Evil Genes

by Barbara Oakley

  Information about borderline personality disorder appears to provide special insight into certain unusual symptoms and traits. Yet research from psychopathy and other disorders is also relevant. As the grand maestro of psychopathy research Robert Hare states: “[I]t is not surprising that there is substantial comorbidity [co-occurrence] of psychopathy with antisocial, narcissistic, histrionic, and borderline” personality disorders.58 We will therefore continue to explore research that relates to both borderline personality disorder and psychopathy. (Those with borderline personality disorder alone, after all, can often feel very real remorse related to the emotional damage they inflict on others.) If you are left occasionally confused as to when one disorder shades into another, don't worry—even experts often face the same dilemma. We're talking about human beings, after all—sloppy business!

  PERSONAL IMPACT: MILOSEVIC AND MY FAMILY

  It's fascinating to learn about different psychological characteristics and how even subtle distortions can profoundly shape personalities. But such analyses can often miss the most important aspect of all—the effect of such personality disturbances on others. I was able, for example, to observe the impact of Milosevic's devastating personality traits through its influence on the early lives of our adopted sons.

  For Bafti and Irfan, life had been increasingly grim since Milosevic had revoked Kosovo's autonomy in 1989, putting the region under the direct and draconian rule of Serbia itself. Schools and colleges were closed—all Albanian professors were expelled from the University of Pristina. Denied any education past eighth grade, our sons ended up in an illegal, privately organized high school, seated on the floor of a neighbor's house, crowded with fifty other students in a sixteen-by-sixteen-foot room, the teacher squeezing past to reach the makeshift chalkboard.

  Many Albanian language newspapers and television stations were closed, and hundreds of thousands of workers—including Bafti and Irfan's parents—lost their jobs. There was no money for food, clothing, shoes, medicine, or fuel during the frigid winters. Racism against “primitive” Albanians was rampant, and the country, once a model of integration, was reduced to a de facto apartheid. The tiny income the boys made selling cigarettes—fleeing at the merest glimpse of the corrupt and brutal Serbian police—was the only thing that kept the family alive. Random arrests increased, along with beatings, prison sentences, and outright murders by the Serbian paramilitaries.

  The leader of the Kosovar Albanians, Ibrahim Rugova, modeled his resistance after the peaceful, passive techniques of Gandhi. But Rugova's advocacy of passive resistance seemed, if anything, to encourage Milosevic and the Serbs in their terrorism and ethnocentrism. As Rugova would eventually discover, Milosevic and the Serbs were not like Lord Mountbatten and the British in India, and Rugova himself was nowhere near as manipulatively adroit at nonviolence as Gandhi.

  January 15, 1999, was the beginning of the Muslim holiday of small Bajram, widely known as Eid—a day of celebration that marked the end of the austere fasting of Ramadan. Extended machine gun fire had taken place early that morning in Racak, a village roughly half a mile from Bafti and Irfan's home in Shtime. Arising early to celebrate the holiday, Bafti had heard the gunfire but thought nothing of it. Both Shtime and Racak, where a number of Bafti and Irfan's cousins lived, were routinely exposed to such weapons firing in the increasingly terrorized province.

  US Ambassador William Walker's explicit description of the events surrounding what Bafti had heard near Racak that January morning helped galvanize international opinion and would eventually lead to the NATO intervention against the Serbian military infrastructure. Walker—head of the Kosovo Verification Mission, the international monitoring group sent to Kosovo to guarantee the human rights situation in the beleaguered province—recalls the day as follows:

  We entered the village [of Racak]…. There were a lot of women around in tears and crying. We came out of the village…. After about 500 yards, we came across the first body…. I was a little shaken by this thing with the head gone…. We saw about 10 bodies while going up the hill. We finally reached a pile of bodies, maybe 17, 18, 19 bodies just helter-skelter in a big pile, all with horrible wounds in the head. All of them were in these clothes that peasants in that part of the world wear when they're out in the fields doing their jobs. A good number of them had lost control of their bodily functions, and so their clothes were stained, and that sort of thing. This had not been concocted by anyone, even though this was later the claim of the government.59

  Fig. 7.2. Counting bodies on the hillside beside the village of Racak after the massacre.

  NATO commander General Wesley Clark recounted a “red-faced Milosevic's description of the Racak massacre as a provocation. ‘This is not a massacre,’ he said. ‘It was staged. These people were terrorists.’”60 Milosevic's words were a prelude to his defense at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. A description by Newsweek's Michael Leverson Meyer catches Milosevic's expertise in twisting the truth. “‘Why are you inventing this?’ Milosevic asked a witness who told of a villager with his chest hacked open and heart ripped out, a photo of which I also have. ‘I saw it,’ the man replied, telling how he and others emerged from the forest to find the bodies after the Serbs had left…. What's dismaying is Milosevic's insouciant disregard for the truth of what happened in that village that day. It's not that he knows, or doesn't. It's that he considers it irrelevant, a laughing matter.”61

  By the end of Milosevic's dictatorship, lines of bedraggled vendors were reduced to hawking bottles of petrol or logs for firewood in downtown Belgrade, the capital of Serbia—all a result of Milosevic's brutally craven bilking of every possible penny from the populace. Milosevic was one of Serbia's top bank managers before he came to power nationally. He could have “used his knowledge of capitalism to introduce free market reforms and privatization. Instead, he ran the Serbian economy the same way he ran the Serbian state, setting up a network of trusted loyalists who either took over or sidestepped the established financial institutions.”62 When Milosevic was directly accused of taking the Serbs back to the Middle Ages, his response was simply a smug “I know.”63

  * * *

  a.I myself saw this dogmatic inflexibility firsthand, so to speak, while visiting in Kosovo with Bafti and Irfan's relatives, watching Milosevic testifying on television during The Hague Tribunals. When asked about the massacre of Racak, where my sons’ young cousins were butchered along with the rest of the village, Milosevic responded to the effect that the deaths were due to an artillery barrage—a by-product of war. When asked how an artillery barrage could produce marks of mutilation and torture, Milosevic's response was that his translating earphones had cut out.

  “Don't believe everything you think.”

  —Anonymous

  “Do you know who Stalin was?” Irena asked. Irena was the officers’ waitress—she'd noticed me eyeing the picture of “Uncle Joe” Stalin screwed into the wall beside the porthole. Captain Shevchenko shot her a warning look. It was the early 1980s, and I was a hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest on a Russian trawler—technically then part of the “Evil Empire” of the Soviet Union. As far as Shevchenko was concerned, Stalin was not a suitable subject for discussion with me—the sole American onboard. I glanced down; my tumbler had been unobtrusively topped off with more Stolichnaya, straight from the freezer.

  “Of course I know who Stalin was,” I replied. “Na zdorovye.” To your health. I cocked the tumbler as the rusty two-hundred-foot trawler lurched starboard. After months at sea, I could no longer smell the belching, acrid smoke of the fish meal plant or the rotting fish on deck. The perennial thrumming of the ship's engines and salt spray that often ruffled my hair just seemed natural now—like home.

  I followed Irena's question with one of my own: “Did you know Stalin was responsible for the deaths of at least twenty million people during his purges?”

  “Have you ever known anyone who lost somebody during those so-called
purges?” Shevchenko scoffed. The captain was a true believer in communism.

  “Yes,” I said, “Most of my teachers lost at least one member of their family.”

  “Oh,” said the captain. He'd thought he had me. “Well…everybody makes mistakes.”1

  LENSES AND FRAMES

  It has been nearly twenty-five years since my days as a translator on Soviet trawlers. I still miss the daily ration of palatalized consonants and the meandering, caboose endings I once slung so glibly. As Vladimir Nabokov muses in “An Evening of Russian Poetry”:

  Because all hangs together—shape and sound,

  heather and honey, vessel and content.

  Not only rainbows—every line is bent,

  and skulls and seeds and all good worlds are round,

  like Russian verse, like our colossal vowels:

  those painted eggs, those glossy pitcher flowers that swallow whole a golden bumblebee,

  those shells that hold a thimble and the sea.2

  The study of language, it turns out, has often played a key role in understanding neurological processes. Linguist Noam Chomsky used his ideas about the formation and learning of language to help pick apart flaws in Skinner's ideas, which helped begin the long overdue overthrow of Skinnerian behaviorism in psychology. Chomsky gave credence to the idea that the brain was composed of a modular set of units, with specialized, innately unique areas that were responsible for learning different things, such as language, mathematics, or the various motor skills. Another revolutionary investigator, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, cut his professional teeth on research related to language before moving on to write The Blank Slate. Pinker's brilliant book, along with the Judith Rich Harris's seminal The Nurture Assumption, was to help redefine psychology so that nature—genetics—was firmly shown to play an equal or even more crucial role than nurture—that is, the environment. Pinker, along with John Tooby and his wife, Leda Cosmides, and others, also stood on the shoulders of Chomsky's ideas to eventually conclude that the human brain, including its module for learning language, evolved by natural selection, just like other body parts.

  The ability to learn a language, any language, is related to innate “wiring” that's built in to nearly all human beings. As a language and surrounding culture is learned, however, it subtly shapes perception, often in ways in which people aren't consciously aware. Those who grow up speaking Chinese, for example, process mathematics in different areas of the brain than those who grow up speaking English as their first language. Both groups use the inferior parietal cortex, but Chinese speakers also use a visual processing area, while English speakers use a language processing area. Richard E. Nisbett, codirector of the University of Michigan's Culture and Cognition Program, notes that studies involving this type of phenomena are important because they tell us “something about the particular pathways in the brain that underlie some of the differences between Asians and Westerners in thought patterns.”3 Other studies have shown that gyri in the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes develop differently in Chinese speakers than in English speakers—acquisition of a different language appears to cause anatomical differences in the brain.4 Chinese speakers literally see the world differently than English speakers—eye-tracking studies show that English speakers tend to first focus on individual items in the foreground of the picture, while Chinese speakers tend to first take in the background and the picture as a whole.5

  In some sense, then, language and culture might be thought of as helping to structure the neurologically based lenses that people use to perceive reality. But of course, language and culture aren't the only influences on our neurological lenses. Family upbringing, religion, political persuasion, educational background, work experience—all help create the different framing lenses people use.6 Practiced expertise with a musical instrument, for example, can change the structure of the musician's primary motor cortex; London's experienced taxi drivers develop enlarged back ends of their hippocampi as a result of the intricate mental map of the city that they develop and store.7

  James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds drives home his counterintuitive thesis that multiple viewpoints from individuals with a wide range of backgrounds, rather than the restricted viewpoints of experts or specialists, are crucial in reaching informed decisions on complex topics. Such successful problem solving almost certainly reflects the value of using a wide variety of framing lenses. In some sense, getting input from a broad variety of people is like getting input from a wide variety of devices—microscopes, telescopes, litmus paper, tensile testors, ultrasound devices, and weighing scales. There is indeed a shared physical reality out there; but for complex problems, no single one of us—experts included—has the all-encompassing set of tools or ways of perceiving that are necessary to truly understand its every aspect. In fact, experts receive such similar training that occasionally they can be unaware, as a group, of shared inadequacies in their approach.

  Living and working among the Russians was a terrific way for me to, in some sense, broaden my neurological frame. (Later, the study of engineering would prove enticing precisely because I knew it would provide yet another, very different, frame with which to shape my experiences.) I've a good ear for language—mirror neurons in my language module fire quite nicely, thank you. After a few months out on the boats, my Russian took on the soft Ukrainian flavor of Nakhodka's fishermen, mixed with the salty language of fishermen everywhere. I learned that Russian-speaking brains slice life differently than my English-speaking brain. Reality may be the same in Russian—but it feels different. And reality feels different in another way beyond that of language.

  “The terrible things your own people say about their country,” said Captain Shevchenko one night as we sat up drinking after another late-night trawl was tucked into the hold. “No self-respecting person should ever say things like that about where they live. Not if they have any respect for their history and their culture and their race. Not if they have any patriotism.”

  “You can't teach patriotism,” I began.

  But Shevchenko interrupted contemptuously, as if I'd just drooled. “Of course you can teach patriotism. We do it all the time.”8

  The conversation rolled on, but that part of it stuck, bothering me.

  I remembered dozens of one-sided tipsy Slavic arguments, which from the Soviet's perspective involved clear-cut dichotomies of good against evil. Excessive Western personal freedom, for example, versus sacred duty to the state. All-pervasive Western drug addiction versus minor Russian drinking habits (not quite!). The wicked American invasion of Vietnam versus the high-minded Russian invasion of Afghanistan, which was solely for the good of the Afghans.

  I could see the crumbling decay of the Soviet Empire all around me, from the rotten fish processing plant below decks, to the hollow-eyed fear of the political commissar and the KGB, to the “who cares” attitude toward work, to the rampant alcoholism of the crew. But despite the all-pervasive rot, it was a rare Russian who could see—much less admit to—any problem with the system of government.

  I'd tried to lure the Soviets into dispassionately viewing both the Soviet and the American systems by expressing my own genuine admiration for the positives of Soviet society. (After all, how could I not love a culture where even the lowliest deck crew worker was enamored of chess, and where vulgar public displays of wealth were nonexistent?) I related positives about my own country and modeled criticism as well. “Of course the United States has made mistakes,” I admitted, proudly showing off my naive open-mindedness. I played right into their hands. The Soviets almost literally could not hear me when I said anything good about America—it just didn't mesh with anything they'd ever been taught, and anyway, I was obviously brainwashed. They tuned in only when I criticized my country—criticism of the United States was easy for them to understand because I was only reinforcing for them what they'd already learned so deeply. In psychology, such a phenomenon is called “confirmation bias.” It involves behavior where
one looks for and notices things that confirm one's beliefs, while ignoring, not looking for, or undervaluing the relevance of what contradicts one's beliefs. Selective thinking. A bit of voluntary blindness. Dangerous stuff.

  Fig. 8.1.

  As Shevchenko had inadvertently pointed out with his crack about patriotism, I was a cultural chump. If you've been raised from childhood to think a certain way about things like the greatness of Mother Russia and the Soviet Union, if you've had a one-sided education about the superiority of communism and the evils of Western decadence, a few conversations with a foreigner to the contrary won't amount to a hill of beans of difference. Despite the incipient decay and fearful, police-state behavior visible everywhere around me, despite the deaths of tens of millions of Russians in horrendous purges that lasted half a century, Shevchenko could mindlessly, in almost cultlike fashion, assert that theirs was the best system in the world.

  I'd learned one of the most valuable lessons I would ever learn—that deep-rooted emotional reasoning can often trump logic.

  How does that happen?

  NEUROLOGICAL SYSTEMS AND HOW THEY FUNCTION TO REGULATE EMOTION

  The Cerebral Cortex

  Emotion involves two very different structures in the brain, the first of which is the cerebral cortex—the newer part of the brain in evolutionary terms. But where, you might ask, is the cerebral cortex? Well, if you happened to have a preserved dead body lying around, you could use a handily vibrating Stryker saw to whir your way around the upper portion of the skull. Then you could chisel away at the bone until you were in a position to use real muscle to pry the skullcap off. In an old anatomist's trick, you could tuck the removed skullcap under the remaining part of the skull to serve as a pillow—this lifts the rest of the corpse's head into a more “comfortable,” easily viewed position. Peel away the remains of the meninges, the fibrous membranes that cover the brain, and you would see the cerebral cortex lying directly before you—the entire region just below where the corpse's hat used to sit.