The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

[lightreads]

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A book about psychopaths that I actually liked, minor miracle, and that made me think a lot about compassion.



Okay, qualifications – the book is more about “the madness industry” – the complex of media and medicine and science and big pharma and fucking weirdness that informs our understanding of people who are mad. It’s a wandering book, tracking Ronson’s haphazard introduction to psychopathy, to spotting psychopaths, and then onto a survey of madness criminal, madness florid and newsworthy, madness very sad. It’s about the stigma and sexiness of madness – Ronson is wondering on a meta level, as a journalist, why some people’s madness is culturally fascinating and others’ is repulsive. He manages to talk about the utterly crap job psychiatry does at diagnostics and some of the fringiest of the fringe elements of conspiracy theory with the same inquisitive interest. It’s a really great book; I think the one major point Ronson missed was failing to really dig in to the validity of our diagnostic categorizations. He wonders how many people are “mad” by virtue of being too difficult, too inconveniently odd, but misses the deeper point that socioeconomics and race play an enormous and terrifying role in diagnostic categorization.



Anyway, who talks about books in book reviews anymore?



One of my favorite moments here was when Ronson, becoming a little alarmed and disenchanted by the power of the diagnostician, says to someone that it sounds like he’s talking about these people – psychopaths – like they aren’t human. His interlocutor doesn’t really know how to answer that, because it’s absolutely true.



And yes. Yes yes yes, this is what it is like. Psychiatric professionals, true crime authors, journalists, cop shows – they talk about psychopaths like they are animals, and often like they should be put down. And when someone gets uncomfortable with this, the response is usually something like, “well, but he doesn’t have any compassion for you.” Because psychopaths don’t, generally – that’s pretty much the definition, right? Inability to connect, inability to learn from adverse stimuli – an inability to learn social norms more bluntly, a lack of understanding of others’s pain, sometimes enjoyment of it.



And I just . . . that’s not my definition of compassion. It doesn’t exist just for the object. I could get into all the humanist and philosophical reasons, but I imagine someone smarter has done this better (I’m pretty sure there’s an entire subgenre of European postwar writing on this). My point is even woo-wooier.



I know that Ashley X cannot appreciate or understand my compassion for her and the terrible thing that was done to her, but I’ve spent years giving it while respected academics explain in the New York Times why I shouldn’t, why she wasn’t wronged at all because the rules don’t apply to her. She’s different. She’s less than human – it’s not even subtext for some people in this argument.



Compassion can be transgressive, and it can definitely be a political act.



And I have a crazy theory that sometime in the next few hundred years, our treatment of criminals is going to become one of those society-redefining arguments. Our justice system is a travesty of racial and economic oppression, a massive financial drain, and largely ineffective. We punish like no one’s business, and funny thing, it doesn’t really work. Just makes people feel good. And at the same time we’re just barely beginning to muck about in the sort of neuro-fiddling science that might, one day, let us, you know, actually have a corrections system. (And won’t that be a whole new and scary can of worms). And sometime in the next few centuries these things are going to collide, and we’re going to have one hell of a cultural paroxysm about, well. About how we have no compassion for those with no compassion.



At least I really hope so.





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Comments

[jadelennox]

I need to spend time with you again because seriously, we need to have conversations about these things, and they are so much easier in person.

[lightreads]

I think it's our turn to come to you this time.

Though actually, hang on, you should come to con.txt next June. It's a rolicking good time, and I have been known to get trashed and lie about having very serious conversations with people.

[firecat]

Great review/essay/brain candy.

I have a crazy theory that sometime in the next few hundred years, our treatment of criminals is going to become one of those society-redefining arguments.

Fuck, I hope so.

[cahn]

Interesting. I... don't know. I really have no idea. Where does one, in fact, draw the line between human and non-human? (Having a small kid is interesting in terms of this question, because now that I have experienced one I can tell you that a year-old kid? Is definitely not human. Less human than a psychopath, really. Is definitely more like an animal than a human. Probably less cognitively than a dog. Can't give informed consent for anything, or even contribute to the decision. And yet. And yet, we think of them as human. Assume they are human.)

This is a separate point: I also don't know about Ashley X. I mean, I think (maybe) what was done to her was wrong. But I wonder if it's the sort of situation where there are no right choices, and everything you can do (or not do) is wrong, and maybe this could be the least wrong of the wrong choices. Not least because I remember that I was kind of hysterical when I started having cramps and menstruating and growing breasts, and I was intelligent and well-read and knew exactly what was going on; and it was still scary and painful and weird; and if it had happened when I was 6 I think I would be scared out of my mind. And I can't judge her parents for doing what they think is right, because these kinds of things are so hard and because I don't know what it's like. And at what point does it become okay to do this without her consent? If she had a potentially fatal disease and her life was in danger? If she had some sort of chronic extremely painful condition? If she had a high probability of developing a potentially fatal disease? A high probability of developing a chronic painful disease? I don't know where to draw the line. (But all my waffling here is not predicated on whether she is human or subhuman or what.)

[lightreads]

I suspect if you knew more about the case you wouldn’t be waffling at all. That wiki article is pretty sparkly clean. Put it this way – her parents sincerely argued that they partly did it because they wouldn’t always be around to take care of her, and they were worried she might be the victim of a sexual predator later.

…
…

Yeah, so apparently if you think someone is vulnerable to sexual predation, the appropriate response is to remove their sexual organs. I’ll take victim – it’s not even blaming anymore, it’s mutilation – for 10,000. Not to mention, um, sexual predators don’t stop praying on someone because they look like a child. Also also, way to take away what little physical strength she might have gained through size to defend from touches she didn’t like.

Or the part where they said if she was smaller, their lives would be easier. Wow, that is definitely not an okay reason to completely alter your child's body for the rest of her life using an untested and not understood treatment. They weren't doing this for her. They did it for themselves, and the rest of their ablist friends who are uncomfortable with looking at a mentally disabled person, and would rather her physical body more closely matched her mental age. Because god forbid a person with a disability make the people around her uncomfortable by having to look at her.

Which isn’t even getting into all the echoes of the eugenics movement and forced sterilization of people with disabilities that went on in this country for decades. Her parents could have been reading from an instructional manual, it was impressive.

Seriously, you do not want to end up on the same side as these people – their utter creepiness will rub off. You can't condone their actions without also getting tarred with their reasons, because so many of their reasons are based in unconscious and deeply fucked up ablist assumptions.

And the thing is? They never denied her humanity either. But Peter Singer did, loudly and at great length. And so did a lot of other people who were really and rightly uncomfortable with her parents’s arguments, but who needed to feel that what they did was okay. Because if it’s not okay, you have to open this huge can of worms and realize that she was as much a victim of her parents lack of support – our chronic societal lack of support for people with severe disabilities to stay with their families. And also a victim of the medical establishment which shrugged and basically said, ‘sure, whatever, might be interesting!’ As well as her creepy creepy parents.

[cahn]

Fair enough -- this is why I like discussing these things with you, because you have an educated perspective that I don't have, and I learn a lot from these discussions about my own unconscious biases and assumptions. I hope you don't mind talking them through with me, even if I display my ignorance and assumptions quite a lot -- you are certainly educating me on these issues.

I did poke around the parents' website, but I wonder if maybe they cleaned it up, because I didn't see the more problematic stuff you talk about, although it's also totally true that I didn't poke around it much. (Because, okay, I could be convinced there are physical issues with menstruation, but WTF, sexual predators?? I agree that, in addition to being deeply problematic, MAKES NO SENSE.)

I also agree that the undertones of "this makes us uncomfortable" are highly HIGHLY skeevy. I must say though that there's some of "if she were smaller our lives would be easier" that in the practical sense does resonate with me, though... I have a 30lb kid who frequently has to be picked up, and it totally makes sense to me that once you start getting larger it just... gets really difficult. While agreeing it's wrong to do things to your kid because it would make your life easier, I... understand it, too, , although I think my attitude towards this is deeply, deeply colored by being a parent of a small child who has been, as I said, on the order of a small animal. I have frequently done things that made my life easier but were not always the best thing for her, except in the sense that having a sane mother is better than having an insane one. I went back to work because I needed to work to stay sane, even though we don't require the money, and it would undeniably be better for her to have me at home with her. There have been times where I let her cry in her crib because I could not muster the energy to deal with it. Last week I went on a business trip and her sleep schedule got really screwed up and she was desperately unhappy because of it for a week. And yes, these are stupid trivial examples not even on the same scale as altering your child's body, but I can imagine it scaling up.

Anyway. This is not to deny that she is, as you say, a victim of her parents' lack of support and/or our chronic societal lack of support. She is. I'm on board with that. But I also can't judge the parents, partially because it's hard for me to disentangle the extremely-skeevy-creepy reasons from the not-quite-so-creepy ones, but also because I don't honestly know how much support I would be capable of giving to a child in such a situation. (I hope I'm not being ableist here; I would feel the same if I had triplets with no disabilities, for example -- I believe I would seriously think about giving one away. I simply do not know how many physical and emotional reserves I have as a matter of giving-constant-care.) I think all I'm saying here is that yes, I see that there are deeply screwed up ablist isssues, but I think there could also be other non-ablist issues coming into play. (And again this is from the point of view of someone who has not been following the case as it's going on, and has only read stuff that I imagine was specifically designed to make them look good, so I may be giving more credit than is due.)

And yes... if societal care and mores were adequate, this wouldn't be an issue. (In the triplets example, for instance, if I had to give a triplet away, there is a substantial societal bias against giving away a non-disabled kid, and because of this I could be reasonably sure that the kid wouldn't be institutionalized, whereas this wouldn't be true for a severely disabled child.) ...I think this is a good can of worms to open. It's certainly made me think about it, anyway.

[lightreads]

but I wonder if maybe they cleaned it up,

I bet they did. The last time I looked into this was . . . geez . . . Fall 2008? And when I say “looked into” I mean I spent weeks researching, using every library tool I could find to locate every last news and blog reference. I’m pretty sure I read everything that existed at that point (I was doing some academic work, you know how these things snowball). So at this point I have no recollection of what they said where. But I bet they did clean up the website some, after the pushback they got on the rape thing in particular, because ick.

While agreeing it's wrong to do things to your kid because it would make your life easier, I... understand it,

Right. I mean, this is the dilemma of parenting, at least it has always looked that way to me. For my female friends in particular, making choices that are healthy for them, let them keep living the lives they want to with a child. In the midst of societal pressure to subsume their entire identity into being someone’s mother, and of course the personal desire to do the best they can. (Which is one main reason I don’t intend to have kids. I mean, I don’t like babies much, but I could get over that for my own. Mostly it’s that I don’t want to be a mother enough -- I would rather have the life I have now, work ridiculous hours, run, read. I would rather be a writer than a mother, to put it bluntly.)

But I think we’re coming at this from different directions. You’re talking about this as a parent, from a what can/should parents do to and for their children? Which is a big old question with a lot of history religiously, socially, medically.

And I’m coming at it from a place as a disabled person, and saying what do systems – parents, doctors, societies – do and condone being done to disabled people’s bodies? Which has a totally different history and framing. The two approaches intersect here, but I think trying to explain the second with the first doesn’t work.

Which is I think why your examples don’t work for me. Partly, no one has ever been able to move me with these sorts of comparison arguments on a rhetorical level. They’re kind of like slippery slope arguments, which also don’t work for me. Because there may be some similarity in talking about parents who make little choices every day that prefer their comfort to their child’s good . . . and? Comparing the thing that everyone does to the scary thing a couple people did doesn’t really illuminate the scary thing. It doesn’t locate it any more certainly on a spectrum of acceptable and not acceptable.

Probably because it’s trying to explain what her parents meant. Intentionality again. When one of the central goals of social justice right now is to say that intentionality is just one of those shields we use to duck the hard stuff. Like how we can’t know what her parents were feeling, and even if we could we can’t trust it. Because the insidious thing is you can never separate their legitimate frustration with the really hard hand they were dealt, from what they did with it. They said, outrightly and subliminally, that it was okay to do what they did because their child was disabled. Which just flat out cannot be true, it cannot be so that a person loses a right to bodily integrity by virtue of being disabled. I mean, think about it this way – if their kid had not been mentally disabled, but had severe physical disabilities that made her bedridden. If they were still in the exact same position from a physical standpoint with having to move her and lift her and turn her . . . they never would have been allowed to do what they did. There would have been this enormous battle and controversy. It might never even have occurred to them. It occurred to them as possible because she was mentally disabled. And there was no battle, and only a tiny controversy. Mostly, people thought it was a great idea.

Anyway, off point. The point was intentionality doesn’t help, even when it is compassionate. Because what they did is so contextual, so embedded in ablist systems that it doesn’t matter what they meant, or thought they meant. They rewrote a disabled person’s body, and that is just never going to be okay with me.

[cahn]

Okay, so this? Is why I like talking to you. Because you illuminate the stupid assumptions I'm making. (And I hope you don't mind too much. I'm trying to learn! And thanks for doing it so patiently :) )

Because I have this deep agreement with everything you're saying in this comment: yes, that is the central dilemma of parenting as I understand it; and yes, that I am coming to it from an angle that doesn't necessarily illuminate the problem from the disability angle. Here's another example where I hope I am getting it right this time: I feel that I can't judge a mom who kills her kids. I hope I will never be in a situation where I think that is the option open to me, but taking care of a kid myself has made me understand how it could happen. And what you're saying (I think) is that regardless of my personal judgment or lack thereof on such a person, in general I, and society, totally agree that killing one's kids is wrong and bad, no questions whatsoever. But that isn't the case here, which is where the societal problem comes in. (I think I was fumbling towards that with my triplets example, but hadn't quite made it there.)

I really like your example about the physical disabilities -- that clarified a lot to me inside my head. (My head: "But that seems like it would be fine too, if the kid consented... but then you have all these controversial issues of, how can you be sure it's informed consent, how would you know there wasn't subconscious pressure on the kid... wait... making a connection here... oooohhhhhhhh." Lightbulb moment!) It also occurred to me that what if they had said, "So, it would be a lot easier to take care of her if she were lighter! So we will chop off her legs, that'll take off a good ten pounds!" I... would have kneejerk problems with that that I didn't with this case. (I mean, don't get me wrong, after thinking about it, I agreed it was wrong, but I had to think about it, whereas the leg-chopping-off was immediate.) So... yeah. Gotta work on that. Although -- and here I really am getting off-topic and just musing randomly -- some of this, as well, is no doubt due to my own internal lifelong issues about trying to downplay the importance of gender and sexuality to my identity. But as you said so perceptively in one of your other reviews -- and I don't think I ever thanked you for linking me to that amputation article -- meat is who we are.

[lightreads]

(And I hope you don't mind too much.


You kidding? You're not shouting at me on goodreads or sending me abusive pm's or defriending me for having inconvenient opinions or any of the other unpleasant things of the past 12 months. This is, goodness, a conversation between grownups, which is a freaking pleasure, let me tell you.

I feel that I can't judge a mom who kills her kids. I hope I will never be in a situation where I think that is the option open to me, but taking care of a kid myself has made me understand how it could happen.


Huh, you know, that's a good one. I'd never thought of it, because of course it is such a flashpoint of insanity (see also, Casey Anthony). But yeah, if the idea is you can hate and grieve the thing done, but not have to inquire into whatever knot of external pressure and impossible situation and internal fracture made it happen on a personal level, that makes sense to me. And is, I think a project of social justice, because it makes a lot of things actually possible. Not the least of which, a single conversation in which no one derails through defensivley explaining how they didn't mean it that way, it couldn't have been wrong, you can't judge things contextually you must only judge by personal motivation don't judge me OMG you're judging me!

(Tangent: I actually had to process your example for a while, because I have a lot of . . . complicated knee-jerk reactions. Because I agree with you as a philosophical matter about not being able to judge. I read this totally infuriating book years back, before I was reviewing, that was supposed to be a biography of one of the more famous mother-killers in recent memory . . . her name escapes me. And its entire project was explaining how she failed, how she was rightly hated, while giving us alarming glimpses of the religious and social prison she was in, not to mention her obvious and untreated psychotic disorder. It was really, really upsetting, actually.

But some friends of mine did a project called the Rolls of the Dead, in which every month for a long time they scoured newspapers, blogs, etc. and compiled all the stories about people with disabilities who were murdered in that time. The results were -- wrenching is not adequate a word. One of the most remarkable trends though was not a surprise: it was the prevalence of parents who kill their disabled children, and the generally tepid public response. Contrast, say, Casey Anthony with the British father who smothered his conscious and aware thirteen-year-old physically disabled son to death. People who look like casey Anthony have been assaulted in public; this guy was charged with negligence (negligence!) and I don't actually think ever convicted, though he explicitly confessed. It's one example of an overwhelming pattern, a vaguely shame-faced sense that well yes it was wrong, but the kid was disabled and you can understand it right? So I have, uh, baggage, and I had to kick it for a while. Separate the bits out and figure out that it's systems I'm most angry with, not parents. End of tangent.)

[cahn]

Oh, good. I know you've been put through a lot of crap lately, and I know I've got ablist attitudes where I just haven' thought about it, and I didn't want to contribute to the crap pile more than I could help. (And can I just say... I am also really really pleased at having a conversation that isn't, you know, people yelling past each other!)

It seriously disturbs me how worked up people are getting about Casey Anthony, for pretty much the reasons I've described. But, wow. Now that I know about the Rolls of the Dead thing, now I'm even more seriously disturbed.

[cahn]

(sorry, hit the comment button too early)

But yeah, if the idea is you can hate and grieve the thing done, but not have to inquire into whatever knot of external pressure and impossible situation and internal fracture made it happen on a personal level, that makes sense to me. And is, I think a project of social justice, because it makes a lot of things actually possible.

Yeah, that is what I meant, although as usual you put it rather more perceptively and eloquently than I was able to.

Not the least of which, a single conversation in which no one derails through defensivley explaining how they didn't mean it that way, it couldn't have been wrong, you can't judge things contextually you must only judge by personal motivation don't judge me OMG you're judging me!

Heh. Well, I did mean it that way, only I hadn't thought about it hard enough? :) I don't think, as a rule, I think about judging things(/systems) contextually enough, although I think I am naturally judgmental of other people, so I've also been trying to really work on my judgement of people's personal motivation. Which is part of the baggage I was bringing to this conversation as well. And it's really made me think about how much they are intertwined.