The Wisdom of Psychopaths (27 page)

“Mindfulness,” I tease Mark, in his office at the Warneford Hospital, “is basically Buddhism with a polished wooden floor, isn’t it?”

He offers me a sweet roll.

“You forgot the spotlights and the plasma TV,” he counters. “But yes, there’s a certain whiff of the East in a lot of the theory and practice.”

Mark gives me an example of how mindfulness-based CBT might help someone overcome a phobia, like a fear of flying, for instance. Jamie, Leslie and Danny couldn’t have put it better.

“One approach,” Mark explains, “might be to take the person on a plane and seat them next to a flying buff. You know, someone who absolutely loves being up in the air. Then, midflight, you hand them a pair of brain scans. One of them depicts a happy brain. The other one depicts an anxious brain. A brain in a state of terror.

“ ‘This pair of pictures,’ you tell them, ‘represents exactly what’s going on in each of your heads right now, at this precise moment in time. So obviously, because they’re so different, neither of them really means anything, do they? Neither of them predicts the physical state of the plane.

“ ‘That truth is in the engines.

“ ‘So, what
do
they signify?’ you ask them. ‘Well,’ you explain, ‘what, in fact, they do represent is … precisely what you’re holding in your hands. A brain state. Nothing more. Nothing less. What you’re feeling
is simply just that. A feeling. A neural network, an electrical ensemble, a chemical configuration, caused by thoughts in your head that drift in and out, that come and go, like clouds.

“ ‘Now, if you can bring yourself round to somehow accepting that fact; to dispassionately observe your inner virtual reality; to let the clouds float by, to let their shadows fall and linger where they please, and focus, instead, on what’s going on around you—each pixelated second of each ambient sound and sensation—then eventually, over time, your condition should begin to improve.’ ”

Jamie and the boys’ pragmatic endorsement of the principles and practices of mindfulness—though not, necessarily, of the precise existential variety that a distinguished Oxford professor might extol—is typical of the psychopath. Their rapacious proclivity to live in the moment, to “give tomorrow the slip and take today on a joyride” (as Larry rather whimsically puts it), is well documented—and at times (therapeutic implications aside) can be stupendously beneficial.

Take the financial world, for instance. Don Novick was a trader for sixteen years, and didn’t lose a penny in any of them. He is also, as it happens, a psychopath. These days—retired, though still only forty-six—he lives quietly in the Scottish Highlands, adding to his wine cellar and collecting vintage watches.

I call Don a psychopath because that’s what he calls himself. At least, he did the first time I met him. So to be on the safe side, I decided to run a few tests. The results turned out to be positive.

Sitting in one of the drawing rooms of his secluded Jacobean castle—the driveway’s so long it could do with a couple of service stations—I ask Don, quite literally, the million-dollar question.
What, precisely, is it that makes a successful trader? I’m not too interested in the difference between good and bad, I point out. More in the difference between good and really good.

Though he doesn’t name names, he has no hesitation in answering the question objectively, from a qualitative, analytical standpoint.

“I would say that one of the biggest differences when it comes to separating out the really good traders is how they seem at close of play, when trading has finished and they’re turning it in for the day,” he tells me. “You know, trading is a profession that, if you’re the least bit vulnerable mentally, can completely undo you. I’ve seen traders crying and being physically sick at the end of a hard session. The pressure, the environment, the people … it’s all pretty brutal.

“But what you find with the guys at the very top is that at the end of the day, when they’re heading out the door, you just don’t know. You can’t tell by looking at them whether they’ve raked in a couple of billion or whether their entire portfolio has just gone down the tubes.

“And there it is in a nutshell. Therein lies the fundamental principle of being a good trader. When you’re trading, you cannot allow any members of your brain’s emotional executive committee to knock on the door of the decision-making boardroom, let alone take a seat at the table. Ruthlessly, remorselessly, relentlessly, you have to stay in the present. You can’t let what happened yesterday affect what happens today. If you do, you’ll go under in no time.

“If you’re prone to emotional hangovers, you’re not going to last two seconds on the trading floor.”

Don’s observations, coming, as they do, from sixteen years on the fiscal razor’s edge, are strongly reminiscent of the lab-based results from Baba Shiv, Antoine Bechara, and George Loewenstein’s “gambling game” study. Logically, of course, the right thing to do was to invest in every round. But as the game panned out, some of the participants began declining the opportunity to gamble, preferring instead to conserve their winnings. They began, in other words, to “live in the past”—allowing, in Don’s words, members of their brain’s emotional executive committee to knock on the door of the decision-making boardroom. Bad move.

But other participants continued to live in the present. And, at the conclusion of the study, boasted a pretty healthy profit margin. These “functional psychopaths,” as Antoine Bechara referred to
them—individuals who are either better at regulating their emotions than others or, alternatively, don’t experience them to the same degree of intensity—continued to invest and treated each new round as if it were the first.

Oddly enough, they went from strength to strength. And, exactly as Don would have predicted (indeed, did predict when I told him about the experiment), wiped the floor with their cagier, more risk-averse rivals.

But the story doesn’t end there. Several years ago, when news of this study first hit the popular press, it carried a headline that grabbed a few headlines itself: “Wanted: Psychopaths to Make a Killing in the Market.” According to Don, the caption has hidden depths.

“A professional killer, like an executioner, for instance, probably has no feeling at all after taking someone’s life,” he explains. “Plausibly, remorse or regret just don’t come into the equation. It’s a similar story with traders. When a trader completes a trade, he’ll call it an ‘execution.’ That’s common trading parlance. And once a trade has been executed, the really good traders—the kind of guys that you’re interested in—will have no compunction at all about getting out. About the whys and wherefores, the pros and cons—about whether it’s right or wrong.

“And that’s completely irrespective, going back to what I was saying earlier, of how that trade has gone—whether they’ve made a couple of billion or whether they’ve thrown it down the toilet. Exiting a trade will be a cool and clinical decision that has no subsequent emotion, no lingering psychological aftereffects attached to it whatsoever …

“I think the idea of killing professionally, be it in the market or elsewhere, demands a certain ability to compartmentalize. To focus on the job at hand. And, when that job is finished, to just walk away and forget it ever happened.”

Of course, living in the past is just one side of the equation. Living in the future, getting “ahead of ourselves,” allowing our imagination to run riot—as mine had done under that pallet of reinforced concrete, or whatever the hell it was—can be equally incapacitating. Studies,
for instance, of cognitive and emotional focus in the context of dysfunctional decision making have shown that whenever we evaluate common, everyday behaviors—things like diving into a swimming pool, or picking up the phone and delivering bad news—the
imagined, potential reality is significantly more discomfiting than the real one.

Which explains, of course, our unquenchable urge to procrastinate much of the time.

But psychopaths never procrastinate.

Just one of the reasons why, if you recall the words of Richard Blake from earlier, my host at Broadmoor and one of the clinical team in the Paddock Centre, they tend to excel at activities on the ward. Psychopaths need to do something. Nothing just isn’t an option.

“Feeling good is an emergency for me,” Danny had commented, as he’d slammed in his fourth goal for Chelsea. “I like to ride the roller coaster of life, spin the roulette wheel of fortune, to terminal possibility.”

He frowned, and adjusted his baseball cap.

“Or at least I did”—he shrugged—“till I got in here.”

Coming from a psychopath, it’s not an untypical statement—one we could all perhaps do with taking on board just that little bit more in our lives.

“When I was a kid,” Larry tells me, “we used to go on holiday every year to Hastings. One day—I’ll never forget it—I watched my sister playing in the sea, and this big wave came in and hit her. She ran out crying, and that was that. She never went in again. When I saw what had happened—and I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight at the time—I remember thinking to myself: ‘If you stand where the waves break, you’re going to get hurt. So you’ve got two choices. You can either stay on the shore and not go in at all. Or you can go out further so the waves lift you up and then crash and break behind you.’ ”

Jamie gets to his feet.

“The secret, of course, is not to go out too far,” he grunts. “Otherwise you wash up in this place.”

“Well, you know where I am. I ain’t going nowhere.”

Jamie and I are shaking hands. I’ve just told him I’ll definitely look him up next time I’m passing, and he’s filled me in on his movements. Larry and Leslie have already bowed out. Leslie quite literally, with a sweeping genuflection. Larry with a sturdy salute. Maybe the old boy was a former sea captain after all. Danny’s returned to the soccer.

Back in the corridors and security-infested wormholes that connect the DSPD unit with the outside world, I feel a bit like a spaceman on reentry.

“Settle in okay?” Richard inquires as we jangle our way back to clinical psychology suburbia.

I smile. “Started to feel quite at home.”

As the train picks up speed for London, I study the expressions of those sitting around me: commuters, mostly, on their way home from work. Some are tense and anxious. Others are tired and drawn. You don’t see many of those kinds of faces at Psychopath School.

I fire up the laptop and punch in some thoughts. An hour or so later, as we pull into the station, I have the template for what I call an “SOS” mentality: the psychological skill set to Strive, Overcome, and Succeed.

I label the skill set the Seven Deadly Wins—seven core principles of psychopathy that, apportioned judiciously and applied with due care and attention, can help us get exactly what we want; can help us respond, rather than react, to the challenges of modern-day living; can transform our outlook from victim to victor, but without turning us into a villain:

Without a shadow of a doubt, the power of the skill set lay squarely in its application. Certain situations would inevitably call for more of some traits than others, while within those sets of circumstance, some sub-situations, going back to our trusty mixing desk analogy, would plausibly demand higher or lower output levels of whichever traits were selected. Cranking up the ruthlessness, mental toughness, and action dials, for instance, might make you more assertive—might earn you more respect among your work colleagues. But ratchet them up too high and you risk morphing into a tyrant.

Then, of course, there was the opposite consideration of being able to turn them back down—of fading in and out and appropriately contouring the soundtrack. If the lawyer, for example, whom we met in
chapter 4
was as ruthless and fearless in everyday life as he evidently was in the courtroom, he would’ve soon ended up needing a lawyer of his own. The secret, unquestionably, was context. It wasn’t about being a psychopath. It was rather about being a method psychopath. About being able to step into character when the situation demanded it. But then, when the exigency had passed, to revert to one’s normal persona.

That, of course, was where Jamie and the boys had gone wrong. Rather than having trouble twiddling the faders up higher, theirs, in contrast, were permanently stuck on max: a manufacturing error with decidedly unfortunate consequences. As Jamie had articulated when I’d first arrived in Broadmoor, 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.

At the back of the chapel of Magdalen College, Oxford, there sits a prayer board. One day, amid the numerous petitions for divine intervention, I noticed this one: “Lord, please make my lottery numbers come up, then you won’t ever have to hear from me again.” Strangely enough, it was the only one that God had replied to. Here is what he wrote: “My son, I like your style. In this wretched, mixed-up world, which causes me so much sorrow, you’ve put a smile on my face. Hell, I WANT to hear from you again. So better luck next time you cheeky bastard! Love God.”

Anyone who thought that God didn’t have a sense of humor might want to think again. And anyone who thought that God was so remote from the world that he didn’t take a personal interest in the trifling concerns of his lost, lamentable little children might also wish to reconsider. Here, quite clearly, the Almighty sees fit to present a different side of Himself: as a shrewd, tough, no-nonsense operator
able to give as good as He gets and with more than a passing knowledge of human psychology. If that sounds like the kind of God who’s not afraid to twiddle those dials on the mixing desk up and down when the situation calls for it, then you’re not mistaken.