The Wisdom of Psychopaths (2 page)

As one hugely successful young attorney told me on the balcony of his penthouse apartment overlooking the Thames: “Deep inside me there’s a serial killer lurking somewhere. But I keep him amused with cocaine, Formula One, booty calls, and coruscating cross-examination.”

Ever so slowly, I moved away from the edge.

This aerial encounter with the young lawyer (he later ran me back to my hotel downriver in his speedboat) goes some way toward illustrating a theory I have about psychopaths: that one of the reasons we’re so fascinated by them is because we’re fascinated by illusions, by things that appear, on the surface, to be normal, yet that on closer examination turn out to be anything but.
Amyciaea lineatipes
is a species of arachnid that mimics the physical appearance of the ants on which it preys. Only when it is too late are its victims finally disabused of the notion that they’re good judges of character. Many people I’ve interviewed know exactly how that feels. And they, believe me, are the lucky ones.

Take a look at the picture below. How many soccer balls can you see? Six? Take another look. Still six? Turn to the end of the preface and you’ll find the answer at the bottom.

This is what psychopaths are like. Outwardly personable, they use their charm, charisma, and seamless psychological camouflage to distract us from their “true colors”: the latent anomaly right in front of our eyes. Their intoxicating, hypnotic presence draws us inexorably in.

Yet psychopathy, as the Devil and his flamboyant London protégé just hinted, can also be good for us, at least in moderation. Like anxiety, depression, and quite a few other psychological disorders, it can at times be adaptive. Psychopaths, as we shall discover, have a variety of attributes—personal magnetism and a genius for disguise being just the starter pack—which, once you know how to harness them and keep them in check, often confer considerable advantages not just in the workplace, but in everyday life. Psychopathy is like sunlight. Overexposure can hasten one’s demise in grotesque, carcinogenic fashion. But regulated exposure at controlled and optimal levels can have a significant positive impact on well-being and quality of life.

In the pages that follow we’ll examine these attributes in detail, and learn how incorporating them into our own psychological skill set can dramatically transform our lives. Of course, it’s in no way my intention to glamorize the actions of psychopaths—certainly not the actions of dysfunctional psychopaths, anyway. That would be like glamorizing a cognitive melanoma: the malignant machinations of cancer of the personality. But there’s evidence to suggest that psychopathy, in small doses at least, is personality with a
tan
—and that it can have surprising benefits.

I’ve witnessed a few firsthand. As the years rolled by and he retired from the markets, the gods didn’t look too favorably on Dad. (Though it wasn’t as if he was picky: figurines of Buddhas, Muhammads, Sacred Hearts, Virgin Marys … they’d all done their time in the back of his three-wheeler van.) He got Parkinson’s—and went, in a frighteningly short space of time, from someone who could pack up a suitcase in ten seconds flat (an ability that had come in handy surprisingly often) to someone who couldn’t even stand without an aide on either arm (“In the old days, they used to be cops,” he would say).

But his finest moment undoubtedly occurred posthumously. At least, it was after he died that it came to my attention. One evening, not long after the funeral, I was going through his things when I came upon a volume of handwritten notes in a drawer. The notes had been penned by a succession of the various caregivers who’d looked after Dad over the previous few months (he’d managed, against the advice of pretty much everyone, to stick it out at home), and amounted, I suppose, to a kind of care “diary.”

The first thing that struck me about the diary, I remember, was how neat and painstakingly detailed the entries were. Unmistakably female, the handwriting catwalked voluptuously across the page, modestly attired in blue or black Bic, with barely a serif or ligature out of place. But the more I read, the more it dawned on me just how little variety there had been in Dad’s last few months: how monotonous, repetitive, and unremittingly bleak that final pitch, that final stand in the market stall of life, must’ve been. Not that he’d ever given me that impression when I’d dropped in to visit him, of course. The Parkinson’s may well have been kicking the shit out of his arms and legs. But it was no match for his spirit.

Yet the reality of the situation was clear:

“Got Mr. Dutton out of bed at 7:30.”

“Gave Mr. Dutton a shave.”

“Made Mr. Dutton a cucumber sandwich.”

“Brought Mr. Dutton a cup of tea.”

And so on. And so forth. Ad infinitum.

Pretty soon I started to get bored, and, as one does, began randomly fanning through the pages. Then something caught my eye. In tremulous, spidery writing, scrawled in big block capitals across the middle of one of the pages, was the following: “MR. DUTTON DID CARTWHEELS DOWN THE HALL.” Followed, a couple of pages later, by “MR. DUTTON PERFORMED A STRIP SHOW ON THE BALCONY.”

Something told me he might be making it up. But hey, this was Dad we were talking about. Why mess with the habit of a lifetime?

Besides, the rules of the game had changed. Behind the cut-price bullshit lurked a higher, greater truth: the story of a man whose soul was under fire … whose circuits and synapses were hopelessly and mercilessly outgunned … but who, when the chips were down and the game was all but up, was going down fighting in a hail of irrepressible irreverence.

Cartwheels and strip shows beat shaves and cucumber sandwiches any day of the week.

Who cared if it was crap?

Okay. You’re right, It is six. But now take a closer look at the man’s hands. Notice anything unusual?

The names and identifying details of certain people featured in this book have been changed. Such necessary demographic camouflage, however, does not in any way compromise the voice of these disguised individuals—and every step has been taken to report encounters and conversations as accurately and as authentically as possible. It should be noted that on account of the restrictions regarding recording equipment, this was especially the case in Broadmoor, where some degree of narrative license became inevitable in striking a balance between maintaining patient confidentiality and preserving the unique landscape of both the characters and the dialogue.

A scorpion and a frog are sitting on the bank of a river, and both need to get to the other side.

“Hello, Mr. Frog!” calls the scorpion through the reeds. “Would you be so kind as to give me a ride on your back across the water? I have important business to conduct on the other side. And I cannot swim in such a strong current.”

The frog immediately becomes suspicious.

“Well, Mr. Scorpion,” he replies, “I appreciate the fact that you have important business to conduct on the other side of the river. But just take a moment to consider your request. You are a scorpion. You have a large stinger at the end of your tail. As soon as I let you onto my back, it is entirely within your nature to sting me.”

The scorpion, who has anticipated the frog’s objections, counters thus:

“My dear Mr. Frog, your reservations are perfectly reasonable. But it is clearly not in my interest to sting you. I really do need to get to the other side of the river. And I give you my word that no harm will come to you.”

The frog agrees, reluctantly, that the scorpion has a point. So he allows the fast-talking arthropod to scramble atop his back and hops, without further ado, into the water.

At first all is well. Everything goes exactly according to plan. But halfway across, the frog suddenly feels a sharp pain in his back—and
sees, out of the corner of his eye, the scorpion withdraw his stinger from his hide. A deadening numbness begins to creep into his limbs.

“You fool!” croaks the frog. “You said you needed to get to the other side to conduct your business. Now we are both going to die!”

The scorpion shrugs and does a little jig on the drowning frog’s back.

“Mr. Frog,” he replies casually, “you said it yourself. I am a scorpion. It is in my nature to sting you.”

With that, the scorpion and the frog both disappear beneath the murky, muddy waters of the swiftly flowing current.

And neither of them is seen again.

During his trial in 1980, John Wayne Gacy declared with a sigh that all he was really guilty of was “running a cemetery without a license.”

It was quite a cemetery. Between 1972 and 1978, Gacy had raped and murdered at least thirty-three young men and boys (with an average age of about eighteen) before stuffing them into a crawl space beneath his house. One of his victims, Robert Donnelly, survived Gacy’s attentions, but was tortured so mercilessly by his captor that, at several points during his ordeal, he begged him to “get it over with” and kill him.

Gacy was bemused. “I’m getting around to it,” he replied.

I have cradled John Wayne Gacy’s brain in my hands. Following his execution in 1994 by lethal injection, Dr. Helen Morrison—a witness for the defense at his trial and one of the world’s leading experts on serial killers—had assisted in his autopsy in a Chicago hospital, and then driven back home with his brain jiggling around in a glass jar on the passenger seat of her Buick. She’d wanted to find out whether there was anything about it—lesions, tumors, disease—that made it different from the brains of normal people.

Tests revealed nothing unusual.

Several years later, over coffee in her office in Chicago, I got to chatting
with Dr. Morrison about the significance of her findings, the significance of finding … nothing.

“Does this mean,” I asked her, “that we’re basically all psychopaths deep down? That each of us harbors the propensity to rape, kill, and torture? If there’s no difference between my brain and the brain of John Wayne Gacy, then where, precisely, does the difference lie?”

Morrison hesitated for a moment before highlighting one of the most fundamental truths in neuroscience.

“A dead brain is very different from a living one,” she said. “Outwardly, one brain may look very similar to another, but function completely differently. It’s what happens when the lights are on, not off, that tips the balance. Gacy was such an extreme case that I wondered whether there might be something else contributing to his actions—some injury or damage to his brain, or some anatomical anomaly. But there wasn’t. It was normal. Which just goes to show how complex and impenetrable the brain can sometimes be, how reluctant it is to give up its secrets. How differences in upbringing, say, or other random experiences can cause subtle changes in internal wiring and chemistry which then later account for tectonic shifts in behavior.”

Morrison’s talk that day of lights and tectonic shifts reminded me of a rumor I once heard about Robert Hare, professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and one of the world’s leading authorities on psychopaths.
Back in the 1990s, Hare submitted a research paper to an academic journal that included the EEG responses of both psychopaths and non-psychopaths as they performed what’s known as a lexical decision task. Hare and his team of coauthors showed volunteers a series of letter strings, and then got them to decide as quickly as possible whether or not those strings comprised a word.

What they found was astonishing. Whereas normal participants identified emotionally charged words like “c-a-n-c-e-r” or “r-a-p-e” more quickly than neutral words like “t-r-e-e” or “p-l-a-t-e,” this wasn’t the case with psychopaths. To the psychopaths, emotion was irrelevant. The journal rejected the paper. Not it turned out, for its conclusions, but for something even more extraordinary. Some of the EEG
patterns, reviewers alleged, were so abnormal they couldn’t possibly have come from real people. But of course they had.

Intrigued by my talk with Morrison in Chicago about the mysteries and enigmas of the psychopathic mind—indeed, about neural recalcitrance in general—I visited Hare in Vancouver. Was the rumor true? I asked him. Had the paper really been rejected? If so, what was going on?

“There are four different kinds of brain waves,” he told me, “ranging from beta waves during periods of high alertness, through alpha and theta waves, to delta waves, which accompany deep sleep. These waves reflect the fluctuating levels of electrical activity in the brain at various times. In normal members of the population, theta waves are associated with drowsy, meditative, or sleeping states. Yet in psychopaths they occur during normal waking states—even sometimes during states of increased arousal …