The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

by Jon Ronson

“You have to feel sorry for psychopaths, right? If it’s all because of their amygdalae? If it’s not their fault?” “Why should we feel sorry for them?” he replied. “They don’t give a shit about us.”

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

“It is a frightening and huge thought,” I said, “that the ninety-nine percent of us wandering around down here are having our lives pushed and pulled around by that psychopathic fraction up there.” “It is a large thought,” she said. “It is a thought people don’t have very often. Because we’re raised to believe that deep down everyone has a conscience.”

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.

He blamed psychopaths for the brutal excesses of capitalism itself, that the system at its cruelest was a manifestation of a few people’s anomalous amygdalae.

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.