Evil Genes
Page 14
Decision making generally requires the coordinated activity of several or more brain structures. Structures that need to work together to accomplish a given task, such as the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex, show synchronized neural firing, like the internal clocks in computer chips. These synchronized rhythms, which are strongly affected by neurotransmitters, appear to help the brain to focus on the task at hand by allowing it to ignore structures that are not tuned in to the same frequency. The occasional inability to shut down certain brain wave communication channels is like having to listen to someone talking who won't shut up, says Matthew Wilson of MIT, who has contributed significantly to research in this area.29 Out-of-synch brain waves may be related to mood disorders and diseases such as schizophrenia.
Could it be that, by sending conflicting signals as with the difference between reality and what the borderline falsely insists is reality, desynchronization might occur in neural structures that normally work together? Such desynchronization might account for the confused short-term reaction and the depressed long-term reaction to gaslighting behavior.30
Health care provider organizations have found that individuals with borderline personality disorder who see a doctor for routine or emergency reasons can take up an extraordinary amount of resources and staff time; efforts to resolve the many subsequent customer service complaints can occupy considerable administrative time and effort. Additionally, because the patient does not comply with requested measures, it is often difficult to achieve clinical improvement with borderline patients. At the same time, the patient denies any self-responsibility for these failures—and is more likely to litigate.31
Borderlines can be devastating to deal with in business environments. According to Dean Knudson, a psychiatrist for Behavioral Medical Interventions, a disability-management and workplace-intervention company in Minneapolis:
People with BPD often have failing relationships and difficulties getting along with others, including co-workers…. They are prone to depression and abrupt anger and can engage in vicious personal attacks…. They often create chaotic environments, doing so in the workplace by pitting supervisors and workers against each other. Their self-identity and beliefs fluctuate frequently, and they can lack empathy for others or fail to feel remorse for their misdeeds…. People who are borderline are simply very, very difficult to live with, to speak with, to work with.32
It is the “now you see it, now you don't” borderline propensity for normal, loving behavior, alternating with denial in the face of bewilderingly spiteful and manipulative activities, that can make borderlines so difficult to understand—or diagnose—whether in the workplace, a hospital, or at home.
In fact, it is precisely those bewildering personality traits that led my family and me to an unlikely but intimate introduction to the consequences of Machiavellian—and deeply borderline-like—leadership.
And to two new members of our family.
* * *
a.In this book we shall follow the example of borderline expert Jerold Kreisman and others who, for the sake of clarity and efficiency, refer to individuals by their diagnosis. Thus, “borderline” is shorthand for someone who exhibits symptoms consistent with the DSM-IV diagnosis of borderline personality disorder.
b.To give a little perspective, Kelly Ripa, star of two hit television shows (Live with Regis and Kelly and the sitcom Hope and Faith), made headlines for being “Pin Thin!” at 105 pounds. Kelly is an inch shorter than my sister was. Interestingly, one study of neurotransmitter activity has found that ritual religious fasting enhances the transmission of serotonin between neurons, thus perhaps helping to induce a spiritual state. Perhaps my sister's anorexia was an attempt to self-medicate. Indeed, anorexia is in part a cognitive disorder—those who have it are often in denial, and see their bodies differently from reality.
On a side note here, some may wonder whether Carolyn suffered from symptoms related to bipolar disorder or hypomania. I don't believe so—neither syndrome has appeared in any of my relatives, and while Carolyn often showed symptoms of depression, she never displayed any symptoms of being hyperdriven, excessively chatty, or having an-idea-a-minute. Be that as it may, there is evidence for considerable overlap between borderline and bipolar diagnoses—both disorders show unstable self, impulsivity, affective instability, anxiety, irritability, and episodes of intense anger.
c.The term “gaslighting” comes from the 1944 film Gaslight in which Ingrid Bergman, a newly married heiress and soon-to-be victim, remarks to her ne'er-do-well husband Charles Boyer that the gaslights in their home seem to be dimming. “No, they aren't darling,” Boyer lies suavely. “You are imagining things.” In reality, the gaslight of their Victorian household was dimming—Boyer was sneaking up to the attic and causing the pressure to dim in the room below. Gradually, it unfolds that Boyer is trying to convince his wife she's losing her mind—that she inherited bad genes from her mother, who died insane. Boyer hides Bergman's possessions, for example, to make it appear her memory is fading, and plays other tricks to disorient and confuse her. In the restricted Victorian household of Bergman's character, with no telephone, television, or computers, there were few touchstones to reality. Bergman's self-confidence and emotional equilibrium were destroyed as, over time, what she perceived as reality was not being validated by her seemingly loving husband.
“The hypothalamus is one of the most important parts of the brain, involved in many kinds of motivation, among other functions. The hypothalamus controls the ‘four F's’:
fighting
fleeing
feeding; and
mating”
—Psychology professor in neuropsychology intro course
Bafti and Irfan, then in their teens, first arrived at our house not long after the 1999 war in Kosovo. A professional we knew had agreed to serve as their sponsor for high school and college, but somehow, when it came time for the promised tuition, room, and board, the sponsorship evaporated. By that time, because the erstwhile sponsor had farmed the boys out to us, we had gotten to know them well. It seemed a horrific shame to send them back to a life of makeshift day labor in Kosovo, especially when they had such bright dreams of a college-educated future.
So, with a deep breath and some soul-searching, we adopted them, and set their goals for college as one with our family. Our two daughters suddenly had two big brothers to squabble with over the use of hair dryers, television, computer time, and dirty dishes. Now all four kids are, well, typical brothers and sisters, off and doing their own thing most of the time but relishing the opportunity to get back together for bouts of merciless teasing. Although Bafti and Irfan are brothers, their physiques reflect the melting pot of the Balkans. Bafti's light coloring echoes that of a blonde, green-eyed maternal aunt, while Irfan's features are like those of their father, descended from a well-known imam. (What with his black hair, dark eyes, and mild, difficult-to-place accent, Irfan is often misidentified as Mexican, which ruffles his Albanian pride.)
It took me several years to disentangle the politics behind the boys’ semi-refugee status. Kosovo, a small province immediately next-door to Serbia, was peopled largely by Muslim Albanians, an ethnic and religious group who are quite different from Serbia's Orthodox Christian Slavs. The two mutually antagonistic peoples—who had gleefully worked toward each other's destruction for centuries—had been subsumed in the greater Yugoslavia in the historic equivalent of a howitzer wedding. Much as Hitler had used (and murdered) the Jews as a pretext to help unite the “Aryan” Germans, the situation in Yugoslavia was ripe for using minority Muslims as a pretext to unite the Serbs. Areas such as Kosovo and Bosnia were particularly useful in this regard—Serbs were present, but only in smaller numbers, so they could be portrayed in Serbia proper as being persecuted and thus in need of military intervention.
All that was needed was a Machiavellian to light the fuse.
THE QUINTESSENTIAL MACHIAVELLIAN: SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC
Slobodan Milosevi
c, the “Butcher of the Balkans,” used his sinister brand of Serbian nationalism to tear Yugoslavia apart in a bloody four-war decade of ethnic cleansing. By the time he was forced to stop, over two hundred and twenty-five thousand people were dead and millions of refugees—our sons Bafti and Irfan among them—were scattered worldwide.
After the unsolved mystery of Milosevic's prison cell death in March 2006, Jeffrey Fleishman neatly encapsulated Milosevic's devious life for the Los Angeles Times: “Sipping plum brandy and puffing Dutch cigarillos, the silver-haired Milosevic was defiant and arrogant, relishing his role as the key to stability in the Balkans. The Yugoslav leader frustrated a parade of U.S. and European diplomats by making promises he often broke. His government—circumventing years of international sanctions—took on the aura of a tawdry, gangster-run enterprise. Former US Ambassador Warren Zimmermann once called Milosevic ‘the slickest con man in the Balkans.’”1
Milosevic maintained a connection with Dessa Trevisan, the London Times Balkan correspondent and doyenne of the Balkan press corps.
The doughty Trevisan confronted the Serb leader. “I said to him: ‘Mr. Milosevic, you have so much power, you have the whole nation behind you. You have to make a speech of reconciliation.’ He listened to me, and he said, ‘You mean a conciliatory speech.’ I said, ‘No, no, one of reconciliation.’ He said it was a good idea. He would always agree with you…[H]e would agree, and do nothing. He is like an eel, he would look at you with those piggy eyes, he would flatter you and make it seem like he is listening, that what you say is going in, and then he would do the opposite.”2
Milosevic had extraordinary people sense, with an uncanny ability to judge how serious his opponents were. Said one senior US official with extensive experience with Milosevic: “He was a real student of human nature. We might say ten times that he had to do X, Y and Z. He knew the one time out of ten when there would be consequences if he did not.”3
Milosevic biographer Adam LeBor notes that in Dayton, Ohio, negotiating the final peace settlement for Bosnia, Milosevic became just one of the guys—an “ebullient rumbustious Serb,” instead of a sinister fanatic. This, LeBor points out, was a clever move to disguise the fact that the war Milosevic had initiated in Bosnia had caused the deaths of two hundred thousand. Milosevic skillfully played his politician negotiators against one another, mocking the Americans when he was with the Europeans, and likewise contemptuously mimicking the Europeans when he was with the Americans. (Throughout his life, in all his dealings with people, Milosevic's excellent memory was a great boon.)4 The “Butcher of the Balkans” walked out of Dayton feted as a peacemaker.
Arch dissembler that he was, however, Milosevic wasn't always the life of the party. He clicked on his charm only for those who counted—with others, he could be insufferably rude.5 The ever-perceptive US Ambassador Warren Zimmermann stated: “As with all natural actors, it was impossible to tell how much consciously he deceived others and how much he deceived himself.”6
Milosevic's biographers Dusko Doder and Louise Branson remarked on his ability to charm and flatter power people, disguising his true intentions and ambitions. “Orthodox Marxists in the party hierarchy regarded him as a staunch Bolshevik. At the same time, Western diplomats saw him as a young and energetic bank president who was pragmatic, reasonable, and pro-Western. He played his roles well: he talked liberal economics to one audience while he emphasized the need to maintain Marxist orthodoxy to another.”7 Later, both the Serbian nationalists and the diametrically opposed Communists would each be convinced that Milosevic was on their side. “The most striking thing about Milosevic was the absence of any ideological motivation at all,” note Doder and Branson. “He was a chameleon.”8
IDENTITY DISTURBANCE
“‘Milosevic could switch moods with astonishing speed,’ former envoy Richard Holbrooke wrote in To End a War, a diplomatic chronicle of the Bosnian conflict and Dayton negotiations. ‘He could range from charm to brutality, from emotional outbursts to calm discussion of legal minutiae. When he was angry, his face wrinkled up, but he could regain control of himself instantly.’”9 Milosevic's chameleon-like ability to shift moods and identities is, as mentioned earlier, associated with borderline personality disorder. This shape-shifting has been given a psychological term: identity disturbance, which means “a markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.” In some individuals, such identity disturbance shows itself as a tendency to be obstinately inflexible; in others, it can be revealed as an opposite tendency to be overflexible in values, attitudes, and preferences to please others.
And indeed, both counterposing tendencies were apparent in Milosevic. Perhaps surprisingly, Milosevic's wife, Mira, exerted an extraordinary, almost Svengali-like influence over him. One of Mira's friends related that Mira's ideas influenced Milosevic so much that he would begin to “utter her thoughts and assessments as his own unaware of where she ends and he begins.”10 Mira was deeply complicit in Milosevic's activities—so much so that an entire book has been written about the joint actions of the pair: Slavoljub Djukic's Milosevic and Marković: A Lust for Power. In the foreword to Djukic's book, Mihailo Crnobrnja writes: “[U]nderstanding Milosevic without understanding his wife, and the special bonds that held them together, is next to impossible. It might not be an exaggeration to say that his enormous and unwavering love for her, together with her lust for power, was the unfortunate combination that triggered the tragic events in Yugoslavia.” Mira suffered from her own deeply Machiavellian personality characteristics. Many feared her.
But identity disturbance is an odd trait. As alluded to previously, in some individuals it can show itself as inordinate flexibility, in others, or even in the same individuals at different times, such a disturbance manifests itself as being very critical, inflexible, and dogmatic about certain beliefs, to the point of offending others.11 Guy Lesser, who studied Milosevic intensely during The Hague war crimes tribunal, described precisely those traits: “[U]ltimately the most interesting challenge in watching the proceedings is less about trying to sort out the daily testimony as it is presented by the prosecutors and more about trying to size up Milosevic as a man—and to ponder the enduring human capacity for evil…[O]ne can glean clues to his personality from the pro forma way in which he usually greets the crime-based witnesses, particularly those whose stories are the saddest. ‘I am sorry for what happened to you’ he'll say, in a harsh baritone. Then, virtually without a pause, he'll add, ‘if it happened to you.’”a.12
Tess Wilkinson-Ryan and Drew Westen have found that the many aspects of identity disturbance might most succinctly be described as having several different dimensions, including:13
Role absorption—the tendency to define oneself in terms of a single role, label, or reference group. The person's identity seems to revolve around a “cause” or shifting causes, and the person tends to define himself in terms of a label that provides a sense of identity.
Painful incoherence—where a person tends to feel like a “false self” whose social persona does not match his or her inner experience. Psychiatrist Salman Akhtar has described this as lack of authenticity, which manifests itself as a tendency to take on the characteristics of others and a chameleon-like tendency to change one's personality in different situations.14
Inconsistency—the person shows an inconsistency in his or her behavior and attitudes that would make any coherent rendering of who the person really is difficult; for example, an individual who is a strong proponent of conventional sexual values for others while being personally promiscuous.
These facets of identity disturbance show themselves in the more difficult-to-understand personality quirks that Machiavellian characters often display.
THE DSM-IV DESCRIPTION OF BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER
As mentioned earlier, psychologist John McHoskey found that Machiavellian traits correlate not only with antisocial personality but also with borderline personality disorder. And so it is interesting to
learn that identity disturbance is one of the key criteria that the DSM-IV uses to define the disorder. A positive checkmark on any five of the nine criteria is enough to categorize a person as having the disorder.
But identity disturbance isn't the only borderline trait that Milosevic seems to have carried. Another symptom was that of alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation, also known as splitting or black-and-white thinking. As described above, splitting is when the borderline sees another person or group as either all good or all bad—there are no nuanced shades of gray to ponder. Milosevic, for example, was well known for feeling that “anyone…was either for him or against him, with no middle ground.”15 Likewise, Milosevic's chameleon-like persona at the Dayton talks made it easier for him to “split” his opponent negotiators, alternately seeing one group, and then the other, as the “bad guys.”
In relation to another criterion, paranoid ideation (that is, having frequent paranoid thoughts), many borderlines generally expect others to behave badly toward them. Along these lines, Milosevic's most striking characteristic, according to one prominent biographer, was his complete lack of trust. Milosevic even had a saying that “if his hair knew what his intentions were, he'd have to shave it off.”17 He disliked committing anything to writing and was fondest of verbal agreements with no witnesses. As Doder and Branson further note:
DSM-IV Diagnostic Criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder16
Mood-Related Criteria
Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).
Chronic feelings of emptiness.
Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days). [Dysphoria is the opposite of euphoria; it is a mixture of depression, anxiety, rage, and despair.]