Sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges.
My worryingly paradoxical thought process could be summarized thus: Thank God I don't believe in the secret rulers of the world. Imagine what the secret rulers of the world might do to me if I did!
On social media there's this thing where on many occasions, there's a single proscribed way of acting. Like if somebody dies, everyone has to say "R.I.P.! R.I.P.!" Basically they're saying, "Don't hurt me, I'm a good person."
Trying to solve the mystery is what I enjoy most about writing.
Most goat-related military activity is still highly classified.
The laughing way we make damaged people our playthings, it's so dehumanizing.
At the end of our conversation she (Martha Stout) turned to address you, the reader. She said if you're beginning to feel worried that you may be a psychopath, if you recognize some of those traits in yourself, if you're feeling a creeping anxiety about it, that means you are not one.
The way I portrayed the people is accurate. Because they're human beings and we have a kind of wonderful capacity to be absurd and ridiculous.
We want to see ourselves as curious and open-minded and smart and understanding things in terms of context and nuance, but when someone tries to do that in the midst of a shaming they're turned on.
I'm not what you'd call a fearless type of person.
Sometimes labeling is only useful, like with OCD. Once you're labeled you can be treated. On other occasions labeling leads to tyranny, like with childhood bipolar disorder in the U.S.
Success is always less funny than failure.
I think if somebody is so set in their ways about what they feel about something - and you get this a lot in academia, of course, and also different sorts of journalism too - you're going to sweep under the carpet the facts that don't suit your thesis. And I think that happens quite a lot in the courtroom, for instance.
I have thought sometimes that the sanest people, the people who are just very balanced, very happy, are probably lower achieving than other people. My kind of irrationality happens to be fear or anxiety.
I am the neurological opposite of a psychopath, in that I feel anxious almost all the time. It must be great to not constantly feel like you’ve got someone living inside your face, shooting you with a mini Taser.
A strange thing happens when you interview a robot. You feel an urge to be profound: to ask profound questions. I suppose it’s an inter-species thing. Although if it is I wonder why I never try and be profound around my dog. ‘What does electricity taste like?’ I ask. ‘Like a planet around a star,’ Bina48 replies. Which is either extraordinary or meaningless - I’m not sure which
Of course there are people who would like to eat breakfast without the screams of toddlers all around them, but those people should get over themselves and stop being stuck up and idiotic.
We have to understand how the extremists got the way they are. Without that kind of understanding, we'd never really get to know them. I put in nothing about their childhoods. But what I have put in is stuff about the weird symbiotic relationship between us and them.
We're living in post-nuance online times.
Bedlam: an institution with a history so fearsome it gave its name to a synonym for chaos and pandemonium.
At first, I did stories on people who were maybe just eccentric. Omar was a natural progression from that.
We were creating a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland.
My paranoia never ends, but I haven't been paranoid about being spied on my shadowy forces for some time now.
I wasn't in any way a kind of soothsayer or not surprised when Sept. 11 happened. I was absolutely shocked.
Obviously, I like to write stories that are page-turners. But I always try my very, very hardest to be as factually true as possible.
The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.
Friends are the fruitcake of life - some nutty, some soaked in alcohol, some sweet.
Guy Savelli's role in the War on Terror began when half-a-dozen strangers, within days of one another, contacted him via e-mail and telephone in the winter of 2003. They asked him if he had the power to psychically kill goats. Guy was bewildered. He did not go around publicizing this. Who were these men? How did they know about the goats? He feigned a casual tone of voice and said, 'Sure I can.'Then he phoned Special Forces.
As I glanced at the phraseology of the research report, dull and unfathomable to outsiders like me, I thought that if you have the ambition to become a villain, the first thing you should do is learn to be impenetrable. Don’t act like Blofeld—monocled and ostentatious. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.
It is an awful lot harder, Tony told me, to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy.
There's definitely evidence that capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior. When you look at the worst corners of the American health insurance industry or the sub-prime banking market, it really feels like the more psychopathically someone behaves, the more it's rewarded.
No, people back home don't realize why there is this kind of need for heroes in America at the moment. People in Britain don't really understand what's going on here. They don't understand why Camp X-ray exists.
Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.
Somebody told me, “Twitter hates tabloids, but Twitter is constantly acting like a tabloid, repeating the mistakes of the things we’re hoping to better.” Twitter wanted to become a more egalitarian justice system, but instead it became a draconian one.
But on the extremist side I didn't get any rejections at all. Everyone agreed to talk to me.
I write funny nonfiction adventure books about crazy, serious worlds.
Oh, you know what bloggers are like, they write and write and write. I don't know why, because they're not being paid.
Discover the time of day when you write best, and write then. For me it's about 7 am to noon. For other people it's overnight. Try not to do anything other than write between those times.
I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.
It's not a good idea to define the boundaries of normality by tearing apart people who are outside of it.
Well, I had nightmares when I was doing the Klan story all the time. I had a recurring nightmare of basically being exposed as a Jew inside the Klan compound.
Feeling no remorse must be a blessing when all you have are your memories
In the midst of a burning-hot shaming, calling for patience and context and understanding and empathy can really land you in trouble.
Twitter wanted to become a more egalitarian justice system, but instead it became a draconian one.
You can say anything to David Icke and he will accept it and put it into his ideology.
Capitalism, perhaps at its most remorseless, is a physical manifestation of psychopathy.
There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.
I have panicked unnecessarily in all four corners of the globe.
It is slightly chilling to realize there are rational, functional people up there employed to spot, nurture, and exploit those down here among us who are irrational and can barely cope. If you want to know how stupid you’re perceived to be by the people up there, count the unsolicited junk mail you receive. If you get a lot, you’re perceived to be alluringly stupid.
Nothing uniquely bad has happened to me in my personal life, but all the regular little bad things have accumulated to make me a neurotic person. And these adventures are my way of trying to make sense of that.
Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!
Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity?
Trying to prove you’re not a psychopath is even harder than trying to prove you’re not mentally ill,’ said Tony.
I heard a story about her once,' said James. 'She was interviewing a psychopath. She showed him a picture of a frightened face and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn't know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them.
Ever since I learnt about confirmation bias I've started seeing it everywhere.
My ideal world was the early days of Twitter, where everyone was curious about each other and everyone saw it as kind of a window into people's lives where we could be compassionate and curious and empathetic and we could tell each other secrets.
When I asked Robert Spitzer about the possibility that he'd inadvertently created a world in which ordinary behaviours were being labelled mental disorders, he fell silent. I waited for him to answer. But the silence lasted three minutes. Finally he said, 'I don't know.
