aren’t home and hanging out. To get a buzz, or release “pressure,” she does much that one mustn’t. The book is super smart and probing but also fun, fun, fun.

Now I’m reading Richard Wright’s Native Son (#66) of 1940 and Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula (#86). Guess what bizarre plot element these books have in common, randomly? It’s that a man cuts off a young blond woman’s head. The woman is dead when she is decapitated in Native Son and undead when it happens near the end of Dracula. Very different vibes but creepy that the woman has to actually lose her whole head for both plots. Oops, I finished Dracula and three more ladies lose their heads before the final curtain. It’s all accounted for in the plot but it is also symbolic of a loss of rationality, of beauty, of civilization, and of security.

Dracula is an amazing story but Native Son is rich on another level. This is a book about a man under too much racist pressure and the catastrophic results. You’re with the main character, Bigger, on the inside of the wall he puts up to everyone. Wright sneaks in sentences of limpid insight amid the action. While reading I noticed time and again that my hand was over my mouth, such is the suspense and pull of this whirlwind world of a book.

I read these books in close proximity by chance, but they reverberate. Racism keeps beating down on Bigger to the point where he is murderous unto butchery. Count Dracula is without mercy or regard for anyone and he spreads his viciousness through the trauma of his bite.

It’s strange to —accidentally and in such different genres and time periods—strange to find three people who for different reasons are not concerned with the well being of others. Indeed, all three enjoy doing harm — though only the fictional ones are violent. Bigger’s fury at a life of degradation makes him a killer who revels in the memory afterwards. Dracula is a blend of (thrilling) fears of the foreigner and of the “born criminal” who can take pleasure in cruelty.

About that “born criminal” idea. Cesare Lombroso was an Italian physician whose theory of “criminal man” won favor across Europe in the late-19th century. Lombroso claimed that criminals were evolutionary throwbacks to a more violent animal state, describing the criminal type as having bushy eyebrows that met over a birdlike aquiline nose, and “a relic of the pointed ear.” (Criminal Man, 1876). Stoker described the Count as such: “His face was aquiline…[with a] thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose…His ears were pale and at the top extremely pointed.” I talk about this in my book The End of the Soul.

This dangerous biologizing of crime (which fed into eugenics) was in part a fantasy of being able to spot the cold hearted on sight—something our age frets about, especially regarding psychopathy and sociopathy.

Oddly, in this deeply gendered story of a man-bat sucking on incapacitated women, the men are kind and self-sacrificing, led by the good scientist Dr. Van Helsing; and the women are brilliant and appreciated for it. It’s Wilhelmina, who keeps her head, who realizes, “the Count is…of criminal type… Lombroso would so characterize him.”

Oh, I also finally read Harper Lee’s 1960 To Kill a Mockingbird (#12), and the book lives up to the hype, just sublime. I’d been scared of its central anguish, but most of it is being a fascinating, vivid child, with young Truman Capote for a friend. On audible.com it’s read darlingly by Sissy Spacek. I listened at 1.2 speed but it made her sound even more like Sissy Spacek somehow. Especially compared with the chaos and pain in the other books here discussed, it’s wildly nice to inhabit Scout’s world with her. The chaos is in this book too, of course, but there is also Atticus Finch, who does what he can.

Why Am I Not a Sociopath? Because they don’t have holidays. Because of Atticus Finch. Well, that doesn’t sound like it would be enough so we may have to conclude that I am a sociopath, just a foul weather one. Let the sun come out for me and dry my hurt and I’m back to wearing my heart on my shirt.

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Okay Jacks and Jills, Jackets and Gillettes, peaches and Rockettes, I’ll keep dancing if you will. Have fun. Keep your head. Stay with us and I will return to encourage us again.

Love,

Jennifer