Adventures in high functioning psychopathy
By 
Thanks to commenter Judas Peckerwood for flagging this fascinating if terrifying essay from the Guardian, about the evolving understanding of the varieties of human psychopathy.
It wasn’t from a forensic psychology but a business studies background that Dr Karen Mitchell arrived in the territory of high-functioning psychopathy. By the late 2010s, she’d spent 30 years working as a consultant on large-scale change in corporate culture. Her work tended to be with organisations in crisis: “So it might be market alignment, or deaths or suicides in companies,” she tells me from her home in Australia. Observing the sheer number of problems at work that stemmed from specific individuals with predatory traits, she started to research those same “dark personality” behaviours in other precincts. “Child sex abuse in religion, coercive control in human trafficking and domestic violence and terrorism,” she says. “When you look at all our global knowledge on human predators, there are so many fields and none of them interact.”
Mitchell’s particular interest is in high functioning psychopaths, as opposed to the traditional subject pools in the area, which focused on prison populations and other socially marginal subgroups.
This matters because predatory personalities cause an astronomical amount of harm. We’re bad at recognising them interpersonally, for reasons to be discussed, but we’re also bad at pattern finding in aggregate – mainly because different disciplines have so many different names for these kinds of people. Mitchell lists some of the terms: “Malignant narcissist, dark triad, psychopath, coercive controller, primary psychopath, grandiose narcissist, corporate psychopath, Machiavellian, dark tetrad, covert narcissist, toxic leader.” These are all traits that she argues are part of the same phenomenon, the Dark Personality, or the Persistent Predatory Personality.
Who are these people and what are they like?
From this research, which took her five years, Mitchell built a template of 20 attributes, divided into four clusters, and 25 tactics that would identify a high-functioning persistent predatory personality type. Cluster one includes a need for control; a grandiose sense of self; pathological inner response to challenge; vengefulness; refusal to compromise. Cluster two includes being predatory or exploitative; sadistic and cruel; having a low regard for laws, agreements, social and moral codes; no boundaries in sexual relationships; unreasonable expectations of others. Cluster three relates to the truth: Dark Personalities cultivate a façade of normality; they are chameleon-like; dishonest; devious and manipulative; and unwilling to accept responsibility for the negative impacts they cause. Finally, cluster four is around the Dark Personality’s own interior life: their emotions are acted and they do not experience affinity or the joy that comes with it; they are callous and devoid of empathy; unremorseful; self-interested; and brazen.
Hmmm, have you ever met anybody like that? Or maybe seen them on the TV?
Another expert on the subject, Essi Viding, points out that under certain circumstances (cough cough) the so-called “Goldwater rule” against remote diagnosis is pretty ridiculous:
Viding fixes on the traits that leave society extremely bad at protecting itself against predatory behaviour. We all know that people lie, but think instinctively that we know when we’re being lied to. “These individuals almost short-circuit us in our ability to detect the danger signals until it’s too late,” Viding says. “The majority of us, if we get caught lying, look deeply uncomfortable. It’s not nice to get caught lying, we worry about our reputation, it’s embarrassing. But these individuals are not embarrassed when they’re caught lying. This has not been formally tested, but one might hypothesise that they take people in much more readily, precisely because they display these characteristics of extreme confidence and do not seem nervous.” She cites a 2019 paper in the Journal of Personality Disorders which developed the idea that behaviours which don’t normally go together in the human population – for example, absolute confidence and total untruth – tend to go together in Dark Personalities. This, Viding says, is why these people “can often do a lot of damage before anyone catches them”. . . . Viding, however, finds the fixation with diagnosis perhaps irrelevant in this context. “I always find the obsession with diagnosing these people interesting. You don’t need to diagnose them, there are a set of personality traits, and you can recognise individuals with those traits. If someone’s in political power, you can see those exemplified in behaviour, and most people are perfectly capable of making an assessment of what that signifies.”
At some point you can “remotely diagnose” that Victor Wembanyana is, like, real tall, without too much concern that you might be wrong, know what I mean?
Another fascinating nugget from the article:
The idea of a “pathocracy”, a democracy of normal people taken over by psychopaths, was conceived by an obscure Polish psychologist, Andrew Lobaczewski, who had lived under both the Nazis and then Soviet-era communists. His ideas never landed, because “the psychology publishers thought it was too political, and the political publishers thought it was too psychological,” according to editor and bloggerHarrison Koehli.
Sounds like somebody whose work really ought to be de-obscurified under current circumstances.
Trump is a person born into extraordinary wealth and all the privileges that go with such wealth in our society, who also happens to be a narcissistic psychopath of an extreme type. He therefore feels even less bound by social rules – such as don’t steal from people just because you can get away with it – than even most other extremely rich people in our increasingly degenerate plutocracy.
His genius, such as it is, was to grasp early in life that consequences were for other people. That he managed to use that insight to become the leader of the United States of America says even more about the depravity of the culture of which he has become the central and characteristic figure than it does about Trump himself.
From The Triumph of Stupidity