After writing about Patric Gagne I was inspired to write about the history of the psychopathy construct itself a bit, how it's been used and the strange dualism of the 'successful' occasionally even 'prosocial' psychopath as contrasted with the 'unsuccessful' antisocial kind.
In the process of doing background reading for this I took the time to read through Hervey Cleckley's Mask of Sanity.
In this book we find one of the earlier defining portraits of the "psychopath", very different to later portrayals, despite covering the same basic "symptoms". The book is a series of monographs describing different psychiatric patients who seemed remarkably normal when they wanted to be but kept fucking up any attempt at living a stable lifestyle. They didn't really read as incomprehensible beasts as much as your feckless cousin who refuses to get a job in lieu of endless series of casual dubious schemes, that always manages to talk his way out of pulling himself together and acts like he's 15 when he's in his late 30s. One of the few female accounts was of a girl who's main problem appeared to be she was down to fuck and not very choosy about with whom despite her parents' handwringing.
Actually, I found the hagiographic terms with which the subjects families were near universally described rather suspect, and it triggered the first seeds of a thought that I'll get into later.
Fundamentally, these kind of wastrels and vagrants are just people who are irresponsible there’s nothing weird or alien there. Cleckley keeps trying to explain the reason they are like this is that they somehow have some weird internal structure where they learned the words to interact with society and yet underneath it had no capacity for any true depth of emotion, “they know all the words but not the music”, his contention was, far from being people who might be suffering from some agonising dysfunction driving them to socially unacceptable behaviours, they simply didn't care, not just they didn't care about the onerous and conservative requirements of respectable society in 1940's America, or didn’t care about this or that relationship to which they had not truly internally committed, but that they didn't have the capacity to care about anything.
But looking at the monographs, the people described don't read like some inhuman monster like Joel Osteen, who I call a monster not because of the massive amount of harm people like Osteen do but simply because his behaviour is inhuman, like actually. His motives are so far off anything relatable to a normal person to be completely alien. Like anyone can relate to being irresponsible or trolling or being braggardly delinquent in a sort of cheeky childish way or living a feckless life of getting drunk and acting the fool, that’s something anyone could enjoy if they had no better goals or out of resentment for the demands placed on them.
The loudest detractors of people who do live like that explicitly tend to be very rigidly self controlled people who just seem to be a bit jealous because their self-control is such a burden on them and they resent someone just blithely stumbling through life instead of having to make all the painful sacrifices they made, but surely even to them it’s fundamentally understandable. The emotion such people induce far more than horror is exasperation, you see how their behaviour is self-destructive and its aggravating that they don't seem to value the same things you value and don't seem to be motivated by the things that motivate you in your efforts to explain this. You might take the time to find out what does motivate them of course, but then you risk it being something you find as contemptuous as they find your values. It’s a divergence not an absence.
Willingly being a televangelist for DECADES though, out of nothing but unmotivated greed - not accumulating resources with some particular end in mind but the focused dedication of it purely for the sake of having more? THATS INSANE! He doesn’t even look like he’s enjoying it! Ironically it's in Cleckley's "partial" manifestations of the disorder we're most likely to see this type of person rather than his full psychopaths. But even here we see a picture of archetypal beggars forcing themselves into the mold of contemporary life more than bonafide hungry ghosts.
Human beings did not evolve to have schedules and careers and live in a world where literally everything is fenced off and “claimed” ever fearful of an insane technopanopticon where the only escape is collecting magic tokens that let you enslave people you'll never meet. It’s unnatural.
We ultimately spent most of evolutionary history wandering around picking berries while yapping, hunting small mammals, chilling round the campfire telling jokes and stories, and occasionally showing off the neat crafts we made or megafauna we managed to kill.
Megachurches are insane.
Getting back to the point, as I was reading through the monographs outlining the "full" psychopaths, it stood out to me, as I said, with what wonderful gushing terms Cleckley described the parents. His motive for this, as he was fairly clear about, was to push back against the then fashionable (although already waning in popularity) notion that all dysfunction was rooted in family dysfunction and childhood mistreatment. He's trying to tell us, these guys have normal parents, they weren't abused, they weren't mistreated, they're just like this.
And that's fair enough, I'm sure we all know someone where the idea that the "apple doesn't fall far from the tree" seems absurd. Who's behaviour and values are so dichotomous to those of their parents its striking. But just the way he again and again talked about these parents as if he was applying for them to be beatified, it gave me pause. After all, most parents can be pretty shitty at one point or another, especially if challenged with a still dependent adult child with serious behavioural issues, yet the worst you get is things like at one point he described how a parent who's patience had been frayed by years of this uncharacteristically spoke a bit rudely to his son.
The patients on the other hand frequently were reported to have made accusations controlling, abusive and violent behaviours about their families. This was deemed to be malingering, entitlement, sympathy seeking and so on. And I am not saying its rare for people use such accusations in all those ways, but it's just very suspect to me when all the families are wonderful, almost to an unreasonable degree, and all the patients are lying. When the narrative was so black and white, surely even psychopaths have aggressive controlling parents or spouses sometimes? You can't just assume they're always lying...
I didn't do much with this thought when it first entered my head, it lingered in the background waiting to pass comment when I finally read the section on the "partial psychopaths", most specifically the one titled "the Psychaitrist", left til last as if it was special, as if it was hoped this is the one that would stick in your mind.
While reading it I was mostly taking it at face value, although I raised an eyebrow at the comment that "It was also heard that with female patients he sometimes suggested, or even insisted on, activities (as therapy) which are specifically proscribed in the Hippocratic oath." followed by "But what physician has not had similar things said about him?". Of course these manipulative lying mentally ill women will do such things, of course they do, yes it happens... to everyone though? So routinely that it makes sense to ignore as a matter of course... hmm... just like I suppose families are always wonderful and the patients accusations lies...
Then I reached the bit right at the end of the story, Cleckley, who was clearly a good writer has spun his narrative well, he has us feeling distaste but perhaps also a little admiration for the brazenness of his protagonist, he has introduced a stupid female who is fawning over them, we all smile internally, we are not like her, we're better, we wouldn't be fooled by such a charlatan, now it's time for the big reveal:
Striking at once for her hearer's closest interests, she began to talk about a wonderful lecture she had recently heard in a distant town at some woman's club or literary society which was fostering the cause of mental hygiene.
The lecturer was marvelous, she insisted. He stirred up such enthusiasm that half the ladies present had begun to study psychology. And his subject! He talked about the queerest people! They were not exactly insane, but they really did the most fantastic things! They were even harder to understand than lunatics themselves! But the lecturer understood them, though he confessed in all modesty that some points about them were a puzzle even to one of his own experience. He was a most impressive person - so poised and authoritative, yet always quiet-spoken. He was such an intellectual person. A man of wide and profound culture. And such a gentleman!
"I declare, I believe half of the women in our club wished they could exchange roles with his wife! With all that grasp of psychology, just imagine what a husband he must be!"
She would like to learn more about these people … psychopathic personalities or psychopaths the doctor had called them. And the doctor's name … She uttered it in hushed tones of admiration.
I burst out laughing. OH! This is about HIM. The Psychiatrist is HIM. HE gets drunk in a different town so he's not recognised and abuses people! HE pretends to know things to impress people! HE tells his patients that getting molested and raped is therapy! He does all those things, because its such a drag to go on being normal and respectable day in day out and every moment of it he is just itching to fuck with people. And the stupid woman yapping with adoring enthusiasm? Why that's us, the dear readers, for believing this bullshitter, for taking his nonsense seriously, and he wants us to know it... but also he doesn't...
It was such an obvious narrative flow, really quite expertly painted, like I really cannot credit this guy enough, that I was sure that I'd find discussion about it out there on the internet. I looked. Nothing. Just glowing, hagiographical portraits of the man and his many virtues and good deeds and his expert work The Mask of Sanity. The only real questioning of him was not about this, but another book he wrote about how gays are mentally ill degenerates. I was blindsided. Surely I was not the first person to pick up on this? It's not subtle! It's obvious! The way it's written is literally like a big red arrow pointing at himself. I... how... how has no-one noticed this?!?
I know I've overused the word hagiography in this piece but am afraid I have to mention it again in relation to the "documentary" about Cleckley's life titled A Man for All Seasons:
This truly vomit inducing memorial might indeed be touching if played at a funeral, for people who knew him (and didn't know about all the patients he raped), but as something that is available to the public it's a truly bizarre artefact.
I looked up the man who produced it and found it was largely the vision of one General Perry Smith who has also produced several other hagiographies of various military "heros". His interest is presumably because he is related tangentially to Cleckley by marriage, although on his website he states that he has suffered victimisation at the hands of psychopaths 5(!!) times in his life, truly an unlucky fellow.
Unlike Cleckley, General Smith is not a good writer. That's putting it mildly. I would say his writing is akin to either a relatively erudite child or a severely intellectually and emotionally stunted person who by virtue of patient tutoring has managed to gain an adult level of language skills despite lacking any thoughts, feelings or internal sensations requiring that level of complexity to express (made somewhat tragic by the far more common case of the opposite occurring where due to a lack of interested mentors someone fails to develop the linguistic fluency to express their vividly complex inner world). If his place in the US Military Aristocracy didn't make plain which of these is the case his geriatric age surely will.
It was looking into this that I started to think about the fact that, a psychiatrist sure would have a lot of power in the 40s. Let alone a successful psychiatrist, well connected and embedded in the old boy networks of the American officer class. Likewise the authority of parents would not be subject to too much scrutiny back then, without irrefutable evidence a middle class white father's take on what was going on in the home would be unlikely to be questioned at all really...
It occurred to me, maybe, just maybe, there are no monsters here, no unfeeling human automatons. I have never personally come across a human automaton (jokes about Osteen notwithstanding), despite coming across some truly despicable people all of whom had obvious emotional drivers behind their despicable behaviours. Maybe that's just a very convenient way for Cleckley and his privileged buddies (and the owner of a very well kept brothel he perhaps frequented) to write off their inconvenient family members who just wouldn't play the game, who were causing scandal, who were making noise about grievances, and making accusations of... hm well, Dr. Cleckley said that "The Psychiatrist" was going after female patients but maybe there's things even he would feel afraid to hint at. I'd imagine he got a lot of exposure to troubled young men during his time as a psychiatrist for the VA...
I started painting a fundamentally darker picture in my mind about all of this. Maybe Cleckley wasn't a cheeky naughty boy rapist straining in and chafing against his square life... maybe this monograph wasn't a, or wasn't just a cheeky joke. Maybe the reason no-one brought it up is that Cleckley was actually setting a test - where those who could recognise him could be inducted into something, or recognised as potential threats and managed. Maybe he was a much more calculated sort of rapist...
There is a story in the Old Testament about a time when Noah (the only good boy in the world) got wasted and made an idiot of himself then passed out naked and his son Ham laughed at him and invited his brothers to come laugh at him too and his brothers chastised him for revealing their father's shame, covered him up and because of this all the descendants of Ham's son Canaan, identified with whichever group is being enslaved at any given time from European Serfs to dark skinned Africans, were cursed to be the "servant of servants".
When I think about this story, on the one hand, disloyalty, betrayal, we all know that's a big deal. None of us would want our drunken indiscretions emailed to our boss by someone we thought was our friend. Indeed what makes the whole notion of the psychopath actually scary is specifically the idea they cannot form loyalties. That no matter how much they seem on your side they can turn at the drop of a hat and dob you in to the feds. But see... there's times when disloyalty is called for. For instance no matter how sincerely and deeply loyal you are to a person, if you find out they've been molesting your little brothers, you really ought to betray them.
If the sin of Ham was revealing his father's indiscretion, are we to suppose that the story itself would repeat this sin? That it would make plain what this indiscretion that the only good boy in the world had committed? You know... I don't think it would. But it doesn't matter. The characters in the Old Testament may or may not have existed in some form but it's literally ancient history if they did. I only bring it up because it relates to the whole notion of traditionalist conservative societies and the conflation of being civilised and "covering up".
There's been a few studies on the difference between people with different political leanings and the sort of moral palettes they paint with, and one of those differences is that "liberals" (I hate how they define these things) put a significant amount of emphasis on harm (negatively) and compassion/care (positively) whereas conservatives tend to emphasise disgust and loyalty.
A conservative world is a world that feels as though loyalty trumps harm. Where if someone to whom you owe loyalty does something harmful, you should close ranks and stand by them. That covering it up, that preventing the scandal, it not just a self-protective thing, it's protective of the whole social order, a positive good for society.
When a conservative world finds that a respected pillar of the community is abusing his son, they aren't just covering for a friend when they cover it up: they are protecting everyone from the social disruption that finding out such a respectable and admirable person has done such a thing. If they start questioning him, they might start questioning other respected figures, they might start thinking that the people at the top don't actually deserve to be there, that its right and valuable to question them, that they’re no better than the rest of us and potentially worse, and then what? All hell breaks loose is what! Seditious communists, bomb throwing anarchists, all manner of deviant riff raff will up end the very foundations of Western Civilisation. Yes, it's a real tragedy it had to come to this, he was a good kid, but he understood the rules and he persisted in pushing. There have to be people on top and people on the bottom, there have to be rules, can't have a game without rules can you! Should have played ball!
All that might sound like a ridiculous way to think in 2025, but in the 1940s it was not unusual to very openly think that way and express those sorts of sentiments. While such notions are no longer fashionable there are still many who very much feel that way about things. It's increasingly common to hear them expressed too, Jordan Peterson has been talking that way for a long time.
That sort of culture is very ripe for an adjacent sort of culture, sort of the natural "shadow" of that culture: the blackmail gang.
Conservative cultures stigmatise a lot of different behaviours, they maintain those stigmas primarily through the use of taboo, it's not that you can't go round drinking before 10 or flying off the handle or being poor or being a homosexual or raping women, its that you mustn't talk about it, it mustn't been seen, as if knowing about it, seeing it, hearing it, revealing it is a curse. The messenger as cursed as the message's object, all witnesses are cursed and so on - but as long as it remains a secret, even a secret everyone knows, the curse is not activated.
Because they have such stifling expectations of who you are supposed to appear to be, expectations far beyond what any normal human being can realistically live up to, everyone naturally feels a bit hemmed in and whether due to differences in innate temperament or socialisation women are more likely to internalise this, to respond with sicknesses, emotional troubles and writing self-indulgent poetry, and the boys are more prone to externalising it. They need to let loose, to be wild, to get in a bit of trouble or hurt someone even. To assert their will against or above social norms.
And the blackmail gang knows this, it knows it's especially true when they're young but it never really stops, and it offers them fun and freedom in an attractive buy now pay later package. So the boys have their fun, and make their trouble, maybe they just go for a little joyride, maybe they cheat on their wife, maybe they fence some obviously stolen merch, maybe they rape a few patients. Sometimes girls do get caught up in this too (someone needs to work in the brothel!), but it's mostly the boys who both tend to more hyperactivity and have the opportunities afforded by less intense supervision. And the blackmail gang is all smiles and friendly - we're all in this together, we're all having fun, we all need to let loose. But then one day the person that gets raped is you or someone you really care about and thats when they turn around and show their teeth, because you're in deep now and let me be clear boy, we can fuck you as much as we fucking like. And you let them fuck you because you don't want anyone to find out about all the shit you've been doing which has likely escalated far beyond boyhood pranks. Now you're their slave.
But sometimes you get someone who's a bit more bold. Who isn't really phased by this kind of threat, or who's a bit more antagonistic and willing to burn their life to the ground if it hurts the gang. And this terrifies the conservative. It doesn't just hurt the perpetrator they feel, it hurts the whole social order. Which intensifies the threat to you, because you won't be believed and if you are believed your conservative society still feels it needs to be "kept in house" and "kept under wraps".
Still if you persist the blackmail gang has another ace up its sleeve, because a lot of people who are bold or antagonistic, as others do too, have quite a bit of ambition for status, or want power or have a sadistic streak and want opportunities to exercise it and so the blackmail gang says, ok ok, we got you, but you're a tough guy, you're not like those silly little boys getting caught up in all this, why don't you join in with us, this is just how the game is played, this is how the world really works, you're initiated now. And a lot of them get excited by this, now they're in on it, now they're one of the big boys, if punishment doesn't work, try seduction. Often followed shortly by even greater sins to be threatened with and a personal investment in the whole system of blackmail as a method of asserting control.
the kingdom of heaven suffers violence and the violent take it by force
But see some of them, a rare few are *so* angry and unphased (and at this point it's generally both) that they do not respond to that either, or stop responding to it after a while. Then the gang needs to make good on it's threat. It needs to fuck them well and good, not just to get rid of them, not just as an example to the others - but to preserve the whole damn social order, civilisation itself, without which we would be plunged into chthonic chaos.
And then there's Cleckley, society's darling, telling us that some people who seem kinda... antagonistic, who seem sorta impulsive and (no doubt often frustratingly) unbeholden to social sanctions... the exact kind of people who would be likely to be most motivated to and least afraid of telling the blackmail gang to fuck right off, and he tells us: despite seeming entirely sane and normal when you talk to them, they have no real feelings, proper ones like you and me, and thus are irredeemable and simply cannot care about or appreciate anything significant, maybe the shallow imitation of a feeling at times but nothing serious, they lie all the time, they're self destructive and their lives inexplicably just keep on turning to absolute shit. He tells us they're mentally ill and we shouldn't listen to a word they say because they have a sort of "semantic aphasia" as he calls it that makes it all meaningless. It just sounds awfully convenient to me... it makes me wonder what they were really saying.
Speaking of why does Cleckley also have a book pathologising homosexuality. He declares that 'psychopaths' do not really feel and homosexuals do not really love - things perceived by people as fundamental parts of their 'humanity'. He feigns concern, presents both things as sicknesses, but does so in a way that fully discredits and isolates those who bear the stigma. If it's not intentional, it could not be more effective a tool if it was.
I ended up with a vision of a world where tradition acts as an open prison that threatens bars to those who would be held by them and offers the opportunity to be a jailer to those for whom that is not enough.
The constant belittlement of women in socially conservative circles reflects the nature of the club - men are socialised to present themselves as bold, independent and strong, easily induced to overlook moral transgressions to prove that they're above that sort of thing, on a higher level, powerful and unmoved. Women are socialised to enforce and uphold the moral order, to use the tools of shame, ostracisation and condemnation to keep people in line. This directly mirrors the duality in conceptions of personality disorder: ASPD aggression is for personal gain, the lone wolf in it for himself. BPD aggression is wrought to rectify a moral order, avenge a wrong, or to punish a transgressor.
Women are not allowed in the club because it's not part of their social role to be wild and free or the amoral 'individual' standing on the mountaintop - their role is to be good, and to keep the boys in line, they can only express antagonism either to police, to punish naughty children and enforce anathamas - or conversely chaotically in their role as weak, victims, lacking agency and easily led astray by demons and vicious men, by their histronic wombs and their frayed nerves.
In this world to threaten him, if it is not enough, we can always threaten her, take away her honour, her dignity, her source of social power. Then there is the brothel, the easy women, allowed to see man's hidden face, inherently disreputable, thrown away when used up - and a picture of female psychopathy as promiscuity, sex that is unfeeling, the woman who exploits men's weaknesses of the flesh, painted by men who get away with doing the exact same thing - excluded, but necessary to satiate that same weakeness, the perfect whore.
And then, much like in 1984 with The Party and the proles, the freedom of the marginalised is paid for by powerlessness: the vulgar churls, descendents of Canaan, need not submit to such strict requirements of duplicity - but at the cost of being more directly, brutally, controlled, seen as more animal than human. A world in which hypocrisy is the central virtue of the civilised: control through the consciences aversion to betrayal, ones own sense of self-preservation and lust for power.
Who's left after that? The extremely impulsive, the stubbornly principled (or antagonistic) and the profoundly grandiose: sounds a lot like psychopathy actually... but it doesn't sound anything like a portrait of evil or of the unfeeling and insensitive.