| The 2001 film, A Beautiful Mind portrayed the life struggles of mathematician John Nash, one of the principle architects of game theory, from the individualist perspective of a brilliant man fighting a lonely battle against his own dark demons. But the three-part 2007 BBC documentary, "The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom", which was recently offered as a fund-drive premium at Pacifica's KPFK in Los Angeles, takes a very different view, focusing less on Nash, the man, than on the role that his creation played in leading us toward a conception of freedom that's little more than a cage.
Although Nash was a paranoid schizophrenic, the model of consciousness his work best applies to is that of a quite different mental defect--that of the sociopath, one who is completely normal in outward appearance, whose only defect lies at the core of their being, in the lack of what might be called a conscience, at least for shorthand sake. I'll explain the connections as we go along.
Wikipedia describes the beginning of Part 1 of The Trap as follows:
1. "Fuck You Buddy" (11 March 2007)
In this episode, Curtis examines the rise of game theory during the Cold War and the way in which its mathematical models of human behaviour filtered into economic thought. The programme traces the development of game theory with particular reference to the work of John Nash, who believed that all humans were inherently suspicious and selfish creatures that strategised constantly. Using this as his first premise, Nash constructed logically consistent and mathematically verifiable models, for which he won the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics. He invented system games reflecting his beliefs about human behaviour, including one he called "Fuck Your Buddy" (later published as "So Long Sucker"), in which the only way to win was to betray your playing partner, and it is from this game that the episode's title is taken.
These games were internally coherent and worked correctly as long as the players obeyed the ground rules that they should behave selfishly and try to outwit their opponents, but when RAND's analysts tried the games on their own secretaries, they instead chose not to betray each other, but to cooperate every time. This did not, in the eyes of the analysts, discredit the models, but instead proved that the secretaries were unfit subjects.
What was not known at the time was that Nash was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, and, as a result, was deeply suspicious of everyone around him-including his colleagues-and was convinced that many were involved in conspiracies against him. It was this mistaken belief that led to his view of people as a whole that formed the basis for his theories. Footage of an older and wiser Nash was shown in which he acknowledges that his paranoid views of other people at the time were false.
How does all this relate to sociopathy? First, let's explain what sociopathy is: it's not like any other form of mental disease, indeed, superficially, the sociopath appears perfectly normal. There is no surface disturbance in sociopathy. The sociopath appears perfectly sane in the moment. Rather, what is disturbed--even, one might say, missing--is the core. And hence the name of the initial classic study, The Mask of Sanity, the fifth edition of which is available free online in PDF form here.
The Mask of Sanity does not provide a lucid overview of its subject matter. It is, instead, a work of groping through a large mass of baffling first-hand examples. And yet, precisely because of its origins in the immediacy of the effort to understand a baffling phenomena, it retains an importance that rewards the effort to wade through its somewhat rambling style. With that in mind, here is a relatively brief passage that gives some broader sense of the whole in a relatively short space:
Let us then assume, as a hypothesis, that the psychopath's disorder, or defect, or his difference from the whole or normal or integrated personality consists of an unawareness and a persistent lack of ability to become aware of what the most important experiences of life mean to others. By this is not meant an acceptance of the arbitrarily postulated values of any particular theology, ethics, esthetics, or philosophic system, or any special set of mores or ideologies, but rather the common substance of emotion or purpose, or whatever else one chooses to call it, from which the various loyalties, goals, fidelities, commitments, and concepts of honor and responsibility of various groups and various people are formed.??Let us assume that this dimension of experience which gives to all experience its substance or reality is one into which the psychopath does not enter. Or, to be more accurate, let us say that he enters, but only so superficially that his reality is thin or unsubstantial to the point of being insignificant. Let us say that, despite his otherwise perfect functioning, the major emotional accompaniments are absent or so attenuated as to count for little. Of course he is unaware of this, just as everyone is bound, except theoretically, to be unaware of that which is out of his scale or order or mode of experience. If we grant the existence of a far-reaching and persistent blocking, absence, deficit, or dissociation of this sort, we have all that is needed, at the present level of our inquiry, to account for the psychopath.
The end result is that sociopaths live life in shallow, disconnected episodes. The lack of depth entails a lack of continuity as well. And there is certainly no learning:
Without suffering or
enjoying in significant degree the integrated
emotional consequences of experience, the psychopath will not learn from it to modify and direct his activities as other men whom we call sane modify and direct theirs. He will lack the real driving impulses which sustain and impel others toward their various widely differing but at least subjectively important goals. He will naturally lack insight into how he differs from other men, for of course he does not differ from other men as he sees them. It is entirely impossible for him to see another person from the aspect of major affective experience, since he is blind to this order of things or blind in this mode of awareness.
Returning to Wikipedia's description of The Trap:
As the 1960s became the 1970s, the theories of Laing and the models of Nash began to converge, producing a widespread popular belief that the state (a surrogate family) was purely and simply a mechanism of social control which calculatedly kept power out of the hands of the public. Curtis shows that it was this belief that allowed the theories of Hayek to look credible, and underpinned the free-market beliefs of Margaret Thatcher, who sincerely believed that by dismantling as much of the British state as possible-and placing former national institutions into the hands of public shareholders-a form of social equilibrium would be reached. This was a return to Nash's work, in which he proved mathematically that if everyone was pursuing their own interests, a stable, yet perpetually dynamic, society could result.
This was also, of course, a good description of Greenspans belief underpinning his enthusiasm for financial deregulation, thinking that greedy speculators would create a stable, yet perpetually dynamic financial sector. If one has no inner sense of long-term meaning or purpose, then it's clearly impossible to conceive of government having any such purpose. Why not leave everything to a bunch of riverboat gamblers, aided by a theory that says everything will be just fine?
So, that's one side of the story--how sociopathy and "free markets" are deeply interconnected. But there are also just a whole lot of sociopaths coming out of the woodwork, too.
Take, for example, the renewed prominence of that dynamic duo, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. Digby recently mused on a Matt Bai profile of Newt, and what struck me most of her musings was this flashback:
According to fellow conservative Susan Molinari, Gingrich believed he was a worldwide revolutionary:
Molinari paints Gingrich as nothing short of an incompetent, delusional megalomaniac. An obsession with grandiose or extravagant things or actions. . Her behind-the-scenes description of last summer's failed coup attempt against the speaker reveals a world of ruthless backstabbingand deft double-crossing that would make Machiavelli proud. Molinari says Gingrich compared himself to Napoleon, FDR, Churchill, and Eisenhower and was overwhelmed by his own grandiosity. When Gingrich's four top henchmen, among them Molinari's husband, Bill Paxon, Republican congressman from Buffalo, NY., arranged an "intervention" to tell the speaker that he had to shape up, Gingrich dissolved into a rage. "People all over the world are listening to us, watching what we are doing. I'm at the center of a worldwide revolution," he huffed, turning to Paxon, adding, "You will never understand that, Bill."
Was there ever a better example of a man who felt so little of life's meaning? He didn't deliver divorce papers to his cancer-stricken wife because he was a sadist. Sadists have far more feelings than sociopaths do. Not nice feelings, to be sure. But, you know, human, all to human, nonetheless. Newt can't really feel anything unless it involves the superhuman, the titanic. Bill Paxon was simply too insubstantial for Newt to relate to. Only world historical figures were real to him--even though he consistently and extravagantly misunderstood them, too. After all, to actually understand them, he would have to understand the real-life worlds in which they lived--a world that for him was nothing but shadows.
And that is the problem with a party of sociopaths. We and our sufferings simply aren't real to them. If you're a sociopath, the only real significance of a catastrophe like Hurricane Katrina is that it can help illustrate your talking points. Bobby Jindal's casual lying about Katrina is just one more indication of the psychopathic ethos that now permeates the GOP. Ditto Michael Steele's preposterous lie that government never created a single job. Casual or extravagant lies mean nothing, because the hard truths of other people's lives mean nothing: they are not real, they are merely insubstantial shadow people.
So, naturally, joking about killing them--or even thier President--comes quite naturally. It's all a part of the psychopathic package. It kind of makes Bushian authoritarian faith-based mayhem look like the good old days. Except, thank God, these guys are not in power. |
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