The Destructivity of Psychopaths
Sociopath, Psychopath, Antisocial Personality Disorder - There Is a Difference and Here’s Why It Matters
Hervey M. Cleckley, the seminal modern authority on psychopaths, ended his thumbnail depiction of them by evoking their internal chaos “that results in purposeful destructive behavior, often more self-destructive than destructive to others.” But what he failed to evoke there, I’d like to add now. It’s this…
His book, The Mask of Sanity, was published in 1941, as an Austrian-born psychopath was unleashing a destructivity that would result in the deaths of tens of millions of people. Decades later, my country has also found itself with a chaos-driven psychopath at the seat of power. That too has resulted in the un-necessary deaths of many people.
As for my other takeaways, the first is the easiest to say, and should be obvious: The destructivity of psychopaths can also be even more significantly perilous to others, even globally so.
For this reason, just as our survival as a species would be aided by more awareness of climate change, and better planning for dealing with pandemics, we’ve similarly been in need of a better recognition of psychopathy. Its inadequate presence in the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is akin to having an inadequate test for the coronavirus. It was a failure of psychological vision that might have better warned us when a Trojan horse had entered our gates—a psychopath running for president. For like the pandemic, his psychopathy has effected, has infected the nation.
And so, if these don’t feel like ordinary times, maybe it’s because they’re not. This may be when the bill comes due for our lack of discernment. A time to learn from grievous mistakes; and if we don’t learn them now, our collective grief can’t help but increase. Now is the time when “all of us together” begin to suffer the limitations of what our planet can bare. Already the dying has begun—a billion animals burnt to death in a single Australian summer. American democracy attacked from within, just barely alive. How bad does it need to get? And who knows how many deaths the pandemic will claim?
And so, if it’s time to die, may as many as possible … die to what we have been. May we suffer, and rejoice in the great death of the mystics, that is also the birth canal of what we could be. While the nation’s 45th president claims to be making America great again, may many, as many as possible, learn from the limitations we are suffering now: the limitations of what can be achieved—or restored--without wisdom.
For though it can’t help but sound apocryphal, ours may really be the epoch with the greatest urgency for individual and collective transformation that the world has ever known. And so, were they alive now, I imagine the Old Testament prophets blowing ram’s horns, and wailing warnings to wake the people. Such is the spiritual, mythic, and ecological obliviousness of these times—against a backdrop of the urgent evolutionary shift our planet needs us to make.
In a secular age, and a time when psychopathic lies are told from on high, we must become those prophets now—the kind who speak uncomfortable truths. For as Dylan once sang—inspired by a biblical passage from Isaiah: So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.