The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (22 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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“He’d probably cry his eyes out if he got a dent in his car,” said Bob. “If he had a Ferrari or a Porsche—and he probably does—and someone scratched it and kicked it, he’d probably go out of his
mind
and want to kill the guy. So, yeah, the psychopath might cry when his dog dies and you think that’s misplaced because he doesn’t cry when his
daughter
dies.”
I was about to say, “Al Dunlap doesn’t have a daughter,” but Bob was continuing. “When my daughter was dying, it was killing me inside. She was dying of MS. I put myself inside her skin so many times and tried to experience what she was going through. And many times I said to my wife, ‘Boy, what an advantage to be a psychopath.’ A psychopath would look at his daughter and say, ‘This is really bad luck,’ and then go out and gamble and . . .”
Bob trailed off. We ordered coffee. “With corporate psychopathy, it’s a mistake to look at them as neurologically impaired,” he said. “It’s a lot easier to look at them from a Darwinian slant. It all makes sense from the evolutionary perspective. The strategy is to pass on the gene pool for the next generation. Now, they don’t consciously think that. They don’t think, ‘I’m going to go out and impregnate as many women as I can,’ but that’s the genetic imperative. So what do they do? They’ve got to attract women. They like women a lot. So they’ve got to misrepresent their resources. They’ve got to manipulate and con and deceive and be ready to move on as soon as things get hot.”
“Ah,” I said, frowning again. “With Al Dunlap that really doesn’t hold up. He’s been married for forty-one years. There’s no evidence of affairs. None at all. He’s been a loyal husband. And a lot of journalists have dug around—”
“It doesn’t matter,” interrupted Bob. “We’re talking in generalities. There are lots of exceptions. What happens outside the marriage? Do you know? Do you have any idea?”
“Um,” I said.
“Does his wife have any idea what goes on outside the marriage?” Bob said. “A lot of these serial killers are married to the same person for thirty years. They have no idea what goes on outside the marriage.”
 
 
In the clean, minimalist New York City office of an enormously wealthy moneyman—a man who would talk to me only if I promised to preserve his anonymity—I sat on my hands like a schoolboy and watched as he scrolled through my website, reading out descriptions of my various previous interviewees. There were the Special Forces soldiers in my book
The Men Who Stare at Goats
who believe they can walk through walls and kill goats just by staring at them. There were the conspiracy theorists in my book
Them: Adventures with Extremists
who believe that the secret rulers of the world are giant pedophile, blood-drinking reptiles from another dimension who have adopted human form.
“Wow,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “I feel out of place even speaking with you. Wow. I’m about as boring a person as you’re ever going to chat with.”
He indicated his office, which was indeed filled with nothing crazy. In fact, it was filled with nothing at all. The desks and chairs were contoured in such a way to suggest they were impossibly expensive.
This man, whom I will call Jack, witnessed the Al Dunlap affair close up. He was around when a co-owner of the company, the billionaire financier and philanthropist Michael Price—at $1.4 billion the 562nd richest person in the world—lobbied to get Dunlap appointed as CEO, and, Al’s reputation preceding him, everyone knew what that would mean.
“I disagreed with the job cuts,” said Jack. “I said, ‘Don’t blame the people and the number of people.’ You ever seen what happens to a community when you close a facility?”
“I went to Shubuta,” I said.
“I’ve been to these places,” said Jack. “I’ve stayed at little inns. I’ve been to the schools. I’ve been to the training centers and the tech areas. It’s a joy. It really is a joy to go to these places. And then to see Wall Street applaud as they got destroyed . . .” Jack trailed off. “If you look at any research report from the time, it’s so transparent to anyone who understands what’s going on.”
“What do you mean by ‘research report’?” I asked.
The “research reports”—Jack explained—are written by hedge funds and pension funds and investment banks, advising their clients on which companies to invest in.
“Wall Street, or the darker side that writes these research reports,
lionized
the job cuts in places like Shubuta,” said Jack. “If you look at the community of support—if you were to grab research reports of the time—you’d be amazed at the comments.”
“Like what?”
“The level of callous jubilance over what he was doing. You’d probably wonder whether society had gone mad.”
“I guess those research reports are lost to the sands of time now,” I said.
“It might be possible to grab some of them,” he said. “It was like in the Coliseum. You had the entire crowd egging him on. So who really is the villain? Is it the one who’s making the cuts? Is it the analysts who are touting it? Is it the pension funds and the mutual funds who are buying?”
“Of course that was all twelve years ago now,” I said. “Has anything changed?”
“Not anything,” Jack said. “Zero. And it’s not just in the U.S. It’s everywhere. It’s all over the world.”
 
 
A few weeks passed and then, as he promised, Jack dug up and sent me one of the research reports. He said he hoped I would agree it made for extraordinarily cold-blooded and bullish reading. It was from Goldman Sachs, dated September 19, 1996. It read:
We reaffirm our trading buy rating on SOC (Sunbeam) shares based on the company’s pending turnaround/restructuring, with CEO Al Dunlap leading the charge.
 
Jack had double underlined the next part to indicate just how shocking it was:
Our EPS ests do not reflect SOC’s pending restructuring and are
unchanged
at 25c for 1996 and 90c for 1997.
 
And then, finally, underlined and circled with an exclamation mark:
P/E on Nxt FY: 27.5X
 
“P/E on Nxt FY: 27.5X” was the cruelest line in the paper, Jack had said. I found it incomprehensible. When I see phrases like that my brain collapses in on itself. But, this being the secret formula to the brutality, the equation that led to the death of Shubuta, I asked some financial experts to translate it.
“So,” e-mailed Paul J. Zak, of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies in Claremont, California, “the PE is the average price of the stock divided by next year’s forecasted earnings. The increase in the PE means that the stock price was expected to rise faster than the increase in earnings. This means the investment house expected that the Draconian cuts would produce higher earnings for years to come, and next year’s stock price would reflect that higher earnings for years in the future.”
“For a company making low-priced appliances,” e-mailed John A. Byrne of
BusinessWeek
, “it’s a very high PE. The analyst is assuming that if Dunlap can squeeze out overhead and expenses, the earnings will shoot up and investors who get in early will make a killing.”
“Bottom line,” e-mailed Paul J. Zak. “One investment house thought that most investors would cheer mass layoffs at Sunbeam. This is a remorseless view of people losing jobs. The only upside of this is that whomever followed this advice was seriously pissed at the investment house a year later when the stock tanked.”
 
 
As I glanced at the phraseology of the research report, dull and unfathomable to outsiders like me, I thought that if you have the ambition to become a villain, the first thing you should do is learn to be impenetrable. Don’t act like Blofeld—monocled and ostentatious. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.
7.
 
THE RIGHT SORT OF MADNESS
 
I
t was a week after I returned from Florida. I was sitting in a bar in North London with a friend—the documentary maker Adam Curtis—and I was animatedly telling him about Al Dunlap’s crazy sculpture collection of predatory animals and his giant oil paintings of himself and so on.
“How’s Elaine dealing with your new hobbyhorse?” Adam asked me.
Elaine is my wife. “Oh, she likes it,” I said. “Usually, as you know, she finds my various obsessions quite annoying, but not this time. In fact, I’ve taught her how to administer the Bob Hare Checklist and she’s already identified lots of people we know as psychopaths. Oh, I think A. A. Gill’s baboon-killing article displays . . .” I paused and said, darkly, “. . . psychopathic characteristics.”
I named one or two of our mutual friends as people we also now thought were psychopaths. Adam looked despairing.
“How long did it take you to get to Al Dunlap’s house?” he asked me.
I shrugged. “Ten hours on the plane,” I said. “Plus a round-trip by car to Shubuta, Mississippi, which took about another fifteen or sixteen hours.”
“So you traveled thousands of miles just to chronicle the crazy aspects of Al Dunlap’s personality,” said Adam.
There was a short silence.
“Yes,” I said.
I peered at Adam. “Yes, I did,” I said, defiantly.
“You’re like a medieval monk,” Adam said, “stitching together a tapestry of people’s craziness. You take a little bit of craziness from up there and a little bit of craziness from over there and then you stitch it all together.”
There was another short silence.
“No, I don’t,” I said.
 
 
Why was Adam criticizing my journalistic style, questioning my entire project?
“Adam is such a contrarian,” I thought. “Such a polemicist. If he starts picking apart my thesis after I’ve been working on this big story for so long now, I’m not going to listen because he’s a known contrarian. Yes. If Adam picks apart my thesis, I won’t listen.”
(Item 16: Failure to Accept Responsibility for Own Actions—He usually has some excuse for his behavior, including rationalization and putting the blame on others.)
“We all do it,” Adam was continuing. “All journalists. We create stories out of fragments. We travel all over the world, propelled onwards by
something
, we sit in people’s houses, our notepads in our hands, and we wait for the
gems
. And the gems invariably turn out to be the madness—the extreme, outermost aspects of that person’s personality—the irrational anger, the anxiety, the paranoia, the narcissism, the things that would be defined within
DSM
as mental disorders. We’ve dedicated our lives to it. We know what we do is odd but nobody talks about it. Forget psychopathic CEOs. My question is, what does all this say about
our
sanity?”
 
 
I looked at Adam and I scowled. Deep down, although I was massively reluctant to admit it, I knew he was right. For the past year or so I had traveled to Gothenburg and Broadmoor and upstate New York and Florida and Mississippi, driven by my compulsion to root out craziness. I thought back on my time with Al Dunlap, about the vague disappointment I had felt whenever he said things to me that were
reasonable
. There had been a moment before our lunch, for instance, when I’d asked him about items 12 and 18—
Early Behavior Problems
and
Juvenile Delinquency
.
“Lots of successful people rebelled against their teachers or parents!” I had prompted. “There’s nothing wrong with
that
!”
But he’d replied, “No. I was a focused, serious kid. I was very determined. I was a good kid. In school I was always trying to achieve. I was always working hard. That saps your energy. You don’t have enough time to troublemake.”
“You never got into trouble with the authorities?” I said.
“No,” he said. “And remember, I got accepted into West Point. Listen. The psychopath thing is rubbish. You cannot be successful unless you have certain”—he pointed at his head—“
controls
. It won’t happen. How do you get through school? How do you get through your first and second job when you’re formulating yourself?”
It was a terribly persuasive point and I had felt disappointed when he said it. Also, he denied being a liar (“If I think you’re a schmuck, I’ll tell you you’re a schmuck”), or having a parasitic lifestyle (“I’ll go get my own meal”), and even though he was against “nonsense emotions,” he did feel “the right emotions.” Furthermore, his $10 million donation to Florida State University might have been narcissistic, but it was also a nice gesture. And he really did have a loyal wife of forty-one years. There really were no rumors of affairs. This would score him a zero on items 17 and 11,
Many Short-Term Marital Relationships
and
Promiscuous Sexual Behavior
.

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