Just Psychopaths

They're everywhere.

Talking about personality disorder last week, several readers have asked about the concept of psychopathy, sowhat better place to start than Wall St? For decades, the eminent New York financier, Bernard Madoff (1938-2021) had been highly visible in the US East Coast financial world, as sometime chairman of NASDAQ, and a leading light of New York and Palm Beach society. He was reputedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars but in December 2008, at the height of the Global Financial Crisis, he confessed that his financial empire was entirely fraudulent. Subsequent investigations over several years showed that he and his small group, including his brother Peter, had defrauded investors of some $65billion. At his trial, he pleaded guilty, claiming that he alone was responsible, and was sentenced to 150 years in prison although he died before completing it.

By all accounts, Madoff was charming and helpful. In particular, he cultivated very close links with the large and wealthy East Coast Jewish population, including many charities and non-profits, by offering them specialised and personalised investing services. People thrust their money at him and were delighted with the huge returns. They were less impressed when they had to hand it back. Many of them were bankrupted and a number of important charities had to close.

How did he get away with it? Over the years, a forensic investigator named Harry Markopolos  had lodged several complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission by. However, the SEC conducted only perfunctory investigations, essentially relying on what they were told by Madoff and, in particular, his two sons, who were not party to the fraud but who profited from it enormously. Influenced by Madoff’s financial eminence but mainly due to his seductive talk, he led them up the garden path.

Madoff certainly wasn’t the only crook to wear an Armani suit; the GFC exposed dozens of frauds but they just keep happening. Volkswagen cheated on its vehicle emissions for years. Enron cheated the Californian electricity market by closing some of their generating plants for “repairs” during heatwaves, so they had to buy power from their interstate plants at ten times the price. FTX simply stole the money and gambled with it. The startling thing is: how do they think they can get away with it? They know there are auditors but they also know auditors can be bought: PwC was advising the Australian Government on how to reduce international tax evasion, yet they were also selling their reports to “selected clients.”

The people running these frauds and all the other criminal enterprises are generally called “psychopaths,” meaning mental deviants, but there’s a problem: the term is no longer found in either of the systems of classification (DSM5 or ICD11). The further problem is that, mostly, nobody knows of their deviance until after they’ve been exposed. Whatever they look or act like, crazy isn’t part of it. It’s their normality that gets people in, coupled with their ability to talk and charm and seduce (seduce doesn’t just mean sexual), which leads to psychiatry’s problem with the idea.

Without going into the long history of psychopathy, I’m sure that every race and culture since the dawn of time understood the difference between charmingly naughty/ smoothly evil on the one hand, and explosively destructive on the other. Western society understood it until 1980, when they replaced the word with “sociopath.” That was a great loss as psychopath means so much more. Traditionally, the essential features were: a person of normal intelligence and no formal mental disorder who shows persistently amoral behaviour, with no sense of remorse and no empathy for anybody who is hurt by that behaviour. This is personality or character, but not a “mental illness” in any sense of the term.

In the 1970s, we were taught there are three forms of psychopathy, the explosive, the inadequate and the creative. Explosive psychopath more or less equates with the modern term “Antisocial Personality Disorder,” which DSM5 describes as persistent dishonesty and law-breaking, impulsivity and physical aggression, general recklessness and irresponsibility, and lack of remorse for actions. The stereotype is male, the sort of bruiser you’d meet in a pub or in a prison, usually a hard worker but unable to hold a job because of explosive temper and fighting, well-known to the police, impulsive dishonesty, drinks heavily, uses drugs, can’t keep a girlfriend or look after his children, on and on.

Closely related was the inadequate psychopath. Again, we think of men, this time of a small-time, petty crook who can’t keep his hands to himself, drinks a lot, tells pointless lies, constantly trying to deceive people but who, when caught, gets miserable and weepy, full of complaints about police persecution, nobody understands or cares, full of remorse but it never lasts. Nothing lasts, nothing works out: jobs, wives, criminal plans etc. but it’s always somebody else’s fault, if only he’d been given a chance, if only people hadn’t interfered blah blah.

Straight away, we see neither of these describes Bernard Madoff or any of the other suits who carefully craft their long-term frauds in the corridors of power, far from grubby police and prisons. These people, male and female, were picked up by the concept of the creative psychopath. This is exactly what Madoff showed: well-educated, well-behaved, well-dressed and well-regarded, a charmer who studies the scene then quietly works out how best to work his way into the system and make off with the prize. Critical point: they were not considered psychopaths until they were caught and it all came out. Nobody would have said it or even dreamed it as they fool everybody. Fooling people is their business, that’s what they’re good at, that’s how they get ahead.

For the true creative psychopath, getting ahead is everything. Nothing is allowed to get in their way, and they do get ahead just because they are unburdened by a sense of morality or fair play. If it becomes necessary to bribe somebody, it’s done with a good sense of what that person is worth; if somebody else’s business deal needs to be sabotaged, it will be done with no traces; if a competitor needs to be bumped off, that’s done calmly and efficiently with no hard feelings. In general, they are very good at working out somebody’s price as sentiment never gets in the way, an art in which the late and unspeakable Jeffery Epstein (1953-2019) had few equals.

 In her two volume account of Epstein’s webs of intrigue, the investigative reporter, Whitney Webb, gives a crushingly detailed account of how organised crime has formed an alliance with the international intelligence apparatus to pervade US society - and the rest of the world [1]. As far as I can see, it’s correct but even if only 10% of it is true, we’re in trouble. However, the striking point, which she doesn’t emphasise, is that the upper echelons of the corporate-financial-military-government-academic-intelligence world are, almost to a man and woman, composed of creative psychopaths. If they aren’t psychopaths themselves, then they are very good friends of and work closely with people who are (as in “I’m not one but most of my best friends are”).  

That’s history: in 1980, the laudable term “creative psychopath” was swept into one of psychiatry’s many memory holes and ceased to exist. In its place, we have only ‘Antisocial Personality Disorder’ which is a bit silly as an antisocial personality just is a personality disorder. It’s like saying “pneumonia sickness." Anyway, the confidence men and women were given a “get out of prison” card and flitted gaily off into the world of business and government where they could get on with their business of ripping off the unwary. So why did this happen? First thing to remember is that this decision had nothing to do with science. It was a deal sorted out largely in secret by a committee of the great, the powerful and the irredeemably compromised. The same thing happened with homosexuality: it was a “mental disease” until, after a great deal of squabbling and muck-throwing, the committee voted that it wasn’t. Thus is the science of mental disorder reduced to back-room politics.

The second thing about it was the reason for the change. We will never know. Perhaps there are committee minutes stashed somewhere in Washington but having spent a lot of time trying to get minutes that the owners don’t want inspected, I’d say the chances of getting them aren’t good. However, res ipso loquitur, the facts speak for themselves. If the criteria for creative psychopathy had been applied fairly across the board, then a very large proportion of the American elite – political, academic, corporate, finance (especially finance), military and spying, sporting, entertainment and religious – they would have got the label. So it had to go. Simply by adding the qualifiers of criminality and physical fights, all the rich, educated, well-placed and mainly white people escaped the net while all the poor, uneducated, unemployed people of colour were swept up.

The essence of the creative psychopath is that they are creative: they used their creativity to divert attention from their clever crimes to all the poor people and their dumb crimes. Thus, nobody suspects what they’re up to and, as Madoff showed, nobody ever wants to open that can of worms, who knows where it might lead?

More recently, there has been talk of a personality disorder called the “malignant narcissist.” The criteria are exactly the same as for creative psychopath. The message is: the creative psychopath is a reality. Don’t take any notice of DSM, they had a lot to hide. As for causes, who knows? Over many years, there have been hundreds of studies to try to work out why people become psychopaths. Predictably, biological psychiatry tries to find a genetic/biological cause such as hormones or changes on brain scans but nothing consistent has ever been found. Socially, they can come from good families or bad; expensive schools or poor; wealthy areas or deprived, it doesn’t seem to matter much. Aggressive psychopaths generally come from disrupted family backgrounds with a lot of abuse and deprivation but even that’s not a rule. However, they’re not the problem. Yes, they get lots of attention in the media but that says more about the media: many, if not most of the owners and operators of the media are highly psychopathic, and they don’t want anybody looking at them or at their friends, so they distract us.

Crucially, and regardless of anything these powerful people say, they don’t give a rat’s arse about any of us, or about nature, or even the survival of the planet. All that counts for them is dominance: wealth, power, influence and rubbing their power in our faces. For them, humans are things, objects to be used and discarded, just pawns in a bigger game known as “winning.” People ask: “How can they be like this, how can they not be moved by suffering?” The answer is quite simple: they don’t care. They have no attachments to other people, or to communities, or nations or trees or whales, etc. Their focus is self. Just as you and I have no emotional investment in the outcome of a football match in Patagonia, they have no attachments to things you and I regard as important – unless it affects them, of course, then it’s different. They have no commitment to honesty, that’s for fools and weaklings who thereby leave themselves open to being cheated by smarter people (psychopaths all believe they’re the smartest person in the room). Mostly, they are not personally violent but they use violence as a means to an end, just another technique to be turned on and off according to need. Of course, they can justify it but that will be turned around when it suits them: the West invaded and wrecked Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction (which didn’t exist), but is outraged when Russia invades Ukraine to prevent NATO’s weapons of mass destruction being stationed on their borders.

So to the question everybody asks: Is Donald Trump a psychopath? Answer: I don’t know, I’ve never met him but, regardless of what he says, his behaviour meets most of the criteria. His dishonesty in business is a legend and he is likely to go to jail. He treats people, especially women, as objects, e.g. he never pays his bills. He is sexually aggressive (now convicted), and unfaithful: his fling with the porn star was when his wife was still in hospital after delivering their child. He is impulsive, manipulative, says any bit of rubbish that comes into his head, twists facts, blames other people for his failings, gets them to lie for him then dumps them when the lies are exposed. That behaviour just is psychopathic; whether Donald J Trump is a psychopath, I can’t say but it’s not looking good.

How could such an appalling person get to the top? An unwavering determination to dominate, totally unfettered by morality combined with amazing luck in finding people to pay for him, which he thinks is due to his talent. That’s part of it. Nice people never get to the top, they’ll be either worn out by dealing with pricks or lured into an alley and clubbed. But that’s not enough, as Trump’s dire performance in the debate with the well-prepared, well-organised and very much sharper former prosecutor, Kamala Harris, showed. She made a total fool of him, repeatedly dangling hooks in front of him that his egocentricity wouldn’t allow him to avoid. That’s how he ended up repeating that drivel about Haitian migrants eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio (one of the most boring towns in US). Trump is a dim-witted fool but he’s not the person we’ve got to worry about. Behind him, lurking unseen in the shadows, are a small army of very much smarter, better-connected, more cunning and genuinely wealthy people who have no intention of spreading their wealth around. They’re using him and he’s too stupid to know when he’s being played by highly creative, highly psychopathic individuals who are in it for themselves and nobody else. That’s the danger. Are the other side any better? Hardly.

For ordinary people, the take home message is: Don’t hand your future to people who smile too much or who promise everything. If it sounds too good to be true, it is. Be alert, be aware, be involved because most of the people who slide their way into the political arena are in it for themselves. Sure, they’ve changed the name but psychopathy hasn’t changed, it hasn’t gone away. And never will.

References:

1.      Webb, WA (2023).  One Nation Under Blackmail: the sordid union between Intelligence and crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein. (two volumes) New York: Trine Day.