The Psychopath Inside (19 page)

I've written part of this book at my friend Larry's cabin in the San Bernardino Mountains, and part at Fabio's father's house in a medieval town overlooking Lago d'Orta in Italy. Living a monastic, sedentary lifestyle with little coffee or alcohol, I don't wheeze or get acid reflux as much anymore, and I've stopped most of the heroic, mind-blowing snoring, at least temporarily. I'm now sleeping five hours a night instead of four, but to me that is not such a good thing. I get plenty done in my extra hours of wakefulness. That has helped my career, helped me win at everything except, of course, the fight against a fifty-inch waistline. But there are some undeniably negative things that are also occurring. I rarely got sick after I was a toddler. Now I'm getting lumps and rashes and aches and pains I never had before. This may be due to the toxins accrued in fat from years of self-abuse of all types, now being released into my tissues, and believe me, it isn't fun or pretty.

Which gets me back to the main challenge I face. At what point do I stop being “good”? I've always liked myself and still do, and have absolutely enjoyed my whole life to this point, and things seem to be getting better as the decades go by. All the maladies and near-maladies I've had over the years just seem to have made me tougher and happier. I want to keep it that way, and the moment I start to become unhappy in order to make anyone else
happy is the moment I put on the brakes. I don't want to have to give up all those inappropriate and dangerous activities with inappropriate people, even those that happen to put others close to me in life-threatening, career-ending harm's way. I do love that so, and that will be my bright line in the sand.

As far as “will” is concerned, I want someone to say with a straight face that Oprah, with her constant losing battles against obesity, lacks will. That woman has more will than 99.9 percent of people. But it is not the “will” that society, her friends, her family want. They want her to be wonderful and to do great works, and be famous,
and
be thin. Well, folks, unless she gives up everything else and stays focused solely on her weight for the rest of her life, she is going to keep coming back home. All behaviors can be modified in the face of a genetic and epigenetic makeup that says otherwise. But to stay changed in the face of those genetic imperatives usually means you have to give up nearly everything else you hold most dear. Our genes and how their effects are modified by stressful experiences early in life don't necessarily predict categorically who we are and what our deep character is about, but they create constant pressures to be and act a certain way.

Psychopathic tendencies are particularly hard to fight, and attempted cures may make only small differences. Drugs that influence the monoamine neurotransmitter systems can partially reduce impulsivity and aggression, and early interventions involving diet and meditation can decrease behavioral problems, but the core neuropsychological deficits leading to lack of empathy and remorse remain. There are no magic bullets.

I'll continue to ignore the most basic rules of proper social conduct, and anything a government or church control freak decides is good for us. Social structures like religion allow you to wash yourselves of your sociopathic behaviors, atone, and be absolved and start over fresh and pure. I used to call my bad behaviors sins. Now I'm just calling them psychopathic behaviors, something I won't get rid of or feel guilty about ever again.

When I see a sign directing me to park somewhere proper and legal, whether for a restaurant or sports event, I will continue to ignore the rules, knowing that the sign is there to serve whoever put up the sign, and not the rest of us. I'll find a place on the grass or next to a real space close to the door, partly because I'm lazy and partly because I like getting away with it. While these scofflaw behaviors are not really psychopathic in any serious sense, they do signify I can be a real jerk, or, as less polite people may call me, an asshole.

The diagnosis of psychopathy is culturally dependent to some degree. Rules are usually created for someone else's comfort and peace of mind. And yes, I do know that I am missing a few screws when it comes to knowing right from wrong in social matters. I don't think I've ever understood morality anyway. As an obsessed child and hyper-religious young teen I was feeding a need for order. I didn't get morality then, and may not get it now, fifty years later. But what the hell, I'll give it a try just out of curiosity if nothing else.

I guess there are several ways I can go from here. Perhaps a place to start is to try to treat the people closest to me better, to
show up at the weddings and funerals and birthday parties even if I have to feign enthusiasm. Maybe enough practice doing the good and right things will recondition my taste for fun and pleasure, and I suspect that might take a year or three to get used to. I can report to you now that when I do something for Diane or with her that I wouldn't have before, or go the little extra step to help her or notice her when I wouldn't before, she seems to like it, and honestly, that is a buzz for me now.

Any behavioral improvements on my part, however, have to start happening sooner rather than later. I have too many friends who have become “good,” but they know and I know without saying it that they simply can't get it up anymore, “it,” of course, referring to that little creature in our limbic system that whispers for us to beat the boredom and take that little peek outside the pigsty that might tempt us now and then. While some people may be able to change some of their behaviors through concerted attempts, those behaviors that are most deeply driven from the genetic machinery, whether they be addictive behavior or a lack of empathy, are something else. I can change my behaviors like others can, but, like others, the main destructive habits always return a year or ten later. Even psychopathic serial killers can go for years without succumbing to the drive to murder, but at some point the urge overpowers all other priorities. My urges are much less destructive than that, fortunately, and if I make it my priority above all other concerns, they may be tamed.

I need to see my innocent teasing and practical jokes for the hurt that they can cause. Even though unintentionally
bothersome, these behaviors fringe on sadism, the more I look at them and their effects on the happiness of others.

Recently my mother told me, “Jim, I know you better than anyone, and deep down there somewhere is a sensitive, good guy.” That may be the good guy she knew from the early years, before my prefrontal cortex switched to a full cognitive mode, leaving emotional empathy and even some morality in the dust. I remember that little boy and young teenager who collected all the sacks of Halloween candy to drop them off at midnight at the doorsteps of charities, but that little boy is someone or somewhere else now.

I sometimes have to remind myself about the things I've been doing since that little boy grew up that were good and perhaps useful to others. I never lost my general connection to strangers. I continue to try to help people in trouble who contact me out of the blue. And I'll continue not to ask for money or thanks or anything in return, perhaps as a tip of the hat to my father and uncle and father-in-law, who gave so generously to strangers, and anonymously. Although I do not believe in real altruism—everything we do is at least a little bit selfish—their behavior has approached that ideal.

I've tried to remember some of the consistent behaviors that I should probably keep. I realize that my idea of ethics and morality is probably different from that of most people. To me ethics are a set of rules governing behavior that are specific to a group or a society. The prefrontal cortex learns them and then teaches them to the ventromedial and orbital cortex. But morality is inherent. Kids don't need to be taught murder is wrong. My morals
aren't so good, but I do have some sense of ethics. For example, one time in grad school, long after I'd shed my persona as Catholic Boy of the Year, I saw the questions for an upcoming final exam on a secretary's desk and refused to take the test, reporting that I would have an unfair advantage since I knew the questions. Okay, I stole some cars with friends when I was younger, but we didn't want to hurt people, and we returned the cars, so really it was just borrowing. Occasionally I got involved in frisky adolescent behaviors like breaking into houses with friends and drinking the booze we found there. But that was lightweight childhood stuff and I knew it wasn't right.

Another ethical quandary came up in the early 1990s, when Diane asked, given our political beliefs against a large federal government and its grants and aids programs, whether I could accept federally funded grants. Private grants, even state grants, would be fine, but because I oppose federal taxation to support education and research, I couldn't in good conscience continue to be funded in this way. We knew this would affect some significant percentage of our income up to about 35 percent, our level of pension funding, and my promotions. But there it was, and it had to be done. To that point, I had enjoyed fifteen years of federal grant funds, but I stopped taking them. I've softened on the issue because categorically refusing federal money would have inhibited good work in my lab, which seemed silly. I said I'll take money but not be primary investigator on grants. To some that's a cop-out, but I want to be practical. We're always dealing with contradiction and struggling to find a sensible, sane way to deal with problems.

So I believe I do have some personal sense of ethics and morality, regardless of how others might see it.

•   •   •

There is still a significant amount of unfinished business in my life and, more important, in my relationships. This point was driven home as I added the final touches to this book in the spring of 2013. I wanted to include some recent genetic findings on a potential link between mood, obesity, sleep, panic, anxiety, and psychopathy. I e-mailed Diane a rough draft of this material, and she responded later that night, “I don't know how you can say you haven't been able to figure out why the swings in weight occur. They occur because you don't move—and don't sleep . . . You don't want to do it and that's fine, actually. You don't need to make excuses. This is how you choose to live, period. I think you would be more honest with yourself (and everyone else) if you simply say, ‘I hate any kind of physical exercise and I'd prefer obesity to exercise.'”

Her response irked me. I was disappointed that after everything I'd taught her about genetics, physiology, and medicine she wouldn't accept the biological explanations for my list of lousy behaviors. Then I stepped back and realized that my ire was indicative of something still way off in me. She was trying to be perfectly candid and helpful and was crying out for me to just snap out of my perceptual blindness.

From my earliest years, when I suffered from severe asthma, I have associated exercise with an inability to breathe. But after I started taking medication for the asthma as a young adult, I could control the onset, and the fear of the asthma attacks, just as I had
learned to control my panic attacks in my late twenties and thirties. So I didn't really have an excuse not to exercise, and Diane was right. I'm not a kid anymore, but I continue to act like one. Nonetheless, I still absolutely hate to exercise. But when this book is done, I will try to swim several times a week and walk again. This is the least I can do for her, and me, and our grandchildren.

D
o we need psychopaths? This may be a leading question. Do we need saints, or rock stars, or people who do no evil but do no good, either? Such questions can quickly turn into a goofy parlor game, but there may be meaning in addressing them. Scientists tend not to phrase things in such a way, nor do they ask if and why evolution creates and sculpts species. The commonsense approach may be to wonder why evolution was created, or why species were created, but this is upside-down thinking or, more directly, magical thinking, religious thinking, which may be useful sometimes, but not for scientists. Instead of looking for inherent purposes to behaviors in a universal master plan, scientists tend to say: What conditions were present that allowed for certain realities to come about, certain genes associated with certain traits to survive and thrive? Put more succinctly, what evolutionary survival advantage do such traits, and the genes that underlie them, offer?

Psychopaths are present in all human societies. The pancultural reality of psychopathy, at a rate of about 2 percent, suggests that psychopathy, or at least the traits and associated alleles found
in psychopaths, is somehow “desirable” in humanity. Otherwise evolution should have wiped them out or at least diminished their numbers ages ago. You might think that because brain damage and childhood abuse also contribute (according to my Three-Legged Stool theory), psychopathy is just an unfortunate outcome of these negative environmental effects. But those effects have always been there throughout evolution—parents have always beat or abandoned their kids—and the genes contributing to psychopathy have persisted given those real-world conditions, so maybe they and their associated psychopathic traits contribute some survival advantage.

Perhaps full psychopaths, those scoring 30 points or more on the Hare Checklist, are just a statistical fluke or a roll of the dice in the genetic casino, amassing too many of the genes that are helpful individually. But 2 percent is a lot of people. And that number is constant across races, even though the prevalence of specific genes, such as the warrior gene, vary widely. We should consider why psychopathic traits might be individually advantageous, or at least tolerable, from an evolutionary standpoint.

There has been a concerted effort by some behaviorists in the past decade or so to argue that the natural state of human interaction is one of peace, harmony, altruism, and eleemosynary behavior. While some humans do exhibit seeming holiness, the bulk of human history is highlighted by recurrent mayhem, cruelty, greed, and war. So other neuroscientists support the notion that humans are basically selfish, greedy, and violent, even when their
outward behavior seems sweet, giving, and peaceful. Many people wear masks so they can just get on with life and be liked, accepted, and loved. Few want to be shunned by society. This also allows us to selfishly pursue sex and resources at the expense of others, ultimately helping our genes. If your intentions are no good, hiding them helps you get what you desire, and prevents you from being booted from the community and the gene pool.

Most people with a conscience have tells that betray their thoughts and emotions. That's why most people are poor poker players. But psychopaths are masters at hiding their true intentions. One of their disarming but pernicious attributes is their ability to remain cool when they lie.

Since psychopaths don't feel emotion the way normal humans do, they don't give the same tells as others. Because their ability for cold cognition is so much greater than their ability for hot, emotional cognition, true functioning (or successful) psychopaths can dream up fantastic lies and never show any sign of guilt or remorse. Some psychopaths do respond emotionally, as measured by heart rate and galvanic skin response, and these sorts, mostly men, can be ferreted out faster. And, of course, there are cases of psychopaths who are prone to acting impulsively when faced with stress or anxiety, for instance when caught in an act of treachery. These people are, at least, less dangerous because they're easier to spot.

Psychopaths also benefit in other ways from their lack of anxiety. The steroid hormone cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, travels throughout the body to carry out parts of the stress
response, including the mobilization of sugar, fat, and protein metabolism, and an inhibition of the immune system. Thus, under constant stress, the body is less able to fight disease. People who naturally have little stress, such as psychopaths, can avoid most diseases their whole lives because their immune system is always working at peak efficiency.

So, in theory, a psychopath could live a nice, healthy, long life of manipulating people to get what he wants without anyone cottoning on. Charming.

Even known psychopaths don't have trouble finding mates. You'll always find women waiting outside prisons for murderers to come out. Psychopaths can be great at showering affection on partners, who often want to be lied to. Many people are looking for the unconditional love and devotion that a psychopath can fake—at some point a regular person would say, “Listen, babe, I'm not going to put up with your crap.” The attention can be like a drug for women, and they put up with a certain amount of pain to get that buzz.

Family members, especially mothers and wives, will tolerate psychopaths because they look for some spark of empathy and think they can change the person. Of course, the person never changes. It's like a guy who marries a girl he met at an orgy and then is surprised when two years later she's sleeping with somebody else. Even smart people can fool themselves in that way. Everyone wants to think they can control another person's behavior and destiny: “I have a special relationship with him and I
can see the good in him. I know he's a good boy.” Psychopaths know how to make people feel special. They can draw them in, hook them, and then, in some cases, the beatings and humiliation start, followed by, “I love you.” The family member will say, “He can't help himself. I know he's got an animal inside, but I can deal with him.” So the wife and mother protect him. For brothers and other family members, there's a sense of loyalty, an empathy toward the clan. So even as a psychopath makes enemies, his blood stands by him.

How should you behave around someone you know to be a full psychopath? Do not appear to be vulnerable in any way. If it's a brief encounter, don't engage. Just smile and walk away. At every party with a hundred people, there's probably a psychopath in there, and he's looking for weakness. If it's an ongoing interaction, watch the person carefully and keep track of any odd behavior. Psychopaths will navigate their way through an office or a friend group, always looking for alliances. They may know you're not vulnerable but will use little pieces of information about you to gain leverage with others. It's a chess game. They'll play a whole group, looking for one or two vulnerable people they can use to obtain whatever they're looking for, whether it's sex or money or power. So they'll observe their target's interactions and prepare to deal with a suspicious sister or office manager. Then they'll try to engage with those people and neutralize them by seeming like a nice guy. There are a lot of secondary and tertiary characters to utilize even just a little bit. How do you protect against that? Tell
people that this guy might try to con you. But be careful. Don't make a big deal, or he might get even with you. And you won't know how he'll do it.

•   •   •

Clearly individuals can benefit if they have psychopathic tendencies, but what about society as a whole? Do psychopaths have anything to offer the rest of us?

They can be strong leaders. A recent study from Caltech found that people with the warrior gene make better financial decisions under risk. Whereas many people will freeze in a stressful situation, real leaders take chances, as do psychopaths. In a position of power, they'll branch out into new markets when times are uncertain, or they'll activate the military or take their tribe over the next mountain. This may work out for the group they're in charge of, or it may not. On a larger scale, it benefits civilization to have groups take chances, because some will succeed and move civilization forward—just as biological evolution benefits from mutations, even though many of them are deadly.

We also need individuals with narcissism, because to have the energy to be a leader you've got to be full of yourself. Who the hell else would want to be a president or CEO if they really knew what it involved? You need heavy egotism and a lot of glibness and a bit of bullshit to aspire to that kind of work and to do it well.

Robert Hare, the man behind the psychopath checklist, sees psychopathy at work in the finance and banking and investment community, perhaps in some people like Bernie Madoff. (A strong
study showing greater psychopathy in business hasn't been done, but the hypothesis is reasonable.) It could be argued that the only reason these money-managing swindlers exist is that the general public wants to make that quick and easy buck and, while lacking their own combination of high risk and knowledge, use hired guns like Madoff and other investment mavens to do their dirty work for them. The person most effective in making you money will often be a little bit psychopathic, because he's not there to save the world. Of course, there are plenty of problems with relying on these guys. They can be found out—like Madoff was—or, when push comes to shove, they will turn out to have benefited at your expense. Nonetheless, common experience tells us that many of us love hot merchandise, we love a tough and heartless CEO, and we love tough guys who make us money and protect us.

It could easily be argued that we all have a bit of larceny in our souls, and we welcome the employ of clever and ruthless psychopaths to get us what we want. At some point, don't most people wish they could have their own mafia to mete out justice? Haven't you harbored thoughts about seeking revenge or playing dirty to get ahead? The top business executives I know, leaders of Fortune 500 companies, are not psychopaths at all. They're family men who are good to their underlings. But I've worked with some CEOs of smaller companies who are psychopaths—maybe it's easier to get away with this at a private versus public company. I know one investment counselor who was effective and ruthless in his work. But he took his quirk to the outer limits. He even boasted that in trying to get another guy's girlfriend, he created a situation
where the guy ended up committing suicide. This is a gentleman who is hard to like or admire in any way.

Kent Kiehl, a noted expert on psychopathy and especially the brains of criminal psychopaths, has estimated that the national cost of criminal psychopathy per year, in 2011 dollars, is $460 billion, an order of magnitude greater than the cost of depression. That covers prosecution, incarceration, and damages, but if it were possible to add in the costs of nonviolent psychopathy, the numbers would potentially be staggering. Are there advantages to psychopathy that actually save money? One could make the case that
Dexter
-style justice saves the economy billions, in that psychopaths can mete out justice at very low societal costs. Don't the Mafia and the gangs tend to kill their own? A psychopathic gang leader can limit violence by being surgical rather than explosive. They don't want to be caught, they don't want their business to be screwed up, and they don't want other people seeking revenge against them for an unjust wrong. This is a tough argument to swallow, but if we are just talking economics, psychopaths may actually save society money on one end of their behavioral spectrum while they are burning it on the other.

Psychopaths also make strong warriors. Humans love to go to war, or at least they deem it necessary, seeing as we've been killing each other in the name of survival since our species came into being. It's pointless to deny the existence of these instincts, no matter how you feel about war itself. Supporting war doesn't necessarily make one psychopathic; humans will do anything to
preserve themselves, even break the law or kill if they need to. That's normal behavior, and Western society doesn't consider that immoral.

Modern humans are much less violent, in terms of per capita killing rates in battle, than our ancestors. Australopithecine hominid warriors, three to four million years ago, appear to have been the most effective killers, and over the eons, modern humans have been maiming and killing at lower and lower rates so that now, in the early twenty-first century, we have the least lethal human civilization of all time. Part of this “savings” may be due to the development of more effective long-range weaponry, as we have transited from clubs to spears to artillery to ICBMs and now drones. Impersonal and devastating distance weaponry may have created the necessity of more effective alliances to keep war at bay. Otherwise, all-out warfare could be catastrophic. I also point out to my horrified friends (when I offer such apologia) that the people I know in the military are the most antiwar people I've come across because they understand the full cost of battle. (A few, as might be expected, rather enjoy war, much as prizefighters or even some street fighters just live to fight, a phenomenon found in my own extended family to a surprising degree.)

The most successful warriors and fighters appear to be those who disengage emotionally from the action. In battle, soldiers try to take out people methodically, without being scared to pull the trigger and without getting pleasure from it. A soldier has to be able to determine the real target and go for it without prejudice or emotion. In regular society that could be considered psychopathic,
but in warfare it's very useful, where fifty milliseconds is the difference between life and death.

And psychopaths have a better chance of surviving the battle once they've returned home and have less risk of suffering PTSD. As a specialist on cognition and war, I advise some military think tanks and am working with colleagues to find ways to maximize the effectiveness of soldiers while simultaneously reducing the risk that they will suffer PTSD or commit suicide. Those who are less prone to feel emotions are probably less likely to experience this sort of trauma.