by Harrison Koehli
22 May 2011
from
Ponerology.Blogspot Website
"I've always believed society to be a
fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is
built on insanity?"
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 isn'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.
Robert Hare
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 message 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
-
Paul Lawrence's Driven to Lead,
...are good and welcome efforts, but they barely
scratch the surface of what Lobaczewski presents in Ponerology.
With that said, because Ronson lacked the key to understand what is REALLY
going on, I'm going to focus on a few areas where he isn't all that clear
and comes to some wishy-washy conclusions. Some of his errors are just
"so-so", but some are plain bad.
Ronson starts off with a look at the DSM, the manual for psychiatrists that
lists every "known" mental disorder, their symptoms, and the checklists for
determining if a person suffers from a particular disorder (or several).
Ronson cracked open its pages and,
"instantly diagnosed myself with twelve
different ones... I was much crazier than I had imagined."
Indeed, with everything from Arithmetic
Learning Disorder, to Parent Child Relational Problem, to
Caffeine Induced Disorder and Nightmare Disorder, it seems like
the DSM writers,
"had a crazy desire to label all life a
mental disorder."
(pp. 34-35)
The disorders end up sounding like the outdated
ones of past centuries, for example,
drapetomania,
"evident only in slaves... the sole symptom
was 'the desire to run away from slavery'"
(p. 54)
Ronson meets up with some Scientologists who are
vehemently critical of psychiatry.
Even the mention of the words "mental disorder"
raises eyebrows. One of the Scientologists, Brian, introduces Ronson to
Tony, the guy who faked madness in order to avoid prison.
According to Brian,
"He's completely sane! He faked his way in
there! And now he's stuck. Nobody will believe he's sane."
Despite the fact that that wasn't exactly true
(his doctors knew he was sane, but they also knew he was a psychopath, which
is why they were keeping him), it's pretty ironic to read about the
Scientologists' zealous crusade 'against'
psychiatry.
Here's why.
Jon Ronson
First of all, they've got a point.
There is much,
"gullibility and inexactness [in] the
psychiatry profession".
(p. 42)
The sheer number of disorders, for which there
are no scientifically verified etiologies, and number of people "afflicted"
by them is enough to raise questions.
And it seems that the more complicated human
behavior gets, the more it is labeled a disorder. But on the other hand, the
Scientologists seemed to be dismissing real problems that cause people and
families suffering by reflexively labeling everyone "sane" to suit their
ideology.
While noticing the contradiction, Ronson gets
stuck in the middle-ground, writing in the final chapter:
I think the madness business is filled with
people like Tony [a "semi-psychopath" in Ronson's words], reduced to
their maddest edges.
Some, like Tony, are locked up in DSPD units for
scoring too high on Bob's checklist. Others are on TV at nine p.m.,
their dull, ordinary, non-mad attributes skillfully edited out,
benchmarks of how we shouldn't be.
There are obviously a lot of very ill people
out there. But there are also people in the middle, getting over-labeled,
becoming nothing more than a big splurge of madness in the minds of the
people who benefit from it.
(p. 267)
But Ronson is confusing categories, causing him
to come to bad conclusions.
In fact, the solution to the problem can be
found on page 58 of his own book, in a quote from Tony's doctor, Professor
Maden:
I e-mailed Professor Maden: "Isn't that like
that scene in the movie Ghost when Whoopi Goldberg pretends to be
psychic and then it turns out that she actually can talk to the dead?"
"No," he e-mailed back. "It isn't like that Whoopi Goldberg scene. Tony
faked mental illness. That's when you have hallucinations and delusions.
Mental illness comes and goes. It can get better with medication. Tony
is a psychopath. That doesn't come and go. It is how the person is."
There's a difference between "mental illness"
and psychopathy.
Mental illness is what non-psychopaths may or
may not have: emotional problems caused by trauma, toxins, abuse, etc.
Psychopathy is completely different. Yes, psychopaths may have some
apparently useful qualities, but they're incidental to
the underlying psychopathy.
Yes, they may be charming and good talkers, but
that's an act. Yes, they may not kill, but they manipulate and harm others
in different ways. It's just the way they are, and that's the point Ronson
seems to have trouble digesting. And it's those very psychopaths occupying
the middle ground that can be so dangerous.
They're,
...that wreak havoc on entire
economies and societies. Or, if they never get that far to the top, they're
the impossible bosses, the abusive husbands, the corrupt lawyers and police
officers.
But getting back to the Scientologists, why did I say their zealotry was
ironic? Well, it turns out that in 1966
L. Ron Hubbard moved from his home
in the UK forever.
As a Scientologist told Ronson while visiting
Hubbard's home:
"The conclusions he was coming to..." Bob
said. An ominous tone had crept into his voice. ...
"What was the nature of his research?" I asked.
There was a silence. And then Bob quietly said, "The antisocial
personality."
(p. 52)
Hubbard seems to have identified the problem,
but his followers are making the same mistake Ronson does, to the point
where they actively petition the release of those very same,
"antisocial personalities", whom Hubbard
said "cannot feel any sense of remorse or shame. They approve only of
destructive actions. They appear quite rational. They can be very
convincing."
Interesting turn of events, eh?
Perhaps that's the problem.
"They can be very convincing."
We see the ripples in the pond, but the jagged
rock remains invisible, cloaked behind a veil of normality.
White becomes black, right becomes wrong, peace
becomes war, and sanity becomes madness. In fact, that twisting of meanings
is a clue to psychopathy. They're masters of "doublespeak", creating verbal
traps and impossible situations that leave non-psychopaths bewildered.
Perhaps that's the solution to the catch-22 of
modern psychiatry?
A certain degree of "mental illness" is human,
even healthy. Like an immune reaction in the body, it's the normal response
to the affront of psychopathy on a healthy mind.
-
workplace bullying
-
soul-killing jobs
-
abusive relationships
-
economic depression
-
modern
warfare
-
chronic stress
-
social hysteria,
...these are not normal human
conditions. They are symptoms and effects of
psychopathy.
But the more we react to true madness (of the psychopathic kind), the more
we are labeled as mad. And the real enemy goes unnoticed. Could that say
more about psychiatry, and those pushing for such an antihuman approach,
than the people diagnosed and drugged in response?
As Tony told Ronson,
"It's like witchcraft... They turn
everything upside down."
(p. 62)
Remember
drapetomania? Remember Al Dunlap's
"Leadership Positives"?
He had said of,
"grandiose sense of self-worth", "If you
don't believe in yourself, nobody else will."
Manipulative?
"I think you could describe that as
leadership."
Impulsivity?
"Quick Analysis."
Shallow affect?
That
"stops you from feeling 'some nonsense emotions.'"
Lack of remorse?
"[F]rees you up to move forward and achieve
more great things."
(pp. 156-157)
The answer was staring Ronson in the face, but
he never made the connections.
Dr. Allen Frances had told Ronson:
"The way the diagnosis [of childhood
bipolar] is being made in America was not something we intended... Kids
with extreme irritability and moodiness and temper tantrums are being
called bipolar. The
drug companies and the advocacy groups have a
tremendous influence in propagating the epidemic."
"Psychiatric diagnoses are getting closer and closer to the boundary of
normal... There's a societal push for conformity in all ways... There's
less tolerance of difference."
(pp. 244, 245)
Couldn't Ronson see the connection between the
"Al Dunlaps" of the economic/corporate world and psychiatric/pharmaceutical
drug-pushing world?
That the missing key is psychopathy? That that
is the reason for this push to label normal people "mentally ill" and keep
us and our children drugged up, sick in mind and body, while the truly ill
are the ones reaping the benefits?
Ronson was actually on to something when he wrote:
All that talk of snakes adopting human form
reminded me of a story I once did about a conspiracy theorist named
David Icke, who believed that the secret rulers of the world were giant,
blood-drinking, child-sacrificing lizards who had shape-shifted into
humans so they could perform their evil on an unsuspecting population.
I suddenly realized how similar the two
stories were, except in this one the people who spoke of
snakes in suits
were eminent and utterly sane psychologists, respected around the world.
Was this a conspiracy theory that was actually true?
(p. 138)
No, they're not lizards.
Rather the secret rulers of the world are rich,
blood-lusting, child-raping psychopaths. Remember the comments about
"squashing bugs"?
These people just don't give a shit about
mass-murder, raping mothers in front of their children, or children in front
of their parents. They don't care about nuclear meltdowns, oil poisoning the
Gulf, lung-cancer-causing pollution, disease-causing diets. They are
absorbed by it. Fascinated.
They get a kick out of making people suffer and
driving them crazy. Literally.
They're the kind of cretins that will cut
themselves and blame it on their wives for custody of children in a divorce,
stab their "best friend" in the back if by doing so they can frame someone
else and get some kind of payoff. Dirty tricks. Fun and games. They're
cunning, manipulative, and ruthless. And this is where Ronson goes from
so-so to just plain bad.
Twice in the book he relates his annoyance at being called either a "shill"
or "stupid" for not believing the 9/11 and 7/7 conspiracy theories. While
Ronson may be a smart guy in many regards, when it comes to "conspiracy
theories", I've gotta go with his detractors.
In a section on one of the survivors of the 7/7
attacks, Rachel North, he writes:
"Only the most extreme magical-thinkers
among [the 9/11 truthers] were 7/7 conspiracy theorists, too: while 9/11
obviously wasn't an inside job, 7/7 OBVIOUSLY wasn't an inside job."
(p. 183)
Yet the only point he ends up demonstrating is
that a lot of conspiracy theorists are stupid and grossly misguided.
No, the 7/7 attacks weren't a "fake stunt" using
"pyrotechnics and stuntmen and actors and special-effect blood." Yes, Rachel
North was a real victim of the attacks. Yes, real planes flew into the World
Trade Centers.
But none of that dismisses the fact that the
9/11 and 7/7 attacks were false-flag operations, using real bombs, causing
real death and destruction, ruining lives and bringing devastation to
thousands of families. Yes, making light of the atrocities and harassing
victims is callous.
But no, looking for the truth, paying attention
to details like the locations and physical features of the blast holes of
7/7 is not callous. Is a police detective callous because he tries to
discern the point of entry and exit of a bullet wound? No, he's just trying
to find the truth, so that there can be real justice. Ronson's diatribe
against conspiracy theorists is as shameful as those conspiracy theorists
who spout nonsense and DO act in callous ways.
But even then, there's more to this than meets
the eye.
Rachel North's critics accused her (as Ronson's accused him) of being a
"shill", a government agent spouting disinformation. Ronson also devotes
several pages to a discussion of
David Shayler, ex-MI5 officer, 9/11 and 7/7
conspiracy theorist, "no-planer", cross-dresser, and second coming of
Jesus.
David Shayler
Yes, the guy is completely insane. That's a given.
What Ronson ignores is the fact that David
Shayler is the real agent in this whole drama! He's the self-professed
government agent. He even admitted to dressing as an anarchist at a
demonstration during his "stint" with MI5.
Let me spell it out. First let's start from the big picture. Psychopaths
rule our world. The experts agree on that.
The higher to the top you get, the more
psychopaths you find. They're in business, banks, politics, intelligence,
military, media, academia. They're also cunning, manipulative and ruthless.
They're the evil bastards in Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot novels who get
off by killing people and then blaming it on someone else.
Now, I'm sure not many will disagree with me
when I say: politicians lie, intelligence agencies are secretive.
They conduct many "black operations" often
involving killing innocent people. Corporate interests steer politicians.
They also own the media and do not promote news that would have negative
consequences for themselves. Again, psychopaths saturate all these
industries. Their leadership often overlaps. They have mutual interests.
And again, they're psychopaths.
Now,
-
How hard is it to believe that some of
these evil bastards would commit real atrocities against their own
people and blame it on some boogieman in the interests of global
hegemony?
-
Remember Hitler?
-
Remembering Goring and Himmler and
Goebbels?
They were psychopaths too.
-
Remember the Reichstag fire?
-
Remember the control of the media, the
use of scapegoats, the incestuous relationship between corporate,
media, military, economic, and political powers?
-
Is it not completely freaking obvious
that there is no evil thing these whackos wouldn't do?
-
That they have done such things in the
past and will CONTINUE doing them?
-
And don't you think they'd have agents
set up to make anyone exposing these deceptions look loony?
Yes, there are stupid conspiracy theorists.
There are also stupid skeptics and debunkers.
That's beside the point of what actually happened.
Whether it's police agents dressed as "anarchists" at protests who instigate
violence, UK troops posing as Iraqi insurgents with bombs and guns, Israeli
operatives creating fake Al-Qaeda cells, or any other
counterintelligence-type operations, this is STANDARD operating procedure.
And it's people like Ronson who stare at the
ripples in disbelief, unable to see the jagged rock staring them right back
in the face.
Anyways, I'm ranting. One more small point before I wrap up. Noting the
absence of psychopathy in the DSM, Ronson wonders whether there had been
some "backstage schism in the psychopath-defining world".
It turns out there was.
Lee Robins, a sociologist, rallied to
exclude it, focusing only on "overt symptoms" instead of personality traits
such as empathy. This is a telling point, which I deal with in this article.
In it, I also give my thoughts on the "dimensional vs. categorical" debate.
My intuition is similar to Hare's.
Psychopaths are different. They have the shape
of a human, the outer form. They walk, talk, speak, eat, and breathe. They
may even collect McDonald's toys or statues of predators, like the
psychopaths interviewed by Ronson. But when it comes to the inner essence
that makes us human, that part of another that we come to love and
appreciate, no, they are not human.
They are an intraspecies predator. Not quite
human.
While Ronson does an admirable job bringing the topic of psychopathy,
and the idea that it runs our world, to the mainstream, he never really gets
to the meat of the matter. He collects some of the clues, but lacks the key
to give a wider understanding. For that, you need
Political Ponerology.
There may not be anything new in The Psychopath
Test for regular readers, but I did find it enjoyable for its case studies
and Ronson's quirky and engaging style. So check it out.
Just be sure to round out your reading with
something a bit more substantial.