God in Physics (the God joke)

Them professor types have been consistently pulling this one line of trollery and laughing snobbishly at the people who bite. And the inside joke is about mentioning God or even outright spewing terms like the "God Particle" et c. The joke has really been pushed rather far in some of the looser interpretations of some of the quantum mechanics theories, like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. I want to talk about the nature of this joke.

The essence of the joke is about measuring (aka detecting, observing) things and some things being more difficult to measure/detect/observe than others. In general, to measure some phenomenon, it must is some shape or form interact with the real world and that interaction or the outcomes of it could be somehow observed. Some things in the universe don't readily interact with matter/energy or interact in ways that are not easily observable, making them excessively difficult to detect. Furthermore, some things don't actually exist and are not real, but are accepted by scientists to be true like "virtual particles" or "virtual photons". These are used as tools to describe the mechanics of processes that happen in the real world in a much simplified fashion (i.e. Feynman diagrams), which makes them useful when things start getting exceedingly complex, as they tend do in quantum physics. That's the setup for the joke.

Now all of the religions out there postulate that their gods are interactive: they have and do interact with the real world. Some very much so indeed. Like creating the Earth, Sun, Moon, Stars, animals, fishes, humans et c. Not to mention the command over weather events, answering prayers for health and fortune for oneself and the misery and demise of ones enemies. The thing about that  is that all of those activities/interactions (and their consequences) would have been exceptionally easy to detect, measure and incorporate into the existing scientific models of the universe.

With the advent of science, the adherents of religions had to resort to greater and greater feats of mental equilibristics to explain how it is that their gods are actually real and interactive, but can't be detected. This is illustrated in the Scripture of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, who uses His noodly appendages to mess up the instruments of scientists, in order to avoid detection... That's the punch line.

I can understand why religions are so persistent even in the view of all the evidence contrary to their claims. As one can imagine, numerous studies were done in order to ascertain whether prayers over sick people do in any shape or form affect the recovery. The results are that they generally, don't with the exception of when the person being prayed for knew about this fact - then this negatively affect the recovery. Now, why would masses of people consistently engage in an activity that is futile at best? The answer is that firstly, this makes people feel better about themselves without actually having to do anything expensive or overly tedious. Sitting around and engaging in wishful thinking or chanting something is not that expensive/complicated. Secondly, this sort of thing instills a feeling of some false sense of control over things that people can't really control, which is comforting. Life is complicated, full of uncertainties and unknowable dangers often outside of one's control, thus stressful. And the ways for managing this stress are often called for. Especially when dealing with the ultimate stress source - death.

This nature of religion as the means of stress relief could actually be beneficial/valuable at times (unless harmful things are promoted via religion). Of course, with the advent of science the areas over which we have no to little control are shrinking. We did find out that 2 minutes of washing one's hands is so much more effective in preventing plagues than infinite prayer time.

*A tangent on the "God Particle". It was called so because Higgs et al postulated that rather than there being a specific particle that is contained every every piece of matter being responsible for "creating mass", there is a universe-wide invisible (and barely detectable) field that permeates everything and through interaction with it mass is acquired (Higgs field). The whole idea of there being a single largely uniform invisible field permeating everything caused them smug professor types to start inserting "God" into things related to it. And at the Large Hadron Collider they have been experimenting at "calling out" mass out of this field. The've been moderately successful at that - they got a particle (Higgs boson) with the mass of apprx 70 times the sum of masses of the other particles that they used to create it. And they got the Nobel prize for the effort. And this creation of "something out of nothing" is why they felt really smug.

Sociopaths and strong emotions

What emotion is greater than the feeling of grief of a loss of a loved one. I've listened to some discussions on the matter and it really struck me how much my experiences/perspective on dealing with death as a sociopath differ from those discussed. Both in respect of others dying and contemplating my own death. While yes, I’ve lost people close to me and even I loved, genuine grief is something that never really happened. I did not cry or feel depressed about it. I felt some sort of sadness, but could not really relate to the emotions of people around me. I’ve seen major manifestations of grief, which do lead to irrational and self-destructive behaviors. I find such sort of actions rather pointless as the person in question is already gone and there is nothing that could really be done. It seemed to be from the lack of those connections of emotional feedback stemming from empathy that bind people together socially. I can easily observe those connections at play and both the benefits and drawbacks that they can bring. I can easily empathise with the physical pain that people may be feeling, but emotional hurts and concerns are all but alien.

I guess, that sadness that I experienced came from the feeling of absence of a person that has been discussed. In my view, some people make my world better by being in it and the world without them is worse. A special person in my life did die; she was my childhood friend since kindergarten we had been friends until her death after college. When I was in the third grade I went through the trouble of persuading my parents and school administration that I needed to change schools and I openly said that the only reason for that had been that “I want to attend that school because there is a person that I like in it”.  After college I moved to another city and we have not met or even talked for a couple of years before she died, but the story of her dying made me really sad. She was a religious person, and though I am an atheist I would sometimes order mass to be done in her name, as a token of respect, I guess. But that sadness had been much greater than that what I experienced when some of my close relatives died. There currently are a couple of other people in my life about the departure of whom I believe that I would be sad.

As for my own death, I am completely disinterested in what kind of “legacy” I leave and not too concerned with my death itself. The whole legacy thing also relies on some sort of emotional connections between the departing person and those that that person is leaving behind and/or vanity. I have neither. I am not looking forward to death, but as nothing really can be done about then there no need to worry. The inevitability and absoluteness of death is rather apparent, so worrying about it is exceedingly unproductive. On this note, I would not choose immortality, even if I had been a choice to be immortal. All things must end really, and any life over say 120 years would essentially be too repetitive and pointless. And I believe that I would strongly prefer to die alone, rather than having anyone beside me.

This brings me to the point of "fitting in" and faking the expected reactions. The whole "fitting in" thing used to be a real problem when I was a kid or a young adult. But since my mid-20s it has lost most of its relevance. Now I am in my mid-30s and it is hardly a matter of concern to me. Now I can choose freely who I associate with and there are hardly any situations where a forced "fitting in" is required. As I understand, the main issue with dealing with a sociopath is that people tend to have certain expectations as to how a person must react to different situations. And sociopaths may not "live up" to these expectations of other people.

 One answer to this problem is transparency. I am pretty upfront and "out of the closet" about who and what I am. If I am close to the person to a degree that my condition may affect them, I would openly explain what to expect and not expect of me and why, and I've written a number of articles on the matter to give some knowledge as to how the whole thing works. Then I would leave it to the other person to decide whether they are willing to associate with me or not.

 Of course, such an approach often proves to be problematic. One problem is the rampant prejudice and discrimination against sociopaths. Just look at the BS media portrayals of the matter - especially the movies and books, with maybe 1 or 2 doing a decent job at portraying the matter accurately. But generally it is the grossly inaccurate pieces like "American Psycho" or "Silence of the lambs" that go mainstream. Plus there are thousands of hate groups against sociopaths openly pouring out stupidity founded in ignorance. On one hand, can't really blame the people in these groups, because people do rather personally take the fact that some sociopaths do not live up to their expectation. On the other hand, it is well established that sociopathy is a biological condition that one is born with, that has very high similarity in to autism. And autistic people do not really have to go about their life being forced to justify their existence. But as a result of such an approach, when given the knowledge, there were people who were not willing to associate with me because of what I am.

 Then there is the second problem. There are people who will associate with me even knowing of my condition. But even then, they can't really comprehend it because they are quite literally wired differently. And problems do arise occasionally, where I did not act in a manner that they expected. People find it difficult to accept that I genuinely can't empathize with some of their feelings or circumstances, simply because I can't comprehend/experience them.

I guess, that grief would fall into this category. When something like that happens I found that the best way is to keep my distance. Because things that I might say or do that would comfort me, tend to be the exact opposite of what people need to hear. This is a fairly significant problem. On a number of occasions I've been told that what I say/do "devalues" the feelings that the person is having and even have been directly and unambiguously told by these people to pretend and act as if I were "normal". I was curious about it, so I asked whether it would bother them knowing that I am pretending  and my actions are not legit. Oddly, I got the answer that it does not really matter whether I am sincere or not, the experience of receiving such comfort/emotional feedback or something is way more important than such considerations of fakeness. And the exact thing happened on a number of occasions with different people, so I feel that this could be generalized pretty much to the whole population of "normal people" with rather high fidelity. The irrationality of this approach totally blew my mind, by the way. It is not unexpected, of course, because do use "fake" substitutes for many of their needs: porn for sexual desires, books for communication/relationships et c.

But my approach has always been that I would not pretend/act in a "fake" way. I do not believe that I should go about apologizing for the fact that I was born this way. It is not that chose it. If me being this way is a dealbreaker for some people, then godspeed.

How Sociopaths hurt people around them

Sociopaths do hurt people around them and this is a fact of life, which I think that is foolish to deny. I am not going to talk here about the low-life sociopaths that manipulate people for material gains, because the matter has been rather extensively and correctly covered elsewhere. The material gains is only one of the many scenarios that happen. Also I am not going to talk about the sociopath as a child situation. I want to talk about the sociopathic spouse, or a sociopathic partner, who did not want anything tangible scenarios. 

Such situations lead to long-term emotional scars that sociopaths leave their "victims" with. Though, cases are different, there is a key factor that can be seen throughout all of them: Sociopaths do not "live up" to the expectations/needs that their partner or the society places upon them. Sociopaths may strongly reinforce these expectations by being rather successful at displaying the sexual behaviors that are common to normal humans. But, as often is the case, they may fail to sustain these behaviors over prolonged periods. Sociopaths are really good and convincing at delivering what is expected of them at the moment, but in the long term they ultimately fail. It is important to note that many of these expectations/needs are deeply rooted in human biology, thus not fulfilling them happens to hurt people around them very deeply. I want to go through some of these expectations/needs, how they work and how/why sociopaths fail to deliver.

• Lack of bonding and emotional feedback. Humans among other social animals have a range of mechanisms that are designed to bond people within a group or two people together. These typically include emotional feedback to the actions and worries of other people. This feedback could be expressed in body language, physical contact, trivial conversations and empathy in general. For a sociopath such activities clearly lack purpose and consequently they fail to deliver. This is often seen as being "cold" or "callous". But regardless, such communication is immensely important for normal humans and not receiving it is very confusing. When all the bonding efforts of a person turn out to be in vain, it hurts them a lot.
• Inability to empathise with emotional or physical pain. From my experience, it is next to impossible for a normal person to understand, how it is that you do not feel anything when the other person is hurting. In such situations one is expected to show some sort of an emotional reaction, but a sociopath will remain "cold" and rational throughout, being unable to soothe the person in pain. Not receiving comfort is a situation when it is expected, hurts people a lot. A sociopath will understand the concept of such pain,  but the attempts to soothe the pain may appear to be insincere, further aggravating the situation.
• Being overly secretive about everything. Sociopaths do not like talking about their past or sharing what is important to them, or sharing at all. This is deeply rooted in the childhood trauma that many sociopaths have. Such sharing is a part of emotional bonding, and not doing that may be seen as a sign of distrust. Sometimes people would expect to be provided access to cellphones or personal computers, but a sociopath may see it as an intrusion of privacy and be very vocal about not doing it, even if there is nothing "bad" to be found. Such actions will facilitate distrust and ultimately hurt people.
• Being distant/needing unusual amounts of personal space. As I mentioned earlier, a sociopath may need some extra personal space, when compared to other people. This make take form in shutting the world off via movies or games, or avoiding physical contact or conversations. Such actions at the times when their partner needs attention and bonding will surely lead to hurt feelings.
• Lying and deceptive actions. There are things that people want to hear and that one is supposed to say or do in certain scenarios, for the relationship to "work". It may be along the lines of empathy, one's feelings, or one's life plans and goals. So, if a sociopath wants to have a relationship with someone he or she likes, a certain degree of lying may be required. Some lie more successfully and others less so, but this will surely cause backlash sooner or later. In truth, the sociopaths do not seriously believe that "living happily together ever after" is a viable possibility. This is due to a plethora of reasons, that I described in the Relationships post.
• Breaking contact and disappearing for periods of time. Everybody wants to be alone at times, but sociopaths may need it more than others. As I described it in the Relationships post, sociopaths do feel varying degrees of discomfort, when around people. Sometimes they just want to "get away from it all". The problem here is that the situation would seem to have come "out of nowhere" to the other person, because they will not feel any tension building up in their partner. One day everything was fine and the next day he or she is gone or isolated themselves. These behaviors and their seeming irrationality seem to hurt people a lot.
•  Isolating their partner from friends and family. Sociopaths may feel highly uncomfortable when around other people. That is why they may refuse to take part in various group activities like family meetings, parties gatherings, picnics et c. Ultimately this may lead to the situation when their partner will have to choose between them and their friends and families. Whatever the choice, the partner may feel guilty before the other party. This will result in negative emotions and contribute to the negative atmosphere overall. Especially if this situation hurts other relationships, which it may.

This is not a complete list of all of the drawbacks of being with a sociopath. I understand that it is a scary one and it is clearly not for everybody. I've met people who could deal with all of this, but it came at a hefty price.

Sociopath at a Workplace; Hiring a Sociopath

Here I am going to discuss the "successful sociopath" types, who are distinctly different from sociopaths with a criminal record and/or manifestations of antisocial behavior. Much of the research on Psychopathy/Sociopathy that is available and hits the mainstream, has been and is being performed within the penal system, and, in my view, is not representative of the people with sociopathy in general. As each case of sociopathy is unique, and there being a spectrum to it, the most noticeable part of the spectrum is those sociopaths with clear antisocial manifestations. But many sociopaths lead lives without any negative impact for anyone.

When it comes to employment, an important stereotype that needs to be addressed is that "Sociopaths are always disruptive to the groups that they are in". This may be somewhat true in some short-term engagements, because meeting and getting along with new people is very stressful for a sociopath for the reasons described here. But in the long-term engagements, the workplace becomes some sort of a home for a sociopath, and he or she would not do anything to disrupt that, and, furthermore, would take action to ensure stability, often becoming a key factor in maintaining it.

Another important factor as to why sociopaths could contribute towards long-term stability is that they are largely incapable of and would oppose any discrimination and exclusion based on age, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and identity. Pretty much, merit is the only factor that a sociopath would consider relevant for evaluating a subordinate. Having said that, a sociopathic person would have a distinct set of strengths and weaknesses that may be relevant for his or her employers. I will try to name those  and scenarios where they may either useful or detrimental:

• Firstly, if the company is in need to sell some BS convincingly, a sociopath is the obvious top choice to do it, due to personal charisma and presentation skills.
• Having very strong "emotional intelligence" a.k.a. people skills, a sociopath may be good at creating appropriate motivation schemes and ensuring retention of key personnel. Cross-departmental collaboration will also likely be on point. On the other hand, if the corporate culture is weak and internal politics is a thing within the company, then a sociopath may take advantage of that to increase personal standing.
• A sociopath is likely to be a very hard negotiator. Being able to deal out some serious BS himself, selling BS to a sociopath may be an exercise in futility. Also, having some deep insight into the motivation of everybody at the table, a sociopath will negotiate with the people, present, rather than the company that they represent, leading to higher success rates of negotiations.
• Sociopaths would tend to show high resilience in a wide array of work-related conflict situations, which may be stressful to other people. I.e., a sociopath would not take personally a heated discussion over budget allocations and maintain a neutral and logical position throughout, and mediate such a discussion, should it get stuck over personal animosities of those at the table.
• Being rather analytical, a sociopath will probably be able to make some rather inciteful reports  and think of efficient courses of actions, which may miss other people.
• A major limitation of hiring a sociopath is creatine a motivation scheme that would actually work. It should be rather fair and be aimed at promoting the qualities that you would want him to exhibit.

But, in the end, it is up to you to make the decision, whether hiring a sociopath is worth the trouble...

Living with a sociopathic child or the child of a sociopath. Some advice for parents.

Living with a sociopathic child is a lifelong endeavor, that can be a major stress and sorrow both for the parent, and the child alike. There are many elements that contribute to this: failing to understand each other leading to the lack of trust; the child being the constant reminder of how his or her sociopathic parent acted; and the actions of the child himself, which may cause some social problems for the parent. I will try to sum up my thoughts on the natures of these problems, and try to give some advice to the parent.

Firstly, nobody is born a devious manipulating “monster” that grown-up sociopaths typically are. These are the things that a sociopath learns during childhood. And these traits won’t really change once into adulthood. There is no way that you will be able to “therapy the child to love you”, the results will likely be the exact opposite. We are dealing with a biological condition here. Dealing with the situation, solely relies on the level of trust that you will be able to establish with a sociopathic child. You will have to be able to position yourself as an ally, rather than another enemy – and go from there. I firmly believe, that the potential negative impact of the sociopath on the people that he will meet in his life, as well as harm to self, can be really decreased via parent activity. So, I will try to give some background info on causes of problems, as I see them, and some possible things to do.

The childhood of a sociopath sucks on many levels (sorry, no other way to put it). A sociopath would likely come from a household that is dysfunctional on some level: with being abandoned or neglected by the father as the most common case. Not being able to form social bonds naturally, a sociopathic child would likely be bullied at school. Sociopaths can't comprehend and are incapable of violence without a clear tangible purpose, so the reasons for them being bullied would completely escape them.

As sociopaths can't naturally form in their minds a cause and effect relationship between doing something that is perceived by others as bad and receiving a negative stimulus, they don't respond to punishment normally. Any punishment that they may receive is seen as an act of senseless aggression. And furthermore, as the person delivering the punishment would not see a normal emotional feedback, they are more likely to intensify punishment in hopes to incite this feedback. But a sociopath is simply incapable of such a feedback and this situation may well spiral out of control. And as the positive stimuli don't really work either, such a child is likely to get totally demotivated, leading to study problems and delinquency. Forcing such a child to apologize for something or demand remorse from him or her is also seen as an act of emotional violence.

Having essentially the same emotional needs as any child, dealing with all of this may be very hard and consequently sociopaths are suicidal and are very likely to inflict some form of self-harm. Such a child is likely to adopt very early a mindset of "the whole world is against me" and will be very hesitant to ask anyone for help and always try to rely only on him or herself. This in turn may lead to petty crimes, as doing so may seem as the only reasonable way of getting something they may need.

So, what do you do? Some things may be hard to swallow, but I hope you give it a shot. I’ll try to sum up some of things that worked or did not for the cases that I know of:

·       A sociopathic child absolutely needs a “safe zone” to get away from all the stuff that is going on in his life. So some place that nobody can enter, unless invited by him is absolutely critical. By doing that you will appear as an ally, who understands him.

·       You need to make it crystal-clear that you will not punish him for whatever he does, or for what other people say he did. This goes double for school: you should absolutely disregard his grades. If you are to come to a parent-teacher conference, and whatever they say, take the child for some ice cream. And pretend that you do not care about whatever. That is how you get trust and instill the sense of security.

·       The only goal for going to school for the sociopathic child is to attempt to socialize. But that would be the source of constant grief for the child because of many reasons. Social acceptance is one of the biggest issues at that age. So giving him some tools to help out with this would make sense. You should buy something that he can share with kids: something that they like. I am not talking about the new iPhone or a PSP, but something cool for group activities, like board games or whatever the kids play together with these games. So getting a crowd around him would help a lot with his self-esteem. I am unconvinced about hobby clubs’ merit, but this may surely work if the child is the one to choose it: so give him some options to choose from.

·       Moral/ethical issues. “Normal” ethics and rules and religious commands simply do not apply to such a child. Although it may seem otherwise, sociopaths are born extremely rational and logical. And they will have problems doing something or following rules that do not seem logical to them. The only thing that would apply is the internal moral code that many sociopaths actually have. One way to go around this is explain to the logic behind some important rules. I.e. lying to neighbors may be beneficial in the short term, but is detrimental in the long term, because when you would need something important, you would not get it.

·       Understanding the motivations. As I wrote above, sociopaths are extremely logical and rational. They won’t do anything without a clear purpose/goal in mind. I.e. the purpose of saying mean things to you or lying is to get you off their backs or avoiding immediate punishment. And they world typically know exactly why they did what they did. If you are even somewhat successful with points 1-4, you should be able to ask motivational questions directly. Though I would recommend that you do it in the most unemotional and logical way possible. Such questions could be: “What was the purpose/goal of you doing XX? Why doing that was important to you? What other options of getting what you needed did you consider? Why did you think that acting the way that you did was the best way to do it? et c.”

This the post too long already. So if you have questions on this, I’ll follow up.

The Life of a Psychopath

Let's face it: a Sociopath a.k.a. Psychopath typically lives in a world that is very hostile.

The childhood of a sociopath sucks on many levels (sorry, no other way to put it). A sociopath would likely come from a household that is dysfunctional on some level: with being abandoned or neglected by the father as the most common case. Sociopathy is highly hereditary and the odds of a sociopath having a sociopath for a parent are very high. Not being able to form social bonds naturally, a sociopathic child would likely be bullied at school. Sociopaths can't comprehend and are incapable of violence without a clear tangible purpose, so the reasons for them being bullied would completely escape them.

As sociopaths can't naturally form in their minds a cause and effect relationship between doing something that is perceived by others as bad and receiving a negative stimulus, they don't respond to punishment normally. Any punishment that they may receive is seen as an act of senseless aggression. And furthermore, as the person delivering the punishment would not see a normal emotional feedback, they are more likely to intensify punishment in hopes to incite this feedback. But a sociopath is simply incapable of such a feedback and this situation may well spiral out of control. And as the positive stimuli don't really work either, such a child is likely to get totally demotivated, leading to study problems and delinquency. Forcing such a child to apologize for something or demand remorse from him or her is also seen as an act of emotional violence.

Having essentially the same emotional needs, dealing with all of this may be very hard and consequently sociopaths are suicidal and are very likely to inflict some form of self harm. Such a child is likely to adopt very early a mindset of "the whole world is against me" and will be very hesitant to ask anyone for help and always try to rely only on him or herself. This in turn may lead to petty crimes as doing so may seem as the only reasonable way of getting something they may need. A sociopath will not commit crime or cause any physical or emotional harm for fun.

Well, if a sociopath reaches adulthood alive and without a criminal record, it may become a whole different story. Though carrying a massive baggage of childhood trauma, a sociopath is likely to have a set of natural traits to be successful in life. By adulthood, a sociopath may have acquired emotional intelligence/people skills on an unparallelled level. This manifests in charisma and an ability to understand emotions and motivations of others. The analytical and decision making processes for a sociopath are largely unaffected by emotions, allowing to make objective risk assessments and decisions even in the situations that would be very stressful for other people. And there are many jobs out there where these capabilities are key.

As for the personal life of an adult sociopath, it is likely to still be pretty miserable. I discuss the reasons for this here. My personal way of dealing with this generally is honesty and transparency. As sociopathy actually is a medical condition with clear biological causes, I would tell those, who may be affected by my condition, about what my condition is, what it means, how to treat me in different situations, what to expect and, more importantly, what to not expect of me in different scenarios. I know, this approach is not for everyone with this condition. As for the success rate of people actually knowingly accepting me, it is fairly good at around 25%. On the other hand, I clearly understand, that being close to me may weigh hard on people, so I try to accommodate to the extent possible. But acting in an open manner has been generally worthwhile for me. At least I have the peace of mind, if not all of the relationships that I wanted.

Psychopaths and Relationships

Contrary to the popular belief, many Sociopaths a.k.a. Psychopaths do want and need meaningful relationships. Sociopaths are human and have the same basic human needs of being accepted socially and personally. The problem being that such relationships are exceptionally difficult to maintain. There are several reasons for this: emotional and physiological in nature.

The primary reason being the discomfort that a sociopath may feel when other people are close to him or when there are people inside his "safe zone" at home or work. All the sociopaths that I know, including myself, experience various degrees of discomfort when around other people. The degree of discomfort tends to increase the closer those people are, culminating with immediate family, relatives, roommates and love partners. The discomfort may be very intense, up to the point of experiencing pain and revulsion at physical contact. Though, if there is sufficient personal space available, this discomfort may be at a tolerable level and manageable even in the long term. This discomfort may manifest in sociopath being irritable or reserved. Importantly, whatever happens in the relationship, a sociopath is extremely unlikely to display any physical violence - even much less likely than a normal person. Sociopaths do not commit "crimes of passion" because their capabilities to have strong emotions such like rage are very limited.

Secondly, the abnormalities in the orbitofrontal cortex of sociopaths affect the processing of certain stimuli. Particularly this concerns processes relating to empathy, leading to sociopaths being viewed as "cold" or "callous". Empathy itself is extremely important for the human species and is the key component upon which the bonding within social groups and between people occurs. Within relationships emotional feedback tends to be very important for the relationships to be stable. But these are the things that a sociopath may be completely incapable of. Unlike many autists, sociopaths can clearly perceive normal social interactions and understand what is required for such interactions to occur.

This in fact creates the biggest problem in the life of a sociopath. Though a sociopath may desire a normal and meaningful relationship, the sociopath lacks the natural tools for it to happen at the most basic biological level. To deal with this sociopaths exclude themselves from the society as much as possible and imitate the responses they think that expected of them in the setting that they are in. As sociopathy is something that one is born with and being perceptive by nature, it is very likely that by adulthood, a sociopath may be exceptionally good simulating the required responses. But this task is very demanding in terms of energy.

So, in order to fulfill the natural human desire to be accepted socially and personally, a sociopath is often required to use tools that are frowned upon by the society at large or even deemed immoral by many people. When it comes to relationships, the choices actually available to a sociopath are pretty bad and have major drawbacks: to be excluded from the society or to simulate the required responses.  On the other hand, it seems to be difficult for normal people to understand this situation and the real motivation behind the deemed "deception" if it comes to light.  So, to put this lightly, misunderstandings happen.