Psychopathy as Adaptation
Some researchers have suggested that psychopathy is an adaptation[6], rather than a disorder. I had the same idea many years ago when involved with a difficult young woman. She was in treatment for borderline personality disorder. She moved from job to job, always blaming others. Her life was a long story of abusive parents, ex-partners, and friends.
She lived in a cloud of chaos and emotional pain. Yet it was others who always showed the real hurt. No matter how bad the situation got, she was able to find a way out, and attract new friends. Behind her, she left a trail of damage and trauma. She was on medication, which she rarely took. She had a therapist, whom she later seduced. The "sufferer" always got what she wanted.
Above all, she was predatory in a confident and innocent way. It took me a long time to realize I’d been sleeping with a psychopath. She wore the mask of "borderline" to be a more successful victim. At the time I also took notes. They documented my descent into an alternate universe. In a relationship with a psychopath, our core laws of social conduct are gone. In their place grows something alien and hungry.
There are already plenty of people studying psychopathy-as-a-disorder. I wanted to explore psychopathy-as-an-adaptation because it fit my data better. Further, it seemed to lead to more positive, and useful conclusions.
To model psychopathy as an adaptation rather than a disorder opens a door to a new world. Our questions change. We ask what struggle pushed this evolution. We ask what specific adaptations they actually own. Do psychopaths have longer teeth? Sharper claws? Or are their talents more discrete?
We also ask what counter-adaptations might exist in social humans (the non-psychopath majority). We ask, "Could the psychopath-social relationship in fact be a predator-prey story?" And the answer turns out to be an emphatic "Yes, of course!" We ask, "How old is this story?" and the answer is, "Millions of years."
The Predator Model
The author of "Dracula," Bram Stoker, drew the psychopath as predator. Perhaps he had personal experience. The story is not meant as literal truth. It is a metaphor, and a good one. Dracula comes in the night, dressed to kill. He drains the life blood out of you, even as he seduces you with his charm and sexuality.
Dracula does not kill outright. Rather, he turns you into a weak copy of himself. He is powerful and animalistic. He can read your thoughts, even as you scramble to escape. And the best tension is human versus vampire, with vampire-on-vampire conflict as cherry topping.
Dr Robert Hare started describing psychopaths as social predators in his landmark 1994 article in Psychology Today[7]. The subtitle is: "This Charming Psychopath — How to spot social predators before they attack." In this article and his work he focuses on identifying psychopaths. Many of us are familiar with his "Psychopath Checklist."
Predators deceive their prey as a core strategy. Human predators cheat their victims as a core strategy. It is the same thing. Animal models are essential to understanding and predicting human behavior. We find it hard to look at ourselves without lying. Our self-analysis crashes into notions of "free will" and "consciousness." We cannot improve nor discard these notions, so they obsess us. Yet we have no trouble dissecting animal behavior without such distractions.
What I’ve done in this book is use the predator model as a backbone onto which all the rest can hang. We start with predators that cheat their way through the human social universe. All the rest derives from that, and makes sense in that context.
My first exposure to the predator model was in Stefan Verstappen’s excellent work, Defense Against the Psychopath[8]. This was the first text I read that suggested strategies for confronting and defeating a psychopath, which is the path I’ve taken in this book.
Not the Ants You Are Looking For
"There are spiders in Australia that smell and behave like ants: some are so convincing that the ants will allow a spider to live permanently as one of them. This spider will then feast upon its new friends, but it won’t eat all the ants, or even a significant number; instead, it extracts resources slowly, sustainably, and over time." — Daniel N. Jones, "Snake in the grass"[9]
It’s not just a few spiders. Thousands of different insects have hacked into the ant colony in one way or another. One caterpillar mimics the queen ant’s voice[10] to trick workers. The Paussus beetle is born, lives, and dies inside the ant colony. Not only does it smell right (ants use smells to detect friends from foes), it also mimics the sounds the ants make. Literally, it mimics the queen ant, saying "it’s OK" to ants and larvae, even as it gobbles up.
Ants evolved to work together to collect food and protect it from thieves. They divide the work, care for their young together, and live in large colonies. They communicate, and they think collectively. An ant colony shows intelligent behavior.
Ants thrive, despite the parasites and predators after them, their protection, and their food. Indeed, ants are one of the most successful species. Ants have languages, tribal identity, social organization, the ability to work together. These are adaptations. One must ask, to solve what problems? and the answer seems to be: exactly that horde of cheats.
Ants started by spreading the risk of a seasonal food supply. Many ants can harvest a wider area than a single ant. A lucky ant can share with unlucky ones. An unlucky ant will survive a bad spell. So ants evolved altruism, which is a good answer to a risky food supply. Other answers are migration, hibernation, and synchronized breeding cycles.
Yet altruism has a weakness, which is cheating behavior. The ants' food supply is open to anyone who needs it. If you get into the colony, you can eat ants, larvae and food without work. Thus altruists had to evolve defenses against cheats, or go extinct. For an ant colony, this means to detect intruders, and then kill them. Genes for altruism can only survive if they also enforce reciprocity.
As Daniel Jones writes[11]:
Some predators are fast, mobile and wide-ranging, executing their deceptions on as many others as they can; they resemble human psychopaths. Others are slow, stalking their prey in a specific, strategic (almost Machiavellian) way… There is a never-ending arms race between the deceiver and the deceived among most living things.
So the ants evolved languages of smell, touch, and sound to identify each other. The cheats evolved to imitate these languages. The ant languages got more sophisticated. The cheats got better. And so on, over hundreds of millions of years, to give us the modern ant. One family of ants from Argentina now covers much of the world in a "intercontinental super colony"[12]. This super colony is invasive, dominant, and drives out local ant species. An ant from Portugal can enter a nest in New Zealand, and be accepted.
This should be familiar to you. Cooperative altruism appears in other species. Termites, bees, and species of wasp have evolved along the same path. So have vampire bats, killer whales, and humans. We also form an intercontinental super colony, that is invasive, dominant, and often acts like one family.