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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:04:22
Hunting the Psychopath - Mike Cross Interviewed on Freedomain Radio
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I have from Sweden, Michael Kross, who is a novelist and researcher who has some theories about psychopathy.
Welcome to the show.
Well, thank you for having me on.
So just before we get into the details of your theories, why do you think you're drawn to this particular topic?
I mean, I think it's a very interesting topic, of course, but what's your affinity for it?
Well, I think the thing that has really excited me, or at least motivated me in this area, is that in education I have somewhat of an interdisciplinary background.
I have a master's degree in community health, an undergrad degree that's centered on psychology and political science, And so, of course, I, you know, I'm an educator in Sweden and teach international relations, international finance, as well as psychology.
And, believe it or not, the disciplines all seem to find one thing in common, that there is really A great amount of influence from this one particular what I would call personality disorder, and that's psychopath.
And I don't think most people are aware of that.
Most people have a Hollywood image of what a psychopath is, and that's something similar to Silence of the Lambs or the character who
was uh... capturing women and skinning them or uh... bill i think he has and that's their image in reality the psychopath is that's only a very very very small percentage well in there i feel that they're almost used as a camouflage for the true psychopath who is much more dangerous because he's much less obvious Yeah, yeah, the true psychopath.
Now, of course, what I'm talking about here is there's two categories of psychopath that I would like to center on, and that's charismatic psychopath as well as cerebral psychopath.
Now there's the, what would be considered the, without going into a lot of detail, the distempered psychopath, but they're the ones that usually get studied in prisons.
They're the less intelligent or the ones that are unable to control their impulses, so eventually they wind up getting in a barroom brawl or someone cuts them off on the road so they shoot them or something like that.
The charismatic or the cerebral psychopaths, on the other hand, are the ones you have to really worry about.
On a grand scale.
So let's talk about some of the characteristics that are common.
I mean, you have the two, the cerebral and the charismatic.
Let's talk about some of the characteristics that you would put in that category.
Okay.
Well, first of all, I would just want people to try to understand that... Well, I'll give you an example that might help people understand the way they think about the world.
If you pick up a newspaper article and find out that your neighbor got in a car wreck and got killed, you're going to have a very emotional reaction to that.
uh... if you pick up the newspaper and see that there was a flood in bangladesh and you're not from bangladesh that kills a thousand people it's going to be mostly a uh... cerebral or intellectual uh... analysis of that but you're not going to feel you're not going to feel any emotions really what's that quote from stalin a single death is a tragedy a million deaths is a statistic yes Yes.
Now, the thing I would like people to try to understand with psychopathy is that's the way that a psychopath sees pretty much the entire world, both at the interpersonal level, except for maybe first-degree relatives, as well as, well, just people around them.
So if you work with a psychopath, They really don't have what's known as empathy.
So that's one of the number one characteristics of a psychopath.
I'm sorry, just to interrupt and to clarify that, because people have a different understanding.
I sort of categorize them in two areas.
One is called sympathy and one is called empathy.
Empathy, because one of the things that I think is quite true about psychopaths is they're really good at figuring out what people's needs are and then pandering to them.
So if you have a A chink in your armor of ethics, you know, if you have vanity, or if you have greed, or if you have certain kinds of insecurity, then they can sort of play you like a, you know, a Hammond organ.
And so they really are very good at figuring out what people want, what their deficiencies are, what their weaknesses are, what their vanities are, and exploiting them.
Yes.
And that is a kind of empathy, but what they don't have is, because, you know, you have to be empathetic to figure out what other people's weaknesses are, what they don't have is sympathy.
And I wanted to differentiate that, or see if you feel that that's a useful differentiation.
Oh, absolutely.
If someone gets injured, they can feel like, oh, that's too bad that they got injured.
But they're not going to have that empathy, that old saying of walking in someone else's shoes.
They're not going to be able to feel that.
There's an analogy I like to use to illustrate this.
There's another condition that's called, and it's not related to psychopathy directly, but it's called Asperger.
And that is where, it's a type of autism, and it's where a person has a very hard time processing emotional stimuli, emotional clues from the outside world.
Now, psychopaths, when they're young, start out the same way.
The analogy I like to use is, if you've got two ten-year-old kids, and Uh, the little, the little neighbor girl comes over and she's crying because her kitten got run over, uh, by a car.
Um, the, the Asper child is gonna maybe, they're gonna blurt out something like, oh, well, I guess you need to buy a new kitten.
Which of course, you know, may sound callous, but they have a hard time processing those emotions.
But they still have them.
They still have those emotions.
They just don't know how to relay them.
The Big Bang Theory, the tall skinny fella, I can't remember his name.
And he can plumb the secrets of the universe to ten decimal places, but when asked to process somebody else's emotional state, he mostly is just throwing darts blindfolded attempting to guess and he's quite happy when he gets it right.
Yeah, Sheldon.
Sheldon, that's right.
And now the ten-year-old child that has psychopathic tendencies is going to be sort of in the same boat.
They're not going to really know how to relate to this little girl's losing her kitten.
Now what happens though is, as these two children develop, the Asperger child will continue not being able to really be able to process emotional information.
Whereas a psychopath learns a certain level of being able to read people.
And they may not feel anything, as opposed to the Asperger who feels it, but they just have a hard time processing it.
The psychopath doesn't feel it, but they have a very easy time interpreting and processing.
And therefore, if instead it's a You know, we go up to when these kids are 17, and the Asperger's kid's still gonna be like, well, I guess you need to go buy a new kitten, versus the psychopath is going to, you know, ask the girl to cry on his shoulder, and, you know, he's gonna talk about how horrible it was that she lost this kid.
He won't feel it, though.
It'll be more like, oh, well, maybe now I can seduce her if we go on a date.
You know, I'll act like I really care.
Right, so it's a kind of mimicry, as is like a parrot learning how to speak language.
It's more of a mimicry than it is any genuine emotional state.
Yeah, yeah, and so they learn very early on how to interpret What people really want and how people will respond if you act a certain way.
That's the danger because the ones that are highly intelligent will use this skill and be able to get up in front of audiences and basically be able to seduce an audience into believing what this person is saying.
He or she will be able to read this audience and be able to strongly connect to them.
And there's an aspect that you see in politicians, I think, which relates to this, which is Passionate integrity in the moment, and they're very, very convincing in the moment.
It's only when you stretch statements that they've made over time.
Of course, The Daily Show makes great hay about this, with people saying, you know, well, three hours ago he said this.
Now he's saying the exact opposite, with the same kind of passionate intensity that is perfectly believable in the moment.
It's only when you string these beads together that you begin to see this picture of shape-shifting, of pleasing whoever has the most power or has the most to offer in the moment.
Right, and what they often will be able to do is be able to use words convincingly.
They may not even be lying technically, but they know how to convey that what they say is conveying
a sort of truth but it's not true and so an audience will hear them say uh... they will hear them say something that they want them to say and then the politician can go to a new audience and say something else and people believe that he or she is saying what they want them to say right and i i've always got the sense that they view people as
utility as resources and they almost view manipulation as a tool and if I have a cup and one day I use it for tea and then the next day I use it for coffee and then the third day I put a plant in it there's no lying about that it's not true or false it's just what I happen to want to use it for in the moment and so there's no real sense of Good or evil?
I see what you're saying.
It's not really lying.
Well, was I lying when I used it for tea?
No, I wanted it for tea in that moment.
Was I lying or suddenly changing my mind or doing something different when I put a plant in it?
No, I just wanted a plant in it in that moment.
Again, I think it's that level of objectification of the race around them that produces these kind of chilling results.
Yeah, and the sad part is I think our culture has made it very easy for these people to climb to the very top of, you know, corporations and politics to where you almost see it as an art ever since the days of, well, I think every year we see more and more of the philosophy of Edward Bernays coming through to where What you're trying to do is just convince people.
It doesn't matter what you're really saying.
It's what will get them to do something that they normally wouldn't do.
Yeah, it's what Socrates complained about 2,500 years ago, which was sophistry, which is making the worst argument appear the better.
I also think as our time frame for evaluation has fragmented and shrunk, our natural defense against this kind of creepiness is to look at things over the long term, to see the arc of somebody's life, to see how their integrity stretches out against the long term, not just what feels good in the moment, because this kind of behavior is like the cheesecake of dieting, you know?
It's like, eh, it's good in the moment, but over the long term, if you only eat cheesecake, you're going to get really sick, whereas in the moment, cheesecake's always going to be better than broccoli.
And I think that the fact that our sense of time and our sense of continuity has really shrunk to a moment-by-moment scenario has made, I think, us much more susceptible as a society to these kinds of people.
Well yeah, and we live in the era now of soundbites.
In which, in politics, we don't really care about politics anymore.
We care about politicians.
People are convinced to vote for someone because they have a picture of them with a dog.
Or they have a picture with their family or something.
Oh, you see these ridiculous things where he's down 20 points in the polls, he's up 20 points in the polls, like literally over three days.
I mean, that's completely insane.
I mean, when you think about it, I mean, either the man or the woman have integrity and you agree with them, in which case you're going to stick with them, or they don't, in which case you shouldn't touch them at the 10-foot pole.
But the people going up and down like crazy in the American polls, of course, Centorum and Gingrich and all these people, like wildly oscillating up and down.
How could that conceivably be if they have a 20 or 30 year track record in politics and they're the same person yesterday as they are today pretty much?
It's just that their poll numbers are changing so enormously which indicates that it is just a moment-to-moment evaluation of immediate credibility which is really to say no credibility.
Yeah, and we're also in an era in which, during this last election, I'm not going to make any accusations towards one candidate displaying certain psychopathic tendencies over another, but we see a situation in which character, you could bring up something about someone's character when it relates to their family,
And people will still think, oh well, that was then, this is now, we shouldn't look at that.
You know, you get these weird inconsistencies in which maybe someone who belongs to the so-called religious right will endorse a candidate who has shown very little of those particular values over the course of their life, but will get up in front of an audience and talk about, well, we need to have school prayer.
Right, right.
No, because what happens is these people tend to talk in idealized statements about sort of virtue and country and nationalism and goodness and sacrifice and so on, but then they just simply make base pragmatic alliances in the moment, and then anybody who calls them out as a complete deviation from their ideals is called impractical and an idealist, and you get insulted either way, right?
If you question their idealism, then you're a cynic.
And if you question their cynicism, then you're an idiotic idealist.
So they can just invent whatever they want to make themselves right in the moment.
Which again, in this era of the soundbite and just the image, we really are setting ourselves up for these kinds of people to be able to climb to the top and win based on these sort of popularity contests that are very superficial.
Right.
And I also have found that this type of personality tends to provoke A difference in status, usually through the provocation of envy, and this tends to be self-fulfilling, right?
Obviously, if somebody like this is very physically attractive, then that makes a big difference in terms of status.
If they have a lot of money, if they know particular dance moves in the breakdancing community, make it up whatever you want, right?
Whatever it is that they particularly have skill in, they will use to create envy, and then envy gives them power over people, and I think that is something that is mined quite a bit as well.
The real sad part is that it seems that the person who does have these characteristics, and we should go into some of the other characteristics really, but the person who has these characteristics is able to Um, relate to the people in such a way that he or she gives them what they want to see, even though that's not really them.
And so, you have a situation in which, uh, a person may really, really, like you said, the breakdancing community, they might go and speak before people, um, who they really have nothing in common with, but they're able to They're able to let that community project through them and feel like they're really connected to this person, which they're not.
Well, and of course, whatever the psychopath gives you cannot be sustained.
It cannot be sustained, which is what the addiction then becomes.
You become dependent on the illusion maintained by that personality, by that dysfunctional personality.
So if somebody praises you for an attribute you don't have but desperately want, then you kind of become dependent on the continuation of that praise because it's not real, and therefore you become addicted to the illusion that's being pumped out by these fire hydrants of demi-craziness.
Well, yeah, it is an addiction.
You could actually say, and without going into too much, you know, deep, deep psychology, the psychopath is somewhat of the Jungian shadow archetype.
They are the, like you said with the analogy of the coffee cup, they're not, in their mind, they're not good or evil, they're just who they are.
And they can present an image to people that allows people to live through them.
And to a certain degree, that means we also set ourselves up for victimization.
You'll talk to women who've been in relationships with psychopaths and they'll talk about how they have been, how now they look back and think how they were abused or how they were conned or whatever.
But then you'll ask, did you have a good time during the six months you were with him?
And they'll say, yeah, it was the best time of my life.
Well, and as you know, at a very base biological level, and this is as true for men as it is for women, if the psychopath is high status, then the woman might... I mean, certain shallow kinds of women will say, well, that's good for my status, right?
So he's really good-looking, or he's really rich, and he's very powerful, and so on, and so there is that status, and that envy, and that desire for mastery over others, not through virtue, but through status, which is really quite the opposite.
And also a certain level of power.
Um, people feel like they want... the psychopath is able to project a certain level of protection.
Um, they may manipulate you, but they're gonna try to present themselves as being your savior, the one who can protect you from the outside world.
This is why, you know, that you can find...
The charismatic psychopaths will wind up not just being in politics, but also forming religious or philosophical movements.
Or in the military.
Yeah.
Where they can give a certain sense of power, which people want.
They like that.
He or she will stand up for me, but at the same time, it's this person, like you said with the addiction, they will keep taking it further and further.
If I can get away with going to step A, Then maybe I can get away with going step B. And if I can get away with going step B, I can go to step C. And if no one calls me on it, I can just continue and continue and continue.
And we see in history what that does.
Civilizations who adopt these kind of people as their leaders eventually overextend themselves and crumble.
Because it cannot be maintained.
Well, and I've always felt that You know, just for my amateur opinion, that the psychopath will almost always offer you protection from a danger that he or other psychopaths have actually generated.
So the traditional example, of course, is the guy who opens a restaurant in an Italian neighborhood.
Let's go full cliche.
It opens a neighborhood in an Italian restaurant and the Roughneck comes by and says, you know, it would be a real shame if something happened to your store like a fire or a break-in, but we can protect you from all of that.
And so they're selling you protection for the danger that they themselves are representing.
Writ large, this looks like the Patriot Act after 9-11 where the government was offering protection to its citizens from a danger that the government itself had provoked through its foreign policies.
So, that's another thing.
It's like, I will protect you from the danger.
It's like, wait a minute, aren't you the danger?
Well, let's skip over that.
Let me just get back to protecting you.
Well, now there's one thing, there's one thing a lot of people don't, you know, connect to when it comes to psychopaths, and that is the fact that the psychopath is going to think that other people believe the same way he or she does.
And so, generally they become very paranoid.
And you can see that like in, use an example, you brought up Stalin.
In these revolutions that take place that often are led by psychopaths, the first thing they do is kill off all the people that actually got them in power.
Because they're thinking that, they're projecting out and thinking those people have the same attitudes that I do, so therefore I need to erase this threat.
And the danger when they are in charge is that they're going to create all these nightmare scenarios for the population they control.
They're going to hype up any and all dangers to the point that people are willing to give up whatever measures of civil liberties that they have and say, oh well that's okay, that's okay.
We'll accept that because there's a huge threat right now.
We'll accept people stopping us on the road and checking our car and if they see cameras jotting down information and shipping it off to a fusion center.
Right, right.
So let's talk about, you mentioned that you wanted to talk about some of the other characteristics as we try and spot these tigers in the grass.
Just real quick, I like that analogy too, the tigers.
I think a lot of time people... I've heard a lot of people use the analogy of reptiles.
Saying that the psychopath is like a reptile.
They don't care about anyone aside from themselves.
I would actually use the analogy of a tiger or a lion.
Yeah, that seems more like a narcissist to me.
Yeah, the tiger or the lion, we don't blame them for killing, for food, or killing in order to protect their young.
In fact, we still think they're pretty cuddly.
You see a tiger or a lion, and you're like, oh, I just wish I could put my arms around them.
And again, they represent somewhat of an amoral but survivalistic way of life.
And that is very similar to the way a psychopath will feel.
uh There's one individual, Richard Kuklinski, he was a murderer, and he I would show classes when we're dealing with personality disorders.
I would show interviews with him.
If anyone wants to look it up, he's also known as Iceman.
Someone insulted or threatened one of his children.
This was his best friend, and then he chopped him up later.
Because of that.
Because he wanted to protect his children.
Now the irony is, and that's one of the reasons why I got into the idea of writing a book that would illustrate the way a psychopath feels, is I would always get quite a few of the female audience thinking, they would actually state, this guy is so cool, I would love to meet him.
And I would say, well wait a minute, this guy's a murderer, he's killed like 200 people.
And they're like, yeah, but look at his charisma, look at how interesting he is.
And you'd be like, what?
I mean, this person could kill you.
Well, but sorry, I think one of the definitions of the most dangerous kind of charisma is the kind of personality that can make you believe that all rules are delusions, that all rules are fantasies, that all rules are imposed by authority to
Diminish competition to get you to self-attack, to diminish you, whereas there's this glorious Nietzschean nihilistic universe of infinite possibility that if you simply break out of the bounds that you were grown up with, if you break out of the petty bourgeois religiosity, whatever rules you grew up with, break out of these rules, take to the skies, fly, be a pterodactyl of infinite eating, and
Those kinds of people can make people very giddy and they can make them almost jump out of their own, I think, pretty healthy limitations and imagine that all is possible.
That's the great lure of the great nihilistic characters in history, Satan, Raskolnikov, even Hamlet to a large degree, that you simply have to will rather than obey and all can be yours.
Yeah, and I think in reference to Nietzsche, the psychopath sees themselves as the ultimate Uberman.
The rules are made for other people.
Now that's ironic.
If you believe the rules, they're true.
If you don't, you're free.
That's what they believe.
But here's another danger, though.
When psychopaths do wind up taking control of a society, again, that projection, that fear they have that other people are thinking in the same way they are, they're more likely to set up very strict rules because they want to make sure that, I mean, you could say they don't want to competition, but they're going to feel like the only way to control the society is through authoritarianism.
Sorry, to be annoyingly precise, totalitarianism rarely sets up rules of any kind.
What they do is set up incredible punishments.
But the rules themselves are almost unobeyable, right?
I mean, in the Soviet Union, people would get yanked off the street, and Solzhenitsyn writes about this in the Gulag Apikalago.
That there was no way to know what was legal and what was not, but there was an omnipresent sense of dread at any potential law, or if you displease someone in authority, they could just make up some law or just have you arrested on a whim.
It's not that they set up rules.
Rules, you could almost survive.
Like, if there was a death penalty for chewing gum, just don't chew gum and you feel safe.
But there are no rules, but there are savage, almost random punishments that occur, and I think that's a little bit different.
I don't want to be annoyingly precise, but that is something I really wanted to mention.
Yeah, and we can, you know, it's controversial, we can say this is sort of evolving now within at least North America.
Oh, I don't think it's that controversial.
I mean, I think that there are attorneys out there who say, you know, give me a man, I'll follow him for a day, I'll find three felonies.
No problem.
Like, without even breaking a sweat.
I mean, nobody can conceivably obey all of the made-up, violent, aggressive, dictatorial rules that exist in society.
I mean, the Federal Register or Federal Reserve, sorry, the Federal Agencies passed hundreds of thousands of legislative advances last year alone.
There are millions of laws.
The tax code is six million words long.
Nobody has a clue how to obey all of these laws, and the punishments, of course, are severe at the time when the ignorance of the law is claimed to be no excuse.
So, I agree with you, but I don't want to go on that rant and stay on your topic.
But it does show a certain level of distrust, whereas, at least in the United States, the founding fathers They felt that laws should be at a minimum, and they should be more localized.
We've evolved now, at least within the United States, to the point that things are becoming more and more federalized, to the point that if I grow a carrot in, I don't know, Idaho, and I happen to give that carrot to a friend in Oregon, I might be breaking some sort of FDA rule or USDA.
No, they don't even need that.
In fact, they've come down on people with gardens because the produce could conceivably be shipped to another state, even if they just drove it in the car across the state line and thus it falls under interstate commerce and they can shut these people down.
Oh yeah, it's completely mad.
And this is what I mean.
There's no rules in North America or in the West at all.
Nobody has any clue what is legal or not.
There's no single human entity who can tell you whether you're above or below the law.
That is the tragic reality of what this metastasizing cancer of state laws has produced.
Well, I heard this is a kind of weird situation, but it shows just how far government will go.
There was a guy, I think in California, that just set up a website that he would, for free, he would do donations for women who were wanting to have children.
And, you know, that You know, and he had all the health papers and everything showing that he was healthy.
And you could say that this was an individual contract if this woman comes in and says, sure, you know, I want to have a child.
My husband's sterile or I'm single.
But now the FDA is threatening him.
Because they're saying that he's a manufacturer of human cells and therefore they have jurisdiction.
And you're thinking, wait a minute, if they can go into something that personal to consenting adults.
Manufacturer of human cells, that's amazing.
I mean, I believe in my teenage years I was probably the equivalent of mainland China at the moment.
So I think we might all fall under that shadow.
Yeah, and if we get to the point where the FDA feels that they have the right to regulate even that sort of thing between consenting adults who decided that, yeah, sure, you know, I like you, you can make a baby for me, then there's no limit to where the government can go with that.
Oh yeah, but there's no limit to where governments can go anyway.
There's no practical limit, it's whatever they can get away with, which increasingly is more and more.
So, I wanted to ask, In terms of defense, defense against the dark arts, let's do our Harry Potter reference, what is it that people can look out for in people that they meet as possible tiger stripes in this kind of personality height?
Well, the first thing I would encourage people to do is actually look up the characteristics of psychopaths.
Dr. Robert Hare has like 20 characteristics That he lists for the, that you could, you know, if a person scores high on all 20 or just a majority, then they are a psychopath.
So, look up the Hare checklist, first of all.
H-A-R-E?
H-A-R-E, yeah.
He's a researcher.
I'll put the link below the video, yeah.
He's a researcher out of British Columbia.
And some of those characteristics, first of all, are superficial charm.
Um, if you're with someone who, no matter what, they're a very good chameleon, you know, you can see that no matter what the situation, they can say the right thing all the time.
That's something maybe, uh, that would, that would raise my suspicion.
Yeah, no level of discomfort in any situation means no integrity because there are always going to be people you meet who contradict your values and that can be an uncomfortable, that is often an uncomfortable situation.
So, yeah, I think that's an important characteristic to look for.
Yeah, if you're in a situation where you just see that this person just knows how to elicit just the right responses and then right afterwards they're just like, okay, well that's accomplished.
Then you might consider that they're doing the same thing to you as well.
They butter somebody up and smooth over a situation and then turn to you and roll their eyes?
You know, like they just performed some unnecessary trick like cleaning a fish or something?
Yeah.
Other characteristics are a certain grandiose sense of worth.
Now, we may look and think ambition is a wonderful thing, but if No matter what the situation is, they feel that they're the most important person there.
And they have a destiny.
Which is kind of scary because most of our politicians lately have Well, again, you're the expert, so correct me where I go astray, but I would say that this is particularly true in the absence of actual accomplishments.
I think of politicians, they tell us they want to run our lives.
It's like, okay, well, first of all, have you run your own life in a way that is absolutely admirable?
Are you the Socrates of the modern age?
And secondly, have you really studied first principles and virtue and ethics, and can you make a convincing case for virtue and goodness?
Do you really understand it?
And the answer is invariably no with politicians in Congress.
Many of them are in debt, they've kited checks, they've had DUIs, they're just a pretty seedy crowd.
So when they profess to want to have the right to tell you how to live and to organize society at the point of a gun in the pursuit of virtue, that is grandiose in the extreme, and it is without the accomplishment of actually having lived a virtuous life, with some exceptions, of course.
Or when, you know, they're the head of some large financial investment organization or a bank and they wind up coming to the government and saying that they need several billion dollars to bail them out, and then later that same government takes them and puts them in charge of regulating the industry.
Right.
Or if they say to people who miss, you know, a couple of mortgage payments, we're tossing you out of the house and nailing up the door because if you don't pay your bills, you should suffer the consequences.
If you can't pay your mortgage, if you can't pay what you owe, then you suffer the consequences.
That's the rule that they impose on those they have power over.
And then, of course, they go bleaching to the government for bailouts when they can't pay their own bills.
And it's astounding.
And they don't even seem to notice the disconnect.
Those are really chilling kinds of soulless carp, I think.
Yeah, but like I said, society now has gotten to the point where, again, we don't really have investigative journalism anymore.
We just have this kind of fluffy entertainment type of journalism that doesn't really dig deep anymore.
And I just find it interesting that if I want information on the American elections, I will go to the British press.
Oh, and if you want information about England, you go elsewhere.
There's no question that this biosphere of media that sort of goes over every single country can only be penetrated from outside.
You can't see a damn thing from inside.
Oh, correct, correct.
Other characteristics, very charming individuals, of course that goes along with the superficial charm, but they can say all the right things at the right time.
And funny!
They can be incredibly funny in a way that is quite disarming.
A comedy is often quite close to anger and it is a way, of course, of disarming somebody and of having a kind of authority over them and producing an involuntary response.
So they can be very funny.
I was going to point that out as well.
Oh, I would note that, again, most people, you know, the Hollywood image of the psychopath is of this kind of creature, Norman Bates type creature, is really incorrect.
It could have been, you know, they're very good at law, acting, they might be your favorite college professor.
Yeah, I mean, I've read, although I haven't really seen much verification, but that a lot go into psychology in order to... Well, I mean, it's almost like if the heads of these organizations are themselves subject to some of these diagnoses, and of course you can't, I mean, nobody can diagnose from a distance, least of all an amateur like me.
But if you were in that position and you wanted to hide your true colors from everyone else, then you would create an extreme example to distract people, and you'd say, the only tigers that are dangerous are the ones that have rabies.
And that actually makes you feel more comfortable around all the other tigers, even though the ones with rabies, which are the Buffalo Bill psychopaths as portrayed in the media, are incredibly rare, and you're never likely to meet any of them, whereas the other ones are, you know, I've heard a couple of percentage points of the population, and in significant positions of authority, you run into them a lot.
Well, actually, if it's 1 in like 40 males and 1 in 100 females, you're likely to have run into them many times.
Particularly if they're like helium balloons, if they're bubbling up to the tops of authority, they have an effect far disproportionate to their actual numbers.
Yeah, so there was a recent article
that's came out that was saying that ten percent uh... wall street uh... ten percent of wall street workers uh... fit the psychopathy uh... definition i'd say it's probably much higher if you were to give this the same study in uh... congress or the senate or the people that inhabit and it would be interesting to know where those people were in the hierarchy i mean if it's ten percent of the very top then it's wall street may they define the culture
I mean, I worked in a trading house.
There's lots of layers, of course, of people all the way down to secretaries.
So, it would be interesting to see where they were in the hierarchy, I would guess, closer to the top.
But, I mean, without further data, that would be hard to ascertain.
Right.
And one of the other traits that might help when it comes to people in politics, as well as media, as well as the financial services industry, is the idea that they also have no feeling of guilt.
They're very good at rationalizing.
If they do something wrong, they are able to say that they didn't reach a goal, or they wish they had done something different, but there's no sense that they've broken some sort of underlying rule in their character, and therefore they feel bad about it.
Yeah, it was a strategy that failed.
I mean, it's the dual use of the word wrong that is very, very interesting.
You know, wrong means morally wrong and wrong also means incorrect.
You know, if I go fishing at the wrong end of the lake, well, I've not had a great day of fishing.
I'm just not a bad guy.
I'm not an evil guy.
I just didn't Fish well.
I did a bad job of fishing, so I should recalibrate and try again.
And I get the feeling that most of the people in this category use the word wrong simply to mean oops rather than evil.
Right.
Or they get caught.
Right.
Which means that... But that's more like... They get caught in the way that you get tackled in football.
It doesn't mean you're evil.
It just means you zigged when you should have zagged.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But they're not going to have that feeling that when you maybe hurt someone That you're thinking, oh, you know, I've done something really bad.
They don't feel that way.
No, I mean, when I'm watching those videos on TV, you know, where someone's kid's swinging at a piñata and they take one to the nuts, I mean, I'm like, oh man!
Whereas, you know, a lot of people are laughing.
And I think that's kind of a different category of moral empathy or even just what they call these mirror neurons, which allow you to experience what somebody else is experiencing almost involuntarily.
In fact, it is involuntary for a lot of people.
But for a lot of people, I think nothing really lights up.
Right.
And like I said, they will always shift responsibility.
over onto someone or some institution for all their faults.
If you're stupid enough to get conned, then, you know, it's your fault.
Yeah.
The other traits, easily bored.
Now, I mean, there's a lot of people that are easily bored, but they're always wanting some new experience.
Some people have speculated that most psychopaths are very low on the brain chemical serotonin.
So, they're having to do new things and reach new heights, or else... I must confess to having enormous skepticism, having interviewed a bunch of people and read a bunch of books, enormous skepticism about the brain chemistry arguments, but I certainly do think that they're sort of like sharks, like if they stop moving they sink.
Because they just have that restlessness and that emptiness.
And they, you know, I think if they spend long enough time alone, they get closer to the heart of who they are.
So they always have to be out there doing stuff and manipulating and, you know, following the bright lights.
Well, their personas, they are their persona.
They are their ego.
They are the image that they have presented to other people.
Now that still may be a very chameleon-ish like image, but it is still the image that they have projected out.
And that means that they have to constantly be getting that reinforced.
And so if they are in politics, they have to strive to get higher and higher and higher, especially since they're going to look at other people around them and think, why do they deserve to be higher than me?
There's always that envy that they have.
Let's talk a little bit about the genesis of this personality type.
I can't even remember where I read it, and it's probably more apocryphal than anything, but I sort of read, if you get really disastrous care or significant abuse in your first sort of six to twelve months, you get psychopathy.
And then later, you know, from sort of one to two years, you get narcissism.
And sort of three years and upwards, you get neuroses.
And I know that's a gross oversimplification, but I have to imagine that people who end up with this kind of empty, charming, shiny, silver-eyed, predatory personality must have gone through some pretty bad stuff when they were kids to end up.
I sort of believe that people are, you know, born good and made bad.
I think there's some fairly good science behind that.
But again, I sort of defer to your expertise.
But do you have any sense of, or is there research out there that has confirmed even a tendency or trend towards the kind of conditions, understanding the kind of conditions that produce this kind of personality?
Okay.
If I have, okay, I would say it's a combination of genetics as well as your upbringing.
Now if I have two, I hate to use this, but if I have two dogs, one is a Rottweiler and the other one is an Irish Setter, and I raise both of them in a very loving, tender manner, I will have a very sweet and wonderful Rottweiler and an Irish Setter.
And I probably will never have any troubles with either of those dogs attacking someone.
If I raise both of those dogs in a really abusive and mean environment, the Rottweiler will be a very vicious potential killer.
The Irish Setter will not be as nice as normal, but won't be nearly as destructive in potential as the Rottweiler.
In fact, it might even become passive.
Well, and in the, sorry, just to confirm this, I mean, in some of the, I've got this video series called The Bomb and the Brain, I just, fdrurl.com forward slash bib, and in it they talk about, this of course is epigenetics, it's the idea that we're not born with a fixed set of genes, but we have some, and then some are turned on or off.
Depending on our situations and depending on our environments.
And there has been almost a perfect correlation of, you know, boys in abusive environments with certain gene patterns just become violent.
I mean, it's just the way it is.
The problem is, of course, you don't know ahead of time whether you have the genes or not.
Some people can smoke to be a hundred like George Burns and live to be a hundred and they're fine Other people have ten cigarettes and die of lung cancer.
You just don't know ahead of time and that's of course why the abuse is not You know a stamp now this person comes out this way It is of course a complex but but we always know that it's gonna tend towards a negative outcome to be an abuse but I yeah, so I just wanted to sort of flesh that out for some of the people who've heard some of my other stuff and Yeah, and I agree.
The thing is that there's some human beings that are going to be, if you raise them in tremendously wonderful environments, They will still turn out bad.
But it will be less that will turn out bad.
Let me ask you that.
That's pretty sweet.
Let me just question you on that.
I just want to get some facts behind that.
Because your other example was, I thought more believable, that if you subject two species of dogs to these negative environments, the one who has more innate aggression will turn out worse.
Now you're kind of saying that if you raise a Rottweiler and an Irish Setter in great environments, you might still get, you know, without any illness or brain disease or tumors or whatever, you just might get a vicious Rottweiler, even if you raise it peacefully and lovingly.
No, you may wind up with a person who is, statistically, you still might get bit by the Rottweiler, even if you raise them nicely, but it's going to be statistically much smaller levels.
But how has this been established?
Because, you know, somebody who's a criminal might say, I had a great childhood.
But I mean, of course, how would you verify that?
That's my question.
That's true.
A lot of it is going to be something where it's going to be their own interpretation.
It's self-reporting and unverifiable hearsay and so on, right?
An example of that would be the interview that James Dobson did with Ted Bundy, in which Ted Bundy said the reason why he turned out the way he did was because he was looking at dirty pictures.
And if you actually study his background and what he was really doing, there was a lot more going on than that.
However, the thing is, he knew that he could build up sympathy for himself before his execution by fixing the blame on someone else.
And of course, again, the child might have been raped at the age of six months and have no memory of it whatsoever, other than, of course, the deep, traumatic, mostly inaccessible body memory.
And again, I don't want to say this is not true, it's just that, to me, I would have a much higher burden of proof for that kind of statement.
I don't know if it's been established in any way that is really strongly verifiable, or whether it still relies mostly on self-reporting.
And I'm totally open if it has, I'll correct myself otherwise, but I have a very high degree of skepticism towards, raised lovingly, no brain injuries, no tumors, you know, became evil.
Because that seems to me incomprehensible, but again, I'm open to the argument.
Well it's still going to depend on what you define as evil as well.
I mean, if I do have a child who has this genetic predisposition towards looking at the world through the eyes of a psychopath, they may wind up, again, being a Wall Street broker who makes lots of money, that is the president of their local chamber of commerce, who everyone looks up to, who goes to church every Sunday, and has the perfect family.
But yet, at the same time, has this personality.
So a lot is good.
I mean, obviously, if someone, on the other hand, winds up killing their sister or something like that when they're 14, Then when they're let out of prison on parole, they go out and rob a bank and kill a bunch of other people.
Then we can say, oh, well, yeah, they're horrible people.
Let's find everything that they did that was in their lifestyle that was wrong.
In preparation for this chat, I watched some biographies of Ted Bundy, of John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer and so on.
And they all, you know, again, you can't specifically say it's causal, because I still believe there's choice and there's this epigenetics thing, so it's really complex, but they all had wretched childhoods.
I mean, just horrible childhoods.
But other people had childhoods that were even worse.
Absolutely, that's why I'm saying it's not, so whether it's after genetics and choice, like you made a bad decision and then you make another bad decision and it's just like dominoes, it gets worse and worse.
I don't know, obviously nobody has the answer to these things, so it's like a bad childhood is necessary but not sufficient for this kind of behavior, but I can't go the other way.
To me, going the other way is sort of like saying, well, this 20-year-old man is in a wheelchair.
Well, what happened?
Nothing.
Well, no, no, no.
If he's in a wheelchair, something had to have happened to him that caused him to be in a wheelchair.
And so, if we have somebody who's acting out really in a violent, destructive, addictive way, and we know, of course, I mean, the science is very clear on this, statistics are very clear on this, you know, the sort of adverse childhood experience study that's being run by Vince Finletti with the Kaiser Permanente study, that the correlation between dysfunctional behavior and negative or traumatic experiences in childhood is so strong that, and Gabor Maté talks about this quite a bit as well, they've both been on this show.
And again, this is why I'm sort of digging my heels in, and again, hopefully not entirely wrong-headedly.
But the correlation between destructive to others and self-destructive behaviors and negative childhood experiences is so clear that it's sort of like saying, as a guy in a wheelchair, why is he there?
No reason.
Well, we can't accept no reason.
And so if somebody's turning out bad, and they have had a great childhood, and who knows what that even means, right?
And that's a really complex question.
You know, people can have what is commonly called a great childhood, and as you say, end up in pretty, you know, what the future may regard as, well, he was a really great slave owner.
You know, he was a really compassionate slave owner.
It's like, well, at the time, that made sense, but now in the future, we don't think that's so good.
And it may, you know, I mean, to be a Wall Street broker was an honorable occupation at one point.
I think there are a lot of people who would question that now.
So, again, it's really complex, and if there is more studies, I would love to dig into them, but I can't go yet to the place where a great childhood can produce a bad person.
Well, still, though, you have the choices.
The person can still make moral choices, and again, we go into the definition of what Well, sorry, just to interrupt again, and I'm sorry, this is one of the ones I feel very passionately about, so I admit my bias up front.
But if somebody's making bad moral choices, and they have a great family, if they have great parents, and great siblings, and great friends, then they will be talking to those people about those moral choices.
Those people will be informed, and invested, and helping them out, and giving them constant guidance with those moral choices, and they'll have an open relationship.
They'll say, well, I did this, and then this thing happened, and people can respond, and so on.
So they'll be in a situation of constant guidance.
They won't be making these moral choices as they develop their personality and their character.
They won't be making them in isolation, but rather with the heavily invested feedback from, you know, really loving, caring, good people.
Well, they wind up in a situation where they at least know that they can trust certain people.
If I'm abused by a parent, I may still love the parent, but I'm not going to feel that I can trust them under certain circumstances.
And so that's also going to affect the way I'm going to look at society and other people around me.
I think that's what you're saying, right?
That if someone's raised to where they feel like they have someone they can rely upon, Well, not feel.
I mean, they do have someone they can rely on, right?
So, when my daughter gets older, she's going to face peer pressure, she's going to face the urge, the impulse to drink or do drugs or whatever.
But, you know, I'm going to be heavily involved, as I am now, in day-to-day aspects of her life.
She can talk to me about anything.
There's going to be, you know, a non-judgmental, let's discuss, let's explore, let me tell you about my experience, let's reason it through, let's look at the ethics of the situation.
So, it will be a situation of constant Guidance.
And the one thing that seems to be the case, I was thinking about Jeffrey Dahmer, that, I mean, he seemed to grow up kind of in a moral vacuum.
His mother seemed to be completely absent.
She moved out while he was still living there without even telling him.
And so there's this kind of non-attachment to an authority figure who you genuinely love and respect.
I don't really believe that you can love an abuser.
I think you can have a Stockholm Syndrome attachment.
I don't think you can really love, because I think that It's to use the same word for somebody's attachment to a virtuous person as it is for somebody's attachment to an abusive person.
I don't think it's quite the same word.
In fact, I'd say it's kind of opposite.
But no, my argument is that if we can find, if there's a way to find out that a good loving home can produce somebody who does great evil, then in a sense it's not evil anymore.
In the same way that somebody who, I don't know, strangles a cat because he has a brain tumor can't be convicted of animal cruelty because he has a physiological problem.
If it is a pure base physiological problem, I don't see how we could put the label of evil on it.
So almost by definition, if they're like a brain injury, got a spike through his head or a nail in his head or something.
But the idea that somebody could end up in a moral wheelchair without any illness, without any trauma, without any bones breaking, to me is incomprehensible.
I don't see how somebody could end up making a whole series of bad moral choices while being raised and instructed and embedded in quality-loving moral relationships.
Well, you'll have much less likelihood that that person will do things that we would consider wrong.
But we must also remember that a person who has psychopathic tendencies is also looking upon themselves as the ultimate moral standard.
They see their own particular way of looking at life as being the way to look at life.
So if you do raise them with an honor code, I believe that, yes, they will likely adopt those particular viewpoints.
I think the only way you'd be able to actually determine the nature versus nurture argument would be to take a psychopath that is clinically listed as being psychopathic, not one of the distempered ones, but actually one of the cerebral or charismatic ones, but actually one of the cerebral or charismatic ones, and clone them and raise them in 10 – yeah, raise them in 10 – Yeah, yeah.
And I would bet what's left of my hair on the result.
And again, this is all just amateur rambling, so I don't claim this to be anything settled.
But the brain is shaped through early experiences.
Epigenetics means that by the time we become an adult, our brain is shaped and there's very little that you can do.
without a huge amount of self-work in changing that, but the brain is formed.
And I do believe, of course, that there are people who are more susceptible to character illogical or character disorders based upon negative experiences, but those negative experiences still have to be there.
And there are some people who are more susceptible to sunburns, but you still have to have a Maybe they need to do more sunscreening, but nobody's going to get it in a dark room underground.
Nobody's going to get that sunburn.
I think the sun of abuse has to be there before you get that kind of dysfunction, but again, until we can clone people and raise them in opposite environments, which will never happen.
It would be completely unethical.
You know, I think we need to go with the trend.
If there is an exception, you know, it'll be fascinating to see.
And I've never seen one verified or credible as yet.
Of course, everyone says, you know, that every shooter's family says, we had no idea he comes from a loving family because they don't want to pour more grief on a grieving family or the parents themselves get defensive and say, well, we loved him and we cared for him and we did this and that and the other.
He had a wonderful childhood.
I don't know what happened.
Which, of course, shows only defensiveness and a stunning lack of genuine curiosity.
I guess it's not that stunning if you have a shooter.
But to penetrate through all of that and to find out what actually might have happened, I mean, there's so much that's lost to the fog of history and denial that... Anyway, that's the end of my rant.
I just sort of wanted to... If that's verifiable, I think that would be fascinating.
I haven't seen a case which has been verifiable as yet, but again, if people listening to this know of more, I'm happy to hear it.
But of course, I mean, Again, we have to go into what the definition of being raised in that wonderful environment is.
If you're raised in a very loving environment, but your father is always telling you that your number one goal in life is to make lots and lots of money, and you happen to have a predisposition towards psychopathy, Then you're going to go at it in a much different way than if your parents raised you to believe that the ultimate purpose in life is to be happy.
Well, but can you really be said to be loving someone when you demand that they measure their worth by material gain, regardless of how it's achieved?
I don't think that that would be compatible with a rational definition of love.
I'm not calling you irrational, I'm just saying that almost by definition that to me would not be a loving home if you're told that you have to measure your worth or your value is measured by your father on your future degree of material acquisition no matter how it's gained.
I just don't see that that would be compatible with a sort of virtuous and respectful love at its root.
Right, but I think that there are... we could look at various situations where... I mean, again, it's going to be defined as what we're going to see as a loving family.
That kind of image of the 50s sort of family in which the son is raised to take over and advance and excel in all things.
A lot of people have different definitions of what the loving environment are going to be and so forth.
Right.
Yeah, so I think that remains an open question.
I think we can safely say, based on the evidence, that negative childhood experiences creates much higher risk for these kinds of dysfunctional behaviors all along the spectrum, perhaps depending upon epigenetics, depending on how early and how severe the trauma was.
Does it work the other way, that loving environments can produce a, quote, monster?
I think that remains against the evidence and Unproven.
That's, again, you know, people out there who know a hell of a lot more about than my amateur ramblings feel free to bombard me with emails and studies and I will certainly do my best to get them out.
But listen, I want to make sure that people get, because you've got a novel and writings on the internet and YouTube videos, I want to make sure that people can get a hold of information About this I think I think it's a very important topic, which is why I'm glad that we were able to have this this conversation So where can people go on the internet to to get the the wit and wisdom of m cross?
Well, you can either check on Facebook And just do a search for the term freedom from conscience You can do the same when it comes on Google.
I've put some videos out there I'm I'm still in the process of creating a website But, yeah, Freedom From Conscience.
And, again, the novel was... I chose that title because I'm trying to illustrate the way that a psychopath would see the world and maybe a freedom from the barriers of consciousness would be, by them, seen as an advantage versus... Sorry, did you mean freedom from the barriers of conscience?
You said consciousness.
Yeah, well, the title is Freedom From Conscience.
Okay, sorry, go ahead.
Again, the reason I chose that title is because I'm trying to present this from the perspective of how a person with psychopathy would see the world around them.
Because I don't think they look at it as a burden.
I think that many of them would see it as a great advantage.
And especially since the series will follow... I mean, the publishers already talked about publishing the sequel.
If the other sequels get out, they will be...
They will follow the character into politics.
And I think people will find that very interesting to see how a person who is totally cognitive-based and not emotional-based would see the world around herself.
Freedom from conscience.
All right, I'll put a link also on the video and on the podcast feed.
I really do want to thank you for taking the time.
I've really enjoyed the discussion and I think it is a very valuable topic for people to become aware of.
I mean, these are a lot of the people I think in authority, a lot of people who are prominence and people that you may know.
I think it's really important to study them.
They are Quite fascinating and quite dangerous and well worth, you know, the antelope got to study the lions and a little bit more than the lions have to study the antelopes and I hope that people will avail themselves of your material and the material of Dr. Hare and learn more about these fascinating beasts among us.
Yeah, and like you said, the thing is that you really will understand the way politics works if you understand how the personalities that have this particular mindset work as well.
Right, right.
Well, thanks again for your time and I will talk to you again, I'm sure.
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