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The Risk Watch Column
By Dr Alan Waring
‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’. This Old French motto meaning ‘may he be shamed who thinks evil of it’ is written into the coat of arms of Her Britannic Majesty’s Government on the front cover of every British passport. The motto implies that it is incumbent on each individual not to harbour evil thoughts (and, by extension, do evil acts) otherwise they bring shame on themselves. But, is the sanction of shame always enough in itself to deter evil? Moreover, how easy is it to spot an evil person and what can be done realistically to thwart them?
Meet the Psychopaths
In essence, evil is the hallmark of a psychopath. The term ‘psychopath’ conjures up images of diabolical, murderous individuals throughout history such as the Roman emperor Caligula, Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein, gangsters such as Al Capone and The Krays, and serial killers such as Dennis Nilsen, Ted Bundy and Peter Sutcliffe. Although violence, torture and murder do feature in many of these high profile cases, whether by their own hand or through control of other perpetrators, it is not true that all psychopaths engage in or direct physical violence. Individuals with psychopathic personality disorders are all around us in all sectors of society, walks of life and workplace. Very few ever display any violence or threats of violence and may go unnoticed, save perhaps for their tendency to be ruthless, manipulative, pushy and lacking in any kind of integrity or conscience. A psychopath is anyone who causes harm to others without self-recognition of his or her harmfulness, no empathy for those harmed, and no conscience, remorse or guilt about it.
Many individuals in society display some of the characteristics of psychopathy. But, is the obnoxious loud-mouth, for example, who bulldozes his way through all objections to secure what he wants, necessarily a psychopath? Forthright, assertive and determined individuals are not all psychopaths. Big business, political parties and their supporters adore such people. Just take a look at some of the current political demagogues, such as Donald Trump in the US, Nigel Farage in the UK and, recently in Greece, Yanis Varoufakis. Without a doubt, all three are forthright, assertive and determined. However, the more relentless, manipulative, domineering, grandiose, controlling, ruthless and devoid of conscience is the behaviour, the more likely it is that the individual is psychopathic. Are persistent assertions, coupled with selective facts and fictitious data, about the alleged threat from all muslims to the United States, or from all migrants to the UK or from all foreign creditor governments to Greece, merely normal political exaggeration or the product of something psychopathic? Persistently lying or creating fictions without conscience or concern about the harmful consequences is one of the defining characteristics of psychopathy.
Dr Robert Hare is an acknowledged expert on psychopathy who has produced a 20-point list of characteristics. If an individual exhibits more than half of these persistently, they are likely to be a psychopath and the more they exhibit the more certain is the diagnosis. High on the list are displaying a glib and superficial charm, shallow insincere emotions, confidence trickery and manipulativeness, pathological lying, grandiose self-worth and narcissism, scapegoating and blaming others for their own failings, and reacting badly to rejection. Add to these a callous disregard and lack of empathy for others, and a lack of any sense of remorse, conscience or guilt for their appalling behaviour and the harm it has caused, and the person is well on the way to a textbook diagnosis.
Corporate Psychopaths
Undetected and unchecked, psychopaths are likely to cause others, often large numbers of others, significant if not great harm. One of my associates, Dr Mike Walton, has made a special study of toxic leadership in corporations and what may be termed ‘boardroom psychopaths’. Dare any government or organisation take a risk that a particular forthright, assertive and determined ‘wunderkind’ in their ranks is not in fact masking an underlying psychopathy? Psychological profiling may be essential to avert disaster. Remember, Hitler was only in power for a paltry twelve years but look at the scale of destruction, death and misery that he unleashed across Europe.
Some argue that the 2008 global financial collapse is attributable in part to the activities and decisions of psychopaths within the banking and finance industry. A current TV series entitled Meet the Psychopaths on UK’s Channel 5 investigates the phenomenon and among specific cases has examined two corporate CEOs, Robert Maxwell of the British company Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) and Jeffrey Skilling of the US energy giant Enron.
Following his death in 1991, Robert Maxwell’s gigantic fraud perpetrated on MGN soon became apparent. His menacing and baleful stare and deep, gravelly voice fitted well with his awesome reputation as a bully. Part of his fraud involved share ramping by buying and selling stock between his large network of companies solely to artificially increase the share prices in a merry-go-round fashion. In fact, his corporation overall was short of liquidity and this was a way of inflating its value to impress and convince banks and other outsiders that the business was strong when it was not. Another string to his fraudulent bow was to ‘borrow’ large amounts from the company pension fund, some GBP 460 mln in total, to pump in to his web of companies. As a result, some 30,000 MGN pensioners lost most of their pensions. Maxwell’s persona and ruthless ‘end justifies the means’ and ‘what can we get away with?’ behaviour had all the hallmarks of a psychopath.
In November 2001, the energy giant Enron went bankrupt in what was the biggest ever corporate collapse in the USA. Nearly 4,000 employees lost their jobs and many who had retirement plans based on Enron shares also lost their pensions. In the four years leading up to the collapse, Enron shareholders lost US$ 74 bln in stock losses, of which over half was attributable to a mega fraud perpetrated and directed by the three top Enron executives – Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling and Andrew Fastow. The details of their fraud are complex but in essence it involved inflating the company’s share values and the price of energy by false means, including high risk ‘forward accounting’ mechanisms that treated prospective and predicted future revenues as if they were actual cash flows. The top three executives were convicted of multiple classes of fraud, insider trading, money laundering and conspiracy and sentenced to very long jail terms. In classic psychopathic fashion, none expressed any remorse, guilt or empathy for their victims and sought to pretend that everything they had done was above board and normal business practice.
Social Media Psychopaths
Social media and the internet have given rise to the blog and twitter phenomena, whereby large numbers of individuals post their views on just about anything. Some posters include ‘trolls’ i.e. those who use the facility to vent their anger and frustrations and, in particular, to attack the integrity of other posters and vilify them in every way possible. In some cases, victims have been driven to suicide. Moreover, the vile rants that can be read on almost any of these facilities are often generalised attacks on whole classes of person whom the poster hates for some reason. Nowadays, for example, muslims are being vilified wholesale on blog columns and being blamed for all the world’s problems.
Those who vilify and promote hatred of and harm to others, especially people they have never met, display a strong degree of abnormal behaviour and personality disorder. There is a close association between psychopathy and ethnic and religious bigotry and extremism. The sheer hatred vented in their relentless blog outpourings has revealed a whole class of psychopaths previously hidden from view. These may well be the mirror images of those other psychopaths, the terrorists such as Daesh/IS. Goodwill to all men is thus a fragile and elusive goal until and unless effective ways are found to control and treat all manner of psychopaths.
Dr Alan Waring is an international risk management consultant who has written the Risk Watch column since 2004. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health. His latest book Corporate Risk and Governance is at www.gowerpublishing.com/isbn/9781409448365 . Contact [email protected] .
©2015 Alan Waring
