The Wisdom of Psychopaths (26 page)

Ten minutes later, when he returns with the duty psychiatrist, he’s back in uniform. “So,” mutters the psychiatrist. “What seems to be the problem this time?”

Cracknell looks edgy.

“It’s not me you should be talking to,” he stammers. “It’s him. You’re not going to believe this. But, just before you got here, he was all done up in a clown’s costume and asking me what I wanted for breakfast!”

The psychiatrist shoots Griffiths a suspicious glance. Griffiths just shrugs.

“Looks like we’re in business,” he says.

Dai Griffiths, take my word for it, isn’t a man you want to get on the wrong side of in a hurry. Plenty of people have—and most of them ended up with a couple less teeth than they started with. He’s not called the Dentist for nothing.

But Griffiths, quite clearly, has more than one string to his bow. He could easily have taught Cracknell a lesson. Drunks, as everyone knows, have “accidents.” Bang into things. Pick up the odd bruise here and there. And yet he didn’t. Instead, he went a different route entirely. He avoided the trap that Leslie had so eloquently warned of—the temptation to not just get what you want, but to be seen to get what you want: to show Cracknell who was boss behind closed doors on a personal, superfluous level—and focused, in contrast, on finding a
solution that would resolve the dilemma once and for all, not just for himself but for his colleagues down the line. He concentrated on the issue at hand. Rolled out the red carpet. And eradicated the problem at source. Psychiatrists could put their feet up over the weekend.

Of course, the observation that charm, focus, and ruthlessness—three of the psychopath’s most instantly recognizable calling cards—constitute, if you can juggle them, a blueprint for successful problem solving might not come as too great a surprise, perhaps. But that this triumvirate can also predispose—if the gods are really smiling on you—to inordinate, towering, long-term life success might well be a different matter.

Take Steve Jobs.

Jobs, commented the journalist John Arlidge shortly after Jobs’s death, achieved his cult leader status “not just by being single-minded, driven, focused (he exuded, according to one former colleague, a ‘blastfurnace intensity’), perfectionistic, uncompromising, and a total ball-breaker. All successful business leaders are like that, however much their highly paid PR honeys might try to tell us they are laid-back fellas, just like the rest of us …”

No. There was more to him than that. In addition, Arlidge notes, he had charisma. He had vision. He would, as the technology writer Walt Mossberg revealed, even at private viewings, drape a cloth over a product—some pristine new creation on a shiny boardroom table—and uncover it with a flourish.

Apple isn’t the world’s greatest techno-innovator. Nowhere near it, in fact. Rather, it excels at rehashing other people’s ideas. It wasn’t the first outfit to introduce a personal computer (IBM). Nor was it the first to introduce a smartphone (Nokia). Indeed, when it
has
gone down the innovation road, it’s often screwed up. Anyone remember the Newton or the Power Mac G4 Cube?

But what Jobs did bring to the table was style. Sophistication. And timeless, technological charm. He rolled out the red carpet for consumers, from living rooms, offices, design studios, film sets—you name it—right to the doors of Apple stores the world over.

Apple’s setbacks along the road to world domination (indeed, they were on the verge of going down the drain in the early days) serve as a cogent reminder of the pitfalls and stumbling blocks that await all of us in life. No one has it all their own way. Everyone, at some point or other, “leaves someone on the floor,” as the Leonard Cohen song goes. And there’s a pretty good chance that that someone—today, tomorrow, or at some other auspicious juncture down the line—is going to turn out to be you.

Psychopaths, lest Jamie and the boys have yet to disabuse you, have no problem whatsoever facilitating others’ relationships with the floor. But they’re also pretty handy when they find themselves on the receiving end—when fate takes a swing and they’re the ones in the firing line. And such inner neural steel, such inestimable indifference in the face of life’s misfortunes, is something that we could all, in one way or another, perhaps do with a little bit more of.

James Rilling, associate professor of anthropology at Emory University, has demonstrated this in the lab, and has discovered, in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma task like the one we discussed in
chapter 3
, an odd yet uplifting paradox about the psychopath. Perhaps not surprisingly, psychopaths exhibit an enhanced propensity for “defection” under such conditions, which, in turn, precipitates elevated levels of belligerence, of opportunistic interpersonal aggression (encapsulated in the “cooperate-defect” dynamic) on the part of their opposite numbers.

Yet here’s the deal. When the shoe’s on the other foot, they simply aren’t as bothered by such setbacks. Following the occurrence of these turnaround, “see how you like it” outcomes, in which those scoring high in psychopathy find their own attempts to cooperate unreciprocated, Rilling and his coworkers uncovered something interesting in their brains. Compared with their “nicer,” more equitable fellow participants, the psychopaths exhibited significantly reduced activity in their amygdalae: a registered neural trademark of “turning
the other cheek” … which can sometimes manifest itself in rather unusual ways.

“When we were kids,” Jamie chimes in, “we’d have a competition. See who could get shot down the most times on a night out. You know, by girls, like. Although, in old McAllister’s case here, we’d have had to have widened the field a bit.”

Larry looks at me, nonplussed.

“Anyway, the bloke who’d got the most by the time the lights came on would get the next night out for free.

“Course, it was in your interest to rack up as many as possible, weren’t it? A night on the town with everything taken care of by your mates? Aces! But the funny thing was, soon as you started to get a few under your belt, it actually got fucking harder. Soon as you realize that it actually means jack shit, you start getting cocky. You start mouthing off. And some of the birds start to buy it!”

Give rejection the finger and rejection gives it back.

Jamie and company aren’t the first to make the connection between fearlessness and mental toughness.

Lee Crust and Richard Keegan at the University of Lincoln, for example, have shown that the majority of life’s risk takers tend to score higher on tests of general “mental toughness” than those who are risk averse, with scores on the challenge/openness-to-experience subscale being the single biggest predictor of physical risk taking, and scores on the confidence subscale being the biggest predictor of psychological risk taking. Both of which qualities psychopaths have in abundance.

Recall the words of Andy McNab in the previous chapter? You know there’s a high chance of getting killed on a mission; you know there’s a fair probability of being captured by enemy troops; you know there’s a good possibility that you and your parachute will be swallowed up by waves the size of high-rises in some seething foreign
ocean. But fuck it. You get on with it. That’s what Special Forces soldiering is all about.

That members of Special Forces are both fearless and mentally tough (psychopathically so, it emerges, as the results of many of those I’ve tested bear witness) is beyond doubt. In fact, the instructors on the SAS’s brutal, bestial selection course (which extends over a period of nine months, and which only a handful of candidates pass) are specifically on the lookout for such qualities—as some of the nightmares one endures on it attest to.

One example, recounted to me by a guy who came out on top, provides a pretty good insight into the kind of mental toughness that separates the men from the boys; that exemplifies the mind-set, the elite psychological makeup, of those who eventually prevail.

“It’s not the violence that breaks you,” he elucidates. “It’s the threat of violence. That carcinogenic thought process that something terrible is going to happen. And that it’s just around the corner.”

He goes into details about one particular instance—which put me off fixing my car exhaust forever:

“Typically, by this stage, the candidate’s exhausted … Then, the last thing he sees before we place the hood over his head is the two-ton truck. We lie him down on the ground, and as he lies there, he hears the sound of the truck getting closer. After thirty seconds or so, it’s right there on top of him—the engine just inches away from his ear. We give it a good rev, and then the driver jumps out. He slams the door and walks away. The engine’s still running. A little while later, from somewhere in the distance, someone asks if the handbrake’s on. At this point, one of the team—who, unbeknownst to the guy in the hood, has been there all the time—gently starts to roll a spare tire onto his temple as he lies on the ground. You know, by hand. Gradually, he increases the pressure. Another member of the team revs the truck up a bit so it seems like it might be moving. After a few seconds of that, we take the tire away and remove the hood. Then we lay into him … It’s not unusual for people to throw in the towel at that point.”

I amuse the fellas—Danny, Larry, Jamie, and Leslie—with my own little taste of SAS selection, which I got while doing a TV pilot.
Shackled to the floor of a cold, dimly lit warehouse, I watched—in abject terror—as a forklift truck suspended a pallet of reinforced concrete several yards above my head … and then proceeded to lower it so that the sharp, rough-hewn base exerted a light, splintery pressure on my chest. It hovered there for about fifteen seconds before I heard the operator holler above the sinister, sibilant screeching of the hydraulics: “Shit, the mechanism’s jammed. I can’t shift it …”

In hindsight, after a hot bath, it soon became apparent that I’d been as safe as houses all along. In actual fact, the “reinforced concrete” hadn’t been concrete at all. It was painted polystyrene. But needless to say, it would have been news to me at the time, And news to the Special Forces hopefuls who undergo such ordeals upon selection. In the moment, as I reported in
Split-Second Persuasion
, it’s horribly real.

Jamie, however, is distinctly unimpressed. “But even if the mechanism had jammed,” he points out, “that doesn’t mean to say the rig’s going to come crashing down on top of you, does it? It just means you’re stuck there for a while. So what? You know, I’ve thought about this. They say that courage is a virtue, right?

“But what if you don’t need courage? What then? What if you don’t have fear to start with? If you don’t have fear to start with, you don’t need courage to overcome it, do you? The concrete and tire stunts wouldn’t have bothered me, mate. They’re just mind games. But that doesn’t make me brave. If I couldn’t give a shit in the first place, how can it?

“So you see, I just don’t buy it. It seems to me that the reason you harp on about courage all the time, the reason people feel they need it, is to bring yourself up to the level I function at naturally. You may call it a virtue. But in my book, it’s natural talent. Courage is just emotional blood doping.”

Sitting on a sofa opposite a six-foot-two psychopathic skinhead as he positions a sizable psychological magnet by the side of your moral
compass isn’t exactly comfortable. Of course, I’m well aware of the psychopath’s powers of persuasion. But even so, I can’t help thinking that Jamie has a point. What a “hero” might do against the muffled synaptic screaming of hardwired survival instincts, a psychopath might do in silence—without even breaking a sweat. And to set the compass spinning even faster, Leslie introduces another existential conundrum to the proceedings.

“But it’s not just about functionality, though, is it?” he demurs. “The thing about fear, or the way I understand fear, I suppose—because, to be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever really felt it—is that most of the time it’s completely unwarranted anyway. What is it they say? Ninety-nine percent of the things people worry about never happen. So what’s the point?

“I think the problem is that people spend so much time worrying about what might happen, what might go wrong, that they completely lose sight of the present. They completely overlook the fact that, actually, right now, everything’s perfectly fine. You can see that quite clearly in your interrogation exercise. What was it that chap told you? It’s not the violence that breaks you. It’s the threat of it. So why not just stay in the moment?

“I mean, think about it. Like Jamie says, while you were lying under that lump of concrete—or rather, what you thought was concrete—nothing bad was really happening to you, was it? Okay, a four-poster might’ve been more relaxing. But actually, if you’d been asleep, you’d really have been none the wiser, would you?

“Instead, what freaked you out was your imagination. Your brain was on fast-forward mode, whizzing and whirring through all the possible disasters that might unfold. But didn’t.

“So the trick, whenever possible, I propose, is to stop your brain from running on ahead of you. Keep doing that and, sooner or later, you’ll kick the courage habit, too.”

“Or you can always use your imagination to your advantage,” interjects Danny. “Next time you’re in a situation where you’re scared, just think: ‘Imagine I didn’t feel this way. What would I do then?’ And then just do it anyway.”

Good advice—if you’ve got the balls to take it.

Listening to Jamie, Leslie, and Danny, you might well be forgiven for thinking you were in the presence of greatness: of three old Buddhists well on their way down the Eightfold Path to nirvana. Of course, they’re anything but. Yet anchoring your thoughts unswervingly in the present, focusing exclusively, immediately, on the here and now, is a cognitive discipline that psychopathy and spiritual enlightenment have in common.

Mark Williams, professor of clinical psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford, incorporates this principle of centering in his mindfulness-based cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) program for sufferers of anxiety and depression.