The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (15 page)

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Authors: Jon Ronson

Tags: #Social Scientists & Psychologists, #Psychopathology, #Sociology, #Psychology, #Popular Culture.; Bisacsh, #Social Science, #Popular Culture, #Psychopaths, #General, #Mental Illness, #Biography & Autobiography, #Social Psychology, #History.; Bisacsh, #History

BOOK: The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
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These were the words of another of Bob’s videoed case studies—Case Study J. We laughed shrewdly when we heard him say this, because we
did
now know. That cryptic, powerful knowledge of how to decipher and identify psychopaths and anticipate their next move, even when they were feigning normalcy, was ours now. What we knew was that they were remorseless monsters and they would do it again in a heartbeat.
 
 
As I sat in the tent, my mind drifted to what I could do with my new powers. If I’m being honest, it didn’t cross my mind at that point to become some kind of great crime fighter, an offender profiler or criminal psychologist, philanthropically dedicated to making society a safer place. Instead I made a mental list of all the people who had crossed me over the years, and wondered which of them I might be able to expose as having psychopathic character traits. Top of the list of possibilities was the
Sunday Times
and
Vanity Fair
critic A. A. Gill, who had always been very rude about my television documentaries and had recently written a restaurant column for
The Sunday Times
in which he admitted to killing a baboon on safari.
I took him just below the armpit. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out. I wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger. You see it in all those films. What does it really feel like to shoot someone, or someone’s close relative?
 
 
“Item 8: Callous/Lack of Empathy
,
”
I thought.
 
I smiled to myself and zoned back in to Bob. He was saying that if he were to score himself on his checklist, he’d probably get a 4 or a 5 out of the possible 40. Tony in Broadmoor told me that on the three occasions they scored him, he got around a 29 or a 30.
 
 
Our three days in West Wales came to an end. On the last day Bob surprised us by unexpectedly flashing onto the screen a largescale, close-up photograph of a man who’d been shot in the face at very close range. This came after he’d lulled us into a false sense of security by flashing photographs of ducks on pretty lakes and summer days in the park. But in this picture, gore and gristle bubbled everywhere. The man’s eyes had bulged all the way out of their sockets. His nose was gone.
“Oh
GOD
,” I thought.
An instant later my body responded to the shock by feeling prickly and jangly and weak and debilitated. This sensation, Bob said, was a result of the amygdalae and the central nervous system shooting signals of distress up and down to each other. It’s the feeling we get when we’re suddenly startled—like when a figure jumps out at us in the dark—or when we realize we’ve done something terrible, the feeling of fear and guilt and remorse, the physical manifestation of our conscience.
“It is a feeling,” Bob said, “that psychopaths are incapable of experiencing.”
Bob said it was becoming clearer that this brain anomaly is at the heart of psychopathy.
“There are all sorts of laboratory studies and the results are very, very consistent,” he said. “What they find is that there are anomalies in the way these individuals process material that has emotional implications. That there’s this dissociation between the linguistic meaning of words and the emotional connotations. Somehow they don’t put them together. Various parts of the limbic system just don’t light up.”
 
 
And with that our psychopath-spotting course was over. As we gathered together our belongings and headed toward our cars, I said to one attendee, “You have to feel sorry for psychopaths, right? If it’s all because of their amygdalae? If it’s not their fault?”
“Why should we feel sorry for them?” he replied. “They don’t give a shit about us.”
 
 
Bob Hare called over to me. He was in a hurry. He had to get the train from Cardiff to Heathrow so he could fly back to Vancouver. Could I give him a lift?
He saw it before I did. A car was upside down. The driver was still in his seat. He was just sitting there, as if good-naturedly waiting for someone to come and turn him right way up again so he could continue on his journey. I thought, “He looks
patient
,” but then I realized he wasn’t conscious.
His passenger sat on the grass a short distance away. She was sitting cross-legged, as if lost in her thoughts. She must have been thrown clean through the window a moment or two earlier.
I saw the scene only for an instant. Other people had already parked their cars and were running toward them, so I kept going, pleased that I didn’t have to be the one to handle it. Then I wondered if I should worry that my relief at not having to deal with the unpleasant responsibility was a manifestation of
Item 8: Callous/Lack of Empathy—“He is only concerned with Number 1.”
I glanced in my rearview mirror at the good Samaritans rushing over and surrounding the overturned car and continued on my way.
“Jon?” said Bob, after a moment.
“Mm?” I said.
“Your driving,” said Bob.
“What about my driving?” I said.
“You’re swerving all over the road,” said Bob.
“No, I’m not,” I said. We continued in silence for a moment. “It’s the shock of seeing the crash,” I said.
It was good to know that I had been affected after all.
Bob said what was happening was my amygdala and central nervous system were shooting signals of fear and distress up and down to each other.
“They certainly are.” I nodded. “I can actually feel it happening. It’s very jarring and jaggedy.”
“You do realize,” said Bob, “that psychopaths would see that crash and their amygdalae would barely register a thing.”
“Well then, I’m the opposite of a psychopath,” I said. “If anything, my amygdala and my central nervous system shoot far too many signals up and down to each other.”
“Can you concentrate on the road, please,” said Bob.
“I came to you,” I said, “because of this guy called Tony. He’s in Broadmoor. He says they’re falsely accusing him of psychopathy and he hopes I’ll do some campaigning journalism to support his release. And I do have warm feelings for Tony, I really do, but how do I know if he’s a psychopath?”
Bob didn’t seem to be listening. It was as if the crash had made him introspective. He said, almost to himself, “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.
 
 
It wasn’t only Bob who believed that a disproportionate number of psychopaths can be found in high places. In the days after Essi Viding had first mentioned the theory to me, I spoke to scores of psychologists who all said exactly the same. One was Martha Stout, from the Harvard Medical School, author of
The Sociopath Next Door
. (You may be wondering what the difference is between a psychopath and a sociopath, and the answer is, there really isn’t one. Psychologists and psychiatrists around the world tend to use the terms interchangeably.) They are everywhere, she said. They are in the crowded restaurant where you have your lunch. They are in your open-plan office.
“As a group they tend to be more charming than most people,” she said. “They have no warm emotions of their own but will study the rest of us. They’re the boss or the coworker who likes to make other people jump just for the pleasure of seeing them jump. They’re the spouse who marries to look socially normal but inside the marriage shows no love after the initial charm wears off.”
“I don’t know how many people will read this book,” I said to her. “Maybe a hundred thousand? So that means around a thousand of them will be psychopaths. Possibly even more if psychopaths like reading books about psychopaths. What should my message to them be? Turn yourselves in?”
“That would be nice,” Martha said. “But their arrogance would hold up. They’d think, ‘She’s lying about there being conscience.’ Or, ‘This poor dear is restrained by conscience. She should be more like me.’ ”
“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 of 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 is 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 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.”
At the end of our conversation she turned to address you, the reader. She said if you’re beginning to feel worried that you may be a psychopath, if you recognize some of those traits in yourself, if you’re feeling a creeping anxiety about it, that means you are not one.
 
 
Everyone in the field seemed to regard psychopaths in this same way: inhuman, relentlessly wicked forces, whirlwinds of malevolence, forever harming society but impossible to identify unless you’re trained in the subtle art of spotting them, as I now was. The only other way would be to have access to some expensive fMRI equipment, like Adam Perkins does.
Adam is a research fellow in clinical neuroscience at the Institute of Psychiatry, South London. I had visited him shortly after meeting Essi because he’s an expert in anxiety, and I wanted to test out my theory on him that suffering from anxiety is the neurological opposite of being a psychopath when it comes to amygdala function. I imagined my amygdala to be like one of those Hubble photographs of a solar storm, and I imagined psychopaths’ amygdalae to be like those Hubble photographs of dead planets, like Pluto. Adam verified my theory, and then to demonstrate, he strapped me up to some wires, put me into a dummy fMRI scanner, and without any warning, gave me a very painful electric shock.

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