The Psychopath Factory Tristam Vivian Adams The Psychopath Factory How Capitalism Organises Empathy Table of Contents INTRODUCTION Welcome to Red Tower Novelties Ltd CHAPTER 1 A World of Psychopaths CHAPTER 2 Dreaming of the Voight-Kampff Test CHAPTER 3 “Giving a fuck when it ain’t your turn to give a fuck” CHAPTER 4 Goldilocks CHAPTER 5 Organised Scarring CHAPTER 6 Capitalist Theatre: Don’t Call Me Boss! CHAPTER 7 Cool Customers… CHAPTER 8 …Under Bright Lights and Medication CHAPTER 9 The Competition Sickness CHAPTER 10 Cured: Psychopathy as the Writing of Capitalism CHAPTER 11 Dialectic of Empathy: Deconstructing Sadistic Empathy CHAPTER 12 You Can’t Get Out Backwards BIBLIOGRAPHY EXTENDED FILMOGRAPHY NOTES INTRODUCTION Welcome to Red Tower Novelties Ltd Each day millions and millions of calls, emails and letters flood into the Red Tower Novelties Ltd Customer Service Department. It is a call centre that also deals with written correspondence. Employees are expected to be flexible and good at multitasking. The purpose of the call centre is, of course, customer service: caring about and listening to customers and solving their problems. In a way the Customer Service Department — the call centre — offers relationships, empathy, sympathy and understanding. But this is all it can offer. This is because the company that owns and operates the call centre, Red Tower Novelties Ltd, has not provided good service or satisfactory products. Many of its products are defective and do not operate as they should. In fact, the products of Red Tower Novelties Ltd are dangerous. On many occasions the products of Red Tower Novelties Ltd have been known to malfunction, causing injury or harm. So as you can imagine, the call centre needs to offer its customer services to the millions and millions of customers that call or write letters detailing their distress, injury, loss or bereavement. The predicament for the workers inside the call centre is that Red Tower Novelties Ltd will not allow full refunds, replacements, compensation or likewise. The company has accepted that it cannot fulfil the promises made by them, and expected by their customers. Red Tower Novelties Ltd knows its products are dangerous but cannot do anything about it. Hence, the large call centre, the Customer Service Department of Red Tower Novelties Ltd, is very busy. Some of the more cynical managers in the call centre refer to the situation as “fire-fighting”, but most are more positive and describe the task at hand as a “reactive management of consumer expectations”. For the people that work there, a large part of the job is looking at photos of injuries that customers may have experienced as a result of the failed products as well as listening to the customers’ grievances on the phone. Many “newbies” get a little upset at first. They panic or collapse in tears. In fact, many of the staff experience some form of mental and emotional breakdown. A common complaint is that the working conditions are stressful, but this isn’t really the case. The working conditions are only the way they are so that employees can work in the most efficient and productive manner. Being organised and managing one’s workload is the best way to combat stress. Each time a new case arrives the photographic evidence pops up on the employees’ computers — not dissimilar to a pop-up advert you see on the Internet. As you can imagine, the customer complaints come in thick and fast and employees may see a lot of images showing various injuries that result from faulty products. When a particularly important case, a high level case, comes in, alarms sound to alert employees. Of course, only the most serious of cases warrant this. Naturally, this alarm is different to the fire alarm that sounds each week in accordance with the current health and safety regulations. The headsets of each employee also beep when their cases receive follow up emails. This helps each employee manage their workload and operate efficiently; it helps them plan their time. Visibility and knowledge sharing are key values at Red Tower Novelties Ltd. The employees often pin photographs and printouts of various mishaps and accidents on notice boards. These activities are important. The more intensive the knowledge sharing (and the greater the experience base) the better employees are at offering customers the good service and support they need. The managers all help too. Fun music is played to boost energy levels and encourage team spirit. When targets are hit, or when an employee closes a particularly troublesome case, they announce the employee’s success in bulletin emails and write the employee’s name in big letters on notice boards. Recognising success is important. It ensures members of the team are aware of each others’ achievements. The managers are very friendly. Red Tower Novelties Ltd is a very relaxed place to work. No one would call anyone Boss or Sir. It is like we are one big team, all on the same level, rather than a hierarchical company. Not like school where you had to watch what you said all the time. No, it is not like that here. At Red Tower Novelties Ltd the managers are on first name terms with everyone just like we are with them. They banter and joke and so do we. The managers often arrange team-building exercises. Occasionally a manager will vanish, just like that. Without a goodbye or anything. No one knows why. And anyway, the other managers are always there to offer support. Occasionally managers ask for favours — of course everyone is happy to help, because they are so friendly and help so much too. It is not uncommon to see managers silently mouthing helpful advice to the call centre employees whilst they are tackling a particularly challenging phone call with an upset customer. The “newbies” who panic and collapse really have no reason to. They are just too sensitive, highly strung or not “cut out for the job”. Panicking doesn’t help anyone and these “newbies” certainly aren’t helping anyone if they can’t keep a lid on it. The best way to stay relaxed is to keep on top of the work. It is best to just keep calm and carry on with the task at hand. Red Tower Novelties Ltd has certainly implemented robust and transparent measures that ensure their employees work in the most productive and efficient manner possible. By giving employees the help they need, by enabling knowledge sharing and encouraging team spirit, they can work well. Being in control of one’s workload and being able to successfully manage expectations is key to morale. The only criticism one could have for the Customer Service Department at Red Tower Novelties Ltd would be that the lighting isn’t always perfect. You see, up on the ceiling, in between the large grey tiles, there are long halogen lights. Many of these lights flicker. Not all the time, but intermittently. Every now and then they would start flickering for a few minutes then stop. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that the call centre is quite large, and that because of this there is always a flickering light in sight. This isn’t the fault of Red Tower Novelties Ltd but perhaps that of the contractor that Business Space Solutions’ Department of Maintenance and Servicing has employed to provide the lighting. Also, by coincidence, the Red Tower Novelties Ltd Customer Service Department happens to be located in a region prone to intense lightning storms. Of course, you can’t blame them for that. Red Tower Novelties Ltd are not responsible for the weather! CHAPTER 1 A World of Psychopaths Norman Bates from Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960); Hannibal Lecter from Thomas Harris’ novels (Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal and Hannibal Rising); Tom Ripley from Patricia Highsmith’s The Ripley Omnibus; Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1993 [1866]), or perhaps Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov from The Brothers Karamazov (1997 [1880]). There is Patrick Bateman from Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (2000), Dr Jed Hill from Harold Becker’s Malice (1993), Simon from Antonio Campos’s Simon Killer (2012), Asami from Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999), Rhoda Penmark from The Bad Seed (1956), Kevin from We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), Benoit from Man Bites Dog (1992), Gordon Gekko from Wall Street (1987), Bridget Gregory from The Last Seduction (1994), Rynn Jacobs from The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), The Joker from The Dark Knight (2008), Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men (2007), Kevin McCallister from Home Alone (1990). Film and literature has no shortage of characterisations of psychopathy. We shall focus more on examples of fictional psychopathy rather than ruminating on persons who have been diagnosed as psychopathic by authorities — because the interest here is in psychopathy and empathy, not criminal psychology or antisocial behaviour. Looking to persons diagnosed as psychopathic is not conducive to our exploration, because such persons are often diagnosed after crime or during incarceration. We shall not confuse psychopathy with criminality or antisocial behaviour, so looking to fiction is preferred over exploring the psychiatric evaluations of criminals diagnosed as “psychopathic”. Also, in terms of psychopathy, looking to fiction is not uncommon for criminal psychologists or psychiatrists. Hervey Cleckley’s The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-Called Psychopathic Personality Disorder (1988) is a foundational text on psychopathy. It is littered with considerations and comparisons of literary characters’ psychologies; characters from the works of Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Shakespeare, Mann, Dickens, Proust and Bronte (to name but a few) are all considered. Likewise, Robert D. Hare — in his cornerstone text Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us (1999) – uses a somewhat narrative, rather than clinical, approach. Hare doesn’t rely on fiction, but does use a wealth of material from True Crime literature and newspaper reports. Hare states that not all persons described in his book are psychopaths — but the character descriptions are useful to describe aspects of psychopathy. Hare also, very much like Cleckley, uses vignettes to communicate psychopathic characters and aspects of psychopathy. We too shall utilise narrative techniques — but for a very different purpose. Not, like Hare, to render vivid antisociality, criminality or extraordinary levels of manipulation, but so we can sympathise, identify with, and see ourselves in such fictional psychopaths. Let’s return to our list of fictional psychopaths; there seem to be many different types. For example, a psychopath may be depicted as a maniac full of paranoid neuroses and impulses. Or a psychopath could be depicted as being highly intelligent, charming and socially adroit. It seems that psychopaths can be fringe dwelling failures, but they can also be successful, powerful silhouettes of authority. Psychopaths may be shown to be psychotic and out of touch with the world, but they may also be portrayed as being acutely aware of the world, others and the concomitant expectations of them. The former could be delusional and volatile, whereas the latter could be controlling, calculating, and adept at manipulating those around them. Perhaps it is because of all these contradictions that psychopathy has somehow ended up as a catchall term for “baddies”, for people who we ought to fear: dangerous people, manipulative and intelligent killers or cold-hearted narcissists. There is a common theme running throughout almost all depictions of psychopathy — violence, selfishness and crime. In life it seems that every time a particularly gruesome or shocking crime is executed we quickly label the criminal a psychopath. When something bad is committed we often seek a reason or a label. The psychiatric evaluations of the Norwegian killer Anders Breivik in 2013 are a case in point; Breivik was never diagnosed as being psychopathic but was initially deemed schizophrenic, psychotic, and criminally insane. Breivik was also diagnosed as exhibiting blunted affect and a severe lack of empathy. In the first instance of evaluation Breivik was diagnosed as suffering from paranoid-schizophrenia — psychotic at the time of the crimes and during psychiatric evaluation. However, a second evaluation concluded that Breivik was not psychotic at the time of his crimes, nor during evaluation. In this second instance he was diagnosed as having antisocial personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder instead of paranoid schizophrenia. During the trial, experts testified that it was highly unlikely that Breivik was schizophrenic. It was also testified that Breivik was not delusional or psychotic. This shift of