Masks without Faces
The social function of the 'sociopathy memoir'
Yesterday the youtube algorithm recommended me this video:
in which Patric Gagne, a woman with a resting bitch face presumably forged over decades of people who never met her in person misgendering her due to her name, shills her book "Sociopath: A Memoir".
Now I will admit I have not read her book, I'm not going to read her book, I can't think of anything I'd less like to read than a whole book of this sort of self-indulgent naval gazing (this sort specifically, naval gazing is fine sometimes: I enjoyed Dostoyevsky). The 'white woman with no particular noteworthy qualities is totes a psycho' genre has already been covered by M.E. Thomas's Confessions of a Sociopath another book that I haven't read but thankfully (or not) these authors are both too hell bent on self promotion to leave it at that and there's plenty of material available for free.
The video is weird, there's this part fairly near the start where Patric tells a story about how as a kid she was having a bad day and another kid was provoking her but in a way that she claims shouldn't have been a big deal (we are not made privy to the details so the audience is deprived of the opportunity to judge for themselves) so she stabbed the kid with a pencil. A kid flipping out and stabbing a pencil into another kid might sound like a relatively minor incident to anyone with the slightest experience with children: something to address but not something to see as a concern in and of itself, but Patric blows it up to dramatic proportions, telling us expectantly that hurting this other child made her feel good, then backtracking a bit, as if genuinely fearful of the judgement this could elicit, to say, it wasn't hurting the other child that was "like a high" but the euphoria it made her feel as if that isn’t a distinction without a difference (imagine "it wasn't receiving a gift that made me feel good, but the joy that getting it made me feel"). Again, expectantly she appeals to the audience as if there ought to be some kind of shock value to this incredibly mild story of childhood aggression and even more her salicious confession of enjoying it. Surely we in the audience are all clutching our pearls to ward off the vapours??
I am willing to bet that a decent majority of people can think of a time where hurting someone made them feel good if they really took the time to consider the question seriously. Especially if they are willing to look back into childhood at a time when their impulses were less well controlled and their reactions to life were more raw. The barrier to hurt is not generally that hurting others inherently feels bad, it can feel bad, or it can feel good (or it can be little more than an unarousing chore), do we feel, whether or not we “actually” are, justified? Do we fear this act of aggression risks backlash or punishment that matters to us? Do we fear it weakens or severs an important relationship in our lives? Does it interfere with some ideal we've made foundational to our sense of self? Anxiety, shame and guilt can soil the pleasure of aggressing, but in the right circumstances they needn't come into play or can be swatted away with a little self-talk or redirection.
It's much more odd to me the way Patric seems expectant that her audience will be shocked by this minor act of aggression than it seems that she performed it. Its not even a question of being edgy, children can be and often are very shitty to one another, they have yet to develop much impulse control, their feelings are all over the place and their subordinate social position requires them to engage in and partially excuses them from forms of communication (like throwing a tantrum or stabbing another child with a pencil) that would be deemed highly unacceptable for an adult.
As an aside: a commenter on the video talks about bullies referencing this incident, yet suddenly lashing out to a provocation (however minor) with shoving a pencil into the provacateur’s hand is not really a case of being a bully, such an act is far more indicative of being a good target for bullies, it’s the kind of response that your average bully yearns for like water in a desert. Finally some good fucking reactions! Maybe this factor of her personality adds to the appeal Patric finds in the “sociopath” identity: to be the aggressor, not the one subject to aggression, to rewrite her weaknesses in ways that make her the dangerous one rather than the victim. Nobody likes a victim.
Another story Patric tells is about hearing her mother shame her sister with "you don't want your teacher to be disappointed in you right?" or something akin to that and her sister getting wide eyed and asserting strongly that this would be undesirable for her. Patric says she thought to herself that she didn't much care what her teacher felt about her and also that she knew it would not be ok for her to express this.
In this story also, what stands out here is not that she didn't care what her teacher felt about her, but more, that her home environment was repressive, such that she didn't feel like she could be honest about her feelings about it with her mother, that's not so odd, there are many such cases, what is odd is that she didn't draw the conclusion here that her sister may under such a repressive regime also feel compelled to play up her 'good girl' credentials, that she assumed her sister was being entirely sincere while she herself would be being duplicitous to keep the peace. She took the incongruence of her feelings with the performance demanded of her as evidence of her defectiveness rather than the unreasonableness of the demand to perform. Again, not an unusual thing for a child to do, but illustrative of the weaknesses of her theory of mind, especially given she has not found cause to re-evaluate during adult retellings of the moment.
Who was this mother to whom it would be unsafe to express something as basic as "no actually I don't care what my teacher feels about me"? The kind of mother who's frustration that her attempts to emotionally manipulate compliance from her children were ineffective was expressed with enough vigour for those children to know it was off the table not to play along She is described as a very normal, devoted, southern (usa) housewife. I'm not well versed on the cultural milleu but clearly these sisters did not grow up in an environment where it was safe to have their own feelings. Why was it so unsafe? What would her mother have done to her? Of course as a child small consequences can feel very big, but I remember many times in my own childhood where my mother was quite vocal about her disagreements with me about things of that ilk and none of them were so consequential that it made it feel like it was unsafe to express those things to her, conflict and disagreement were not verboten, it was safe to argue.
Based on Patric's conclusion ("I am a sociopath") I imagine that her mother made her feel as though there was something deeply fundamentally broken about her if she did not exhibit the 'correct' responses, as fed through the lens of her own ideals of 'good' children. I wonder whether or not she would have responded differently to a son who said “don’t care” in that situation? I can’t say for sure but I imagine she may have been more forgiving.
That brings me back to M.E. Thomas's similar memoir: also a white woman, from the south, growing up in a conservative household, with a for lack of a better word 'narcissistic' father (M.E. Thomas explicitly says this of her father, the glimpses we get of Patric's idealised image of her own father also lean that way) and a stay at home mother, with all the potential baggage that comes from making raising up your children the central pillar of your social role: that it reflects badly on you if you do a bad job and bring up 'bad' children and the resulting anxiety to bring up 'good' children, rather than a more relaxed approach of allowing the children to discover themselves in an environment of relative safety.
Women and men are rife with identity issues in the modern world, straining under the weight of individualism and the prescription to self-definition. But it is curious that the trend of self-identifying (even if diagnosis is then pursued: you can find someone to diagnose you with anything you like and it's not hard to game the DSM) as a 'sociopath' is far more often engaged in by women. Not just women in general either: women like this. What does this identity do for them? You'd hope it allows them to throw off the shackles of being a "good girl". To let go of "the mask", and yet if anything it seems to reinforce the mask, to trap them in the performance of being someone who is good at performing.
Consider how often some piece of media in which a man celebrates his mindless brute aggression, with far more impactful consequences than a childhood pencil meltdown, and is in turn celebrated for that aggression: yet our female "sociopaths" never dare (its not that no women do either, although far more rarely than men, just not the ones who describe themselves as "sociopaths"). Patric was so nervous about being "stigmatised" for admitting she enjoyed it that she did some weird convoluted mental gymnastics about not enjoying it itself but enjoying that she felt enjoyment and you see this so much with these people women, assigning the "closest thing to living breathing demon walking the earth" psych label to themselves and then making pains to insist they're not a bad person and being bizzarely, overly concerned with approval, walking this strange neurosis between wanting to be dangerous and edgy and needing to maintain that good girl, respectable image.
While my first thought, that Patric grew up in a repressive household, that made her feel damaged for not being a 'good girl' at all times and her very normal and human straining against this stifling environment only confirmed to her 'there's something wrong with me' there's a second more cynical possibility that crosses my mind. Perhaps rather than being as gormless as she seems Patric is engaging in something a bit more sophisticated here: by presenting a very normal thing as evidence of her sociopathy, she is opening a door for her readership to feel a sense of identification with her as sociopath, many of her readers are likely to already flirt with the idea, to find the identity appealing both those with similar backgrounds for whom it might validate and justify their shame at not being 'good girls' (while being excellent performers of good girl-ness and thus sharing none of the features of the multitudes of "sociopaths" trapped in the prison system), but also simply those who find the identity desirable as the archetype of the perfect human under capitalism. At that point the naval gazing extends into more of a circle jerk of validating one another, "we're the same you and I, we're not like them, we see behind the veil".
That's the insidiousness of the sociopathic archetype as ideal (rather than the punitive version imposed on people in the criminal justice system), the way it addresses the human being "we see behind the veil" and then implies "and we must wear it". By presenting the central facet of their "sociopathy" as being people who are good at performing, they require of themselves in order to shore up their sense of identity to never stop performing. Of course they can fuck people over and be vicious and cruel, that's part of the game, compassion is a weakness, it lifts the veil and makes you raw, they necessarily must be ruthless, but they must do it in a way that's civilised, in a way that gets them rewarded with goodies by society, a way that is responsive to the incentive models imposed on them: a way that makes them easy to control.
Being told that their advantages come in the form of their capacity to jettison all feeling, all personality so that they can exploit others, they find themselves merely slaves of necessity, doing precisely as society would have them do in order to win "success", little more than automatons on behalf of capital. Whether as master or slave this cultural archetype of the "sociopath" is ideal in capitalism, a person without roots or ties, able to sever all connections, able to jettison all attachments, all preferences, all hopes and loves, unburdened by fear, unhindered by care, never angered by injustice or moved by need, able to fully give themselves over to possession: desire without personhood, desire without a specific object, perfect to direct at a fungible, liquid medium. Exploitable for having desire: extra exploitable for having nothing else. Capable of the ruthlessness required to "win": empty enough to be unable to conceive of playing any other game.
The people who desire this, to be this, are ironically the most successfully socialised of all people under capitalism. Masks without faces.
I often wonder about the people behind both books more than the broken children they depict: the author's agent, the author's editor, the person at the publisher who saw it's potential. These are the people I imagine actually have the cynicism to have something interesting to say about it. They're also not giving interviews and using publicity as a means of self-validation so I guess without a lucky break my curiosity will go unfulfilled.