The

present financial meltdown may only be the latest example of the

incalculable harm done to civilization, and countless individual lives, by

psychopaths, a subspecies of Homo sapiens. The purpose of this essay is

twofold. First, I will provide a brief tour of the psychopath subspecies so

that you understand who they are and how they operate. You probably already

know psychopaths, and it is overwhelmingly likely that at some point in your

life a psychopath that you encounter personally will try to harm you. Second, I

will draw the correlative between psychopathy and the present financial

meltdown and provide a suggestion of a relatively simple change that could

decrease the likelihood of the sort of abuses that could lead to future

meltdowns.

Part

One: What is a Psychopath?

History

Kunlangeta

is a word Yupik Eskimos apply to "a man who . . . repeatedly lies and cheats

and steals things and . . . takes sexual advantage of many women — someone who

does not pay attention to reprimands and who is always being brought to the

elders for punishment." In a Harvard University study conducted by

anthropologist Jane M. Murphy in 1976, an Eskimo man was asked how his people

might deal with a Kunlangeta, to which he replied, "Somebody would have

pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking."

In the

West, the formal recognition of psychopaths goes back at least as far as Theophrastus,

a student of Aristotle, whose study of the Unscrupulous Man defines the basic

characteristics of psychopathy. Much later this condition came to be

referred to as manie sans délire ("insanity without delirium"), a term that by

the 1830s evolved into moral insanity, the key symptom of which is a "defective

conscience."

By 1900

the label was changed to psychopathic personality, but it wasn't until 1941

that psychiatrist Dr. Hervey M. Cleckley of the Medical College of Georgia

systematically defined the condition.

A

General Description

Very

roughly (we'll expand on these characteristics momentarily) a psychopath is a

person without conscience, empathy or even an ability to experience the range

of human emotions. Their ability to feel is confined to a narrow range of

primitive proto-emotions such as anger, frustration and rage.

Psychopaths will tend to be pathological liars and expert manipulators

victimizing family, friends and strangers. Often they are charming,

charismatic, popular and admired, if not loved, by members of both genders.

They are not mentally ill, not delusional, and may often be more coldly

rational and intelligent than non-psychopaths. They are likely to be

promiscuous and to abandon partners without remorse. They are prone to

entitlement, grandiosity and find nothing wrong with themselves. They

typically blame others for the consequences of their actions and engage in

moral reasoning that is glib and superficial if not absurd. They usually

have little fear of consequences and enjoy risk as they need novelty,

stimulation and living on the edge to compensate for their emotional vacuity.

Psychopathy

Demographics

Across

all eras and societies, approximately one in a hundred men is born a clinical

psychopath, and one in three hundred women. About twenty percent of an

average prison population, male or female, is comprised of psychopaths, but

amongst the violent offenders it is about fifty percent. Psychopaths

commit more than fifty percent of the serious crimes. For example, about

half of serial rapists are psychopaths. About 25% of wife assaulters are

psychopaths. Both male and female psychopaths commit a greater number of

crimes, and their crimes tend to be more violent, abusive and predatory than

those of other criminals. They also tend to recidivate earlier and much

more often than other criminals. While psychopaths make up about one percent of

the population, ten percent of the general population falls into a grey zone

with enough psychopathic tendencies to be of significant concern to society.

Lack of

Empathy and Emotional Depth

Most of

us take emotional experience for granted and tend to assume that others have a

similar range of emotion as we do. Most of the time this premise is

correct, and this allows us to often accurately replicate the emotional state

of another within our own perception. But among those to whom we apply

this principal are psychopaths who often have a chameleon-like ability to

replicate and counterfeit emotions in ways that allow them to manipulate our

perceptions of them. We are very likely to accept as genuine their

counterfeit displays of emotion, and thereby falsely attribute emotional depths

to psychopaths who in actuality are entirely lacking the feelings we think we

perceive. In reality they may be completely indifferent to the acute

suffering of someone right in front of them, and can remain cold and unmoved by

all sorts of things that what would emotionally affect most people. On

the other hand, insignificant matters that most would react to with minor

annoyance can greatly enrage them.

Dr.

Cleckley believed that psychopaths have a profound underlying disorder in which

emotional and linguistic components of thought are not properly

integrated. He called this condition semantic aphasia and concluded that

it greatly reduced the capacity for developing internal control, conscience and

the capacity for making emotional connections with others.

Functional

MRI scans of the brains of psychopaths show that their patterns of brain

response to words and images of strong emotional content have a fundamental

difference with non-psychopaths. Ordinarily, limbic regions of the brain

process emotional content, but for psychopaths, activations occur in regions of

the brain associated with comprehension and production of language suggesting

that things which evoke emotion in normal people are experienced by psychopaths

as linguistic categories. A psychopath might scan the inanimate, animate and

emotionally charged with the same neutral, indifferent coldness — a rusting

transmission over here, a person writhing in agony over there, an overturned

trash can just up ahead, etc. They may be well aware, however, of how

others might react, and can smoothly feign an emotional response if so doing

serves their agenda.

For

example, a psychopath who killed an elderly man during the course of a

burglary, casually gave the following account of his evening:

I was

rummaging around when this old geezer comes down the stairs and . . . uh

. . . he starts yelling and having a fucking fit . . . so I pop him one in the,

uh, head and he still doesn't shut up. I give him a chop to the throat and he .

. . like . . . staggers back and falls on the floor. He's gurgling and making

sounds like a stuck pig (laughs) and he's really getting on my fucking nerves

so I . . . uh . . . boot him a few times in the head. That shut him up . . .

I'm pretty tired by now, so I grab a few beers from the fridge and turn on

the TV and fall asleep. The cops woke me up (laughs).

A

researcher tried to find out if a psychopathic convict recognized the feeling

of fear. When asked, the psychopath responded, "When I rob a bank I notice that

the teller shakes or becomes tongue-tied. One barfed all over the money." The

psychopath found these responses puzzling.

The

researcher pressed the psychopath to describe his own fear and sked how he

would feel if the gun were pointed at him. The convict responded that he might

hand over the money, get the hell out or find a way to turn the tables.

"Those were responses," the researcher said. "How would you feel?"

"Feel?

Why would I feel?"

Psychopaths

can, however, feel primitive protoemotions like anger, frustration and

rage. Occasionally, even full-blown psychopaths like Eric Harris (of

Columbine infamy) will display what seem like flickers of empathy. Eric

appeared to feel bad for his dog when it was sick and, along with Dylan,

apologized on his basement videotapes to his parents for the trouble he

anticipated they would experience after the massacre. Since psychopaths are

so often masters of feigning emotional responses, however, it can be hard to

discern what might be an actual moment of empathy from another simulation.

A

probable psychopath that I knew in the early Eighties seemed to have a

subordinate part of his personality that had elements of conscience and

empathy. For example, he once warned me that he was evil and that I

should have nothing to do with him. Foolishly I responded

sympathetically, and rather than heeding the warning I told him I thought he

was being too hard on himself. For a moment he seemed to take me behind

the scenes of his inner psychopathic machinery. He said that he was just

kidding when he told me that he was evil, but then told me that when he said he

was kidding that it was just an example of his deceptiveness so that he could

disown his own statement. Then he said no, he really was just kidding, and put

on again his usual charming, smiling demeanor. Although this might seem like

merely a mind game and a psychopath toying with someone, it was also a type of

confession. He was intentionally going in and out of psychopathic mode to

show me what he was.

That

same evening, he related a specific incident in his past when he felt that his

soul died. This did not seem a mind game at all; a palpable sense of

suffering and bitterness was in the air as he confessed this. He also confessed

many traumatic details of his life that I was later able to verify.

Although it is a classic psychopathic technique to reveal some truths as part

of playing someone, I don't think that was the complete explanation in this

case. There also seemed to be motivations of actual confession and

reaching out for help.

Months

later I discovered a series of deceptions and thefts he had committed against

me. In what appeared to be an act of calculated carelessness, he kept

evidence of all his petty crimes against me in a place where I could easily

find it, as though a part of him desired to be caught.

A

Psychopathic Paradox

In my

research on psychopaths I noticed an obvious paradox: psychopaths, everyone

agrees, are notoriously unempathetic, but they are also, everyone agrees,

superb manipulators able to accurately read other people and gauge their weak

points with fine precision. None of the research I encountered seemed to

comment on or explain this paradox, so I'm going to offer my own

speculation. Non-psychopaths are often inaccurate in their reading of

others because of their own complex emotional lives. When emotions are

swirling around inside of you it is all too easy to project feelings and

expectations onto others. We also tend to assume that others must have a

similar range of emotions as we have. Most dogs, for example, display a

range of emotions that seem very recognizable to us, so it is natural to assume

that our fellow humans must have these as well. The emotional vacuity of

the psychopath combined with their cold rationality may allow their psyche to

register an image of our personalities as if on a clean photographic plate.

They may be able to recognize our needs and vulnerabilities much more

clearly since there is little emotional confusion within them to obscure

that. With a focused, predator consciousness as their inner baseline,

they can see all of our characteristics that deviate from that baseline in

distinct relief. Even if we are complex, it may not take complex insight

to manipulate us because even complex people have very stereotyped

vulnerabilities and therefore can be manipulated by flattery, sexual attention,

greed, intimidation and fear.

The

Charm, Magnetism and Charisma of the Psychopath

"He is

such a caring man. So intelligent. He can always find the right words to reach

your heart. You must love him." —

Woman who befriended a rapist/murderer on death row.

Everyone

who has observed psychopaths has noted their intense charm and magnetism, which

will often cause them to be the most popular individuals in almost any social

circle. Many of the most popular movie heroes, Clint Eastwood's

Dirty Harry character comes to mind, are psychopaths. In

Cleckley's classic study of psychopaths, "likeable,"

"charming," "intelligent," "alert,"

"impressive," "confidence-inspiring," and "a great

success with the ladies" are some of the most common descriptions of

psychopaths. Most people labor under insecurities and psychopaths are often

objects of intense admiration since they possess desirable traits such as

overwhelming self-confidence, decisiveness and attractiveness to the opposite

sex. Even well trained mental health professionals with substantial knowledge

of psychopathy are deceived and seduced into sexual relationships with known

psychopaths. For example, a prison psychologist had an affair with a psychopath

and planned to marry him after his release. When a psychiatrist showed

the prison psychologist a copy of Without Conscience, by

Robert Hare, the world's leading expert on psychopathy, it had no effect on her

love and marriage plans with the psychopath.

Hare

writes about,

. . . A

con artist who became Man of the Year, president of the Chamber of

Commerce and member of the Republican Executive Committee in the town

where he resided for ten years. When found out, this man was unconcerned, and

stated that he knew if he was ever discovered 'these trusting people

would stand behind me. A good liar is a good judge of people.' He

was right in many senses. The local community rushed to his support. 'I

assess (his) genuineness, integrity, and devotion to duty to rank right

alongside of President Abraham Lincoln,' wrote the Republican party

chairman.

I have a

theory of the often-astonishing appeal of psychopaths, cult leaders, super

salesmen and demagogues of various sorts that uses magnetism as an

analogue. Most people are highly fragmented and oppressed by what

psychologists call psychic entropy — the anxious tape loops and other

distracted thoughts and fantasies that crowd their attentional space.

When a person of single-minded focus and confidence appears it is analogous to

placing a powerful magnet below a sheet of paper on which there is a scattering

of iron filings. The magnet immediately organizes the scattered filings

into a coherent pattern that reflects its magnetic field. The scattered

personality feels an immense relief to be structured in this way from the

outside and craves further contact and submission to the magnetic personality

that can produce this effect, relieving them of their default state of psychic

entropy.

Psychopaths

and Pawns

"My

belief is that if I say something it goes. I am the law. If you don't like it,

you die." –Eric

Harris

Psychopaths

are predators and their predation is oriented toward members of their own

species whom they view as pawns, suckers, targets and victims. They are

unable to empathize with anyone and are therefore completely unfazed, if not

contemptuous, by the suffering of their victims. Although they may appear

charming and solicitous, covertly they are domineering, hostile and

exploitative. According to Hare,

Their

statements often reveal their belief that the world is made up of 'givers

and takers,' predators and prey, and that it would be very foolish not to

exploit the weakness of others. In addition, they can be very astute at

determining what those weaknesses are and using them for their own benefit. 'I

like to con people. I'm conning you now,' said . . . a forty-five- year-old man

serving his first prison sentence for stock fraud.

Psychopaths

recognize no rights of others while feeling infinite entitlement for

themselves. They will, therefore, violate any boundaries to get what they

want. Often they will take pleasure in dominating, exploiting and

humiliating their victims.

Grandiosity

"I hate

the fucking world. I feel like God. I am higher than almost anyone

in the fucking world in terms of universal intelligence." –Eric

Harris (From his journal, which was entitled "The Book of God."

Eric also wrote a composition for school entitled "Zeus and I" in which he

compared himself to Zeus.)

Although

other personality types also display grandiosity, psychopaths seem to be

particularly high on themselves. Hare described a psychopath named Earl

whose long list of accomplishments included stabbing a teacher with a fork in

kindergarten, becoming a pimp at age 10 by procuring young girls including his

12-year-old sister, multiple counts of assault, rape, theft, fraud, attempted

murder, sexually abusing his daughter, and raping his daughter's

girlfriend. Earl described his self-esteem this way: "I'm always

being told by others how great I am and how there's nothing I can't

do — sometimes I think they're just shitting me, but a man's got to believe in

himself, right? When I check myself out, I like what I see."

Pathological

Lying

"I lie a

lot — almost constant, and to everybody, just to keep my own ass out of the

water. Let's see what are some big lies I have told . . . No, I haven't

been making more bombs." –Eric

Harris

Psychopaths

lie with such ease and coolness that they can become addicted to it and will

often lie when it serves no practical purpose. They have no anxiety about

lying and are often extremely convincing and are even able to pass polygraph

tests. Polygraph tests register physiological stress responses to the anxiety

of lying, but since psychopaths have no anxiety about lying, the lies register

no different than their baseline. Psychopaths also lie to themselves and

may get deceived by complex beliefs about their own talents, powers and

abilities. As Hare put it,

Lying

comes so naturally to psychopaths that one of them compared it to

breathing. Often they take considerable pride in their facility with

lies. One female psychopath, when asked if she lied easily, laughed and

replied, 'I'm the best. I'm really good at it, I think because I sometimes

admit to something bad about myself. They'd think, well, if she's admitting to

that she must be telling the truth about the rest.' She also said that

she sometimes 'salts the mine:' with a nugget of truth. 'If they think some of

what you say is true, they usually think it's all true.'

Lack of

Remorse, Shame, Guilt and Empathy

A

psychopath can commit the most heinous deed without experiencing a trace of

remorse, guilt or empathy for victims. A lack of empathy, however, does

not mean he will to do harm. Many psychopaths are nonviolent and may

instead be found amongst white-collar criminals. But when a psychopath

also happens to be a sexual sadist, the lack of empathy can produce a

catastrophic result — a remorseless, efficient rapist and/or killer. Ted Bundy,

who may have murdered as many as a hundred women, was once asked about guilt:

"Guilt? It's this mechanism we use to control people. It's an

illusion. It's a kind of social control mechanism — and it's very

unhealthy. It does terrible things to our bodies. And there are much

better ways to control our behavior than that rather extraordinary use of

guilt." An expert on serial killers I once heard interviewed recalled an

instance where he asked a serial killer what he thought about what he

systematically stalked a young woman and prepared to abduct, torture, molest

and kill her. He replied, "Takin' care of business." The shame,

guilt and anxiety that might inhibit or trip up the average criminal may be

entirely absent in psychopaths, allowing them to be cool, collected and

efficient. Where we might hope to find inner conflict about an act of

violence we may instead find only pleasure and considerable pride. On the

block I grew up on in the Bronx a guy in his twenties would sometimes show up

who carried a laminated clipping in his wallet that he showed off every chance

he got. The clipping described how he had fatally stabbed someone for

bumping into him at a dance.

Glib

and/or Warped Moral Reasoning

If a

psychopath attempts to justify a crime, the moral reasoning is likely to be an

act, but if sincere it will be glib and superficial or absurdly

rationalized. A rapist psychopath justified himself this way: "What's a

guy gonna do? She had a nice ass. I helped myself." Joyti De-Laurey

, a female psychopath who stole more than 7 million dollars from her employers

to lead a lavish lifestyle, felt sure that God was on her side. She kept

notebooks she called "Bibles of Daily Thoughts," which contained her letters to

God. In one of them she wrote: "Dear God. Please help me. I need one more

helping of what's mine and then I must cut down and cease in time all the

plundering. Please ensure my job is safe and my integrity is

unquestioned."

While

some might comfort themselves that religiosity should be an immunization of

some sort against psychopathy, the opposite seems to be the case. Religion can

easily be used by a psychopath like Jim Jones as a justification for an agenda

of power, greed, sexual conquest and sadistic manipulation. Since

religious communities tend to assume bonds of affinity amongst members, they

are the perfect hunting grounds for psychopaths.

A Need

for Risk, Excitement and Novel Stimulation

Because

of their emotional vacuity, psychopaths may have an extreme and overriding need

for risk and life on the edge. They are often high-risk thrill-seekers,

as this may be the only way they can feel anything. For example, a female

psychopath said, "But what I find most exciting is walking through airports

with drugs. Christ! What a high!" This need for continual stimulation, as we

shall see later, is a key point of connection between psychopathy and the

financial meltdown.

The

Power of Now

A

related quality is that psychopaths tend to live for the moment and usually

don't dwell on the past or future. They tend to be clever situationalists

interested in getting as much stimulation out of the day that they can. They

are usually less interested in long-range planning and tend to disregard

consequences for themselves and others. A psychopath in high finance, for

example, will be much more interested in making a windfall profit this quarter

rather than doing what is in the long-term interest of his company or clients.

Disregard

of Consequences

Since

psychopaths tend to live for the now, and are often unable to feel fear, they

tend to have little concern about consequences for themselves and others.

They are usually very poor at mentally picturing the consequences of their

actions. Particularly fuzzy is any image they might have of consequences

for their victims. The excitement of immediate rewards seems much more real

than the vagueness of future consequences.

Don't

Know Thy Self

Psychopaths

usually don't find any fault with themselves. They apparently don't notice the

inconsistency between their enormous sense of entitlement and their stunning

disregard for the rights of others. If they acknowledge anything wrong

they can always blame it on someone else or on society. For example, a

young psychopath said, "I wouldn't be here if my parents had come across when I

needed them. What kind of parents would let their son rot in a place like this?"

Asked about his children, he replied, "I've never seen them. I think they

were given up for adoption. How the hell should I know?" A refusal to

accept blame can also characterize a psychopathic culture, and I certainly

can't recall hearing a single mea culpa during this financial meltdown.

Psychopath

as Predator, Parasite and Chameleon

Psychopaths

typically lead a parasitic lifestyle. They are experts at finding people and

institutions that can be drained of resources. The host could be a vulnerable

person with a bank account or a Wall Street investment firm. Many

researchers describe psychopaths as chameleons because of their great

proficiency at blending in and disguising their true agendas and nature.

As the author of Columbine, David Cullen, put it, most

people think Hannibal Lechter when they think of psychopaths, but it would be

more accurate if they thought of Hugh Grant. Robert Hare related a recent

incident where he was taken in by a psychopath and he said that his "antenna"

weren't aroused at all. One researcher described the psychopath as a

"near perfect invisible human predator." Another described him as a

chameleon that becomes "an image of what you haven't done for

yourself."

Ann

Rule's book, The Stranger Beside Me,

describes how she worked across a desk from Ted Bundy at a suicide hotline and

became his close friend. She had great trouble accepting that her friend

and fellow counselor was one of the most notorious serial killers in history.

Psychopaths

are known to be masters of tapping into the vulnerabilities of others, at first

by appearing to be what victims are hoping to find, and later taking ruthless

advantage of their fears and insecurities.

People

frequently report that in the presence of a psychopath their hearts are racing

and they are sitting at the edge of their chair. The air around them may

seem to crackle with electricity, which some find thrilling and magnetic.

According to a survey conducted by psychologists Reid and M. J. Meloy, one in

three mental-health and criminal justice professionals report such feelings

when interviewing psychopaths. In their paper based on the survey, Reid

and Meloy speculate that this may be an ancient intraspecies predator-response

system.

I've had

some experiences that would provide a little anecdotal support to their

speculation about an ancient intraspecies predator-response system. One

time on a daytime train ride to Brooklyn I had the distinct feeling of close

proximity to a murderer/predator. The feeling was quite unpleasant and

seemed primordial and almost cellular, a feeling that seemed primitive enough

not to be specifically human, but rather to be a feeling that a great many

other organisms experienced. What I experienced was the very unpleasant

sensation of my body as meat, as a possible food source for a predator.

As I looked around the subway car, however, I couldn't locate the source.

Another time, around 1987, I had a very similar feeling, also on in the NYC

subway system, but this time while waiting on the platform of the 14th Street

Union Square station. I looked all around me, but the only people I could

see seemed fairly harmless. A couple of seconds after my brief visual

survey I saw two adolescent males, both of them relatively small and skinny,

coming down the staircase. One of them was wearing an Eight Ball leather

jacket. Eight Ball leather jackets, cleverly sewn together out of colored

segments that depict a pool table and a large eight ball, were one of the

hottest retail items in the inner city, the Air Jordans of that particular

season. Having only just left a six-year stint as teacher and dean of a

public high school in the South Bronx, where I was also the building security

coordinator, I understood the significance of such a jacket. Five minutes

after leaving my class, a student of mine, who had an imposing physical size

and presence, was shot with a shotgun when he resisted giving up a different,

though similarly popular, type of leather jacket. Anyone wearing an Eight Ball

jacket likely took it from someone else and/or had the means to defend this

high status item — probably with a device that could easily make a series of

nine-millimeter holes in a would-be jacket thief of any size.

Besides

the implications of the one boy's jacket, these two adolescent males lit up as

the source of my predator-alert feelings. Since Union Square was a

well-populated station I didn't feel that I was in imminent danger, despite the

sensation of my predator-response system, and decided to stand near these two

adolescents when they reached the platform. The more dominant-seeming of

the two appeared to be surveying people on the platform, many of them

well-dressed professional types, and said to his partner, "So much meat

on the hook and we can't do shit." I understood his statement to mean

that he saw that there were many prime mugging victims around, but that the

crowded station prevented them from acting.

If my

feelings and suppositions were correct, this would be the second time that I

had encountered a dyad — a two person killing team. Some famous dyads include

Bonnie and Clyde, Leopold and Loeb, and, far more recently, Eric Harris and

Dylan Klebold. In both of the dyads I encountered, it was instantly

obvious that one of the pair was dominant and acted toward the other like a

puppet master. According to Columbine, dyads

are much more likely to be complimentary rather than similar.

Are

Psychopaths a Subspecies?

"How

dare you think that I and you are part of the same species when we are so

different. You are human? You are a robot. And if you pissed me off

in the past you will die . . ."

–Eric

Harris

Although

psychopathy, like every other psychological attribute, has an environmental

component, its source may be biological. According to at least one major study

of identical twins, psychopathy does seem to have a strong genetic component.

It is often impossible to account for a psychopath based on his environment and

upbringing. Psychopaths often occur in caring families amongst empathetic

siblings. Eric Harris quoted Shakespeare in an entry he left in his day

planner for Mother's Day : "Good wombs have borne bad sons."

Alan

Harrington, in his book Psychopaths, states that the

psychopath is "the man of the future." Other researchers, among them Dr. Marnie

Rice, an Ontario-based psychologist, echo this sentiment by claiming that the

condition isn't a "disorder" at all, but is more accurately considered an

adaptive, evolutionary trait. From the point of view of this theory, in

societies where most people are law-abiding and inhibited by conscience, a

finely tuned, camouflaged predator can find a great, adaptive niche. Part of

their successful evolutionary adaptation hinges on the fact that psychopaths

become sexually active earlier and remain more promiscuous than their non-psychopath

counterparts. Besides the frequency of their sexual transactions, their

uninhibited use of coercion and exploitation, as well as their tendency to

freely abandon partners and quickly take up with new ones, means that they are

considerably better than average at passing on their genes. Psychopaths

also seem to selectively target reproductively fertile women and are less

likely to sexually target the same gender or the prepubescent.

Part

Two: Psychopaths and the Financial Meltdown

Two

businessmen are walking together, each carrying a briefcase. We're only

morally bankrupt,' says one. 'Thank God,' says the other.

Are

Psychopaths Uniquely Adapted to Succeed in High Finance?

Although

Harrington called the psychopath the "man of the future," when it comes to the

world of high finance the psychopath may be the man of the present and recent

past. R. J. Smith, in his book, The Psychopath in

Society, views psychopathy as an orientation encouraged and

rewarded by the materialistic, competitive, marketplace values of our

capitalistic society. Our tour of psychopathy emphasized those who committed

violent crimes, the easily defined psychopaths who, by their open acts of

transgression, are available for study. However, the cleverer, more successful

psychopaths are likely to elude detection and may even achieve great success in

society. It is the failed psychopaths, those who are not able to blend in

and restrain their impulses, whom we hear about in newspaper headlines. Most

psychopaths are not violent criminals; they may be more likely to pursue

white-collar crime, where the payoff is so much higher and the odds of

detection so much lower.

Psychopaths

are perfectly designed for success in many fields, especially business, law and

politics. They have higher IQs on average than the general population; they are

charming, charismatic and manipulative; they can be decisive and take risks

without anxiety, and they are ruthless, cunning and coldly rational.

Psychopaths often personify many of the traits that the human resource

departments of many corporations look for in job candidates: confidence,

charisma, decisiveness, emotional detachment, coolness under fire and

relentless drive. Take for example Bernie Madoff, who was described by a

reporter who grilled him for two hours as "cool as a cucumber." He was

relentless in his drive for success and was not inhibited by conscience when he

took money from friends, schools or charities. His all-confident charisma and

capacity for deception took in many very astute people. Madoff was a

master at making it seem like he didn't particularly want your business so that

prospective customers had to court him, and when he acquiesced they felt

privileged to be part of an exclusive club.

A

Parasitic Agenda

Psychopaths

are natural parasites, and parasites always look for rich deposits of energy

such as blood, sexual chi, and money. Wall Street and other spheres of

high financs are like super-charged magnets for psychopaths. As Hare put

it, "If I were unable to study psychopaths in prison, my next choice would very

likely be a place like the Vancouver Stock Exchange." Vast deposits of

energy in the form of money are available for the clever and ruthless

manipulator with a head for numbers. In the process of manipulating money

the ambitious psychopath may also achieve prestige, if not celebrity.

Since they are emotionally vacuous, money fills up a psychopath; he can use

money to fulfill all his needs and won't be tormented by guilt or a sense of

emptiness.

World as

Cookie Jar

Opportunities

to steal money are irresistible for psychopaths. As one psychopath

convicted of selling forged corporate bonds put it, "I wouldn't be in prison if

there weren't so many cookie jars just begging me to put my hand in." For

psychopaths, known for their grandiosity and ability to "think big," the entire

global economy is a planet-sized cookie jar begging to be plundered.

Psychopathy,

the Nightmare from which We are Trying to Awaken

The

affinity of psychopaths for high finance is certainly not my discovery.

My original working title for this essay was: "Reptiles in Brooks Brothers

Suits." I abandoned that title when I discovered that Robert Hare, the

world's leading expert on psychopathy, had co-authored an excellent book

entitled Snakes in Suits — When Psychopaths go to Work. I

almost abandoned the whole project, wondering if I had anything new to

say. After some consideration I realized that although the main

hypothesis was already well established by others, I had a few new points to

add and, in any case, the subject is so important, and with such vast

implications for society, that I felt obliged to continue. The damage that

psychopaths do to the global economy, and human civilization in general, is

incalculable. As the James Joyce character Stephen Dedalus said,

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken." Psychopathy may be

one of the prime drivers of the nightmarish aspect of history.

Situational

Psychopathy, a Confusion of Terms

To

understand the depth of connection between psychopathy and the financial

meltdown we need to acknowledge that not everyone who acts like a psychopath is

a psychopath. As we pointed out earlier, about ten percent of the

population is in a grey zone where they are not full blown psychopaths but have

enough psychopathic aspects to be of concern to society. A psychopathic

culture can cause people who might otherwise be restrained or even moral to act

like psychopaths. The stress and culture of combat, for example, can

cause some soldiers to act like psychopaths, needlessly killing civilians even

when not specifically ordered to do so. As veterans, these soldiers may

be tormented by profound feelings of guilt and remorse. Many male

subcultures have a psychopathic attitude toward women such that it is considered

virtuous and manly to ruthlessly exploit women without remorse. Street

and motorcycle gangs, organized crime families and syndicates, all tend to have

psychopathic cultures. The person who is most ruthless, cool under fire,

and skilled in lying and manipulation will likely be deferred to or made the

leader of a gang or other criminal enterprise.

Non-psychopaths

who act like psychopaths are frequently called sociopaths. Sociopath is a

term that many researchers dislike since it is often incorrectly used as a

synonym for psychopath. A sociopath is someone who acts in an anti-social way,

who commits transgressions without taking moral responsibility. Most

psychopaths are sociopaths, but many sociopaths are not psychopaths. If

that's not confusing enough, the DSM created a third unilluminating term,

antisocial personality disorder or ASPD, which they define as " . .

. a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others

that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into

adulthood." Some say that ASPD is just psychobabble for "criminal."

My former writing mentor, E.L. Doctorow, once called such psychiatric terms

"the industrialized form of storytelling." We do, however, have a

rigorous way of defining and diagnosing psychopaths — Hare's psychopathy

checklist — so it is the other two terms that seem to muddy the waters and

create endless confusion. I propose, and will hereafter use, the terms

"situational psychopathy" and "situational psychopath" because I believe these

clarify the key difference. Some people, who are not psychopaths, will

act like psychopaths in some situations and there are some situations that seem

to bring out psychopathic behaviors in non-psychopaths. The stress of combat,

as we discussed above, is the classic situation of situational pscyhopathy.

Bond trading and the floor of the stock exchange are often described as combat

situations, with people screaming and shouting orders amidst frantic activity

and general chaos. Many areas of high finance seem to be psychopathic

cultures (a culture that generates situational psychopathy) where

psychopaths and situational psychopaths act similarly. Robert Hare was a

consultant to the excellent documentary, The Corporation, which

documents the psychopathic culture that reigns in many, but not all,

corporations. As illustrative examples of how this psychopathic culture

is generated we will next take a look at the movie, Wall

Street, and the documentary, Enron: The Smartest

Guys in the Room.

Psychopathy

on Wall Street

No other

artifact of popular culture captures the mythology of Wall Street so well as

Oliver Stone's classic 1987 movie, Wall Street. Oliver

Stone's father was a Wall Street trader and the film was meticulously

researched and informed by insider information. Twenty-two years later it seems

not just mythological, but also remarkably prophetic. The personification of

Wall Street in the movie is a corporate raider, Gordon Gecko, a man who we are

told, "…had an ethical bypass at birth," a description that sounds almost like

a definition of psychopathy. The character is named after a reptile and

Gecko lives in a super-charged atmosphere of reptilian proto emotions. He is

continually saying things like, "we're in the kill zone, lock and load," and,

"I want every orifice in his fucking body flowing red."

The main

thing Gecko wants in prospective employees is killer instinct and emotional

vacuity: "Give me guys who are poor, smart and hungry, and no feelings."

He has complete remorseless contempt for his competitors and the thousands of

victims of his hostile takeovers: "We beat them because they're sheep, and

sheep get slaughtered."

Gecko

seems motivated by risk and the atmosphere of combat. He tells his young

protégé, Bud Fox, that it's "trench warfare out there pal. It's better than

sex."

Gecko is

named after a reptile, but his protégé, Bud Fox, is named after a mammal. While

Gecko seems pure psychopath, Fox is obviously not a psychopath; he is a man of

conscience who eventually acts nobly. The Bud Fox character personifies the

situational psychopath, a person who becomes seduced by a psychopathic culture

into acting in ways that violate his essential human values.

Enron:

The Smartest Guys in the Room

Enron:

the Smartest Guys in the Room is a brilliant 2005 documentary about the Enron

scandal. Imdb.com offers the following summary:

Enron

dives from the seventh largest US company to bankruptcy in less than a year in

this tale told chronologically. The emphasis is on human drama, from suicide to

20,000 people sacked: the personalities of Ken Lay (with Falwellesque

rectitude), Jeff Skilling (he of big ideas), Lou Pai (gone with $250 M), and

Andy Fastow (the dark prince) dominate. Along the way, we watch Enron game

California's deregulated electricity market, get a free pass from Arthur

Andersen (which okays the dubious mark-to-market accounting), use greed to

manipulate banks and brokerages (Merrill Lynch fires the analyst who questions

Enron's rise), and hear from both Presidents Bush what great guys these are.

The film

also provides fascinating glimpses into a psychopathic culture dominating a

major corporation. It would be presumptuous for me to diagnosis any

subject of the documentary as a psychopath. A diagnosis of psychopathy

should be made by a professional who has significant access to the person in

question and has been rigorously trained in the use of Hare's psychopathy

checklist, the widely accepted tool for screening possible psychopaths.

Most of the people involved in the Enron scandal were probably not

psychopaths. As the director of the documentary put it,

These

were not extraordinary people, extraordinarily bad people, they were

everyday people and many of them off the job were

extraordinarily decent people, but on the job they were killers

and how did that happen? Well, in some ways, I think, the only conclusion

you can come to is that the culture of Enron infected them in a way that they

lost any sense of moral perspective.

It is

easy to recognize many instances of at least situational psychopathy in the

Enron culture. Many have pointed out how high testosterone and predatory

competition dominated the culture of Enron. As one very candid former Enron

employee put it, "Talking about my compensation — If I step on somebody's

throat and that doubles it, well I'll stomp on the guy's throat. That's how

people were." Jeffrey Skilling said that he liked to hire "guys with

spikes." In the most famous instance of situational psychopathy, a sound

bite widely replayed on TV news, two Enron energy traders who knew they were

being recorded, have a bit of informal conversation. The dialogue

takes place when Enron was artificially creating rolling blackouts in

California so as to manipulate the energy market through systematic extortion.

Here's a

sample:

"Yeah,

Grandma Millie, man, she's the one who couldn't figure out how to fuckin' vote

on the butterfly ballot. Now she wants her fucking money back on the power you

charged right up her ass."

Enron

president Jeffrey Skilling, perhaps the most visible of the Enron players,

displayed a number of psychopathic values and tendencies. A reporter who

interviewed Skilling just before he resigned from Enron, left absolutely

convinced of the improbable story that he was leaving Enron because of family reasons.

As the reporter put it in his interview for Enron,

Skilling

convinced me that it was for personal reasons. I left his meeting

feeling sort of

emotional because of the concern that he seemed to be showing about the

relationship he had with his family. He appeared to be distraught and I

remember saying to an investor, 'If he's not telling the truth, then it's a

good thing he quit his day job because he needs to go to

Hollywood.' Skilling always seemed convinced of his own innocence

despite all the dramatic evidence to the contrary. His moral

reasoning seemed to embody the glib superficiality and sense of entitlement so

common in psychopaths. At one point Skilling looks a video camera right in the

eye and with a look of poignant sincerity says: 'We're the good guys. We're on

the side of angels.'

Skilling

and a number of the key Enron players seemed motivated by the exhilaration of

risk even when it was at the cost of self-interest. In the documentary we

are told by people who knew Skilling personally that despite the fact that he "

. . . portrayed himself as somebody who very tightly monitored risk, in reality

he's a gambler, he gambled away huge sums of money before he was twenty years

old by making wild bets on the market." It's also pointed out that

Skilling " . . . was a huge risk taker. He actually talked about wanting

to go on trips that were so perilous that someone could actually die." In

fact, Skilling organized many such dangerous trips for himself and other Enron

executives. These high-risk adventures yielded many broken bones and

other serious injuries and no doubt helped to inculcate the high testosterone

Enron culture with its emphasis on aggression, risk and a thrill-seeking life

on the edge. While there was so much evidence of the garish palette of

reptilian proto emotions, there were few displays of other sorts of feelings

and a noticeable lack of empathy. At one point in the documentary, Lou Pai, who

would later flee Enron with a 250-million-dollar golden parachute, said,

"I'm not feeling anything."

Enron as

a corporation seemed to embody the parasite strategy of going after a rich

deposit of energy and finding a way to drain it. Rather than getting into

the energy production business, they were mostly interested in being energy

middlemen using a variety of trickster strategies to acquire wealth and power

without producing anything of value to society. Fed Chairman Allan

Greenspan, and other true believers in the innate intelligence of the

marketplace to self-regulate, was not wary enough about parasitic tricksters

who like to take huge risks with other people's money. As a result, the

Enron scandal came as a huge shock, but not enough of a shock to get the SEC to

uncover Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, which they had been warned about

repeatedly. Also, as we are all now painfully aware, there was a

remarkable lack of action by any government agency or regulatory force while

sub-prime mortgages were being feverishly propagated by a whole sector of the

economy that was infected by a similar trickster passion for gambling with

enough of other people's money to threaten the economy of our entire planet.

The Flaw

in Greenspan's Model

During

congressional testimony and several interviews, former Fed Chairman Allan

Greenspan acknowledged that he was shocked to discover that there was an

essential flaw in his model of the economy. Before Congress he

acknowledged the flaw, but in densely abstracted Greenspanease. In

interviews he described the flaw more conversationally (unfortunately, I cannot

quote verbatim) and said that he falsely assumed that self-interest would keep

people from doing certain things. In other words, Greenspan recognized

that his model had a psychological flaw that made an incorrect assumption about

human motivation. I believe that Greenspan would have been quicker to recognize

this flaw in his understanding of motivation if he knew more about

psychopathy. Psychopaths are, of course, motivated by self-interest, but

there is another, more primary motivation that will often trump

self-interest. As we have discussed earlier, psychopaths are emotionally

vacuous, and therefore they are powerfully drawn toward risk taking in order to

feel anything. Psychopaths also live in the present and are not very

concerned about consequences for themselves and others. Harsher penalties may

not be much of a deterrent for psychopaths and might actually contribute to the

adrenaline rush they often crave when they take risks.

Repairing

Greenspan's Flaw

If

harsher penalties would likely be ineffective, is there any way to change the

model so as to discourage psychopathic plundering?

First,

we must repair the flaw in Greenspan's model. The assumption of

self-interest as a psychological constant underestimates the irrationality that

so often drives individual and collective psychology and behavior. Although

psychopaths are more rational than average, any casino owner knows that, even

for nonpsychopaths, the thrill of risk taking, combined with greed and

over-confidence will often override rationality.

We must

be aware of psychopaths, their techniques and their motivations, when we design

financial structures. Usually I have little confidence in social engineering,

and rarely make any suggestions in that direction, but I do have one for the

problem of psychopaths and Wall Street. Sometimes when computer hackers

are caught they are then hired by government and/or business to help defend

against or catch other computer hackers. Kevin Mitnick is a notable

example of a reformed hacker who now runs his own computer security company,

Mitnick Security Consulting, LLC. Many have commented that the SEC tends

to employ those trained in finance but who are not as clever, ruthless or

determined as those they are trying to monitor. I would suggest that they

be open to hiring psychopaths with MBAs and offer them multi-million dollar

bonuses and recognition, celebrity recognition if possible, for catching high

level scams. Since psychopaths are a force of nature we are unlikely to

eliminate, we should instead harness their unique talents to serve the socially

useful purpose of catching other psychopaths. Who could possibly be better

qualified, better able to pierce strategies of deception, than other highly

motivated psychopaths? To use Wall Street metaphorically, we need a

highly motivated team of clever reptiles and foxes to catch other reptiles and

foxes.

In

Conclusion

Most of

the problems that the human species confront, such as racism, violence,

warfare, environmental pollution, and economic issues, all stem from a common

source — human psychology. It is human psychology that decides short-term

profits are more important than the long-term consequences to our

biosphere. All wars are a psychological product. Money is a

psychological artifact. By consensus we have agreed that these symbolic

counters have value, and it is our psychology that decides what we are willing

to do, or not do, to get hold of these artifacts. The irrationality and

ever-fluctuating emotionality of markets and economic structures are well recognized

and rigorously studied in fields like Behavioral Economics and Behavioral

Finance. In recent years neuropsychology and economics have merged and

researchers have made fascinating discoveries by observing people with

functional MRI scans while they make financial decisions. Allan Greenspan's

most famous phrase is "irrational exuberance," and Robert Shiller, an American

economist and Yale professor, wrote a bestselling book entitled Irrational

Exuberance, which predicted the burst of the stock market bubble in

the late 1990s, and warned about the emergence of a housing bubble after the

dot-com bubble burst in 2000. Another of Shiller's books is entitled Animal

Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global

Capitalism. The book opens with the following two sentences:

To

understand how economies work and how we can manage them and prosper, we must

pay attention to the thought patterns that animate people's ideas and feelings,

their animal spirits. We will never really understand important economic events

unless we confront the fact that their causes are largely mental in nature.

Many of

the thought patterns and animal spirits driving economic events are generated

by psychopaths and situational pyshopaths, and to prevent another such economic

catastrophe we must take this into account as we design regulations, checks and

balances. We especially need an agency that, unlike the SEC, includes a core of

highly motivated and talented investigators who understand the remorseless mind

of the psychopath and who can stalk those who stalk us, the reptiles and foxes

who will forever try to steal the world's treasure.

Notes

[i] Jane

M. Murphy, PhD, Psychiatric labeling in cross-cultural perspective ( Science

191, March 12, 1976), 1019-28.

[ii]

Robert D. Hare, PhD, and Paul Babiak, PhD, Without Conscience: The Disturbing

World of Psychopaths Among Us (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), 87.

[iii]

Hare and Babiak, Without Conscience , 94.

[iv]

Robert D. Hare, PhD, and Paul Babiak, PhD, Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths go

to Work (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2007), 18.

[v] Hare

and Babiak, Snakes in Suits , 118.

[vi]

Hare and Babiak, Snakes in Suits , 22.

[vii]

Hare and Babiak, Snakes in Suits , 55.

[viii]

Hare and Babiak, Without Conscience , 86.

[ix]

David Cullen, Columbine (New York: Twelve, 2009), page#.

[x] Hare

and Babiak, Snakes in Suits , 269.

Hervey

Cleckley, MD, The Mask of Sanity (London: Henry Kimpton, 1941), 353-54.

[xii]

Hare and Babiak, Snakes in Suits , 67.

[xiii]

Hare and Babiak, Snakes in Suits, 279.

[xiv]

Hare and Babiak, Without Conscience, 111-12.

[xv]

Cullen, page#.

[xvi]

Hare and Babiak, Without Conscience, 49.

[xvii]

Cullen, page#.

[xviii]

Hare and Babiak, Without Conscience , 99.

[xix]

Cullen, page#.

[xx]

Hare and Babiak, Without Conscience , 47.

[xxi]

Stephen G. Michaud, Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer (Irving, TX:

Authorlink, 2000), 281.

[xxii]

Hare and Babiak, Without Conscience , 88.

[xxiii]

Hare and Babiak, Snakes in Suits , 237-38.

[xxiv]

Hare and Babiak, Without Conscience , 61.

[xxv]

Hare and Babiak, Without Conscience , 21.

[xxvi]

Hare and Babiak, Snakes in Suits , 39.

[xxvii]

John Seabrook. Suffering souls: the search for the roots of psychopathy, New

Yorker (November 10, 2008).

[xxviii]

Cullen, page#.

[xxix]

Medical News Today: Psychology/Psychiatry, The origins of antisocial behaviour,

twin study, http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/25078.php

[xxx]

Alan Harrington, Psychopaths (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1973),

[xxxi]

Hare and Babiak, Without Conscience, 114.

[xxxii]

Robert Joseph Smith, The Psychopath in Society (New York: Academic Press,

1978).

[xxxiii]

Hare and Babiak, Without Conscience, 119.

[xxxiv]

Hare and Babiak, Without Conscience, 121.

[xxxv]

Howard H. Goldman, Review of General Psychiatry (Columbus, OH: McGraw-Hill),

341.

[xxxvi]

Wall Street, Directed by Oliver Stone (Century City, CA: 20th Century Fox,

1987).

[xxxvii]

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room , Directed by Alex Gibney (New York, NY:

Magnolia, 2005).

[xxxviii]

The Internet Movie Database, [email protected], Enron: the smartest guys

in the room, plot summary,http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1016268/plotsummary.

[xxxix]

Robert J. Shiller and George A. Akerlof, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology

Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism , (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2009), 1.

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Image by Muffet, courtesy of Creative Commons license.