This makes sense, as one of the book’s primary aims is to answer the “why question” with regard to psychopaths:
But if there’s one thing we are even more fascinated with, it’s wanting to know why. Why would anyone spread such malicious gossip? Why would anyone ever use a publicly owned company as a private piggy bank? Why would anyone knowingly starve millions of his own people? Psychology, with explanations founded on “defense mechanisms,” “countertransference,” and “acting out,” can go only so far. Neuroscience is fleshing out the field nicely, but unfortunately, popular hard science-based books about the successfully sinister are rarer than frequent flyer mile seats to Hawaii at Christmas.
And the author, as someone victimized by a psychopath she loves, must be extra curious about the hard answers to this simple question.
Successfully Sinister
Successfully sinister is a great turn of phrase that Oakley adopts when talking about her subject, and it is necessary for her to do so, because there is little agreement over how to define what psychopathy is. At one point, Oakley cites the following four characteristics as being both necessary and sufficient for the label to be applied:
1. Views others as objects to be manipulated rather than as individuals with whom to empathize.
2. Lack concern with conventional morality. Lying, cheating, and other forms of deceit are acceptable forms of behavior.
3. Lack obvious psychopathology. Although perhaps not the epitome of mental health, contact with the more objective parts of reality would be within normal range.
4. Have low ideological commitment. They are more concerned with tactics for achieving possible ends than in an inflexible striving for an ultimate idealistic goal.
Sound like anyone you know? It probably does, because people with these traits are fairly common in our society. Some even rise to positions of authority.
A Genetic Basis
The book spends a lot of pages exploring the potential for a genetic basis for the confluence of these behaviors in people. Much of it supports that supposition, and little of it allows us to definitively conclude it. As with so many other things, the knot of nature and nurture is frustratingly difficult to untangle. One interesting tidbit on that front, however, is the following, referring to genetic predisposition to high and low levels of a neurotransmitter called Monoamine Oxidase A (or MAO-A).
The MAO-A system is interesting, too, because it was the first neurotransmitter system to reveal how the same environment might have a different effect on people with different genetics. In 2002, Avshalom Caspi and his colleagues gave evidence that indicated why some children who are maltreated grow up to develop antisocial behavior, whereas others do not. The key to the differences, it turned out in this study, lay in the children’s genotype. Children who grew up in positive environments generally had no developmental difficulties, whatever their genotype. But those children who grew up being maltreated showed significant differences depending on whether they had high- or low-efficiency MAO-A alleles. Maltreated kids with efficient MAO-A activity weathered the storms of their youth relatively well. However, those with inefficient MAO-A activity developed significant antisocial problems -- 85 percent of those with a low activity MAO-A genotype who were severely maltreated developed some form of antisocial behavior. That result was twice as high as the high-activity group under severely maltreated conditions. It was thought that deficient MAO-A activity disposes the kids toward neural hyperreactivity to threat.
I think what really jumped out at me there was the sentence “Children who grew up in positive environments generally had no developmental difficulties, whatever their genotype.” That would seem to argue against the very title of Oakley’s book. There are “evil genes” I guess, but evidently you have to maltreat children in order to activate them. Treat children well, and no one is turned evil by their genes?
In fact, the emphasis that Oakley places on genes, neurons, neurotransmitters, and brain regions in this book seems entirely misplaced to be. Do you really want to answer the question about why psychopaths exist?
“Patients with borderline personality disorder often report incidents of abuse during childhood. These environmental events, together with the genetic propensity, may interfere with development of executive control, which in turn influences the ability to develop clear ideas and empathy for the minds of others as well as the experience of diffusion of one’s own identity.” In summary then, a very difficult childhood can take a predisposition for borderline personality disorder and turn it into a devastating reality. A decent upbringing, however, can mean that a person with the same predisposition will grow up only to be difficult to deal with, but not necessarily someone who comes to the attention of a clinician.
Here’s an idea. Let’s stop people from abusing children.
Machiavellians
The other subject that Oakley spends a lot of printer ink on is analyzing the behavior of famous and powerful “successfully sinister” people throughout history. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Slobodan Milosevic -- in addition to her sister Carolyn, they all come under Oakley’s scrutiny, and she begins to call them simply “Machiavellians.”
Ultimately, a Machiavellian, as I use the term throughout this book, is a person whose narcissism combines with subtle cognitive and emotional disturbances in such a fashion as to make him believe that achieving his own desires, and his alone, is a genuinely beneficial -- even altruistic -- activity. Since the Machiavellian gives more emotional weight to his own importance than to that of anyone or anything else, achieving the growth of his pre-eminence by any means possible is always justified in his own mind.
Again, does that remind you of anyone? Oakley is writing in 2008, so she is unable to make our most recent comparison, but I won’t shy away from it. Try this paragraph on for size:
Perhaps at these high levels, the best an ordinary person can do is to try to lay aside his or her own ideological blinkers and look honestly at public figures. If a given individual seems most interested in vilifying others, proceeds to characterize his own in-group as having been unduly victimized, is ruthlessly vindictive, and finally, is discovered to have cozy, self-serving financial deals, there are reasonable grounds to assume that person is more than a little Machiavellian and this his or her leadership may be aimed more toward self than public service. Unfortunately, our own tendency, at least regarding leaders who purport to share our ideology, is often to avoid looking too closely.
Welcome, as they say, to Trump’s America.
Books to Get
One of the joys of reading books is stumbling across references to other books that must find their way onto my to-read list. Here’s one from a footnote in Evil Genes:
Robert Conquest’s monumental work on Stalinist horrors, The Great Terror, earned enormous animosity upon its initial release in 1968 -- its graphic descriptions of the horrors perpetuated in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s direction were felt by many to be false in virtually every particular. The opening of the Soviet archives and later verification by a host of Russian historians not only supported Conquest’s findings, but showed [that] Stalin’s “model state” had been even worse than Conquest had originally outlined. When The Great Terror was rereleased in a post-glasnost 1992 edition, Conquest was asked if he would like to give it a new title. His terse response was: “How about, I Told You So, You Fucking Fools.”
+ + +
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment