“I should never have done all my research in prisons. I should have spent my time inside the Stock Exchange as well.”

So asks Jon Ronson in his latest book, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry. Ronson is probably best known for his book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, which was adapted for the big screen and starred George Clooney. It documented a slightly loony group of American Army men who were convinced they could walk through walls and kill goats by simply glaring at them menacingly (apparently they took the phrase “looking daggers” a tad too literally). He also wrote a book on fundamentalists, extremists and radicals, even tailing David Icke for a spell. For research, of course. Having already spent much of his career peering into the fringe boundaries of normality, The Psychopath Test pushes him further into the sphere of madness and the science that attempts to explain it. The result is entertaining, sometimes informative, yet a mixed-bag that never really answers the questions he set out to tackle.

I’m going to avoid giving a chapter-by-chapter rundown of the book. As I said above, it’s an entertaining, and easy, read. I’m not a particularly fast reader but wolfed this one down in three sittings over two days. So if you’ve the time, cash, and/or inclination, check it out. Rather, I want to focus on what I’ll call the good, the bad, and the so-so. Ronson gets a lot of things right. First of all, he’s a great writer. The book is peppered with entertaining, funny, and somewhat disturbing accounts of his interviews with people he comes to believe are genuine psychopaths. Pitting a self-described neurotic, over-anxious journalist against some of the world’s most dangerous criminals and manipulators is a recipe for a good story, and in this regard, Ronson delivers.

Like Martha Stout (whom Ronson quotes in the book), author of The Sociopath Next Door, Ronson does a great job introducing the concept of psychopathy to readers who otherwise wouldn’t be interested in scouring dry textbooks on the subject. He treks across the world interviewing potential candidates: from a convicted UK man who tried to fake madness in order to avoid prison, only to be placed in an institution for the criminally insane; an ex-death squad leader from Haiti who was supported and protected by the CIA; to ex-CEO of Sunbeam, Al “I believe in predators” Dunlap, who gleefully fired thousands before being charged with corporate fraud. Finding them, he confronts his interviewees about their own psychopathy, with surprising results. Many deny it, of course, while not-so-subtly revealing the opposite in their answers to Ronson, who dutifully jots down his diagnoses on his notepad. Dunlap, on the other hand, managed to turn each item of the Psychopathy Checklist into a “Leadership Positive”. To Dunlap, hey, being a psychopath ain’t that bad at all! More on that below.

Then there was the failed experiment at Oak Ridge, in Canada, where psychopathic offenders were treated with LSD and encouraged to “share their feelings”, engaging in group therapy where they acted as each other’s psychotherapists. The inmates showed remarkable improvement and were released into the world, reformed beings eager to start life anew. At least, that’s what the doctors thought. But the therapy had simply taught them to be better manipulators, and it seemed to have gone to their heads. Their recidivism rates ended up being even higher than ordinary psychopaths. It’s good to see this kind of anecdotal knowledge about psychopathy reach the mainstream. As psychopathy expert and author of the Psychopathy Checklist, Bob Hare, says, psychopaths are born psychopaths. You can’t treat them. This is one of the highlights of the book: the scattered airport-hotel conversations Ronson had with Hare over the course of his research for the book. For example:

Bob said it’s always a nice surprise when a psychopath speaks openly about their inability to feel emotions. Most of them pretend to feel. When they see us non-psychopaths crying or scared or moved by human suffering, or whatever, they think it’s fascinating. They study us and learn how to ape us, like space creatures trying to blend in, but if we keep our eyes open, we can spot the fakery. (p. 100-101)

“I should never have done all my research in prisons. I should have spent my time inside the Stock Exchange as well.”

I looked at Bob. “Really?” I said.

He nodded.

“But surely stock-market psychopaths can’t be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths,” I said.

“Serial killers ruin families.” Bob shrugged. “Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”

This–Bob was saying–was the straightforward solution to the greatest mystery of all: Why is the world so unfair? Why all that savage economic injustice, those brutal wars, the everyday corporate cruelty? The answer: psychopaths. That part of the brain that doesn’t function right. You’re standing on an escalator and you watch the people going past on the opposite escalator. If you could climb inside their brains, you would see we aren’t all the same. We aren’t all good people just trying to do good. Some of us are psychopaths. And psychopaths are to blame for this brutal, misshapen society. They’re the jagged rocks thrown into the still pond. (p. 112)

“If some political or business leader had a psychopathically hoodlum childhood, wouldn’t it come out in the press and ruin them?” I said.

“They find ways to bury it,” Bob replied. “Anyway, Early Behavior Problems don’t necessarily mean ending up in Juvenile Hall. It could mean, say, secretly torturing animals.” He paused. “But getting access to people like that can be difficult. Prisoners are easy. They like meeting researchers. It breaks up the monotony of their day. But CEOs, politicians …” Bob looked at me. “It’s a really big story,” he said. “It’s a story that could change forever the way people see the world.” (p. 118)

Later, Ronson confronted Hare with a criticism he’d heard from another professional, saying that Hare talked about psychopaths as if they were a different species. And in what appears to be a one-half “cover-your-ass” and one-half “here’s what I really think” reply, Hare said:

“All the research indicates they’re not a different species,” said Bob. “There’s no evidence that they form a different species. So he’s [the critic, that is] misinformed on the literature. He should be up to date on the literature. It’s dimensional. He must know that. It’s dimensional.” …

Bob looked evenly at me. “I’m in the clear on this,” he said. There was a silence. “My gut feeling, though, deep down, is that maybe they are different,” he added. “But we haven’t established that yet.” (p. 268)

And in a conversation with Martha Stout, he asked:

“What if the wife of a psychopath reads this?” I asked. “What should she do? Leave?”

“Yes,” said Martha. “I would like to say leave. You’re not going to hurt someone’s feelings because there are no feelings to hurt.” She paused. “Sociopaths love power. They love winning. If you take loving kindness out of the human brain, there’s not much left except the will to win.”

“Which means you’ll find a preponderance of them at the top of the tree?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. The higher you go up the ladder, the greater the number sociopaths you’ll find there.”

“So the wars, the injustices, the exploitation, all of these things occur because of that tiny percent of the population up there who are mad in this certain way?” I asked. It sounded like the ripple effect of Petter Nordlund’s book, but on a giant scale.

“I think a lot of these things are initiated by them,” she said.

“It’s a frightening and huge thought,” I said, “that the ninety-nine percent of us wandering around down here are having our lives pushed and pulled around by that psychopathic fraction up there.”

“It’s is a large thought,” she said. “It is a thought people don’t have very often. Because we’re raised to believe that deep down everyone has a conscience.” (pp. 113-114)

The reference to Petter Nordlund alludes to the mystery that got Ronson started on the path that led to The Psychopath Test. Several neurologists and other academics had anonymously received a cryptic manuscript entitled Being or Nothingness. One of them contacted Ronson to solve the mystery, which he did. So what was the answer? What was the “missing piece” to make it all make sense and crack the code?

Yes, there was a missing piece of the puzzle … but the recipients had gotten it wrong. They assumed the endeavor was brilliant and rational because they were brilliant and rational, and we tend to automatically assume that everybody else is basically just like us. But in fact the missing piece was that the author was a crackpot.

“Can’t you see it? It’s incredibly interesting. Aren’t you struck by how much action occurred simply because something went wrong with one man’s brain? It’s as if the rational world, your world, was a still pond and Petter’s brain was a jagged rock thrown into it, creating odd ripples everywhere.”

“Petter Nordlund’s craziness had had a huge influence on the world. It caused intellectual examination, economic activity, and formed a kind of community. Disparate academics, scattered across continents, had become intrigued and paranoid and narcissistic because of it. They’d met on blogs and mesage boards and had debated for hours, forming conspiracy theories about shadowy Christian organizations, etc. One of them had felt motivated to rendezvous with me in a Costa Coffee. I’d flown to Sweden in an attempt to solve the mystery. And so on.” (pp. 28, 31)

Like Martha Stout and Bob Hare told Ronson, we assume that people are the same, all trying to live decent lives and be “good”. But that is not the case. And when something totally foreign intrudes on our humanity, when the predator barges into our lives looking for a meal, we grossly misinterpret it, projecting our humanity onto it, reading too much into it (or too little), like the word-salad of some raving eccentric. And it comes to affect us in ways we’d never imagined nor anticipated.

It was this question that prompted Ronson to ask if it could really be true that psychopaths rule our world, that they shape the form and function of our society. Could this simple, yet radical, idea explain it all? From the “brutal excesses of capitalism itself” to the utter callousness of profiting off the destitution of entire industries? As one “enormously wealthy money-man” told Ronson, nothing has changed in recent years. “And it’s not just in the U.S. It’s everywhere. It’s all over the world.” (p. 167)

What does this mean? After a chance encounter with psychopathy researcher Essi Viding while researching the mysterious manuscript, a colleague of hers relates this story to Ronson: “She was interviewing a psychopath. She showed him a picture of a frightened face and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn’t know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them.” (p. 10) Another psychopath said that to him, killing people was like “squashing bugs.”

Think about that.

But anyways, that’s the good. As for the so-so, Ronson never really comes to an answer to the question of “could it be true?” He just leaves it hanging without actually doing any real digging. Despite the opinions he quotes, which I think make a pretty good case for answering in the definite affirmative, he never comes to a conclusive answer, describing his efforts as leading to mixed results. Early in the book he writes:

“I could really be on to something … It really could be that many of our political and business leaders suffer from Antisocial or Narcissistic Personality Disorder and they do the harmful, exploitative things they do because of some mad striving for unlimited success and excessive admiration. Their mental disorders might be what rule our lives. This could be a really big story for me if I can think of a way to somehow prove it.” (p. 34)

But it looks like Ronson just didn’t look hard enough. His search might have led him to another mysterious manuscript, but one with much more importance and which actually gives clinical answers to these “tough” ideas and questions. Of course, I’m talking about Andrew Lobaczewski’s Political Ponerology, which just barely made it out of Communist Poland, the first copies destroyed, stolen, and lost and its researchers hunted, arrested, tortured, killed, and silenced. Lobaczewski survived long enough to write the book from memory and contact a publisher who recognized the importance of what he was saying: yes, psychopaths rule the world, and this is how it works. He was saying it before anyone else, too, but his work has been largely ignored and suppressed. Recent books like Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect, Martha Stout’s The Paranoia Switch, Hare and Babiak’s Snakes in Suits, Barb Oakley’s Evil Genes, and Paul Lawrence’s Driven to Lead are good and welcome efforts, but they barely scratch the surface of what Lobaczewski presents in Ponerology.

cont. – http://ponerology.blogspot.com/