Jon Ronson is fascinated by people who are bonkers. And insane people who appear to be normal, and ostensibly sane people doing crazy things. The British journalist's book "The Men Who Stare at Goats" — about a secret U.S. military wing that hoped to use mind power to walk through walls, become invisible and perform psychic executions — was the basis for the 2009 film of the same title.
Now, Ronson's paddling around the swampy parts of sanity again in "The Psychopath Test," a book that manages to be as cheerily kooky as it is well-researched.
Generally described as a dangerous personality disorder in which there's a severe lack of empathy, psychopathy is thought by some to be incurable and to define one out of 100 people. "It would be a mistake to start meddling in the world of psychopaths, an especially big mistake for someone like me, who suffers from a massive surfeit of anxiety," Ronson writes. His curiosity, of course, swiftly gets the better of him.
In his search to discover who psychopaths are, Ronson goes to prisons in England, Canada and the U.S. He takes a three-day seminar from Robert Hare, the leading expert in psychopathy, whose Hare PCL-R Checklist is used by law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and elsewhere to evaluate offenders.
"I became a Bob Hare devotee, bowled over by his discoveries," Ronson explains. "I think the other skeptics felt the same. He was very convincing. I was attaining a new power, like a secret weapon … the power to identify a psychopath merely by spotting certain turns of phrase, certain sentence constructions, certain ways of being."
Armed with this new power, Ronson decides to field-test it himself. He tries it out on Toto Constant, a man convicted, in absentia, for leading a Haitian death squad and currently in a U.S. prison for mortgage fraud. At first, it seems as though Constant will upset the checklist, but then his answers conform to it quite well. Or do they? "Nah, he's not a psychopath," two prison guards tell Ronson as he leaves. And they should know.[source]
