The Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton Read Free Book Online Page B

psychopath.
    Within, I should add, the rarefied, cloistral confines of a maximum-security personality disorder unit:
    “A powerful top-of-the-range sports car is neither a good thing nor a bad thing in and of itself, but depends on the person who’s sitting behind the wheel. It may, for instance, permit a skilled and experienced motorist to get his wife to the hospital in time to give birth to their child. Or, in a parallel universe, run an eighteen-year-old and his girlfriend off a cliff.
    “In essence, it’s all in the handling. Quite simply, the skill of the driver …”
    He’s right. Perhaps the one stand-alone feature of the psychopath, the ultimate “killer” difference that distinguishes the psychopathic personality from the personalities of most “normal” members of the population, is that psychopaths don’t give a damn what their fellow citizens think of them. They simply couldn’t care less how society, as a whole, might contemplate their actions. In a world in which image and branding and personal reputation are more sacrosanct than ever—what are we up to now: 500 million on Facebook? 200 million videos on YouTube? One closed-circuit TV camera for every 20 people in the U.K.?—this constitutes, no doubt, one of the fundamental reasons why they run into so much trouble.
    And, of course, why we find them so beguiling.
    Yet it may also predispose to heroism and mental toughness, to estimable qualities such as courage, integrity, and virtue: the ability,for instance, to dart into blazing buildings to save the lives of those inside. Or to push fat guys off bridges and stop runaway trains in their tracks.
    Psychopathy really is like a high performance sports car. It’s a double-edged sword that inevitably cuts both ways.
    In the following chapters, I’ll chronicle, in scientific, sociological, and philosophical detail, the story of this double-edged sword and the unique psychological profile of the individuals that wield it. We begin by looking at who, precisely, the psychopath really is (if not the monster we usually think of). We travel through both the inner and outer zones of the psychopathic metropolis, cruising the ultraviolent downtown ghettos and the lighter, leafier, more visitor-friendly suburbs.
    As on any scale or spectrum, both ends have their poster-boy Hall of Famers. At one end we have the Dahmers and Lecters and Bundys—the Rippers and Slashers and Stranglers. At the other extreme we have the antipsychopaths: elite spiritual athletes like Tibetan Buddhist monks, who, through years of black-belt meditation in remote Himalayan monasteries, feel nothing but compassion. In fact, the latest research from the field of cognitive neuroscience suggests that the spectrum might be circular … that across the neural dateline of sanity and madness, the psychopaths and antipsychopaths sit within touching distance of each other. So near and yet so far.
    From secluded neural datelines, we’ll shift our focus to cognitive archaeology, and having sketched out the coordinates of modern-day psychopathy, we’ll go in search of its origins. Using the instruments of game theory and cutting-edge evolutionary psychology, we will reconstruct the conditions, deep in our ancestral past, under which psychopaths might have evolved. And we’ll explore the possibility—as profound as it is disturbing—that in twenty-first-century society they’re continuing to evolve, and that the disorder is becoming adaptive.
    We’ll consider, in depth, the advantages of being a psychopath—or rather, in some situations at least, having those dials turned up a little higher than normal. We’ll look at the fearlessness. The ruthlessness. The “presence” (psychopaths tend to blink just a little bit lessthan the rest of us, a physiological aberration that often helps give them their unnerving, hypnotic air). 2 Devastating, dazzling, and super-confident are the epithets that one often hears about them. Not, as one might