CHAPTER TEN CHAPTER TEN
They say that going to India is an assault on the senses. But they’re wrong. It is an assault on the soul.
Senses are collateral damage.
The road from New Delhi to Dharamsala takes 16 hours by taxi and swoops, swooshes, teeters and judders through three provinces – Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and the Punjab – before rollercoastering through the clouds into Himachal Pradesh.
I have no choice but to take it.
At this time of year, October, the baby monsoons make air travel unreliable and I need to be in McLeod Ganj, the Narnian headquarters of the Dalai Lama’s Central Tibetan Administration, by eight o’clock tomorrow morning. There I will meet a monk who, for the next couple of weeks, shall be my guide in a land where magicians are reputed to prowl: reclusive tsanbalas who meditate high in the mountains and who have psychological powers the rest of us can only dream of.
I have come to test them – to see whether their renowned capacity for emotional detachment is greater than that of psychopaths.
I reckon it’ll go to penalties.
I’m off to a funny old start. At the airport in Delhi the taxi driver holding the ‘Kevin Dutton’ sign isn’t who I’m expecting.
‘Morning, mate, welcome to India!’ crows a familiar voice as soon as I come through arrivals.
I stop dead.
‘What the . . .?’
Andy laughs.
‘It was all sorted weeks ago,’ he says. ‘That missus of yours can certainly keep a secret!’
Over in the car park is a gleaming Toyota Hilux with a full tank of petrol and a route map on the dashboard. I sling my rucksack on to the backseat and Andy steers us out into the vehicular bear pit of New Delhi. Cars, rickshaws, lorries, buses and motorbikes come at us from all angles.
But he couldn’t give a damn.
‘I hope you took out insurance on this thing,’ he smiles, one arm out the window, the other fiddling around with the CD player.
‘Yeah, that’s a point,’ I say. ‘How did you . . .?’
‘There’s some beers under your seat,’ he says. ‘Why don’t you have one and just chill out, for fuck’s sake?’
The sun rises and we zoom north.
I snap open the top of an ice-cold Kingfisher and take a swig.
For once, I could’ve kissed the old bastard.
It’s just after eight as we enter the town of Panipat on the National Highway – part of the Grand Trunk Road, which, for over two millennia, has linked the easternmost and westernmost regions of the Indian subcontinent, from Chittagong in Bangladesh in the east to Kabul in the west.
Just like anywhere else at that time of the morning, it’s rush hour. Roadside shanties selling everything from silks to car tyres to electrical goods are pushing up the shutters and traffic is at a standstill.
Andy has a slug of Diet Coke and rips open a Mars bar.
‘Nice to see the Peckham diet of the mid-Seventies is still going strong then,’ I say.
He smiles.
‘Yours is in the glove compartment,’ he mumbles.
I open it up and find a small jar of Jelly Brains. But they’ve all coagulated into one big Albert Einstein Jelly Brain in the heat and it’s stuck fast. I’d need a Black and Decker to get it out.
‘When I was in the Regiment I had a mate called Clive,’ Andy says, as a cow mopes past the window and peers in at us. ‘Clive had just moved into a new flat in town and everything was perfect except for one thing: his neighbour, a taxi driver, who got up at the crack of dawn and sang very loudly in the shower. Normally this wouldn’t have been a problem. But the walls in the flat were like paper. And the neighbour – well, he wasn’t exactly going to get a record deal any time soon.
‘To make matters worse, the taxi driver seemed like a bit of a drama queen. Already, in the fortnight or so since Clive had been living there, he’d twice heard him lose his temper in the flat – and on both occasions it’d been over something trivial. So if it was a quiet life you were after – and Clive was like that: he came from Woking and was into Sibelius – knocking on someone’s door and telling him to shut up probably wasn’t a good idea. But on the other hand, things clearly couldn’t go on the way they were. So, what to do? Well, what happened was this:
Very cleverly, Clive made use of the fact that by this stage he hadn’t actually met his neighbour face-to-face. Yep, he certainly knew what he looked like – had seen him through the window a couple of times – but his neighbour had never seen him.
So one evening, what Clive does is this. He notes down the guy’s number plate in the car park outside and then, a couple of days later, gets me to flag him down outside Hereford train station.
We get talking.
‘My mate’s just moved into a new apartment,’ I say.
‘Oh yeah?’ says the driver. ‘How is it?’
‘Well,’ I say, ‘it’s great except for one thing. His next-door neighbour has got the worst voice he’s ever heard in his life. Can’t sing for shit, apparently. But you know what? At half five every morning, at the top of his voice, he sings – or rather squeals – in the shower!
‘Can you believe that? To be honest, it doesn’t really bother him all that much. He quite likes Queen and George Michael as it happens. Plus, my mate reckons this neighbour’s actually quite a nice bloke.
‘But hey, maybe he should say something anyway. You know, for the neighbour’s benefit. Just in case someone else puts in an official complaint. What do you think?’
There’s a pause.
‘Hmmh,’ says the driver, a bit uneasy. ‘Yeah . . . maybe he should.’
He checks his rear-view mirror.
‘By the way, where did you say you were going again?’
‘I’m actually going round my mate’s now,’ I say. ‘Asquith Court. Number 7.’
‘You know what, Kev? The rest of the journey passed in silence, mate. As did the mornings round at Clive’s from then on!’
Throughout this book we’ve touched at various points on the origins and function of two very important parts of the brain. On the one hand, the amygdala, the ancient emotional control tower which splits the world into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ experiences based on primeval survival values. And on the other, the prefrontal cortex: the newer, more diplomatic, more metrosexual voice of reason.
During the course of our evolutionary history, natural selection, as we’ve seen, began to install phone lines between these two neural ministries. And channels of communication were opened.
Slowly, as the millennia rolled by and language, consciousness and society began showing up to the party, the Department of Emotion started talking to the Department of Rational Thought and a political sea change began to take place in our brains. Our problem-solving and decision-making strategies became markedly less ‘autocratic’ and decidedly more ‘democratic’.
Back in the day, many was the occasion when we simply had to fight; when thinking about fighting would have entailed that we thought no more. But, over time, our priorities changed. And after millions of years of ruling the brain by itself, precedence, all of a sudden, was forced to share power with preference.
‘Good and bad’ and ‘better and worse’ formed a coalition.
If you need any convincing that natural selection nailed it and that this was the right move, then the story that Andy just told about his mate Clive and the taxi driver is all the evidence you need.
Understandably, Clive was getting a bit pissed off with the early morning Bohemian Crapsodies scaramouching through his bedroom wall. But if the bottom line was a quiet, hassle-free life in his new apartment, then venting his anger in what would undoubtedly have been a volatile confrontation wasn’t, perhaps, the best way of going about it.
OK, on the one hand the singing might’ve stopped. But, on the other, who knows what might have come crashing through the bedroom wall in its place. Instead what he did – decoupling the emotion from his behaviour – was the most effective strategy.
The singing did stop.
The taxi driver saved face.
And no harm was done.
Emotions are great. They save our lives; make us fall in love; forge lifelong friendships; and help us appreciate great works of art.
But they can also be a pain in the arse.
Especially the big hairy ones like anger.
‘You know, Kev, I’ve been angry for at least half of my life,’ Andy tells me as we grind to a halt in a sea of cows and cars.
‘For years, I hated everyone and everything, mostly because I didn’t have what they had. As you know, I spent the first fifteen years of my life on a housing estate in South London. But, as I’m sure you’re aware, despite what Only Fools and Horses would have you believe, Peckham was never full of Del Boy cheeky chappies having a laugh on the market and then going off to drink cocktails in the pub. It was full of unemployment, drugs, guns, and mindless vandalism just to fill in the time.
‘I didn’t do the drugs or the guns. That was a mug’s game. But I did do my fair share of vandalism. I felt angry with people who had shiny new cars or spotless motorbikes so I used to kick them in just because I could. I’d vandalize people’s shops and mess up their goods – simply because they had stuff, and I didn’t.
‘I can also remember being very angry with my teachers. I went to nine different schools between the ages of five and fifteen, so there were a lot of them to be angry with. I was angry that they kept putting me in remedial classes. But then again, I wasn’t exactly doing anything to get out of them.
‘In fact, I used to like being bottom of the class. It gave me yet another reason to feel angry. I liked the feeling of being a minority, the feeling that everyone was against me. It was like being part of my own select club. It made me feel that my anger was justified and that I was entitled to do things that others couldn’t, or shouldn’t, do.
‘There was only one problem. Not everyone saw things the same way and by the age of fifteen I ended up in juvenile detention for destroying a flat full of nice shiny things that someone else had worked really hard for. Sadly, my time in borstal didn’t teach me anything. In fact, it just made me even more angry. As I saw it, the reason I was in there was no fault of my own. It was everyone else’s. Borstal’s short, sharp shock treatment just reinforced the fact that no one cared about me.’
‘And if they didn’t care, then why should you, right?’ I say, turning up the air conditioning.
‘Exactly,’ says Andy. ‘But there was one good thing about borstal, Kev. It was there, as you know, mate, that I was recruited into the army. OK, I didn’t get to be a helicopter pilot like the sergeant said I would. I was packed off to join the infantry. But, on the other hand, things pretty soon turned out to be even better than I’d imagined.’
‘Go on,’ I say.
’Well,’ Andy continues, ‘I soon found out that the army liked its young men to be angry. And when I found that out, mate, I got to like the army. Big time!
‘I especially liked milling. Milling is where you’re thrown into the middle of a human boxing ring and told to fight the other 16-year-old lad thrown in there with you. Each fight lasts for two minutes – or until one of you drops. Milling was designed to get the blood up. To make you angry. There’s no technique. No style. You just get in there and try to drop your opponent before he does the same to you. I couldn’t believe my luck. I was actually somewhere where they wanted me to be angry.’
‘And, what’s more, they were paying you for it!’ I say.
‘A perfect storm!’ says Andy. ‘And that’s not all they were paying me for. They also paid me to stick a steel bayonet on to the end of my rifle, think about all the people who had ever made me angry, and then charge towards a sandbag with it, screaming at the top of my voice. Again and again, I would ram home that lump of steel into all my teachers, all the borstal staff . . . into anyone I could think of who’d ever had more in their lives than me.
‘It was great. Here was a talent I had plenty of! For once in my life, I could do something right.’
‘Must’ve felt very liberating,’ I say, as the cows tinkle off into a siding and we get on the move again. ‘Finally, you were on your way. And all the previous shit had been worth it.’
Andy nods. ‘That’s exactly how it felt,’ he says. ‘And it got better! After my year as a boy soldier, I was sent to my infantry battalion. The guys there were all pretty similar to me and we got on like a house on fire.
‘They were angry, too. But, unlike me, their anger seemed to be directed more towards the system than individuals. They were pissed off with bigger things. Like the government, for instance. And the army itself, for that matter. And you know what, Kev? I could see why. Because at the time, as a hard-as-nails baby infantryman, I just couldn’t get my head around the army’s attitude towards the aggression that they instilled in us soldiers.
‘They trained us to be aggressive. To get really angry and fight. But then, when that anger spilled out into civilian life – as it inevitably would in garrison towns up and down the country on a Saturday night – they seemed surprised and we’d get severely punished for it. I mean, what was all that about? They paid us to fight, didn’t they?
‘One Saturday night I was in the thick of it myself. The pubs had shut and a fight broke out between the squaddies and the townies.’
‘No!’ I say. ‘Really?’
Andy chuckles. ‘Yeah, funny that,’ he says. ‘Anyway, someone called the military police and they came down in their vans to arrest us. But somehow – can’t remember how – I managed to escape. So all of a sudden there I am running down this cobblestone road in the middle of the night being chased by a big fat military copper who I know doesn’t stand a chance in hell of catching me, with him screaming orders at me to stop.’
Andy pauses, a bemused smile etched across his face.
‘And you know what I did, Kev?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘You stopped.’
He looks at me in amazement.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘I did. But you know why? Not because he was ordering me to. Or because I knew I’d done something wrong. It was nothing like that.
‘The reason I stopped was because my anger towards him and the system that he represented got the better of me and I decided that right there and then might be a good moment to have a go back. You know, hurl a few insults at him, allow him to get up close, then fuck off into the distance leaving him playing catch-up again.’
‘And?’ I say. ‘What happened?’
Andy shrugs.
‘Well, it was a good plan in theory,’ he says. ‘But in practice, I never got the chance.’
‘Why?’ I ask.
‘Because, out of frustration, the fucker goes and lobs his truncheon at me, and as I turn round, it cracks me right across the side of the head and knocks me spark out!’
We both laugh.
‘Mind you,’ Andy continues, ‘then the boot really was on the other foot and it was the Royal Military Police’s turn to take their anger out on me. I got a good kicking and they carted me off.’
‘So what was the turning point, then?’ I ask, as the road opens up again and the kaleidoscopic shanties give way to hot green fields. ‘When did you change – assuming you have, that is?’
Andy smiles.
‘Actually, Kev,’ he says, ‘the turning point came when I joined the Regiment. By the time I’d reached my mid-twenties and had been promoted to sergeant, I began to wonder if my anger might be put to better use elsewhere. And, I mean, the SAS fought all the time, didn’t they? But how wrong I was! Once I’d passed Selection I very quickly discovered that there was no place at all for anger in the Regiment. None whatsoever. The vibe was completely different to that in the regular army.
‘All of a sudden I found myself in a much calmer, much less aggressive environment. Nobody seemed to need to shout or chest-poke any more to get things done. People treated each other more respectfully. Even called each other by their first names.
‘A lot of the army’s rules and regulations had disappeared, too. For a start, there was no marching. And no uniform either. Most of the men were in jeans. This was a whole new world for me. And one that I had to learn to adapt to fast.’
‘So what was the main difference?’ I ask. ‘You were talking about a different “vibe” just now. But can you put your finger on what that vibe was, exactly?’
‘Easy!’ says Andy. ‘In a nutshell, the focus was less about anger, and more about self-control. There was enough violence going on in the Regiment as part of the job anyway. They didn’t need you to work yourself up until you were red in the face and had steam coming out your ears in order to get yourself ready for it. They needed you to be able to control your aggression, so that you could take your time to think, assess a situation, and be ready to take whatever action was necessary. Regiment guys never got into fights downtown on a Saturday night, for instance. If you were caught fighting or drink-driving you were RTU’d – Returned to Unit. Kicked out of the SAS.
‘Besides, Regiment guys were more interested in trying to pull in bars than fight in them! But there were other, more subtle differences. “The enemy”, for example, were no longer called, or even viewed, as the enemy. Like I’ve said before, they were simply called “players”. As we were, too.
‘And our “tasks” weren’t called tasks any more, either. They were called “jobs”. Or “the business”. You see, in the Regiment, Kev, the concept of “right” and “wrong” is a little more vague. In short, my new world couldn’t have been more different to my old one. It was hard to believe both were part of the same army. In my new world, I discovered, being “kinetic” – a wonderful military understatement that means blowing things up and killing people – didn’t require anger. It required something else entirely. It required being cool, calm and collected.
‘It didn’t take long for the penny to drop. And when it did, it was quite a shock. The message was crystal clear: I didn’t need anger any more. It certainly wasn’t going to make me an efficient Special Forces soldier. It was just going to get in the way. So, bit by bit, I learned to bin the old habits I’d learned in the regular army – the ones that had served me well up to then – and take a different approach on jobs. Tone it down a notch. Quite a few notches, in fact.
‘I mean, anger wasn’t going to help you blend in as an undercover operator in Derry, was it? Long hair and cheap trainers might. But getting sparked up definitely wouldn’t. In order to carry out the business and stay alive as an undercover operator, Kev, you have to become the grey man. And the thing about grey men is: they don’t get angry.’
Andy’s account of life in the SAS and how it differed from life in the regular army is a good example of how sometimes, when you focus on the bottom line – when you weigh up what you really want out of a situation – you can get there much more efficiently by surgically removing emotion from the equation.
That’s what his mate Clive did with the taxi driver – an SAS sting operation if ever there was one! – and the devilish wheeze went off without a hitch. But if Clive had got ‘sparked up’ on that ‘job’, if his blood had started to boil when the ‘business’ became ‘kinetic’, chances are things might’ve turned out rather differently.
Yes, there’s a time and a place for anger. There’s no denying that. And in the ‘old world’ Andy came from, as he said, it served him well. But in the world of Special Forces it’s a dangerous and unnecessary impediment to cool and clinical judgement – whether you’re dealing with hijackers, insurgents . . . or karaoke cabbies.
‘You know, legend has it that there’s a little office on the top floor of Harrods in which a man sits – feet up all day – doing crosswords, making pot-noodles and watching television,’ I say, as the road gets hotter and dustier and we pass people sleeping in the middle of it – sprawled out in rags in the grime and the dirt and the rubble. ‘He sits there all day every day in jeans and a T-shirt and gets paid to do absolutely nothing.
‘Well, almost nothing. On a desk in the corner sits a telephone. The telephone doesn’t ring all that often. Once or twice a month, at most. But when it does the man puts down his crossword, changes out of his jeans and T-shirt, slips on the Harrods uniform that he keeps in a little suit-cover behind the door, and descends to the shop floor of whichever department has summoned him. There, the following ritual ensues:
MANAGER: Smithers, it was you that was responsible for ordering Professor Blatherwick’s exorbitantly over-priced Greco-Roman figurine, was it not?
SMITHERS: Yes, sir.
MANAGER: Then could you possibly explain to Professor Blatherwick here how it has come to acquire this hairline crack along the base?
SMITHERS: No, sir. I’m afraid I couldn’t.
MANAGER: Thank you, Smithers. You’re fired. Gather up your things right away and get out!
SMITHERS: Very good, sir.
At which point Smithers, suitably admonished in front of the irate customer the manager has been unable to appease, slopes off dejectedly to the elevator, heads back upstairs to his little office on the top floor, changes back into his jeans and T-shirt, and resumes his crossword until the next time the telephone rings . . .
MANAGER: Smithers, it was you that was responsible for delivering Lord Farqhuar Pilkington-Bland’s ludicrously expensive white truffles, was it not . . .?
‘Such is the nature of the cushiest job in the world. The man who gets paid to get fired!’
It’s noon, and we’ve stopped off at a roadside café a few miles north of the city of Karnal. It’s a pleasant enough spot with toilets out back you can smell in the forecourt out front and a zoo’s supply of lizards on the walls.
Much to the surprise of the waiters, Andy endeavours to catch one – to demonstrate to me that this particular variety has an evolutionary trick up its sleeve: when captured, it jettisons its tail.
Either it doesn’t feel especially threatened or David Attenborough is having a bad one because a minute or so later he releases it, tail intact.
We sit in the shade and order dhal, chapathis and water. When it comes, it’s bloody good.
‘You know, we were talking back there about anger being a barrier to clear thinking,’ says Andy tucking in, ‘but it’s not the only emotion that gets in the way. You can become paralysed by fear, too. In the Regiment, to be honest, I never really saw it – there’s more than just the one psychopath in there, you know. But in the regular army it’s actually pretty common: young lads so shit-scared they can’t even pick up a weapon.’
‘Isn’t that natural, though?’ I ask. ‘You go from Basildon to Basra in pretty much the blink of an eye and the next thing you know you’ve got bullets whistling past your ear?’
Andy nods. ‘Absolutely,’ he says. ‘And I’m not saying it isn’t. All I’m saying is that just as there’s no place for anger in Special Forces, there’s no place for fear either. Fear is just another obstacle that gets in the way of the job. And that doesn’t just go for Special Forces, of course. It goes for everyone. I heard a great story once – you couldn’t get a better example. Can’t remember where it was: Australia maybe? But anyway, a bus pulls over to pick up a couple of pedestrians:
No sooner do the doors open than one of them – a big old boy with tattoos, you know, the works – begins effing and blinding at the driver. The reason? He and his girlfriend won’t cough up the fare and the driver isn’t having it.
The clock starts ticking.
The traffic starts building.
And the standoff begins to escalate.
Then up steps one of the passengers.
‘Look, mate,’ he says in a calm, reasoned voice. ‘It’s not the driver’s fault you don’t have the money. So why don’t you just back off, yeah?’
The dickhead stops in his tracks. He looks at the passenger. Then at his girlfriend. And then back at the passenger. You could hear a pin drop.
‘You wanna fucking ’ave some, you cunt?’ he snarls.
The passenger stands his ground.
‘Er, actually, yes I do,’ he replies coolly. ‘But not here, eh? If we’re going to have a fight, let’s do it properly. Outside, on the street.’
The bus holds its breath as he gestures towards the door. The Terminator and his girlfriend can’t believe it. They look at each other – and then, ready to rumble, step out on to the sidewalk.
The passenger turns to the driver.
‘I’d shut the doors now if I were you, mate,’ he says. ‘Let’s hit the road!’
In the finance industry they have something called the Sharpe Ratio. Put simply, the Sharpe Ratio is an equation which tells you whether the return on the end of a particular investment is worth the amount of risk associated with it.
Imagine if we had something similar for the dilemmas of everyday life!
Certainly, if we did, then for the passenger in Andy’s story the numbers would’ve stacked up. Here was a situation that entailed high risk (he could’ve got the shit kicked out of him) for large gain (a peaceful resolution to what was increasingly becoming a rather nasty situation). And, in true GOOD PSYCHOPATH style, he decided to play the odds.
Luckily, he came out on top. But there’s no denying that his ice-cool intervention took balls.
Do the opposite, in contrast – take a high risk for a small gain – and you’re in different territory altogether. That doesn’t take balls, it takes something else entirely: recklessness.
Which is what BAD PSYCHOPATHS do.
Their fearlessness dials are permanently set on max – which means that they lack the cognitive flexibility necessary for intelligent shot selection. They can’t differentiate when to go for the backhand down the line and when to play safe. The result, as we know, is that they always go for the backhand down the line. And most of the time they end up hitting it out.
Of course, not going for your shots when you should go for them is equally self-defeating – and that’s where the rest of us come in.
Having the bottle of the GOOD PSYCHOPATH to hit the outright winner when necessary, to take the emotion out of the decision-making in the right context, is a personality characteristic that many aspire to but relatively few possess.
The key, as always, is CONTEXT.
THE SHARPE RATIO
Several years ago – talking of Sharpe Ratios – an American study looked at the way we make financial decisions. It illustrates this point perfectly. The study took the form of a gambling game consisting of twenty rounds. At the beginning of the game each participant was handed a roll of $20 bills and, at the start of each new round, was asked whether they were prepared to risk the princely sum of $1 on the toss of a coin.
A loss incurred the penalty of that $1 invested, but a win swelled the coffers by a cool $2.50.
Now, it doesn’t take a genius to work out the winning formula.
Logically, as one of the authors pointed out, the right thing to do is to invest in every round. But logic, as someone else once rather sagely pointed out, is often in the eye of the logician.
Prior to the experiment participants were divided up into two groups. Those with lesions – damage – to the emotion areas of their brains. And those with lesions in other areas.
Now if, as neuroeconomic theory suggests, it’s an overdose of emotion that is responsible for the unnecessary risk aversion, then, according to the dynamics of the game, those participants with the ‘right’ kind of lesions (in other words, those in the first group) should clean up. They should outperform those with the ‘wrong’ kind – the kind unrelated to emotion (those in the second group).
Surprise surprise, that was exactly how the study shook down. As the game unfolded, ‘normal’ participants began declining the opportunity to gamble, preferring instead to conserve their winnings.
But participants with problems in their brains’ emotion neighbourhoods – participants whose brains were not equipped with the bobby-on-the-beat, everyday emotional police force that the rest of us take for granted – kept right on going. And ended the game doing quite a bit better than their thriftier, more cautious competitors.
‘This may be the first study,’ claims one of the authors, ‘that documents a situation in which people with brain damage make better financial decisions than normal people.’
His colleague goes one better:
‘Research needs to determine the circumstances in which emotions can be useful or disruptive, [in which they] can be a guide for human behaviour . . . The most successful stockbrokers might plausibly be termed “functional psychopaths” – individuals who are either more adept at controlling their emotions or who do not experience them to the same degree of intensity as others.’
‘Many CEOs,’ adds another author, ‘and many top lawyers might also share this trait.’
It’s late afternoon, and at Jalandhar we branch north off the Grand Trunk Road and head for the Himalayas. The sky fries in a pale blue oil and entire families perch on the back of dodgy-looking mopeds as they weave in and out of traffic like clapped-out human toast racks.
This is the Punjab where the roads are smooth and tarmacked (relatively speaking, at least); where the mountains start getting their act together; and where everybody wears the brightest colours imaginable.
Even the elephants are painted.
‘You know,’ says Andy, swerving suddenly to avoid a crateful of chickens that’s fallen off the wagon in front, ‘it’s funny you should mention that because I was going to tell you about something very similar that also happened in America a few years back – an experiment that compared financial decision-making with military decision-making.
‘You’ve heard of the United States Marine Corps, right? Well, the US Marine Corps is twice the size of the British Army. In fact it’s bigger than the army, navy and RAF put together . . . but is commanded by way fewer generals than we have. Which means that not only do these generals need to have big brains, they also need to have big shoulders. Because when the shit hits the fan, there are only so many uniforms it can land on. ‘Anyway, in the late Nineties, to try to cut down on their dry-cleaning bills, the Marine Corps head shed decided to make a little trip to Wall Street to see what they could learn from stockbrokers about making decisions. You see, it’d suddenly dawned on some bright spark that the City and the battlefield have more in common than you might think. For a start, stockbrokers work in a continuous state of confusion, rumour and conflicting information, accompanied, all the time, by the constant risk of things going tits-up big style – exactly the same conditions that any general experiences when they’re commanding their forces in battle.
‘Then there’s the question of battle plans. Stockbrokers always have a plan of action for the day’s trades. They plan to win – obviously – and to make a shedload of money in the process, so they can shell out even more of the green stuff on hair gel and Rolexes.
‘But the problem for these slicked-backed stockbrokers is that all the other slicked-back stockbrokers are trying to do the same – just as the problem for our crew-cut generals is that whoever they’re up against in Iraq, Afghanistan or wherever is trying to mess up their plans. So, could these cigar-chomping Gordon Gekkos offer them any tips? Turned out the answer was yes! The main thing the generals were interested in was how the stockbrokers made decisions so quickly.
‘You’ve got your double-decker-high digital displays; you’ve got computer screens by the hundred displaying rolling share prices; you’ve got all the shouting and hand signals coming at you from across the floor . . . how the fuck were they able to download into their heads the shitload of data bombarding them from every corner and then, within just a matter of seconds, make instant decisions, instant trades, and risk hundreds of millions of dollars? If the generals could work that out, they reckoned, they really would have it made – because it was exactly how they fought their battles.
‘We’ve all seen the war films with the “situation room” – windowless spaces with dozens of bodies hunched over computer screens showing everything from aircraft bombings to naval positions, everyone punching keyboards and rabbiting away on radios as they communicate with the guys in the battle space. In the middle of it all is the general. The one big body in the one big chair – taking no notice of any of the surrounding mayhem but instead just absorbing the data.
‘The parallels were certainly there, all right. But what if the two of them actually went head to head? What if the stockbrokers could somehow compete with the generals? Play them at their own game? Who’d come out on top?
‘To find out, two separate situation rooms were set up into which were fed identical descriptions of battle information. The information came from a simulated military exercise in which the battle space changed interactively according to strategy – you know, in line with the decisions that were made by the occupants of each room.
‘In one room were the generals. In the other, yep, were the stockbrokers. Would the Gekkos beat the Eisenhowers on their home turf? Or would military savvy and combat zone experience win the day?
‘The answer blew everyone out of the water, mate!
‘Both groups won their battle. But guess what: it was the stockbrokers, not the generals, who ended up with way more of their troops still alive and their ships and aircraft intact.
‘Why? Well, when they looked into it, it turned out that there was one humongous difference between the way the generals were making decisions and the way the stockbrokers were making them. The generals were “fighting”. But the stockbrokers weren’t.
‘Far from taking things personally, the stockbrokers were just solving equations. They were reading the data, crunching the numbers, getting information dumps, then making up their minds, quickly and coolly, purely on the basis of that. There was no emotion behind their decisions. Just cold, hard maths.
‘The generals, on the other hand, were also reading the data. But they were seeing it through compassion-tinted glasses: their feelings were coming into play. With their wealth of conflict experience, they knew first hand the implications that any wrong decision might have for a young man or woman in the battle space. Yes, there will always be lives lost in combat. Unfortunately, that’s the nature of war.
‘But because the generals belonged to the same tribe as the men and women who were fighting, at the back of their minds all the time was damage limitation. They were constantly doing their best to keep casualties to a minimum. Which was honourable and commendable and all that. But also a bit of a problem. Because by doing so, by that slight hesitation in trying to work out an alternative, possibly safer way of getting the job done, they were actually costing more lives, more ships and more aircraft than if they’d gone with the emotionless option.
‘It was a bit like I was telling you about rugby that time. Go into a tackle not fully committed and you put yourself at greater risk of injury. But if you go into it a hundred per cent then you’re more likely to come out of it OK.
‘Which is not to say that empathy isn’t good. Of course it is. But it does have a downside – you start feeling it when you can least afford it. And those warm, buzzy feelings can cost lives rather than save them.
‘Emotion doesn’t cut it if it’s “on” all the time. But if you’ve got a switch to turn it on and off – that’s when it can really work for you.’
Andy’s observations couldn’t come at a more opportune time in psychopathy research. For years it had been thought that psychopaths just didn’t experience empathy, just didn’t have the necessary operating systems installed in their brains to support it.
But a recent study has changed all that and suggests – exactly in line with Andy’s recommendations – that, rather than being incapable of experiencing empathy, psychopaths in fact have an empathy ‘switch’ that they can turn on and off at will . . . and the default setting just happens to be programmed to ‘off’.
The study in question, I tell him, as the air gets clearer, the roads get higher and narrower, and twilight settles like a dust blanket over the foothills of the Himalayas, stuck a bunch of criminal psychopaths in a brain scanner while showing them a series of video clips featuring a pair of hands touching.
The hands touched in four different kinds of ways:
•One hand stroked the other hand affectionately.
•One hand inflicted pain on the other hand.
•One hand ‘rejected’ or pushed the other hand away.
•The two hands made contact in a neutral way.
The study was divided into two parts.
In the first part, the psychopaths were simply shown the clips without any prior instructions and their brain activity was recorded.
But in the second part things got more interesting.
This time, the psychopaths were shown the clips again but were specifically asked beforehand to try to put themselves in the position of the other person and to feel what they might be feeling. To empathize with them, in other words.
The results were extraordinary.
When the researchers examined the psychopaths’ brain scans from the first part of the study they drew a blank. Compared with the brain activity in an equivalent group of non-psychopaths who watched one hand inflicting pain on the other, the psychopaths’ brains just shrugged.
Activity in their mirror neuron system – a network of brain cells specifically equipped to mimic or ‘mirror’ the actions and feelings of others – was way down on the level observed in normal people. But when it came to the scans from the second part of the study, where the psychopaths were explicitly requested to put themselves in the other person’s shoes, it was a completely different story. This time around there was no significant difference in levels of mirror neuron activity between their brains and anyone else’s.
‘So when we want to, then, we can feel.’ Andy smiles. ‘The question is: do we want to?’
A couple of years ago, Andy introduced me to a Japanese Special Forces sergeant by the name of Yoshiji Hayashi (Japanese for Andy McNab!). Hayashi had been one of the first off the helicopter in the city of Nihonmatsu, evacuating men, women and children who’d been exposed to radiation from the Fukushima nuclear plant. Like Andy, and certain other Special Forces soldiers I know, he had a certain ‘something’ about him.
A vibe.
A confidence.
A psychological force field of limitless possibility: as if his brain was some kind of neural tax haven, eerily exempt from the standard rate of everyday emotional duty.
‘I was just going through the motions,’ Hayashi told me. ‘Don’t misunderstand. It wasn’t that I didn’t care. It was that, at the time, I couldn’t afford to care. My training didn’t let me. If I had thought: “These are my people. These are my brothers and sisters. Look what has happened to them . . .” then maybe I couldn’t have done it.
‘Yes, people are scared. People are screaming. People are in pain. But you just deal with it. You have to. You kind of switch yourself off inside. And go on to autopilot. You think about it later.’
I was reminded of Hayashi’s comments when, some time later, I interviewed a leading neurosurgeon. He told me:
I have no compassion for those whom I operate on. That is a luxury I simply cannot afford. In the theatre I am reborn: as a cold, heartless machine, totally at one with scalpel, drill and saw.
When you’re cutting loose and cheating death high above the snowline of the brain, feelings aren’t fit for purpose. Emotion is entropy and seriously bad for business. I’ve hunted it down to extinction over the years.
Sounds chilling, doesn’t it? Something that you might expect from a Special Forces soldier, maybe, but not from someone who’s going to saw open your skull and rummage around in your brain.
But think again!
Henry Marsh, a consultant neurosurgeon at St George’s Hospital in London, has a new book out entitled: Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery. Here is a passage from it:
It’s one of the painful truths about neurosurgery that you only get good at doing the really difficult cases if you get lots of practice, but that means making lots of mistakes at first and leaving a trail of injured patients behind you.
I suspect that you’ve got to be a bit of a psychopath to carry on, or at least have a pretty thick skin. If you’re a nice doctor, you’ll probably give up, let Nature take its course and stick to the simpler cases . . .
It is an experience unique to neurosurgeons, and one with which all neurosurgeons are familiar. With other surgical specialties, on the whole, the patients either die or recover, and do not linger on the ward for months.
It is not something we discuss among ourselves, other than perhaps to sigh and nod your head when you hear of such a case, but at least you know that somebody understands what you feel. A few seem to be able to shrug it off, but they are a minority. Perhaps they are the ones who will become great neurosurgeons.
Or perhaps they’re the ones who happen to know where the switch is!
‘Hey,’ I say to Andy, as we meander through the Kangra valley on our final approach to Dharamsala, ‘I’ve got a conundrum for you.’fn1
You are a commander in a war zone. You are about to send thousands of troops into a major battle.
You feel you have a good chance of winning the upcoming battle, but victory will come marginally more quickly and with lower casualties if the enemy is fooled by misinformation regarding your intentions.
At the same time you have a spy who has proved his loyalty to your cause many times, and been extremely effective at great personal risk. What if you feed him false information and send him into a location where you know he’ll be captured?
He will be horrendously tortured, mutilated and ultimately killed. But in the process he will divulge the false information in a convincing way that will strengthen your hand in the battle.
Do you send him?
We pull into a passing place to let a busload of tourists from McLeod Ganj – Upper Dharamsala or ‘Little Lhasa’ as they call it – come through.
Andy looks at me nonplussed.
‘Of course I would,’ he says. ‘Why wouldn’t I?’
‘Because he’s loyal and brilliant?’ I hazard.
Andy laughs.
‘Then all the more reason to use him!’ he says, swinging back out. ‘I mean, you’re not going to send someone who’s fucking dodgy, are you?’
OK. It’s highly unlikely that you’re ever going to be first off the helicopter in a nuclear disaster. Or operating way behind enemy lines deep inside the brain. Or sending a brilliant secret service agent to his death. And anyway, even if you do happen to find yourself in any of those positions, it’s highly likely that you’re already pretty adept at keeping your house of emotions in order.
But if you’re not a fan of heights, even the most insignificant of molehills really can seem like a mountain – and none of us go through life entirely on the flat. So next time you encounter a longer, steeper gradient than you might, perhaps, feel comfortable with, here are some tips to keep you moving forward and stop you looking down.
Kerry Packer, the Australian billionaire, was a familiar face in Las Vegas from the 1970s through the 1990s. The amount of money both won and lost by the media tycoon is legendary – and, when he was in town, casino bosses would regularly fall over themselves to offer him their hospitality. Meals, girls, suites, cars – you name it – were all laid on for him compliments of the house. And every whim, no matter how small, was catered for.
But there were occasions, unsurprisingly, when Packer’s star billing didn’t exactly endear him to his fellow guests. On one such occasion – at the Stratosphere Casino – a wealthy Texan oil-investor, irate at yet another show-stopping performance by the Australian high-roller, decided to have it out with him.
‘What makes you so special?’ he growled. ‘I’ve got $100 million in the bank.’
Packer smiled. ‘That’s great,’ he replied. ‘Tell you what – I’ll toss you for it.’
A hundred million dollars is a heck of a lot of money. And rolled up tightly in that mountain of dollar bills is a heck of a lot of emotion. People tend to get quite attached to what they’ve got in their bank accounts! So when the oil baron asked Packer what made him so special, he got his answer right there and then in no uncertain terms.
It wasn’t the fact that he was able to part with a hundred million dollars just like that. Actually, that was the easy part. No. It was the fact that he could part with a hundred million dollars’ worth of emotion just like that.
That’s a bit more difficult!
Now we’re not suggesting here that you go throwing away your life’s savings or anything like that.
‘Unless you want to throw it in our direction,’ Andy chimes in.
But what we are recommending is a very basic technique that’s as simple as it is powerful. Next time you find yourself stressing out over a difficult task, take a step back from it and ask yourself this:
•What would I do if I didn’t feel this way?
•What would I do if I didn’t give a damn what other people thought?
•What would I do if it just didn’t matter?
And then, when you’ve got the answers to those questions . . . just go ahead and do it. Simple! It’s not rocket science. Just do it.
When Steve Davis, the six-time world snooker champion, was asked the secret to being a great player, he replied: ‘Playing like it means nothing when it means everything.’
‘I mean, I’ve told you before, since when did you need to feel like doing something in order to actually do it?’ says Andy, nursing us steadily upwards into the sandalwood-scented night through the candlelit bazaars of Lower Dharamsala. ‘If that was the case most people wouldn’t even get out of bed in the morning. Did I ever feel like shooting anyone? No. To be honest, I would’ve been worried if I had. It’s just part and parcel of the job. Did I ever feel bad about shooting someone? No. Again, it’s just part of the job.
‘I heard a great little story once. Well, more a parable actually. A Muslim warrior goes to war against infidels. On the battlefield, an enemy soldier spits in his face. About to slay the soldier, the Muslim warrior stops and lets him go. Dumbfounded, the soldier asks him why.
‘Before you spat on me I was going to kill you in the name of Allah,’ replies the warrior. ‘But after you did I was going to kill you to preserve my ego.
‘That is a sin.’
‘You know, the way you feel isn’t real, is it?’ says Andy, coining, without realizing it, a half decent mantra. ‘I mean, it is but it isn’t . . . if you get where I’m coming from. It’s just different tribes of cells migrating about in different directions in your brain. It doesn’t actually mean anything. If you watch a film without the soundtrack it’s still the same film. The soundtrack doesn’t change what happens. That’s how I think about feelings.’
If Andy’s take on the relationship between emotion and experience – between the world within and the world without – seems familiar, then you’re not mistaken. It would, on the face of it, make a great mission statement for mindfulness – the living-in-the-moment mindset that we looked at in the previous chapter.
Lots of stuff goes on between our ears which bears absolutely no relation to reality whatsoever – and in many cases this can include the way we feel about things.
So keeping that in mind – remembering that it’s often ‘all in your head’ – is a great first step towards asking yourself the $100-million question ‘What if . . .?’ And then cracking on regardless.
When I was writing The Wisdom of Psychopaths, mindfulness expert Mark Williams gave me perhaps the best example of the power of this way of thinking that I’ve ever heard, when explaining how you might use it to help someone get over a fear of flying.
‘One approach,’ Mark elucidated, ‘might be to take the person on a plane and seat them next to a flying buff. You know, someone who absolutely loves being up in the air. Then, mid-flight, you hand them a pair of brain scans. One of them depicts a happy brain. The other one depicts an anxious brain. A brain in a state of terror:
‘This pair of pictures,’ you say, ‘represent exactly what’s going on in each of your heads right now, at this precise moment in time. So, obviously, because they’re so different, neither of them really means anything, do they? Neither of them predicts the physical state of the plane. That truth is in the engines. So, what do they signify? Well, what, in fact, they do represent is . . . precisely what you’re holding in your hands. A brain state. Nothing more. Nothing less.
‘What you’re feeling,’ you say to the anxious passenger, ‘is simply that. A feeling. A neural network, an electrical ensemble, a chemical configuration, caused by thoughts in your head that drift in and out, that come and go, like clouds.
‘Now, if you can bring yourself round to somehow accepting that fact; to dispassionately observe your inner virtual reality; to let the clouds float by, to let their shadows fall and linger where they please, and focus, instead, on what’s going on around you – each pixelated second of each ambient sound and sensation – then eventually, over time, your condition should begin to improve.’
The South African golfer Louis Oosthuizen won the 2010 British Open Championship against all the odds. He hadn’t had the best of build-ups to the tournament and most of the pundits fully expected him to surrender the four-shot lead that he was carrying into the final round.
But they were wrong. The Oosthuizen of the previous year might’ve choked. But not this one. And the reason was very simple. A small red spot, just below the base of his thumb. On his glove.
The spot was the brainchild of sports psychologist and performance coach Karl Morris. A short time earlier, Oosthuizen had paid Morris a visit to help him deal with intrusive thoughts of failure that had begun to creep into his mind at exactly the wrong moment – such as whenever he was about to play a crucial shot. And Morris came up with a very simple solution.
Whenever Oosthuizen was about to play a shot, he was to deliberately distract himself. He was to zone in exclusively on the dot on the base of his thumb and concentrate on that. At the critical moment, it was the dot, not the shot, that mattered. The golfing part of his brain knew all too well how to play the shot, thank you very much – without the rest of ‘him’ being there and screwing things up.
He won by seven strokes.
Morris’s ‘dot con’ solution to Oosthuizen’s psychological woes has a name in sports psychology. It’s called a process goal. A process goal is when a performer is made to focus on something else in order to take their mind off everything else.
The idea, as Oosthuizen proved, is that much of the time we know what we’ve got to do. But the anxiety of not being able to do it gets in the way of us doing exactly that.
Doing it!
Anyone who’s ever had trouble getting to sleep will understand this only too well. The harder you try, the harder it gets – because, as Andy points out, ‘If performance anxiety is going to get in the way of anything it’s going to be getting to sleep.’
Instead, the thing to do is to set up the best possible conditions for ‘optimal performance’ to occur – a dark, quiet room with a nice, comfortable bed – and let things take their course.
The power of distraction to deal with emotional distress is well documented in the scientific literature. Distraction reorients our attention away from the main issue at hand – and the agonizing uncertainty often inherent to its outcome – and diverts it on to something less ‘meaningful’.
Now, this distinction between the event itself and the intrinsically probabilistic nature of its occurrence is actually extremely important. Because, although it may not seem like it, it is, ironically, the uncertainty over bad things happening that’s the killer. Not the bad things themselves!
One study, for instance, found that people whose jobs are chronically insecure report significantly higher rates of depression and poorer health than those who’ve actually lost their jobs. Another found that when people were asked to predict whether some unresolved issue in their life would turn out badly, they got it WRONG 85 per cent of the time.
‘It was the same during SAS Selection,’ Andy says. ‘The tabs over the Black Mountains are specifically designed not just to test candidates’ physical fitness but also their mental fitness. Most of the lads are fit enough to cover the ground with the weight on their backs and are able to map-read. But the problem is that no one knows the cut-off times – how long you actually have to go each distance. That constantly nagging uncertainty really fucks people over. It makes everyone insecure.
‘But the remedy is simple. You read the map and put one boot in front of the other as quickly as possible. Nothing else matters.’
The message is crystal clear. We find uncertainty so hard to deal with that we’re prepared to assume the worst just to get shot of it. So next time you’re faced with a ‘crucial shot’ of your own, reflect, before you play it, on the following:
•Uncertainty, by its very nature, is uncertain.
•Things could go badly. But they could just as easily turn out OK.
•Even if things do turn out for the worse, IMAGINING them turning out for the worst is worse!
On the other hand, however, distraction can be just as powerful a tool for emotionally disarming others as it is for disarming ourselves.
In Chapter Seven, if you recall, we saw how the Incongruity Principle of persuasion utilizes distraction by lobbing a psychological stun grenade through the expectancy window of the brain. And then, in the ensuing pandemonium, slipping in whatever it is that’s required sub-radar.
It’s an extremely effective technique – especially in conflict situations where the assassination of negative emotions is particularly important for successful resolutions. As we finally pull up outside our hotel in McLeod Ganj, Andy comes up with a brilliant example.
‘Back in my Regiment days I had a mate who was a copper in Hereford called Dave. Dave was a football nut and his team, Brentford, had been drawn against Liverpool in the FA Cup at Anfield. Anyway, he goes up there to cheer them on and they get hammered 38–0 or something. On the train home Dave also gets hammered and, arriving back in Hereford, hits the bars big time.
‘When he gets back to his house, he’s not a happy camper. He kicks over the living-room table, puts his fist through a door, then turns on his missus, pushing her about and that. So she’s shitting herself and runs out of the house into the street. She doesn’t want to call the Old Bill in case she gets one of his mates, so she gets on the blower to me. I tell her to stay where she is until I get there.
‘So I jump in the car, nip round to Scouse Billy’s – another Regiment lad’s – house to borrow a Liverpool shirt and then five minutes later I’m marching up Dave’s drive in the pissing rain and knocking on his door. His wife can’t believe it!
‘“Hello, mate,” I say, when it opens. “Just passing and wondered if you happened to know how Brentford got on?”
‘There’s a moment of silence as he takes it all in. The rain. The cold. The missus. The LIVERPOOL TOP! Then he laughs.
‘“You stupid bastard,” he says. “You’d better come in.”
You hear about the benefits of regular exercise everywhere. But there’s evidence to suggest – and you won’t thank us for saying this – that regular exercise accompanied by a freezing cold shower at the end of it is even better.
On its own, exercise helps combat anxiety, stress and depression by placing the body under manageable, controllable, adjustable physical strain, which, in the same way that a flu jab protects your immune system against the lurgy, inoculates the mind against more virulent emotional stressors.
But so too, it would seem, can regular exposure to cold water.
At least, that is, in rats!
Scientists have discovered that getting rats to swim regularly in cold water makes them less prone to the malaise of learned helplessness – the inability, if you recall from Chapter Three, to ‘take the initiative’ and ‘fight back’.
Whether such benefits in resilience and emotion-hardening extend to us humans is a moot point. But some researchers claim that they do, suggesting that regular exposure to intermittent periods of stress and recovery of the kind that a regular exercise regime may give you – accompanied by the acute thermal rigours that a cold dunk at the end may provide – constitutes an incremental affective toughening process that renders those who go through it more emotionally stable when confronted by prolonged stress.
Such evidence is, as I say, speculative. But there may well be something in it.
Beginning with the premises, as some evolutionary biologists argue, that back in the days of our prehistoric ancestors the neurobiological hardware underpinning mammalian thermoregulation might also have paved the way for subsequent mechanisms of emotional arousal, the American psychologist Richard Dienstbier proposes that cold tolerance and emotional stability may well be correlated. And that by building up the former you may well be increasing the latter.
Coincidence that road rage was pretty much unheard of in the days before sophisticated climate-control systems became fitted as standard in cars, homes and offices? Perhaps. But then again, perhaps not.
Recent evidence implicates the widespread proliferation of such systems in the equally pervasive increase in obesity levels.
Studies conducted in enclosed chambers, for instance, have shown that reducing the temperature by a mere five degrees Celsius – from 27 to 22 – results in an extra 239 calories being burned per day.
When you consider that temperatures in the average British home have gone up from 13 degrees in 1970 to 18 degrees in the year 2000, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how such a hike might well, over time, translate into significant rates of weight gain, a general reduction in fitness levels . . . and increased emotional lability.
Thermal stress is something we learned to handle – over millions of years of our evolutionary history. If, as some suggest, and as the experiment with the rats seems to indicate, the neurophysiological mechanisms of thermoregulation and emotional regulation might at some point have converged during the course of that history, then it’s entirely possible that micromanaging the temperature of our indoor environment might well have an impact on our ability to deal with stress.
‘There might be more to the phrase “letting off steam” than we think!’ I say to Andy, as we stand on the balcony of our appropriately monastic room and gaze across town at the twinkling golden lights of the Dalai Lama’s palace.
‘Anyone for a run, a sauna and an ice-cold plunge?’
He grins, shakes his head and cranes his neck up and down the street.
‘What do you reckon the chances are of grabbing a bacon sandwich round here at this time of night?’ he says.
0–11 Your brain is a dictatorship governed by emotion. Time for a coup, perhaps?
12–17 Your brain may not be an emotional dictatorship but emotion is certainly the ruling party. Vote of confidence in order?
18–22 50 per cent Jo Brand, 50 per cent Russell Brand.
23–28 Your head definitely rules your heart. You weigh things up before you act and are good at getting things in perspective.
29–33 You’d give Spock a run for his money!
fn1 Thanks go to Crispin Rovere for this dilemma.
We hope that our little questionnaires at the end of each chapter have told you something useful about yourself. If it’s something you didn’t know, then so much the better. If you did already know, tough. But all is not lost! To find out your final GOOD PSYCHOPATH score, and where you sit on the overall spectrum, why not go on to our website and enter your scores individually for the Seven Deadly Wins? By doing so, you will be helping us conduct a unique GOOD PSYCHOPATH survey of the nation, which will analyse the precise links between GOOD PSYCHOPATH personality traits and various other aspects of life in general.
Here’s where you click: www.thegoodpsychopath.com
Over 1.5 MILLION people have already filled out our general psychopath questionnaire.
So, go on – you know you want to! And it won’t take long.
JUST DO IT!
