Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Mara's avatar

I am a retired clinical psychologist who worked for several years in the correctional system in Australia. (And BTW, I was trained in the use of the Hare psychopathy assessment, and found it very interesting and useful). And I will tell you now, one of my greatest learnings from that period of my life was that there are more psychopaths on my side of the bars than inside. And I don't mean the correctional officers - though you might find the odd one there. Look at the management...

That figure of 20% among inmates is not correct. True psychopathy among inmates is actually fairly rare (probably higher if you are talking about a maximum security unit though). OTOH, the highest numbers of psychopaths are among the powerful elite - whether business or government or institutional. I think it is the power that attracts them. That, plus the fact that you need to have a certain amount of moral flexibility to get to the top. I have never personally worked in parliament, but from what I have heard, it is almost impossible to succeed if you have ethical principles that you stick to.

Expand full comment
ChesterView's avatar

In my youth I was an investment banker with a top New York firm. I hailed from Houston, grew up in a middle class Catholic family (Dad was a senior manager at Exxon but not quite corporate executive level) and got an engineering degree at Rice. Spent a couple years out of college at Exxon, then went to Wharton and from there, Wall Street.

I was always struck by how different the people in finance were from the folks I grew up with. It wasn't really intelligence, although that may have been some of it. After all, Rice is an elite school and I would say the intellectual caliber there was at least as high as at Wharton, although arguably a bit lower than the investment banking average. It was more a certain coldness, a lack of empathy in my finance colleagues that struck me as being bizarre. Cold fish. Not true of all of them but true of a pretty high percentage, certainly much higher than in the general population.

After about ten years I left investment banking and returned to the land of the humans. Much happier for it. I remember joking with friends (not in the business) that many of the folks I used to work with would have made great hit men. I may have been on to something.

Expand full comment
66 more comments...

No posts