The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (4 page)

Read The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry Online

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 someone has created a convincing Facebook persona for Levi Shand,” Deborah said.
I took this possibility in.
“Have you thought about his name?” Deborah asked.
“Levi Shand?”
“Haven’t you worked it out?” she said. “It’s an anagram.”
I fell silent.
“ ‘ Lavish End’!” I suddenly exclaimed.
“No,” said Deborah.
I got out a piece of paper.
“ ‘Devil Has N’ . . . ?” I asked after a while.
“‘Live Hands,’” said Deborah. “It’s an anagram of ‘Live Hands.’”
“Oh, okay,” I said.
“Like the drawing on the cover of
Being or Nothingness
,” prompted Deborah. “Two hands drawing each other . . .?”
“So if Levi Shand doesn’t exist,” I said, “who created him?”
“I think they’re all Hofstadter,” said Deborah. “Levi Shand. Petter Nordlund. I think they’re
all Douglas Hofstadter
.”
 
 
I went for a walk through Gothenburg, feeling quite annoyed and disappointed that I’d been hanging around here for days when the culprit was probably an eminent professor some four thousand miles away at Indiana University. Deborah had offered me supplementary circumstantial evidence to back her theory that the whole puzzle was a product of Douglas Hofstadter’s impish mind. It was, she said, exactly the sort of playful thing he might do. And being the author of an international bestseller, he would have the financial resources to pull it off. Plus he was no stranger to Sweden; he had lived there in the mid-1960s. Furthermore,
Being or Nothingness
looked like a Hofstadter book. The clean white cover was reminiscent of the cover of Hofstadter’s follow-up to
Gödel, Escher, Bach
—the 2007 book
I Am a Strange Loop
.
True, the creation of a fake Indiana University student with a fake Facebook page and an unlikely tale about a harem of beautiful French women was an odd addition, but it would do no good to second-guess the motives of a brilliant man like Hofstadter.
Furthermore, Deborah believed she had solved the book’s puzzle. Yes, there was a missing piece, but it didn’t take the form of invisible ink or significant words cut out of page 13. It was, she said, the way the book had revealed an inherent narcissism in its recipients.
 
Being or Nothingness
, and the package it came in, photographed by a recipient, Eric Rauchway, professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and reproduced with his permission.
 
“That’s what
I Am a Strange Loop
is about,” said Deborah. “It’s about how we spend our lives self-referencing, over and over, in a kind of strange loop. Now lots of people are asking themselves, ‘Why was I selected to receive this book?’ They aren’t talking about the
book
or the
message
. They’re talking about
themselves.
So
Being or Nothingness
has created a strange loop of people and it is a vessel for them to self-reference.” She paused. “I think that’s Hofstadter’s message.”
 
 
It was a compelling theory, and I continued to believe this might be the solution to the riddle right up until the moment, an hour later, I had a Skype video conversation with Levi Shand, who, it was soon revealed, wasn’t an invention of Douglas Hofstadter’s but an actual student from Indiana University.
He was a handsome young man with black hair, doleful eyes, and a messy student bedroom. He had been easy to track down. I e-mailed him via his Facebook page. He got back to me straightaway (he’d been online at the time) and within seconds we were face-to-face.
He told me it was all true. He really did find the books in a box under a railway viaduct and Douglas Hofstadter really did have a harem of French women living at his home.
“Tell me exactly what happened when you visited him,” I said.
“I was really nervous,” Levi said, “given his prominence on the cognitive science scene. A beautiful young French girl answered the door. She told me to wait. I looked through into the next room, and there were more beautiful French girls in there.”
“How many in total?” I asked.
“There were at least six of them,” said Levi. “They had brown hair, blond hair, all standing there between the kitchen and the dining room. All of them stunningly beautiful.”
“Is this
true
?” I asked him.
“Well, they might have been Belgian,” said Levi.
“What happened then?” I asked.
“Professor Hofstadter came out from the kitchen,” he said, “looking thin but healthy. Charismatic. He took the books, thanked me, and I left. And that’s it.”
“And every word of this is true?” I asked.
“Every word,” said Levi.
 
 
But something didn’t feel right. Levi’s story, and indeed Deborah’s theory, worked only if Douglas Hofstadter was some kind of playful, dilettantish prankster, and nothing I could find suggested he was. In 2007, for example, Deborah Solomon of
The New York Times
asked him some slightly facetious questions and his replies revealed him to be a serious, quite impatient man:
Q. You first became known in 1979, when you published “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” a campus classic, which finds parallels between the brains of Bach, M. C. Escher and the mathematician Kurt Gödel. In your new book, “I Am a Strange Loop,” you seem mainly interested in your own brain.
A. This book is much straighter. It’s less crazy. Less daring, maybe.
Q. You really know how to plug a book.
A. Well, O.K., I don’t know. Questions of consciousness and soul—that is what the new book was motivated by.
Q. Your entry in Wikipedia says that your work has inspired many students to begin careers in computing and artificial intelligence.
A. I have no interest in computers. The entry is filled with inaccuracies, and it kind of depresses me.
 
And so on. Hofstadter’s work, I learned, was informed by two neurological tragedies. When he was twelve, it became clear that his young sister Molly was unable to speak or understand language: “I was very interested already in how things in my mind worked,” he told
Time
magazine in 2007. “When Molly’s unfortunate plight became apparent, it all started getting connected to the physical world. It really made you think about the brain and the self, and how the brain determines who the person is.”
And then in 1993 his wife, Carol, died, suddenly, of a brain tumor. Their children were two and five. He was left overwhelmed with grief. In
I Am a Strange Loop
he consoles himself with the thought that she lived on in his brain: “I believe that there is a trace of her ‘I,’ her interiority, her inner light, however you want to phrase it, that remains inside me,” he told
Scientific American
in 2007, “and the trace that remains is a valid trace of her self—her soul, if you wish. I have to emphasize that the sad truth of the matter is, of course, that whatever persists in me is a very feeble copy of her. It’s reduced, a sort of low-resolution version, coarsegrained. . . . Of course it doesn’t remove the sting of death. It doesn’t say, ‘Oh, well, it didn’t matter that she died because she lives on just fine in my brain.’ Would that it were. But, anyway, it is a bit of a consolation.”
None of this painted a picture of a man who might have a harem of French women and a propensity to create a complicated, odd conspiracy involving posting dozens of copies of strange books, anonymously, to academics across the world.
I wrote him an e-mail, asking him if Levi Shand’s story about the box under the bridge and the harem of French women was true, and then I went for a walk. When I returned, this was waiting for me in my in-box:
Dear Mr. Ronson,
 
 
 
I have nothing to do with Being or Nothingness except that I’m mentioned in it. I am just an “innocent victim” of the project.
Yes, Mr. Shand came to my house and delivered a few copies of the odd book, but the rest of his story is sheer fabrication. My daughter was having her French lesson with her French tutor in the living room, so perhaps Mr. Shand espied the two of them and heard them speaking French. Also, I speak Italian at home with my kids, and for all I know, Mr. Shand may have mistaken the sound of Italian for French. The point is, there was certainly no “house filled with beautiful French women”—that’s utter rubbish. He wanted to make his mission sound mysterious and titillating.
It’s a shame that people do this kind of thing and post it on the Web.
 
 
Sincerely, Douglas Hofstadter
I e-mailed back. Much of Levi Shand’s tale didn’t ring true, I said, not only the business of the harem but also the story of how he found the box underneath the railway viaduct. Was it possible that Levi Shand was in fact the author of
Being or Nothingness
?
He replied:
Levi Shand is certainly not the author of the small white book. I have been sent about 80 copies (70 in English, 10 in Swedish) by its author. They sit untouched in my office. Before the book existed, I received a series of extremely cryptic postcards, all in Swedish (all of which I read, although not carefully, and none of which made the least sense at all). People who are normal (i.e., sane, sensible) don’t try to open lines of communication with total strangers by writing them a series of disjointed, weird, cryptic messages.
From there on, it only got weirder—first several copies of the book were sent to me in a package, and then, some months later, about 80 copies arrived at my office, and then came the bizarre claim that a bunch of copies “were found under a bridge” on my campus, and then books started arriving at various universities around the world, sent to people in certain disciplines that were vaguely associated with Al, biology, etc. And then there were the scissored-out words (super-weird!), and the taped-in letter, addressed to me. All of it was completely nuts. I could say much more about it all, but I don’t have the time.
I have a great deal of experience with people who are smart but unbalanced, people who think they have found the key to the universe, etc. It’s a sad thing, but there are many of them out there, and often they are extremely obsessive. This particular case was exceedingly transparent because it was so exceedingly obsessive.
 
Yes, there was a missing piece of the puzzle, Douglas Hofstadter was saying, but the recipients had gotten it wrong. They assumed the endeavor was brilliant and rational because they were brilliant and rational, and we tend to automatically assume that everybody else is basically just like us. But in fact the missing piece was that the author was a
crackpot
.
The book couldn’t be decoded because it was written by a
crackpot.
Hofstadter wrote:
“Being or Nothingness” was written (and published) by a psychologist (or possibly a psychiatrist) in Göteborg, Sweden, who prefers anonymity and thus goes by the pseudonym of “Joe K.”
 

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