Vaporous Conjecture #1: Could a sociopath be a good president?

Did Sam Vaknin, at some point, stop identifying himself as a narcissistic personality? (He shouldn’t have.) I got that impression from a quick read several years ago, but haven’t had the slightest motivation to check on his later plethora of marketplace youtube videos. I mention him because he has opined that Barack Obama was a narcissistically disordered president. I don’t think that’s true, but the point I’ll draw from our lack of agreement is that one might be a narcissist and still commit some consensus positive acts, and still project an air of benevolence, conscience and class.

Is this true of a sociopath on the world stage? Normal and normatively neurotic people know that Trump is sociopathic, and is a toxically botched president. But could some other sociopath be different and better than him? A “pure” narcissist would have no conscience, no bond-warmth for a human being or humanity but – possibly – for a primordial shard embedded in his prodromal infancy. (That might manifest in moments of maudlinity, which some mobster-types have shown, at least in old movies.) Narcissism exists on a continuum, however. A man might be faux-warm and generous to people solely to magnify his glory, never in a selflessly caring way. He would be a solipsist, meaning that the universe is just a mirror around him and he is trapped in self-reference. But feelings are absurdly complex, and he may have an expansive feeling and interpret it to himself as love. And he might live for years on that interpretation and therefore act it in a convincing way.

I have never found a reason to differentiate sociopath from psychopath. We’re looking at a “lizard brain” in either case, the bond-burned never-born soul. Whether he is a serial killer or a quiet and relatively harmless hater of humankind is just a factor of life’s colorations in early childhood. I would speculate that a sociopathic president, in his urge for predatory power (like Trump), could never emotionally justify a widely acceptable policy unless its purpose was to harm an even wider population. (Such as pleasing a large swath of our country by rejecting the entire world of potential immigrants.) While a sociopath will con an innocent, goodhearted elderly person, a president sociopath couldn’t ally with any world leader who was possessed of a basic moral sense. He would (barring anvil-to-the-head idiocy) know his con wouldn’t work with an independent actor in the presence of a wide audience, and would feel fatally “allergic” to the heart in the person. Psychopaths feel dead inside and therefore want to destroy the living.* Sociopaths survived the death of love in their moments of creation and now must hate love and compassion. This president would propagate cruel acts in alliance with other miscreants.

So I’d say that no sociopath could be a good president. (Unfortunately, “good” – in a world plagued by so much micro-sociopathy in the form of absence of empathy – is not a universally agreed-on quality.)

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* See James Gilligan, M.D.’s book, Violence.