I will leave family out of this essay so as not to disrupt the carefully curated world views of my siblings. Besides, my mother’s fraternal (dizygotic or non-identical) twin sister sent a long letter to all of us explaining her sister’s history and psychopathy in layman’s terms. Since then, of course, my mother’s psychopathic fiction has had decades in which to overshadow, supplant and consume her sister’s eyewitness chronology in my siblings.
The big question I’ve often wondered about is how the psychopath convinces those they lie to not to repeat these lies to the victim of their wiles without raising suspicions on the part of those to whom they lie. Rationally, those listening should want to hear from both parties but end up not wanting to hear from the victim. To hear from the victim would be to face the terrible prospect of confronting the psychopath, of whom they are already instinctively afraid, with the possibility that said psychopath is truly evil. Even Greta Thunberg famously refused to believe that about climate deniers and pollution profiteers in her UN address. In this way, the psychopath is protected by the extremity of his or her own evil, and by the audacity to dare people to suggest its existence, let alone question it.
To the torrential fictional narrative of the average psychopath, reality gives way like a rickety wooden fence in a landslide. As with any torrent, the damage done by these fictional constructs is permanent and irreversible, surviving their mostly silent victims as well as their authors into the nethermost reaches of eternity. Like the last whiplash of the Balrog, it lashes out, reaches far beyond the grave and draws all down into the abyss to keep it company in eternity, all the better for our unwillingness to do so. Only physical laws are more permanent, but not even the movement of the celestial bodies they guide are less certain to succeed in their mission of vengeance for the crime of escaping their unconditional wrath to the farthest reaches of the globe. The evil that roils within them will find its way.
Babiak and Hare (Snakes in Suits, 2006), referred to hereinafter as B&H, divide the corporate psychopath’s modus operandi into three phases: Assessment, Manipulation and Abandonment. In a corporate technology context (and most probably in many others) this typically translates into Assessment, Availing Themselves of and Taking Credit for the Victim’s Talents and finally Giving Them a Bad Review. (They’ll easily figure out how to give you a bad review whether or not they’re officially authorized to do so.) They also discuss the ten basic personality disorders and distinguish them from psychopathy, as well as three variations in personal style among true psychopaths: the Classic style, the Manipulative style and the Macho style. Corporate Bullies are described as a variation on the Macho style and Corporate Puppetmasters as combining the features of the Manipulators and the Bullies. They compare the Corporate Puppetmasters to Stalin and Hitler and consider them the most dangerous subtype amongst the classic psychopaths.
As far as I’m aware, my suggestion is original that corporate psychopaths think hierarchically rather than rationally, manipulating fragments of the rational milieu as suit their needs to promote or maintain their place within the social hierarchy. I should qualify this assessment, however, with the current understanding of this “Machiavellian IQ” as being orthogonal to a person’s “Rational IQ”, which would mean that there would remain in a given individual a greater or lesser capability for rational thought to operate in coordination with hierarchichal scheming. Hierarchically wired as many appear to be, however, I would posit that above a certain threshold, the Machiavellian IQ (MIQ) predominates over the rational IQ (RIQ), subjugating the latter to a supporting role in the causes and courses of Machiavellian scheming. Those with an MIQ above this threshold are often ill-equipped of themselves to deliver useful goods and services whose production would require a dominant exercise of rational thought and action. They advance instead not by merit but by using others whom they perceive to be vulnerable as stepping stools, kowtowing to their superiors on the one hand as Dr. Jekyll whilst berating their prey as Mr. Hyde on the other. Perverting truth and stapling unrelated facts together into a semblence of rationality by which they cast their rivals in an unfavorable light, they thus promote themselves by contrast to them. Most of the people with whom they preferentially surround themselves – even those among this group who think rationally – are no less deceived by this lexical sleight of hand than are their most devoted and ardent sycophants willingly blind to them. It is thus not without considerable cooperation, be it willing or unwitting, that corporate psychopaths deftly reverse the true polarity of this contrast in the eyes of those around them. Their tell-tale signature for those willing to step back and look for it is an endless stream of beguiling verbal emoticons as I put it in The Way of Ages (2010). This is the outward manifestation of a round the clock, round the calendar influence campaign. Think of the spinning plates act in the repertoire of the Chinese acrobats. A moment’s inattention and it would all come crashing down. Perhaps for lack of sufficient training or experience in critical thinking, the vast majority of people are too readily and completely taken in by such histrionic whirlwinds and never pause to consider the merits of stepping back to reflect on a broader purview of their environment and of the stranger denizens that swim within it.
Although I did not come across any clear assertion of it in B&H, the one truth about psychopaths of which I from my own experience am thoroughly convinced is that each and every one of them is vividly and intensely aware of who and what they are, for the depth, breadth and constant, time-sensitive pressures brought about by their unrelenting and labyrinthine schemes could scarcely allow room for self-delusion. Those amongst the rest of us with any doubts at all can therefore rest at ease. If you were, you’d know it. You’d love every minute of it. Not only would you not give a hoot but you’d be altogether incapable of fathoming the concept of a qualm. You’d have no reservations about anything and be living and running on constant automatic.
Of the personality disorders that B&H discuss I shall mention the Narcissistic variety and add that I have personally identified two individuals socially who fit this profile but who also display the full range of behaviors the authors attribute to mainstream psychopathy with such subtlety and skill as to be undetectable without close and retrospective scrutiny over extended periods of time. I did this long before it became widely known that US Presidential candidate and later President Donald Trump suffers from NPD and began to weave his now famous torrent of fiction and rhetoric. Despite my long prior experience, it took me just as long if not longer than anyone else to realize this. B&H indicate that when Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) shades into antisocial and destructive behaviors it is characterized instead as “…aggressive or malignant narcissism, which is difficult to distinguish from psychopathy.” I will suggest here that this difficulty may reflect the lack of a distinction given close enough scrutiny on the one hand and a wide enough purview on the other. Those with NPD weave a social fiction, for example, with a form and purpose that’s not easy to distinguish from the psychopathic fiction understood and agreed upon scientifically as a manifestation of psychopathy. Applying Ockham’s Razor, we might explain this difficulty by abandoning any attempt to distinguish between the narcissistic and the psychopathic fiction on the one hand, and between narcissism and psychopathy on the other. The experts already agree on several distinct styles of psychopathy, so why not just add one more and be done with it? Everything falls into the same pattern when one stops treating NPD differently and starts to think of it as but a smug and smiling but no less genuine and destructive style of mainstream psychopathy.
Of the psychopathic styles that B&H discuss I shall mention the Corporate Puppetmasters and add that I have personally identified one individual who fits this profile. I will also suggest that these individuals exhibit serial aggression no different in overall style from that with which homicide detectives are familiar, and that from the perspective of the victims of these individuals the three phases are more aptly designated as Isolation, Control and Subjugation and Elimination after the community of contributors to the Tim Field Foundation page at http://timfieldfoundation.org/what-is-bullying. In this context, the Nazi Holocaust can be viewed as the Elimination phase of whom we might designate a Political Puppetmaster’s standard pattern – to remind ourselves, if nothing else, of the seriousness and potential scope of this subject matter.
I’ve also identified others in these and other categories that I’ve encountered in the past at various organizations, or who have come and gone from a single organization – but never representing more than the statistical estimate of one percent within a given organization that B&H indicate for the general population. Lest the reader suggest that I’m seeing psychopaths in my soup, therefore, I’ll suggest instead that the more appropriate question to ask is whether I’ve correctly identified two of the eight or nine psychopaths statistically indicated to exist within the extended (but geographically localized) organization in which they were encountered, given that it had not been subjected to any filtering process specifically targeting psychopathic personality traits.
I chose this time to report my findings to date, finding myself as I now do either at or near the end of a Corporate Puppetmaster’s Elimination phase. I would place my chances of still having a job upon return from vacation at about even. This is a far cry from where I was last year. (Within two weeks of writing this I was placed on layoff notice and was subsequently stonewalled from other jobs within the organization. I will defer discussion of the causal link between these events and the act itself of merely writing this very article in de facto isolation, let alone publishing it.)
In an effort to keep my experimental results, if we may call them that, as pristine as possible, I was careful to minimize my indirect reactions to the past few year’s sequence of events, to avoid altogether any direct responses to the Corporate Puppetmaster and just as importantly to defer the composition of this article until all of my results were in. I’ve applied similar discipline with respect to the NPD subject mentioned above since catching on to this person’s behavior patterns several years ago and matching them over time to those described in the psychoanalytic literature. Since 1995 I’d been writing a book on comparative philosophy whose subject matter began to blend in parts with that of B&H in the context of my workplace experiences – more particularly where the subject philosophies cited counterexamples to the prescribed behavior patterns. By the time of these most recent events over the past several years I had become keenly attuned to the machinations of these corporate denizens and decided it was time to formalize my research. My methods are no more or less subjective than those of B&H, as direct experimentation is categorically problematic where human subjects are concerned. As to my observations, it is hoped they will be considered as valid as any of those contributed thus far to the work of B&H or to serious victim communities such as the Tim Field Foundation. I kept those in my philosophy book as original and impressionistic as possible by deferring my full reading of B&H until after it was completed. I thought it more likely that they would contribute to rather than merely reflect the existing body of knowledge if made a priori in the context of the much earlier literature that the book is about.
Having completed my full reading of B&H, I’ve submitted my annotations directly to the authors in the hopes that a way forward can be found for everyone affected by these invisible monsters among us. In one place they recommend diplomatic accommodation, then strict avoidance in another. I fear alas that avoidance and accommodation will only allow the social problem to worsen over time. We do not simply avoid and accommodate serial killers, after all, so where is the morality in avoiding and accommodating those who wreak havoc and destruction over wide swaths of society, or who kill slowly but just as permanently?
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