David Sloan Wilson
Author of Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory
Can Change the Way We Think about Our Lives
The Wizard of Oz said loudly to Dorothy and her friends:
“I am Oz, The Great and Terrible! Pay no attention to the small man behind the curtain.”
Imagine what would have happened if Dorothy had obeyed the wizard. Would she ever have made it back to Kansas? Instead of obeying, she continued to think and observe, leading herself and her friends toward their goals.
You face a similar challenge in reading this book: you'll have to be courageous. Go ahead, buy it; it's important. It's also quite entertaining.
Why is a psychiatrist writing this preface? Well, you see, although many people think psychiatrists can “read people's minds,” we cannot. Instead, the principal value of a good psychotherapist is to enable people to ask dangerous questions and tolerate the answers, while maintaining a sense of hope. Since Dr. Oakley's book asks some very dangerous questions, my goal in the next few paragraphs is to prepare you to tolerate the information she presents and the implications, while maintaining your own sense of hope.
First, as you read this book, you must remember that on the whole, humans are remarkably good. This is not just a wishful statement. Sophisticated brain science (the type Dr. Oakley so superbly displays in this book) shows how deeply our tendency to trust and cooperate with others is rooted in brain anatomy and function—even when such behaviors place us at direct personal risk. For example, a research team at the Center for Neural Science at New York University recently conducted a remarkable experiment examining the natural willingness many people have to trust others. They showed that this tendency is rooted in the brain circuits we use for learning through trial and error, a region called the caudate. Even when subjects were repeatedly being taken advantage of, their caudate continued to respond in a trusting manner, if they had been led to believe they were working with a “good” person. (If they thought they were working with someone neutral or “bad,” they figured out what was going on quickly.) This caudate response, and their trusting behavior, persisted even when the subjects understood the error they were making! Their brains appeared to be wired for cooperation. At times you may find yourself quite disturbed by the implications of this book, which describes some very opposite research results, applying to a minority of humans. So please remember: most of us are surprisingly good.
A second source of hope is especially important when “belief”—certainty in one's knowledge, often wearing the robes of religious faith or walking the halls of politics—has so actively challenged scientific thought. This hope springs from the value of true understanding. Accurate information, on its own, is never dangerous. What we think of it, and what we do with it, can indeed be potentially very harmful. But obtaining accurate information, and thinking clearly about it, can only be helpful to us. The more we avoid trying to understand what is really happening around us, because it makes us uncomfortable or does not fit with our existing beliefs, the worse off we will be. Instead, when we use a rigorous scientific method to ask important questions and then think clearly about the implications of the research results, we are more likely to live free and prosperous lives. This book is a testimony to that process.
Some psychiatrists could quibble about the way in which borderline, antisocial, and bipolar disorders are treated herein, but these conditions are highly related and overlapping and not inaccurately treated here. However, I suspect there will indeed be screaming about this book. “You want to label people, even before they are born!” “This is the beginning of a slippery slope, which leads to genetic screening and sterilization; this is a return to eugenics!” True, there is a great risk that we will use genetic information wrongly, driven by our “us versus them” tendencies, our inclination to stereotype people who are not like us and make them “enemies.” You can almost see it coming: “evil genes” will be thought to be more common among groups whom we are inclined to hate and used as a justification for striking out at such peoples. As you know, this kind of thinking has even led to efforts to completely eradicate some ethnic groups. And yet, as Dr. Oakley shows in this book, such societal insanity is more likely when the leaders themselves possess antisocial traits. Perhaps the world will be safer if we watch for these traits among leaders and anticipate their behaviors (although trying to solve that problem by invading their country has not recently seemed to be the best way to approach things, one might argue).
We should not fear this book. We should fear the implications of what Dr. Oakley describes, but the more we understand about “bad behaviors,” the better equipped we will be to deal with them. Therefore you will find it useful, as well as important, to read all the way through this book. Fortunately, Dr. Oakley has written it as a combination of personal narrative and science story. The result is not unlike The Wizard of Oz: an entertaining story in which one encounters some very nasty characters. Remember to take with you the Lion and the Tin Man; that is, remember that most humans are remarkably kind and generous and brave. One simply has to learn one's way around the kingdom, with eyes wide open.
Jim Phelps, MD
Author of Why Am I Still Depressed?:
Recognizing and Managing the Ups and Downs
of Bipolar II and Soft Bipolar Disorder
“My mother's obsession with the good scissors always scared me a bit. It implied that somewhere in the house there lurked: the evil scissors.”
—Tony Martin, The Late Show
“Back to the real world after panic attack. Must ease Jack out. Can't tolerate the smoke or the late night ‘sloppies.’ He is still a good friend to have.”
There they are: Carolyn's last written words, directly from the diary found lying on her bed stand after her death. Words mattered to Carolyn. Did she suspect what was about to happen?
I knew who Jacka. —the “good friend”—was. He and my sister Carolyn had lived together on and off for years, beginning soon after Carolyn had decided to move up from southern California to Sequim, Washington. Sequim rhymes with “swim.” As the T-shirt says: “Sink or Swim in Sunny Sequim.”
Sequim is an oddly bipolar town, crouched in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains. Mount Olympus, less than thirty miles west near the coast, gets nearly seventeen feet of rain a year. But by the time the air travels over the mountains to Sequim, a paltry seventeen inches a year is all that's left—not much more than what Tucson gets. The same air then continues over Puget Sound, picking up moisture again to drizzle up to a yard a year in Seattle. Wedged between two mother lodes of rain, Sequim is actually a postage stamp desert weirdly laced with irrigation ditches, streams, and rivers, all of which funnel rainwater and snowmelt from the Olympic Mountains down toward the sea. Living in Sequim is like living in a vortex. You can look up nearly every day and see bright blue skies overhead. But often as not, the town is surrounded by a ring of ominous storm clouds, kept at bay as if by some awesome force.
Retirees often move to Sequim, attracted by the unusual juxtaposition of mountains, sea, sunshine, and mild winters. They build huge homes on bluffs and hillsides overlooking the ocean—virtual villas with lovely gardens and masses of windows to take in the scenic vista. But after a year or so, some retirees discover that their chirpy realtor had inflated the average temperatures for the area by ten degrees. Newcomers expecting the climate of Tucson often find temperatures closer to those of Juneau. It's never exactly cold in Sequim, but it's never exactly warm, either. Year-old villas are often for sale in Sequim.
Both my parents were living separately in Sequim, each for different reasons, at the time my sister moved to town. My father reveled in the outdoors. After being a veterinarian for thirty years, he spent his retirement days happily felling trees in the National Forest and hauling them home to peel and insert in his ever-growing complex of log structures: log cabin, log storage shed, log garage, log guesthouse, log pantry buildings, log woodsheds, log sau
na, log bridges, log greenhouse, and even, for reasons only he could explain, a three-story log water tower with a thousand-gallon tank and a panoramic view of the jutting peaks of the Olympics. The entire complex was nestled in a private forest of soaring Douglas firs, graceful hemlock, and spidery madrone.
Fig. Intro.1. My father at play setting the corner post for a covered log bridge. A few weeks after this picture was taken, he fell twenty feet from the top of the bridge onto the stone creek bed. Swelling from the resulting concussion, egged on by his genetic predisposition, led to the peculiar gene-environment mix that probably caused his death.
My mother, on the other hand, reveled only in my father, which was a little creepy, all things considered. Long after their divorce, she had tracked him down and moved about three miles away to a small apartment near Sequim's slightly bedraggled downtown, across the street from a dusty field of quackgrass, wild barley, and a gaggle of Garry oaks. Despite the proximity to my father, it took years before my mother finally realized that merely extricating herself from alcohol and acting nice wouldn't resurrect her ruptured thirty-year marriage. So she lived a lonely life serving as a hostess in a Mexican restaurant. Gradually, as the owners realized her skills, she became the restaurant's bookkeeper and, ultimately, a manager.
Carolyn, like my mother, had moved to Sequim for a reason.
About a decade after my parents’ divorce, my mother had begun dating a wealthy emphysemic—a wheezy fellow named Ted, who planned to take her and his oxygen tanks on an extensive trip through Europe. Ted and his breathing apparatus were perhaps no great catch, but he was good company for my mother, as she probably was for him. And in all the years of our family's moves around the United States, my mother had never before been overseas. I remember listening to her talk about her upcoming trip to Europe with Ted, her breath coming quick and eyes sparkling as she wondered about the food in France—was it as good as they say?—the cathedrals, and even the width of the streets. It was the first time in years I'd seen her show any real animation or enthusiasm.
When I saw my mother again several months later, rather than discussing baguettes and béchamel, she told me how her Mexican restaurant made vegetables look greener by taking the lid off the steaming pot. She was mum about her social life, so only much later did I find out the particulars. Apparently, about a month before departure, my mother had mentioned her pending European adventure during a rare, probing telephone call from Carolyn. A few days after the phone call, Carolyn had pulled up her Southern California stakes and abruptly moved to Sequim. One leg still limp from her childhood bout with polio, my sister tucked herself and her crutches up beside the less-than-active Ted while my mother pitched in to get her situated in her new apartment. Carolyn had a dazzling knowledge of French food and wine. She paused frequently in her connoisseur's conversation—each pause just long enough to catch Ted's eye.
Soon Carolyn was comfortably ensconced beside Ted's oxygen bottle on a flight to Paris. Just another underhanded episode in a lifetime of such episodes. My mother never did get to see Europe.
THE SUCCESSFULLY SINISTER
Prompted by my sister, even as a child I used to wonder about subtly nasty characters—the ones who get really close to you so the knife goes deeper. I read about the alluring but sometimes sinister wives and concubines of the Roman emperors and Ottoman sultans. Were these women perhaps like my sister? I learned of the evil machinations of Count Romulus, some two thousand years ago in North Africa; his legendarily malevolent nature has passed down to modern culture in the naming of Star Trek Romulans. I shivered over stories of China's dowager empress Cixi, famed for her beauty, charm, love of power, and utter ruthlessness.1 She was accused of killing her own grandchild to retain her hold on the throne—her narrow-minded policies undoubtedly set the stage for China's gruesome self-immolation during the twentieth century. Like tens of thousands of other children my age, I read The Diary of Anne Frank and wondered at how the horrific policies of a single demented leader could resonate in an echo chamber of banal evildoers and result in the deaths of millions.
As I grew older, I noticed literature, movies, TV shows, video games, and comics that brimmed with quirky, evil antagonists: Shakespeare's sinister Iago; David Copperfield's servile Uriah Heep; The Lovely Bones’ pitiful serial killer, George Harvey; Glenn Close's psychotic book editor Alex in Fatal Attraction; Silence of the Lambs’ Hannibal Lector; Nurse Ratched of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest; Captain Hook; manga's twisted gang girl leader Mitsuko Souma; Batman's Joker; Seinfeld's Soup Nazi. Entertainment, it seemed, could hardly be entertainment without a bad guy (or gal) smiling through the duplicity.
Real life, of course, is much worse. Hitler, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Nicolae Ceausescu, Rafael Trujillo, Slobodan Milosevic, Anastasio Somoza, Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin—the twentieth century's list of monstrous leaders grows longer the more you look. Altogether these bloody despots were responsible for policies that caused the murders of well over one hundred and fifty million people during the twentieth century alone—that's about fifteen hundred families for each word in this book.
And each of these ruthless dictators shared a similar devious expertise in manipulation and control. The subtly deceitful Stalin, for example, was prone to tricks such as having newly promoted field marshal Grigory Kulik entertained in the office above the cell where the marshal's wife, the beautiful Countess Kira, mother of an eight-year-old daughter, was being tortured after having been kidnapped on her way to the dentist. This was Stalin's way of ensuring that his people toed the line. (One month later, the countess was coldly executed with a bullet in the head; Kulik himself was quietly shot a decade later.) Millions died during Stalin's grisly purges, which assigned quotas for executions by the thousands; millions more died during his enforced starvation policies in the Ukraine.b.2
In China, Mao followed Stalin's lead. Rather than sending hapless millions to the gulags to suffer and—if they were lucky—die, Mao turned all of China into an über-gulag. Using gullible Western writers, Mao created a legend for himself as a Chinese Robin Hood who won the respect of all those he led. The reality was that he ruled by savage caprice, willful incompetence, and messianic egotism. Ultimately, he was responsible for the deaths of over seventy million Chinese during peacetime alone. Mao also set the example for Pol Pot, who espoused a radically revised Maoism that resulted in the “killing fields” that depopulated much of Cambodia.
When I read accounts of these tyrants, I shuddered. But something always baffled me, just as it baffled all of the tyrants’ careful biographers and their readers, and just as it must have baffled those victims cognizant enough to know the ultimate source of their needless suffering. How did these seeming psychopaths get to the top?c.3 Shouldn't people have noticed these tyrants were a little, well, odd before they ascended to power? How could they fool and manipulate people so easily? And, in this new era where dictators like Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein are caught and tried rather than butchered on the spot, it's disconcerting to watch these caged mini-Hitlers face the overwhelming evidence of their atrocities and—poof—pretend it didn't happen, or wasn't that serious, or was someone else's fault. I can't help but wonder, what is going on in these people's minds?
Compared to people like Mao, Stalin, and Milosevic, my sister's many devious manipulations and deceits were small potatoes indeed. But for my parents and the many people she affected through her mysteriously foreshortened life, the pain of her purposefully malign actions was real and devastating. I thought a lot about my sister as I grew older and learned more about her ability to deceive. I thought about her wit, her intelligence, and her uncanny ability to charm.
While working as a Russian translator on Soviet trawlers during the cold war of the early 1980s, I studied the avuncular picture of “Uncle Joe” Stalin on the captain's wall. I knew all about Stalin's loathsome policies and personality, yet I still couldn't help but speculate—would I have known what Stalin was really like if I'd naively met him a
t his wedding cake–shaped mansion, or at a well-lubricated Kremlin dinner party? After all, even Winston Churchill, a man who clearly had Hitler's number, was fooled. I read with interest how Churchill was charmed and dazzled by Stalin, “that great man,” with whom he shared cheerful drinking bouts and similar paternal adoration of their redheaded daughters.4 Stalin was a gifted organizer who was capable of working prodigious hours. But, as Stalin's most perspicacious biographer, Simon Sebag Montefiore, discovered, the “archives confirm that his real genius was something different—and surprising: ‘he could charm people.’ He was what is now known as a ‘people person.’ While incapable of true empathy on the one hand, he was a master of friendships on the other. He constantly lost his temper, but when he set his mind to charming a man, he was irresistible.”5
Near the little town of Rochester, Michigan, not far from Detroit, where I now live with my family, I often drive by the site of the old Machus Red Fox Restaurant—the last place Jimmy Hoffa was seen alive. Hoffa was the dark mastermind who created an enduring image of Teamsters as bullies who achieved the same thuggish levels as their managerial opponents; Hoffa's unresolved disappearance that lazy summer day in 1975 fixed a stain on his legacy that will never be erased.
Evil Genes Page 2
