Psychopaths and the World Order

You may listen to the audio version of this essay here.

A psychopath is someone who for reasons of different brain chemistry (altered processing of emotional stimuli at the level of the cerebral cortex) is incapable of experiencing empathy. Pretty simple, but enough to create a reptilian inter-species predator and more consequential than you could ever hope to imagine.

Psychopaths--creatures without conscience--represent around one percent of the population but make their smallish presence heard: they commit 50% of serious crimes. Surely these inmates are simply the ones who don't have the right sociopolitical leverage and are therefore of the prison classes. Donning the white collar offers a security blanket for the more ambitious psychopath. Take, perhaps, your country's leader, or that financial company you trusted that gambled with your money and lost it. Occasionally you unknowingly read about a psychopath who killed someone for some arbitrary reason that doesn't quite make sense; more often you read about larger institutions whose actions have caused much more harm and are safely tamped down by lawyers or uninterested media. When we open our eyes to this new dimension, however, we see something very clear. Psychopaths alter our societies and have scarred history. They are no small addition to the universe.

Academics offers little help in understanding the psychopath's World Order. The minutia-laden and therefore unscholarly world of academia has for decades focused on the smallest of petri dishes, insisting on performing endless intricate studies of how psychopathic brains work and refusing to apply this knowledge to the world. This is the opposite of intellectualism. Academic myopia is itself a product of a psychopathic world.

How deep does the cover-up go? Just as the term psychopath has been misapplied by mass media, so too is the inter-species predator in front of you completely misunderstood. The term "psycho" has come to mean "crazy." And yet the term should be exclusively reserved for those who are psychotic: in other words those who have difficulty determining what is real and what is not. Think schizophrenics and other fairly harmless and tragic people. Psychopaths are not psychotic: they see the world more clearly than you and more clearly than I do. Since they don't have the same emotions that you or I have, they can view human interactions dispassionately and apply the appropriate leverage to take advantage of you. And believe me, this is their entire motivation.

You walk across town, taking care not to bump into someone because, well, you wouldn't want someone else to do that to you. You have empathy. Your brain has the ability to put itself in someone else's shoes, imagine the pain they might feel, and your prick of conscience does the rest. Call it the Golden Rule or the non-aggression principle or whatever ethical code glues together a society. The psychopath does not experience any of this. He walks down the street as if he were the only person on earth: because he is. This deep narcissism if not solipsism means he cannot possibly understand what you are feeling. It's not that he doesn't care: it is not within him to care. He does recognize that other entities exist, but for him they are illusions, secretions in his brain: objects to amuse him should he choose. The psychopathic serial killer who falls asleep after helping himself to the fridge in the home of the person he murdered does not have the faintest whiff of anxiety about his situation. His victims were a moment of pleasure: he's already forgotten about them by the time he cracks open his beer. The eternal present looms large for the psychopath. He is temporarily immortal. His body has removed physiologically from his experience all aspects of anxiety that cripple everyone else: a natural blessing and a curse for a creature unable to conceive of the past or the future.

The psychopath lives for something else. He has no bonds, he has no love, no greater cause. When you perceive these things in him it is because you are in the process of being processed, you are caught in mid-spell. The psychopath has no ability for human connection. He is as alien to you as he is to himself. As one researcher has put it: "The only emotions that sociopaths seem to feel genuinely are the so-called 'primitive' affective reactions that result from immediate physical pain and pleasure, or from short-term frustrations and successes." You have one major disadvantage. While the psychopath knows what you are, you don't easily know what he is. Psychopaths inhabit a body that you recognize to be human. Call it an evolutionary predatory advantage. "The problem is," psychopath expert Robert Hare says, "that as a species we continue to evaluate people as they appear to us." (I am Fishhead) Perhaps we are the ones witnessing illusions.

Evolution? We might discuss from whence psychopaths arise. In his book Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of Psychopaths Among Us Robert Hare summarizes a scientific argument brewing on the origins of this phenomenon:

The relatively new discipline of sociobiology argues that psychopathy is not so much a psychiatric disorder as an expression of a particular genetically based reproductive strategy. Simply, sociobiologists assert that one of our main roles in life is to reproduce, thereby passing on our genes to the next generation. We can do so in a number of ways. One reproductive "strategy" is to have only a few children and to nurture them carefully, thus ensuring that they have a good chance of survival. A different strategy is to have so many children that some are bound to survive, even if they are neglected or abandoned. Psychopaths supposedly adhere to an extreme version of the latter strategy: They reproduce as often as possible and waste little energy in worrying about the welfare of their offspring. In this way, they propagate their genes with little or no personal investment.

Robert Hare's successor adds a few words: "I would come to realize during my research that psychopaths' lack of connection with their children is one of the most salient features of the condition" (The Psychopath Whisperer).

I will add to Hare that neglected childhood is the sometimes-asserted trigger of psychopathy. Psychopaths live in a shadow realm, passing on their psychopathy like the parasitic Cuckoo bird. Martha Stout suggests Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu may have used the Romanian orphan phenomenon to export psychopaths to other countries in a mass adoption effort. Who says vampires are the stuff of legend?

For the religiously-inclined, here is my best offering: psychopaths are human-like entities born without a soul who are here to test you in some way, or simply as a byproducts of the fall of Eden like any disease or venomous creature whose purpose you cannot quite justify in any other way. How long have you wracked your brain about why God created mosquitoes in his ordered world?

Interesting speculation, but we're better off focusing on the eternal present.

Like sizing up an enemy in a challenging role-playing game, the stats of the psychopath are more than most of us can manage. The lack of conscience gives a +5 bonus to attack power. Bomb civilians? Without a second thought. And oh how courageous he is. Fire 500 employees to save X percent of expenses? Pay for studies that hide the toxic substances in food products? Done and done. Lie without shame to your face as you sign up for the Ponzi scheme. His only concern is whether the pen he's giving you could have been cheaper to save a few cents.

(Let's continue).

Print money that will more affect future generations than the present. The very embodiment of psychopathic thinking. Mass surveillance to enhance power and diminish freedom? The psychopath doesn't even know what freedom is: freedom as with nearly any concept we live with requires one's ability to conceive of others. Create a death cult? No problem. Continue sex after HIV contraction. Nothing I've said here is even fiction. One psychopath remarks, "You know, sometimes I wonder, Why have a conscience? It just puts you on the losing team." (The Sociopath Next Door)

As a side note: not everyone who does these things is psychopathic. The results may be the same, but it's still worth asking: are psychopaths evil? Beware murky waters. I don't want to minimize evil. When people act against their conscience to harm others, knowing that they are harming them: that is evil. The psychopath doesn't have a conscience: he doesn't understand harming others because he doesn't understand others. A crocodile is not evil for eating a zebra.

That doesn't mean people have sympathy for crocodiles. A Nigerian tribe calls psychopaths arana-kan, those "uncooperative and full of malice." The Inuits prefer the word kunlangeta for when "the mind knows what to do but he does not do it" (The Psychopath Whisperer). The Inuits take such people on a fishing expedition at night. Unfortunately for the kunlangeta, the icy cliffs are very slick.

Back to role-playing. The lying ability of psychopaths boost their speech skill by +3. Just as Nietzsche would write in his famous "On Truth and Lying in the Nonmoral Sense," the psychopath approaches lying purely as a technique, of which he has many inherent advantages. Due to his aberrant brain structure, his "thoughts and ideas are organized into rather small mental packages and readily moved around" (Without Conscience). In other words, he is designed to be the ultimate lying machine. Having no shame whatsoever, the words come quickly and smoothly. He studies the face of the victim, witnessing emotions that he does not have, but has come to comprehend in others as various signs of weakness and thus potential exploitation. What's this? A flirtatious eye twitch? His predatory instincts click into gear. "He smells insecurity and loneliness the way a pig smells truffles." "I liken sociopathic charm," Martha Stout notes, "to the animal charisma of other mammals who are predators."

Calmness under pressure grants additional advantage. There is no consequences for the psychopath, no future: only the eternal present. It says the things most likely to gain it the advantage in any split second. It displays supreme confidence: a feature valued in leaders and in men. The "volume reductions in the anterior cingulate, parahippocampal gyrus and superior frontal gyrus" contribute to a vastly different episodic memory in psychopaths. The psychopath puts itself as the hero or victim in the story it creates spur-of-the-moment with supreme storytelling ability. Capable of amazing deeds and prone to immense betrayal. Sympathy is garnered, victimhood enhanced: the confidence propels it along its mission for domination.

Is the psychopath a product of our modern self-centered world? Debatable. Either way, predecessors saw them too. Shakespeare, in tune with all of human experience, declares his villain Iago a "motiveless malignity." The "Scorpion and the Frog," a tale in the mind of Aesop and his fables, sees a scorpion hitch a ride on a frog across a body of water only to see the scorpion kill the frog and drown them both. "Why?" the frog asks as he dies. "Because I'm a scorpion."

Curable? Yes, that's what people want. They refuse to believe the human face in front of them does not house a human. The original deception. Unfortunately there's no known cure. Is psychopathy a disease? Is it a "mental illness"? The cogent psychopath would beg to differ. Under interview they argue that humans, bogged down in messy emotions that may even hinder the human mind through crippling depression, are the truly mentally afflicted. In defense, we reach for our bag of arguments: but family, and love and empathy: the words sound increasingly less compelling when spelled out in their logical detail. Simple as it may be, the psychopath looks on in amazement: it knows what it is more than you.

For a cure to be considered, the afflicted must surely desire that result. And yet, psychopaths do not. They enjoy confusing and manipulating their therapists and are often successful in doing so. He "thinks the rest of us are naive and stupid for not playing it his way" Martha Stout says of one interviewee (The Sociopath Next Door). Psychopaths are fully comfortable in who they are. The "violent recidivism rate of psychopaths is about triple that of other offenders.” Psychopaths make up 20 percent of inmates (Without Conscience). Impulse, remorselessness, and no concept of moral self that one might "reform"--these do not a cured psychopath make. As for hope of solution, Robert Hare admits that in the end he "can find no convincing evidence that psychopathy is the direct results of early social or environmental factors" (Without Conscience).

Now does it begin to make sense? The conquering, the bloodshed, the bombs, twenty-five percent of Cambodians erased on the killing fields? Deception, manipulation, lock-down, absolute power corrupting absolutely. "Surely they mean well - surely they have our interests at heart in some way.”

Let's talk to our resident psychopath, Grant, about what he thinks of us, as interviewed by Kent Kiehl:

When I asked if he had done anything for which he hadn't been caught, Grant laughed with what seemed like childish mischief, and said, 'Lots ... arson, robberies, breaking and entering, car theft, check and credit card fraud, and of course there are a few bodies around.’ He's shot a few strangers, he said, for getting in his face, and drowned at least one girlfriend in a pool. ... I eventually got Grant to concede that he had ten murder victims. Oddly, he's never counted them up; in fact, he hardly ever thought about them (The Psychopath Whisperer).

Know our enemy, we have not.