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A review by giorgiawessels
Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight by M.E. Thomas
informative
mysterious
slow-paced
3.5
3.5 stars. This book really wasn’t bad despite all of the bad ratings it got. If you take the emotion out of it (pun intended), it’s actually pretty insightful to read how the author experiences and goes about life. The only reason I didn’t give it a higher rating is because it is quite a long read and may get a little unexciting at times.
Here are some paragraphs I found interesting:
“The reality is that I have nothing of what people refer to as a conscience or remorse. The concept of morality, when defined as an emotional understanding of right and wrong, goes right over my head like an inside joke of which I am not a part.”
“Although hardwired emotional moral compasses typically help people to do what is good and avoid what is bad, there should be other reasons that people would do good things besides a sense of morality. It is rational for me to obey the law, because I do not want to go to jail; it is rational for me not to harm or injure other people, because a society in which everyone acted harmfully would inevitably cause me harm too.”
“At some point, I have to wonder if all of my rational decision-making can make up for my inability to empathize, and I conclude that it doesn’t. People take for granted the empathy with which they were born, and the morality that they somehow internalize. Crying when someone you love cries—I was not born with this shortcut into the hearts of other people. Feeling guilt when you hurt someone you love is an internal safeguard to prevent you from losing them, but I have never been able to learn it. The work-arounds that I have devised for these things often fail me.”
“But as heartless as I am, I have wanted to feel love, to feel connection, to feel like I belong to the world like anyone else. No one, it seems, can escape loneliness.”
“I indulge in inserting myself into a person’s psyche and quietly wreaking as much havoc as I can. To indulge in malignity. To terrorize a person’s soul without having any real design on the person.”
“Outwardly I was all confidence and openness; inwardly I was spiteful and lonely and unaware of how to relate to the world. I wanted so much to be good but only knew how to appear that way by being bad.”
Here are some paragraphs I found interesting:
“The reality is that I have nothing of what people refer to as a conscience or remorse. The concept of morality, when defined as an emotional understanding of right and wrong, goes right over my head like an inside joke of which I am not a part.”
“Although hardwired emotional moral compasses typically help people to do what is good and avoid what is bad, there should be other reasons that people would do good things besides a sense of morality. It is rational for me to obey the law, because I do not want to go to jail; it is rational for me not to harm or injure other people, because a society in which everyone acted harmfully would inevitably cause me harm too.”
“At some point, I have to wonder if all of my rational decision-making can make up for my inability to empathize, and I conclude that it doesn’t. People take for granted the empathy with which they were born, and the morality that they somehow internalize. Crying when someone you love cries—I was not born with this shortcut into the hearts of other people. Feeling guilt when you hurt someone you love is an internal safeguard to prevent you from losing them, but I have never been able to learn it. The work-arounds that I have devised for these things often fail me.”
“But as heartless as I am, I have wanted to feel love, to feel connection, to feel like I belong to the world like anyone else. No one, it seems, can escape loneliness.”
“I indulge in inserting myself into a person’s psyche and quietly wreaking as much havoc as I can. To indulge in malignity. To terrorize a person’s soul without having any real design on the person.”
“Outwardly I was all confidence and openness; inwardly I was spiteful and lonely and unaware of how to relate to the world. I wanted so much to be good but only knew how to appear that way by being bad.”