The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

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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