The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

by Jon Ronson

“I heard a story about her once,” said James. “She was interviewing a psychopath. She showed him a picture of a frightened face and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn’t know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them.”

Quite frequently these days, in fact, I set off from my home with an excited, purposeful expression and after a while I slow my pace to a stop and just stand there looking puzzled.

They assumed the endeavor was brilliant and rational because they were brilliant and rational, and we tend to automatically assume that everybody else is basically just like us. But in fact the missing piece was that the author was a crackpot. The book couldn’t be decoded because it was written by a crackpot.

Here was the American physician Samuel Cartwright identifying in 1851 a mental disorder, drapetomania, evident only in slaves. The sole symptom was “the desire to run away from slavery” and the cure was to “whip the devil out of them” as a preventative measure.

It doesn’t matter how wise and insightful adult life has made us. “Two days with your parents at Christmas and you’ll all just be swatted back to the deepest level of the family’s pathology.”

“Serial killers ruin families.” Bob shrugged. “Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”

“Sociopaths love power. They love winning. If you take loving kindness out of the human brain, there’s not much left except the will to win.”

She said if you’re beginning to feel worried that you may be a psychopath, if you recognize some of those traits in yourself, if you’re feeling a creeping anxiety about it, that means you are not one.

“You know you’re in a depressed place when even the jail has shut down,” I said.

“I gave this talk at a retreat and this woman came up to me and said she was the Bride of Christ. I checked it out with God and it turned out that she was an incarnation of one of the Gods and so I started going out with her.” David paused. “It turned out to be quite a peculiar relationship.”

“A lot of psychopaths become gatekeepers,” said Bob, “concierges, security guards, masters of their own domains.”

I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.

(“Friends are the fruit cake of life—some nutty, some soaked in alcohol, some sweet”)

And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.