I’ve been pointed to the great lecture Jon Ronson delivered at TED2012:
“Strange answers to the psychopath test”
It becomes very interesting and maybe even somewhat scary from minute 9.
Some parts o the transcripts to get the idea:
capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior — the lack of empathy, the glibness, cunning, manipulative.
So, here’s the statistics:
One in a hundred regular people is a psychopath.
Although that figure rises to four percent of CEOs and business leaders, […]
the reason why is because capitalism at its most ruthless
rewards psychopathic behavior —
the lack of empathy, the glibness, cunning, manipulative.
In fact, capitalism, perhaps at its most remorseless,
is a physical manifestation of psychopathy.
It’s like a form of psychopathy that’s come down to affect us all.
“You know what? Forget about some guy at Broadmoor [prison] who may or may not have faked madness. Who cares? That’s not a big story. The big story,” he said, “is corporate psychopathy.
You want to go and interview yourself some corporate psychopaths.”
But please do not get upset and continue, because the ending of the lecture (from about minute 12), the conclusion contains some nice self-referencing:
And then I realized that becoming a psychopath spotter
had kind of turned me a little bit psychopathic.
Because I was desperate to shove him in a box marked “Psychopath.”
I was desperate to define him by his maddest edges.
And I realized, my God — this is what I’ve been doing for 20 years.
It’s what all journalists do.
We travel across the world with our notepads in our hands,
and we wait for the gems.
And the gems are always the outermost aspects of our interviewee’s personality.
And we stitch them together like medieval monks,
and we leave the normal stuff on the floor.
Everyone’s a bit psychopathic.
[…] you shouldn’t define people by their maddest edges.
[…] he’s a semi-psychopath.
He’s a gray area in a world that doesn’t like gray areas.
But the gray areas are where you find the complexity.
It’s where you find the humanity, and it’s where you find the truth.
Surtil : 