The Hegemony of Psychopathy

Front matter

Lajos Brons

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Contents

Preface * 13 1. The Holocaust * 17

2. Psychopathy * 25 Definitions * 29

Signs of Cultural Psychopathy * 31

Preface

Some people— such as Johan Norberg, Steven Pinker, and Hans Rosling— believe that the world is a much nicer place than it used to be and continues to get better and better." Such optimistic claims are supported by a rather selective use of data and indicators of progress, however. Sure, some things have gotten better. Music, for example, although I accept the possibility that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for the proliferation of extreme and experimental genres of underground music of the last decades. And the personal computer I’m using to type these words is a lot more convenient than the mechanical typewriter I used as a child. Indeed, we have more and nicer stuff, but many of us are forced to work longer hours, while real wages have declined almost everywhere. Inequality within and between countries is on the rise. Job satisfaction has been destroyed by excessive bureaucracy and a culture of distrust. Depression and other mental disorders have become the number one health problem. Electronic and camera surveillance is becoming ever more pervasive. Welfare programs are cut back and coupled to increasingly repressive and demeaning measures. Nothing is safe from markets and marketing. Universities and hospitals have become factories. Racism and other kinds of intolerance never disappeared and even seem to be on the rise again. Politics have devolved into a circus controlled by the super-rich. And catastrophic climate change is looming. The world is not becoming a

1 Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011). Johan Norberg, Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future (London: Oneworld, 2016). Hans Rosling is best known from a series of interesting TED Talks available on YouTube.

better place; by any standard that matters, it’s getting worse. Optimism is ideologically motivated self-deception.

Asa child of the 1970s, I was raised on a diet of optimistic belief in progress. The world would move towards social justice and a reduction of human suffering. The future would offer greater equality between social classes, genders, ethnic groups, and peoples. Rather naively, I experienced the 1980s as a mere temporary setback— soon the world would get back on track. It took a few decades of further destruction before I finally lost my optimism to disillusionment and anger. In her latest book, Martha Nussbaum makes the silly and somewhat offensive claim that anger involves a desire to see the wrongdoer suffer.* If she would be right, then a mother who is angered by her child would want that child to suffer, but while virtually all parents are angry at their children on many occasions, very few would want their children to suffer. And in case of the anger that permeates this book, Nussbaum’s claim could not be further from the truth: it is the persistence of massive suffering that made me angry in the first place, and that anger is related to a strong desire for less suffering, not more. It is that desire that motivates this book.

Most of (the first draft of) this essay was written in the Fall of 2015, but some parts have been lifted—albeit in significantly altered form— from earlier work. Some sentences about “othering” in the first chapter come from “Othering, an Analysis.” In the second chapter, Box 2 (on power/authority) as well as a few other sentences come from “Anarchism as Metaphilosophy.”* Most of the section “Education for Compliance” in the same chapter and some other sentences and paragraphs in that chapter are lifted from an unpublished talk given in 2013, “Truth, Rhetoric, and Critical Thinking.” And there are a few sentences in the last section of the fourth chapter that also can be found in “Facing Death from a Safe Distance:

2 Martha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

3 Lajos Brons, “Othering, an Analysis,” Transcience: A Journal of Global Studies 6.1 (2015): 69-90.

4 Brons, “Anarchism as Metaphilosophy,” The Science of Mind 53 (2015): 1339-58.

5 The full text of this talk is available at my website: www.lajosbrons.net.

PREFACE

Samvega and Moral Psychology.”* The epilogue, on the other hand, is newer— it was added in July 2016.

I want to express my deep gratitude to everyone who took the effort to read an earlier version of this essay and comment on it. Many of the comments I received were very helpful in improving it. Because I didn’t write this essay just for an “academic” audience, I was especially pleased with the many thoughtful comments I received from “non-academics” (i.e., people who do not work in science, broadly understood). One recurring comment surprised me, however, and is worth mentioning here. Some readers appeared to have the idea that a reference to some author implies broad agreement with that author. To avoid misunderstanding, I want to emphasize here that this is not the case. For example, Robert Nozick’s short paper on the Holocaust plays an important role in the first chapter (and returns in the last)? but this by no means implies that I share his views on social and political philosophy (for which he is far more famous). The same applies to various other authors mentioned in this essay: references are to particular texts or even to particular ideas or quotes in those texts, never to whole oeuvres.

In addition to these readers of earlier drafts, there are a few other people who I would like to thank: my students, for continuously forcing me to rethink my arguments and explanations; Takashi lida, whose support enables my position on the academic fringe and thus also made it possible for me to write this essay (but who has not read a word of it yet); Ka Ketelmug for Figure 1; and Eileen Joy and everyone else at punctum books for publishing this “spontaneous act of scholarly combustion.”*

Most of all, I want to thank my wife Tomoko for regularly reminding me that philosophy is useless (and for allowing me to be

6 Brons, “Facing Death from a Safe Distance: Samvega and Moral Psychology,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 23 (2016): 83-128.

7 Robert Nozick, “The Holocaust,” in The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 236-42.

8 “Spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion” is a slogan on punctum books’ website. It also describes very well how I think of this little book and was one of my reasons for choosing punctum to publish it.

part of her life), and our daughter Nagi for being a source of joy in an increasingly dystopian world.

Tokyo, September 2016.

l The Holocaust

The Holocaust has received surprisingly little attention from social and political philosophers. This is surprising because the scale and extent of the atrocities involved in the Holocaust should be impossible to ignore. If we humans can do that, then that makes a difference— or should make a difference— for our beliefs about the ideal society, for example. At the very least, we should want to organize society to avoid any recurrence.

Among the very few philosophical texts that explicitly deal with the Holocaust, three stand out as especially important— at least, in my opinion. These three are Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, Norman Geras’s The Contract of Mutual Indifference, and Robert Nozick’s “The Holocaust”.'

The last— at a mere 7 pages— is by far the shortest of the three, but by no means the least important. Nozick argues that after the Holocaust, “mankind has fallen” and “humanity has lost its claim Of course, he doesn’t deny or even play down the many other horrendous atrocities committed by men, but he main-

M2 to continue”.

tains that the scale and extent of the Holocaust is such that it “alone would have been enough”, and that “the Holocaust sealed the situation and made it patently clear.” Nozick imagines alien observers, visitors from another galaxy, looking at human history:

1 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963). Norman Geras, The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy After the Holocaust (London: Verso, 1998). Robert Nozick, “The Holocaust,” in The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 236-42.

2 Nozick, “The Holocaust,” 238.

3 Nozick, “The Holocaust,” 238.

It would not seem unfitting to them, I think, if that story came to an end, if the species they see with that history ended, destroying itself in nuclear warfare or otherwise failing to be able to continue. These observers would see the individual tragedies involved, but they would not see . . . any further tragedy in the ending of the species. That species, the one that has committed that, has lost its worthy status.*

Nozick goes on to ask himself whether there is anything we can do to “redeem ourselves.” He suggests that perhaps, we need to change our own nature, transforming ourselves into beings who are unhappy and who suffer when others do, or at least into beings who suffer when we inflict suffering on others or cause them to suffer, or when we stand by and allow the infliction of suffering.’

The English noun “compassion” comes from Latin “com-pati” (through Old French), which literally means “to suffer with.” Hence, etymologically, to have compassion for someone is to suffer with that someone, to share their suffering. This is the kind of compassion that Nozick points at in the above quote. A compassionate being— in this sense— is a being that suffers when others do, and therefore, if Nozick’s call for “redemption” makes sense, we should be(come) compassionate beings.

Compassion should not be confused with pity, although the two are somewhat similar. Pitying someone or feeling sorry for someone is not the same as suffering with someone. Pity is inherently hierarchical— even patronizing, perhaps— while compassion is not. Compassion is an aspect or variant of empathy, which has become a prominent research theme in social and moral psychology as well as in ethics and the philosophy of mind. For example, the social psychologist Daniel Batson mentions “compassion” as an alternative denotation of what he calls “empathic concern,” an other-oriented

4 Nozick, “The Holocaust,” 238-39. 5 Nozick, “The Holocaust,” 240. 6 C. Daniel Batson, “The Things Called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct

THE HOLOCAUST emotion in agreement with the perceived welfare of someone in need.” Within the burgeoning research on empathy, “empathy” itself is not a univocal concept, however. In addition to his own notion of empathic concern, Batson distinguishes seven others.’ Table 1 summarizes them.’

As Batson points out, the proliferation of concepts of “empathy” is partially due to the fact that the concept is brought in to explain two very different things: knowing what another person is thinking or feeling, and responding with care to the suffering of another person. Different mental capacities figure in these explanations, and consequently, the eight concepts of empathy in Table ı are not just different concepts, but describe different (albeit related) capacities as well. Perhaps, rather than as concepts of empathy, they are better understood as facets or varieties of empathy.

The eight varieties of empathy play different explanatory roles, but also differ in other respects such as the degree to which they are controlled or automatic and their self / other orientation. For example, perspective taking and simulation are both controlled processes while motor mimicry and sympathy are more or less automatic. Perspective taking and simulation differ from each other in their orientation: the former is other-oriented, while the latter is self-oriented. Empathie concern and empathic distress differ in the same way: the former is other-oriented, while the latter is self-oriented.

Furthermore, many of these varieties of empathy are more or less independent abilities, and therefore, having an ability or deficiency with regards to one (or more) of these kinds of empathy doesn't necessarily imply having abilities or deficiencies with regards to the others. Some people are very good at simulation, for example, but are incapable of perspective taking (or even of understanding the difference between the two). People on the autism spectrum tend to be less proficient in some of the lower-numbered kinds of empathy,

Phenomena,” in The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, ed. Jean Decety and William John Ickes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 3-15.

7 Batson, The Altruism Question: Toward a Social-Psychological Answer (Hillsdale, ny: Erlbaum, 1991). Batson, Altruism in Humans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

8 Batson, “The Things Called Empathy.”

9 Neither the terminology nor the descriptions in Table 1 are completely identical to Batson’s.

Table 1: Eight Concepts of Empathy

Concept of Empathy Short Description 1 | cognitive empathy knowing the other’s mental state (i.e what someone else is thinking or feeling). 2 | motor mimicry mimicking the other’s facial expression, posture, and/or motor action. 3 | sympathy coming to feel as the other (i.e., (emotional contagion) matching emotions). 4 | projection projecting oneself in the other's situation. 5 | perspective taking imagining what/how the other is thinking / feeling. 6 | simulation imagining what/how one would think/ feel in the other’s situation.

7 | empathic distress feeling distress at witnessing the other’s suffering.

8 | empathic concern (compassion) | feeling for the other who is suffering.

but often have no deficiencies with regards to empathic concern (although this is different for people with “full-fledged” autism). For psychopaths, narcissists, or people with an anti-social personality disorder, on the other hand, a deficiency in empathic concern (and distress) can go hand in hand with “normal” capacity for some or most of the other varieties of empathy.

While the kind of empathy that matters for Nozick’s redemption is just the eighth, empathic concern, many of the varieties of empathy distinguished by Batson relate to the Holocaust in a different way. Norman Geras argues that post-Holocaust society is built on a foundation of “mutual indifference,” that is, a widespread deficiency in empathic concern (and distress), perspective taking, and simulation (although he doesn’t use these terms), but the Holocaust itself was made possible by selectively taking these deficiencies to their climax. The opposite of compassion is psychopathy, but the antipode of empathy in general is “othering.”

The list of atrocities committed by men since the end of the Holocaust is long and depressing. For example, the Yugoslav Wars

10 Geras, The Contract of Mutual Indifference.

THE HOLOCAUST of the 1990s are less than two decades in our past, and continue to shape the region. The viciousness with which former friends and neighbors attacked each other calls for explanations and instilled in many a need to make sense of what happened. Reflecting on the war, Slavenka Drakulié wrote:

I understand now that nothing but “otherness” killed Jews, and it began with naming them, by reducing them to the other. Then everything became possible. Even the worst atrocities like concentration camps or the slaughtering of civilians in Croatia or Bosnia.”

Othering is a form of dehumanization. It is the reduction of the other from other human being to mere (faceless) thing. More technically, othering is the construction and identification of the self or in-group and the other or out-group in mutual, unequal opposition by attributing relative inferiority and/or radical alienness to the other / out-group.” (See Box 1.) By reducing people to mere things, anything becomes possible. SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief organizers of the Holocaust, was not just not thinking— as Hannah Arendt famously argued— but he was notthinking about non-humans.” He was a bureaucrat manipulating numbers and symbols on paper. That’s the limit of negative empathy— reducing the other to something non-human— then indeed, everything becomes possible."

By implication, even if Nozick’s call for redemption sounds just a tad too religious for your preferences, his (implicitly) suggested link between empathy and atrocity is not that far-fetched. Perhaps we do not need compassion (and other kinds of empathy) to redeem ourselves, but we certainly need it to avoid recurrence of the Holocaust u Slavenka Drakulić, The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of the War (New York: Norton, 1993), 145.

12 Lajos Brons, “Othering, an Analysis,” Transcience: A Journal of Global Studies 6.1 (2015): 69-90.

13 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem.

14 Simon Baron-Cohen suggests to substitute the term “empathy erosion” for “evil,” and argues that “empathy erosion arises from people turning other people into objects”. Baron-Cohen, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 6.

Box 1: The Other / Othering

In her introduction to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir wrote that “the category of the Other is as fundamental as consciousness itself” and that “no group ever defines itself without simultaneously positing the Other facing itself.” The focus of her book was on women as Other. Throughout most of history women have been depicted as weak, passive, irrational, emotional, and so forth, and men have defined themselves in opposition to that. In Orientalism, Edward Said showed that the self-identification of the West contra the East takes place in nearly identical terms.'* Such processes of unequal identity construction are called “Othering.”

Othering is the identification of one’s own group in opposition to others or other groups in such a way that one’s own group turns out to be superior. Constructing the other as inferior or backward justifies exclusion and oppression. However, the main purpose of such unequal identity construction is self-affirmation. People need a more or less positive self-image, and the easiest way to achieve that is to construct one’s own identity and the identity of the social groups one belongs to as superior.”

and to end the history of (in-)human atrocity. Unfortunately, we are moving in the opposite direction: rather than compassion, cultural psychopathy is spreading. And the consequences thereof do not just include atrocities, but also the ongoing destruction of environments, communities, countries, and almost everything else most of us care about.

Of course, Pm not claiming that “psychopathy” explains everything that is wrong in the world. Nor am I dismissing or even devaluing the many acts of compassion that occur and have occurred in any age. What I will be arguing in this essay is that psychopathy as a cultural phenomenon is one of the most destructive forces in the history of mankind, and that this cultural psychopathy has become “hegemonic,” which has important implications for any attempt at a remedy.

15 Simone De Beauvoir, Le Deuxieme Sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 18. My translation.

16 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

17 See, for example, Fritz Heider, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations (New York: Wiley, 1958), and David K. Sherman and Geoffrey L. Cohen, “The Psychology of Self-Defense: Self-Affirmation Theory,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 38 (2006): 183-242.

THE HOLOCAUST

Before proceeding to substantiate these claims (in the following chapters) it should be noted that my claim is closely related to Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell’ claim that narcissism has become epidemic. Narcissism shares most of its diagnostic indicators with psychopathy (see next chapter), and a cultural trend becoming epidemic is more or less a consequence of its being hegemonic (see the chapter “Hegemony”). Nevertheless, I disagree with both terms in Twenge’s and Campbell’s cultural “diagnosis.” Firstly, the diagnosis “narcissism” is itself symptomatic for what they and I are diagnosing: it focuses too much on the self, thus downgrading how selves relate to others (i.e., empathy). Secondly, the term “epidemic” falsely suggests that this is a natural phenomenon and obscures its political dimension. The hegemony of psychopathy is as much a political as a cultural phenomenon. And even if my political preferences are somewhat left of center, the hegemony of psychopathy is not just a problem for the left. Psychopathy as a cultural phenomenon also conflicts with the teachings of all of the “World Religions,” and because it destroys community, it should concern the communitarian right as much as it should concern the left. Consequently, although the hegemony of psychopathy is also a political problem, it is not a problem for particular political ideologies or organizations— it is a problem for mankind.

18 Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (New York: Atria, 2009).

This is obviously not an essay in clinical psychology or forensic psychiatry, and it should be equally obvious that when I write about “psychopathy as a cultural phenomenon” I am not using the term “psychopathy” in its clinical sense." Nevertheless, my use of the term is not unrelated, and to explain what I mean by “psychopathy” it is useful to look at the clinical use of the term first.

Research on psychopathy is dominated by Hervey Cleckley and Robert Hare. The first more or less defined the modern understanding of the disorder in The Mask of Sanity.” The second converted Cleckley’s case-study-based construct into something that can actually be measured and tested by means of his Hare Psychopathy Checklist. Cleckley listed 21 (in 1941) or 16 (in 1976) characteristics of the psychopathic personality, on the basis of which Hare developed a checklist to score 20 items. By means of factor analysis

1 Itcan be debated whether there is such a thing as “psychopathy in its clinical sense.” Psychopathy is not listed as such in recent editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Dsm), but as “antisocial personality disorder.” The existence of widely accepted diagnostic criteria does seem to imply that there is a clinical notion of psychopathy, however. See Robert D. Hare, The Hare Psychopathy Checklist — Revised, ıst and and edns. (Toronto: Multi-Health Systems, 1991 and 2003).

2 Hervey Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues about the So-Called Psychopathic Personality, 1st and sth edns. (St. Louis, Mo: Mosby, 1941 and 1976).

3 Robert D. Hare, “A Research Scale for the Assessment of Psychopathy in Criminal Populations,” Personality and Individual Differences 1.2 (1980): 11-19, and Hare, The Hare Psychopathy Checklist — Revised.

Table 2: Four Factors of Psychopathy

Factor / Dimension | Items ı | affective lack of empathy; lack of remorse or guilt; shallow affect; failure to accept responsibility

2 | interpersonal glib / superficial; grandiose self-worth; pathological lying; manipulative

3 | lifestyle stimulation seeking; impulsive; irresponsible; parasitic; lack of realistic goals

4 | antisocial early behavior problems; juvenile delinquency; poor behavioral controls; criminal versatility; revocation of conditional release

(unrelated items) promiscuous; many short-term relations

(a statistical technique to reveal underlying “factors” in data) 18 of those 20 are grouped into four factors, shown in Table 2. These four factors can be interpreted as different but not independent dimensions or aspects of psychopathy.

In Hare’s first explorations based on Cleckley’s 16 characteristics, he found that a factor aggregating lack of empathy, pathological egocentriticy, and other characteristics similar to the items in factor 1 in Table 2 was by far the most important (i.e., explained most of the variance). This suggests that the affective factor / dimension is the most central aspect of psychopathy. However, in later studies it is not consistently the case that the affective factor is the most important, but it seems plausible that this is largely due to the fact that psychopathy is almost exclusively researched. by forensic psychiatrists and that virtually all of the research samples consist entirely of criminal offenders and/or forensic psychiatric patients, which probably are somewhat atypical (in comparison to the general population) with regards to lifestyle (factor 3) and antisocial behavior (factor 4). The forensic background of Hare’s checklist is also clearly reflected in the items of factor 4, antisocial behavior, which focus strongly on criminal behavior. Other kinds of antisocial behavior exist, of course, and a more general (i.e., non-forensic) understanding of psychopathy needs to take that into account. Furthermore, research by David Cooke and his colleagues suggests that antisocial behavior is probably merely a secondary symptom or consequence of psychopathy, and the other factors are more central to the construct.* These considerations and findings suggest that the four factors or dimensions differ in their centrality or peripherality to psychopathy: the affective dimension (1) is the most central, followed by the interpersonal and lifestyle dimensions (2 and 3) while the antisocial dimension (4) is a more peripheral aspect.

Most personality disorders are scales or spectra rather than dichotomies,’ and this is the case for psychopathy as well.* By implication, Hare’s checklist and its associated psychopathy construct posit a more or less arbitrary cut-off point: patients who score at or above that cut-off on the test are diagnosed with psychopathy, while those who score lower are not. Such a cut-off point or threshold is set at a certain level in accordance with the purpose of the test and construct. In case of Hare’s checklist, that purpose is primarily forensic, but in other contexts lower or higher thresholds may be more useful or appropriate, and if the purpose of the construct is not diagnostic (i.e., not applied to individual human beings) then no sharp cut-off may be needed at all. Thus, if one is not so much interested in psychopathy as a predictor of criminal behavior, but as a social or cultural phenomenon, for example, then the threshold should be lowered and blurred sufficiently to pick out levels of psychopathy that pose no serious criminal threat, but that are socially destructive nevertheless. Alternatively, the positing of a threshold can be waived altogether, leaving the concept of psychopathy intentionally vague. People, then, are psychopaths or not to differing extents. If some definition of psychopathy is neither a diagnostic tool nor a measuring rod, no arbitrary cut-off point is needed. Therefore, it is this option that I will adopt here.

4 David J. Cooke, Christine Michie, Stephen D. Hart, and Daniel A. Clark, “Reconstructing Psychopathy: Clarifying the Significance of Antisocial and Socially Deviant Behavior in the Diagnosis of Psychopathic Personality Disorder,” Journal of Personality Disorders 18.4 (2004): 337-57.

5 Lee Clark, “Assessment and Diagnosis of Personality Disorder: Perennial Issues and an Emerging Reconceptualization,” Annual Review of Psychology 58.1 (2007): 227-57.

6 Robert D. Hare and Craig S. Neumann, “Psychopathy as a Clinical and Empirical Construct,” Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 4 (2008): 217- 46.

Table 3: The Affective Dimension of Psychopathy

Essential Indicators Additional Indicators

lack of empathic concern lack of empathic distress

lack of ability or willingness to lack of ability or willingness to engage in perspective taking and engage in simulation projection

lack of remorse or guilt failure to accept responsibility

As mentioned, of the four dimensions of psychopathy, the fourth, antisocial behavior, is either peripheral or even a consequence of the other dimensions. Moreover, as non-criminal forms of antisocial behavior are less casily captured in a small list of indicators, I will ignore this dimension. Of the remaining three dimensions, the affective dimension is the most important, and therefore should play a central role in a definition of psychopathy. (See Table 3.) Within this dimension, “lack of empathy” is the most important aspect (it has a factor loading of 0.82, which is the highest of all factor loadings, other factors included). As we have seen before (see previous chapter), the concept of empathy is very ambiguous, however, and consequently, some clarification is needed.

It is possible that a psychopath is deficient to varying extents in all eight kinds of empathy distinguished in the table in the previous chapter, but that doesn’t mean that all eight deficiencies would be defining criteria.” Hare uses the term “callous” as an alternative denotation for “lack of empathy,” which implies that it is a lack of empathic concern that is a defining feature. However, in most cases, this lack of empathic concern is probably paired to a lack of empathic distress and (both are) causally related to a lack of ability or willingness to engage in perspective taking, projection, and possibly also simulation. While all of these deficiencies are indicators of psychopathy, some are more essential to the concept than others. Something similar seems to be true for the other items in Hare’s checklist: lack of remorse or guilt is a more important indicator (i.e., has a much higher factor loading) than failure to accept responsibility. Table 3 summarizes the indicators of the affective dimensions of psychopathy, taking this difference into account.

7 Many psychopaths are good “mind-readers,” implying that they have no deficiencies with regards to cognitive empathy.

Table 4: The Interpersonal and Lifestyle Dimensions of Psychopathy

Indicators of the Interpersonal Indicators of the Lifestyle Dimension

Dimension

egocentric (grandiose self-worth) (short term) stimulation seeking, impulsive

manipulative lack of realistic (long term) goals

deceitful parasitic

The other two dimensions require less clarification, although in a few cases a slight change of terms may broaden their applicability. For example, in some variants of Hare’s checklist, the more general— and for that reason preferable— term “deceitful” is used instead of “pathological lying.” In case of the lifestyle dimension, it needs to be noted that many of the indicators mentioned are hard to separate from each other. Short-term orientation, stimulation seeking behavior, risk-taking, and several of the other indicators mentioned are all closely related. This also includes the “parasitic” indicator, although that may be less obvious. Psychopaths take risks, but intelligent and not-so-intelligent psychopaths take different kinds of risks. That is, intelligent psychopaths take risks on behalf of others, and are parasitic in that sense: if all goes well, the profit is theirs, but if things go wrong, most of the damage is done to others.

Definitions

A psychopath is defined here (i.e., in this book) as someone who matches all of the essential indicators in the left column of Table 3, at least some of the additional indicators in the right column of Table 3, and at least some of the indicators in Table 4. This definition, as mentioned above, is intentionally vague in the sense that it does not posit an arbitrary cut-off point. Instead, it takes explicitly into account that psychopathy is a spectrum: the more indicators apply to some individual, the more psychopathic that person.