The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Ronson makes a strong case for leadership being psychopathic. In a sense the test and the way society is; have the same root. Both the psychopath test is about achieving certain metrics, measuring personality orientation. Society in our rationalist contemporary way, is about achieving goals, which are often defined in terms of metrics rather than irrelevant reactions, like feelings or ideals like humanity. So it makes sense that those of us who are able to concentrate on a narrow portion of sociality in order to achieve (any arbitrary thing) would be likely to miss the part of a human that makes our attention/understanding in a situation less rational.
Ronson takes a very around about way to discovering and saying what he wants to say. He seems like a contrarian as well, always asking questions and trying to see things from the other angle. Although he is nervous, he still tries to get to the root of things. He highlights several important angles; that the test’s threshold is arbitrary; that the way people label things (esp other people) creates injustices, and that ultimately the experts can be very correct about things but also very wrong when contexts change. We all make this up as we go along, hiding behind the moniker of “science” as we do it. Tracing the history of an idea is one way to undermine it, to see it as being often un-necessary, that the accidents of history could have turned out another way.
In a sense, this book is about tracing madness and civilization all over again, but from a less discourse oriented perspective and more from a journey of unraveling a particular idea that has hit on us in a random sort of way. In the process we get an amusing, human oriented story that educates us about what psychopaths are, and how the concept has been developed by psychologists — and because of that presentation we are also left unable to really understand what to do with this concept. While there are some people who are partially so, no one is really totally so. Like all labels, this is a matter of degrees of grey.
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