The Wisdom of Psychopaths (28 page)

In 1972, the writer Alan Harrington published a little-known book called
Psychopaths
. In it, he advanced a radical new theory of human evolution. Psychopaths, contended Harrington, constitute a dangerous new breed of
Homo sapiens
: a made-to-measure Darwinian contingency plan for the cold, hard exigencies of modern-day survival. An indomitable Generation P.

Key to his thesis was the progressive, insidious weakening, as he saw it, of the primeval ionic bonds—ethical, emotional, existential—that for century upon century, millennium upon millennium, had bound humanity together. Once, argued Harrington, when Western civilization subscribed to the traditional bourgeois mores of hard work and virtue seeking, the psychopath was confined to the margins of mainstream society. He was condemned, by his fellow right-minded citizens, as either a madman or an outlaw. But as the twentieth century unfolded and society, over time, became ever more fast and loose, psychopaths came in from the cold.

For a Cold War novelist from a nonscientific background, Alan Harrington certainly knew his stuff. His depiction of the psychopath rivals—in fact occasionally even surpasses, given its diverse, eclectic brushstrokes—many of the portraits one sometimes reads today. The psychopath, as Harrington defines him, is the “new man”: a psychological superhero free from the shackles of anxiety and remorse. He is brutal, bored, and adventurous. But also, when the situation demands it, beatific.

Harrington cites some examples: “Drunkards and forgers, addicts, flower children … Mafia loan shark battering his victim, charming actor, murderer, nomadic guitarist, hustling politician, the saint who lies down in front of tractors, the icily dominating Nobel Prize winner stealing credit from laboratory assistants … all, all doing their thing.”

And all, all, without the slightest care in the world.

Harrington’s inclusion of saints on the list is no accident. It’s also no one-off. Throughout his book, the cool, iridescent prose is littered with comparisons between psychopaths and the spiritually enlightened. Not all of them his own.

He quotes, for instance, the physician Hervey Cleckley, whom we met in
chapter 2
, compiler, in his 1941 classic
The Mask of Sanity
, of one of the first clinical descriptions of psychopathy:

“
What he [the psychopath] believes he needs to protest against turns out to be no small group, no particular institution, or set of ideologies, but human life itself. In it he seems to find nothing deeply meaningful or persistently stimulating, but only some transient and relatively petty pleasant caprices, a terribly repetitious series of minor frustrations, and ennui … Like many teenagers,
saints
[author’s emphasis], history-making statesmen, and other notable leaders or geniuses, he shows unrest: he wants to do something about the situation.”

Harrington also quotes Norman Mailer: “
[The psychopath] is an elite with the potential ruthlessness of an elite … His inner experience of the possibilities within death is his logic. So, too, for the existentialist … And the
saint
and the bullfighter and the lover.”

The implications are intriguing. Is it possible, Harrington asks, that the saint and the psychopath somehow constitute two transcendental sides of the same existentialist coin? Is it possible “
whether we want to admit it or not, for the most wicked, wholly inexcusable psychopath to murder his way into a state of grace? Achieve a sort of purity by terrible means? Be transformed by his ordeal, and the ordeals he imposed on others, into a different person, his spirit cleansed by theater, publicity, fame, terror?”

Though contrary, perhaps, to their delicate intellectual sensibilities, New Testament scholars might struggle to disagree. Two thousand years ago, a certain Saul of Tarsus sanctioned the deaths of countless numbers of Christians following the public execution of their leader—and could today, under the dictates of the Geneva Convention, have been indicted on charges of genocide.

We all know what happened to him. A dazzling conversion as he journeyed on the road to Damascus
¹
transformed him, quite literally overnight, from a murderous, remorseless tentmaker into one of the most important figures in the history of the Western world.
Saint Paul, as he’s more commonly referred to today, is the author of just over half of the entire New Testament (fourteen of the twenty-seven books that comprise the corpus are attributed to him); is the hero of another, the Acts of the Apostles; and is the subject of some of the best stained glass in the business.

But he was, in addition, almost certainly a psychopath. Ruthless, fearless, driven, and charismatic, in equal measure.

Let’s take a look at the evidence. Paul’s apparent predilection, both on the open road and within seething inner cities, for dangerous, inhospitable areas put him at constant risk of random, violent assault. Add to that the fact that he was shipwrecked a grand total of three times during his travels around the Mediterranean basin, on one occasion spending twenty-four hours adrift in the open sea before being rescued, and a picture begins to emerge of a man with little or no concern for his own safety.

There’s the habitual lawbreaker who seems incapable of learning the error of his ways (either that or he just didn’t care). Paul was imprisoned multiple times during his ministry, spending, in total, an estimated six years behind bars; was brutally flogged (five times receiving the maximum thirty-nine lashes: too many might kill a person); was, on three occasions, beaten with rods. And was once, in the city of Lystra, in what is now modern Turkey, stoned by a mob so viciously that he was, by the time they were finished, given up for dead and dragged outside the city, as was the custom.

Scripture records what happened next: “But when the disciples gathered about him, he rose up and entered the city, and on the next day he went on with Barnabas to Derbe” (Acts 14:20).

Would you calmly reenter a city whose inhabitants had just tried to stone you to death? Not sure I would.

And we’re not finished yet. There’s the peripatetic drifter who was continually on the move due to threats against his life. When the governor of Damascus placed a cordon around the city to arrest him, he made his escape in a basket through a gap in the city walls.

There’s the cold, calculating, political mover and shaker, unafraid to tread on the feelings and sensibilities of others, no matter how important or personally loyal they were. Paul’s bust-up with Saint Peter in Antioch, in which he accused Peter to his face of being a hypocrite in forcing Gentiles to adopt Jewish customs when he himself lived like a Gentile, is described by L. Michael White, professor of classics and religious studies at the University of Texas at Austin, in his book
From Jesus to Christianity
as “
a total failure of political bravado, and Paul soon left Antioch as persona non grata, never again to return.”

Finally, there’s the remorseless, unblinking maneuvering of the shadowy psychological cat burglar. The silky-smooth self-presentation skills of the expert manipulator.

Recall the words of master con man Greg Morant? One of the most powerful weapons in the grifter’s unholy arsenal is a good “vulnerability radar.” They could just as easily have been Paul’s.

Or, to put it another way:

“To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people” (1 Corinthians 9:20–22).

If it really was Jesus on that road to Damascus and he wanted an emissary to help him spread the word, he couldn’t have picked a
better man for the job. Nor, among Christians, a more feared or unpopular one. At the time of his conversion Paul, without doubt, was at the height of his persecutory powers. In fact, the very reason he was going to Damascus in the first place was to instigate more bloodshed. Coincidence that his ministry started there?

Not all psychopaths are saints. And not all saints are psychopaths. But there’s evidence to suggest that deep within the corridors of the brain, psychopathy and sainthood share secret neural office space. And that some psychopathic attributes—stoicism, the ability to regulate emotion, to live in the moment, to enter altered states of awareness, to be heroic, fearless, yes, even empathic—are also inherently spiritual in nature, and not only improve one’s own well-being, but also that of others.

If you need any convincing, you’ve just got to look at the Magdalen College prayer board once in a while.

The ability to smile in the face of adversity has long been regarded as a measure of spiritual intelligence. Take, for instance, the words of the poet Rudyard Kipling, the last thing you see as a player before stepping out onto center court at Wimbledon:

But though such a mind-set is usually associated with saints, the link with psychopaths is somewhat less often conjectured.

In 2006,
Derek Mitchell at University College, London, decided to buck the trend—and presented two groups of participants, psychopaths and non-psychopaths, with a procedure known as the Emotional Interrupt Task (EIT). The EIT is a reaction time test of discriminatory ability. Typically, volunteers sit in front of a computer screen and press keys with either their left or their right index fingers
depending on whether a particular kind of shape, usually a circle or a square, flashes up in front of them.

Pretty simple, you might think. But in actual fact, the task can be rather tricky.

The reason for this is that the shapes don’t appear on their own. Instead, each circle or square is sandwiched, for a couple of hundred milliseconds at a time, between different pairs of images—usually faces. Either two positive images (smiling faces), two negative images (angry faces), or two neutral images (expressionless faces), respectively.

Most people find the emotional images a problem. Simply because of
that
: they’re emotional—and distracting. But if, Mitchell hypothesized, psychopaths really are as unfazed and laid back as their reputations suggest, really can take the rough with the smooth, this shouldn’t, in their case, be true. They should, in fact, respond faster and more accurately, compared to controls—that is, they should be less distractible—on those trials where the circle or square is flanked by either two positive or two negative images. Images, in other words, that, one way or another, conceal an emotional valence. In contrast, Mitchell suggested, this difference between psychopaths and non-psychopaths should disappear on the neutral trials, where distraction is less of an issue.

As it turned out, this is exactly what he found. Whenever the circle or square was flanked by an emotionally charged image, the psychopaths, exactly as predicted, were better at differentiating the targets than the non-psychopaths—and quicker, too. They were, as Kipling might’ve put it, better at keeping their heads while others were losing theirs.

Stoicism is a quality greatly prized by society. And with good reason. It can come in handy in all sorts of ways: during bereavement, after a breakup, at the poker table—even, at times, when you’re writing a book. But as a long-suffering follower of the England soccer team, and a veteran of more penalty shoot-out debacles than I care to remember, it’s the relationship between stoicism and sport that’s perhaps most salient to me.

And I’m not just talking from a spectator’s point of view. As a psychological prism, sport is second to none in dispersing stoicism into
its two constituent wavelengths, fearlessness and focus, which themselves comprise elements of both psychopathy and spiritual acumen.

“Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize?” wrote Saint Paul. “Run in such a way as to get the prize … I am like a boxer who does not waste his punches. I harden my body with blows and bring it under complete control” (1 Corinthians 9:24, 26). That Kipling’s words hang above center court is certainly no coincidence … nor are they exclusive to tennis.

“Play like it means nothing, when it means everything,” replied the snooker legend Steve Davis when he was asked to spill the beans on sporting greatness. “Let go” of bad shots—and, for that matter, good ones—and focus your attention 100 percent on the next one.

The same is true in golf.

In 2010, the South African Louis Oosthuizen was a rank outsider to win the British Open Championships at St. Andrews. After a string of disappointments in the events leading up to the tournament, he was fully expected, even with a four-shot lead, to crack under the pressure of the cutthroat final round. But he didn’t. And the reason for that was surprisingly, though deceptively, simple: a small red spot, conspicuously located just below the base of his thumb, on his glove.

The idea of the spot came from Karl Morris, a Manchester-based sports psychologist, who was called in by Oosthuizen to help him touch base with what one might reasonably describe as his hidden inner psychopath. The goal was to center his mind on playing the shot at hand, rather than obsessing, at exactly the wrong moment, about the consequences. So Morris devised a plan. Whenever Oosthuizen was about to take a swing, he was to focus his attention, calmly and steadily, on the dot. The dot was all that mattered at that point in time. He wasn’t to play the shot. The shot, instead, was to play him.

He won by seven strokes.

Oosthuizen’s red spot is a classic example of what’s known in sports psychology as a process goal—a technique by which the athlete is required to focus on something, however minor, to prevent them from thinking about other things: in Oosthuizen’s case, all the ways he could possibly screw up the shot. It anchors the athlete firmly in
the here and now—before the shot is actually played, before the move is actually made, and, most important of all, before confidence begins to fade.
In fact, this ability to concentrate purely on the task at hand—what the Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls “optimal experience,” or “flow”—is one of a number of key techniques that performance psychologists now work on, not just in golf, but among high-level competitors in all areas of sport.