The Coming of the Psychopath

"There walk among us men and women who are in but not of our world," wrote psychiatrist Robert Lindner. "Often the sign by which they betray themselves is crime, crime of an explosive, impulsive, reckless type. Sometimes the sign is ruthlessness in dealing with others socially, even commercially."

The menacing individuals to whom Dr. Lindner referred (in Must You Conform?, 1955) are well known. They have a familiar name. In psychiatric as well as popular literature, in Sunday supplements and sociological studies, at cocktail parties and inquests, in the Armed Forces, at medical conventions, in employment offices, clinics and police stations, they are readily identified as psychopaths.

The Wizard of Woo

To Matthew M., the time he spent romancing lonely, middle-aged women was an investment, one that returned $100,000 in just two years. ...

M. had a way with women ... a way that led him into at least nine marriages and uncounted romances that paid tidy dividends. So the one-to-ten-year rap he's now doing shouldn't be a total loss, M. is writing his memoirs. Tentative title: "The Computerized Love Bandit."

M. was seized in Memphis ... and after indicating he would demand a trial, abruptly pleaded guilty here. ...

"It was worse than stealing," he told the court in a handwritten statement. "Promises I had no intention of keeping ... a past life built on lies ... my life revolting even to me.... I have total obligations of $100,000 and I would like the opportunity to pay them back.

"Let me work to pay them to prove I am no longer a liar.... I could begin by putting my personal obligations in order, making full restitution, and if I can't do this, I'm not fit for society. A man changes, he can change.... I know I'm at a point of no return in life."

The judge agreed on the point of no return--and sentenced M. to one to ten years in prison.

Whether making headlines like this or living out his days as a troublemaker on the neighborhood level, the traditional psychopath is hardly a new man. We know him as the town drunk, habitual wife beater, wastrel, swindler, forger, family disgrace, black sheep, the "bad seed" minister's son--or we may recognize her, according to perhaps bygone standards, as the loose, man-hungry housewife on the prowl for strangers, or the "girl from a good family" unaccountably gone wrong.

On another level, the psychopath may be a doctor constantly involved in malpractice suits, the businessman whose proposals always appear a little shady and whose ventures somehow fail "through no fault of his own." We have one near certainty: Sooner or later, when the classic psychopath comes onstage, things will go wrong.

People associated with him--especially his family and friends--will suffer. And, it so often happens, incomprehensibly. Patterns of temporary success or at least stability are followed by strangely brutal and irresponsible behavior, stupid and unnecessary falls from grace for which there can be no rational explanation. Yet in between these disasters, and sometimes while they are taking place, the offender (it's hard to call him a victim, since he gives little evidence of suffering very much) may remain on the surface an utterly plausible, often attractive individual, lucid and ready with all kinds of explanations. Until he has repeated his destructive routines many times over, his loved ones characteristically long to forgive him, and even blame themselves for having been too harsh. This can be understood, because in retrospect his behavior appears in many instances to be simply beyond belief--so much so that the hurt and astonished mate, friend or business associate who has suffered at the hands of the psychopath may well be persuaded that he or she, not the other, has been temporarily out of his mind.

I am thinking, for example, of a successful mutual-fund salesman named Mark, who maintained a small mansion, a Rolls-Royce and his pretty wife in a chic community on Cape Cod during the summers. In addition, he was a writer, and the competition--typing in cottages and hovels nearby--learned that, dismayingly, this new Renaissance man had sold a script to someone like Gregory Peck for $200,000. He had just returned from the Coast. Amusingly enough, the actor had found his script in such good shape that he had spent the time they had together talking with the writer about mutual funds and was about to take him on as a financial advisor as well.

Meanwhile, Mark, the bluff, hearty Renaissance man, had allowed his friends on the Cape to get in on his growing mutual fund, offering especially advantageous terms. Summer went by, then fall, winter and the following summer. The script, the deal, were somehow not forthcoming. There was no question that Mark worked hard enough. He had set up his workshop in an old windmill. As early as six in the morning, his typewriter could be heard. By 11 his writing stint was over and he came out onto the beach for volleyball. Meanwhile, his mutual-fund business grew. A number of merchants in the town put their savings in Mark's enterprise.

A few months later Mark was exposed. There had been no script, no deal with Peck or any other star. Mark had been living high on the moneys he was supposedly investing in his fund. His case may be seen as textbook psychopathy. In an honest manner, free of strain, he sold whatever he wanted to sell almost without trying. People actually pressed money on him. On the business side there was no "good reason" for the fraud, in that he was in fact a more than competent money manager and could have done well without cheating his clients. Typical was the amazing and hardly worthwhile labor that went into maintaining his deceit. Not only did he get up early and tap out something (but not the fake script) on his typewriter but when his wife expressed uneasiness over the script and the deal Mark one day suddenly produced a copy of a contract with a big film company on that company's true letterhead, with his own, his "agent's" and the actor's signatures at the bottom.

As might have been predicted by anyone having close-in experience with a psychopath, Mark was hospitalized but not prosecuted, and those he defrauded still liked him so much that they declined to testify against him. Soon afterward he was discharged from the mental institution as obviously sane, left his wife, moved to another part of the country, consented to a divorce, married again....

• • •

Literature on psychopathy goes back 150 years. The newly observed character disorder was described early in the 19th Century by Dr. J. C. Prichard in England as "moral insanity." The French physician Dr. Philippe Pinel, who first freed madmen from dungeons and shackles, called it "manie sans délire." Later in the century, the Italian Cesare Lombroso saw the lucid, apparently not in the least deranged person who committed violently antisocial acts as a "born criminal" and "moral imbecile."

Today, or until very recently, among students of the psychopath this much has generally been agreed upon: Persons diagnosed as psychopathic begin as rejected, cruelly or indifferently treated children, or may possibly have suffered early brain damage, detected or not. They strike back at the world with aggressive, unrestrained, attention-drawing behavior. (Why one person emerges from a disordered childhood inhibited and neurotic, and another, the psychopath, with the opposite tendencies remains unclear.) Since conscience is instilled by early love, faith in the adults close by and the desire to hold their affection by being good, the child unrewarded with love grows up experiencing no conscience. Uncared for, he doesn't care, can't really love, feels no anxiety to speak of (having experienced little or no love to lose), does not worry about whether he's good or bad, and literally has no idea of guilt.

Psychopathic children can be helped--and this is debated--only by a dramatically improved environment. For adult psychopaths, successful therapy has proved all but impossible. To begin with, the therapist's goal must be the opposite of that in treating neurotics--he must try to instill guilt and anxiety, rather than alleviate such feelings.

The psychopath doesn't suffer so much as he makes others suffer. Since he is free of inhibitions, his impulses become action. He takes what he wants when he wants it. Although he's supposedly incapable of loving anyone, he can sometimes inspire far more devotion than the average person. He may lie glibly and show little if any embarrassment when caught. The classic psychopath leaves a trail of misery, fighting, fraud and debt; he may abandon his wife and children--perhaps returning now and then if he feels like it--leave a job without notice or suddenly begin to perform so poorly or dishonestly that he is fired. If prompted by more vicious impulses, psychopaths will be arraigned as killers, rapists or molesters of children. (But such crimes are not in themselves psychopathic and may be committed by persons not in this category.) Whether arrested for disturbing the peace, forgery, child abandonment or murder, the psychopath will react with indifference or, it may be, put on a show of outraged innocence.

Psychopaths generally go free to create more trouble. They frequently turn on charm that proves hard to resist, time and again deceiving police, judges, juries, hospital authorities, employers, wives and families--and psychiatrists--into accepting their arguments that the latest incident was "all a mistake." If need be, (continued on page 318)the Psychopath(continued from page 204) like the Wizard of Woo, they come on with fake repentance--tearful self-denunciations and the like--that disappears as soon as freedom or forgiveness has been attained.

There may follow a quiet period, with every evidence of stability and cautious predictions that the wayward individual has straightened out or learned his lesson. But psychopaths of this kind do not learn from experience. The prospect of punishment will not keep them from going off the rails again.

Much of the literature on the subject has assumed that the rational but dangerously unstable, erratic people diagnosed as psychopaths are bound to lose: At odds with society, they sooner or later end badly. The Mask of Sanity, by Dr. Hervey Cleckley--which is all but universally conceded to be the master-work on the psychopathic mystery--demonstrates this point in one case history after another. But deep into his work, we find Dr. Cleckley disturbed by a kind of person he can't explain but whom he acknowledges: the Successful Psychopath.

This individual's illness, if it is such, appears circumscribed and in no way damages his career. Cleckley never satisfactorily accounts for him, except to distinguish the partial from the full psychopath and to note rather lamely that "although [the successful outlaws] occasionally appear on casual inspection as successful members of the community, as able lawyers, executives or physicians, they do not, it seems, succeed, in the sense of finding satisfaction or fulfillment in their accomplishments."

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the concept of the part psychopath began to emerge more clearly in psychiatric studies. The scheming outlaw inspired a thrill of fear as well as fascination. There was a sense of menacing strangers in our midst, brilliant, remorseless people with icy intelligences, incapable of love or guilt, with aggressive designs on the rest of the world.

The successful psychopath, it was said, could dominate people as he damaged them precisely because of his lack of feeling. Uninvolved with others, he coolly saw into their fears and desires and maneuvered them as he wished. Such a man might not, after all, be doomed to a life of scrapes and escapades ending ignominiously in the jailhouse. Instead of murdering others, he might become a corporate raider and murder companies, firing people instead of killing them, and chopping up their functions rather than their bodies.

We now have a disquieting awareness of people who may at the same time be profoundly ill and yet, in many ways, far more capable than we are. Hints of magic appear: Cleckley cites, for instance, "the astonishing power that nearly all psychopaths and part psychopaths have to win and bind forever the devotion of women."

The psychopathic spirit of our time has been imagined as inhabiting people very different from one another: crank, obscene phone caller, writer of poison-pen letters, compulsive, perhaps acid-throwing pursuer of a hated loved one, lone wolf or part of a gang--such as the member of the Florida bike gang who nailed a girl by her hands to a tree for several hours because she didn't bring in enough money. But we also have the psychopath in respectable circles, no longer assumed to be a loser. Or if he loses, he may bring down others with him, in the style of Senator Joseph McCarthy, Dr. Sam Sheppard or the eventually murdered financier Serge Rubinstein.

In "The Psychopath in Our Society," William Krasner comments: "They--psychopath and part psychopath--do well in the more unscrupulous type of sales-work, because they take such delight in 'putting it over on them,' 'getting away with it'--and have so little conscience about defrauding their customers. They become private detectives and police, bodyguards, strikebreakers. Many go much higher, to become even politicians and industrialists, where, though often erratic and unreliable, their complete lack of scruples overcomes their more or equally able rivals."

What links these varied individuals, if they can be linked? Cleckley, along with Lindner, likens psychopaths to adolescents driven to extreme behavior by boredom. He then goes on to a startling though now fashionable concept:

"What [the psychopath] believes he needs to protest against is no small group, no particular institution, set of ideologies, etc., but human life itself. In it he finds nothing deeply meaningful or persistently stimulating, but only some transient and relatively petty pleasant caprices, a terribly repetitious series of minor frustrations and ennui. Like many teenagers, saints, history-making statesmen and other notable leaders or geniuses, he shows unrest; he wants to do something about the situation."

With the coupling of psychopath and saint--even if the comparison is unfavorable to the former--we have come a long way from the "moral imbecile" of the 19th Century, the "predatory personality" diagnosed by Dr. Karl Menninger or the "hollow, isolated person" identified by Dr. Arnold Buss in his book Psychopathology.

The psychopath emerges now as a failed saint. How can this be? We may begin to watch the gradual change-over of an old concept and the birth of a new model in its place as the psychopath and saint are, by one observer then another, combined into a new kind of person.

• • •

In the summer of 1957, Norman Mailer's essay "The White Negro" appeared in Dissent magazine. In it, Mailer breaks through to an entirely new conception. The menacing psychopath is embraced. Incredibly--it seems at first shock--we are urged to turn into an "antithetical" version of the outlaw and find our way to his radical vision of the universe.

"The White Negro" produced the effect of a door suddenly flung open to reveal a frightening jungle just beyond the threshold. In this jungle "where paranoia is as vital to survival as blood," the new psychopath will be king. Hip is the American existentialist's way to live. The "psychopathic brilliance" of the hipster's style is modeled on the black experience. "The Negro has the simplest of alternatives: live a life of constant humility or ever-threatening danger." To survive, he must remain cool, stay on top of life at every threatening moment and live in "the enormous present."

An absolute and continuing need to acquit oneself with grace under pressure drives this individual. If he scores, triumphs, gets his way, he grows and lives more intensely. If he fails, allows anyone or any circumstance to put him down, he actually dies a little. His energies weaken and his soul diminishes: He may even sicken and, Mailer believes, contract cancer.

Psychopathy--hitherto deemed an illness and public menace--is dressed up by Mailer in this remarkable manifesto and presented as an answer to life. What Lindner foresaw with alarm, Mailer celebrates: "The psychopath may indeed be the perverted and dangerous front runner of a new kind of personality which could become the central expression of human nature before the 20th Century is over. For the psychopath is better adapted to dominate those mutually contradictory inhibitions upon violence and love which civilization has exacted of us."

Mailer then suggested that (even in 1957) our cultural direction is already to a marked degree being determined by psychopaths. Not every psychopath is an extreme case, but "the condition of psychopathy is present in a host of people, including many politicians, professional soldiers, newspaper columnists, entertainers, artists, jazz musicians, callgirls, promiscuous homosexuals and half the executives of Hollywood, television and advertising."

Have we come, then, to the hour of the psychopath, the advent of psychopathic man, when what was once assumed to be a state of illness is abruptly declared to be a state of health? Can it be true that with the dramatic appearance of the psychopathic ideal, a new man has come upon us; that, in order to survive turbulent years ahead, far from seeking to treat the psychopath in clinics, we should rather emulate him, learn how to become him? Would it be advisable, for instance, for even the non-revolutionaries among us to honor the present only and annihilate history, past standards, the memory of bygone cultures, for the reason that defunct models of life can only get in our way?

History, we have commonly supposed, teaches that something we like to call human nature prevails through the upheavals that take place over the centuries. Superstructures of behavior come and go, but the essential character structure of man endures. But now this has been denied by Mailer, who sees in the late 20th Century the creation of a new nervous system; by Timothy Leary, who describes those of us who have tripped out on LSD as "mutants" whose consciousness will never be the same; and by Marshall McLuhan, who envisions new electronic circuitry changing the heads of men and women all over the world.

The idea of a constant nature underlying history is rejected also by Dr. Thomas Szasz in The Myth of Mental Illness. "Both man and society change," he believes, "and, as they do, 'human nature' changes with them." Like Leary, Dr. Eric Berne (Games People Play) and many others, Szasz sees the lives we pursue as game structures of one kind or another. He regards mental disability or malfunction as "more akin to a language problem than to illness," and hysteria, for example, as "sign-using behavior." The patient is reporting that he doesn't understand the game going on. "The analyst seeks to unravel the game of life that the patient plays."

What, then, is the psychopath signaling? Possibly the breakdown of games that have been sanctioned by Western civilization. Even more important, what are those who have appropriated the term psychopath signaling? For in tracking down his role, we have not so much to determine what he is or may be but, rather, to find out why so many people today admire what they think he is. We are faced with the revolutionary, hip but also intellectually chic proposal that Western man is rapidly turning into a person for whom violence, immediate gratification of desire, self-assertion, combat readiness and performance are all, while compassion, willingness to wait in line and refrain from taking advantage have become moral luxuries that growing numbers of us can no longer afford. (Emerson's definition of a gentleman as someone who does not insist on his rights seems now insane.)

We may ask why this model--the view that life must imitate psychopathy; that our scene may, even should be converted into a playground for psychopaths--has been welcomed and sustained by so many intellectuals. Why have the psychopathic style and ideal become fashionable?

Perhaps we are going to discover that in times of stress, particularly times of transition, when orthodox religions no longer comfort masses of people, mental health rushes toward illness out of a longing for salvation. We may find also that psychopathy lies waiting, dormant in millions of nervous systems, holding the possibility of metamorphosis into a new kind of human being as soon as the liberating force comes. Whatever this force--drugs, rock, violence, mystical experience or a combination of these--it seems capable of changing an individual, especially a young person, practically overnight. Both for good and for evil. The fearsome motorcyclist baptized in Pat Boone's swimming pool (assuming this to be good) embraces Jesus. The Y. M. C. A. boy one day mounts a hog and starts turning hairy and savage.

Psychopathic mutants, if they can be so imagined, are often remembered by friends and neighbors back home as having been the absolute reverse of their transformed selves. For example, Charles Watson, the disciple of Charles Manson, was recalled in his home town, Copeville, Texas, as a "clean-cut high school athlete." According to his football coach, Watson had "real good speed." His brother James said that Charles was "a good boy--he never got into trouble. We always had fun as boys here. We would go to the lake and go water-skiing and used to make gocarts together. He's a good boy, he's my brother." But the lawyer for Watson, who had known him from boyhood, observed: "He is thirty pounds lighter. He looks like a different person. He's very detached and doesn't seem concerned about anything."

Detached and unconcerned--the mark of clinically diagnosed psychopaths everywhere, except during brief flare-ups of temper. But Manson himself, leader of the nomadic family whose members killed as a means of social protest, for revenge, for pleasure, at random and for no reason, may be seen as a spectacular incarnation of destructive psychopathic force--which at times seems magical and in a terrible way almost religious--having the outlaw prophet's historic Rasputin-, Savonarola-like gift not merely for dominating but for bewitching others.

Does such magic derive precisely from wretchedness and deprivation in childhood years? If so, possibly we must acknowledge that since psychopathy may breed psychopathy, we are now being confronted by increasing numbers of mistreated or unloved children--from both the slums and the suburbs--who, having grown up, possess a fearlessness and headlong energy that we haven't been prepared for.

Gresham's law states that in any monetary exchange, bad currency tends to drive out good. Correspondingly, middleclass people whose coin is moderation may ask whether psychopathy tends to drive out and dominate sanity.

In The Psychopath, William and Joan McCord cite a 1933 study: "Elizabeth Knight, a social worker ... compared the family backgrounds of nine extremely aggressive children with those of nine very submissive children. The mothers of all the aggressive boys rejected their children; the mothers of the submissive lads appeared overprotective. An overtly punitive atmosphere dominated the homes of the aggressive cases; the homes of the submissive children, on the other hand, were 'harmonious.'"

Research of this kind, and there has been a great deal of it, suggests that neglect or maltreatment of children produces among the survivors more alert, stronger, belligerent, predatory boys and girls, and that, as the walls of privilege come down, unloved children may shortly be making a bid to put the advanced society through terrible changes, dominating and running wild over the children of kindness. Suppose that mystical powers, giving off emanations of either love or hatred, may be distilled only from early sorrow. If these powers can dominate the decency of ordinary people, then is kindness a waste? Is giving love to a child bad training? What we can't yet get around is the astonishing fact that lack of love, even cruel treatment, in childhood seems often among psychopaths to produce the power to inspire love and fanatical devotion.

Why do supposedly normal people so frequently find themselves bowing down to widely differing kinds of psychopaths, whether Hitler, Charles Manson or a fake-inspirational tent shouter or television preacher? With the old gods gone, he has no doubts, betrays no fear, gives a meaning and authority to life--no matter how twisted, wild or mysterious it may be.

Can there be something at the very heart of American life that breeds psychopathy? If so, is there anything we can do to change this? Should we? Or will it be best to teach our children the psychopathic style in order that they may survive?

• • •

How do we identify a psychopath? He lives free of form, predictable only in his impulsiveness and the probability that if confined in any sort of routine he will break out of it, bringing trouble to somebody. He refuses to delay gratification, will not yield to the rules of any game but his own. The good of society doesn't interest him much, if at all. According to Lindner, he has a "completely defective sense of property." Characteristically, he may, as the phrase has it, "not live up to his family obligations"; he may steal; he violates time and duty, wipes out boredom with drugs or drunkenness, blithely or coldly takes what he wants, grins happily or suddenly explodes in anger like a baby, is one in a sense (a psychiatrist has said that we are all born psychopaths), hits out, loves, leaves, grasps, exploits without guilt and regardless of warnings that he's out of line and subject to punishment.

We have here a revolt against conservative humanism, with its social contracts. For the psychopath, there are no social contracts, no obligations--assumed by all middle-class authority, including the psychiatric establishment--that relate to the values of settling down, staying put, rearing a family, obeying the law (Theodore Roosevelt: "Fear God, and take your own part") and being productive. In 1941, the U. S. Surgeon General's Office ascribed to psychopaths the characteristic of being nomads. This is akin to police classifications of drifter or vagrant--condemnation enough in many parts of the country to justify the jailing of shabby-looking people. Another descriptive tag often used to support a diagnosis of mental illness: "The patient no longer paid any attention to his personal appearance." For a number of years now, millions of a rising generation have adopted a style that provides for deliberately becoming nomads and no longer paying attention to their personal appearance.

Followers of the style--many, perhaps most, imitation psychopaths--recognize no crime against property. They hold use to be sacred, not ownership. The combination of drugs, evangelical Populism, communal living and readiness for violent action mingled with an ideal of Buddhist simplicity, going with life from one moment to the next, has created a heady revolutionary brew. The effects, when encountered for the first time, can have a distressing impact on people whose lives have been conventionally ordered.

As old forms slowly collapse, the display of madness becomes deliberate and turns into a routine. Again, who is to judge whom? Today's outlaw refuses to sit still for pious judges he knows have been bought many times by one syndicate or another. Or any judge, since, say, if charged with murder, he has good reason to believe that proper decorum will lead only to the gas chamber. From his point of view, why show respect for procedures that will surely end your life? Hence, at his Los Angeles trial, Charles Manson to Judge Charles H. Older:

"Are you going to use this courtroom to kill me? ... The minute you say I am guilty, you know what I'm going to do...."

"What are you going to do?"

"You know...."

"I order you to be quiet, Mr. Manson."

"You order me to be quiet while you kill me in your court. I'm not just going to sit here and let you kill me. I'm a human being and I'm going to fight for my life, one way or the other."

"I'm going to have you removed if you don't stop."

"I'm going to have you removed if you don't stop. I have a little system of my own----" (Leaps over the defense table at the judge)

Later, being led away: "In the name of Christian justice, someone should cut your head off!"

In search of justice, we find psychopathy on all sides, including that of law and order. For example, what fairness could Manson expect when he heard that a judge scheduled to try his case had attended a skit performed by members of the bar--based on their hilarious perceptions of Manson's commune--titled "The Family That Slays Together Stays Together"?

• • •

We have followed the misuse, mythic development and the coming to new life of a psychiatric concept originally intended to describe a form of mental illness, and now reach this point:

It's not so much that individuals who may be diagnosed at least as part psychopaths have risen to eminence and leadership in our country (there's nothing particularly new in this) but that the psychopathic ideal of acting out all desires has become routinely accepted, possibly as supreme--even among people who are not psychopaths.

The ascendancy of the psychopath as a model, predicted by Mailer, seems close at hand. New violent saints and rapistprophets appear everywhere. Readiness with fist, brick, knife and gun may define the new holy orders. But since the violent will always be the most noticeable, violent psychopathy may distract attention from other manifestations of the new style, not all of them necessarily destructive.

May there not be a sweet side to psychopathy, as there is to babies? Has psychopathy perhaps "a good twin"? To say so would be to recognize the psychopathic condition as neither good nor bad, or rather to call it a state of being with both good and bad attributes. The outlaw--in uninhibited, free-form action--would then set new standards of sanity, with good and evil quite irrelevant, thus fulfilling the commandment that we become as little children.

We are now confronted by a band of psychopaths in motley, in their various ways evil and sometimes beneficent, headlong and magical, louts and schemers, children unrestrained and charged with energy ... drunkards and forgers, addicts, flower children, Mafia loan shark battering his victim who can't pay up, charming actor who makes crippled little boys and girls laugh, charming orator, murderer, the prophet who makes us love life again, gentle, nomadic guitarist, hustling politician, hustling judge, writers and preachers coming back with a vengeance to visit retribution on the middle classes that rejected them, whore and pimp, cop on the take, chanters filling the multitudes with joy, prancing Adonis of rock concerts, the saint who lies down in front of tractors, a student rebel, an icily dominating Nobel Prize winner stealing credit from laboratory assistants, the businessman who then steals the scientist's perception, turning it into millions ... all, all doing their thing, which is the psychopathic commandment.

Now to pull back from sentimentality, avoid premature appeasement of the new man. Return to the clinic. Remember what Cleckley told us, and Menninger, the McCords and Lindner: The psychopath is a sick human being and the harbinger of distress. Possibly, then, those who glorify the psychopathic way of life--and the others, no matter how brilliant and forceful, who serve as heroes and models of the new man--are in varying degrees all crazy and are leading us to destruction.

The inquiry seems as much philosophical as clinical. Have we a plague that will pass or the revolution of consciousness hailed by so many prophets? From now on, perhaps the race will, indeed, require a new nervous system in order to survive. In a godless universe, the anxiety-free psychopathic style may be the antidote to mass suicide. But we should watch out for those who say so. What games are they playing? Can we be sure they are not Judas goats? And how many of the authorities we consult about all this will themselves be psychopaths?

• • •

The investigator pauses. He no longer feels sure of his direction. Psychopaths of all persuasions have emerged, and they fit no simple category. Only one development appears sure. A variety of revolutions, like many whirlwinds, have been tearing apart the formerly secure middle-class scene he once depended on, even while criticizing it. He knows that bourgeois complacency, deceit, the war, pollution have all invited savagely destructive change. Certain revolutionary evils do appall him. The hatred, intolerance, debased language, guns and dynamite.... Yet at the same time, he feels his own moral restraints, the ones he grew up with and thought would always guide him, now giving way.

The world of the psychopath and the world of the bourgeoisie meet like two colliding galaxies. A sense of craziness fills the air. What to do in these circumstances, how to navigate? Resist the psychopath, hunt him down, imitate him? Yield to insanity accepted as normal? Cultivate one's own latent psychopathy, perhaps trying to adapt it to good ends? Is it true that in a violent and godless time psychopathy has become operative and welcome?

Bridge to the New Psychopathy

We have a new situation. In the past year, perhaps two years, it seems almost overnight, events caught up with medical and sociological expertise: The psychopathic style has become epidemic around the country. Hence, we have no quarry. There's no need to hunt for psychopaths, to identify, classify, isolate them. The style has infiltrated everywhere. And in trying to pin it down, the single-minded pursuit of a mysterious mental illness or defect in the nervous system turns out to be not nearly informative enough. Certainly to deny psychopathy as an aberration of some sort would be foolish. But today psychopathic behavior can no longer be described only in terms of a disease. Rather, it should also be explored as something else--a release of newly developed impulses in late-20th Century heads.

The style, for many, appears to have evolved away from its destructive and criminal sources. Of course, the antisocial model persists. The moral moron is loose. His atrocities (as, say, with the loan shark's savagery) have become institutionalized. But today we have a new phenomenon: a milder, often drug-induced psychopathy in which many outlaw values--relating, for instance, to time, responsibility and the reach for immediate pleasure--remain, but not necessarily in destructive form. Thus, criminal as well as revolutionary sociopaths and free-form psychopaths of varying persuasions exist side by side, sharing many characteristics, but even so they can't fairly be judged the same.

Medical libraries contain scores of authoritative papers on the mystery of the psychopath. Most are well-documented and illuminating presentations, but even so, as we have seen, they tend to project conventional middle-class values. The psychopath is unhesitatingly identified as an absolute misfit, and sick.

But suppose that one day the mild family man, the expert on psychopathy, brilliant Ph.D., who knows nothing of menace in his own life, wakes up, looks around in alarm to discover that his middle-class security guard has vanished--one son, perhaps, in jail for assaulting a dean, another on heroin, his daughter pregnant in a commune and even his wife giggling over her first illegal smoke. Stripped, no longer safe, he finds himself living on the edge of a freaky, violent frontier he never knew existed. The analytical techniques that have served him so efficiently seem all at once useless. What becomes of his carefully constructed understanding of the psychopath's behavior patterns? For he himself, sitting at home, in his classroom or laboratory, may shortly be engulfed by the very psychopathy he presumes to investigate.

• • •

Assume, then (though it may abort), that something like an uprising of psychopaths is under way. In the beginning, we have supposed, the reflexes that produce such an uprising may be observed in the nervous systems of braindamaged, neglected or badly treated children. They also come--we concede this all too easily--from slum ferocity generated out of injustice and squalor. Dutifully we have traced, studied, watched out for, tried to control these dangerous reflexes, locked them up, tranquilized them, provided them with odd jobs.... But at last there are too many damaged souls, including those of dropout privileged middle-class children, for us to keep in order. They have broken free--and the psychopathic spirit infiltrates everywhere, appearing simultaneously as illness, style and new consciousness.

Again, the free-form revolt may fade out, be repressed or change in some unforeseen way. Not only has this tremendous psychic shift just begun but the long-range effects on it, for instance, of LSD and other such materials, not to mention the inroads of the despised aging process, won't be revealed for years.

Just the same, our new trip promises to be a long one. Already the breakaway spirit in its two forms--(one) headlong, pitiless action and (two) quiescent dropping out, abandonment of the whole idea of leading a competitive life--is beginning to change over many of our supposedly civilized procedures.

Inquiring into this, perhaps every speculation should be allowed. Even ask, say, whether, in evolutionary terms, if the psychopath's time has come, there may be a world-wide need for him. Could the coming of the psychopath be a natural and inevitable result of our drastically deteriorating environment (which helps fling him up)--as well as one answer to it and, who knows, a potential remedy for such deterioration?

Conceivably, without attempting a clever inversion of values, the race may be calling upon uncivilized, antirational, antiscientific, nihilistic violence as a last-ditch effort to save us from destruction. Following this line, evolutionary man may have come up with psychopaths by the millions just in time to blow up air-polluting smelters and rescue the species, and all species, from the cloud of evil we ourselves produced. We may be struggling toward something not necessarily all bad, not necessarily death. In the midst of our slow-motion apocalypse, we dimly perceive this. Could we be passing through a plague of the spirit that, destructive as it may seem, might purge the overcrowded, clouded, gassed, smog-stricken society and somehow make it better?

Notes From A Psychopathic Journal

In 1969, the chapel at Boston's Logan Airport had to be closed at night because travelers were dumping refuse inside it and using it as a urinal and for sex.

• • •

Brain damage. Permanent alteration of the head, new people. The catastrophically injured live out their disordered years in mental hospitals. But the partially damaged, the psychopaths who survive, who somehow overcome childhood disorder, sorrow and terror, are the ones who return and shatter the neighborhood calm. Criminals, preachers, innovators ... their heads are different.

Possibly the damaged psyche has--without knowing it--from the beginning felt closer to nonexistence, pre-experienced the approach of death in a way that can never be understood by those treated with consistent early tenderness. This could be the reason for the psychopath's impatience with mortal, linear referents (time, history, responsibility) and his need to stay excited (reassurance that he's alive) by keeping his neighborhood, town, world, everyone about him, in constant turmoil.

Question also the nature of damage. Is the oyster damaged by its pearl? Does a damaged brain concede its injury? So frequently damage seems to evolve, emerging in the form of power drives not experienced by healthy people whom early love has left more contented.

Imagine the early lesions in Hemingway's head, all the misfiring reflexes that recombined and were converted into genius. Greater geniuses--Tolstoy, Gandhi, O'Neill--with erratic brain waves, wretched in the treatment of their own children, creating misery as well as miraculous works on all sides. The damage done by saints.

Dr. Bruno Bettelheim: "I have no use for saints. They are impossible people; they destroy everybody around them. The sooner they go to heaven the better, because that is where they belong."

Again the continuing and mysterious association between the saint and the psychopath. Also the increased vulnerability of decent people. What about a cast off aerospace engineer--the one who committed himself to the vision of reaching the moon, only to be told to go job hunting in a recession as soon as the dream was realized? Has he suffered a brain insult a little late in the game? What did decency and loyalty earn for him? Possibly broken rhythms of confidence making him susceptible to an early stroke. The psychopath won't be fooled like this. He experiences no loss of faith when dreams start to go bad. If he himself can't be the lunar hero, such long-term commitment bores him, which is why you'll find very few psychopaths among the anonymous technicians.

• • •

Are saints bored?

• • •

It's precisely the neurotic's heritage of sexual inhibition that psychopaths deny, assault and transcend. In a businesslike way, they provide services performed by no one else. All over the world we have a tribe of sexual manipulators--whores for both sexes, madams, pimps, utterly amoral hustlers and exhibitionists of every description--psychopaths ministering to neurotics. We experience the outlaw as uncaring, cynical healer. Indifferent psychopaths performing their tricks at will--in brothels, secret apartments, rooming houses and chic hotel rooms--help the sad neurotic act out his fantasies.

And do not current therapeutic techniques follow the psychopathic style? Since the middle 1960s, theatrical acting out has begun to supersede remembrance of things past in the doctor's office. In place of tortured reflections on the couch, Masters and Johnson teach pleasure by means of live-action models and partners. Or the troubled, overcivilized neurotic may join encounter groups whose members not only confess and cry out but push, shove, insult, fondle and wrestle with one another. Encounter thus aims, often in a positive and helpful way, at controlled psychopathy, putting outlaw impulses to good use, captured within a framework of games and rituals. It offers psychopathic baptism enclosed in new (though neopagan) sacraments with Christian self-abasement and confession tacked onto it. Psychopathy and Christianity mingle. Dignity is deliberately lost, identity diffused among strangers naked together in the womb pool. Only frustration and anxiety are felt as evil. Everything else goes. We have no postponed gratification--excepting in most such groups the specifically sexual, and this is simulated in numerous ways. The encounter session then frequently becomes a psychopathic playground and presumably helpful torture chamber, in which socially disapproved "emotional immaturity," sometimes brutal behavior, callousness, irresponsibility, "impulsivity" and explosive assaults on others become the norm.

So the theater for damaged souls has emerged from little shame-filled rooms to arenas in which members of the involved group maul, embrace and excoriate one another, reaching out for a new kind of love that surely must be there.

• • •

Suppose in our disturbing dream that psychopaths came to be in charge. What kind of tests would be laid on us? Might we be accused, for instance, of not having enough fun? The times I hurried past the girl beckoning in the doorway, and sensibly so, might be held against me. Might they sit me down in front of a huge Guilt-Calculating Machine and laugh at my soaring score? Conceivably, too, in another test devised by ascendant psychopaths, the cautious middle-class person might be riddled with electric shocks every time he failed to take a risk.

• • •

From conversations with Yale psychiatrists:

Dr. Thomas P. Detre: "A key element in psychopathy is a profoundly disturbed time sense. They never see their behavior in the context of tomorrow. An example: You and I could be unfaithful to our wives and so could a psychopath be. You and I might have as much of an irresistible desire as he. What would differentiate the two of us from him is that we would rather carefully try to minimize the pain we cause to others as well as reduce the social risks involved. All this requires is a number of steps. The psychopath, on the other hand, never adjudicates the situation with reference to the future. He just plunges ahead. In other words, if I'm a psychopath and I have an appointment to meet you, but unexpectedly run into an old friend on the street, I might spend my afternoon with him, and simply not show up for our meeting.

"A characteristic of all psychopaths is that there's no set of values by which they can live. Take some of your presentday revolutionaries. I don't mean the leaders. The followers in any such movement are likely to include a large number of psychopaths. That's in the beginning. But the psychopath will drop out soon. He'll be bored and feel too many demands on him. He may even turn informer.

"He can't feel isolated or lonely for long. In order for him to experience loneliness, it would require that he do nothing about it. But it just doesn't occur. He immediately goes to a bar, or a drag race. He's always going somewhere. Perhaps we sometimes envy the diversity of his experience. I do believe that psychopaths, men or women, are going to be less frustrated by the discrepancy between fantasy life and real activity, but they will also be more bored than the average person. They have to constantly escalate in order to get a kick out of life. And at times, they escalate to the point of being arrested. Have you ever seen a psychopath sitting down quietly in a chair? They always wiggle. Sure, they dissipate tension with greater ease. They get what they want more quickly. But though they dissipate tension, it recurs faster than in normal people."

Dr. Gary Tucker: "The psychopath who comes to us is someone who gets caught. Billie Sol Estes was a 'financial genius' until he was found out. You've got to consider American society as a whole, all the maneuvering, the selfishness. We say psychopaths can't delay gratification. The paradox you mention: that they can manipulate but not sympathize, can't put themselves in the other person's place. But what's so unusual about that today among so-called normal people?

"Most revolutionary kids aren't merely adopting a new style. The patina comes from society. In a riot they scream not only at the pigs but at the phoniness of their parents. Business duplicity, greed. But most of all at the hypocritical attitudes around them. The strange numbness.... Do you know America is the only country in the world where you can watch three wars a night on television?

"Yes, psychopaths are acting out various kinds of protest, but they get tired. You don't see many old psychopaths...."

Dr. David Kupfer: "The very nature of modern organizations encourages this kind of behavior. The most effective administrative style encourages manipulation. So you can say that organization, increasingly as we see it today, generates psychopathy.

"Follow the urban style, you tend to become hyperalert. You develop eyes behind your head.... The successful revolutionary employs the same style, in extreme form, as the psychopath who makes it in business. Look at Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. They believe what they're doing, but they also score. You know who can be pathetic, the ones in the crowd, their followers, trying unsuccessfully to imitate the revolutionary style. Jerry and Abbie and all the famous ones, they'll make their ego trips pay. The followers are the ones brought to this hospital. Stoned, hysterical, out of their heads for one reason or another. We get them. After that May Day rally for Bobby Seale and the Panthers, a lot of them came in. Hallucinating. On drugs? Not all of them. They were just high and scared. One I remember couldn't go to the toilet. Every time he sat down he hallucinated that there was a bomb under him.

"Psychopaths find vulnerability in other people....

"They require feedback and to an extent they can be identified by the numbers of people around them. This is how they define their identity, how they make it. The lonesome psychopaths are the ones we get here. Will a sociopath ever be found going off and fishing by himself? Never!

"Being shy, quiet, a nice guy, doesn't work in America. The nice guy is the postman, the milkman.

"Why did Manson turn on so many young people? Adventure, romance, against the establishment, beating the system, excitement, charisma. The need ... I see it in little doses all around me."

• • •

"People have asked me why I did what I did at the station house and I told them a story similar to the one I just told here, but it was all bullshit. I really did it because it was fun. That's what I tell my friends. To my brothers I tell the real truth, which is that I don't know why I did it. They smile because they know any explanation I give is made up."

Abbie Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It

• • •

In New York, along Lexington Avenue, I see a man hauling his heavy laundry bag. It's Saturday morning, with relatively few people around. I know where he's going. To the Chinese, and it will be fascinating to watch. Because there is no longer a Chinese. The same thing happened to me two days ago. He's plodding with his head down, and across the street I follow him.

He stands before an empty lot on which the Chinese laundry stood only a week before. It has been bulldozed and swept flat. All the buildings are gone and they have even taken the rubble away. The man finally turns about with a numbed look. He actually begins turning in circles, dragging his laundry bag along the sidewalk.

I can see his face, dumb and desolate. For years, perhaps, he has made the weekly trip to Shan Lee's, from his apartment or rooming house to this steamy hole in the wall. Without fail, the spry, mysteriously unsweating Cantonese, like animated punctuation marks, grinned and bobbed their heads and handed him a bright-red or yellow ticket. Now, with no warning, all at once they've vanished. Somebody might have told him. Not that it really matters. A block or two away another laundry will do the same job. Still, how dejected and lost he appears as he heaves the bag over his shoulder and trudges down a side street.

The psychopath escapes all such nostalgia and loss. Stupid, repetitious journeys are not for him. The disappearance or mutilation of a landmark, a row of chestnuts in blossom like those chopped down by rioting Parisian students, let alone the vanishing of a dear familiar laundry, will give him no feeling of disorientation or pain. He's accustomed to disorientation. He experiences time in frames, disposable units, and lives in a traveling compartment of the present. History is what he sees before him now, lived in. Because with all other history banished, the prospect of deterioration and slow loss of energy through the years, which he can't work with, is forcibly ruled out. (But the possibility of violent, explosive death doesn't appall the psychopath; indeed, he often courts it.)

• • •

"Again and again students have told me that they take it for granted they will not survive the next ten years. This is not an attitude with which to prepare for a career or to bring up a family."

Paul Goodman, "The New Reformation"

"I don't plan to be singing that long. There's nothing more ridiculous-looking than old people on the stage.... When I was young, around ten, and my parents' friends would come over and try to be real chummy, like be your friend or peer, and you just thought they were assholes. And people who continue to perform onstage figure everybody really thinks they're neat, and they don't. They think, 'Look at that old jerk.'"

Grace Slick (31), Rolling Stone interview (1970)

• • •

Years ago I knew Neal Cassady, even stood up as a witness at one of his marriages before a gloomy justice of the peace in Newark. In 1957 he would become famous as Dean Moriarty, racing, pot-smoking, jazz-digging, continent-splitting hero of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. According to any medical model ever devised, Cassady or Moriarty (they are virtually identical, with hardly any fictional difference) qualified as a complete psychopath. There can be no way to get around this label. He fits every description.

This was Moriarty:

"In a matter of days they were dickering with Camille in San Francisco by long-distance telephone for the necessary divorce papers so they could get married. Not only that, but a few months later Camille gave birth to Dean's second baby, the result of a few nights' rapport early in the year. And another matter of months and Inez had a baby. With one illegitimate child in the West somewhere, Dean then had four little ones and not a cent, and was all troubles and ecstasy and speed as ever."

In one of the novel's best-known passages, Moriarty and Sal Paradise (Kerouac), at all times living ecstatically in the present, have hitchhiked a ride with a dull couple and Moriarty cries out:

"Sal, think of it, we'll dig Denver together and see what everybody's doing, although that matters little to us, the point being that we know what it is and we know time and we know that everything is really fine.... Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there--and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise."

Today's psychopathic style (as opposed to the certifiable illness, if it can be certified) began, at least in the United States, with the romance of the Beat Generation. The wild demigod Moriarty called to the trapped conformists of the Eisenhower years: "Come on! I'll show you how to live!" Rushing from place to place, back and forth across the country, Kerouac and his friends opened up the possibilities of a crazy, exciting new way to take hold of life. "He makes you want to go to Albuquerque!" sighed a young girl at that time, just after finishing On the Road.

But what does not come through in Beat Generation writing is this: With the exception of ecstatic moments flagellated out of them by speed (at that time, of automobiles), hit-and-run sex and wild new bebop music, the Beats, always living in the present, were most of the time catastrophically bored. From the literature, one has the impression of unending excitement, rushing here and there, one ecstasy after another, this tempo being broken now and then by periods of holy meditation. But in reality, the days were for the most part directionless.... There were long, long stretches of boredom during which I remember the heroes of this generation simply not knowing what to do with themselves and sitting around with hangovers, smoking and wondering what now.

The writers report only the high points. So we have ecstasy and some great and almost great writing founded on boredom. Boredom pursued the Beats like a cloud of gnats and they ran from it. But then--the paradox and wonder--a handful of them managed to project out of this littering of time, and the waste of days, enormously creative work arising mysteriously from the banal hours they actually lived through.

And Cassady, head psychopath, was the most bored of all. Never a bore himself; no, he was exciting, but bored nearly to death. To save himself, he kept constantly in motion. Physically, he never stopped moving, hustling, lighting up, moving on. Even his jobs had to move: railway brakeman, car jockey in parking lots. Yet sophisticated and fetishist of hip that he was, Cassady would always make the wrong move at a critical time--selling marijuana to narcs, mistakes of that sort. The glamor of living by the moment, digging only the moment, impaired his judgment. He was incautious as the rawest rookie. Neal should long since--with his experience and time in jail for the same offense--have had a sense of the narc and how to avoid him. But he had to have whatever he wanted now, and dealt now, if that was his impulse. He lay down to sleep now with too many drugs in him on a night in Mexico that was too cold, and that was the foolish and unnecessary way he died.

• • •

Though he himself may be one, the outlaw has no patience with losers. Get with it or die. Nonperformance is the sin, especially, for example, when it takes the form of illness. See Kerouac abandoned with dysentery and blazing fever by Neal Cassady in Mexico City. Sal Paradise: "I looked up out of the dark swirl of my mind ... and I saw Dean bending over the kitchen table. It was several nights later and he was leaving Mexico City already."

The enchanting psychopath speaks: "Poor Sal, poor Sal, got sick. Stan'll take care of you. Now listen to hear if you can in your sickness: I got my divorce from Camille down here and I'm driving back to Inez in New York tonight if the car holds out.... Gotta get back to my life. Wish I could stay with you. Pray I can come back.... Yes, yes, yes, I've got to go now. Old fever Sal, goodbye."

Later, Kerouac: "When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes. 'OK, old Dean, I'll say nothing.'"

• • •

"... the only morality a matter of how far out you're brave enough and demented enough to go...."

Rolling Stone writer, Michael Thomas, reviewing, Mick Jagger in the film, Performance

"With the bankers and things like that ... I did a job on this banker that we were using, and on a few other people, and on the Beatles. How do you describe the job? ... I maneuver people. That's what leaders do, and I sit and make situations which will be of benefit to me with other people, it's as simple as that.... Maneuvering is what it is, let's not be coy about it. It is a deliberate and thought-out maneuver of how to get a situation the way we want it. That's how life's about, isn't it, is it not? ... It's maneuvering. There's nothing ashamed about it. We all do it, it's just owning up, you know, not going around saying 'God bless you, brother,' pretending there is no vested interest....

"You have to be a bastard to make it, that's a fact, and the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth."

John Lennon, Rolling Stone interview (1971)

"The revolution has replaced the church as the country's moral authority."

Jerry Rubin, Do It!

• • •

Beyond the commandments to perform well and be attractive, the outline of another absolute virtue may be detected. More than any other quality, the new ethic values speed in varied forms. Far more than impatience, the need for instantaneous action comes out of the psychopathic style. Instant being, not laboring to become. Moving into what you want immediately, no delay. Free-form, even serene maneuvering, not slowed by sentiment. Thus, violence is speed. Motorcycles. Brutal directness, speed on the uptake. Getting there effortlessly from one place to another, from one thought to another. Telling the exact truth is speed. Even more, silence is speed, electric understanding too swift for words, moving on.

And then, stasis in flight, a sort of strung-out motionlessness, as seen in the drawings of genius by Saul Steinberg (who remarked, grinning, one night that the most important thing in life is speed; also, that life's most exciting exchanges and best moments occur "tangentially," passing in a flash, not to be dwelt on, gone before you can think about them).

Drugs provide this sensation of speed and, at the same time, motionlessness, some compounds being named after the state of bliss desired. Even marijuana helps in a smaller way achieve the goal of the psychopath and his imitators, which couldn't be more understandable, to remain forever young at the speed of light.

• • •

Years ago, in the spring of 1963, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert turned me on in a Manhattan apartment with what I've always felt, but never can prove, was a gigantic overdose of pure Sandoz LSD. What must have been between 600 and 1000 micrograms sent the neophyte on a wild death-rebirth trip. The universe shivered in pieces. He became a speck, nothing, an item of terror, like an astronaut flung out too far with the apparent certainty at one grievous moment that he would never make it back. This meant going laughing, crying, sobbing crazy for the greater part of ten hours. The journey was difficult and terrible, albeit with some ecstatic moments. Recovery from it even now seems miraculous.

As Leary has always said, the journey through inner space couldn't help but change the voyager's psyche forever. This is no exaggeration: One will never again be quite the same after experiencing the simulation of death and being reborn. It's practically impossible not to see life in a new way.

I remember lying across a couch exhausted after my trip. Leary came in, joking: "Now you know what it feels to suffer ego loss!" He gave me a bite of his apple and a swallow of ginger beer. (He's the only person I ever met who drank Scotch with Schweppes tonic.) Then he picked up a needle that looked as big as a dirigible filled with DMT, offering me the half-hour up-and-down still wilder and farther-out trip that this instant mushroom could provide. I said, "No, no!" pushing it away, and he only laughed and everybody was kind.

I was vaguely elated, but afraid, too. All the people around me had such huge (from the drug, dilated) eyes. Leary clapped me on the shoulder. I could see him, facing me on the couch, a bright, well-wishing and perhaps, yes, a holy man, but--it's hard to express, making allowances for acid-induced paranoia--I felt in the presence of a monstrous tenderness. Later, stumbling home in the dark with automobiles still seeming to swim by, I rang the doorbell in renewed doubt and panic and, bursting in on my wife, told her: "It's a nest of psychopaths over there!"

Ever since, I've wondered what vibrations these were. Why did such likable people, Leary, Alpert and the others, seem vaguely menacing? Had I intended to say that they didn't know right from wrong, or anymore care to distinguish between the two? Were they perhaps telling me that right and wrong were obsolete, merely part of a justice game?

They seemed from another world, out of time. That long ago the psychopathic concept meant little to me. Yet the word came out: "Psychopaths." It was the precise word. I felt I had just come from a cell of new people and I thought then that there was a controlled madness among them. They would soon be able to overturn the world. The substance at their disposal made sure of that. I sensed smiling danger. They were going to put my world into shock. At the same time, I was asking myself why not, why shouldn't they? They had been bright, affectionate companions and instructors during my voyage. Again, why not? Because that disturbing first impression kept returning: They're crazy!

Perhaps as one of the crowd in Galilee, on the hillside by the lake, listening to the New Man preach, I would have experienced the same shiver of paranoia, sensed a new idea being born and wanted to stamp it out. Like Leary or Alpert, that one would have seemed (as, of course, he did) the bearer of a sinister new message, an overly democratic, disastrous conception of love; someone who ought to be shut up, because if he were allowed to continue preaching the doctrine he was coming on with, all the laws I lived by would crumble--and, ill equipped, I'd have to start over again.

• • •

Detachment paradoxically can sharpen pleasure. The unconnected person, feeling no responsibility, has nothing to inhibit him: He has heightened sensation achieved through indifference.

In a small, scattered way, feel the exciting vibrations among strangers, say, at an airport bar. Within minutes everybody will fly off in different directions, never to see one another again. Often talk breaks free and people confess. Un-involved, we touch each other.

And sex in motels. Motels are absolutely for use. There's no dear familiar. In the good ones, bed and thick rug seem to flow into each other. Every toilet fixture is sealed with rice paper, antiseptic beyond belief. A timeless place, the room is intended for nothing but rest, sleep or sex. It offers not the slightest emotional possibility. Sex pit, paradise wholly without extraneous charm. Go to the ice bucket, get out your bottle of vodka, drink or smoke together; make coolly passionate, detailed love built out of marijuana or martinis. Or, a pro, carefully calculate and feel nothing, perform any trick the client wants within reason.... Bourgeois swinger, into group sex, find refurbished ecstasies in the exciting absence of love.

But detachment can also bring on manipulation of others, taking form as some kind of sadism. Sometimes the victim doesn't even know it; the bored, cruel view of life can be that remote. The other night, I visited a friend in his penthouse. As usual, he had his high-powered telescope out and was making the rounds of lighted windows across the park. Nearly every clear night he enjoys this pastime. Whenever he gives a party, guests take turns hunting for naked couples, peering in on their privacy from a mile or two away. He gives a curious little laugh and focuses the telescope. He has found some action. I don't even disapprove of what he's doing (after all, no one is hurt by his inspection), but the onanistic cruelty of it ... he finds the exposed lovers only ridiculous. Voyeur, eavesdropper, obscene phone caller, all game players really. These are the areas in which psychopathy turns mean.

Why is cruelty so close to the detached observer and player of games? Why, for instance, is the manipulative art of blowing the other person's mind so popular now? It is a form of Zen sadism, confusing the innocent one by means of (John Lennon) "only another mirror." There's only a short step from "blow his mind" to "Let's throw the V. C. out of the airplane and listen to him whistle on the way down." Because it's just a "throw the slope out the window" game.

Newspaper clipping:

Breaks Leg Tripping

Mrs. Anna D. tripped over a blind man's cane yesterday, breaking her leg....

That item broke up a party of pot smokers one evening. Also the story of a 35-year-old claims adjuster in Brooklyn who lived with his mother. He had been out of work for a while and for various reasons, decided to kill himself. What held him back was the disgrace and the shame his mother would feel. So he grabbed her around the waist and jumped out the window from four stories up and, landing on her, killed his mother, but he himself survived.

"Mattress-cide!" cried one head.

For the detached game watchers, such stories offer unacceptable anguish, a drag if taken seriously, and are therefore hilarious. Ludicrous pain can only be laughed at. Suffering must never be condoned. "The games people play" appear ridiculous, stupid when they let misery get the best of them. Because they're taking themselves too seriously. Suffering is stupid and an illusion besides (since nothing is that real, and will pass). People are not ends in themselves but reincarnations, reiterations of--not even a single self--an ever-dissolving, renewing, accidentally thrust-up life form each of us imagines as himself. And this perception is what makes detached cruelty and laughter possible on such easy terms.

Holy man and psychopath may be seen as equally cynical, in that they believe existence to be repetitive and circular, hence boring. For them, the wheel of being does not roll nor life build toward anything. It just spins. They don't imagine that the evolutionary chariot might be moving in any direction, such as toward a higher civilization.

If we're just meaninglessly spinning, and each of us amounts to nothing but a spin-off, soon to disappear, then the solution offered by the holy man and psychopath makes perfect sense. Have fun. Forget about dragging responsibilities. Seize the moment, one frame at a time. Reject the linear. Discount history and any sort of long-range planning.

But if it's possible again to suppose that the chariot is careening somewhere, possibly toward a higher, more satisfying existence, then linear faith can be restored and what each one contributes may, indeed, have some meaning.

And there is something new under the sun, an utterly new, unprecedented situation. This is the availability of chemicals that can perhaps help save all lost souls. For used intelligently and sacramentally, as Leary once intended (but a conception he turned his back on), these drugs can contribute toward teaching us to combine circular and linear being as well as restore each shaken pilgrim's faith in the worth-whileness of being worth while, making it possible for psychopath and nonpsychopath to live together and even become as one, periodically reborn.

Psychopathy and Rebirth

Now to tie the strands of our theme together. What began as a condition identified, at least according to middle-class psychiatric diagnosis, as a form of mental illness has now moved beyond the medical model to a style of living followed by great numbers of people. A country-wide invasion or uprising of psychopaths has already taken place. But the psychopath's original "moral insanity" is being transmuted in revolutionary passage. Although he himself may remain sick, his imitators, adopting the sick man's spontaneous and theatrical mode of making out, seem to have broken through to new methods of mastering time and bringing new excitement to many of humanity's outworn games.

Such behavior derived from psychopathy may be seen as medicine we have required. A form of illness produces a form of therapy. Disease has evolved into a style offering repeated simulations of being reborn.

For rebirth is the key. Unhappily, the old orthodoxies that once sustained us have lost it. Young priests, ministers and rabbis are shaking the old structures, but more must be done, quickly; new ceremonies developed to overcome the now fully revealed drag of unadorned death and meaninglessness. And largely for this reason the massive imitation of psychopathy has arisen, as a palliative.

Too often the alternative has been madness. Striving for rebirth has meant for thousands a headlong drive toward mental illness, as if to sweep death and meaninglessness away by going crazy. A deliberately sought crack-up is achieved, with fragmentation perhaps laying the groundwork for spiritual renaissance. We have the idea of fashionable madness, the soul's stormy progress, risking padded-cell disaster en route to tranquillity, propounded by Ronald Laing and others. As Leary put it: "Go out of your mind in order to use your head." Hit bottom before coming back to life. Nearly all therapeutic ceremonies at this time seek breakdown before reunification of the soul. Even political therapy. Jerry Rubin: "I support everything which puts people into motion, which creates disruption and controversy, which creates chaos and rebirth."

Lack of meaningful rebirth ceremonies within a structure of religious faith has had a disastrous result in recent years: the epidemic use of heroin. Heroin addiction, of course, has grown out of many crises, all the familiar social and economic ones, the Vietnam blunder and betrayal, the continuing crisis of boredom. But it has grown very much out of a religious crisis as well: New ways of periodically feeling reborn are required. Drugs provide the illusion and promise of rebirth that increasing numbers of people can no longer find by orthodox religious means. Hence, whether we like it or not, they are used--tragically, in so many instances--to fill a religious need.

And another tragedy is that middle-class authority has almost willfully refused to concede any merit whatever to a selected few of these substances, as opposed to the purely destructive ones. LSD is lumped with heroin as essentially evil, only in a different way. True, LSD and kindred materials have been criminally misused, destroying thousands of souls, and LSD became a food for anarchy. But the abuse of a practice is no argument against the practice itself. The abuse of a drug (swallow 100 aspirins) doesn't necessarily clinch the argument against that drug. And the abuses we recognize need not and must not put an end to these redeeming materials. For, used properly in the right set and setting, LSD has a power as great and useful as prayer. By refusing to make allowances for a church or temple, any religious structure, to contain and sanctify LSD trips into inner consciousness, we gave them over to anarchy, abuse and gangsterism.

Do such drugs encourage psychopathy? Yes, LSD, psilocybin and the other psychedelics (as opposed to the horror of heroin) have provided much of the energy for the psychopathic invasion, and can also help heal the wounds it has inflicted. Speaking mainly of the hallucinogens, and even of marijuana, such consciousness-expanding substances and their availability to the middle-class masses may be recognized as the irreversible force that has probably changed our scene forever. For these materials--if ingested in a sufficiently heavy dosage to stimulate the experience of dying and being reborn--have already, in a permanent way, so changed the heads of most voyagers that they can never again fully accept linear values involving acquisition, advancement and amassing prestige. (That is, they may grow rich, advance and become famous, but will have fun, not laboring humorlessly to do so.)

The cold, maneuvering psychopath has always pretended to accept the old standards, though laughing behind his mask. But the self-destructive knockabout village psychopath, refusing to hold down a steady job, bucking his respectable neighbors, has a consistent record of rejecting just such values. Today he is no longer the exception in town. A generation has joined him--or at least a notable percentage of the first generation exposed en masse to psychedelic materials.

For these--because of revelations experienced during LSD and other such voyages or, at the minimum, marijuana-taught irreverence toward bourgeois complacency and show--middle-class values have simply collapsed. While most rebels and dropouts are by no means clinically psychopathic, values of the psychopath--mainly his denial of time and responsibility--have come to the fore. And the new psychopathy in a number of its manifestations could be helping us not go mad.

Salvation and rebirth by means of deliberately induced madness is a cruel and nutty solution to the problem of a man's, a woman's fight to survive unbelieving in the face of the void. Psychopathy may be serving as a compromise state of mind, a mental halfway house between our old, outworn sanity (which can't properly confront the void) and fragmentation without rebirth (splitting before terror and meaninglessness). When a straight person can't make it anymore, he goes to pieces. Since the psychopath never lingers over his fear but acts out whatever bothers him in precipitate, unreflective fashion, he's much less likely to break down.

Stress again that we are speaking mainly of the middle classes. The poor don't have to be taught psychopathic arts. The best, to struggle free in harsh cities, must employ them. Driving toward liberation, black revolutionaries, among others, work with violent sociopathic techniques, and these, as emphasized by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, absolutely can't be dispensed with: "Muscular action must substitute itself for concepts....

"Violence is thus seen as comparable to a royal pardon. The colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence...."

Again rebirth, this time by revolution. An uprising of people driven sociopathic, seeking justice, revenge, a legitimate, even holy aim for the oppressed, using their psychopathy as a fearful weapon.

The psychopath has been described as ideally suited to frontier life. In the old West, as we've chosen to remember it, he became a romantic figure. We celebrated him and still do. Now, in our time, most alert people find that they have reached another kind of frontier along which varieties of psychopathic behavior flourish and triumph. All souls maneuver in dangerous, contested territory. Some feel stifled, want to smash everything, urinate in your hallway, break your head. Others retire, hide, ask only to be left alone (and almost certainly won't be). In this border country the soul longs not to be afraid. And for many children of the present time, only outlaw behavior can overcome fear, only having fun or smashing things relieves the feeling that one is stifled and oppressed, if not by other men, then by the indifferent universe itself.

It seems that the Great Psychopath in the Sky has it in for all of us. The only thing to do is ride out from under His arbitrariness and indifference, get over the border and break free. No more meditation, musing over this doubt and that fear. No more plodding in earnest pursuit of a sober and responsible life plan. For the psychopath, and now his followers, this is a fool's game. Instead, for them, the point is to travel, move, make out, exploit, strike back, enjoy--unimpeded by any guilt whatever, compassionate only when aesthetically excited or on whim--crossing all borders, being made new after each illegal crossing.

•••

Imagine, in not too many years, an active drug church, or--better--a spiritual circus bringing together sacramentally under one main tent all known techniques of simulating death and rebirth. Its aim would be to institute a kind of reform psychopathy, combining the best, exuberant aspects of this transmuted mental illness with linear hope and persistent striving, perhaps within the framework of Games Taken Seriously.

Establish then a Church of Rebirth by Any Means, a temple for the repeated simulation of dying and being reborn, a religious base making it possible to reconcile the linear and circular views of life. Achieve a fusion of the straight and the psychopathic. Psychopaths and nonpsychopaths lie down together and, by sharing the death-rebirth experience, learn to live with one another.

The psychopath protests linear responsibility. Straight people resist the idea of a meaninglessly turning wheel. Their faith, for many flagging now, is that the evolutionary chariot must be rolling toward a higher state of being. How to combine these approaches and live peaceably side by side? Again, by sacramentally dying and being reborn together; sharing trips in the new temple within a sacred framework. In this way, produce the effect of ceremonially taking time out, restore faith in the games we live by, teach the obsessed as well as the lapsed crusaders among us to become searchers and voyagers instead of glory hunters.

Thus we might lay the foundation for a new orthodoxy in an uninhibited fashion. It would undoubtedly embrace the orgiastic, attempting to achieve the shuddering and throbbing that comes up through the spine, the continuing preorgasm that travelers on the death-rebirth trip so frequently experience (with drugs or not): the same experience that the psychopath randomly, often clumsily seeks, and which, being out of control--except in bed, on prescribed sexual occasions--frightens the bourgeois. The aim, then, in temples of rebirth: to drive out of control, regularly and ceremonially break apart, kill and heal, reassemble the aggressive and also fearful self, shrived, renewed--within ritualistic limits.

As Leary originally intended, substances such as LSD, if used with dignity and care, can serve as the food of such a new faith--pursued in temples, not alone--that so many of us, psychopath and nonpsychopath, desperately need. The psychopath's predatory drives may be softened by the experience of being shattered and healed over during voyages inside his head. Bourgeois complacency and blinkered fixation on linear advancement will similarly be stripped away, as the sales manager laughs and weeps and rolls naked. Soften the psychopath's harsh, manipulative nature. Release the conformist's blocked spontaneity and teach him playful violence. Emerge refreshed from carefully spaced ceremonial explorations into the common pool of memory. The experience of traveling together would link psychopath and nonpsychopath--as, in fact, whenever undertaken, it does--so that they would never again completely misunderstand each other. Tame the psychopath; enliven the straight arrow in order that now and then he can taste the delights of irresponsibility.

In a religious vacuum, the godless psychopath, our most recent model--and, it's said, emotionally disturbed advance man--may turn out to be as Robert Lindner described him: "the harbinger of social and political distress." We may experience him as a sometimes charming, sometimes brutal antichrist multiplying among us, a bored and reckless Pied Piper soon to make off not only with our children but with our very history and all the beliefs we live by.

Yet his coming could also represent "the birth of a savior" projected decades ago by Jung, the event "equivalent to a great catastrophe, because a new and powerful life springs up just where there had seemed to be no life and no power and no possibility of future development."

Are we, then, heading into a world of the deliverer or of the antichrist? Both? Whoever he is, will we necessarily be overwhelmed by him? Is he, indeed, delivering us? From what?

From death, surely. The psychopath distracts himself and everyone by disrupting time and filling our moments with aggression, tricks, games, pain. Distracts us from our linear path to the void, too desperately meaningless to bear now. This, if anything, must be the new man's evolutionary role. If not, he can only have come to teach us how to destroy ourselves.

Hence, it becomes urgent and essential that our new psychopathy be contained within the religious framework. There can be no way of accomplishing this except through fragmentation ceremonies, with or without drugs. Such spiritual circuses held in Churches or Temples of Rebirth would be designed to provoke therapeutic hallucinations, keep going all the colored lights and pinwheels, crystalline explosions, terrifying apparitions and protective angels, all the paraphernalia and the visions of hell and heaven that attend the soul's renewing passage.

Psychopath and nonpsychopath retreat, mingle styles, are ritually shattered and reborn together. From this psychic collapse, renewal and exchange there emerges a new kind of person, perhaps born free of time, whole again until the next visit to the temple--a month, six months, a year, five years later--unafraid, unbored, on the lookout for all kinds of excitements, pleasures, searches.