Highlights from The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson Last read on June 10, 2023
Highlights from this book
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On the day I received Deborah’s e-mail inviting me to the Costa Coffee I was in the midst of quite a bad anxiety attack. I had been interviewing a man named Dave McKay. He was the charismatic leader of a small Australian religious group called The Jesus Christians and had recently suggested to his members that they each donate their spare kidney to a stranger. Dave and I had got on pretty well at first — he’d seemed engagingly eccentric and I was consequently gathering good material for my story, enjoyably nutty quotes from him, etc. But when I proposed that group pressure, emanating from Dave, was perhaps the reason why some of his more vulnerable members might be choosing to give up a kidney, he exploded. He sent me a message saying that to teach me a lesson he was putting the brakes on an imminent kidney donation. He would let the recipient die and her death would be on my conscience.
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James’s department was a crushingly unattractive concrete slab just off Russell Square, the University College London school of psychology. Fading photographs on the corridor walls from the 1960s and 1970s showed children strapped to frightening-looking machines, wires dangling from their heads. They smiled at the camera in uncomprehending excitement as if they were at the beach.
A stab had clearly once been made at de-uglifying these public spaces by painting a corridor a jaunty yellow. This was because, it turned out, babies come here to have their brains tested and someone thought the yellow might calm them. But I couldn’t see how. Such was the oppressive ugliness of this building it would have been like sticking a red nose on a cadaver and calling it Ronald McDonald.
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In a third office I saw a woman with a Little Miss Brainy book on her shelf. She seemed cheerful and breezy and good-looking.
“Who’s that?” I asked James.
“Essi Viding,” he said.
“What does she study?” I asked.
“Psychopaths,” said James.
I peered in at Essi. She spotted us, smiled and waved.
“That must be dangerous,” I said.
“I heard a story about her once,” said James. “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.”
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I had a Skype video conversation with Levi Shand, who, it was soon revealed, wasn’t an invention of Douglas Hofstadter’s but an actual student from Indiana University.
He was a handsome young man with black hair, doleful eyes, and a messy student bedroom. He had been easy to track down. I e-mailed him via his Facebook page. He got back to me straightaway (he’d been online at the time) and within seconds we were face-to-face. He told me it was all true. He really did find the books in a box under a railway viaduct and Douglas Hofstadter really did have a harem of French women living at his home.
“Tell me exactly what happened when you visited him,” I said.
“I was really nervous,” Levi said, “given his prominence on the cognitive science scene. A beautiful young French girl answered the door. She told me to wait. I looked through into the next room, and there were more beautiful French girls in there.”
“How many in total?” I asked.
“There were at least six of them,” said Levi. “They had brown hair, blond hair, all standing there between the kitchen and the dining room. All of them stunningly beautiful.”
“Is this true?” I asked him.
“Well, they might have been Belgian,” said Levi.
“What happened then?” I asked.
“Professor Hofstadter came out from the kitchen,” he said, “looking thin but healthy. Charismatic. He took the books, thanked me, and I left. And that’s it.”
“And every word of this is true?” I asked.
“Every word,” said Levi.
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I have a great deal of experience with people who are smart but unbalanced, people who think they have found the key to the universe, etc. It’s a sad thing, but there are many of them out there, and often they are extremely obsessive. This particular case was exceedingly transparent because it was so exceedingly obsessive. There was a missing piece of the puzzle, Douglas Hofstadter was saying, 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.
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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.”
The thought of this suddenly excited me hugely: 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.
I thought about my own overanxious brain, my own sort of madness. Was it a more powerful engine in my life than my rationality? I remembered those psychologists who said psychopaths made the world go around. They meant it: society was, they claimed, an expression of that particular sort of madness.
Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I’ve always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn’t? What if it is built on insanity?
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The DSM-IV-TR is a 943-page textbook published by the American Psychiatric Association that sells for $99. It sits on the shelves of psychiatry offices all over the world and lists every known mental disorder. There are currently 374 known mental disorders. I bought the book soon after I’d returned from my coffee with Deborah and leafed through it, searching for disorders that might compel the sufferer to try to achieve a position of power and influence over others. [...]
I closed the manual.
“I wonder if I’ve got any of the 374 mental disorders,” I thought. I opened the manual again. And I instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones.
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“I’m Tony,” he said. He sat down.
“So Brian says you faked your way in here,” I said.
“That’s exactly right,” said Tony.
He had the voice of a normal, nice, eager-to-help young man.
“I’d committed GBH [Grievous Bodily Harm],” he said. “After they arrested me, I sat in my cell and I thought, ‘I’m looking at five, seven years.’ So I asked the other prisoners what to do. They said, ‘Easy! Tell them you’re mad! They’ll put you in a county hospital. You’ll have Sky TV and a PlayStation. Nurses will bring you pizzas.’ But they didn’t send me to some cushy hospital. They sent me to bloody BROADMOOR.”
“How long ago was this?” I asked.
“Twelve years ago,” said Tony.
I involuntarily grinned.
Tony grinned back.
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After Tony read that report, he said, he stopped being well behaved. He started a kind of war of noncooperation instead. This involved staying in his room a lot. He really wasn’t fond of hanging around with rapists and pedophiles anyway. It was unsavory and also quite frightening. On an earlier occasion, for instance, he had gone into the Stockwell Strangler’s room and asked for a cup of lemonade.
“Of course! Take the bottle!” said the Stockwell Strangler.
“Honestly, Kenny, a cup’s fine,” said Tony.
“Take the bottle,” he said.
“Really, I just want a cup,” said Tony.
“TAKE THE BOTTLE!” hissed the Stockwell Strangler.
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There had been sustained negative media reports about the Church those past weeks and someone high up had clearly decided that I may be the journalist to turn the tide. What had happened was three former high-ranking staff members — Marty Rathbun, Mike Rinder, and Amy Scobee — had a few weeks earlier made some startling accusations against their leader, and L. Ron Hubbard’s successor, David Miscavige. They said he routinely punished his top executives for being unsatisfactory Ideas People by slapping them, punching them, “beating the living fuck” out of them, kicking them when they were on the floor, hitting them in the face, choking them until their faces went purple, and unexpectedly forcing them to play an extreme all-night version of musical chairs.
“The fact is,” said the Church’s chief spokesperson, Tommy Davis, who had flown from Los Angeles to see me, “yes, people were hit. Yes, people were kicked while they were on the floor and choked until their faces went purple, but the perpetrator wasn’t Mr. Miscavige. It was Marty Rathbun himself!”
(Marty Rathbun has, I later learned, admitted to committing those acts of violence, but says he was ordered to by David Miscavige. The Church denies that claim.)
Tommy said that I, unlike most journalists, was a freethinker, not in the pay of anti-Scientologist-vested interests and willing to entertain unexpected realities. He handed me a copy of the in-house Scientology magazine, Freedom, which referred to the three people who had made the accusations against David Miscavige as The Kingpin, The Conman, and The Adulteress. The Adulteress was in fact “a repeat adulteress” who refused to “curb her wanton sexual behavior,” perpetrated “five incidents of extramarital indiscretions,” and “was removed from the Church for ecclesiastical crimes.”
I looked up from the magazine.
“What about the extreme all-night version of musical chairs?” I asked.
There was a short silence.
“Yes, well, Mr. Miscavige did make us do that,” said Tommy. “But it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it was reported. Anyway. Let’s give you a tour so we can educate you on what Scientology is really about.”
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Tony,” his e-mail read, “did get here by faking mental illness because he thought it would be preferable to prison.” He was sure of it, he said, and so were many other psychiatrists who’d met Tony during the past few years. It was now the consensus. Tony’s delusions — the ones he’d presented when he had been on remand in jail — just, in retrospect, didn’t ring true. They were too lurid, too clichéd. Plus the minute he got admitted to Broadmoor and he looked around and saw what a hellhole he’d got himself into, the symptoms just vanished.
“Oh!” I thought, pleasantly surprised. “Good! That’s great!”
I had liked Tony when I met him but I’d found myself feeling warier of him those past days so it was nice to have his story verified by an expert. But then I read Professor Maden’s next line: “Most psychiatrists who have assessed him, and there have been a lot, have considered he is not mentally ill, but suffers from psychopathy.”
I looked at the e-mail. “Tony’s a psychopath?” I thought.
Faking mental illness to get out of a prison sentence, he explained, is exactly the kind of deceitful and manipulative act you’d expect of a psychopath. Tony faking his brain going wrong was a sign that his brain had gone wrong.
“There is no doubt about Tony’s diagnosis,” Professor Maden’s e-mail concluded.
Tony rang again. I didn’t answer.
“Classic psychopath!” said Essi Viding.
There was a silence.
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah!” she said. “How he turned up to meet you! It’s classic psychopath!”
After I received my e-mail from Professor Maden, I called Essi to see if she’d meet with me. I had just told her about the moment I’d first seen Tony, how he had strolled purposefully across the Broadmoor Wellness Centre in a pin-striped suit, like someone from The Apprentice, his arm outstretched.
“That’s classic psychopath?” I asked.
“I was visiting a psychopath at Broadmoor one time,” Essi said. “I’d read his dossier. He’d had a horrific history of raping women and killing them and biting their nipples off. It was just hideous, harrowing reading. Another psychologist said to me, ‘You’ll meet this guy and you’ll be totally charmed by him.’ I thought, ‘No way!’ And you know what? Totally! To the point that I found him a little bit fanciable. He was really good-looking, in peak physical condition, and had a very macho manner. It was raw sex appeal. I could completely understand why the women he had killed went with him.
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“Do you feel remorse?” he asked.
“My remorse,” Tony instantly replied, leaning forward, too, “is that I’ve not only screwed up my victim’s life but also my own life and my family’s lives and that’s my remorse. All the things that could have been done in my life. I feel bad about that every day.”
Tony looked at me.
“Did his remorse sound a bit rattled off?” I thought. I looked at Tony.
“Did they rehearse this? Was this a show for me? And, also, if he really felt remorse, wouldn’t he have said, ‘My remorse is that I’ve not only screwed up my life but also my victim’s life . . .’? Wouldn’t he have put his statement of remorse in that order? Or maybe it was in the right order. I don’t know. Should I want him released? Shouldn’t I? How do I know?” I crossed my mind that perhaps I should be campaigning for his release in print in a way that appeared crusading but actually wasn’t quite effective enough to work. Like planting barely noticeable seeds of doubt into the prose. Subtle.
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In Palm Springs, California, he heard about nude psychotherapy sessions occurring under the tutelage of a psychotherapist named Paul Bindrim.
The hotel the sessions took place in combined (as the advertising material back then stated) “abundant trees and wildlife” with the facilities of a “high class resort.” There, Bindrim would ask his fully clothed clients, who were strangers to one another and usually middle- to upper-class California freethinkers and movie stars, first to “eyeball” each other, and then hug, and wrestle, and then, in the dark and to the accompaniment of New Age music, remove their “tower of clothes.” They would sit naked in a circle, perform a “meditation-like hum,” and then dive head long into a twenty-four-hour nonstop nude psychotherapy session, an emotional and mystical roller coaster during which participants would scream and yell and soband confess their innermost fears and anxieties.
“Physical nakedness,” Bindrim would explain to visiting journalists, “facilitates emotional nakedness and therefore speeds up psychotherapy.” Bindrim’s most divisive idea was what he termed “crotch eyeballing.” He’d instruct a participant to sit in the center of the circle with legs in the air. Then he’d command the others to stare at that person’s genitals and anus, sometimes for hours, while he sporadically yelled, “This is where it’s at! This is where we are so damned negatively conditioned!”
Sometimes he’d direct participants to address their genitals directly. One journalist who attended a session—Life magazine’s Jane Howard — reported in her 1970 book Please Touch: A Guided Tour of the Human Potential Movement a conversation between Bindrim and a participant named Lorna.
“Tell Katy what things happen in your crotch,” Bindrim ordered her. Katy was Lorna’s vagina. “Say, ‘Katy, this is where I shit, fuck, piss and masturbate.’ ”
There was an embarrassed silence.
“I think Katy already knows that,” Lorna eventually replied.
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“The point about Kingsley Hall,” he said, “was that people could go there and work through their madness. My father believed that if you allowed madness to take its natural course without intervention — without lobotomies and drugs and straitjackets and all the awful things they were doing at the time in mental hospitals — it would burn itself out, like an LSD trip working its way through the system.”
“What kind of thing might Elliott Barker have seen on his visit to Kingsley Hall?” I asked.
“Some rooms were, you know, beguilingly draped in Indian silks,”
Adrian said. “Schizophrenics like Ian Spurling—who eventually became Freddie Mercury’s costume designer—would dance and sing and paint and recite poetry and rub shoulders with visiting freethinking celebrities like Timothy Leary and Sean Connery.” Adrian paused. “And then there were other, less beguiling rooms, like Mary Barnes’s shit room down in the basement.”
“Mary Barnes’s shit room?” I asked. “You mean like the worst room in the house?”
“I was seven when I first visited Kingsley Hall,” Adrian said. “My father said to me, ‘There’s a very special person down in the basement who wants to meet you.’ So I went down there and the first thing I said was, ‘What’s that smell of shit?’”
The smell of shit was—Adrian told me—coming from a chronic schizophrenic by the name of Mary Barnes. She represented a conflict at Kingsley Hall. Laing held madness in great esteem. He believed the insane possessed a special knowledge—only they understood the true madness that permeated society. But Mary Barnes, down in the basement, hated being mad. It was agony for her, and she desperately wanted to be normal.
Her needs won out. Laing and his fellow Kingsley Hall psychiatrists encouraged her to regress to the infantile state in the hope that she might grow up once again, but sane. The plan wasn’t going well. She was constantly naked, smearing herself and the walls in her own excreta, communicating only by squeals and refusing to eat unless someone fed her from a bottle.
“The smell of Mary Barnes’s shit was proving a real ideological problem,” Adrian said. “They used to have long discussions about it. Mary needed to be free to roll around in her own shit, but the smell of it would impinge upon other people’s freedom to smell fresh air. So they spent a lot of time trying to formulate a shit policy.”
“And what about your father?” I asked. “What was he like in the midst of all this?”
Adrian coughed. “Well,” he said, “the downside of having no barriers between doctors and patients was that everyone became a patient.”
There was a silence. “When I envisaged Kingsley Hall, I imagined everyone becoming a doctor,” I said. “I suppose I was feeling quite optimistic about humanity.”
“Nope,” Adrian said. “Everyone became a patient. Kingsley Hall was very wild. There was an unhealthy respect for madness there. The first thing my father did was lose himself completely, go crazy, because there was a part of him that was totally fucking mad. In his case, it was a drunken, wild madness.”
“That’s an incredibly depressing thought,” I said, “that if you’re in a room and at one end lies madness and at the other end lies sanity, it is human nature to veer towards the madness end.”
Adrian nodded. He said visitors like Elliott Barker would have been kept away from the darkest corners, like Mary Barnes’s shit room and his father’s drunken insanity, and instead steered toward the Indian silks and the delightful poetry evenings with Sean Connery in attendance.
“By the way,” I said, “did they ever manage to formulate a successful shit policy?”
“Yes,” Adrian said. “One of my dad’s colleagues said, ‘She wants to paint with her shit. Maybe we should give her paints.’ And it worked.”
Mary Barnes eventually became a celebrated and widely exhibited artist. Her paintings were greatly admired in the 1960s and 1970s for illustrating the mad, colorful, painful, exuberant, complicated inner life of a schizophrenic.
“And it got rid of the smell of shit,” Adrian said.
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Some of the psychopaths, Gary believed, went off and killed to teach the authorities a lesson—that’s what happens when you fire a man as inspiring as Gary Maier.
He sounded mournful, defensive, and utterly convinced of himself when he told me this, and I suddenly understood what a mutually passionate and sometimes dysfunctional bubble the relationship between therapist and client can be.
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In the mid-1960s, just as Elliott Barker was first conceiving his Total Encounter Capsule over in Ontario, Bob Hare was in Vancouver working as a prison psychologist. His was the maximum-security British Columbia Penitentiary. Nowadays it is a prisonthemed bar and diner where the servers wear striped prison uniforms and dishes are named after famous inmates, but back then it was a tough facility with a brutal reputation. Like Elliott, Bob believed that the psychopaths in his care buried their madness beneath a façade of normality. But Bob was less idealistic. He was interested in detection, not cure. He’d been tricked so many times by devious psychopaths. On his very first day working at the prison, for example, the warden had told him he needed a uniform and he should give his measurements to the inmate who was the prison tailor. So Bob did, and was glad to observe how assiduously the man took them. He spent a long time getting everything just right: the feet, the inside leg. Bob felt moved by the sight. Even in this awful prison, here was a man who took pride in his work.
But then, when the uniform arrived, Bob found that one trouser leg rode up to his calf while the other trailed along the ground. The jacket sleeves were equally askew. It couldn’t have been human error. The man was obviously trying to make him look like a clown.
At every turn, psychopaths were making his life unpleasant. One even cut the brake cables of his car while it was in the prison’s auto repair shop. Bob could have been killed. And so he started devising tests to determine if psychopaths could somehow be rooted out.
He put word around the prison that he was looking for psychopathic and non-psychopathic volunteers. There was no shortage. Prisoners were always looking to relieve the boredom. He strapped them up, one by one, to various EEG and sweat and blood-pressure measuring machines, and also to an electricity generator, and he explained to them that he was going to count backward from ten and when he reached one, they’d receive a very painful electric shock.
The difference in the responses stunned Bob. The non-psychopathic volunteers (theirs were crimes of passion, usually, or crimes born from terrible poverty or abuse) steeled themselves ruefully, as if a painful electric shock was just the penance they deserved, and as the countdown continued, the monitors revealed dramatic increases in their perspiration rates. They were, Bob noted and documented, scared.
“And what happened when you got to one?” I asked.
“I gave them an electric shock,” Bob said. He smiled. “We used really painful electric shocks,” he said.
“And the psychopaths?” I asked.
“They didn’t break a sweat,” said Bob. “Nothing.”
I looked at him.
“Sure,” he added, “at the exact moment the unpleasant thing occurred.”
“The electric shock?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Bob. “When the unpleasant thing occurred, the psychopaths gave a response...”
“Like a shriek?” I asked.
“Yes, I suppose like a shriek,” said Bob. But the tests seemed to indicate that the amygdala, the part of the brain that should have anticipated the unpleasantness and sent the requisite signals of fear over to the central nervous system, wasn’t functioning as it should.
It was an enormous breakthrough for Bob, his first clue that the brains of psychopaths were different from regular brains. But he was even more astonished when he repeated the test. This time the psychopaths knew exactly how much pain they’d be in when he reached one, and still: nothing. No sweat. Bob learned something that Elliott Barker wouldn’t for years: psychopaths were likely to re-offend.
“They had no memory of the pain of the electric shock even when the pain had occurred just moments before,” Bob said. “So what’s the point in threatening them with imprisonment if they break the terms of their parole? The threat has no meaning for them.”
He did another experiment, the Startle Reflex Test, in which psychopaths and non-psychopaths were invited to look at grotesque images, like crime-scene photographs of blown-apart faces, and then when they least expected it, Bob would let off an incredibly loud noise in their ear. The non-psychopaths would leap with astonishment. The psychopaths would remain comparatively serene.
Bob knew we tend to jump a lot higher when startled if we’re on the edge of our seats anyway. If we’re watching a scary movie and someone makes an unexpected noise, we leap in terror. But if we’re engrossed by something, a crossword puzzle, say, and someone startles us, our leap is less pronounced. From this Bob deduced that when psychopaths see grotesque images of blown-apart faces, they aren’t horrified. They’re absorbed.
It seemed from Bob’s experiments that psychopaths see blown-apart faces the same way we journalists see mysterious packages sent in the mail, or the same way we see Broadmoor patients who might or might not have faked madness—as fascinating puzzles to be solved.
Thrilled by his findings, Bob sent his readings to Science magazine. “The editor returned them unpublished,” he said. “He wrote me a letter. I’ll never forget it. He wrote: ‘Frankly we found some of the brain wave patterns depicted in your paper very odd. Those EEGs couldn’t have come from real people.’”
Bob paused and chuckled.
“Couldn’t have come from real people,” he repeated.
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We took our places. Bob flicked a switch. And onto the screen came a video of an empty room. It was a drab, municipal-looking room painted in a blue so dull it was barely a color. There was a plywood desk, a chair. The only splash of cheerfulness was a bright red button on the wall. Into the room walked a man. He was good-looking, neatly dressed. He had a bit of a twinkle in his eye. He moved his chair until it was underneath the red button. It made a slight scraping noise as he pulled it across the floor.
“Do you see what he just did?” said Bob. “He moved his chair to right below the panic button. He did it to intimidate my researcher, who’s standing behind the camera. Just a little display of control. That feeling of control is important to them.”
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Psychopaths, Bob said, will invariably argue that their victims had no right to complain. They had insurance. Or they learned a valuable life lesson getting beaten up like that. Or it was their own fault anyway. One time Bob interviewed a man who had impulsively killed another man over a bar tab.
“He only had himself to blame,” the killer told Bob. “Anybody could have seen I was in a rotten mood that night.”
Item 16: Failure to Accept Responsibility for Own Actions.
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And so passed the three days. And as they did, my skepticism drained away entirely and I became a Bob Hare devotee, bowled over by his discoveries. I think the other skeptics felt the same. He was very convincing. I was attaining a new power, like a secret weapon, the kind of power that heroes of TV dramas about brilliant criminal profilers display — the power to identify a psychopath merely by spotting certain turns of phrase, certain sentence constructions, certain ways of being. I felt like a different person, a hardliner, not confused or out of my depth as I had been when I’d been hanging around with Tony and the Scientologists.
Instead I was contemptuous of those naive people who allowed themselves to be taken in by slick-tongued psychopaths, contemptuous of, for instance, Norman Mailer.
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When I heard this story back in the late 1990s, I decided to approach Toto Constant for an interview. I wanted to learn how a man used to wielding such tremendous, malevolent power was adapting to life back home in the suburbs with his mother.
[...] That day in Queens was strange and memorable. Well-dressed men came and went. They sometimes huddled in corners and talked about things I couldn’t hear, although I strained to eavesdrop. Maybe they were planning a military coup or something.
I asked him how he was adjusting to everyday life. What did he do to pass the time? Did he have hobbies? He smiled slightly. “I’ll show you,” he said.
He led me from his mother’s house and down an alleyway, and then down another alleyway, and into a cluster of apartment blocks.
“Nearly there,” he said. “Don’t worry!”
We climbed the stairs. I looked apprehensively behind me. We reached a doorway. He opened it. I took in the room.
On every table, every surface, there were the kinds of tiny plastic figures that come free with McDonald’s and Burger King promotions — little Dumbos and Goofys and Muppets from Space and Rugrats and Batmen and Powerpuff Girls and Men in Black and Luke Skywalkers and Bart Simpsons and Fred Flintstones and Jackie Chans and Buzz Lightyears and on and on.
We looked at each other.
“What impresses me most about them is the artistry,” he said.
“Do you arrange them into battalions?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
There was a silence.
“Shall we go?” he murmured, I think regretting his decision to show me his army of plastic cartoon figurines.
A few minutes later we were back in his mother’s house, the two of us sitting at the kitchen table. His mother shuffled in and out. He was telling me that one day the people of Haiti would call him back to lead them —“They adore me in Haiti,” he said—and, yes, when that day came, he would do his duty for the people.
I asked him about Cité Soleil and Raboteau and the other charges against him.
“There’s not even smoke to those claims,” he said. “Not even smoke!”
“Is that it?” I thought. “Is that all you’re going to say on the subject?”
“The lies they tell about me break my heart,” he said.
And then I heard a strange noise coming from Constant. His body was shaking. The noise I could hear was something like sobbing. But it wasn’t quite sobbing. It was an approximation of sobbing. His face was screwed up like a face would be if it were crying, but it was weird, like bad acting.
A grown man in a dapper suit was pretending to cry in front of me. This would have been awkward enough if he was actually crying—I find displays of overt emotion not at all pleasant—but this was a man palpably simulating crying, which made the moment at once awkward, surreal, and quite disturbing.
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The first obviously strange thing about Al Dunlap’s grand Florida mansion and lavish, manicured lawns—he lives a ten-hour drive from Shubuta—was the unusually large number of ferocious sculptures there were of predatory animals. They were everywhere: stone lions and panthers with teeth bared, eagles soaring downward, hawks with fish in their talons, and on and on, across the grounds, around the lake, in the swimming pool/health club complex, in the many rooms. There were crystal lions and onyx lions and iron lions and iron panthers and paintings of lions and sculptures of human skulls.
Like Toto Constant’s army of plastic Burger King figurines but huge and vicious and expensive, I wrote in my reporter’s notepad. “Lions,” said Al Dunlap, showing me around. He was wearing a casual jacket and slacks and looked tanned, healthy. His teeth were very white. “Lions. Jaguars. Lions. Always predators. Predators. Predators. Predators. I have a great belief in and a great respect for predators. Everything I did I had to go make happen.”
Item 5: Conning/Manipulative, I wrote in my reporter’s notepad. His statements may reveal a belief that the world is made up of “predators and prey,” or that it would be foolish not to exploit weaknesses in others.
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And so the morning continued, with Al redefining a great many psychopathic traits as Leadership Positives. Impulsivity was “just another way of saying Quick Analysis. Some people spend a week weighing up the pros and cons. Me? I look at it for ten minutes. And if the pros outweigh the cons? Go!” Shallow Affect (an inability to feel a deep range of emotions) stops you from feeling “some nonsense emotions.” A lack of remorse frees you up to move forward and achieve more great things. What’s the point in drowning yourself in sorrow?
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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.
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“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?”
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Plenty of people dehumanize others—find ways to eradicate empathy and remorse from their day jobs—so they can perform their jobs better. That’s presumably why medical students tend to throw human cadavers at each other for a joke, and so on.
The thing that made Charlotte truly unusual was the brainwave she came up with one day. It had dawned on her from early on in her career that, yes, the shows’ best guests were the ones who were mad in certain ways. And one day she realized that there was a brilliantly straightforward way of seeking them out. Her method was far more rudimentary than the Bob Hare Checklist, but just as effective for her requirements. It was this:
“I’d ask them what medication they were on. They’d give me a list. Then I’d go to a medical website to see what [the medications] were for. And I’d assess if they were too mad to come onto the show or just mad enough.”
“Just mad enough?” I asked.
“Just mad enough,” said Charlotte.
“What constituted too mad?” I asked.
“Schizophrenia,” said Charlotte. “Schizophrenia was a no-no. So were psychotic episodes. If they’re on lithium for psychosis, we probably wouldn’t have had them on. We wouldn’t want them to come on and then go off and kill themselves.” Charlotte paused. “Although if the story was awesome—and by awesome I mean a far-reaching mega family argument that’s going to make a really charged show—they would have to be pretty mad to be stopped.”
“So what constituted ‘just mad enough’?” I asked.
“Prozac,” said Charlotte. “Prozac’s the perfect drug. They’re upset. I say, ‘Why are you upset?’ ‘I’m upset because my husband’s cheating on me, so I went to the doctor and he gave me Prozac.’ Perfect! I know she’s not THAT depressed, but she’s depressed enough to go to a doctor and so she’s probably angry and upset.”
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On the drive back to London from Devon it hit me: David was right. A lot of people are scared they’re going mad. Late at night, after a few drinks, they admit it. One or two of my friends swear they don’t mind. One woman I know says she secretly wills a nervous breakdown on so she can get admitted to a psychiatric hospital, away from the tensions of modern life, where she’ll be able to have long lie-ins and be looked after by nurses.
But most of my friends do mind, they say. It scares them. They just want to be normal. I’m one of them, forever unpleasurably convinced my wife is dead because I can’t reach her on the phone, letting out involuntary yelps on claustrophobic Ryanair flights, becoming debilitatingly anxious that psychopaths might want to kill me. And we spend our evenings watching Wife Swap and Come Dine with Me and Supernanny and the early rounds of X Factor and Big Brother. TV is just troubled people being booed these days.
There’s a load of films being made where filmmakers go to a council estate and 90 percent of the people there are functional—getting their kids ready for school, paying their taxes, working. And 10 percent are dysfunctional—and they go, “That’s what we’re going to make a film about.” —ACTOR EDDIE MARSAN, INTERVIEWED BY JONATHAN ROMNEY IN The Independent, MAY 2, 2010
Practically every prime-time program is populated by people who are just the right sort of mad, and I now knew what the formula was. The right sort of mad are people who are a bit madder than we fear we’re becoming, and in a recognizable way. We might be anxious but we aren’t as anxious as they are. We might be paranoid but we aren’t as paranoid as they are. We are entertained by them, and comforted that we’re not as mad as they are.
David Shayler’s tragedy is that his madness has spiraled into something too outlandish, too out-of-the-ball-park, and consequently useless. We don’t want obvious exploitation. We want smoke-and-mirrors exploitation.
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Lizzie’s “dark secret”—as she finally informed Colin in Hyde Park, a large team of undercover officers monitoring their every move—was that when she was a teenager, she’d gotten involved with some “special people”—satanic people—and when she was with them, “a baby had had its throat cut. And then the baby’s blood was put into a cup, and everybody had a drink, and it was the most electrifying atmosphere.” After they drank the baby’s blood, they killed its mother: “She was laid out naked and these knives were brought out and this man handed me one of the knives and he asked me to cut the woman’s throat, and I did, and then there was this big orgy, and I was with this man, well, this man was the best ever.”
Lizzie looked at Colin and said she could truly love only a man who had done a similar thing. Colin replied, “I think you’re aiming a bit high.
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David Rosenhan was a psychologist from Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania, and Princeton. Like Spitzer, he’d grown tired of the pseudoscientific, ivory-tower world of the psychoanalyst. He wanted to demonstrate that they were as useless as they were idolized, and so he devised an experiment. He co-opted seven friends, none of whom had ever had any psychiatric problems. They gave themselves pseudonyms and fake occupations and then, all at once, they traveled across America, each to a different mental hospital. As Rosenhan later wrote: They were located in five different states on the East and West coasts. Some were old and shabby, some were quite new. Some had good staff-patient ratios, others were quite understaffed. Only one was a strict private hospital. All of the others were supported by state or federal funds or, in one instance, by university funds.
At an agreed time, each of them told the duty psychiatrist that they were hearing a voice in their head that said the words “empty,” “hollow,” and “thud.” That was the only lie they would be allowed to tell. Otherwise they had to behave completely normally.
All eight were immediately diagnosed as insane and admitted into the hospitals. Seven were told they had schizophrenia; one, manic depression. Rosenhan had expected the experiment would last a couple of days. That’s what he’d told his family: that they shouldn’t worry and he’d see them in a couple of days. The hospital didn’t let him out for two months.
In fact, they refused to let any of the eight out, for an average of nineteen days each, even though they all acted completely normally from the moment they were admitted. When staff asked them how they were feeling, they said they were feeling fine. They were all given powerful antipsychotic drugs.
Each was told that he would have to get out by his own devices, essentially by convincing the staff that he was sane. Simply telling the staff they were sane wasn’t going to cut it. Once labeled schizophrenic the pseudopatient was stuck with that label.
There was only one way out. They had to agree with the psychiatrists that they were insane and then pretend to get better. When Rosenhan reported the experiment, there was pandemonium. He was accused of trickery. He and his friends had faked mental illness! You can’t blame a psychiatrist for misdiagnosing someone who presented himself with fake symptoms! One mental hospital challenged Rosenhan to send some more fakes, guaranteeing they’d spot them this time. Rosenhan agreed, and after a month, the hospital proudly announced they had discovered forty-one fakes. Rosenhan then revealed he’d sent no one to the hospital.
-
What nobody knew was that Spitzer had a plan—to remove, as much as he could, human judgment from psychiatry. For the next six years, from 1974 to 1980, he held a series of DSM-III editorial meetings inside a small conference room at Columbia University. They were, by all accounts, chaos. As The New Yorker’s Alix Spiegel later reported, the psychiatrists Spitzer invited would yell over each other. The person with the loudest voice tended to get taken the most seriously. Nobody took minutes.
“Of course we didn’t take minutes,” Spitzer told me. “We barely had a typewriter.” Someone would yell out the name of a potential new mental disorder and a checklist of its overt characteristics, there’d be a cacophony of voices in assent or dissent, and if Spitzer agreed, which he almost always did, he’d hammer it out then and there on an old typewriter, and there it would be, sealed in stone.
It seemed a foolproof plan. He would eradicate from psychiatry all that crass sleuthing around the unconscious. There’d be no more silly polemicizing. Human judgment hadn’t helped his mother. Instead it would be like science. Any psychiatrist could pick up the manual they were creating—DSM-III—and if the patient’s overt symptoms tallied with the checklist, they’d get the diagnosis.
And that’s how practically every disorder you’ve ever heard of or have been diagnosed with came to be invented, inside that chaotic conference room, under the auspices of Robert Spitzer, who was taking his inspiration from checklist pioneers like Bob Hare.
“Give me some examples,” I asked him.
“Oh . . .” He waved his arm in the air to say there were just so many. “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Borderline Personality Disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder”. Then there was Autism, Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia, Panic Disorder... every one a brand-new disorder with its own checklist of symptoms.
-
When I asked Robert Spitzer about the possibility that he’d inadvertently created a world in which some ordinary behaviors were being labeled mental disorders, he fell silent. I waited for him to answer. But the silence lasted three minutes. Finally he said, “I don’t know.”
“Do you ever think about it?” I asked him.
“I guess the answer is I don’t really,” he said. “Maybe I should. But I don’t like the idea of speculating how many of the DSM-III categories are describing normal behavior.”
“Why don’t you like speculating on that?” I asked.
“Because then I’d be speculating on how much of it is a mistake,” he said.
There was another long silence.
“Some of it may be,” he said.
-
“Oh, by the way,” said Tony on the phone to me now. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. A favor.” “Oh yes?” I said. “When you write about me in your book,” he said, “please name me. My real name. None of that stupid ‘Tony’ business. My real name.”
-
It was time. We entered the tribunal room. The hearing lasted all of five minutes, one of which involved the magistrates telling me that if I reported the details of what happened inside the room—who said what—I would be imprisoned. So I won’t. But the upshot—Tony was to be free. He looked as if he’d been hit by a bus. Back out in the corridor his barrister, and Brian, and some independent psychiatrists he’d co-opted to his side, surrounded him, congratulating him. The process would take three months—either to find him a bed for a transitional period in a medium-secure unit, or to get him straight out onto the street—but there was no doubt. He smiled, hobbled over to me, and handed me a sheaf of papers.
They were independent reports, written for the tribunal by various psychiatrists who’d been invited to assess him. They told me things I didn’t know about Tony, about how his mother had been an alcoholic and used to regularly beat him up and kick him out of the house, how he’d be homeless for a few days at a time and then his mother would let him back in, how most of her boyfriends were drug addicts and criminals, how he was expelled from school for threatening his dinner lady with a knife, how he was sent to boarding and special schools but ran away because he was homesick and missed his mother.
I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.
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“Ever since I went on a Bob Hare course, I’ve believed that psychopaths are monsters,” I said. “They’re just psychopaths, it’s what defines them, it’s what they are.” I paused. “But isn’t Tony kind of a semi-psychopath? A gray area? Doesn’t his story prove that people in the middle shouldn’t necessarily be defined by their maddest edges?”
“I think that’s right,” he replied. “Personally I don’t like the way Bob Hare talks about psychopaths almost as if they are a different species.”
-
when I’d doorstepped him back in Gothenburg, I had dismissed him as just eccentric and obsessive. I had reduced him in that manner. But now I could see that it was his eccentricities and his obsessions that had led him to produce and distribute Being or Nothingness in the most intriguing ways. There is no evidence that we’ve been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.
He e-mailed me back: “I can get a little obsessive—that I must admit...”
And then, as he’d promised he would, he shut off all e-mail contact.