The Wisdom of Psychopaths (13 page)

Sometimes, Ohira and Osumi concluded, it pays to be a psychopath—but in a different way to that shown by Andrew Colman. Whereas Colman had demonstrated that it was good to put the boot in (or in his case, put it down), Ohira and Osumi had discovered the complete reverse. There was similar worth in taking it on the chin.

If you need any convincing of the value of either strategy, just ask someone who’s been in the can.

“Like a flashy, violent streak across the prison sky” is how one private investigator has described them. And there aren’t too many, on either side of the bars, who would disagree with him. The Aryan Brotherhood, also known as the Rock, is one of the most feared gangs ever to emerge within the U.S. federal penitentiary system. Responsible, according to FBI figures, for 21 percent of murders inside U.S. prisons (though their members account for a mere 1 percent of inmates), you can’t exactly miss them. Members display walrus-like mustaches more befitting the Wild West than a modern-day outlaw, and tattoos depicting a shamrock fused with a swastika, with the motif “666” emblazoned upon its leaves. Sport one without permission and you’re invariably asked to remove it. Usually with a razor.

Brutally elite, the Rock is the Special Forces of the prison world. Founded in California’s San Quentin “Supermax” high-security facility in 1964 by a group of white supremacists, the Brotherhood was numerically smaller than other prison gangs, but within a matter of just a few blood-spattered months had skyrocketed to top-dog status. How did they manage it? Well, it doesn’t hurt to be smart, that’s for sure. Despite the fact that many gang members were incarcerated in other Supermax units, often under conditions of twenty-three-hour lockdown, they managed to coordinate their activities through a number of ingenious methods: invisible ink made from urine and a four-hundred-year-old binary code system devised by the Renaissance philosopher Sir Francis Bacon, no less, being a couple of notable examples.

But they were also utterly remorseless, and lived (as still they do today) by one simple, sinister code: “Blood in, blood out.” Blood in: every prospective member is admitted on the basis of their having already killed a member of a rival gang, and on the understanding that they will carry out further executions to order. Blood out: their only exit card is their own, often hastened, demise, whether through an event as vanishingly improbable as natural causes or, as is infinitely
more likely (and, in many cases, more preferable), through similarly violent means.

As members admit, it’s a mercilessly minimalist philosophy. There are no half measures and no questions asked. “Fear nothing and no one” is the mantra. And what the Rock lacks in numbers, it makes up for with nerveless ferocity. Not to mention, as is common in highly motivated psychopaths, ruthless dedication to the task.

With access to prison libraries (plus supplementary reading materials from other, less official sources), members treat killing like an undergrad science module, poring over human anatomy texts (alongside Nietzsche, Machiavelli, Tolkien, and Hitler) to find the parts of the body most vulnerable to sudden trauma. In the warped spacetime continuum that exists within a Supermax prison, a ten-second window is like a wormhole into eternity—and a fight of such magnitude on the inside equates to a twelve-round slugfest in the extended, relativistic orbit of everyday life. Speed is of the essence. In the blink of an eye, much can be accomplished: Windpipes severed. Jugulars ripped out. Spinal cords pierced. Spleens and livers punctured. It’s important to know what you’re doing should the opportunity present itself.

Yet as Barry, one former member of the Rock, pointed out to me, in the impenetrable moral crevices that lurk, unseen and ungovernable, in the fear-darkened corners of a federal penitentiary, such a strategy might actually be construed as adaptive—as firefighting instead of fire-setting. And might, in the long run, contain trouble instead of igniting it.

“Prison,” elucidates Barry, “is a hostile environment. It has a different set of rules than the outside world. It’s a community within a community. If you don’t stand up and be counted, someone can move in on you any time they want. So you have to do something about it. You don’t have to keep taking people out. That ain’t the way it works. Once or twice is usually enough. You do it once or twice and word soon gets round: Don’t mess with these guys. Prevention, is what I’m saying, is better than cure.
Carpe noctem
.”

Barry’s point about conflict resolution is an interesting one, and is echoed, in not so many words, by the incarcerated record producer Phil Spector. “Better to have a gun and not need it,” the Magnum-toting screwball once expounded, “than to need a gun and not have it” (though whether he still believes that today is anybody’s guess). A more nuanced position is taken by the Chinese military strategist of the sixth century B.C., Sun Tzu. “
To subdue the enemy without fighting,” wrote Sun, “is the highest skill”—a skill, as we saw just a moment or so ago with Jim and Buzz, that’s both hard to fake and unequivocally rooted in confidence. Not a false confidence based on bravado. But a real confidence based on belief.

Here’s Dean Petersen, an ex–Special Forces soldier turned martial arts instructor: “Sometimes, when you’re in a hostile situation, your best option is to match the aggressive intentions of a potentially violent individual. And then go one step beyond them. Raise them, in other words, to use a poker analogy. Only then, once you’ve gained the psychological ascendancy, shown them … hinted … who’s boss, can you begin to talk them down.”

How better to assert your authority than by convincing prospective challengers that they’re beaten before they start?

Barry’s argument has wider implications, too—for the selection, not just of ruthlessness, but of other psychopathic characteristics such as fearlessness and superficial charm. Conflict, it transpires, isn’t the only means of establishing dominance in the natural world. Back in the days of our ancestors, survival, just as in prison, didn’t come cheap. Although group membership constituted a significant chunk of the price tag, communities also placed a surprisingly high premium on risk takers.

One observes a similar dynamic in monkeys still today. Male chimpanzees (our closest living relative, with whom we share 96 percent of our DNA) will compete through “magnanimity”: through the direction of unsolicited altruism toward subordinates. Such magnanimity is usually gastronomic in nature: enduring danger to provide the troop with food, sharing out the proceeds of one’s own kills
charitably, and confiscating those of others for the purposes of reallocation.

As the primatologist Frans de Waal points out, “
Instead of dominants standing out because of what they take, they affirm their position by what they give.”

Of equal note are those primates who vie with one another for status through “public service” or “leadership”—by facilitating cooperation within the group, or, if you prefer, through charisma, persuasion, and charm. Dominant chimpanzees, stump-tailed monkeys, and gorillas all compete by intervening in disputes among subordinates. Yet, contrary to expectation, such intervention does not, by default, automatically favor family and friends. It is implemented, as de Waal observes, “
on the basis of how best to restore peace.”

Consequently, de Waal continues, rather than decentralizing conflict resolution, “
the group looks for the most effective arbitrator in its midst, then throws its weight behind this individual to give him a broad base of support for guaranteeing peace and order.”

Ruthlessness. Fearlessness. Persuasiveness. Charm. A deadly combination—yet also, at times, a lifesaving one. Have the killers of today enjoyed a sneaky evolutionary piggyback on the prowess of yesterday’s peacemakers? It may not be beyond the bounds of possibility—though violence, of course, isn’t exactly new.

In 1979, at a remote site near the village of Saint-Césaire in southwest France, Christoph Zollikofer of the University of Zurich and a joint contingent of French and Italian researchers made an intriguing discovery. Dating back to the “transitional period,” when prognathous-jawed, ridge-browed Europeans were undergoing displacement by an anatomically modern influx from Africa, the remains of a skeleton some 36,000 years old had lain in an anthropological coma since the Ice Age. The remains, it was confirmed, were Neanderthal. But there
was something rather odd about the skull. It was scarred. The scar in question was on a section of bone approximately four centimeters in length, and was situated top right. It was not, of course, unheard of for excavations in the field to throw up less than perfect specimens. In fact, it was to be expected. But there was something, somehow, just a little different about this one.

It had the whiff of premeditation about it that suggested foul play; that alluded less to the vicissitudes of geophysical atrophy and more to the exigency of a prehistoric moment, lost deep in the lining of our dark ancestral past. This was no ordinary tale of misadventure, but a lesion caused by violence. Or, more specifically, by a slashing or hacking motion indicative of a sharp-bladed implement. Putting two and two together—the position of the scar; the shape of the wound; the fact that the rest of the skull appeared neither fractured nor misshapen—Zollikofer arrived at a stark conclusion. Interpersonal aggression among humans had a longer lineage than had previously been suspected. Inflicting harm on others came, it would seem, quite naturally.

It’s an intriguing thought that itinerant Neanderthal psychopaths were doing the rounds of prehistoric Europe some 40,000 years ago. But it’s not all that surprising. Indeed, in contrast to the “piggyback” argument just outlined, the traditional take on the evolution of psychopathy focuses, as we saw in the previous chapter, predominantly on the predatory and aggressive aspects of the disorder. On one of the standard psychopathy assessment questionnaires, the Levenson Self-Report Scale, a typical test item reads as follows:

“Success is based on survival of the fittest. I am not concerned about the losers.” On a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 represents “strongly disagree” and 4 represents “strongly agree,” rate how you feel about this statement.

Most psychopaths are inclined to register strong agreement with such a sentiment—which is not, incidentally, always a bad thing.

“Two little mice fell in a bucket of cream,” says Leonardo DiCaprio, playing the role of Frank Abagnale, one of the world’s most celebrated
con men, in the film
Catch Me If You Can
. “The first mouse quickly gave up and drowned. The second mouse wouldn’t quit. He struggled so hard that eventually he churned that cream into butter and crawled out … I am that second mouse.”
⁴

Yet, at the other end of the spectrum, we run into an altogether different kind of exhortation, such as those espoused in religious, spiritual, and philosophical texts. We find allusions to temperance, tolerance, and the meek inheriting the earth.

So which one are you: psychopath, saint, or somewhere in between? The chances are it’s going to be the latter—for which, it turns out, there are sound biological reasons.

We’ve already seen game theory in action earlier in this chapter. A branch of applied mathematics devoted to the study of strategic situations, to the selection of optimal behavioral strategies in circumstances in which the costs and benefits of a particular choice or decision are not set in stone but are, in contrast, variable, game theory presents scenarios that are intrinsically dynamic. Unsurprisingly perhaps, given game theory’s inherent emphasis on the relationship between individual agency and the wider social group, it’s not uncommon to find rich incrustations of this semiprecious mathematical outcrop embedded within branches of natural selection—within models and theories of how various behaviors or life strategies might have evolved. Psychopathy, as the work of Andrew Colman has shown us, is no exception.

In order to take up where Colman left off and explore the evolutionary dynamics of the psychopathic personality further, let’s rig up a situation similar to the one Jim and Buzz found themselves in on the cliffs—only this time, make it a little more personal. Imagine that you and an accomplice are suspected of committing a major crime. The police picked you up and have taken you in for questioning.

Down at the station, the chief investigating officer interviews you both separately—but has insufficient evidence to press charges, so he resorts to the age-old tactic of playing one against the other. He puts his cards on the table and cuts you a deal. If you confess, he will use your confession as evidence against your partner and send him down for ten years. The charges against you, however, will be dropped and you will be allowed to walk away with no further action being taken. Too good to be true? It is. There’s a catch. The officer informs you that he will also be offering the same deal to your partner.

You are left alone to ponder the arrangement. But during that time you suddenly have an idea. What if both of us confess? you ask. What happens then? Do we both go to prison for ten years? Or are both of us free to leave? The officer smiles. If both of you confess, he replies, he will send each of you to prison—but on a reduced sentence of five years. And if neither confesses? Prison again, but this time for only a year. (See
figure 3.3
.)