Review: I am Not a Serial Killer · 11:33pm Aug 24th, 2014
I am Not a Serial Killer, Dan Wells, 2010
The setup is a lot like Dexter: The protagonist works with dead bodies (embalming them), is fascinated by them, and also fascinated by killing. He uses his evil nature for good, ridding his town of a real (supernatural) serial killer, while fighting his own demons. He has a set of rules to follow to stop himself from killing.
A lot of the Amazon reviews called IANASK a teen book, because the protagonist is a teenager. This is stupid. (Most of the Amazon reviews were stupid, in a variety of ways. No one there seems to have understood why the book works.) The problems the story deals with are not everyman alienated-teen-growing-up issues. The story reminded me a little bit of Dorp Dead, a strange magical-realist young-adult gothic horror novel that scarred me when I was very young, that is an alienated-teen book. IANASK has that vibe of creepy, desperate isolation, but it’s much bleaker. The protagonist is an alienated teen, but not one that the typical alienated teen should relate to. There is no hope at the end that he will outgrow or overcome his problems.
IANASK is in first-person, and Dexter (the TV show; I’ve never read the book) has voice-over narration. Both these stories have first-person narration, because a key part of the story is that someone just watching the protagonist’s actions would impute the wrong motives to him. So they show, but also tell.
It’s better-executed than Dexter in a few ways. Dexter is supposed to be a psychopath, but TV has watered that down enough for him to come across as a nice, caring guy you can empathize with. He’s a normal guy who had a traumatic childhood experience that twisted him. Which is wrong. There are different plausible theories about what makes someone a psychopath, but that isn’t one of them.
John, the 15-year-old protagonist of IANASK, is a creature that would never be allowed to be the star of a TV show, because he is modelled more on real psychopaths, and is more disturbing than Dexter. You can’t empathize with John because he explicitly doesn’t have the right feelings to empathize with. He knows fear, and longing, and fascination. But he can’t love. He is less than human. He can’t be redeemed by therapy or pills or the magic of friendship. Wells has some idea what is going on inside John’s head, and it is more consistent than the mishmash of caring and psychopathy we see in Dexter.
Fire changes it from one thing to another, drawing off its energy and turning it into . . . well, into more fire. Fire doesn't create anything new, it simply is. If other things must be destroyed in order for fire to exist, that's all right with fire. As far as fire is concerned, that's what those things are there for in the first place.
In my biology class, we'd talked about the definition of life: to be classified as a living creature, a thing needs to eat, breathe, reproduce, and grow. Dogs do, rocks don't; trees do, plastic doesn't. Fire, by that definition, is vibrantly alive. It ears everything from wood to flesh, excreting the waste as ash, and it breathes air just like a human, taking in oxygen and emitting carbon. Fire grows, and as it spreads, it creates new fires that spread out and make new fires that spread out and make new fires of their own. Fire drinks gasoline and excretes cinders, it fights for territory, it loves and hates. Sometimes when I watch people trudging through their daily routines, I think that fire is more alive than we are— brighter, hotter, more sure of itself and where it wants to go. Fire doesn't settle; fire doesn't tolerate; fire doesn't “get by.” Fire does.
But you can sympathize with John. He would like to be a real boy. He knows something is missing inside him, that he isn’t a real person and can never fit in. His attempts to reach out to people always go wrong.
“I have rules to keep me normal,” I said. “To keep me . . . safe. To keep everyone safe. One of them is that I have to hang out with you because you help me stay normal, and I haven't been doing that. Serial killers don't have friends, and they don't have partners, they're just alone. So if I'm with you I'm safe, and I'm not going to do anything. Don't you get it?”
Max’s face grew clouded. I'd known him long enough to learn his moods—what he did when he was happy, what he did when he was mad. Right now he was squinting, and kind of frowning, and that meant he was sad. It caught me by surprise, and I stared back in shock.
“Is that why you came here?” he asked.
I nodded, desperate for some kind of connection. I felt like I was drowning.
“And that's why we've been friends for three years,” he said. “Because you force yourself, because you think it makes you normal.”
See who I am. Please.
“Well, congratulations, John,” he said. “You're normal. You're the big freakin' king of normal, with your stupid rules, and your fake friends. Is anything you do real?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I. . .” Right there, with him staring at me, I couldn't think of a thing.
“If you're just pretending to be my friend, then you don't actually need me at all,” he said, standing up. “You can do that all by yourself. I'll see you around.”
“Come on, Max.”
“Get out of here,” he said.
I didn't move.
“Get out!” he shouted.
“You don't know what you're doing,” I said, “I need to—”
“Don't you dare blame me for you being a freak!” he shouted. “Nothing you do is my fault! Now get of my house!”
I stood up and grabbed my coat.
“Put it on outside,” said Max, throwing open the door. "Dangit, John, everyone in school hates me. Now I don't even have my freak friend anymore." I walked out into the cold and he slammed the door behind me.
“How'd you like to live with a Mom who thinks you're a robot? Or a gargoyle? You think you can just say anything you want and it will bounce right off? 'John's a psycho! Stab him in the face—he can't feel anything!' You think I can't feel? I feel everything, Mom, every stab, every shout, every whisper behind my back, and I am ready to stab you all right back, if that's what it takes to get through to you!” I slammed my hand down on the counter, found another bowl, and hurled it at the wall. I picked up a spoon and threw it at the fridge, then picked up a kitchen knife and prepared to throw it as well, but suddenly I noticed that Mom was rigid, her face pale and her eyes wide.
She was afraid. Not just afraid—she was afraid of me. She was terrified of me.
I felt a thrill shoot through me—a bolt of lightning, a rush of wind. I was on fire. I was floored by the power of it, of pure, unfiltered emotion.
This was it. This was what I had never felt before—an emotional connection to another human being. I'd tried kindness, I'd tried love, I'd tried friendship. I'd tried talking and sharing and watching, and nothing had ever worked until now. Until fear. I felt her fear in every inch of my body like an electric hum, and I was alive for the first time. I needed more right then or the craving would eat me alive.
I raised the knife. She flinched and stepped back. I felt her fear again, stronger now, in perfect sync with my body. It was a jolt of pure life—not just fear, but control. I waved the knife, and the color drained from her face. I stepped forward and she shrank back. We were connected. I was guiding her movements like a dance. I knew in that instant that this is what love must be like—two minds in tandem, two bodies in harmony, two souls in absolute unity. I yearned to step again, to dictate her reaction. I wanted to find Brooke and ignite this same blazing fear in her. I wanted to feel this shining, glorious unity.
(John’s relationship with his mom, BTW, stuck out as artificial. According to the narrator and his sister, his mom is almost too awful to live with, and has driven his sister away with her cruelty. But in the story she’s a perfect mother. Yet John keeps complaining about how awful she is, and she seems to think she’s an awful mother. Intentional? Maybe, but if so, it harms the story by making John even less sympathetic, and doesn’t fit with John’s rigorous introspection into his own situation.)
Spoilers ahead:
John may still be a little too sympathetic for reality. John does care. It’s only second-order caring; he cares that he doesn’t care. I don’t know if real serial killers do. That’s the novel’s only big flaw: It waffles on the question of what John really feels. He doesn’t care about other people, yet he wants to be a good person, and in the climactic scene, temporarily acquires nobility and humanness because he admires the self-sacrifice of another character. I just don’t know if that works. It’s a bit of a cheat, or at best a mystery.
A lot of the Amazon reviewers complained about the novel’s supernatural aspect as being unnecessary. But it isn’t. The novel’s pathos comes from John realizing, as he stalks Mr. Crowley, the demon in his town, that although the demon isn’t technically human, he’s still a lot more human than John is.
“On what wings dare he aspire?” said a voice. I spun around and saw Mr. Crowley, sitting a few feet behind me in a camp chair, staring deeply into the fire. Everyone else had left, and I'd been too absorbed in the fire to notice.
Mr. Crowley seemed distant and preoccupied; he was not talking to me, as I assumed at first, but to himself. Or maybe to the fire. Never shifting his gaze, he spoke again. “What the hand dare seize the fire?”
“What?” I asked.
“What?” he said, as if shaken from a dream. “Oh, John, you're still here. It was nothing, just a poem.”
“Never heard it,” I said, turning back to the fire. It was smaller now, still strong, but no longer raging. I should have been terrified, alone in the night with a demon—I thought immediately that he must have found me out somehow, must have known that I knew his secrets and left him the note. But it was obvious that his mind was somewhere else—something had obviously disturbed him to put him into such a melancholy frame of mind. He was thinking about the note, perhaps, but he was not thinking about me.
More than that, his thoughts were absorbed in the fire, drawn to it and soaked into it like water in a sponge. Watching the way he watched the fire, I knew that he loved it like I did. That's why he spoke—not because he suspected me, but because we were both connected to the fire, and so, in a way, to each other.
“You've never heard it?” he asked. “What do they teach you in school these days? That's William Blake!” I shrugged, and after a moment he spoke again. “I memorized it once.” He drifted into reverie again. " Tiger, Tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?'“
”It sounds kind of familiar,“ I said. I never paid much attention in English, but I figured I'd remember a poem about fire.
”The poet is asking the tiger who made him, and how,“ said Crowley, his chin buried deep under his collar. ” 'What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain?'“ Only his eyes were visible, black pits reflecting the dancing fire. ”He wrote two poems like that, you know—'The Lamb' and The Tiger.' One was made of sweetness and love, and one was forged from terror and death.“ Crowley looked at me, his eyes dark and heavy. ”'When the stars threw down their spears and watered heaven with their tears—did he smile, his work to see? Did he who made the lamb make thee?'“
The fire rustled and cracked. Our shadows danced on the wall of the house behind us. Mr. Crowley turned back to the fire.
”I'd like to think the same one made them both,“ he said, ”I'd like to think it.“
The trees beyond the fire glowed white, and the trees beyond those were lost in blackness.
Mr. Crowley had arrived, with Kay alongside, and they were talking to someone just ten feet away. He was crying, just like Brooke—just like everybody but me. Heroes in stories got to fight hideous demons with eyes red as burning coals; my demon's eyes were only red from tears. I cursed him then, not because his tears were fake, but because they were real. I cursed him for showing me, with every tear and every smile and every sincere emotion he had, that I was the real freak. He was a demon who killed on a whim, who left my only friend's dad lying in pieces on a frozen road, and he still fit in better than I did. He was unnatural and horrible, but he belonged here, and I did not. I was so far away from the rest of the world that there was a demon between us when I tried to look back.
John studies Crowley but can’t figure him out until a talk with John’s therapist. John couldn’t understand Crowley’s actions because they were based in love. And this love, which connects Crowley to humanity in a way John never can be connected, is the weakness John will use to kill him.
The novel’s tension comes partly from Crowley’s killing spree, and his and John’s mutual attempts to kill each other, but also from John’s struggle against his own desires. Like Dexter, he has a set of rules to follow. But he finds that in order to save his town from Crowley, he has to begin breaking his rules. To save his town from a monster, he must become a monster himself--and he may never be able to go back afterwards.
If you’re worried about gore, there isn’t much. The murders aren’t gory. The goriest scene is at the very beginning, where he and his mother embalm a corpse. I read it while I was having surgery--a very poor choice of book to bring with me--and I still got through it.
I’m impressed with this novel. The emotional structure is well-thought out. Yet it didn’t affect me as strongly as many other novels, because the main character is, deliberately, not someone I can relate to. His problems are abstract to me. I can feel something for him, but feel almost foolish for doing so. It’s like feeling sorry for a cat, while knowing the cat would never feel sorry for you. The story comes across to me almost as a philosophical problem: Supposing such people exist, what can we do with them? And supposing human relationships are such a strange, illogical thing, what does that say about us? But I like philosophical problems, and it’s rare to find a novel that spins one out as an adventure yarn rather than as a sermon.
Bad, Horse! Bad! Anyone can be redeemed by the magic of friendship.
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Rainbow friendship lasers fix everything! Besides, it sounds like his symptoms can be treated by friendship. Daily doses instead of a single cure.
Glad to hear this book is good. The author is part of the Writing Excuses podcast, which I listen to on a semi-regular basis. So I've heard him talking about how he wrote parts of it, but never had much interest in checking out the book itself. Just not really my kind of story. So I've gotten sort of a photo-negative view of the story with him explaining how he did this scene, or that scene, but never anything more substantial about the book itself. The author himself seems like a fun guy to hang out with.
This book reminds me of a movie I watched the other month, "How to be a serial killer."
It was a "black comedy" about a video store clerk who was taken under the wing of a serial killer when the killer noticed how resentful he was towards the dick customers he had had.
That wasn't what drew me in, The opening scene had done that job..
The opening scene was the killer, named Mark or something I believe, in front of a dark auditorium giving a grand lecture about how becoming a serial killing was a great thing one could do in order to increase your quality of life. And he introduced it as a 10 step process in which he lay the groundwork for the rules of his "profession."
But while that was going on we also had scenes that could come out of any documentary about someone who would be a serial killer; talking about how they weren't known for having any relationships, both because they'd find out eventually and also due to the nature of the killer would force them to silence whomever was a "threat" to them. Those sort of things.
Man. The Doors would prrobably write a song about that.
I've always found it enlightening to assume that people are what they claim not to be, and the more they deny it, the more likely they are. Politicians are a good example.
Are there are any good fics featuring a pony with psychopathic tendencies, that stills tries to keep things show-appropriate? It sounds like an interesting premise, and the kind of thing that someone would have tried, but writing it with the necessary finesse would certainly be very hard.
2398186 The interpretation of psychopathology in this book is that there's no such thing as psychopathic tendencies. You either are a psychopath, or you aren't. It's a total lack of brain circuitry for processing emotional connections, like being deaf or blind. I don't know if that's correct, but it's a widely accepted understanding of it.
As to ponies with signs of psychopathology...
img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130222233147/mlp/es/images/3/38/Oh_twilight_you_re_crazy_by_aibotnya-d4cwat4.png
Read this one myself, earlier this summer. I don't think I have much meaningful to add—I think your review covers my own feelings quite well. I am curious, though, whether you're planning to pick up the next one in the series. I'm leaning that way myself, but still a bit on the fence (in part because I've had a hard time picking these up at local bookstores, and usually only find them when I'm strapped for cash).
Hard to believe there was a time when people couldn't get enough of Dexter, isn't it? I've never seen the show, but I've read about its slow, torturous fall from grace, painful enough that people are changing their minds about whether it was ever worthwhile.
2398731 I've only seen maybe 4 episodes, but it's hard to imagine keeping that formula up for 8 seasons.
2398651 I dunno. I'll probably read the jacket and some reviews. I'm skeptical that more can be done with this character.
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They should have stopped sooner than that. From what I can tell, they really stretched credulity as far as they could to keep him from getting found out, but more than that they wrecked their own story to try and make Dexter look like the good guy even though he's a serial killer. They were too enamored with the guy to make life hard for him.
If you don't care about spoilers, here's a review of the infamous series finale to elaborate on all of this: http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/dexter-remember-the-monsters-102659
2398731 The first two seasons still hold up, but the final season (Season 8) has what might be the worst ending in the history of fiction. And the path to it is a slow slog through a vast sea of mediocrity, with some occasional brighter spots.
2398208 Can't say anything about how it actually works. I was using tendencies in the sense that the urge is there, but there is no concrete action being taken yet.
Not everyone with a critical empathy deficit is a serial killer. One of the things that keeps some of them normal-ish is that yes, they can care that they don't care. It can bother them. It's like how depression causes apathy, but an apathetic depressed person can still care about the fact that they're apathetic. The struggle to be more normal drives a lot of people into treatment when they'd otherwise hole up in a dark corner and starve themselves. The drive to normality is tremendously sturdy and can survive the extinction of most other drives. Think evopsych terms. People who shed the urge to be normal don't breed. In all but the most advanced cultures, they don't even survive. As awful as this is, sociopathy is more evolutionarily favored than strong individualism, and therefore more well-preserved in human genetics. The urge to be normal is distinct from the emotional disconnection involved in sociopathy (and most other forms of psychopathology as well).
I was under the impression that one of the things that drives sociopaths is an unbelievable sense of boredom. They're disconnected from the ideas of motive and purpose - their own or others alike. It's a firelike life. It is and it does. The sociopath might see the fire as having just as much life as they do, as having life the same way they do, because they don't connect with the idea that life should (or does) accomplish anything. Life is just another oxidizing chemical process.
This is all intensely unfulfilling. All the human impulses to act are still present, but every last one that ought to be pointing at other humans points instead at a void. So do all the ones that ought to be pointing at personal accomplishment, since there's no such thing, even though the desire to accomplish something still remains. The result is that sociopaths either end up 1) desperately impulsive, or 2) basing their personality on some artificial construct that helps them "keep score" and therefore not feel so pointless.
Type 2's can be semifunctional. I've heard that a lot of them fixate on wealth as the scoring metric. Not that everyone who cares about wealth is a sociopath, but rather, sometimes sociopaths still find they can care about wealth.
2399089 This sounds convincing, and also like Wells is onto something with his talk about fire.
I'm skeptical that "sociopath" is a useful diagnosis. I've known 3 people I suspected were sociopaths. One was happy, popular, and charming, but just didn't seem to care about people. Another loves animals, and has strict moral beliefs, and /thinks/ that he loves people, but doesn't see that contradicts how he always treats everyone around him like shit (more precisely, he treats everyone like shit while believing that they are all conspiring to treat him like shit). The third seems like a nice guy, but is so wrapped up in his own problems, and so convinced that he has a grand destiny and is much more important than everyone else, that he can always rationalize doing the selfish thing. The last two have powerful reality distortion fields that let them interpret everything that happens, even as the direct result of their own selfish actions, as being someone else's fault.
The character in this book is a different type entirely, someone who has no ability at all to care for another person, who is just missing that circuit. I don't know if there really are people like that. I would expect it to be a spectrum disorder instead.
2398186 Try The Secret Life of Rarity by Brony Writer.
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2399213 That is one of the few in my Did not Finish list, actually. It is interesting, but too self-indulgent in the killing itself, and quickly falls off from the show tone.
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Oops. It sounds convincing. I better throw an, "I am not a psychologist," disclaimer on there. I read a textbook once years ago and my special someone took a psych minor. (It's awesome, actually.) Everything else I know is pop psychology. I'd say that I've used my understanding to filter it for inaccuracies, but I don't believe I know enough for that to be an accurate claim. I can name something I don't know. I don't know if it's a spectrum disorder or really a switched flip. I think it's a spectrum disorder with mild and severe cases, but I'm certain I don't know.
I'm talking rather freely because I figured a book review was chiefly in the realm of how to write, not how to make a medical diagnosis. I was actually playing with the selection of fire you put in your blog post. It seemed convincing to me, so I riffed on it as one of the better aspects of the book you reviewed. It's good writing if nothing else. It's a subtle yet powerful character insight. It tells you what the character sees in fire and life, but if you're paying attention it also shows you what they're missing.
That said, I'm going to make a riskier foray, because throwing the term sociopath around incautiously is a bad business. The following is spoilered to protect the apathetic. I don't have anything to say about the first guy you anecdoted. The other two I can say are not likely to be sociopaths. I am still not a psychologist, so don't make any life-altering decisions on the basis of what I say.
First up, the guy with the grand destiny is absolutely not a sociopath if he believes in and feels motivated by his destiny. The constant need for stimulation and poor understanding of motive means that sociopaths are bad at long-term planning and unlikely to be internally motivated. They feel adrift and pointless. People who believe in their own destinies feel grounded and purposeful. Destiny and sociopathy are opposed forces in human psychology. (I believe neither is healthy.) Of course, a sense of destiny is not that hard to fake. The people it doesn't win over are mostly those with enough psychological mindedness that they won't be safely gullible anyways.
Secondly, the two with "reality distortion fields" that make them believe everything that goes wrong is someone else's fault (I'm guessing they think it's even the result of conspiracy against them) are less likely to be sociopaths on the basis of that behavior. They care. They can fabricate potential motives. Yes, it's wild fabrication, but it indicates a real (albeit warped) ability to connect with other people. Granted that it's a fakeable indicator, but it's such an unhealthy behavior that it doesn't accomplish the goals for which personas get faked in the first place. This overlaps with destiny guy and serves as evidence that he probably believes his own selfish blathering.
Sounds a lot like Dexter actually. The first book or two when they were still good pretty much portrayed him the same way. As someone who kind of vaguely, dispassionately, wanted to be normal because he realized he didn't fit, but never really felt the same things as anyone else and never would.
Of course, real sociopaths generally really don't care they can't connect to other people, so Dexter's feelings of alienation were already a little uncharacteristic.
The TV show, as is often the case, watered him way down. Also, the books are first person.
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No, blaming everyone else for everything is an entirely different disorder, though I believe it can be concurrent with sociopathy (people are not limited to one mental disorder at a time, any more than they are limited to one infection at a time). Similarly, rationalization would be unnecessary, except as a lie to give other people.
Anti-Social Personality Disorder, as it's properly termed, has a number of common symptoms, including difficulty learning from punishment and lack of empathy. It's got a range of behaviours but they're all characterized by extreme lack of empathy, that's the condition's most defining feature. A sociopath can range from a violent criminal to the corrupt head of a corporation who will gleefully break corporate law for profit whenever no one's looking but hasn't ever physically assaulted anyone, so you're right that there's a bit of a spectrum. Though said corporate head would commit murder if the reward was big enough and they thought they would get away with it if they were a sociopath-- they've just decided there are much less risky ways to get what they want. A high functioning sociopath is one that primarily functions on unethical but legal methods and white-collar crimes. Well, and ethical actions when they're profitable enough but never for principle and never when more can be had otherwise.
That 'lack of a circuit' would present in all of them, though. However, the main character's fascination with killing wouldn't be universal.
The important thing to remember is that you can be a total selfish asshole without being a sociopath, it's a specific disorder.
2399409 Is there a term for someone who acts callously to other people and never shows any indication of empathy or sympathy? That's what I thought sociopath meant. Those last two people definitely fall in that category.
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Have you noticed the linguistic treadmill around these terms? Sociopathy, psychopathy, anti-social personality disorder, et cetera. Words change as people become dissatisfied with them. Almost anyone can be made callous in the specific case by the right circumstances. I think that drives a lot of the evolution of the terminology. People in the general public are looking for new ways to express themselves. They're looking for a word that means "cruel". Psychologists aren't hunting for a word that means "cruel". That word exists. Psychologists are trying to define new terms for specific disordered patterns. As old words get misappropriated, new terms must be defined. The distinction I'm drawing is between people who only capable of callousness and those who have some other problem scrambling their understanding of other people.
The two I said probably weren't sociopaths sound like clinical narcissists instead. Lack of empathy is a diagnostic feature to narcissism, too. The important difference is that narcissism is amenable to treatment. There's such a thing as a former narcissist who has rebuilt their empathic capability. Sociopathy isn't. To my knowledge, there's no such thing as a former sociopath who has rebuilt their empathic capability. Calling someone a narcissist could theoretically help if they're very psychologically-minded, or if you can also get them to a therapist. Calling them a sociopath just establishes a vendetta. It's a highly polarizing and threatening thing to say.
The term that describes people who act callously to others and never show any indication of empathy or sympathy is "cruel". There's something wrong with anyone who acts that way, but there's more than one thing which can cause it.
2400527 'Cruel' implies doing things to people. The behavior I'm talking about consists of not doing things to people: Not asking them how they feel when they're suffering, not doing the dishes when it's your turn, not taking out the garbage, not paying the rent, not cleaning up after yourself. "Not caring" means "not doing caring things", and that seems closer to sociopathy than actively doing unkind things.
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You're not describing cruelty. You're describing apathy. Think fire. Fire is never apathetic. Fire doesn't ignore things that are going on in the vicinity. Imagine that you're energetic, alert, responsive, and you don't care. Now you're getting closer. That's the mood of reflexive cruelty.
Actively doing unkind things is aberrant behavior. Failing to care in the fashion you describe is normal. "Not caring" may seem like "not doing caring things" to you, but consider what I said about all the impulses to act still being present even when they focus on voids. The result is irritability, aggression, and a measure of behavioral randomization.
2400677 You're talking about psychopathy, people being aggressively anti-social. Sociopathy is more about a lack of empathy, and the people I spoke of met the definitions I've read of it very well.
Perhaps there is some disease that leads people to act cruel and aggressive, but if that's what psychologists want to talk about when they talk about sociopathy, they need to change their definitions. Just not caring is sociopathy, as far as I can tell. It sounds like something everyone does, but when you really see it in the wild, it's shocking. Most people we call "uncaring" do in fact care; they do something selfish deliberately, or to hurt someone, or, well, out of some social reason. When you see a kid who knows that it drives his mom absolutely crazy if he leaves his dishes on the table, and he doesn't mind bringing the dishes to the sink, but he continues day after day to just not bring them to the sink even though it makes his mom rant and scream, because he /does not care about her feelings/ as long as there are no consequences to him--he's not angry or defiant, he just /doesn't care/--that's weird and striking. That's sociopathic. But there's no element of cruelty to it.
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"Sociopathy" is a disfavored synonym of "psychopathy". It fell out due to linguistic misappropriation. The reason I haven't been more circumspect in my use of terms is that I have a reflexive distaste of linguistic treadmills when I notice them, and that reflex leads me to the wrong response. I cling to old terms when I shouldn't. Sociopathy does not mean what you think it means.
Also, your example is fucked up. I've been that kid. Not caring about people who rant and scream at you about minor things is exceptionally normal. It's called "tuning out the crazy". The therapist I had as a poorly adjusted teenager told me so. She also told me not to do it. The reason not to do it is not because it's wrong or evil or a sign of major malfunction, but because it's dangerous to ignore crazy people. People who are unstable enough to scream about dishes left on the table are unstable enough to graduate to physical violence. Let's just say my experiences should have told me that, but somehow I needed a therapist to tell me anyways.
2400767 I am talking about a kid who won't do anything for anybody else, ever, even if it costs him nothing and will make them very happy, unless he gets something out of it. A kid who simply does not care if people around him suffer. He doesn't intend to make them suffer; he just isn't motivated in any way by their suffering.
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You're describing "schizoid personality disorder". It's considered to be a stable, unthreatening pattern in psychology. It's a learned pattern of social distancing which gets beaten into people, and it's one of the healthier ways to adapt to a vicious upbringing. It's "tune out the crazies" writ large - substituting safe mental spaces for dangerous social ones. It's nothing like psychopathy, and when you conflate the two, you favor dangerous people over harmless ones. Schizoid features in other psychological dysfunctions are, in a prosocial sense, a good thing. People who are willfully distancing themselves from others might let suffering pass unchallenged, but they're less likely to be actively causing it, and more likely to effectively remove themselves from stressors that might crack their self-control.
Psychological hardening due to parental abuse is a thing which looks a lot like a child who just doesn't care anymore when screamed at by their mother.
Edit: Be careful about the term "schizoid". I know it looks like "schizophrenic" and "schizotypal", but it's actually very different. "Schiz" is related to "schizm" in each case and each of these relates to a form of break with reality. Schizoid individuals have distanced themselves while retaining insight into their condition and circumstances. The retention of insight is a critical difference that makes schizoid personalities much less dangerous than schizotypal personalities.
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Utter apathetic withdrawal is also common of depression. Again, it's not found as a feature of psychopathy, or any of the "dark triad" empathy deficit conditions. (Narcissism, psychopathy, and machiavellianism.) Apathetic withdrawal doesn't indicate an empathy deficit at all. One of the tasks of psychiatrists dealing with individuals showing warped affect is to differentiate between warped affect because the underlying emotions have become deranged, and warped affect because the individual has become apathetic due to trauma.
2400993 And yet the child I'm describing has never been abused by anyone. As far as I can tell, his strange personality results from the opposite: From being let to do whatever he wanted to do, without punishment.
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Given that we've discussed my personal history before and you'd have cause to know that the example you gave was a scenario that happened in my own history, it had appeared you were talking about me. I've been biting back hurt feelings. It appears I was correct to do so and I'm glad I gave you the benefit of the doubt.
You were talking about someone else all along.
I was talking more confidently because I was sharing the words of a professional secondhand. Now that I can be sure you're talking about someone else, I have to fall back on "I am not a psychologist." I don't have the training to analyze a child. Second-hand, I'm not sure the right training would even be sufficient. I will still point out that to "rant and scream" is abusive parenting by itself. It's not acceptable behaviour towards one's loved ones. With screaming on one side and apathy on the other, it appears that the emotional relationship which should exist has withered into dust.
2401123 When I said rant and scream, I was still speaking in a hypothetical mode, and exaggerating rather than trying to explain the exact dynamics and convince you that what he was doing really upset her and he was really aware of that.
A different example that happened recently: He left the dinner table & went to his computer & started playing a game. His dad asked him to please turn the volume down, or else put the headphones on. He replied that we couldn't hear the music from where we were. So everyone in the kitchen told him that we could hear it. So he said that it was good music anyway. So we told him that we nonetheless wanted to have a conversation. But he still couldn't bring himself to plug in the headphones. So we spent the rest of dinner
shouting to each other over his computer game music. And he was angry at us for arguing with him.
I wouldn't blame her at all for ranting and screaming at him. In fact I wish she would. What they're doing now certainly isn't working.
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What a pain! Yeah, that's striking and weird. That's also not just being apathetic. It sounds like very passive-aggressive conduct.
The author's use of Blake is telling, because Blake also wrote:
I asked a thief to steal me a peach
He turn'd up his eyes;
I asked a long lithe lady to lie her down
Holy and meek she cries.
As soon as I went an angel came:
He wink'd at the thief
And smiled at the dame;
And without one word spoke
Had a peach from the tree,
And betwixt earnest and joke
Enjoyed the lady.
In short, some people just have the knack of getting what they want without even asking--and you don't. You don't have their ability to connect with another person and get them to do what you want. Especially if you're a sociopath/psychopath/whatever. Or even just autistic.
Or a teenager.
I suspect that's why people think this is a YA novel. They just might be right. Wells seems to use the alienation and frustration of John's disorder as a metaphor for the alienation and frustration of an adolescent...
...right down to the use of threatening behavior to relate to adults on equal terms. Because adults instinctively don't treat teenagers as equals, and most teenagers wouldn't know how to relate to adults on an equal basis anyway. So: piercings, weird hair, leather jackets, and their music, have you heard it? it's all noise!...
Of course nerds have the same problem too, but nerds don't usually resort to threatening behavior because we have too good an appreciation of our own vulnerability. And as long as we remain vulnerable, we behave.
But God forbid you should put two science fiction geeks in charge of running a war.
(Seriously WTF--"Gleb Bobrov?" Sounds like a villain in the new Star Wars movie...)
2401157 My best theory is that, while he believes other people have emotions and beliefs, he finds it very hard to believe that they have different emotions and beliefs. When someone says, "Yes we can hear your music," he thinks, "I know they can't hear my music, so they must be lying to make me angry." He has a very rigid way of looking at the world, and doesn't think there can be two equally-valid opinions on a subject. Truths are obvious and indisputable, and "disagreements" are either subterfuge, stupidity, or immorality.
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I'M WORKING ON IT OKAY?
;-)
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That sounds like it should be true. And yet Heinrich Himmler, the creator of the Holocaust, fainted at the sight of blood and showed other evidence of empathy and sympathy towards both humans and animals. He just didn't extend these qualities to Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, and anybody else he didn't like.
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Much that is evil in the world is perpetrated not from cruelty, but from a critical lack of insight.
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Again, sounds good, but..."critical lack of insight" (or "lack of critical insight," maybe) looks more like Snooki. Himmler was a very different thing.
Also, what is this insight that Himmler lacked? That it is wrong to slaughter children? That doesn't seem so much like an insight as an axiom.
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"Lack of insight" isn't just a feel-good statement. It's one of the key predictors of effective stress responses and success in therapy. Someone's insight is their ability to understand themselves and the reasons behind their own behavior. It is metacognition, tolerance for cognitive dissonance, awareness of cognitive biases, and other related skills. The word as used here is related to but not quite the same as the word "insight" used in conversational english.
When I say schizoids retain insight and schizotypals lose it, I'm referring to the fact that both retreat into a fantasy world, but schizoids can tell you that they're doing it, whereas schizotypals insist that their fantasy world is the real world. One is aware that they're thinking oddly and retains awareness of the world everyone else experiences. The other is not and does not.
Some conditions steal insight. Anosognosia, if you're familiar with that, is an infamous example. Delusions often function that way as well. Even conditions that don't steal insight can make it very painful to gain. To mention an empathy deficit condition again, narcissists typically have poor insight. They can gain more in the therapeutic process, but because their ego is fragile and their defense mechanisms pathological, looking on themselves with a critical eye can precipitate a meltdown.
I have no idea who Snooki is. I've never heard the name before. A quick google search revealed someone involved in reality television, which doesn't give me much enthusiasm for research. I expect you'll find that lacking insight is very common. I'm happy to explain the concept for people, but I don't want to speculate about specific cases. I just don't enjoy trying to analyze famous figures current or historical. It's fine if you do, but I'd rather evade this conversation.
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Fom the headphones example, you might be looking at oppositional-defiant disorder but it sounds like it might go a little deeper.
Sadly, I am not a clinical psychologist so it's hard to say exactly what the issue is, except that it doesn't sound like anti-social personality disorder, because frankly most people with that are better at pretending to be normal because they realize it makes life less of a hassle.
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"Ah b'lieve ah've learned somethin' today."
"What's that, Apple Bloom?"
"Well, it's kinda hard t' put it into words, Scootaloo."
"Then why not put it into a song?"
"Good idea, Sweetie Belle..."
Uncorrected personality traits
That seem whimsical in a child
May prove to be ugly in
A fully grown adult…
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Or you can just grow out of them like I did.
If he's driven by different things than you, then the kinds of punishment that would work on you might not work on him. You're thinking that reasoning doesn't work with him, so punishment might, and that yelling at him would serve as punishment. Yelling only serves as punishment if he feels intimidated by whoever's yelling or if he cares about the opinion of whoever's yelling. Regardless, punishment like that is a very short term solution, and rule by fear is probably not what you want anyway.
If you want him to change, you'd have to first get him to pay attention to what you say and not just give a reactionary response (ie. gain his respect), then show him, logically from his perspective, the he should change himself to be more like you want him to be (I think you want him to more easily respect others and pay more attention to what they say). If he's rationalizing things to himself as you suspect, then he is a rational being, and if he's a rational being, then he can be reasoned with. You just need to figure out the logics that he responds to. "Everything I think is right" is one of the easier ones to deal with so long as it doesn't come with a "I'm allowed to change as frequently as I like" clause.
I don't know how you're going to get him to respect you, but people almost universally respect "fast learners".
I've used "you" and "someone that cares and has the time" interchangeably in the above two paragraphs.