CREDIT TK
Voices
high and mighty. So ivory tower. So
reductive. And so from afar. And so
I vowed never to do that. So in The
Psychopath Test, as in my TEDTalk,
I only recount conversations with
people I met in person. That way
all the ambiguities and nuances,
the biases, the power play between
the interviewer and interviewee,
would be part of the writing.
I was thinking about all of this
listening to Julie Burchill’s brilliant
recent interview on the BBC Radio 4
show Desert Island Discs.
At times she could not have
sounded more textbook Hare
Checklist:
JB: “I think I was born without something ... But if I was I’m
glad I was because I don’t want to
be one of those people who creep
around trying to get people’s approval. I think they’re pathetic ...
I’ve always been to some extent
shameless, and I’ve always been an
aggressive person. Not physically
but the way I think and the way I
go after other people.”
Here’s one tweet I read just after
she said this:
“Julie Burchill is demonstrating
psychopathy so clearly on #desertislanddiscs that I might use it as a
teaching tool for my students.”
I know what she meant. You
JON
RONSON
HUFFINGTON
04.07.13
only have to read the checklist.
Anyway, a few minutes later she
was talking very movingly and sincerely about missing her parents,
and how much pain she would feel
going back to Bristol because the
accent would remind her of them:
You are four times
more likely to have a
psychopath running your
business than you are to
have one as your underling.”
“If I was in Bristol and everywhere
I turned someone would be going,
‘all right my lover,’ I’d feel sad and
I’d really miss them.”
I noticed that I felt weirdly disappointed for a moment when she
said this. My fast and triumphant
diagnosis off the radio was not her
whole story. She was more confusing, less black and white. She was
greyer. I had wanted the one aspect
of her personality — the psychopathic-sounding one — to be more
true and significant. So I had to kind
of force myself out of one train of
thought into another.
I think this is part of the reason
why there are so many miscarriages of justice in the psychopath-