Kevin Dutton, "The Wisdom of Psychopaths"

 -e-book

Read from August 26^th to September 8^th 2021

My rating:

 

The title of Kevin Dutton’s book, The Wisdom of the Psychopaths seems ironically oxymoronic, until you read the preface that’s it, and learn that the essay is built on the idea that there is something good in every bad, even in psychopathy, for some of its attributes, like personal magnetism and a genius for disguise, used in moderation, of course, make it adaptive (not different, in a way, from anxiety, for it is known that anxious people can detect threats better than the rest of us, a very useful quality in an hostile or unknown environment):

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.

The challenging thesis formulated, the author proceeds to prove it, gathering information from studies, experiments, books and personal observations, to build an image of psychopaths contrary to many stereotypes we have about them.

Firstly, almost everybody has its place in the spectrum of psychopathy, and only a few inhabit the “inner city”. Moreover, some psychopathic attributes, such as superficial charm, egocentricity, persuasiveness, lack of empathy, independence and focus, are more common in business leaders than in criminals, the difference between the two categories laying in the “antisocial” aspects (physical aggression, impulsivity etc.), as Belinda Jane Board and Katarina Fritzon from the Department of Psychology of the University of Surrey UK, found while testing three groups—business managers, psychiatric patients, and hospitalized criminals – psychopathic or with other psychiatric illnesses. The Canadian psychologist Bob Hare confirmed that psychopathic traits such as “charisma and presentation style: creativity, good strategic thinking, and excellent communication skills” are common in the corporate world.

Another category, formed by high-risk professionals like spies or bomb-disposal operatives, just like psychopaths, have slower heart rates than “normal” people when they enter danger zones, assuming “a state of cold, meditative focus: a mezzanine level of consciousness in which they became one with the device they were working on“, according to Harvard researcher Stanley Rachman.

Besides, Andrew Colman, professor of psychology at the University of Leicester, thinks that the winners will always be those who keep their nerve, ”provided, that is, that their opposite number is sane. Behaving ‘irrationally’ might actually sometimes be rational.”  

Colman’s theory has been validated by Hideki Ohira, psychologist at Nagoya University, and his doctoral student Takahiro Osumi, who have created the Ultimatum Game to show that psychopaths make better financial decisions than the rest of us, under exceptional circumstances: a player is given a sum of money and has to decide how to divide it with his partner. If the proposition is accepted, they get the money accordingly, if not, neither gets anything. Usually, if the proposal approaches 70-30 mark (in favour of player 1), the second player rejects it as a question of principle. Not the psychopaths though, who accept unfair offers, because they are more interested in economic utility than in inequity.

Psychopaths were far less fazed than controls when screwed by their opposite numbers—and… had more in the bank to show for it. A thicker skin had earned them thicker wallets.

Therefore,

…the problem with psychopaths isn’t that they’re chock-full of evil. Ironically, it’s precisely the opposite: they have too much of a good thing. The car is to die for. It’s just too fast for the road.

Secondly, already the young generation, called by social psychologist Sara Konrath, after observing the lack of empathy in college students, ‘Generation Me’, is “one of the most self-centred, narcissistic, competitive, confident and individualistic in recent history”. One of the reasons (and I strongly agree) could be the lack of reading (a survey conducted in 2011 found out that one in three children between eleven and sixteen did not own a book, compared with one in ten in 2005, never received a book as a present, and 12 percent never visited a bookshop):

Reading a book carves brand new neural pathways into the ancient cortical bedrock of our brains. It transforms the way we see the world. Makes us, as Nicholas Carr puts it in his recent essay “The Dreams of Readers,” “more alert to the inner lives of others.” We become vampires without being bitten—in other words, more empathic. Books make us see in a way that casual immersion in the Internet, and the quicksilver virtual world it offers, doesn’t.

And finally, ‘Generation P.’, the name given by the writer Alan Harrington in his book Psychopaths, published in 1972, to the adult generation, it is very likely to become the new Homo sapiens, more equipped for modern-day survival, because of its “SOS” mentality: the psychological skill set to Strive, Overcome, and Succeed.

 

Overall, a very interesting book with its “refusal to accept easy answers in one of the more sensational fields of popular psychology” (as Tim Adams points out in his review published in The Guardian) although its cheerful and enthusiastic tone seems awkward now and then and made some readers angrily reject it.

PS. If you want to find out more about you, you can take this abbreviated version of the Big Five personality test. I did dare and lived to tell the tale of extravert me 😊.