The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a gift from my Latvian friend Zanda for my 26th birthday. When I got it I thought it was going to be about what makes people crazy or sets crazy people apart, and I do believe Mr. Ronson set out to write this book from a kind of similar mental space. Instead, I discovered, together with him, how psychopathy is much different from what is typically understood as mental illness by most people.
A psychopath doesn’t do “crazy” things—they are very calculating. A psychopath doesn’t suffer from schizophrenia, paranoia or psychosis–the actual illnesses we have connected with the picture of madness; in fact, a psychopath could easily pass off as a completely normal, sociable, even extremely attractive person, with one key difference: psychopaths are unable to feel for other people. It’s impossible for them to experience empathy or sympathy. It’s literally impossible. According to Robert Hare, the creator of the Hare Psychopath Checklist, which lent its name to the title of this book and which has been used to spot psychopathy in people, the disorder is actually biological: a certain kind of neural activity in the amygdala of normal people connected to horror, revulsion and other intense emotional responses just do not fire up in psychopaths.
Many murders or serial killers in history have been psychopaths, but to them killing was nothing “wrong”. It was an act of curiosity or of scratching a certain itch. Furthermore, many higher-ups in important corporations holding key positions are actually psychopaths, or at least the profession with the largest percentage of psychopaths within its ranks is that of the CEO. Companies that are shaping the present and future of humanity are run by people who cannot feel remorse or responsibility and only think of their own selfish needs.
Doesn’t that go a long way towards explaining why things are the way they are in the world right now? I mean, I have been wondering for a long time just how hugely influential people manage to live with themselves and their (probably negative) actions. How they can have so much power and influence and just never use it in a way that makes any kind of ethical sense. I was imagining they must look at themselves in the mirror and every once in a while involuntarily throw up a little.
Turns out it is far more likely they go to bed each night feeling proud of themselves and how they spent another day proving the world who’s boss: predators preying on the lesser people who got what they had coming for them.
But if it’s not their fault, if they do end up becoming CEOs because that professional field vastly rewards this kind of remorseless behaviour, what are we supposed to do with that information?
What if you were born without the capacity to connect with other people, to understand why people cry or feel hurt? What if everything boiled down to “predators and prey”, as it does for so many psychopaths? What should the world do with you then? Would it be justified to lock you up and throw away the key?
Bonus: the Psychopath Test reveals the shocking truth that illnesses such as ADHD, bipolar disorder and Asperger’s or autism might not have had as much thought put into their definitions as we might like to think. By DSM V, published in 2013, you would be quite hard-pressed not to find something wrong with you and your mind, even if that were you being scared of spiders, preferring one parent over the other (Parental Alienation Syndrome), spending too much time on the net (Internet Addiction Disorder) and the list goes on.
I don’t want to make assumptions, since I’m not in any way a specialist, but I’m guessing that big pharma wanting to sell drugs for plausible-sounding illnesses, as well as therapists aspiring to categorize everybody’s quirks into a system of diagnosable mental conditions, are playing a much more important role in creating unhealthy, dependent people than the will of the medical industry is oriented towards making everybody’s lives better—be it that of sick, healthy people, or anywhere on or around the murky borders inbetween.