Evil Genes
Page 3
What is it about some men that makes them willing to sign a pact with the devil?
At universities, I've watched the machinations and manipulations of a small pool of academicians—strange, deeply power-hungry professors who terrorize students and drive the staff insane but who earn kid-glove treatment from administrations. Scanning the news, I read about the widespread pedophilia of the Catholic Church and how it was condoned by leaders who set the perpetrating clergy loose again and again to molest tens of thousands of children. I watched as Enron became a buzzword for executive skullduggery, and read of the horrific private lives of business executives like Chainsaw Al Dunlap, who liked to liven things up by telling his soon-to-be ex-wife how he liked to torture children.6 One image consultant Dunlap tried to hire noted: “He was the most unpleasant, personally repulsive businessman I ever met in my life.”7
“There are two ways to rise to the top,” says my business executive husband, with his hypersensitive bullshit detector. “One is to be the cream. The other is to be the scum.”
Ever since the early fascination with my sister's many devious successes, it is the scum who have long held my interest.
SLEUTHING WITH THE SCIENCES
My early engineering studies led in a spiraling path toward research in bioengineering—a relatively new discipline that integrates biology and medicine with engineering to solve problems related to living systems. Indeed, the scope of bioengineering is immense, covering many disciplines. One such discipline is genomics, which involves figuring out exactly how the molecular building blocks of DNA have been stacked to build genes, what each gene does, as well as where each gene is placed among an organism's chromosomes. Understanding how both normal and rogue genes work can lead to improved detection, diagnosis, and treatment of disease—potentially including the intractable conditions underpinning personality disorders. A related field is proteomics—a sort of molecular geography describing the location, interactions, structure, and function of proteins. Advances in proteomics have encompassed discoveries about a variety of cellular processes, including those crucial for understanding the cascade of molecular relay systems underlying human thought and emotion. Bioengineering also explores imaging and image processing that allow us to “see” inside the human body. And bioengineering involves understanding the warp and woof of neural structures in human beings, allowing us to build devices that can help the paralyzed to walk, the deaf to hear, and the blind to see.
How do you apply all this knowledge to the study of sinister people? How would you begin a search of the literature for people who have tried? What keywords would you even use to do a search?
Medline, a standard medical search engine, doesn't provide any relevant answers.
How about
Machiavellian, in fact, hits the jackpot for keywords. It turns out to describe an entire field of study—one that takes the ideas of Renaissance Florentine statesman Niccolo Machiavelli, author of The Prince, and builds them into a sweeping—and often unsavory—portrait of humankind.
A REVOLUTION IN RESEARCH
Over the years, I've learned that much of what's known from psychological, psychiatric, and neuroscientific studies related to Machiavellians or deceitful, manipulative people isn't easily accessible. Often, it's because the findings are relatively new—they haven't had time to chew their way through academic leather straps and into the public domain. Occasionally, it is because the implications of the research findings are controversial and in conflict with other long-held beliefs. The public sometimes catches glimpses of important study results—a hint of information about offbeat neural images related to psychopaths in this science magazine, another tidbit about the effects of genes on impulsivity in that newspaper article. It's as if all the growing pieces of information about the “successfully sinister” (which I use as a synonym for Machiavellian), are lying about disassembled.d. These pieces are waiting for someone to tie them together to hold up a new model to the light—one that goes far beyond the crude label of psychopath. This new model contains surprises—among them, that evil may be unavoidable and that it can even have an unexpectedly good flip side.
Researching the topic as the years have gone by, I've also found intriguing oddities. Hitler, for example, has been diagnosed with dozens of different disorders, including narcissistic, borderline, and antisocial personality disorders; schizophrenia; psychopathy; syphilis; encephalitis; paranoia; malignant narcissism; moral cretinism; Parkinson's disease; hubris-nemesis complex; “enfeebled and unformed self”; “destructive and paranoid prophet”; “a constitutional left-side weakness that allowed his right cerebral hemisphere to exert a strong influence on his thought and behavior”; and, believe it or not, “sibling rivalry.”8 On the other hand, sifting carefully through the two main psychology databases, I find no articles at all about Pol Pot, who was responsible for the deaths of some two million Cambodians—perhaps a quarter of the Cambodian population. Current research on malevolent dictators, I discover, consists of a hodgepodge of contradictory and missing studies.
I type the subject term for one of the most commonly studied psychiatric conditions, “antisocial personality disorder,” into Medline, one of the world's most comprehensive sources of life sciences and biomedical bibliographic information. It pops up, virtually instantaneously, with 5,494 hits. The subject “borderline personality disorder” gets 3,090 hits—meaningful hits, including hundreds of medical imaging studies, genetic studies, drug studies, and so on. On the other hand, if I type in malignant narcissism—a term used by world-class psychiatrists like Otto Kernberg and Jerrold Post, along with hundreds of thousands of Googled others, to describe the kind of malevolent, yet high-functioning people I'm researching—I get nothing. Zero hits. No medical studies whatsoever.9
It is unsettling to discover this kind of omission—like hearing that the oncologist about to operate on your father's cancerous liver actually has a fake degree from a diploma mill. Where's the science here?
The limited interaction between biology and psychology regarding the study of malevolent but high-achieving individuals is evident in the recent article on dictators “Why Tyrants Go Too Far: Malignant Narcissism and Absolute Power” in the prestigious journal Political Psychology. Key neurological factors such as neurotransmitters, the hippocampus, or amygdala—all of which have been profoundly implicated in the kind of impulsive, antisocial behavior often seen in despots—are not even mentioned.10
It turns out, however, that if you're willing to peer directly into the witches’ cauldron of research results, this first decade of the new millennium is an extraordinarily lucky time to be focusing on Machiavellianism. Neuroimaging has progressed well past the point of simply determining the shape and structure of the human brain—now we can watch the molecules of emotion scurry about the cells as they complete their neurological chores. Neuroinformatics is allowing researchers to access libraries of data about thousands of different brains to see what is usual and what is unusual. Brain atlases—images of what a normal functioning brain looks like—are providing detailed roadmaps to help guide research efforts.
Underlying the images we see of the brain's structure and functioning are the genes that help serve as neural operating instructions. Since the completion of the human genome project in 2003, researchers have dived even deeper to understand not only where genes are located on the human chromosomal framework but also how those genes are structured and what they do. Microarray chips give indications about which genes are turned on or off at any given time. This provides information crucial for understanding how genes and proteins communicate within and between cells. The upshot of all this? The entire field of biology is now undergoing a genome-based revolution.
A new field is that of systems b
iology, the “science of everything”—everything living, at least. This new discipline looks at the piecemeal information that has been found related to genes and knits it together with other research to form a big picture describing how cells signal each other and how neurons interconnect. Ultimately, this helps us to understand how slight molecular and genetic differences can result in dramatic changes, not only in how a person looks, but in his or her temperament. This, then, is where we need to look to ultimately understand Machiavellian—unscrupulous, self-serving, often deeply malign—behavior.
Perhaps surprisingly, the more I've learned about Machiavellians, the more I've discovered how fascinated people in general are by the latest scientific breakthroughs in studying them. After all, the social achievements of clearly disturbed individuals such as rapacious pedophile priest John Geoghan, quintessentially greedy Enron CFO Andrew Fastow, or sadistic leaders such as Saddam Hussein can be mystifying. Even more mystifying are the occasional successes of malign individuals who people know personally: colleagues, supervisors, teachers, doctors, lawyers, pastors, or elected officials. Surprisingly often, a successfully malign example turns out to be a family member whose sinister characteristics, often confusingly combined with more lovable traits, have kept the family walking on eggshells for years.
And once we start wondering about the successfully sinister, more questions abound. Do hereditary aristocracies tend to attract those, like Princess Diana, with certain dysfunctional personality traits? Could a propensity for these traits be passed down from generation to generation, leading to the decay of empires? What happens when the successfully sinister take a prominent role in religions? Are Machiavellians skilled at using neurologically based tricks to disable the thinking of those who might oppose them? Should the successfully sinister be despised for what they do to others? Or, like sharks, should they be warily respected for the perversely successful roles they play?
PUTTING THE PUZZLE TOGETHER
This book describes my own attempt to outline results from various fields of research that describe why seemingly evil people exist and how they can function in and even rise to the top of many types of social structures, including government, religion, academia, industry, the everyday workplace, and the ordinary family. The book also explores interesting sociological patterns related to the rise of these malign individuals—patterns that can be observed in social structures as different from one another as Enron, Chairman Mao's China, and the Roman Empire.
For me, a touchstone of this research has always been my sister Carolyn and her life, so I share some of that knowledge. This includes insights gleaned from Carolyn's life story, as well as from her letters and diaries. Although some might expect this book to contain only a traditional objective translation of research findings, I think that just looking at academic papers can result in losing sight of the human picture of what this research means in our lives. And so I describe not only my sister and her relationship with others but additional instructive experiences—a bit of late-night partying on Soviet trawlers; the compulsive collecting of obscure teapots in the far corners of China; drama in a German kaserne.
As background for this book, I've interviewed and communicated with psychologists, psychiatrists, imaging specialists, geneticists, immunologists, biologists, lawyers, historians, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists, and have read extensively in the research literature of many of these fields. I've tried to distill these multifaceted findings and also give some sense of the struggle dedicated researchers have faced as they've tried to find a new framework for what was previously unknown about the successful sinister people among us.
My doctoral training in systems engineering—a unique field of study that provides training in understanding the big picture patterns of diverse disciplines—provides a handy vantage point. It's far enough from any of the schools of thought I'm looking at to help keep me from being blinded by the unwitting side effects of each school's perspective.11 Yet this training underlies many of the cutting-edge techniques used now for medical imaging and genomics—techniques that are providing stunning revelations about how genes are organized and how our brains work. By putting hard-won insights gleaned by researchers in the physical and biological sciences together with extraordinary related results from the social sciences, I hope to provide a look at sinister people with a fresh perspective.
After all, the successfully sinister affect virtually everyone sooner or later. We obsess about trying to reach closure about hurts we've experienced, even if our closure is only vicarious. We have a gut-level need, even in fiction, to see slimy, smiling antagonists get what they deserve. It's why we can't help but follow newspaper, Internet, and—heaven help us—even National Enquirer articles about the latest senator caught in a payoff scandal or the most recent holier-than-thou televangelist caught in bed with a prostitute.
But if there's one thing we are even more fascinated with, it's wanting to know why. Why would anyone spread such malicious gossip? Why would anyone ever use a publicly owned company as a private piggy bank? Why would anyone knowingly starve millions of his own people? Psychology, with explanations founded on “defense mechanisms,” “countertransference,” and “acting out,” can go only so far. Neuroscience is fleshing out the field nicely, but unfortunately, popular hard science–based books about the successfully sinister are rarer than frequent flyer mile seats to Hawaii at Christmas. It appears we'll have some time to wait before we start seeing popular books with titles like He Really Is Driving You Crazy: Understanding Theta Wave Activity, or Bitch: The Science behind the Savagery.
But genetics is as important as neuroscience in understanding the successfully sinister. Groundbreaking books such as Judith Rich Harris's The Nurture Assumption and Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate have served as fulcrums to help swing researchers off their centuries-long love affair with the idea that people are naturally good.12 Under this well-intentioned ideology, “evil” people were believed to be created and shaped solely by their environment. The advantage of this belief is that it gives researchers the comfort of thinking that humans have direct control over evil—that by somehow reengineering the social environment, human evil can be eliminated. The disadvantage of this belief is that it is wrong—there are rafts of studies supporting the conclusion that human personalities are shaped as much by their genes as by their environment. But despite the overwhelming evidence, many academicians today have held so close the belief that people are naturally noble creatures who go astray only because of poor early nurturing that it is sometimes difficult for them to come to grips with the implications of modern research findings.e. All of this has meant that over the last decade, ever since neuroscience hit its stride and the human genome has been sequenced, there has been a gap in communicating the implications of scientific findings about the successfully sinister. People have been left largely unaware of how science is beginning to provide answers to some of their most compelling questions: Why are there evil people, and why are they sometimes so successful?
Evil Genes was written to help answer those questions.
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a.Names and identifying details of Carolyn's friends and acquaintances have been changed, as have similar details of several other individuals for the sake of privacy.
b.Robert Conquest's monumental work on Stalinist horrors, The Great Terror, earned enormous animosity upon its initial release in 1968—its graphic descriptions of the horrors perpetrated in the Soviet Union under Stalin's direction were felt by many to be false in virtually every particular. The opening of the Soviet archives and later verification by a host of Russian historians not only supported Conquest's findings, but showed the Stalin's “model state” had been even worse than Conquest had originally outlined. When The Great Terror was rereleased in a post-glasnost 1992 edition, Conquest was asked if he would like to give it a new title. His terse response was: “How about, I Told You So, You Fucking Fools.”
c.Psychop
aths might best be described as “predators who use charm, manipulation, intimidation, and violence to control others and to satisfy their own selfish needs. Lacking in conscience and in feelings for others, they cold-bloodedly take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without the slightest sense of guilt or regret.”
d.Niccolo Machiavelli's original writings described cunning, scheming, and unscrupulous behavior that any pragmatic leader would have to use occasionally to achieve overall good government. I should make it clear here that I use the modern definition of the term Machiavellian, which involves cunning, scheming, and unscrupulous behavior that can foment evil. The term's modern negative connotations arose in part because Machiavelli's works were forbidden by the Church for placing advantage over morality.
e.One brilliant psychology professor I know provided feedback after she had read the first few chapters of an early draft of this manuscript. The paraphrased essence of her thoughts was: Even if you're right about genes influencing behavior, it's impossible to change, so what good can come of telling people about it? While you cannot control the whole environment, you can put people on notice with regard to their behavior.
In responding, I kept myself from pointing out the obvious ineffectiveness of, for example, putting career criminals on notice about their behavior. Instead, I pointed out that good parents who receive an unlucky shake of the genetic dice and happen to have a psychopathic child might want to hear that their child's behavior isn't directly their fault. Certainly mothers of autistic children, told for decades that their child's autism was directly due to their cold parenting style, have benefited from recent research revealing the strong genetic component involved in the disorder.