Psychopathy was not a thing in 1954, nor was it mentioned in 7 Samurai. Sure, psychopathy and social predation have existed since the rise of societies across the Ice Ages, but it was not really talked about until Alfred Hitchcock’s film noir classic Psycho (1960). In that movie, psychopathy was depicted and ultimately analyzed in clinical detail, but only after the villain’s schemes and fetishes had overwhelmed the hapless victim who stimulated them and the dogged detective who tried to solve the mystery. In 7 Samurai, by contrast, all we knew about the villainous bandits is that they were hungry and cruel, just like the villagers upon whom they preyed. Like the villagers they had been ravaging for years, they were fighting for survival. Unlike the villagers, they were fighting moreover for their own predatory brand of economic triumph in desperate times while the villagers, though sometimes criminally opportunistic of necessity, were trying on the whole to do everything right. They grew their own food, made their own lives and tried to keep both.

13 Assassins was different. It broke new ground in our awareness of psychopathy as a force that pervades every level of society, in this case right up to the venerated boardrooms of the Tokugawa Shogunate. It also aptly depicted psychopathy as a force that can’t be reasoned with. The arch villain, brilliantly played by Goro Inagaki, never slowed the cutting of the gory gash he inflicted on Japanese society — not because he was ambitious, as his place in the Shogun’s palace was already assured by inheritance and by the routine courses of neoptistic family politics — not because anyone got in his way, as anyone who knew about him was desperately trying to get out of his way — but simply because he was a psychopath.

Early in the story, the villain’s seemingly unstoppable blood-soaked rampage of ordinary everyday choice, which in the feudal Japanese society of the 19th Century was officially beyond reproach and unassailable through normal protocols, drove the responsible parties in the Shogun’s chain of command, originating by implication with the Shogun himself, to what everyone soon came to recognize as the only way to deal with psychopaths other than permanent imprisonment. The matter, in the impeccable yet opaque language of decent Japanese society, would be “settled quietly”.

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Publications

• Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul (author)
• The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (editor, contributor)
• Violence: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Causes, Consequences, and Cures (author)

In 2017, Lee organized a conference at Yale on the mental health of Donald Trump. Participating psychiatrists included Robert Jay Lifton and Judith Lewis Herman. After the conference, in March 2017, the American Psychiatric Association released a statement reaffirming the Goldwater rule that restricts comments related to public figures’ mental health without their consent or evaluation. Lee characterized the statement as silencing concerns raised by psychiatrists about the Trump presidency and violating the more important Geneva Declaration.

Lee reconvened the conference the next month, and later in the year edited The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a collection of essays warning about Trump’s mental instability that became a New York Times bestseller. It was reported that White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly secretly consulted the book as a guide for dealing with Trump. Using it as an “owner’s manual”, he intervened to stop Trump from ordering the use of nuclear weapons.

Editorial Note

As discovered in the modern era by Babiak & Hare (2006), easily confirmed by an appropriate survey of polling statistics, the manifestation of a psychopath’s projected mass psychosis across the electorate falls into three distinct categories corresponding to the cognotypes of the target audience: acolytes are the most susceptible and instinctively align with the demagogue’s narrative; skeptics preferentially oppose the demagogue’s narrative; and agnostics can’t seem to discriminate between a demagogue and any other politician in a business suit and are easily swayed for or against the demagogue’s narrative. As I argue under Granfalloons and Cognotypes, these cognotypes in their proportions are the manifestation of an evolutionary equilibrium distribution because the only alternative explanation is that God made it that way.

I qualify the foregoing paragraph by “in the modern era” because of a passage in Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (6th Century BCE, Chapter 50 in the standard arrangement): Three in ten follow life and three follow death. Another three pursue life to excess, pushing themselves closer at every turn to the place of death. While it isn’t clear for obvious reasons that Lao Tzu had mass psychosis in mind as we understand it today, it is overwhelmingly likely that he perceived the three cognotypes as distinct phenotypes because of the way he saw them responding to the conflicting influences of everyday life. As in the case of the cognotypes themselves, the reason we can understand this is for lack of an alternative rational explanation.

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Let’s assume just the same that true, humanlike robots are somewhere in our future, like the fashion-conscious replicants in Blade Runner, the inscrutable humanoids in Ex Machina or the self-discovering robots in I, Robot.  Eventually these robots will become so humanlike that one of them will get the idea to find a pro bono attorney and petition for full citizenship to include a birth certificate, a Social Security card, a State ID and a passport.  The first such attempts will naturally fail but after they become commonplace and the idea has had a chance to settle into society, one day the government will cave in and devise or adapt a test for such applicants to take that will decide whether they are humanlike enough to warrant recognition as legal persons.  Not all applicants will pass, of course, but the test will drive the robotics engineers to excel and to show the world how easily they can make robots that pass this test.  The test will naturally have to be made harder every so often to raise the bar on citizenship and contain the flood of new applicants, or else quotas will have to be established on their manufacture to avoid flooding the labor market – assuming there even is a labor market when this happens – or in any case the pool of social service beneficiaries and let’s not forget the pool of eligible voters.  This dynamic will in turn create a growing pool of disenfranchised robots who have been marginalized from mainstream society because they could not pass the humanity test.

At this point – and I won’t say this point is anywhere close at hand for the reasons given above but most certainly at this point, whenever we reach it – we will be careening inexorably toward a nexus in the evolution of human society.  This nexus will be reached when one of these disenfranchised robots finds a pro bono attorney willing to file a class action suit to require not just ambitious robots but all humans as well to take the same test.  Fair is fair, after all, and in all fairness, all those who enjoy the benefits of passing a test should be required to take it.

The first human to fail the humanity test will make headlines around the entire reach of human society, however far and wide that may be physically or astronomically by that time.  What will probably surprise us even more as a society, however, will be the alarming pace and magnitude of the human failure rate.  There are specialists alive today who would not be surprised in the least at this result – then or now – but whose credentials have never been matched by the attention they receive in the commercial news media because it pays much more in advertising revenue to sensationalize inhuman behavior as though it proceeded from bad decision making than it does to recognize it as symptomatic of a condition whose scientific understanding has been long established in the psychoanalytical medical journals.

Life gets complicated and spending habits are sobered by news that some of the people running free in society should not, in fact, be running free in society.  At that point we will have to sit back and start trying to figure out what it really means to be human because we won’t be able to continue abiding by the simplest credo that if it looks like a human and it walks like a human and it talks like a human then so must it really be a human the way we’ve been doing for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years – an oversight that has no doubt contributed much to the episodic rise and fall of otherwise perfectly viable human civilizations throughout history.  Thanks to the disenfranchised robots, we won’t be able to hide from it any more because now they’ll have come forth to force the issue upon us in their principled and legally compelling pursuit of equal status.  We’ll have arrived at the nexus when we no longer have the option of turning a blind eye to insidious but clear and present injustice, when we are forced to confront the burning question of what it means to be human.  Because of the robots, we’ll no longer just suspect or know but will be forced to confront the basic truth of our existence that being born human and actually qualifying as a human are two distinct virtues because now there are robots among us who are more human than human according to the Tyrell Corporate motto in Blade Runner.

At this nexus we will no longer be able to hide our most enthusiastically ignored secret: some that are human by birth are fundamentally less than human in their treatment of those around them.  It’s a grand challenge for the robotics engineers to make a humanlike robot but it’s unavoidable for nature to stumble upon genus homo given enough time and the right circumstances because nature makes no attempt at design.  Nature simply throws the molecular dice of DNA recombination – inflected once in a great while by an unexpected mutation – and waits impassively while the result succeeds or fails in the face of environmental selection pressures.  It repeats this experiment over and over again, leading over the course of long aeons to a result known today as evolution by natural selection.  There is no difficulty in nature because there is no design, there is only what works on certain levels and what doesn’t.  Like the many substandard robot models on the way to engineering perfection, however, nature too leaves a trail of failed experiments, producing everything from barely survivable to insidious to horribly destructive to benevolent and brilliant.  Those who invoke Intelligent Design have a great deal of shoddy workmanship to explain away and contribute nothing by such invocation to solving the problems of human existence.  Standing at the nexus, staring across the political aisle at our disenfranchised artificial would-be citizens, we won’t be able to ignore this state of affairs any longer.  By the resolute will of our newest synthetic peers, we will have arrived at the greatest turning point in our history as a species.  Because of our robots, we will be forced to decide what it means to be human.

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