The Psychopath Inside (15 page)

We arose quickly, made coffee on the remnants of the fire, and checked the clearing to see that three of the big five game animals had indeed visited us that night, but without incident. We drove to the path leading up to the Kitum Caves and noticed that
many of the saplings along the trail had been freshly stomped down by the herd of elephants that had passed us at some distance during the night. When we arrived at the cave entrance, an intense odor of feral urine and feces nearly knocked us over. We saw thousands of trail and spoor signs of at least a dozen mammals at the cave entrance. As we walked in, a fine spray of multiple grass-filtered waterfalls bathed us, much as they showered the elephants on those magical, noisy nights. Deeper into the cave we could see where elephant tusks had gouged out fresh crevices for salt and mineral mining by the herd. In some areas huge slabs of the cave wall had fallen, blocking our passage in spots. As we entered the last sunlit area of the cave, the skeleton of an elephant that had taken a misstep in the dim cave light lay twisted in a deep crevice. And there, we heard them. As they approached, the din became a deafening cacophony of screeching and the manic flapping of ten thousand wings. In seconds they were all around us, thousands of Egyptian fruit bats we had disturbed. We decided to make haste out of there, getting as far from the caves as we could, and head north to Lake Turkana to look for human fossils at Koobi Fora.

Two years later, back in the safer arms and approved odors of Orange County, I received a rather animated call from Tom. Apparently someone had given him a copy of Richard Preston's
New Yorker
article “Crises in the Hot Zone” and the 1994 book
The Hot Zone
(later adapted into the film
Outbreak
starring Dustin Hoffman), and he was furious. He had correctly guessed that I purposely had taken him on the exact trail from the campsite to the caves where the man had contracted Marburg and died. Suffice it
to say, he was livid at me for putting him in harm's way. “It was a great experience,” he told me, “but I can't forgive you for bringing me to that place.”

This was not the first or last time I would put the lives of people close to me in danger. Whether this is a sociopathic behavioral pattern is of some interest in late-night family discussions around the living room fireplace. To some this is just an indication of an adventurous person sharing his favorite jaunts. But to the people who have been enticed by me into going somewhere without being privy to all the serious dangers involved, this behavior goes way beyond an adventurer's sense of play.

I think the best way to characterize my specific lack of connectivity to people is that I live in an empathetic flatland. While I do have a modicum of empathy, I tend to treat everyone the same, whether they are family members or complete strangers. Like in that bar fight I pulled my buddy out of. I thought it was unfair for the other guy to whale on my friend as he ran away, and also unfair to hold the other guy down so my friend would whale on him. Friends think I'm disloyal because I don't stick by them through thick and thin, but I think I'm just fair. If they're wrong I'll tell them. Meanwhile, my family always wants me to reach out to them more, initiating contact, or at least pay more attention to them than other people when we go out. People close to you naturally desire to be treated in a very special way emotionally, and not being able to deliver that connectivity from the heart can be a big problem for such relationships.

My friendships are less pure than most. A lot of people would
say I'm very giving, and that I do a lot of helpful things for people, but a chunk of that motivation is so I can call on them later to do a favor for me. I can call up busy, well-known people I've helped out and say, “Would you like to do something for me?” and they do it in a second because I've built these connections over the years. People would say that's just good business practice, but the problem is I do this with people without really caring about them. I'm like a Mafia don. When I saw
The Godfather
way back when, it seemed eerily familiar. If you ask people, they say I do good works. It doesn't end up being pernicious; no one ends up feeling used or slighted. It's just not an honest friendship.

The way not to manipulate people is to ask for something in return almost immediately. Guys will do things for women and want sex right away. And you don't manipulate people by snarling. You do it by being sweet as shit. I'm able to use my personality and some amount of charm, techniques that come naturally to me. Early on I saw my friends, brothers, and other male family members get in trouble all the time by fighting, and they never ended up getting what they wanted. To me they were dolts, inelegant, boorish. It's more fun to manipulate people without violence.

Many people, if I told them, “I'm doing this for you so I can use you,” would still probably find that okay, because they know I wouldn't do something mean to them. Friends have said, “I know you're using me right now, but I don't care.” They think I'm fun and I hang around interesting people, so they'll put up with it. Some people close to me who know my motivations don't like it. They want a real relationship. My wife wants a real marriage.

In 2002, Diane was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. She was pretty sure she would die, and at times during chemotherapy she wanted to. I was diligent in providing her a nutraceutical green tea, which remedied the side effects of chemo. She considered my assistance a big deal. It showed I cared. However, in 2008 I carelessly engaged in a series of flirtations that went nowhere but ended up deeply hurting Diane. She made her feelings known, but since nothing actually happened between me and the other people, I did my usual thing and blew off their significance. I understand better now how much pain my indiscretions caused her, so I will not elaborate on them further. Understanding my power to hurt other people does not come naturally.

In many ways, I can appear empathetic. I'm a good listener and I like to hear what people are about. But I often do this because I'm trying to find a way into them. Bars and racetracks are great equalizers—I'll go and chat with people and not mention that I'm a professor. I'll be very open and tuned in to them but always will be thinking in the back of my mind, “How can I play with them? How can I get this girl to say, ‘I want to have sex with you right now,' or how can I get this guy to say, ‘Do you have any businesses I can invest in?' or how do I get this person to say, ‘I trust you with this private information'?” Gaining that kind of access requires empathy, but it's just cognitive empathy, theory of mind.

I don't always use the information I'm given; I just get a buzz when people completely open up to me and make themselves vulnerable, especially when they've only known me for a few minutes.
Often, I'll actually try to help them. If they have a problem, I'll say, “Oh, I'll hook you up with this doctor or that investor.” But the raw motivation is to have them in my hands. People become little experiments to me. I get fun out of talking to people, but to say I really care about them would be going too far.

When people drink, they're more likely to open up, and I think that's why I like to drink so much. When I'm drinking I feel connected, and that feels good, but mostly because I like having domination over people. I don't act on it, because I don't have to. If I didn't have enough going on in my life already I might be a bad guy. The potential is there, but I have so many other things—family, friends, research, businesses, media appearances—that I don't need to go any further. Maybe some guys will need to pick up a woman and take her home, but if some chick just says, “Do you wanna do it now?” that's enough for me. The sex has nothing to do with it. I'm a terrible flirt, and Diane knows this because she knows how women respond to me. Women of all ages will surround me, and I'll listen to them. I know the games. Their boyfriends and their husbands don't listen to them, so I do. I don't use those situations to the advantages you'd associate with psychopathy, though. I don't take it down the darkest dark road.

That's what makes me what I call a “prosocial” psychopath. Our patron saint might be Bill “I feel your pain” Clinton. Of course, I can't diagnose Clinton as a psychopath, but he appears to have several key traits and is probably at least a 15 on the Hare Checklist. Having sexual relations with a college-aged woman who works for you is universally scorned but common, and
denying multiple affairs is hardly psychopathic on its face. But there are his many microbehaviors that we've all seen him do in various forms many times. As the blogger John Craig points out, when Clinton saluted the troops it was with a mock flair, when he was applauded he gushed mock humility, when at a funeral he seemed to appear appropriately somber, and then felt the need to display tremendous grief, always bravely holding back tears. Gentle sobbing might accompany his hearing of the newest poverty statistic. The nonpsychopathic person makes up stories, but only someone with real psychopathic traits will pull these stunts time and time again, with such high stakes, and never step out of character. The former kingmaker adviser to Clinton, Dick Morris, said that his former confidant was devoid of empathy, adding, “Hillary loves Bill, and Bill loves Bill. It gives them something in common.” A hefty swath of the country, particularly in his own party, still loves him. And despite a political rift that separates us, I like him, too. He is my kinda guy.

•   •   •

One of my favorite pastimes is to guess the individualized brain circuitry and genetics of different people I know, or even people I've just met. Going backward from their personalities and various cognitive and emotional traits and subtle tells, I try to guess how their unique neural machinery operates. I'm also asked to do this in reverse for colleagues and legal teams. After testing the genetics and brain imaging data of a person I otherwise know nothing about, I'm asked to explain what their traits might be, and whether they have a psychiatric disorder such as Alzheimer's
disease, schizophrenia, depression, or psychopathy. I'm pretty good at figuring out such things and offering a diagnosis or description of the person's traits. I get the same sort of buzz out of doing this, and of finding out that I'm correct, as I do when I'm trying to handicap winners at the racetrack. These are the games I like best.

In 2010, I was asked to predict what, if any, unique neural circuitry and genetics would characterize the garden-variety Libertarian. This question was posed to me during a show for ReasonTV.
Reason
magazine is the flagship publication reflecting Libertarian ideas and ideals, and after hearing that I was a Libertarian, they slipped that question into an interview on psychopaths, free will, public policy, and individual liberty. After the usual caveats (“No one has ever studied libertarians in this way, so I don't know”), I played the thought experiment I so like to engage.

My guess is that the Libertarian brain is one in which the upper or dorsal cortical areas are more highly functioning than in the non-Libertarian person. This would be associated with the higher than normal rational and cold cognitive approach to problems characteristic of Libertarians. The Libertarian brain might also have lower than average insular cortical activity commensurate with the somewhat reduced level of interpersonal empathy seen in many Libertarians. That is, Libertarians rely more on a sense of fairness and justice than on how they feel emotionally about a person or a group of people. Jonathan Haidt of New York University has studied Libertarians and reported with colleagues
in 2012 that they indeed are more rational, less emotional, and less empathetic than Democrats and Republicans.

Libertarians, like agnostics and atheists, tend to have a low crime rate, so the neural machinery most associated with a sense of ethics, the orbital and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, would be expected to be normal to above average, while their animal drive system involving the amygdala and limbic cortex might be lower than for the non-Libertarian. These circuit factors would be associated with a person with high self-control and low animal drives.

In personal reflection, this pattern fits with my own behaviors in my late teens and early twenties, when I first chose Libertarianism and agnosticism/atheism as political and religious mind-sets. As a Libertarian I would prefer many situations where some people die. I don't feel responsible for individuals dying as part of a broader cause and don't think we should spend every dime we have to save one child. Such coddling will end up destroying the human race. And who adjudicates who gets coddled? I look at the distant horizon, how things will play out in a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand years. If one person croaks tomorrow for the sake of society, it's too bad, but I don't care. I wouldn't let a kid starve right in front of me—I'm not a monster—but if I ran the government I would cut out all welfare.

I haven't heard a lot of Libertarians admit to these views, but if pressed I'm sure many would agree. For me, by sticking to the basic principles of the Constitution—fairness, private property, and so on—I know some people will die, but it doesn't bother me.
If the system weeds out weak or lazy individuals, fine. I don't want to encourage unproductive or irresponsible behavior because I think it will kill society. I'm more sympathetic to the species than I am to that one person or group of people.

There are others who have cared more about larger causes than the people next to them. Many great humanitarians were, on a personal level, apparently not so nice to be around, and seemed to have little interpersonal empathy while simultaneously displaying a great depth of empathy for the poor and downtrodden. Mohandas Gandhi, one of my few heroes, may have been a pill to be around, and even his wife, Kasturba Gandhi, talked about his cruelty to her and their children. (See
The Forgotten Woman
by Arun and Sunanda Gandhi.) Another heroic figure of the twentieth century, the consensus saint Mother Teresa, was reported to be cold to the people close to her, including the children she helped. Donal MacIntyre, writing in
New Statesman
in 2005 (“The Squalid Truth Behind the Legacy of Mother Teresa”), and Christopher Hitchens, discussing in his 1995 book
The Missionary Position
, both point to the seemingly substandard and even cruel treatment of the children she saved. While these claims are controversial, they do illuminate a type of global empathy toward humanity. An empathy that saves thousands, but perhaps is impersonal to the point of disregard and even cruelty to the individual humans being otherwise saved by a great humanitarian.