INTRDUCTION

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

—Kevin Spacey, The Usual Suspects

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the world is in a bit of a fucking mess right now. Our political leaders continually fail us. Our business executives fail us. Our religious leaders fail us.

Almost every day we hear about people in positions of business, political, and religious authority, who should know better, doing horrific things.

There’s an old saying: “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

What if we have it backwards? Maybe it should be: “The corrupt seek power; the absolutely corrupt seek absolute power.”

The central premise of this book is simple: The world is in a fucking mess because we have allowed too many psychopaths to rise to positions of power. The cultures of many of our largest organizations—business, political, military, law enforcement, and religious—attract and reward psychopaths. They prosper and rise into management positions, where they contribute to increasing the toxicity of the organizational culture. Combined, these toxic organizations pose an extraordinary danger to society. We are facing an epidemic of psychopaths.

Psychiatrists estimate that psychopaths (or, as they prefer to call them, people suffering from Antisocial Personality Disorder) make up something like 1 to 2 percent of the adult population—or maybe even as high as 4 percent.¹

The condition seems two or three times more prevalent in men than women.²

Despite what Hollywood might have told you, psychopaths (that’s what I’m going to continue to call them for the sake of brevity, and it includes sociopaths) aren’t all serial killers. Psychopathy is actually much more common than most people assume.³

In fact, according to criminal psychologist Robert Hare, only about 15 to 20 percent of a typical prison population are psychopaths.⁴

So, if psychopaths aren’t all serial killers or criminals, what are they?

Let’s start with a definition. According to the FBI:

Many psychopaths exhibit a profound lack of remorse for their aggressive actions, both violent and nonviolent, along with a corresponding lack of empathy for their victims. This central psychopathic concept enables them to act in a cold-blooded manner, using those around them as pawns to achieve goals and satisfy needs and desires, whether sexual, financial, physical, or emotional. Most psychopaths are grandiose, selfish sensation seekers who lack a moral compass—a conscience—and go through life taking what they want. They do not accept responsibility for their actions and find a way to shift the blame to someone or something else.⁵

In this book, I’m going to make the case that many of the behaviors that come naturally to psychopaths—the lack of empathy combined with a high appetite for risk, lack of conscience, the ability to fake charisma, and an intense desire for power—make them attractive to organizations. Think about your colleagues and managers for a second—do you know anyone who fits that description?

I believe a relatively small group of these “garden-variety psychopaths” end up in management positions in many of our business, religious and political organizations. Most of them, however, do not. They lack the IQ or the motivation to climb the ladder. In some cases, they have both of those but burn too many bridges early on in their careers, scaring people with their intense raw ambition and cold glare.

Martha Stout from the Harvard Medical School, author of The Sociopath Next Door, suggests “most of them are obscure people, and limited to dominating their young children, or a depressed spouse, or perhaps a few employees or coworkers.”⁶

Some, however, have the right combination to climb the ladder. Enough, I believe, to cause society enormous problems.

Reasonable people can do bad things from time to time. We can be cruel, insensitive, selfish and thoughtless. But nature has imbued us with a degree of empathy. We feel remorse, guilt, and regret when we hurt others. While we will all do horrible things from time to time, we don’t go out of our way to do them, and we feel bad afterward. Psychopaths, on the other hand, have no conscience. They don’t feel bad; they feel like winners. And they try to convince the rest of the world that if we want to be winners, too, we should be more like them.

One percent of the adult population of the United States is roughly two million people—two million psychopaths. A percentage of them are undoubtedly already in the prison system. Some are sitting at home, drinking beer while their wives go out to work. Some might be sitting in the big corner office in your building. Some might be working inside the White House, Downing Street, the Vatican, and the Pentagon.

Collectively they wield enormous power over society. If I am right, we need to build systems that protect us from their worst instincts.

Throughout the book, I’m going to examine psychopaths in more detail and explore the various ways that different kinds of organizations develop toxic cultures.

In the final chapter, I suggest a range of things we can all do to stop psychopaths from ruining our organizations and society and how we can protect ourselves from them as individuals.

Psychopaths, like redheads, have probably always been with us. But modern capitalism has given them access to more power than they might have had two hundred years ago.

I want to convince you that this epidemic of psychopaths in positions of power is the biggest problem facing the world today. It’s bigger and more pressing that climate change, Brexit, wars, and offshore tax shelters—because these issues are all caused, or worsened, by the fact that unchecked psychopaths are in power. Remove the psychopaths from the world’s boardroom tables and we could probably solve all of these issues a lot faster.

For the sake of society we need to better understand them, their role in society, and how to stop them from exercising their worst impulses.