The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (21 page)

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Authors: Jon Ronson

Tags: #Social Scientists & Psychologists, #Psychopathology, #Sociology, #Psychology, #Popular Culture.; Bisacsh, #Social Science, #Popular Culture, #Psychopaths, #General, #Mental Illness, #Biography & Autobiography, #Social Psychology, #History.; Bisacsh, #History

BOOK: The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
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“I think I am thrilled that he chose to give his charity to Florida State University, and this building is a place where we can do amazing work because he’s chosen to give us this opportunity and we are so thankful for that,” she said.
“Thank you very much,” I said.
“Thank
you
!” she said, wandering away.
 
 
“Grandiose sense of self-worth?” I said to Al now in his kitchen.
“No question,” said Al. “If you don’t believe in yourself, nobody else will. You’ve got to believe in you.”
“Is there another list of
good
things?” said Judy, quite sharply.
“Well . . .” I said. We all fell silent. “Need for stimulation/ proneness to boredom?” I said.
“Yeah,” said Al. “I’m very prone to boredom. I gotta go do something. Yeah. That’s a fair statement. I’m not the most relaxed person in the world. My mind does not stop working all night.”
“Manipulative?” I said.
“I think you could describe that as
leadership
,” he said. “Inspire! I think it’s called
leadership
.”
“Are you okay with this list?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure, why not?” he said.
 
 
And so the morning continued, with Al redefining a great many psychopathic traits as Leadership Positives. Impulsivity was “just another way of saying Quick Analysis. Some people spend a week weighing up the pros and cons. Me? I look at it for ten minutes. And if the pros outweigh the cons? Go!” Shallow Affect (an inability to feel a deep range of emotions) stops you from feeling “some nonsense emotions.” A lack of remorse frees you up to move forward and achieve more great things. What’s the point in drowning yourself in sorrow?
“You have to judge yourself at the end of the day,” he said. “Do I respect me? And if you do? Fine! You’ve had a great run.”
“You do feel good about yourself?” I asked.
“I do!” he replied. “Oh, I do! Looking back at my life is like going to a movie about a person who did all this
stuff.
My gosh! I did
that
? And through it all I did it my way.”
“What about the way you treated your first wife?” I asked.
“I . . .” Al furrowed his brow. He looked at me. “I’d been at West Point,” he said. “You go from this glamorous lifestyle to being some”—he screwed up his face—“young married lieutenant at some remote base someplace. At that young age it’s an extremely difficult transition. . . .” He trailed off.
“So you saw your wife as something that was holding you back?” I said.
Al shrugged and glanced at the floor for a moment. “I was stationed on a nuclear missile site,” he said. “You’re dealing with
nuclear weapons
. I was there during the Cuban missile crisis. The job’s very serious. You’ve got a mission. If you fail the mission, a lot of people could be seriously hurt. And does that commitment conflict with your family life? Of course it does. . . .”
Al was referring to the time during the Cuban missile crisis that he left his five-months-pregnant wife home alone with no food or access to money and in desperation she had to call her mother and sister for help.
“Oh!” I said. “One more thing. When you see a crime-scene photograph—something really grotesque, someone’s face blown apart or something—do you react with horror?”
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I think I intellectualize it.”
“Really?” I said. “It makes you curious? It’s absorbing? Like a puzzle to be solved?”
“Curious.” Al nodded. “As opposed to, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s frightened me!’ I’m not going to go sit in the corner of the room. What enters my mind is, What happened here? Why did it happen?”
“Your body doesn’t feel debilitated in response to the shock of seeing the picture?” I said.
Al shook his head.
I was leaning forward, peering at him over my glasses, carefully scrutinizing him. He quickly clarified, “Yeah, what enters my mind is, What happened here and how can it be prevented from ever happening again?”
“How can it be prevented from ever happening again?” I asked.
“You cannot be a leader and cringe from evil and badness,” he said. “You’ve got to
face
it.” He paused. “The basic definition of leadership is the person who rises above the crowd and gets something done. Okay?”
 
 
We had lunch before I left. Al seemed in surprisingly high spirits for a man who’d just been questioned on which psychopathic traits most applied to him. He had a little gold ax on his lapel. As we ate, he told me funny stories about firing people. Each was essentially the same: someone was lazy and he fired them with an amusing quip. For instance, one lazy Sunbeam executive mentioned to him that he’d just bought himself a fabulous sports car.
“You may have a fancy sports car,” Al replied, “but I’ll tell you what you don’t have. A
job
!”
Judy laughed at each of the anecdotes, though she had surely heard them many times, and I realized what a godsend to a corporation a man who enjoys firing people must be.
They took me into their TV room and showed me a speech Al once gave at Florida State University on the subject of leadership. At the end of the tape Judy applauded the TV. She clearly adored her husband, adored his no-nonsense approach to life, his practically Darwinian street smarts. I wondered what sort of woman loved a man like that.
I said, “Tell me about the Sunbeam years—”
He cut me off.
“Sunbeam didn’t work.” He shrugged. “Sunbeam’s a footnote in my career. It wasn’t the biggest corporation. It had products that were a bit fickle. Appliances. I don’t get too disturbed about it. In the scheme of things, it’s inconsequential.”
And that’s all he would say about Sunbeam. We talked about Lack of Empathy. Al said he did empathize “with people who want to make something of themselves,” but unfortunately that didn’t include his son, Troy, or his sister, Denise.
For Denise, the relationship ended for good in January 1994, when she called her brother to let him know that her daughter, Carolyn, a college junior, was diagnosed with leukemia.
“Can I just know that you’ll be there if I need you?” she asked him.
“No,” Dunlap tersely replied, she recalls.
—JOHN A. BYRNE,
BusinessWeek
, DECEMBER 2, 1996
 
 
“I haven’t spoken to my sister in years,” he said. “In high school I was very close to the top of the class. I was an athlete. And then I went off to West Point. And she
resented
it! To me that makes no sense. If I had a brother or an older sister, I’d be so proud. I’d be, ‘Wow! I want to be like my brother!’ Her attitude was just the opposite.
‘Look what he’s got.’
I earned it!”
Al’s relationship with Troy was just as frosty.
“I tried to help him on numerous occasions.” He shrugged. “I tried. Honestly, I tried. It just didn’t work out. And then he made some statements to the press. . . .”
Upon hearing the news of his father’s sacking [from Sunbeam], Troy Dunlap chortled.
“I laughed like hell,” he says. “I’m glad he fell on his ass.”
Dunlap’s sister, Denise, his only sibling, heard the news from a friend in New Jersey. Her only thought: “He got exactly what he deserved.”
—Business Week
, 1998
 
 
I wrote in my notepad, and then turned to a clean page so they wouldn’t spot my thoughts,
Feeling no remorse must be a blessing when all you have left are your memories.
“It’s the tall poppy thing.” Al Dunlap was calling from across the room. “Everyone wants to cut the tall poppy. I’m sure since you’ve achieved a level of success, people are saying nasty things about you. And you’re thinking, ‘Wait a minute. Nobody ever gave a damn before I got to this level.’ Is that true?”
“Yes. It’s true,” I said.
“Screw them,” Al said. “They’re just jealous. You do what you have to do. So, you understand?”
I glanced up at the oil painting.
Write something about Narcissus,
I added on a fresh page.
Write something about the moral barrenness of padding around a mansion that’s much too big for just two people, a mansion filled with giant reflections of yourself.
I smiled to myself at the cleverness of my phraseology.
“
You
understand, right?” said Dunlap. “You’ve had some success. You’re like me. When you reach a certain level, jealous people go for you. Right? They lie about you. They try and cut you down. You did what you had to do to get where you’ve gone. We’re the same.”
Also write something about the Queen of Narnia,
I wrote.
 
 
And so it was that shareholders and boards of directors within the toaster-manufacturing world of the 1990s came to appreciate the short-term business benefits of employing a CEO who displayed many character traits that would, as it transpired, score him high on the Bob Hare Psychopath Checklist.
 
Bob Hare was spending the night at the Heathrow Airport Hilton. He e-mailed me to ask how things had gone with Al Dunlap. I replied that I’d tell him in person.
I met him in the hotel bar. He was more in demand than ever, he said, now that a big study he’d coauthored, “Corporate Psychopathy,” had just been published. In it, 203 “corporate professionals” were assessed with his checklist—“including CEOs, directors, supervisors,” Bob said—and the results showed that while the majority weren’t at all psychopathic, “3.9% had a score of at least 30, which is extremely high, even for a prison population, at least 4 or 5 times the prevalence in the general population.”
Bob clarified that we don’t have a lot of empirical data for how many psychopaths are walking around in the general population, but the assumption is that it’s a little less than 1 percent. And so, his study showed, it is four or five times more likely that some corporate bigwig is a very high-scoring psychopath than someone just trying to earn an okay living for their family.
 
 
Over a glass of red wine I briefed him on my Al Dunlap visit. I told him how Al had pretty much confessed to a great many of the psychopathic traits, seeing them as business positives, and Bob nodded, unsurprised.
“Psychopaths say there are predators and prey,” Bob said. “When they say that, take it as factual.”
“It’s funny you should mention predators,” I said. “Try and guess what his house was filled with.”
“Eagles,” said Bob. “Bears . . .”
“Yes!” I said. “Panthers. Tigers. A whole menagerie. Not stuffed. Statues. How would you
know
that?”
“I have a few insights here,” he said, pointing at his skull. “I’m a researcher but I have clinical insights.”
Then I frowned. “But he did tell me he cried when his dog died,” I said.
“Yeah?” said Bob.
“Yes,” I said. “We had just had a conversation about Shallow Affect. He said he didn’t allow himself to be weighed down by nonsense emotions. But then I was admiring an oil painting of his dog Brit and he said he cried his eyes out when it died. He said he cried and cried and cried and that meant he couldn’t be a psychopath.”
I realized I was admitting this to Bob in an almost apologetic manner, as if it was sort of my fault, like I was a casting agent who had put forward an imperfect actor for a job.
“Oh, that’s quite common,” said Bob.
“Really?” I said, brightening.
“Dogs are a possession,” Bob explained. “Dogs—if you have the right dog—are extremely loyal. They’re like a slave, right? They do everything you want them to. So, yeah, he cried his eyes out when his dog died. Would he cry his eyes out if his
cat
died?”
I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t think he has a cat,” I said, nodding slowly.

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