The Power of the Herd. Linda Kohanov
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Sociopath’s Advantage
Arousal and relaxation — and the various emotions that arise from these autonomic nervous system cues — are the building blocks of a sophisticated, nonverbal language. Instantaneous, arguably telepathic, this feature of the “other 90 percent” (the nonverbal dimension of interpersonal communication) enhances relationships with coworkers and loved ones while offering protection from liars, thieves, and other malevolent characters. Yet there’s always a shadow side to remarkable powers of communication and influence. By design, our natural empathic abilities sometimes cause us to defer to a peculiar feature of the sociopathic nervous system, allowing charismatic leaders like Adolf Hitler and Jim Jones to wreak havoc, especially among desperate populations.
The American Psychiatric Association considers sociopathy and psychopathy obsolete synonyms for the official clinical term antisocial personality disorder. Even so, the Psychopathy Checklist, developed by Dr. Robert D. Hare in the early 1990s, remains the diagnostic tool most commonly used to assess this condition. Major symptoms of antisocial personality disorder include the tendency to be glib, superficial, deceitful, and manipulative while also showing a lack of empathy, lack of remorse or guilt, and shallow affect.
In sociopaths, it seems, key emotional- and social-intelligence circuits are missing, while cognitive abilities remain intact. This high IQ–low EQ combination is confusing for the individual and toxic for those in his or her social circle. Hare reports that “psychopaths are often witty and articulate. They can be amusing and entertaining conversationalists, ready with a quick and clever comeback, and can tell unlikely but convincing stories that cast themselves in a good light. They can be very effective in presenting themselves well and are quite likeable and charming.” However, they also “seem to suffer a kind of emotional poverty that limits the range and depth of their feelings. While at times they appear cold and unemotional, they are prone to dramatic, shallow and short-lived displays of feeling. Careful observers are left with the impression that they are play-acting and that little is going on below the surface.”
People with antisocial personality disorder exhibit a severely impaired capacity to feel, let alone use emotion as information. Laboratory experiments employing biomedical recorders have shown that sociopaths actually lack the physiological responses normally associated with fear. Yet psychologists studying this troublesome profile have grossly underestimated the significance of this strange anomaly, which becomes a particularly dangerous talent in those with leadership ambitions.
For most people, Hare explains, “the fear produced by threats of pain or punishment is an unpleasant emotion and a powerful motivator of behavior. Not so with psychopaths; they merrily plunge on, perhaps knowing what might happen but not really caring.”
From a personal-safety perspective, the disability is clear. But once you understand the importance of affection contagion in social interactions, the implications become downright disturbing. Cult leaders, for instance, prey on people who are easily overwhelmed by their feelings — from abuse survivors to highly sensitive adolescents to adults who’ve suffered a recent, debilitating loss. The ability to exude calmness, focus, and charisma in situations others find stressful — while telling them whatever they want to hear in a most charming, articulate, intelligent way — is matched by an equally ruthless impulse to whip followers into states of fear and anger whenever they show signs of regaining independent thought and will. With a bit of clever manipulation, a sociopath’s impaired autonomic nervous system can also be misinterpreted as evidence of an evolved spiritual presence, one whose love connection with the divine has completely expelled all trace of fear. Perhaps this is why some of the most successful and ultimately lethal members of this population manage to secure leadership positions with a religious theme.
Give an emotionally disabled genius enough time, public exposure, and responsibility, and he’ll eventually show his true colors by making a colossal mess of things. But how do you tell the difference between a Winston Churchill and an Adolf Hitler early enough to promote the talents of the former and avoid the mayhem of the latter? The answer lies in boosting your own emotional-and social-intelligence quotient as well as the EQ skills of everyone around you. This significant, multigenerational undertaking is the main supportive arch in all the cathedrals we are building. Without it, we’ll forever be wasting time, money, and lives on faulty construction and psychopathic acts of terrorism.
Imagine if a supervisor asked you to complete a project with only 10 percent of the information available to you, if schools were only committed to teaching 10 percent of what you would need to succeed in life. And yet that’s precisely what’s happening as we overemphasize the spoken and written word in business, education, and relationships. Once we realize that only 10 percent of human interpersonal communication is verbal, we can also recognize that telephone, computer, and text messaging innovations are deceptively seductive tools that limit human potential. Excessive dependence on these convenient devices creates voluntary learning disabilities in the realms of emotional and social intelligence that ultimately foster a kind of devolution if left unchecked over generations.
The tendency to treat the body as a machine already has a good four hundred years of history behind it, starting with René Descartes’s influential philosophy in the seventeenth century and reaching its apex in the twentieth-century assembly line. Frederick Taylor’s famous time-and-motion study technique, for instance, attempted to reach maximum productive efficiency by essentially turning workers into robots. Luckily the same scientific methods that, for a while, promoted a form of “mechanomorphism” in dealing with living beings have recently given us some very good reasons to reconsider the body’s innate, richly nuanced intelligence.
In his book The Other 90%: How to Unlock Your Vast Untapped Potential for Leadership and Life, Robert K. Cooper actually predicts that the “dinosaurs of the future will be those who keep trying to live and work from their heads alone. Much of human brilliance is driven less by the brain in your head than by newly discovered intelligence centers — now called ‘brain two and brain three’ — in the gut and the heart. The highest reasoning and the brightest ingenuity involve all three of those brains working together.”
Physiologists now know that there are more neural cells in the gut than in the entire spinal column. As a result, the enteric (intestinal) nervous system can gather information and adapt to the environment. The heart also serves as an organ of perception. “In the 1990s,” Cooper reports, “scientists in the field of neurocardiology discovered the true brain in the heart, which acts independently of the head. Comprised of a distinctive set of more than 40,000 nerve cells called baroreceptors, along with a complex network of neurotransmitters, proteins, and support cells, this heart brain is as large as many key areas of the brain in your head. It has powerful, highly sophisticated computational abilities.”
“Gut feelings” can no longer be dismissed as whimsical or delusional: both the intestinal track and the heart have been shown to generate neuropeptides, molecules carrying emotional information. In this way, the body serves as a magnificent tuner, receiver, and amplifier for all kinds of information. It feels, learns, and has definite opinions that sometimes contradict those of the brain. As author and researcher Dr. Candace Pert asserts, your body is your subconscious mind. Imagine the edge, the power and insight, the sheer genius available to those who make this somatic wisdom conscious!
While science is finally embracing this concept, we already have a term for people who tap the wonders of those other two corporeal intelligence centers: we say they have “horse sense.” The expression, dating back to the 1800s, refers to sound practical wisdom, a combination of finely tuned awareness, common sense, and gumption. People with horse sense pay attention to that “other 90 percent.” They “listen to their gut” as well as their minds when making decisions and really “put their heart into it” once they commit to action. There’s also an element of intuition involved, as in: “She’s got too much horse sense to believe his story.”