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The Psychopath
as Leader

By Clement Blakeslee, B.A., M.A.,

M.Sc.
Retired public affairs broadcaster, political journalist, human resources
consultant, native affairs advocate, social science academic, and environmental
advocate
Buddha graphic by Wilfredor / CC BY-SA 3.0

Table of Contents
Introduction
The Human Quest: A Relentless Confusion
Has the Celebration of Remorselessness Gone Too Far?
When Your Boss is Almost a Psychopath
How Can You Tell if Someone is a Psychopath?

3
4
7
11
13

Section I: Insightful Perspectives

The Sociopaths Code
13 Rules for Dealing with Sociopaths in Everyday Life
Key Symptoms of Psychopathy

16
17
19
23

Section II: Summaries of Key Literature

Without Conscience
The Sociopath Next Door
Snakes in Suits
The Liars Tale
The (Honest Truth) About Dishonesty
The Folly of Fools
The Moral Landscape
Taming the Tiger Within

25
26
30
32
36
41
45
49
61

Section III: Leadership: A Positive Perspective

Life
The Code of Humanity
The Charter for Compassion

64
65
66
67

The Sages Code: Twelve Transformative Noetic Essentials

68

Introduction

The Human Quest: A Relentless Confusion

For 200,000 years, since the emergence of homo sapiens,
humankind has been plagued by pervasive confusion, that is:
How do individuals or social groupings distinguish between that
which is dangerously fraudulent from that which is
transcendentally miraculous?
The rise and fall of civilizations have been for thousands of years
plagued by this essential confusion. Destructive dictators and
even some religious leaders have achieved success through the
propagation of dangerous fraud. Fortunately humankind has also
generated great sages who, in their presence, exemplify that
which is transcendentally miraculous.
Today's world is as plagued by psychopaths who gain great
following as well as social movements led by sages.
These two realities have many examples historically and
currently. Hopefully this website will aid in providing tools for
understanding and identifying ideas and persons who are either
sagely or psychopathic. The interplay of the noetic and biotic
realms are currently in the forefront of academic and scientific
investigation. The literature is rich with ideas and profound
insights are being generated by a wide range of subject areas.
After 200,000 years, humanity may be ready to understand the
difference between magic and science, between psychopath and
sage, between fraud and miracle, and between that which is
richly spiritual from that which is destructively anti-social.
In the following months, I look forward to the human quest in
action in a rich and vibrant fashion.
This document attempts to delineate those characteristics of the
human mind which are creative, constructive and generative
from those which are negative, destructive and predatory.
Leadership: Two Critical Dimensions
My Native mother often offered the observation, which clearly
demonstrated her view of those in authority or, if you will, people

with leadership. "What you don't see is most of what you get."
Although this observation is harsh, it shows a reality about
leadership experienced by ordinary people. Leadership can be
deceptive and exploitive. This style of leadership is common
enough to warrant a clear and descriptive label.
Exploitive leadership is a label I choose to use for those persons
who deal with their own constituency in deceptive, manipulative,
and ruthless self-serving strategies. It is the self-serving aspect of
such leadership, which can prove to be destructive and diverting.
One of the mysteries of human existence surrounds problems of
exploitive leaders. Why do ordinary intelligent people allow
themselves to be led by self-serving leaders? We see destructive,
exploitive leaders abroad and at home. They can acquire
leadership at the national or local level. This mystery may never
be answered; however, there is an alternative style of leadership.
Fortunately, the human quest is blessed by leaders who focus on
constructive and creative forces within the human community.
Such leaders are responsible leaders. Responsibility in leadership
is dramatically opposite of the characteristics of exploitive
leaders.
The essence of a responsible leader means giving of yourself in a
generous and generative style. Leadership involves privilege,
although a responsible leader acknowledges that with privilege
comes responsibility.
The health of any organizationsmall or largedepends on
responsible leadership. The power of the human spirit and the
vitality of the individual mind is cultivated and enriched by
responsible leaders. Through careful measuring, responsible
leaders can facilitate systematic investment in human resources.
This investment in social capital is by far the most important
investment, which can be made at all levels of society from
neighbourhood to nation.
The following graphic represents the points made above.

Has the Celebration of Remorselessness Gone

Too Far?
By Patricia Pearson
Published in the Friday, Aug. 15 2014 edition of the Globe and Mail
Theres a baseline of depravity and callousness in popular culture
today that is beginning to seem unhinged. You cant dial into a TV show
right now without encountering a hero who would eat you for lunch.
Don Draper on Mad Men, the winking and well-mannered Kevin Spacey
on House of Cards about half the cast of Game of Thrones.
A stroll through Chapters leads you to titles such as The Wisdom of
Psychopaths, by British social psychologist Kevin Dutton, praised by
The Wall Street Journal and blurbed by Michael C. Hall, who plays the
serial killer in Dexter. Dr. Dutton has said in interviews that Bill Clinton,
Steve Jobs, Franklin Roosevelt, James Bond, John F. Kennedy and the
Apostle Paul all had psychopathic tendencies.
There is the bestselling memoir Confessions of a Sociopath, by M.E.
Thomas, the pseudonym of an American lawyer who says she is tired
of being misunderstood. Neuroscientist James Fallon recently gave a
TED Talk about his self-revelatory book The Psychopath Inside. He calls
himself a pro-social psychopath who chooses not to murder people
even though, admittedly, he cares not one whit if he harms them in
other ways.
The celebration of remorselessness is everywhere. Friends on Facebook
have lately been reporting their scores on widely circulating
psychopathy quizzes that ask users to agree or disagree with
statements such as, I never feel remorse, shame or guilt about
something Ive said or done.
Im 19-per-cent psychopath! they announce. Or: I scored five out of
10! As if the chilling absence of human empathy I witnessed as a
crime reporter in covering trials like that of serial killer Paul Bernardo
had become a fun little personality quirk.
What fire, exactly, are we playing with? Have we taken a tolerance of
difference, of identity, of moral relativism, too far?
Destigmatizing psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia or major
depression is one thing, says University of Toronto psychologist
Michael Bagby, an international expert in personality disorder, but
extending this to psychopaths is quite another.

The diagnosis may be clinical, but the issue, fundamentally, is moral.

What kind of a society do we wish to inhabit, with what kinds of leaders
and heroes?
Inhuman humans
Just to be clear, the words psychopath and sociopath are
interchangeable; neither is an officially sanctioned clinical term. In the
newest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM-V), the disease that describes someone who is ruinous,
remorseless, self-interested and reckless is anti-social personality
disorder.
Psychopath-sociopaths are neither wise nor conscientious, because
they lack a capacity for empathy and possess no emotional depth.
They may be cognitively lucid, say experts who study this pathology,
but they are morally insane.
Psychopaths arent necessarily murderous, but anyone who has
encountered the personality the cold, evaluative stare, the radical
objectification of others, the utter indifference to suffering will
experience it as shatteringly inhuman.
Why, then, have inhuman humans become sources of inspiration?
The trend toward normalizing psychopathic behaviour may have
started, innocently enough, in the realm of TV comedy writing.
Networks used to have rules about how characters had to be
likeable, not too offensive or immoral, says Toronto-based scriptdevelopment executive Anne Fenn. Then came Seinfeld, followed by
Curb Your Enthusiasm and Arrested Development, which all allowed
the writers and the audience to peek inside characters uglier,
narcissistic motivations.
Its difficult to say which came first the need for more interesting
characters as a result of this new style of comedy, or audiences
boredom with traditional sitcom, Ms. Fenn says.
But because these psychopathic characters were originally safely
ensconced in the realm of comedy, nobody worried much about it. It
was new and shocking to see characters like this and they made us
laugh, which was kind of the point.
Somewhere along the line, the comic psychopaths softened our
acceptance of dramatic psychopaths. Whereas, earlier in dramatic
writing, the ruthless were pursued by the good, la James Bond and

his villains, now the ruthless were the good, or at least the
sympathetic.
Consider Dexter, the thoughtful serial killer who works for Miami Metro
Police, or Hannibal Lecter, a courteous psychiatrist who engages in
cannibalism (foreshadowing The Silence of the Lambs), or everyones
beloved Walt, the meth-cooking chemist in Breaking Bad.
People enjoy watching sociopaths on television as a kind of
compensation for their own feelings of powerlessness and
helplessness, says Chicago cultural critic Adam Kotsko, author of Why
We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television.
As we are fired, dumped, ignored and bossed around by automated
voices, we perceive the world as increasingly psychopathic.
Transgressive characters stand in for our inchoate rage. Imagine if we
could just screw everyone over the way theyre screwing us over. Mean
begets mean.
As television increasingly panders to this appetite, feeding it with
handsome and often glamorous versions of the sociopath, almost
inevitably, into plain sight, come the real sociopaths, as if exiting an
imprisoning closet.
Here is Dr. Fallon, a professor of psychiatry at UC Irvine, describing
what he assumes familial love means: People close to you naturally
desire to be treated in a very special way emotionally, and not being
able to deliver that connectivity from the heart can be a big problem
for such relationships. His feelings for his family, he concedes, are no
different than his feelings for strangers.
I dont get my jollies from doing harm to other people, he insists.
I simply dont feel that bad if I happen to hurt someone in pursuit of
my own goals or even amusement.
Of course, there was that time he deliberately positioned his brother
between himself and some hyenas in Africa
Ms. Thomas, who says she teaches law as well as Sunday school, is
equally sure that what she writes is reasonable, unaware of its moral
insanity: Most people who interact with sociopaths are better off than
they otherwise might be. Sociopaths are part of the grease making the
world go around. We fulfill fantasies, or at least the appearance of
fantasies. In fact, we are sometimes the only ones attentive to
providing for your deepest wants and needs.

As for the bestselling author Dr. Dutton, his idea of wisdom in

psychopaths is that they show fearlessness, focus and a talent for
identifying the emotions of others.
Ah, where to begin? Duttons argument seems to be that sometimes
we could all use a little of what he terms the seven deadly wins
ruthlessness, charm, focus, mental toughness, fearlessness,
mindfulness and action, writes Boston-based clinical psychologist
Martha Stout while reviewing his book for The New Republic. I daresay
we could but those behavioural features do not represent a dose of
psychopathy, to use Duttons expression. In reality, a touch of
psychopathy would mean a malignant streak of brutality, oiliness,
predatory single-mindedness, callousness, carelessness, exclusive selfinvolvement and clinical impulsivity.
Real-life psychopaths do not resemble charming, focused and ruthless
business leaders and politicians, or breathtakingly intelligent
investigators like Sherlock Holmes. Instead, they are impulsive and
greedy. Their conduct destroys companies and devastates
communities. In his book The Psychopath Test, British journalist Jon
Ronson points to Haitian death squad leader Emmanuel Toto Constant,
a charming brute whom he interviewed in New York, and Al Dunlap, a
prime corporate predator who eviscerated the labour force at
Sunbeam. These men, Mr. Ronson argued, would be much closer
approximations of a clinically assessed psychopath than the fairminded Dexter.
What worries me, says culture critic Mr. Kotsko, is the way that this
kind of literature can legitimize the selfish and heartless behaviour that
we often see among our business and political elites. If we view such
people as especially wise or deserving, it undercuts our ability to
demand better from them and it makes the average person, who is
not going to be able to stomach the kinds of actions a psychopath
would be willing to take, feel like theyre lacking something, when
really its the psychopath whos lacking.
The power of empathy
Any bid to normalize or even celebrate psychopaths absence of
emotional intelligence is disturbing to those who see compassion and
empathy as critical to social growth. Empathy is actually the essence
of a life that contributes to civil society, says Mary Gordon, the
Canadian founder of a celebrated school program called Roots of
Empathy, which is now working, for example, with Protestant and
Catholic children in Northern Ireland to overcome decades of violent
hostility. If we cannot connect, we cannot collaborate.

This is true not only in civic and interpersonal life, but in business. A
pushback against ruthlessness has been going on for some time, led
by people who know how to speak the right language. We need to
transform the perception of empathy as a soft fluffy skill best left to
the dolly birds in HR, says Belinda Palmer, chief executive officer of
British social-media company Lady Geek, who recently launched what
she calls The Empathy Era campaign.
Ms. Palmer, understanding her business audience, points out that
empathy leads to more profit. Most large corporate cultures are
political, hierarchical and based on fear, and thus are missing out on
revenue. Among the LOral sales force, the best empathizers sold
nearly $100,000 more a year than their colleagues did. Waiters who
are better at showing empathy earn nearly 20 per cent more in tips.
Even debt collectors with empathy skills recover twice as much. We
expect companies to be ethical and make money, she says.
The two concepts are no longer mutually exclusive.
Were they ever?
The discernible heart of the world is still beating, in caring civic
leaders, ethical business people, empathetic children, good teachers,
wise parents. What we need are pop and business cultures that
celebrate them.
Patricia Pearson is the author of When She Was Bad: Why Woman Kill
and, most recently, of Opening Heavens Door: What the Dying May Be
Trying to Tell Us About Where Theyre Going.

When Your Boss is Almost a Psychopath

by Julia McKinnell
Published in the August 20, 2012 issue of Macleans
Forensic psychiatrist Ronald Schouten defines an "almost psychopath" as
someone who has an unusual amount of difficulty knowing how to treat
people. "Long before you get to the full-blown diagnosis (of psychopathy),
there's lots of bad stuff that goes on."
Schouten, who has degrees in law and medicine, assesses "almost
psychopaths" in his daily work. He's co-authored a guidebook, along
with former defence attorney Jim Silver, called Almost a Psychopath: Do
I (or Does Someone I Know) Have a Problem with Manipulation and Lack
of Empathy? It helps identify the "almost psychopath" in your midst,
whether it's your boss, doctor or caregiver.
Schouten estimates 10 to 15 per cent of people exhibit psychopathic
traits, "traits that may actually help an individual become a wellregarded member of society," the authors write. "A superficially
charming and engaging personality combined with a ruthless
willingness to do 'whatever it takes to get the job done' can be extremely
useful in high-stakes pressure-filled environments."
If you're wondering if your own charm and ruthlessness places you
somewhere on the psychopathy spectrum, the authors explain it's not
likely. "If last week you took credit for a co-worker's success and in
retrospect feel guilty about it, you are probably not an "almost
psychopath" emotional discomfort is not something a psychopath
would feel. An "almost psychopath" would likely feel deserving of the
unwarranted praise and would see the hapless co-worker whose
thunder he stole as a weak person who isn't worthy of the credit
anyway."
"Almost psychopaths" are drawn to power "like sharks are drawn to
chum." They target the vulnerable and show a profound lack of
empathy for other's feelings.
Watch out at work, the authors warn. On the phone from his office in
Boston, Schouten describes the real life case of "Greta," an "almost
psychopath" whose science degree and M.B. A. landed her a job at a top
consultancy firm where "she 'managed-up' very well, winning over the
senior partners of the firm." Greta's underlings were less charmed. She
treated support stall terribly, made unreason-able demands, and
pointed out her superior education.

The authors recommend confronting the person and stating your

issues assertively. Avoid using apologetic words such as, "Maybe I'm
too sensitive, but....'" That language "always puts you one down in
addressing a conflict, and for an "almost psychopath," that show of
weakness can be like blood in the water to a shark."
If confrontation fixes nothing, file a report with human resources.
"Framing your concerns in the context of the welfare of the
organization rather than saying, 'She's picking on me,' goes a long way
toward establishing your reasonableness." The key point is to get your
concerns on the radar of management. "Even if the conclusion is that
nothing can be done right now, there will be a track record and
eventually it will catch up with the Gretas of the world."
For the "almost psychopath" doctor, the end goal is usually sex with a
patient. "If something sort of tingles and you go, 'Hey, wait a second!'
you owe it to yourself to pay attention to that," urges Schouten. He
advises patients to research a doctor's medical credentials. Next, check
the diplomas on the doctor's wall. "If the diploma says they went to
Harvard but the web page says they went to the University of Southern
Wherever, there's a problem."
The elderly are particularly vulnerable to the "almost psychopathic"
caregiver. "In the cartoon version, the patient has died and changed
their will in the last four weeks. They've cut out the charity, left a
pittance to the family, and left it all to the young housekeeper," the
authors write. "It's funny in the cartoons but it really does happen. Tell a
relative or friend, 'Hey, there's this new person in my life and suddenly
the relationship is ramping up. Now she's bringing her daughter around
and I'm becoming an industry for the entire family.'" In the end, "there
are no great answers," laments Schouten. "Get other people involved.

How Can You Tell if Someone is a

Psychopath?
By Michael Posner
Published in the October 26, 2012 edition of the Globe and Mail
Consider the following scene: You're out for dinner with your family
when your father suddenly stands, raps his spoon against a glass and
calls the restaurant patrons all strangers to attention.
"Many thanks," he says, "for coming tonight, especially to those who
have come from out of town. I can't tell you how much it means that
you could join us. We'd like to continue the celebration after dessert,
with a reception down the street at the King's Arms. It would be lovely
to see you all there."
The diners all applaud with enthusiasm. Leaving soon after, you ask,
"Dad, we aren't really going to the King's Arms, are we?"
"No, son," he says, "but they are. My friend Malcolm has just taken
over as landlord and he'll make a few quid tonight."
That, says British research psychologist Kevin Dutton, who watched his
own father once perform that and many similar acts of brazen
tomfoolery, is classic evidence of psychopathy.
"My father was absolutely a nailed-down psychopath," he said in an
interview. "Never violent, but ruthless, fearless, shameless, charming.
He could have sold shaving cream to the Taliban."
As Dr. Dutton documents in his new book, The Wisdom of Psychopaths,
What Saints, Spies and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success, not
every psychopath is a serial killer like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer.
"There are two deep-seated myths I'm trying to debunk," explains Dr.
Dutton, 45, who teaches at Oxford's Magdalen College. "The first is
that they're all either mad or bad. And second, that you're either a
psychopath or you're not."
On the contrary, he says, predatory violence is only one of a dozen
character traits that inform the authentic psychopath. Among the
others are ruthlessness, charm, focus, intelligence, grace under

pressure, narcissism, appetite for risk, the need to control, emotional

detachment and/or lack of conscience.
Only in extreme cases is sadistic cruelty added to the list. Dr. Dutton's
favoured analogy is the mixing board of a recording studio: Each
control represents a different characteristic, and each can be
modulated to different levels, producing an infinite array of behavioural
results.
"Crank all the dials to max, and you'll end up doing 30 years," he says.
"But if some are up and some down, you can [adjust, and] be quite
successful."
Indeed, stripped of the stereotype's lurid sensationalism, bona-fide
psychopaths are walking among us in serious numbers. (Estimates
range from 0.5 to 2 per cent of the population.) We elect, obey and
idolize many of them.
Bill Clinton, Steve Jobs, Franklin Roosevelt, James Bond, John F.
Kennedy, Vladimir Putin, King David, the Apostle Paul all of these, Dr.
Dutton suggests, would doubtless score well on any psychopathic test.
(He is not prepared to offer judgment about Barack Obama or his
Republican presidential rival, Mitt Romney.)
Mesmerizing chief executive officer, type-A lawyer or cardiac surgeon,
charismatic clergyman, galvanic politician, seductive lead actor all of
these, he says, display psychopathic tendencies, and all the more
effective because they are so carefully veiled.
The common denominator is high achievement. Their methods may
not always pass the smell test. They may leave victims callously
strewn in their wake. But the syndrome does have redemptive value.
Functional psychopaths get things done often, things that contribute
to the broader social good.
"A Martian working at a clinic treating human sun-related conditions,
everything from melanoma to dehydration, would be forgiven for
thinking, 'Let's ban the sun. It's bad,' " Dr. Dutton says. "But you and I
know the sun is only bad in large doses. In fact, without it, we wouldn't
be here at all. It's the same with psychopaths. Exposed to one all day,
you're going to get carcinoma of the personality. But regulated
psychopathy can have intrinsic benefits personality with a good tan."
Psychopaths are such brilliant actors that potential victims may not
realize what they are dealing with, says Dr. Dutton, whose first book,
Flipnosis: The Art of Split-Second Persuasion, was translated into 18

languages. But certain social cues facilitate recognition, he maintains.

Is your husband deceitful (statistically, psychopaths are predominantly
male)? Is your boss manipulative? Does your colleague steal your ideas
or shift blame for failures to other staff members?
The key difference between a criminally minded and a functionally
successfully psychopath is self-control. "The former has his impulsivity
dial turned up higher," Dr. Dutton says. "The other is much better able
to defer gratification."
It's not surprising that politics attracts a disproportionate number of
psychopaths. "Politicians must be self-confident, fearless, very good at
persuasion and manipulation, and be mentally tough to deal with
crises," he says. "One senior British MP he shall remain nameless
told me the only way to see who was stabbing you in the back was to
see their reflection in the eyes of the person stabbing you in the front."
Because apples seldom fall far from their tree, I asked Dr. Dutton
whether he harboured the same psychopathic instincts as his late
father. "Well, I'll tell you, Michael," he says, sounding very much like
the Petticoat Lane market trader his father was. "I've got too much of a
conscience."
But, in other respects, Dr. Dutton is clearly his father's son. He frames
complex ideas in simple ways, demonstrates the same glib facility with
words and establishes instant familiarity by dropping my name
frequently into the conversation.
And, lest we forget, salesmanship: Even though he argues that
psychopathic killers are just a small fraction of the psychopathic
population, Dr. Dutton's website is designed like an advertisement for
A Nightmare on Elm Street, with shock-horror typography.
"That's called getting the best of both worlds, my friend," he said.
"You've got to reel them in somehow. And it's called marketing."
Psycho or hero?
As Kevin Dutton's new book illustrates, the same characteristics that
we might use to describe society's leaders just need a little push to
become traits that define full-throttle psychopathy.
Leadership traits
Charisma
Self-confidence
Ability to influence

Persuasiveness
Visionary
Risk-taking
Action-oriented
Ability to make hard decisions

Psychopathic traits
Superficial charm
Grandiosity
Manipulation
Con artistry
Impulsivity
Fabrication of stories
Thrill-seeking
Emotional coldness

Section I
Insightful Perspectives

The Sociopaths Code

With excerpts from The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene
Since the dawn of academic writing over three millennia ago, in both
east and west, sages have wrestled with the problem of power. Virtue
is seen as the positive use of power and sin is often seen as the
negative use of power.
Human society appears to be plagued with the inability to differentiate
the sage from the psychopath as leader. For my purposes I find the
term psychopath and sociopath as interchangeable terms, although
many academics would argue vehemently about significant differences
between the two terms.
The 48 Laws of Power generated by Robert Green is offered as a
neutral analysis of power acquisition. However, I see these 48 Laws as
a brilliant delineation of the personality profile best described as
sociopathic.

1.

Never outshine the master.

2.

Never put too much trust in friends; learn how to use enemies.

3.

Conceal your intentions.

4.

Always say less than necessary.

5.

So much depends on reputation. Guard it with your life.

6.

Court attention at all costs.

7.

Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit.

8.

Make other people come to you; use bait if necessary.

9.

Win through your actions, never through argument.

10.

Infection: avoid the unhappy and unlucky.

11.

Learn to keep people dependent on you.

12.

Use selective honesty and generosity to disarm your victim.

13.

When asking for help, appeal to people's self-interests, never to their

mercy or gratitude.

14.

Pose as a friend, work as a spy.

15.

Crush your enemy totally.

16.

Use absence to increase respect and honor.

17.

Keep others in suspended terror: cultivate an air of unpredictability.

18.

Do not build fortresses to protect yourself. Isolation is dangerous.

19.

Know who you're dealing with; do not offend the wrong person.

20.

Do not commit to anyone.

21.

Play a sucker to catch a sucker: play dumber than your mark.

22.

Use the surrender tactic: transform weakness into power.

23.

Concentrate your forces.

24.

Play the perfect courtier.

25.

Re-create yourself.

26.

Keep your hands clean.

27.

Play on people's need to believe to create a cult like following.

28.

Enter action with boldness.

29.

Plan all the way to the end.

30.

Make your accomplishments seem effortless.

31.

Control the options: get others to play with the cards you deal.

32.

Play to people's fantasies.

33.

Discover each man's thumbscrew.

34.

Be royal in your fashion: act like a king to be treated like one.

35.

Master the art of timing.

36.

Disdain things you cannot have: Ignoring them is the best revenge.

37.

Create compelling spectacles.

38.

Think as you like but behave like others.

39.

Stir up waters to catch fish.

40.

Despise the free lunch.

41.

Avoid stepping into a great man's shoes.

42.

Strike the shepherd and the sheep will scatter.

43.

Work on the hearts and minds of others.

44.

Disarm and infuriate with the mirror effect.

45.

Preach the need for change, but never reform too much at once.

46.

Never appear perfect.

47.

Do not go past the mark you aimed for; in victory, learn when to stop.

48.

Assume formlessness.

49.
13 Rules for Dealing with Sociopaths in
Everyday Life
1 from The Sociopath Next Door, by Martha Stout
50.

51.
1. The first rule involves the bitter pill of accepting that some
people literally have no conscience.
52.
53. These people do not often look like Charles Manson or a
Ferengi bartender. They look like us.
54.
55.
2. In a contest between your instincts and what is implied
by role a person has taken oneducator, doctor, leader, animal
lover, humanist, parentgo with your instincts.
56.
57. Whether you want to be or not, you are a constant
observer of human behaviour, and your unfiltered impressions
though alarming and seemingly outlandish, may well help you
out if you will let them. Your best self understands without being
told, that impressive and moral-sounding labels do not bestow
conscience on anyone who did not have it to begin with.
58.
59.
3. When considering a new relationship of any kind, practice
the Rule of Threes regarding the claims and promises a person
makes, and the responsibilities he or she has. Make the Rule of
Threes your personal policy.
60.
61. One lie, one broken promise, or a single neglected
responsibility may be a misunderstanding instead. Two may
involve a serious mistake. But three lies says you're dealing with
a liar, and deceit is the linchpin of conscienceless behavior. Cut
your losses and get out as soon as you can. Leaving, though it
may be hard, will be easier now than later, and less costly. Do
not give your money, your work, your secrets, or your affection
to a three-timer. Your valuable gifts will be wasted.
62.
63.
4. Question authority.
64.
65. Once againtrust your own instincts and anxieties,
especially those concerning people who claim that dominating
others, violence, war, or some other violation of your conscience
is the grand solution to some problem. Do this even when, or
especially when, everyone around you has completely stopped
questioning authority. Recite to yourself what Stanley Milgram
taught us about obedience: At least six out of ten people will

blindly obey to the bitter end an official-looking authority in their

midst. The good news is that having social support makes people
somewhat more likely to challenge authority. Encourage those
around you to question, too.
66.
67.
5. Suspect flattery.
68.
69. Compliments are lovely, especially when they are sincere.
In contrast, flattery is extreme and appeals to our egos in
unrealistic ways. It is the material of counterfeit charm, and
nearly always involves an intent to manipulate. Manipulation
through flattery is sometimes innocuous and sometimes sinister.
Peek over your massaged ego and remember to suspect flattery.
70.
71. This "flattery rule" applies on an individual basis, and also
at the level of groups and even whole nations. Throughout all of
human history and to the present, the call to war has included
the flattering claim that one's own forces are about to
accomplish a victory that will change the world for the better, a
triumph that is morally laudable, justified by its humane
outcome, unique in human endeavor, righteous, and worthy of
enormous gratitude. Since we began to record the human story,
all of our major wars have been framed in this way, on all sides
of the conflict, and in all languages the adjective most often
applied to the word war is holy. An argument can easily be made
that humanity will have peace when nations of people are at last
able to see through this masterful flattery.
72.
73. Just as an individual pumped up on the flattery of a
manipulator is likely to behave in foolish ways, exaggerated
patriotism that is flattery-fueled is a dangerous thing.
74.
75.
6. If necessary, redefine your concept of respect.
76.
77. Too often, we mistake fear for respect, and the more fearful
we are of someone, the more we view him or her as deserving of
our respect.
78.
79. I have a spotted Bengal cat who was named Muscle Man by
my daughter when she was a toddler, because OR even as a
kitten he looked like a professional wrestler. Grown now, he is
much larger than most other domestic cats. His formidable claws
resemble those of his Asian leopard-cat ancestors, but by
temperament, he is gentle and peace-loving. My neighbour has a
little calico who visits. Evidently, the calico's predatory charisma
is huge, and she is brilliant at directing the evil eye at other cats.

Whenever she is within fifty feet, Muscle Man, all fifteen pounds
of him to her seven, cringes and crouches in fear and feline
deference.
80.
81. Muscle Man is a splendid cat. He is warm and loving, and
he is close to my heart. Nonetheless, I would like to believe that
some of his reactions are more primitive than mine, I hope I do
not mistake fear for respect, because to do so would be to ensure
my own victimization. Let us use our big human brains to
overpower our animal tendency to bow to predators, so we can
disentangle the reflexive confusion of anxiety and awe. In a
perfect world, human respect would be an automatic reaction
only to those who are strong, kind, and morally courageous. The
person who profits from frightening you is not likely to be any of
these. The resolve to keep respect separate from fear is even
more crucial for groups and nations. The politician, small or lofty,
who menaces the people with frequent reminders of the
possibility of crime, violence, or terrorism, and who then uses
their magnified fear to gain allegiance, is more likely to be a
successful con artist than a legitimate leader. This too has been
true throughout human history.
82.
83.
7. Do not join the game.
84.
85. Intrigue is a sociopath's tool. Resist the temptation to
compete with a seductive sociopath, to outsmart him,
psychoanalyze, or even banter with him. In addition to reducing
yourself to his level, you would be distracting yourself from what
is really important, which is to protect yourself.
86.
87.
8. The best way to protect yourself from a sociopath is to
avoid him,
to refuse any kind of contact or communication.
88.
89. Psychologists do not usually like to recommend avoidance,
but in this case, I make a very deliberate exception. The only
truly effective method for dealing with a sociopath you have
identified is to disallow him or her from your life altogether.
Sociopaths live completely outside of the social contract, and
therefore to include them in relationships or other social
arrangements is perilous. Begin this exclusion of them in the
context of your own relationships and social life. You will not hurt
anyone's feelings. Strange as it seems, and though they may try
to pretend otherwise, sociopaths do not have any such feelings
to hurt.
90.

91. You may never be able to make your family and friends
understand why you are avoiding a particular individual.
Sociopathy is surprisingly difficult to see, and even harder to
explain. Avoid him anyway.
92. If total avoidance is impossible, make plans to come as
close as you can to the goal of total avoidance.
93.
94.
9. Question your tendency to pity too easily.
95.
96. Respect should be reserved for the kind and the morally
courageous. Pity is another socially valuable response, and it
should be reserved for innocent people who are in genuine pain
or who have fallen on misfortune. If, instead, you find yourself
often pitying someone who consistently hurts you or other
people, and who actively campaigns for your sympathy, the
chances are close to 100 percent that you are dealing with a
sociopath.
97.
98. Related to thisI recommend that you severely challenge
your need to be polite in absolutely all situations. For normal
adults in our culture, being what we think of as "civilized" is like a
reflex, and often we find ourselves being automatically decorous
even when someone has enraged us, repeatedly lied to us, or
figuratively stabbed us in the back. Sociopaths take huge
advantage of this automatic courtesy in exploitive situations.
99.
100. Do not be afraid to be unsmiling and calmly to the point.
101.
102.
10. Do not try to redeem the unredeemable.
103.
104. Second (third, fourth, and fifth) chances are for people who
possess conscience. If you are dealing with a person who has no
conscience, know how to swallow hard and cut your losses.
105.
106. At some point, most of us need to learn the important, if
disappointing, life lesson that, no matter how good our
intentions, we cannot control the behaviourlet alone the
character structuresof other people. Learn this fact of human
life, and avoid the irony of getting caught up in the same
ambition he hasto control.
107. If you do not desire control, but instead want to help
people, then help only those who truly want to be helped. I think
you will find this does not include the person who has no
conscience.
108.

109. The sociopath's behaviour is not your fault, not in any way
whatsoever. It is also not your mission. Your mission is your own
life.
110.
111.
11. Never agree, out of pity or for any other reason, to help
a sociopath conceal his or her true character.
112.
113. "Please don't tell," often spoken tearfully and with great
gnashing of teeth, is the trademark plea of thieves, child abusers
and sociopaths. Do not listen to this siren song. Other people
deserve to be warned more than sociopaths deserve to have you
keep their secrets.
114.
115. If someone without conscience insists that you "owe" him
or her, recall what you are about to read here: "You owe me" has
been the standard line of sociopaths for thousands of years,
quite literally, and is still so. It is what Rasputin told the empress
of Russia. It is what Hannah's father implied to her after her eyeopening conversation with him at the prison.
116.
117. We tend to experience "You owe me" as a compelling
claim, but it is simply not true. Do not listen. Also, ignore the one
that goes, "You are just like me." You are not.
118.
119.
12. Defend your psyche.
120.
121. Do not allow someone without conscience, or even a string
of such people, to convince you that humanity is a failure. Most
human beings do possess conscience. Most human beings are
able to love.
122.
123.
13. Living well is the best revenge.
124.

125. Key Symptoms of Psychopathy

1 From Without Conscience by Robert Hare
126.
127.
Emotional/Interpersonal
Glib and Superficial
Egocentric and Grandiose
Lack of remorse or guilt
Lack of empathy
Deceitful and Manipulative
Shallow emotions

128.
129.
Social Deviance
Impulsive
Poor behavior controls
Need for excitement
Lack of responsibility
Early behavior problems
Adult antisocial behavior
130.
131.
Recently, an ex-con offered me his opinion of the Psychopathy Checklist: he wasn't too impressed! Now middle-aged, he
had spent much of his early adult life in prison, where he was
once diagnosed as a psychopath. Here are his responses:
132.
Glib and superficial"What is negative about articulation skills?"
Egocentric and grandiose"How can I attain something if I don't
reach high?"
Lack of empathy"Empathy toward an enemy is a sign of
weakness."
Deceitful and manipulative "Why be truthful to the enemy? All of
us are manipulative to some degree. Isn't positive manipulation
common?"
Shallow emotions"Anger can lead to being labeled a psychopath."
Impulsive"Can be associated with creativity, living in the now,
being spontaneous and free."
Poor behavioral controls "Violent and aggressive outbursts may be
a defensive mechanism, a false front, a tool for survival in a jungle."
Weed for excitement"Courage to reject the routine, monotonous, or
uninteresting. Living on the edge, doing things that are risky,
exciting, challenging, living life to its fullest, being alive rather than
dull, boring, and almost dead."
Lack of responsibility"Shouldn't focus on human weaknesses that
are common."
Early behavior problems and adult antisocial behavior is a
criminal record reflective of badness or nonconfonformity?
133.
134.
Interestingly, he had nothing to say about lack of remorse or
guilt.

135. Section II
136. Summaries of Key
Literature

137. Without Conscience

1 By Robert D. Hare, Ph.D.
138.

139.

Summary, from the back cover:

140.
141.
Most people are both repelled and intrigued by the images
of cold-blooded, conscienceless murderers that increasingly
populate our movies, television programs, and newspaper
headlines. With their flagrant criminal violation of society's rules,
serial killers like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy are among the
most dramatic examples of the psychopath. Individuals with this
personality disorder are fully aware of the consequences of their
actions and know the difference between right and wrong, yet
they are terrifyingly self-centered, remorseless, and unable to
care about the feelings of others. Perhaps most frightening, they
often seem completely normal to unsuspecting targets--and they
do not always ply their trade by killing. Presenting a compelling
portrait of these dangerous men and women based on 25 years
of distinguished scientific research, Dr. Robert D. Hare vividly
describes a world of con artists, hustlers, rapists, and other
predators who charm, lie, and manipulate their way through life.
Are psychopaths mad, or simply bad? How can they be
recognized? And how can we protect ourselves? This book
provides solid information and surprising insights for anyone
seeking to understand this devastating condition.

142.

Review, from Kirkus Reviews

143.
144.
A fascinating, if terrifying, look at psychopaths: the often
charming, glib, sane-seeming people who rape and murder--and
rip-off S&Ls [savings and loans]--without a second's thought
because they utterly lack the emotions that add up to the
defining human characteristic of conscience. Hare
(Psychology/University of British Columbia) gives thumbnail
sketches of one psychopath after another--from John Wayne
Gacy, the serial murderer who liked to entertain children as
``Pogo the Clown,'' to mere kids who torture and kill not only
animals but other children. The author isolates the essential
traits of the psychopath by using a ``psychopath checklist,'' a
system of assessment he's devised during ten years of clinical
practice with psychopaths in Canadian prisons. Again and again,
Hare's rating system has verified a definition devised in 1941 by
psychologist Hervey Cleckley, who concluded that psychopaths

lack all personal values: ``It is impossible for [the psychopath] to

take even a slight interest in the tragedy or joy or the striving of
humanity as presented in serious literature or art,'' Cleckley
wrote. ``He is also indifferent to all these matters in life itself.''
Hare cites provocative new evidence that the brain function of
psychopaths may differ from that of normal adults: It seems that
the speech of psychopaths is controlled by both hemispheres
rather than by just the left, as is typical. In addition, ``neither
side of the [psychopath's brain] is typical in the processes of
emotion.'' While all the implications of psychopathic brain
function remain unclear, Hare makes a strong case for the view
that psychopaths are born, not made--and that, crucially, little
can be done to unmake them. While advocating the firm training
of psychopaths to consider rationally the outcome of their
actions- -substituting head for heart--the author warns that
denying the incorrigible nature of these cold, calculating beings
will allow even more of them to prey on society. A chilling, eyeopening report--and a call to action.
145.

146.

Amazons editorial review:

147.
148.
"Psychopaths are social predators who charm, manipulate,
and ruthlessly plow their way through life, leaving a broad trail of
broken hearts, shattered expectations, and empty wallets.
Completely lacking in conscience and in feelings for others, they
selfishly take what they want and do as they please..." In
Without Conscience Robert Hare argues convincingly that
"psychopath" and "antisocial personality disorder" (a psychiatric
term defined by a cluster of criminal behaviors) are not the same
thing. Not all psychopaths are criminals, he says, and not all
criminals are psychopaths. He proposes a psychopathy checklist
that includes emotional/interpersonal traits such as glibness,
grandiosity, lack of guilt, and shallow emotions, as well as social
deviance traits such as impulsiveness, lack of responsibility, and
antisocial behavior. His writing is lucid and illustrated with
numerous anecdotes. The final chapter, "A Survival Guide," is
especially recommended: as Hare writes, "Psychopaths are found
in every segment of society, and there is a good chance that
eventually you will have a painful or humiliating encounter with
one."
149.

150.
Some selections from Robert Hares website,
hare.org
151.
Driven to Lead: Good, Bad and Misguided
Leadership
1 By Paul R. Lawrence
152.
153.
In this follow-up book to the best-selling Driven, Harvard
professor Paul Lawrence applies his four-drive theory of human
behavior to the realm of leadership, explaining how leadership
like all human behaviorcan be understood as a function of the
balance, or lack of balance, of four basic human drives: the drive
to acquire, to defend, to comprehend, and to bond. We achieve
an optimal state of leadership when all four drives are cultivated
and balanced.
154.
In this next-step resource, Lawrence uses historical
examples and current leadership crises to explain how the
balance of the four drives results in one of three types of
leadership:
155.
Good leadership: The best leaders, followers, and stakeholders
fulfill the four drives in a balanced manner.
Misguided leadership: These leaders, followers, and
stakeholders fulfill one or some of their four drives while ignoring
or suppressing the others.
Evil leadership: Defines leaders who are missing the drive to
bond and have influence over others and only fulfill their drives
to acquire, defend, and comprehend.

156.
Driven to Lead explains the biological underpinnings of
leadership behavior and offers a compelling discussion of the
history of leadership. It examines the critical turning points in the
leadership of political institutions, the rise of the corporation as
the leading economic institution, and the leadership of religious,
artistic, and scientific organizations.
157.
158.
Based on theories that are universal, testable, and
actionable, Driven to Lead brings to light a general theory of
human behavior that can be used to cultivate good leadership
and leaders who have a balance of the four drives.
159.
160.
--From the jacket
161.
162.
The Psychopath Whisperer
1 By Kent Kiehl, Ph.D.

163.
164.
We know of psychopaths from chilling headlines and stories
in the news and moviesfrom Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy,
to Hannibal Lecter and Dexter Morgan. As Dr. Kent Kiehl shows,
psychopaths can be identified by a checklist of symptoms that
includes pathological lying; lack of empathy, guilt, and remorse;
grandiose sense of self-worth; manipulation; and failure to accept
ones actions. But why do psychopaths behave the way they do?
Is it the result of their environment how they were raisedor is
there a genetic component to their lack of conscience?
165.
166.
This is the question Kiehl, a protg of famed psychopath
researcher Dr. Robert Hare, was determined to answer as he
began his career twenty years ago. To aid in his quest to unravel
the psychopathic mind, Kiehl created the first mobile functional
MRI scanner to study psychopaths in prison populations. The
brains of more than five hundred psychopaths and three
thousand other offenders have been scanned by Kiehls laboratorythe worlds largest forensic neuroscience repository of its
kind. Over the course of The Psychopath Whisperer, we follow
the scientific breadcrumbs that Kiehl uncovered to show that the
key brain structures that correspond with emotional engagement
and reactions are diminished in psychopaths, offering new clues
to how to predict and treat the disorder.
167.
168.
In The Psychopath Whisperer, Kiehl describes in fascinating
detail his years working with psychopaths and studying their
thought processes from the remorseless serial killers he meets
with behind bars to children whose behavior and personality
traits exhibit the early warning signs of psychopathy.
169.
170.
Less than 1 percent of the general population meets the
criteria for psychopathy. But psychopaths account for a vastly
outsized proportion of violent crimes. And as Kiehl shows, many
who arent psychopaths exhibit some of the behaviors and traits
associated with the condition. What do you do if you discover
your roommate, or boss, or the person you are dating has traits
that define a psychopath? And what does having a diminished
limbic region of the brain mean for how the legal system
approaches crimes committed by psychopaths?
171.
172.
A compelling narrative of cutting-edge science, The
Psychopath Whisperer will open your eyes on a fascinating but
little understood world, with startling implications for society, the
law, and our personal lives.
173.

174.
175.

--From the inside flap

176.

Biography of Robert Hare, from hare.org

177.
178.
Robert Hare is Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University
of British Columbia, where he has taught and conducted research
for more than four decades, and President of Darkstone Research
Group Ltd., a forensic research and consulting firm. He has
devoted most of his academic career to the investigation of
psychopathy, its nature, assessment, and implications for mental
health and criminal justice. He is the author of several books,
including Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the
Psychopaths Among Us, and more than one hundred scientific
articles on psychopathy.
179.
180.
He is the developer of the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised
(PCL-R) and a co-author of its derivatives, the Psychopathy
Checklist: Screening Version, the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth
Version, the Antisocial Process Screening Device, and the P-Scan
(for use in law enforcement). He has consulted with law
enforcement, including the FBI and the RCMP, was a member of
the former Research Advisory Board of the FBI Child Abduction
and Serial Murder Investigative Resources Center (CASMIRC), and
is an Affiliate Member of the International Criminal Investigative
Analysis Fellowship. He also was a member of the Advisory Panel
established by Her Majestys Prison Service to develop new
programs for the treatment of psychopathic offenders. His
current research on psychopathy includes assessment issues,
developmental factors, neurobiological correlates, risk for
recidivism and violence, and the development (with S. Wong) of
new treatment and management strategies for psychopathic
offenders (Guidelines for a Psychopathy Treatment Program).
181.
182.
He and Paul Babiak have extended the theory and research
on psychopathy to the business and corporate world, with the
development of the B-Scan-360, a 360 instrument used to
screen for psychopathic traits and behaviors, and a book, Snakes
in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work. He lectures widely on
psychopathy and on the use and misuse of the PCL-R in the
mental health and criminal justice systems.
183.

184. The Sociopath Next Door

1 By Martha Stout, Ph.D.
185.

186.

Summary, from the jacket

187.
188.
Who is the devil you know?
189.
Is it your lying, cheating ex-husband?
190.
Your sadistic high school gym teacher?
191.
Your boss who loves to humiliate people in meetings?
192.
The colleague who stole your idea and passed it off as her
own?
193.
194.
In the pages of The Sociopath Next Door, you will realize
that your ex was not just misunderstood. He's a sociopath. And
your boss, teacher, and colleague? They may be sociopaths too.
195.
196.
We are accustomed to think of sociopaths as violent
criminals, but in The Sociopath Next Door, Harvard psychologist
Martha Stout reveals that a shocking 4 percent of ordinary
peopleone in twenty-fivehas an often undetected mental
disorder, the chief symptom of which is that that person
possesses no conscience. He or she has no ability whatsoever to
feel shame, guilt, or remorse. One in twenty-five everyday
Americans, therefore, is secretly a sociopath. They could be your
colleague, your neighbor, even family. And they can do literally
anything at all and feel absolutely no guilt.
197.
198.
How do we recognize the remorseless? One of their chief
characteristics is a kind of glow or charisma that makes
sociopaths more charming or interesting than the other people
around them. They're more spontaneous, more intense, more
complex, or even sexier than everyone else, making them tricky
to identify and leaving us easily seduced. Fundamentally,
sociopaths are different because they cannot love. Sociopaths
learn early on to show sham emotion, but underneath they are
indifferent to others' suffering. They live to dominate and thrill to
win.
199.
200.
The fact is, we all almost certainly know at least one or
more sociopaths already. Part of the urgency in reading The
Sociopath Next Door is the moment when we suddenly recognize
that someone we knowsomeone we worked for, or were
involved with, or voted foris a sociopath. But what do we do

with that knowledge? To arm us against the sociopath, Dr. Stout

teaches us to question authority, suspect flattery, and beware
the pity play. Above all, she writes, when a sociopath is
beckoning, do not join the game.
201.
202.
It is the ruthless versus the rest of us, and The Sociopath
Next Door will show you how to recognize and defeat the devil
you know.
203.

204.

Review, from Publishers Weekly

205.

206.
Stout says that as many as 4% of the population are
conscienceless sociopaths who have no empathy or affectionate
feelings for humans or animals. As Stout (The Myth of Sanity)
explains, a sociopath is defined as someone who displays at least
three of seven distinguishing characteristics, such as
deceitfulness, impulsivity and a lack of remorse. Such people
often have a superficial charm, which they exercise ruthlessly in
order to get what they want. Stout argues that the development
of sociopathy is due half to genetics and half to non-genetic
influences that have not been clearly identified. The author offers
three examples of such people, including Skip, the handsome,
brilliant, superrich boy who enjoyed stabbing bullfrogs near his
family's summer home, and Doreen, who lied about her
credentials to get work at a psychiatric institute, manipulated her
colleagues and, most cruelly, a patient. Dramatic as these tales
are, they are composites, and while Stout is a good writer and
her exploration of sociopaths can be arresting, this book
occasionally appeals to readers' paranoia, as the book's title and
its guidelines for dealing with sociopaths indicate.
207.
208.

209.

210.

Biography, available on Wikipedia:

211.
212.
Martha Stout, Ph.D., is an American psychologist and
author.
213.
214.
She completed her professional training in psychology at
the McLean Psychiatric Hospital. She served as an instructor on
the faculty of the Harvard Medical School for over twenty-five
years, and served as part of the graduate faculty of The New
School, the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, and
Wellesley College. She has written several books on psychology
that appeal to the popular market.

215.
216.
In her most popular book, The Sociopath Next Door: The
Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us, she advises developing an
awareness of the nature of anti-social behavior in order to avoid
becoming its victim and proposes thirteen rules as self-help
guidelines to assessing relationships and behavior for these
characteristics, as well as offering advice on handling situations
when one encounters the behavior.
217.
218.
Dr. Stout currently is in private practice as a clinical
psychologist in Boston.

219. Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go

to Work
1 by Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare

220.

Summary, from the book jacket

221.
222.
Let's say you're about to hire somebody for a position in
your company. Your corporation wants someone who's fearless,
charismatic, and full of new ideas. Candidate X is charming,
smart, and has all the right answers to your questions. Problem
solved, right? Maybe not.
223.
224.
We'd like to think that if we met someone who was
completely without conscience -- someone who was capable of
doing anything at all if it served his or her purposes -- we would
recognize it. In popular culture, the image of the psychopath is of
someone like Hannibal Lecter or the BTK Killer. But in reality,
many psychopaths just want money, or power, or fame, or simply
a nice car. Where do these psychopaths go? Often, it's to the
corporate world.
225.
226.
Researchers Paul Babiak and Robert Hare have long
studied psychopaths. Hare, the author of Without Conscience, is
a world-renowned expert on psychopathy, and Babiak is an
industrial-organizational psychologist. Recently the two came
together to study how psychopaths operate in corporations, and
the results were surprising. They found that it's exactly the
modern, open, more flexible corporate world, in which high risks
can equal high profits, that attracts psychopaths. They may
enter as rising stars and corporate saviors, but all too soon
they're abusing the trust of colleagues, manipulating supervisors,
and leaving the workplace in shambles.
227.
228.
Snakes in Suits is a compelling, frightening, and
scientifically sound look at exactly how psychopaths work in the
corporate environment: what kind of companies attract them,
how they negotiate the hiring process, and how they function
day by day. You'll learn how they apply their "instinctive"
manipulation techniques -- assessing potential targets,
controlling influential victims, and abandoning those no longer
useful -- to business processes such as hiring, political command
and control, and executive succession, all while hiding within the
corporate culture. It's a must read for anyone in the business
world, because whatever level you're at, you'll learn the subtle

warning signs of psychopathic behavior and be able to protect

yourself and your company -- before it's too late.

229.

Review, from Publishers Weekly

230.
231.
Psychopaths are described as incapable of empathy, guilt,
or loyalty to anyone but themselves; still, spotting a psychopath
isn't easy. Babiak, an industrial and organizational psychologist,
and Hare (Without Conscience), creator of the standard tool for
diagnosing psychopathology, present a study of the psychopath
in the corporate landscape. A common description of
psychopathology states that subjects "know the words but not
the music;" Babiak and Hare state that "a clever psychopath can
present such a well-rounded picture of a perfect job candidate
that even seasoned interviewers" can be fooled. In between a
disposable series of narrative acts that follow a psychopath's
progress ("Act I, Scene I - Grand Entrance;" "Act III, Scene II - An
Honest Mistake?" "Act V, Scene I - Circle the wagons"), thorough
research and anecdotes from a number of sources-current
literature, news media, and showbiz among them-to illuminate
the power of the psychopath to manipulate those around him, as
well as what strategies can be used to identify and disarm him.
Clear and complete, this is a handy overview for managers and
HR, with enough "self-defense" techniques to help coworkers
from getting bit.
232.

233.

Review, from The Australian

234.
235.
Robert D. Hare is to psychopathy what Arnold
Schwarzenegger is to violence: our favorite interpreter, if without
a jones for the real thing. An FBI consultant and designer of the
standard diagnostic tool for psychopathy, Hare wrote Without
Conscience and now, in conjunction with industrial psychologist
Paul Babiak, Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work, a
lay guide to corporate psychopaths.
236.
237.
Pathologically duplicitous investment bankers, doctors who
score recreational narcotics, corrupt police officers, unscrupulous
lawyers ... organizations suffering under the mismanagement of
such individuals are educated in screening techniques by this
book and offered solutions.
238.
239.
In many respects, the corporate sphere fosters
psychopathic behavior. Narcissism and insensitivity are
considered a fair trade for the ability to thrive in what the

authors refer to as "an accelerated, dispassionate business

world".
240.
241.
John Dean, former counsel to the US president, noted that
corporate scandals don't happen in vacuums. "Rather," he wrote,
"they need a proper atmosphere ... actions and activities must be
noticed for a scandal to occur, and there must be an atmosphere
intolerant of the action or activity for a scandal to occur."
242.
243.
The Corporation, an award-winning documentary, posited
that the modern corporation is, in itself, a psychopathic entity:
"The institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully
meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath."
244.
245.
Business structures and procedures have changed
dramatically since the early 20th century, when the turgid
bureaucratic model optimized productivity. The mergers,
acquisitions and takeovers of the 1970s and '80s not only
trimmed a lot of corporate fat, they also created a demand for a
new kind of player: not the steadfast "company man" of the past
but an entirely different model: the corporate predator.
246.
247.
Similarly, technological sophistication accelerated the rate
of change.
248.
"A tremendous burden has been put on large
organizations," Babiak and Hare write, "forcing them to reinvent
themselves quickly in order to remain competitive.
249.
"As almost a defensive maneuver, some large corporations
have needed to merge, acquire other companies or downsize."
250.
251.
Attracted by "fast-paced, high-risk, high-profit
environments", disordered personalities thrive in such corporate
instability: Toshihide Iguchi, Nick Leeson, John Rusnak,
Christopher Skase and Peter Young, say, or the number-fudgers
at Adelphia, Enron, Global Crossing, Tyco and WorldCom. "In the
journal Psychology, Crime and Law," the authors report,
"researchers Board and Fritzon administered a self-report
personality inventory to a sample of British senior business
managers and executives. They concluded that the prevalence of
histrionic, narcissistic and compulsive personality disorders was
relatively high, and that many of the traits exhibited were
consistent with psychopathy: superficial charm, insincerity,
egocentricity, manipulativeness, grandiosity, lack of empathy,
exploitativeness, independence, rigidity, stubbornness and
dictatorial tendencies."
252.

253.
To corporate psychopaths, success is the best revenge.
Nice girls, they reason, don't get the corner office. In What Would
Machiavelli Do? The Ends Justify the Meanness, satirist Stanley
Bing counsels aspiring players: "Crush them. Hear their bones
break, their windpipes snap."
254.
255.
Characterized by a disturbing lack of empathy,
psychopaths have little insight into their behavior. Their life
judgments are poor, as evidenced by the disastrous family lives
of many corporate high-flyers, and they rarely learn from
experience, meaning that dysfunctional behavior is repeated ad
infinitum. Their hallmark? Pathological lying.
256.
257.
"They cross back and forth easily between lying and
honesty during conversations," the authors observe, "because
they do not have the guilty feelings the rest of us have when we
try to tell a lie."
258.
259.
Another defining characteristic is the refusal to take
responsibility. Psychopaths are never accountable. All blame is
externalized (circumstances, fate, luck, brainwashing, the
weather). "Pointing the finger at others," Babiak and Hare
conclude, "serves the dual purpose of reinforcing their own
positive image while spreading disparaging information about
rivals and detractors. They do this by positioning their blame of
others as a display of loyalty to the listener."
260.
The psychopath's experience of "primitive or protoemotions such as anger, frustration, and rage" is refracted as
irresistible charm. Their impression management is famously
near-faultless. All that matters is the objective: that is, to
discredit those who see through them.
261.
262.
A far more aggressive psychopathic subclass brings to
mind the leadership style of certain religious heads and
politicians. "This group, the corporate bullies, seems to reflect
many of the traits of the macho psychopath: they are primarily
abusive rather than charming (and) rely on coercion, abuse,
humiliation, harassment, aggression and fear to get their way."
263.
264.
Such emotional poverty and lack of conscience is often
confused with masculinity, the ability to make "hard decisions",
and effective crisis management.
265.
266.
As Babiak and Hare emphasize, the reality is that "there is
no evidence that psychopaths derive any benefit from treatment
or management programs". Hare's Psychopathy Checklist-

Revised (PCL-R), a rating scale rather than easily falsified selfreport tests, involves a qualified person writing an assessment
based on an in-depth interview and clinical records. The authors
suggest similar techniques implemented in corporate
employment processes would, in the long run, save serious
money. Intrigued? Buy the book. However wooden in parts,
Snakes in Suits is a valuable addition to any business library.
267.

268.

About the Authors

269.
270.
Paul Babiak, Ph.D., is an industrial and organizational
psychologist and president of HRBackOffice, an executive
coaching and consulting firm specializing in management
development and succession planning. His work has been
featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Harvard
Business Review, and Fast Company.
271.
--from HarperCollins
272.
273.
Robert D. Hare, Ph.D., is the author of Without Conscience
and the creator of the standard tool for diagnosing psychopathy.
He is an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of
British Columbia, and president of Darkstone Research Group, a
forensic research and consulting firm. He has won numerous
awards for his research, lectures widely on psychopathy, and
consults with law enforcement organizations, including the FBI.
274.
--from amazon.com
275.

276. The Liars Tale

1 By Jeremy Campbell
277.

278.

Summary, from the jacket

279.
280.
Lies are often so subtle, so deftly woven into easily
acceptable truths that we often fail to recognize them. Fireflies
find mates by duping rivals with patterns of deceptive flashes;
politicians win elections by distorting statistics and spouting halftruths; artists often prize imagination and beauty over simple
realism. We accept these events as conventional occurrences
and rarely question how they came to pass nor do we debate
their merit. In The Liar's Tale, Jeremy Campbell rigorously
explores the provocative notion that deception is not only an
ineradicable aspect of human nature, but a necessary and useful
part of human success and enlightenment.
281.
282.
In lucid, engaging prose, Campbell shows that, throughout
history, the devices of falsehood, whether simple exaggeration,
pretense, or barefaced lieshave always been hard to resist and
easy to employ. In tracing the natural history of falsehood, The
Liar's Tale turns Sisella Bok's defense of truth, as demonstrated
in her book Lying, on its head as Campbell compelling argues
that deception can no longer be seen as an artificial, deviant, or
even dispensable feature of life; instead, it is a natural,
inevitable, and relentlessly necessary part of our world. As art
and fiction have increasingly come to dominate our culture, we
have obtained dissatisfaction with the thinness, the inadequacy
of literal truth--a sense that it fails to do justice to the rich
possibilities of language and experience.
283.
284.
Beginning with a discussion of evolutionary biology and the
necessity (and ultimate value) of deceit in the animal kingdom,
Campbell asks the unsettling question of whether falsehood
might, in fact, be instinctual, or at least natural. From there
Campbell describes the classical philosophical foundation of truth
as the ultimate category of knowledge and organizations,
focusing on Aristotle and his battle with the Sophists, early
philosophers who claimed that truth was unstable and illusory.
This division within classical thought has reappeared throughout
history, even in the European enlightenment, which centered on
the possibility of individual knowledge and liberty. Campbells
seamless integration of art, literature, and philosophy shows how

the 19th centurys focus on individuality, imagination and irony

eventually began to privilege artifice and fraud over nature and
simplicity. Ultimately, this laid the foundation for the 20th
centurys philosophical and cultural apotheosis of lying,
exemplified by figures such as Freud, Wittgenstein, and Derrida
all of who made deception and ambiguity a main thematic
component of their thought.
285.
286.

287.
Review from the New York Times by Francis
Kane
288.
289.
Birds do it; bees do it; even educated professors do it: why
not lie? That's the question one might be left with after reading
''The Liar's Tale: A History of Falsehood,'' by the British journalist
Jeremy Campbell. This challenging romp through the underbelly
of intellectual history -- though maybe not as romantic as falling
in love -- is fascinating and troublesome. While granting that
truth may, and perhaps should, be the normal practice of society,
Campbell wants us to see that ''for better or worse, lying,
untruth, is not an artificial, deviant or dispensable feature of life.''
Falsehood is indispensable for human evolution, for we could not
survive only ''on a diet as thin and meager as the truth.''
290.
291.
The tale begins at that crucial historical juncture when
Darwin discovered deception and cunning in the natural world. If
dissembling works for the birds and bees, it makes sense to
examine its function in humans. There is ample evidence, the
author claims, of the utility of stratagems from outright lies and
exaggerations to repressed truths and social myths in
humankind's progression up the evolutionary ladder. While he
allows Darwin to set the table, Campbell's interest is not
primarily in scientific research but in the running intellectual
argument about the status of falsehood in the Western tradition.
His attention, in this basement narrative, is drawn to often
maligned thinkers who have challenged the efficacy of the allconsuming passion for truth. So, among the cast of characters,
the reader will find that ancient dissembler Odysseus and
Protagoras, the sophist; the medieval nominalist Ockham and
wily Machiavelli; Nietzsche (of course) and Freud among the
moderns; and, finally, the usual postmodern suspects like
Derrida, Lacan and Foucault.
292.
293.
Campbell believes -- rightly so, I think -- that postmodern
relativists are the direct descendants of the ancient sophists; yet

he also sees a critical cultural difference between today's

dissemblers and the crafty Greeks. Contemporary philosophers
who debunk the search for truth and replace it with the
investigation of meaning represent not a marginal counterculture
but the prevailing pontificators of meaning for today's world. In
his view, this new kind of sophistry ''elevates lying to the status
of an art and neutralizes untruth by proclaiming that all language
is inherently untrustworthy.'' In that spirit, we absolve ourselves
of scruples over fabricated autobiographical details and our
cultural icon, former President Bill Clinton, has his alibi for a
postmodern riff on the meaning of ''is.'' Despite the author's
obvious relish for the irreverence of many of these outsiders, his
tale ends on a monitory note: while postmodern culture may free
the imagination by ''removing the traditional anchors, dissolving
the foundations,'' it could also unleash ''a certain kind of
madness'' that would plunge us into an Orwellian world where
telling the truth would be a revolutionary act.
294.
295.
To his credit, he has carefully researched and tirelessly
wrestled with the intricacies of sometimes quite obscure
thinkers. He presents difficult intellectual material without
dumbing it down. The story is spiced with enough anecdotes and
humor to keep the reader engaged. He suggests, for example,
that Nietzsche's animus against the truth might have been
softened with a bit of Prozac. Still, this is hardly vacation reading,
except perhaps for those who enjoy their Sorel and Saussure on
the beach. Campbell, who writes a good deal here about irony
and suspicion, possesses his own ironic detachment, which
ensures no thinker will be taken too seriously. At its subtle best
that works quite well; at other times, though, his habit of placing
deflating zingers at the end of paragraphs seems little more than
an annoying journalistic tic.
296.
297.
Advance notices for the book drew a contrast with Sissela
Bok's well-known work, ''Lying,'' and claimed that Campbell's
book will turn the former on its head (another useful
exaggeration?). ''Lying,'' however, is a wise and straightforward
ethical treatise, whereas ''The Liar's Tale'' operates on a wholly
different plane. It reads more like the underside of that old
classic, ''The Story of Philosophy,'' by Will Durant. Campbell's
postmodern twist calls to mind Yi-Fu Tuan's ''Escapism'' and Hillel
Schwartz's ''Culture of the Copy'' (both reviewed here a few
years ago); both of those authors challenged the pre-eminent
claims of ''reality'' over the ''escape'' and the ''original'' over the
''copy.'' If the facsimile can be as true as the original, and the
escape as real as reality, then why cannot falsehood be as useful

as the truth? What's next? The advantages of evil? The delights

of the repulsive? Ah, but haven't those already been written?
298.
299.
At the heart of this story there is a critical and troubling
issue. Campbell fails to pin down in any satisfactory way the
basic concepts of falsehood and truth. On a very basic level, a
deliberate lie is opposed to a simple truth. But to get the tale off
and running, Campbell has to expand his notion of falsehood to
include natural deceptions and illusions, suspicions and ironies.
Imagination and possibility are even considered enemies of the
truth. But that is surely simplistic. A unicorn is a product of the
imagination, but it is hardly false in the same way as cover-ups
by politicians of scandals or their lies about affairs. Campbell
effaces the differences among all his senses of falsehood, in part
because he views truth as one-dimensional. In the familiar but
misleading metaphor he uses, the lie has many faces while truth
has but one. Truth, then, plays the part of an anemic foil rather
than the robust reality it assumes in tradition. There is a sense in
which truth too can be multifaceted -- scientific truths, poetic
truths, political truths -- and, conversely, a single lie can close off
the infinite possibilities that a liberating truth offers. In a less
melodramatic presentation of truth and lies, the more subtle
intellectual positions -- from Socrates' ironic wisdom that he
knows he doesn't know the truth up to Heidegger's attempt to
bridge ancient and modern thought by exploring the meaning of
truth -- would command more attention.
300.
301.
So, we are left with a cautionary tale. Falsehood, however
fascinating and useful as a stratagem, is no substitute for the
equally maddening and bracing search for the truth. Ironically,
while it may be true that lies, like the poor, are always with us, it
is no less true that every attack on the truth will inescapably
invoke it.
302.
Francis Kane, who teaches philosophy at Salisbury
University in Maryland, is the author of ''Neither Beasts Nor
Gods: Civic Life and the Public Good.''
303.
304.

305.

Review from the Guardian, by John Mullen

306.
307.
Is the love of truth always admirable? In Jonathan Swift's
Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver learns to be disgusted by "the faculty
of lying, so peculiar to Yahoos" and becomes enamored of the
Houyhnhnms, talking horses who know no word for
untruthfulness. He imagines a happy life with his new quadruped

comrades, eating oats, conversing only on themes of virtue and

reason, possessed by "an utter detestation of all falsehood or
disguise". No politicians, no lawyers. Utopia.
308.
Except that such an ideal of austere veracity has seemed
grimly inhuman to generations of readers. Gulliver, after all,
comes to hate dissembling mankind so much that he must live in
a stable with herbs up his nostrils to keep off the stink of
encroaching humanity. The Houyhnhnms never lie, but their
puzzled phrase for lying - "saying the thing that was not" - also
covers ambiguity, irony, exaggeration, parody and most of what
we would call humor. Language without the avoidance of truth is
bleached and banal.
309.
310.
Jeremy Campbell's history of falsehood seems to set out to
explore the idea that deception is "a necessary and useful part of
human success and enlightenment". As he remarks, the first true
hero of western fiction is Odysseus, a guileful charmer called by
Homer "polytropos", man of many turns. In pursuit of what the
gods have willed, he needs to be a clever speaker more than a
fierce warrior. The ancient Greeks remained fascinated by the
powers of rhetoric, and Campbell duly takes us on a spin through
their philosophical tradition, concentrating on Plato's attacks on
the Sophists. These teachers of rhetoric stood for the belief that
there is no "truth", simply more or less persuasive arguments.
311.
312.
The leader of the Sophists, Protagoras, looks to Campbell
like an ancient Jacques Derrida, a clever subverter of certainties
who acquired a host of witless acolytes. The Liar's Tale knows
where it is going, and its terminus will be the baleful influence of
structuralism and deconstruction on criticism and philosophy. Yet
Campbell knows that anti-Sophist arguments have their own
problems. Notoriously, Plato found poets guilty of perpetrating
falsehoods, "like the Sophists and rhetoricians".
313.
At this point Campbell's account is interestingly poised,
and we wait to see how he will distinguish between the
falsehoods we need and those that corrode the spirit. Yet, as we
reach the Renaissance, his book stops being a "history of
falsehood" and becomes one of ideas about truth. Ockham,
Bacon, Descartes, Montaigne. On we stroll through the groves of
philosophy in the author's civilized, elegant, just occasionally (on
meeting Jacques Lacan) exasperated company.
314.
315.
He lingers nowhere for long, but he does have his favorite
characters. One is the Scottish philosopher Hume, with his hardacquired sense of the difficulty of pursuing truth. The person who
fixes on this makes himself unfit for human company. Sociability

itself requires us to prefer habit to knowledge. The "truth" that

the skeptical intellectual finds in the solitude of his studies is
likely to seem utterly improbable in the world outside. Campbell
quotes Einstein's praise of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature,
which he claimed prepared him to conceive of the theory of
relativity.
316.
317.
Campbell is usually engaging when he is engaged. He is,
for instance, an entertaining paraphraser of Nietzsche, being
candidly intrigued by Nietzsche's sometimes corrosive,
sometimes mischievous assault on his culture's intellectual
certainties. He also has blind spots. So he is airily dismissive of
Locke, one of the great analysts of how human beings will avoid
the pains necessary to pursue what is true. Righteous idealism
and downright inspiration - aspects of what Locke calls
"enthusiasm" - are usually preferred to the love of truth itself.
318.
Part of Campbell believes that falsehood is the "lubricant
that makes society run". His book opens with a Darwinian reverie
on the possibility that deceit is written into nature - a
consequence of evolution. This Darwinian strain runs throughout
the book, perhaps so that Campbell does not have to examine
how the avoidance of simple truth - in the workings of irony, for
instance - might lead to a subtler truthfulness.
319.
320.
The last third of The Liar's Tale paraphrases those 20thcentury thinkers who have cast beguiling doubt on all
"commonsense" notions that language can express any "truth"
about the world. Campbell is himself half-beguiled by the
greatest of these, Freud, who dominates the last part of his book.
Freud apparently taught us that we cannot believe that we can
know ourselves. Yet an inheritance of psychoanalysis, "in large
part a theory of self-deception", is our culture's peculiar hunger
for self-revelation. Campbell is left wanting to distinguish
between the appetite for truth and the belief that it is attainable.
321.
322.
Freud had little interest in actual lies, calculated attempts
to mislead another person. Campbell quotes Marlowe in Conrad's
Heart of Darkness declaring, "I hate, detest and cannot tell a lie,
not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply
because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of
mortality in lies." Yet Marlowe ends his tale by remembering how
he lied to the fiance of Kurtz. Kurtz's dying words are among the
most famous in fiction: "The horror! The horror!" But Marlowe
tells her that he died with her name on his lips. Some falsehoods
are only human.
323.

324.

Biography from the publisher, W.W. Norton

325.
326.
Jeremy Campbell is the author of The Liars Tale, Winston
Churchills Afternoon Nap, and The Grammatical Man. He is the
Washington correspondent for the Evening Standard and lives in
Washington, DC.

327.

328.

The (Honest Truth) About Dishonesty

1 By Dan Ariely
329.

330.

From the Jacket

331.
332. Most of us think of ourselves as honest, but, in fact, we all cheat.
From Washington to Wall Street, the classroom to the workplace,
unethical behavior is everywhere. None of us is immune, whether
it's a white lie to head off trouble or padding our expense
reports. In The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, award-winning,
bestselling author Dan Ariely shows why some things are easier
to lie about than others; how getting caught matters less than
we think in whether we cheat; and how business practices pave
the way for unethical behavior, both intentionally and
unintentionally. Ariely explores how unethical behavior works in
the personal, professional, and political worlds, and how it affects
all of us, even as we think of ourselves as having high moral
standards. But all is not lost. Ariely also identifies what keeps us
honest, pointing the way for achieving higher ethics in our
everyday lives.
333.
334.

335.
Review from Scientific American Mind, by Jordan
Lite
336.
337.
Liars: they populate our news feeds, perform evil deeds on
our favorite television shows and infuse drama into our daily
lives. The psychological origins of both Bernard Madoffscale
Ponzi schemes and the mundane dishonesties most of us partake
infilching office pens, padding expense reports or secretly
toting a counterfeit designer purseare the subject of Ariely's
The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty.
338.
339.
Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral
economics, suggests that a moral sweet spot guides our
decisions, so that we benefit from dishonesty without destroying
our own self-image. We dial up our lies when we perceive them
as benefiting a friend (that's altruism!) and tend to exaggerate
more liberally when we're sporting fake designer sunglasses
(hey, we're already fudging our fashion, why not push a few
more boundaries?). Rather than applying a cost-benefit analysis

will I get away with it?Ariely argues that we decide whether

to behave truthfully by considering complex internal and
environmental influences.
340.
341.
Many of the factors he cites are social. Social contagion
may facilitate deceit: just as a virus spreads by proximity to an
infectious person, Ariely argues, dishonesty in one's social group
can be catching. Although skeptics have challenged theories of
social contagion, he cites real-life examples in politics, finance
and his own research on cheating, which shows that dishonesty
can become the norm when a group practices it openly.
Creativity, too, is linked to dishonestynot because creative
people are more likely to be dishonest but because they are
probably better at convincing themselves of their own lies.
342.
343.
So what holds us in check? Moral prophylactics such as
the presence of Bibles and locks are associated with honesty,
probably by acting as reminders of a social contract. Similarly,
even suggested surveillance, such as decorating a communal
coffee kitty with a pair of eyes, can promote honesty. Seeing a
person outside one's social circle breaking the rules also seems
to discourage bad behaviormost likely, Ariely posits, because
we want to distance ourselves from people we perceive as
other.
344.
345.
It is slightly dissatisfying that Ariely does not consider the
potential benefits of dishonesty beyond those of white lies,
perhaps overlooking other reasons why we fudge the truth.
Second, he touches on the neurological underpinnings of only
pathological liars, leaving the rest of us with little biological
insight into our transgressions. Yet (Honest) Truth contains a
wealth of fascinating findings about what makes us gardenvariety fibbers do what we do and why certain moral reminders
may make us think twice.
346.
347.

348.
Review from The New York Times, by Janet
Maslin
349.
350. The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, Dan Arielys new book about the
nature of cheating, includes this truly remarkable passage:
351.
352.
353. Cheating by healers. Healing is different. There is
harmless healing, when healer-cheaters and wizards offer omens,

lapels, damage to withdraw, the husband-wife back and stuff. We

read in the newspaper and just smile. But these days fewer
people believe in wizards.
354.
355.
The good news is that Mr. Ariely did not write this. He only
bought it. He went to essay mills that supply dishonest students
with research papers and commissioned 12-page papers about
how cheating works. The essay mills sent him such junk that they
allayed Mr. Arielys immediate concerns about whether or not
academic cheating really pays.
356.
357.
Such crazed gibberish accentuates the otherwise simple,
cheery style in which The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty is
written. In a relatively brief time the very user-friendly Mr. Ariely
has collaborated on so many experiments and research projects
that he has become the James Patterson of social science. He has
parlayed a few basic points into two earlier popular primers
(Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality), many
lectures and even smartphone apps that validate his most
important premise: making people feel smart is a great
marketing tool. They will buy things that tell them what they
already know.
358.
359.
With that in mind Mr. Ariely, a professor of psychology and
behavioral economics at Duke University, sets out to ask why
and when cheating occurs, whether it is useful and how it can be
discouraged. He also defines the paradoxical nature of
dishonesty. In a conversational style drawn straight from the
classroom he promises that we will discuss what makes
dishonesty rear its ugly head and how we cheat for our own
benefit while maintaining a positive view of ourselves a facet
of our behavior that enables much of our dishonesty.) He will do
this by staging many small, simple experiments that grapple with
the obvious in science-made-easy fashion.
360.
For instance: If a refrigerator in a college dormitory
contains cans of Coca-Cola and dollar bills, which will disappear
faster? Hints: College students dont often want to perceive
themselves as thieves. And they are often thirsty.
361.
362.
Mr. Ariely begins each part of this book with a clear point to
make, sometimes using an anecdote about his own life. A
number of these stories are old: one involves his youthful travels
on a slightly forged Eurail pass, at a time when a suspicious train
conductor could be placated with a tape of the Doors. (Theyre a
great American rock band.) After testing the idea behind the
anecdote on a group of subjects, he will rhetorically question his

readers. ( What do you think happened?) And then he will

summarize what happened and why.
363.
364.
It cannot have escaped the notice of Mr. Ariely or anyone in
publishing that readers love the fast, blinky reasoning behind
such books. And Mr. Ariely is an acknowledged leader in the field;
he is often cited as an authority by other authors who overmine
the same subject matter. It helps that this new book has a
disarming personal touch, as when Mr. Ariely refers (as he has
previously) to his painful experiences as a burn victim to prove a
point: that dishonesty can be a good thing. He gratefully
remembers being told during his long hospital stay that he would
someday be all right, even when the medical evidence was less
reassuring.
365.
366.
But most of this book is about the downside of cheating
and lying. Mr. Ariely says that cheating is contagious, and that a
groups behavior will have a powerful effect on each individual.
Bottom line: There are rational forces that we think drive our
dishonest behavior but dont. And there are irrational forces
that we dont think drive our dishonest behavior but do. In
other words, lying, cheating and Mr. Arielys already famous
predictable irrationality are all closely connected.
367.
In offering practical applications from his insights Mr. Ariely
turns to everything from golf to banking to political-action
committees. For one relatively elaborate experiment a student
actor is enlisted to behave badly and set a standard for
cheating at Carnegie Mellon University. This figure wore a
sweatshirt from the rival University of Pittsburgh, just to get the
Carnegie Mellon students in a hostile, dishonesty-prone mood.
368.
369.
Mr. Ariely duly measured how the rest of the group
responded when the actor obviously cheated on a test and what
happened when he only seemed confused about how the rules of
the test worked. Confusion-based dishonesty proved more
contagious than the criminal kind.
370.
371.
Ultimately this sunny author believes that most people
mean to behave honestly unless they are allowed to feel that
minor cheating is justified. What to do? Mr. Ariely isnt strong on
solutions. He suggests that honor codes and supervision help
decrease dishonesty. But they arent much of a match for the
rationalization, self-deception, fatigue and slippery ethics that Mr.
Ariely links to the lying game.

372.
373.

Biography, from danariely.com

374.
375.
Despite our intentions, why do we so often fail to act in our
own best interest? Why do we promise to skip the chocolate
cake, only to find ourselves drooling our way into temptation
when the dessert tray rolls around? Why do we overvalue things
that weve worked to put together? What are the forces that
influence our behavior? Ariely is dedicated to answering these
questions and others in order to help people live more sensible
if not rationallives. Arielys research and interests span a wide
range of behaviors, and his sometimes unusual experiments are
consistently interesting, amusing and informative, demonstrating
profound ideas that fly in the face of common wisdom
376.
377.
In addition to appointments at the Fuqua School of
Business, the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, the Department
of Economics, and the School of Medicine at Duke University,
Ariely is also a founding member of the Center for Advanced
Hindsight. Ariely is the author of many New York
Times bestselling books including Predictably
Irrational (HarperCollins, 2008), which he wrote while a Member
at the Institute. Other titles include The (Honest) Truth About
Dishonesty(HarperCollins, 2012) and The Upside of
Irrationality (HarperCollins, 2010).

378. The Folly of Fools

1 By Robert Trivers
379.

380.

Summary, from Amazon

381.
Whether its in a cockpit at takeoff or the planning of an
offensive war, a romantic relationship or a dispute at the office,
there are many opportunities to lie and self-deceivebut deceit
and self-deception carry the costs of being alienated from reality
and can lead to disaster. So why does deception play such a
prominent role in our everyday lives? In short, why do we
deceive?
382.
In his bold new work, prominent biological theorist Robert
Trivers unflinchingly argues that self-deception evolved in the
service of deceitthe better to fool others. We do it for biological
reasonsin order to help us survive and procreate. From viruses
mimicking host behavior to humans misremembering
(sometimes intentionally) the details of a quarrel, science has
proven that the deceptive one can always outwit the masses. But
we undertake this deception at our own peril.
383.
Trivers has written an ambitious investigation into the
evolutionary logic of lying and the costs of leaving it unchecked.
384.

385.
Review from the New York Times, by John
Horgan
386.
387.
In 1995 I traveled to the University of California, Santa
Barbara, for the annual meeting of the Human Behavior and
Evolution Society, which turned out to be a pep rally for
psychologists, anthropologists and others who view humanity
through the lens of evolutionary theory. Attendees heard
Darwinian takes on lust, love, infidelity, status-seeking, mental
illness, violence, patriotism, politics, economics and religion, as
well as keynote addresses from such luminaries as Richard
Dawkins and Steven Pinker.
388.
389.
The most influential thinker there, arguably, was a scruffily
bearded fellow, wearing sunglasses and a knitted cap, who never
gave a talk. He lurked around the margins of the conference; at
one point I spotted him puffing a joint outside a meeting hall.
This, at any rate, is how I remember Robert Trivers, although as
he points out in The Folly of Fools, memory often tricks us. He

also confesses to being a pothead, so Im pretty sure my

recollection is accurate.
390.
391.
As a Harvard graduate student in the 1970s, Trivers wrote
a handful of papers showing how our genes relentless drive to
self-replicate underpins even our most apparently magnanimous
impulses. According to his theory of reciprocal altruism, we
occasionally act kindly toward strangers because our ancestors
over time and in the aggregate received a quid pro quo
benefit from acts of generosity. In other papers, Trivers proposed
that families roil with conflict because parents share no genes
with each other and only half of their genes with children, who
unless they are identical twins also have divergent genetic
interests.
392.
393.
These concepts were popularized by others, notably
Edward O. Wilson in Sociobiology, Dawkins in The Selfish
Gene and Pinker in How the Mind Works. All have credited
Trivers, whom Pinker has called an underappreciated genius,
and one of historys greatest thinkers in the analysis of behavior
and emotion. If Trivers is not better known, that may be
because he has struggled with bipolar disorder since his youth.
He is also, by his own admission, an irascible anti-authoritarian,
whose sharp tongue often gets him into trouble. He left Harvard
in the late 1970s, eventually ending up at Rutgers. He also has a
home in Jamaica.
394.
395.
No doubt tired of seeing others crank out well-received
elaborations of his work, Trivers has finally produced a
popularization of his own. His topic is deceit, with which by his
own admission he has wrestled on a personal as well as
professional level throughout his adult life. Triverss scope is
vast, ranging from the fibs parents and children tell to
manipulate one another to the false historical narratives
political leaders foist on their citizens and the rest of the world.
396.
397.
Trivers calls deceit a deep feature of life, even a
necessity, given genes brutal struggle to prevail. Anglerfish lure
prey by dangling bait in front of their jaws, edible butterflies
deter predators by adopting the coloring of poisonous species.
Possums play possum, cowbirds and cuckoos avoid the hassle of
raising offspring by laying their eggs in other birds nests. Even
viruses and bacteria employ subterfuge to sneak past a hosts
immune systems. The complexity of organisms, Trivers suggests,
stems at least in part from a primordial arms race between
deceit and deceit-detection.

398.
399.
Our big brains and communication skills make us master
dissemblers. Even before we can speak, Trivers notes, we learn
to cry insincerely to manipulate our caregivers. As adults, we
engage in confirmation bias, which makes us seize on facts
that bolster our preconceptions and overlook contradictory data.
We wittingly and unwittingly inflate the qualities of ourselves and
others in our religious, political or ethnic group. We denigrate
those outside our in-group as well as sexual and economic rivals.
400.
401.
Fooling others yields obvious benefits, but why do we so
often fool ourselves? Trivers provides a couple of answers. First,
believing that were smarter, sexier and more righteous than we
really are or than others consider us to be can help us
seduce and persuade others and even improve our health, via
the placebo effect, for example. And the more we believe our
own lies, the more sincerely, and hence effectively, we can lie to
others. We hide reality from our conscious minds the better to
hide it from onlookers, Trivers explains. But our illusions can
have devastating consequences, from the dissolution of a
marriage to stock-market collapses and world wars.
402.
One intriguing theme running through The Folly of Fools
is that self-deception can affect our susceptibility to disease, for
ill or good. Trivers speculates that some illusions for example,
a daughters insistence that her alcoholic, abusive father is a
good man require so much effort to maintain that they drain
energy away from our immune systems. Conversely, religious
fundamentalism, which often restricts mating or even
interactions with outsiders, may help protect the faithful from
parasites carried by infidels. According to Trivers, religions are
more likely to split into rival factions in regions with high rates of
infectious disease.
403.
404.
Trivers will no doubt alienate many readers when he turns
his attention to politics. Although he indicts many nations for
denying their sins, he is especially incensed by Israels treatment
of Palestinians and the United States treatment of American
Indians, blacks, the Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans and other
groups. I found Trivers too shrill in these sections, even though
my political views overlap with his. Also questionable are his putdowns of cultural anthropologists, whom he accuses of denying
for ideological rather than scientific reasons biological
research that can deepen our understanding of human behavior.
In my experience, evolutionary scholars are at least as driven by
ideology as cultural anthropologists are.
405.

406.
But I cut Trivers slack for his denunciations of others
because he is so hard on himself. Throughout the book, he recalls
instances in which he lied to girlfriends (he has apparently had
many), wives (two), children (five) and colleagues. In one
especially poignant passage, Trivers recalls walking down a city
street with an attractive young woman, trying to amuse her,
when he spots an old man on the other side of her, white hair,
ugly, face falling apart, walking poorly, indeed shambling.
Trivers abruptly realizes he is seeing his reflection in a store
window: Real me is seen as ugly me by self-deceived me.
407.
408.
Trivers is not an elegant stylist like Dawkins, Wilson or
Pinker. His technical explanations can be murky, his political
rants cartoonishly crude. But Triverss blunt, unpolished manner
which I assume is not feigned makes me trust him more
than some slicker writers. The Folly of Fools reminds me of
other irreducibly odd classics by scientific iconoclasts like The
Fractal Geometry of Nature, by the mathematician Benoit
Mandelbrot, and The Society of Mind, by the artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky.
409.
410.
Only in one passage does Trivers strike me as insincere,
when he notes how prone academics are to self-importance; one
survey found that 94 percent considered themselves to be above
average in their fields. I plead guilty, Trivers adds. That, surely,
is false modesty. May his new book give him the attention he so
richly deserves.
411.

412.

Review, from the Economist

413.
414. Deceiving others has its advantages. Camouflage in nature is
useful to the hunter and the hunted. The smarter the animal, the
more likely it is to use (and detect) deception to its benefit.
Humans are particularly good at exploiting trickery to get ahead
for more money, more power or a desired mate. Yet deception
is difficult, regardless of intelligence. Lying often leaves us
nervous and twitchy, and complicated fictions can lead to
depression and poor immune function. And then there are the
ethical implications.
415.
416.
In The Folly of Fools Robert Trivers, an American
evolutionary biologist, explains that the most effectively devious
people are often unaware of their deceit. Self-deception makes it
easier to manipulate others to get ahead. Particularly intelligent
people can be especially good at deceiving themselves.
417.
418.
Mining research in biology, neurophysiology, immunology
and psychology, Mr. Trivers delivers a swift tour of links between
deception and evolutionary progress. Some of it is intuitive. The
grey squirrel, for example, cleverly builds false caches to
discourage others from raiding its acorns. Placebos are
sometimes as effective as medication without the nasty side
effects. Other illustrations require more head-scratching. Mr.
Trivers argues that competition between our maternal and
paternal genes can create split selves, which try to fool each
other on a biological level. Human memory often involves an
unconscious process of selection and distortion, the better to
believe the stories we tell others.
419.
420.
All of this deceit comes at a price. Mr. Trivers suggests that
the most cunning people (whether conscious fibbers or not) tend
to benefit at the expense of everyone else. He highlights the way
overconfident Wall Street traders may hurt investors and
taxpayers at little personal risk. Then there are politicians who
spin stories of national greatness to bolster support for costly
wars in which they will not be fighting.
421.
422.
There is certainly no shortage of human folly to consider.
Mr. Trivers offers some fascinating evidence of our biological
cunning, yet the science of self-deception often takes a back seat
to his political views and skepticism of the social sciences. This
book could probably do without his long digressions about the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Iraq war. But by the time

readers reach these last few chapters, they will be wary of taking
any story at face value anyway.
423.

424.

Biography, from the back cover

425.
426.
Robert L. Trivers is a Professor of Anthropology and
Biological Sciences at Rutgers University. He won the Crafoord
Prize in Biosciences in 2007 for his fundamental analysis of
social evolution, conflict, and cooperation. He lives in Somerset
New Jersey, and in Jamaica.

427. The Moral Landscape

1 By Sam Harris

428.

Summary, from the jacket

429.
430.
Sam Harriss first book, The End of Faith, ignited a
worldwide debate about the validity of religion. In the aftermath,
Harris discovered that most peoplefrom religious
fundamentalists to non-believing scientistsagree on one point:
Science has nothing to say on the subject of human values.
Indeed, our failure to address questions of meaning and morality
through science has now become the most common justification
for religious faith. It is also the primary reason why so many
secularists and religious moderates feel obligated to respect
the hardened superstitions of their more devout neighbors.
431.
432.
In this explosive new book, Sam Harris tears down the wall
between scientific facts and human values, arguing that most
people are simply mistaken about the relationship between
morality and the rest of human knowledge. Harris urges us to
think about morality in terms of human and animal well-being,
viewing the experiences of conscious creatures as peaks and
valleys on a moral landscape. Because there are definite facts
to be known about where we fall on this landscape, Harris
foresees a time when science will no longer limit itself to merely
describing what people do in the name of morality; in principle,
science should be able to tell us what we ought to do to live the
best lives possible.
433.
434.
Bringing a fresh perspective to age-old questions of right
and wrong, and good and evil, Harris demonstrates that we
already know enough about the human brain and its relationship
to events in the world to say that there are right and wrong
answers to the most pressing questions of human life. Because
such answers exist, moral relativism is simply falseand comes
at increasing cost to humanity. And the intrusions of religion into
the sphere of human values can be finally repelled: for just as
there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim algebra,
there can be no Christian or Muslim morality.
435.
436.
Using his expertise in philosophy and neuroscience, along
with his experience on the front lines of our culture wars, Harris
delivers a game-changing book about the future of science and
about the real basis of human cooperation.

437.

438.
Review from the New York Times, by Kwame
Anthony Appiah
439.
440.
Sam Harris heads the youth wing of the New Atheists. The
End of Faith, his blistering take-no-prisoners attack on the
irrationality of religions, found him many fans and, not
surprisingly, a great body of detractors. In Letter to a Christian
Nation, a follow-up prompted by the responses of Christians
unhappy with his first book, he set out, he said, to demolish the
intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most
committed forms, and so acquired, no doubt, more friends and
more enemies. Certainly both books have had a wide and
animated readership.
441.
442.
His new book, The Moral Landscape, aims to meet headon a claim he has often encountered when speaking out against
religion: that the scientific worldview he favors has nothing to
say on moral questions. That claim often keeps company with
the thesis, elaborated by the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay
Gould, that science and religion have nonoverlapping
magisteria. The authority of science and the authority of religion
cover different domains, Gould thought, and the methods of each
are inappropriate for the study of the others problems. Religion
deals with questions about what Harris calls meaning, morality
and lifes larger purpose, questions that have no scientific
answers.
443.
444.
Harris, who has a doctorate in neuroscience, holds the
opposite view. Only science can help us answer these questions,
he says. Thats because truths about morality and meaning must
relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures, and
science alone especially neuroscience, his field can uncover
those facts. So rather than consulting Aristotle or Kant (let alone
the Bible or the Koran) about what is necessary for humans to
flourish, why not go to the sciences that study conscious mental
life?
445.
446.
Harris means to deny a thought often ascribed to David
Hume, according to which there is a clear conceptual distinction
between facts and values. Facts are susceptible of rational
investigation; values, supposedly, not. But according to Harris,
values, too, can be uncovered by science the right values
being ones that promote well-being. Just as it is possible for
individuals and groups to be wrong about how best to maintain

their physical health, he writes, it is possible for them to be

wrong about how to maximize their personal and social wellbeing.
447.
But wait: how do we know that the morally right act is, as
Harris posits, the one that does the most to increase well-being,
defined in terms of our conscious states of mind? Has science
really revealed that? If it hasnt, then the premise of Harriss allwe-need-is-science argument must have nonscientific origins.
448.
449.
In fact, what he ends up endorsing is something very like
utilitarianism, a philosophical position that is now more than two
centuries old, and that faces a battery of familiar problems. Even
if you accept the basic premise, how do you compare the wellbeing of different people? Should we aim to increase average
well-being (which would mean that a world consisting of one bliss
case is better than one with a billion just slightly less blissful
people)? Or should we go for a cumulative total of well-being
(which might favor a world with zillions of people whose lives are
just barely worth living)? If the mental states of conscious beings
are what matter, whats wrong with killing someone in his sleep?
How should we weigh present well-being against future wellbeing?
450.
451.
Its not that Harris is unaware of these questions, exactly.
He refers to the work of Derek Parfit, who has done more than
any philosopher alive to explore such difficulties. But having
acknowledged some of these complications, he is inclined to
push them aside and continue down his path.
452.
453.
Thats the case even with something as basic as whats
meant by well-being. Harris often writes as if all that matters is
our conscious experience. Yet he also insists that truth is an
important value. So does it count against your well-being if your
happiness is based on an illusion say, the false belief that your
wife loves you? Or is subjective experience all that matters, in
which case a situation in which the husband is fooled, and the
wife gets pleasure from fooling him, is morally preferable to one
in which she acknowledges the truth? Harris never articulates his
central claim clearly enough to let us know where he would come
down. But if he thinks that well-being has an objective
component, one wants to know how science revealed this fact.
454.
455.
Harris was a philosophy major at Stanford, but he is
inclined to scant most of what philosophers have had to say
about well-being. There is, for example, a movement in
contemporary philosophy and economics known as the

capabilities approach, which takes seriously the question of

identifying the components of well-being and measuring them.
But neither of the two leading exponents of this approach the
philosopher and economist Amartya Sen and the philosopher and
classicist Martha Nussbaum gets a mention in the book.
456.
457.
The most compelling strand in The Moral Landscape is its
unspooling diatribe against relativism. Harris insists that there
are correct answers to all questions of right and wrong,
regardless of anyones culture or religion. And, though some
questions may escape our inquiries, many can be answered by
science; none, he appears to think, can be answered without it.
458.
459.
You might suppose, reading this book, that this antirelativism was controversial among philosophers. So it may be
worth pointing out that a recent survey of a large proportion of
the worlds academic philosophers revealed that they are more
than twice as likely to favor moral realism the view that there
are moral facts than to favor moral anti-realism. Two thirds of
them, it turns out, are also what we call cognitivists, believing
that many (and perhaps all) moral claims are either true or false.
And Harris himself concedes that few philosophers have ever
answered to the name of moral relativist. Given that, he might
have spent more time with some of the many arguments against
relativism that philosophers have offered. If he had, he might
have noticed that you can hold that there are moral truths that
can be rationally investigated without holding that the
experimental sciences provide the right methods for doing so.
460.
461.
Still, theres plenty of interest in The Moral Landscape.
Harris draws our attention to the fact that science increasingly
allows us to identify aspects of our minds that cause us to
deviate from norms of factual and moral reasoning. And when
he stays closest to neuroscience, he says much that is
interesting and important: about the limits of functional magnetic
resonance imaging as a tool for studying brain function; about
the current understanding of psychopaths (whose brains display
significantly less activity in regions of the brain that generally
respond to emotional stimuli); about the similarities in the ways
in which moral and nonmoral belief seem to be handled in the
brain. I found myself wishing for less of the polemic against
religion, which recurs often and takes up one entire chapter he
has had two bites of that apple already, and will soon be reduced
to gnawing at the core and I wanted more of the illumination
that comes from our increasing understanding of neuroscience.
462.

463.
Yet such science is best appreciated with a sense of what
we can and cannot expect from it, and a real contribution to the
old project of a naturalized ethics would have required a fuller
engagement with its contradictions and complications. Instead,
the landscape that the book calls to mind is that of a city a few
days after a snowstorm. A marvelously clear avenue stretches
before us, but the looming banks to either side betray how much
has been unceremoniously swept aside.

464.
465.
Review, from the New York Review of Books, by
H. Allen Orr
466.

467. 1.
468.
469.
Once upon a time popular science was the attempt to
explain the achievements of scientists to a broad audience. This
was a noble endeavor that performed a useful function. How else
was the public to learn what physicists, chemists, or biologists
had accomplished? Recently, however, a new genre of popular
science has appeared, one that shifts the tense from past to
future. These new books focus on the great things that
science will achieve, and allegedly soon. Thus, before the human
genome was sequenced, we were treated to talk about how the
project was destined to change our view of humanity. (One hears
considerably less about this now, after the fact.) The latest entry
in this new genre of popular science is Sam Harriss The Moral
Landscape.
470.
471.
Harris was trained as a neuroscientist and received his
doctoral degree from the University of California at Los Angeles
in 2009. He is best known as the author of two previous books. In
2004, he published The End of Faith, a fierce attack on organized
religion. The book, which propelled Harris from near obscurity to
near stardomhe has appeared on The Daily Show, The Colbert
Report, and The OReilly Factoris one of the canonical works of
the New Atheist movement, along with Richard Dawkinss The
God Delusion (2006) and Daniel Dennetts Breaking the
Spell (2006). Harris seemed mostly to play the part of polemicist
in the movement. He possesses a sharp wit and an even sharper
pen, and his attacks on mainstream religion had a scorchedearth intensity. In 2006, Harris followed this up with Letter to a
Christian Nation, an uncompromising response to his Christian
critics.

472.
473.
In his latest book, The Moral Landscape, Harris shifts his
sights somewhat. He is now concerned with the sorry state of
moral thinking among both religious and secular people in the
West. While the former are convinced that moral truths are
handed down from on high, the latter are perpetually muddled,
frequently believing that morals are relative, the product of
arbitrary tradition and social conditioning. Harris hopes to sweep
aside both kinds of confusion, convincing his readers that
objective moral truths exist and that we possess a (properly
secular) means for discovering them.
474.
475.
It may not come as a surprise that Harris thinks these
required means are scientific. Science, he insists, will someday
show us the way to the good life. Harriss claims are both bold
and, as expected from his previous writings, plainly put: I will
argue that morality should be considered an undeveloped branch
of science. Indeed, as the subtitle of his book promises, he will
show how science can determine human values. Though Harris
concedes that the science required for this task, particularly
neurobiology, remains in its infancy, the requisite developments,
he suggests, may be on the horizon. We must all face up to the
fact that science will gradually encompass lifes deepest
questions.
476.
477.
Its clear that Harriss mission in The Moral Landscape is
loosely connected to his earlier one. Religion has, for millennia,
been thought the primary source of morality. But if, as Harris
believes, religion is both flawed and wicked, an alternative is
needed. Science can provide it.
478.
479.
Harris is aware that such large claims will invite charges of
naive scientism, but he is unfazed. In particular, he is well aware
that a long intellectual tradition insists that anything resembling
a science of morality is impossible: science trades in facts and
ethics trades in values and, according to the tradition, facts can
never justify values. So Harriss project will require him to do
battle with some deep, and widely shared, views.
480.
481.
The result of all this is not particularly pretty. Part of the
problem is that the book suffers from an awkward structure.
While the first half of The Moral Landscape is concerned with the
possibility of a science of morality, the second half features long
chapters on the neurobiology of belief and the delusions of
religion (including a lengthy attack on Francis Collins, director of
the National Institutes of Health and an evangelical Christian).

Harris ties these chapters only loosely to his main thesis. It turns
out that some of this later material is more or less imported from
Harriss earlier scientific publications or from Op-Ed pieces or
online essays that hes written. None of this makes for a
particularly coherent presentation and the book seems, in places,
aimless. By the end, one worries that Harris has lost focus on the
ostensible point of his book: that a science of morality is
possible.
482.

483.

2.

484.
485.
Harriss story begins where it must, with the notion of a
divide between fact and value. This divide was first emphasized
by David Hume in his A Treatise of Human Nature(1739). Hume
noted that arguments often proceed in the usual waywith a
string of statements about facts (a sibling is a close relative)
only to end with a conclusion about values (one ought to be nice
to ones siblings). This kind of leap seemed to him altogether
inconceivable.
486.
How can statements about facts ever lead to, much less
justify, statements about values? Humes is/ought distinction
suggests that they cannot. G.E. Moore, in his Principia
Ethica (1903), elaborated on this problem. According to Moores
naturalistic fallacy, it is a mistake to try to analyze an ethical
statement by defining good in a way that points to any natural
property, e.g., pleasure. One can, after all, always step back and
reasonably ask whether pleasure is actually good.
487.
488.
To many, then, the world of facts (described by science)
and the world of values (described by ethics) must remain
distinct. Any hope of a science of morality must, consequently,
be abandoned as not only hubristic but nonsensical. As Harris
emphasizes, the taboo against the idea of a scientific morality is
widely accepted in smart circles, including smart scientific
circles. Indeed we scientists, and especially biologists, are taught
early to steer clear of anything that resembles the naturalistic
fallacy: never confuse your scientific facts with ethical norms.
489.
490.
Harris will have none of this. He makes at least three big
claims in The Moral Landscape. The first is that he believes that
the is/ought problem is a nonproblem. Indeed the divide between
facts and values is, he says, largely illusory. Harris offers several
reasons for this conclusion but he seems fond of two.
Neuroimaging studies of the human brain at work reveal that the

same regions of our brains are active when people judge the
truth or falsity of both factual statements (Spain is a country)
and ethical statements (Murder is wrong). In particular,
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, performed
by Harris and colleagues as part of his doctoral research, reveal
that blood flow to certain regions of the brain increase during
such judgments: believing the truth of factual and ethical
statements involves increased blood flow to the medial prefrontal
cortex, for instance, while disbelieving factual and ethical
statements involves increased blood flow to the left inferior
frontal gyrus, among other regions. (Uncertainty about the truth
or falsity of such statements involves increased blood flow to yet
other regions of the brain.) In the face of such neurological
findings, it is hard, Harris says, to sustain the view that a divide
separates facts and values.
491.
Harris also emphasizes that the pursuit of science itself
rests upon the acceptance of certain values:
492.
493. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, scientific
validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making
value judgments; rather, scientific validity is the result of
scientists making their best effort to value principles of reasoning
that link their beliefs to reality.
494.
495.
And:
496.
497. The very idea of objective knowledge (i.e., knowledge
acquired through honest observation and reasoning) has values
built into it, as every effort we make to discuss facts depends
upon principles that we must first value (e.g., logical consistency,
reliance on evidence, parsimony, etc.).
498.
499.
Given all this, how can one possibly drive a wedge between
facts and values? Harris concludes that one cannot: The split
between facts and valuesand, therefore, between science and
moralityis an illusion. Contrary to received wisdom, then,
nothing would seem to stand in the way of a science of morality.
500.
501.
Harriss second big claim is that he has identified the
correct conception of the good. It is the well-being of conscious
creatures. Indeed Harris suggests that any other conception of
the good either is equivalent to this one or is nonsense: Concern
for well-being (defined as deeply and as inclusively as possible)
is the only intelligible basis for morality and values. After all,
every notion of the good ever offered concerns a putatively
conscious creature (either our present selves or, in some

religious traditions, our future spiritual selves in an afterlife) and

its hard to see how concern for a conscious creature could
involve anything but concern for its well-being. A science of
morality must, then, be concerned with what contributes to wellbeing: a prosperous civil society, for instance, or an
atmosphere of beneficence, trust, creativity, and the pursuit of
wholesome pleasures. (Harris also concludes that those, like
serial murderers, who would champion some perversely
eccentric conception of the good are so far outside the
conversation that they neednt be refuted, only ignored.)
502.
503.
Harris further suggests that this notion of the good is
associated with a moral landscape. This landscape is a
hypothetical
504.
505. space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks
correspond to the heights of potential well-being and whose
valleys represent the deepest possible suffering. Different ways
of thinking and behavingdifferent cultural practices, ethical
codes, modes of government, etc.will translate into
movements across this landscape and, therefore, into different
degrees of human flourishing.
506.
507.
Harris acknowledges that the moral landscape might have
multiple peaksthere might well be several or perhaps many
ways in which people can maximize their well-beingbut there
are still facts of the matter here. Some ways of thinking and
behaving are objectively better than others.
508.
509.
And this leads to Harriss third main claim. Given that the
moral landscape reflects a world of facts, it can be studied by
science. Science can map the topography of the landscape and
help us to traverse it, efficiently ascending peaks of well-being.
Harris acknowledges that we have no guarantee that science
can, in all cases, uncover the relevant objective facts about
morality. But this doesnt change the fact that these objective
facts exist. (As he says, there is a difference between answers
in principle and answers in practice.)
510.
511.
Harris notes that a science of morality might deliver some
surprisesour moral intuitions may sometimes err about what
actually increases human well-beingbut it might also confirm
some traditional views:
512.
513. There is every reason to expect that kindness, compassion,
fairness, and other classically good traits will be vindicated

neuroscientificallywhich is to say that we will only discover

further reasons to believe that they are good for us, in that they
generally enhance our lives.
514.
515.
516.
Its also important to see what Harris is not up to in The
Moral Landscape. He is not attempting to provide an evolutionary
account of the origins of human morality. Our moral sense may
or may not reflect much about our evolutionary history as a
species. The logic of natural selection might or might not, for
example, account for the tendency of human beings to act
altruistically to close genetic relatives, as many proponents of
evolutionary psychology suggest. But a science of morality in
Harriss sense is possible in either case. Nor does Harriss natural
science of morality absurdly suggest that whatever is natural is
good. Lots of things are both perfectly natural and perfectly
awful (say, malaria). Finally, Harris is not merely claiming that
science can help us get what we want out of life. Rather, he is
claiming that science can help us to see what we should do
and should want.
517.
518.
Harris acknowledges that, for many, the idea of scientists
in the morality business is unsettling, if not downright creepy.
Who can possibly find appealing the image of a sect of experts,
attired in white lab coats, instructing us in what we should do
and should want? Harriss response is, in effect, to buck up. Its
true, he says, that the science of morality will likely yield a class
of moral experts. Just as some people know more about quantum
mechanics than others, why shouldnt we expect some people to
know more about morality than others? This, apparently, is
another of those objective facts about the world that we must
face up to. In any case, Harris seems untroubled by it.
519.

520.

3.

521.
Although The Moral Landscape is provocative and parts of
it, particularly the neurobiology, are intriguing, Harriss three
main claims seem to me dubious.
522.
523.
First, his reasons for finding the fact/value distinction
illusory leave a bit to be desired. Harriss use of neuroimaging
studies here is far from compelling. While the data themselves
are certainly interestingindeed, Harriss original scientific
publications are fascinatinghis interpretation of them in The
Moral Landscape is extravagant. It seems odd to try to assess the

relationship between two ideas or judgments by analyzing

whether the same brain regions are active when each is
represented in the human mind. Surely such an assessment
requires one to analyze the ideas or judgments themselves. If the
same brain regions are active when people mentally perform
addition and multiplication, would Harris conclude that the
addition/multiplication distinction is illusory?
524.
525.
And putting aside this worry, theres a more prosaic one. Wholebrain neuroimaging studies have only limited sensitivity, as
Harris acknowledges. So it seems a tad incautious to conclude
that, because the same approximate regions of the brain light up
when judging factual and ethical propositions, the purported
divide between them is suspicious.
526.
527.
Indeed Harris softens his language as he turns to the
details of his empirical results:
528.
529. If, from the point of view of the brain, believing the sun is
a star is importantly similar to believing cruelty is wrong, how
can we say that scientific and ethical judgments have nothing in
common?
530.
531.
But of course no one ever said that factual and ethical
judgments arent similar or have nothing in common. Theyre
obviously similar and have much in common. Both are
judgments, both are believed by human minds and not by rocks,
and so on. The relevant claim is that facts and values are not the
same and that statements about facts cannot justify statements
about values. Its hard to see how Harriss data address this
issue.
532.
533.
Similarly, Harriss attempt to blur the fact/value distinction
by insisting that science results from valuing certain things (like
evidence) seems confused. Science results from many things but
that doesnt diminish the difference between scientific facts and
those things. Science, for example, results from the ability to
manipulate the world. But are we to conclude that scientific facts
are the same as the ability to manipulate the world? Something
has gone wrong here. In any case, its odd to see Harris invest so
much in the (apparently) postmodernist claim that science rests
on values and therefore the fact/value distinction is illusory. If
this were really true, it would lead in a number of eminently silly
directions that Harris would be the first to denounce.
534.

535.
Harriss second main claimthat the only intelligible
morality involves the maximization of well-beingcan certainly
be challenged. His view of morality is a species of utilitarianism
and plenty of people have raised plenty of questions about
utilitarianismfor example, the late Bernard Williams in some of
his most telling writings. And Harris doesnt seem to take
seriously the fact that different peoples at different times have
had different visions of morality. When Trotsky said, We
Bolsheviks do not accept the bourgeois theory of the sanctity of
human life, was he endorsing Harriss beneficence, trust,
creativity, and wholesome pleasures, all enjoyed in a
prosperous civil society?
536.
537.
But theres a more important point. Harriss view that
morality concerns the maximization of well-being of conscious
creatures doesnt follow from science. What experiment or body
of scientific theory yielded such a conclusion? Clearly, none.
Harriss view of the good is undeniably appealing but it has
nothing whatever to do with science. It is, as he later concedes, a
philosophical position. (Near the close of The Moral Landscape,
Harris argues that we cant always draw a sharp line between
science and philosophy. But its unclear how this is supposed to
help his case. If theres no clear line between science and
philosophy, why are we supposed to get so excited about a
science of morality? After all, no one ever said there couldnt be
a philosophy of morality.)
538.
539.
Where, then, does actual science enter into Harriss
science of morality? This takes us to his third main claim and,
unfortunately, the answer is somewhat unclear. Harris spends
considerable time talking about neurobiology, particularly the
functional neurobiology of belief. But throughout The Moral
Landscape, he mostly enlists science in the cause of revealing
how to enhance human well-being. He emphasizes, for example,
that certain economic arrangements are objectively more
conducive to human flourishing than are others, so presumably
economics can help. He also provides an example of how the
science of morality could deal with a particular problem,
homelessness:
540.
541. There are an estimated 90,000 people living on the streets
of Los Angeles. Why are they homeless? How many of these
people are mentally ill? How many are addicted to drugs or
alcohol? How many have simply fallen through the cracks in our
economy? Such questions have answers. Are there policies we
could adopt that would make it easy for every person in the

United States to help alleviate the problem of homelessness in

their own communities? Is there some brilliant idea that no one
has thought of that would make people want to alleviate the
problem of homelessness more than they want to watch
television or play video games?Such questions open onto a
world of facts.
542.
543.
Indeed they do. But this vision of the role of science is
wholly uncontroversial. Of course science can help us reach
some end once weve decided what that end is. Thats why we
have medicine, engineering, economics, and all the other applied
sciences in the first place. But this has nothing to do with
blurring the is/ought distinction or overcoming traditional qualms
about a science of morality. If youve decided that the ultimate
value is living a long life (one ought to live as long as possible),
medical science can help (you ought to exercise). But medical
science cant show that the ultimate value is living a long life.
Much of The Moral Landscape is an extended exercise in
confusing these two senses of ought.
544.
Despite Harriss bravado about how science can
determine human values, The Moral Landscape delivers nothing
of the kind.
545.

546.

4.

547.
548.
I suspect that part of the problem with The Moral
Landscape is that Harris may mistake his target. It seems clear
that what really angers and animates him is moral relativism, not
those who question the possibility of a scientific morality. The
Moral Landscape is filled with impassioned, and generally
persuasive, denunciations of politically correct academics who
espouse the relativity of morals. My favorite example:
549.
550. I dont think one has fully enjoyed the life of the mind until
one has seen a celebrated scholar defend the contextual
legitimacy of the burqa, or of female genital mutilation, a mere
thirty seconds after announcing that moral relativism does
nothing to diminish a persons commitment to making the world
a better place.
551.
552.
Unfortunately Harris tends, in his more polemical
moments, to confuse matters and its easy to leave his book with
the impression that those who reject a scientific morality flirt

dangerously with moral relativism. But this neednt be. One can
be skeptical of a science of morality and abstain from relativism.
Heres the proof: religious people have no interest in scientific
morality but no ones ever accused them of moral relativism. Or,
looking in a secular direction, some have suggested that moral
truths have an a priori status, rather like mathematical truths. If
so, morality would have no need of empirical justification; indeed
morals would have a stronger claim to truth than would empirical
facts. This is about as far from mushy moral relativism as one
can get.
553.
554.
Its also important to see that one can have doubts about
Harriss particular attempted scientific morality without closing
the door entirely on some sort of naturalized ethics, one, that is,
thats tied to the world of physical and biological nature. I, for
one, have no particular problem with the notion that our
evolutionary history played some part in shaping our moral
sense, though reason and culture play conspicuous parts too. We
are animals, not angels, and it would be bizarre if natural
selection had nothing whatever to do with the emergence of our
moral intuitions. But we are also rational and culture-creating
animals and it would be equally bizarre if these forces played no
part in shaping our moral norms. The point is that its one thing
to say that Harris fails to plausibly solve the is/ought problem,
another to say that it cant be solved.
555.
556.
In the end, its odd that one can share so many of Harriss
views and yet find his project largely unsuccessful. I certainly
share his vision of the well-being of conscious creatures as a
sensible end for ethics. And I agree that science can and should
help us to attain this end. And I certainly agree that religion has
no monopoly on morals. The problemand its one that Harris
never faces up tois that one can agree with all these things
and yet not think that morality should be considered an
undeveloped branch of science.
557.

558.

Biography, from samharris.org

559.
560.
Sam Harris is the author of the bestselling books The End
of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free
Will, Lying, and Waking Up. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN
Award for Nonfiction. His writing and public lectures cover a wide
range of topicsneuroscience, moral philosophy, religion,
spirituality, violence, human reasoningbut generally focus on
how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is

changing our sense of how we should live.

Mr. Harris and his work have been discussed in The New York
Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Rolling Stone, and
many other journals. He has written for The New York Times, The
Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Times (London), The
Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Annals of Neurology, among
others. His work has been published in more than 15 languages.
Mr. Harris is a cofounder and the CEO of Project Reason, a
nonprofit foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge
and secular values in society. He received a degree in philosophy
from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.
561.

562. Taming the Tiger Within

1 By Thich Nhat Hanh
563.

564.

Summary, from the cover

565.
Acclaimed scholar, peace activist, and Buddhist master
revered by people of all faiths, Thich Nhat Hanh has inspired
millions worldwide with his insight into the human heart and
mind. Now he focuses his profound spiritual wisdom on the basic
human emotions we all struggle with every day.
566.
567.
Distilled from the pages of his many bestselling works,
Taming the Tiger Within is a handbook of meditations, analogies,
and reflections the offer pragmatic techniques for diffusing
anger, converting fear, and cultivating love in every arena of life
a wise and exquisite guide for bringing harmony and healing to
our lives and relationships.
568.

569.

Review, from Publishers Weekly

570. Vietnamese

Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh has authored

three national bestsellers that deal with negative emotions:
Anger, Going Home and No Death, No Fear. Here he distills some
of the best quotations from those three books, offering advice on
how to conquer rage, jealousy, fear and the desire for revenge.
Often the thoughts are just a sentence long, and rarely more
than three; the book is designed to be savored over time through
deep reflection. Some of Hanh's suggestions are practical (such
as walking to diffuse anger or writing a love letter to a cherished
individual), while others will require more rumination. One key to
reducing anger, for example, is to practice ""deep looking"" and
recognize that all beings are interconnected; the angry person is
inextricably intertwined with the one she imagines is her enemy.
Though spare, even Spartan, this book holds seeds of profound
wisdom. However, more serious readers will want to delve into
the three classics that this book draws upon, since they are
already accessible, brief and easy to understand.
571.

572.
Review from SpiritualityAndPractice.com, by
Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
573.
574.
Buddhist monk, scholar, peace activist, and spiritual
teacher Thich Nhat Hanh is the author of more than 100 books.

In this collection of meditations and reflections, he offers advice

on dealing with the difficult emotions that serve as roadblocks to
peace and happiness. These quotations are drawn from his
books No Death, No Fear; Anger; and Going Home. This volume is
divided into sections on recognition, care of anger, mindfulness
of others, fear and time, finding refuge and [then] knowing
freedom, and the love that springs from insight. Here is a
sampler of quotations from Hanh's teachings:
575.
576.
On Anger
577.
Whenever anger comes up, take out a mirror and look at
yourself. When you are angry, you are not very beautiful, you are
not presentable. Hundreds of muscles on your face become very
tense. Your face looks like a bomb ready to explode.
578.
579.
On Punishment
580.
Punishing the other person is self-punishment. That is true in
every circumstance.
581.
582.
On Compassion
583.
Compassion is a beautiful flower born of understanding. When
you get angry with someone, practice breathing in and out
mindfully. Look deeply into the situation to see the true nature of
your own and the other person's suffering, and you will be
liberated.
584.
585.
On Fear
586.
No fear is the ultimate joy. When you have the insight of no fear,
you are free.
587.

588.
Biography from plumvillage.org, Thich Nhat
Hanhs practice centre
589.
590.
Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh is a global spiritual leader,
poet and peace activist, revered throughout the world for his
powerful teachings and bestselling writings on mindfulness and
peace.
591.
His key teaching is that, through mindfulness, we can learn
to live happily in the present momentthe only way to truly
develop peace, both in ones self and in the world.
592.

593.
Thich Nhat Hanh has published over 100 titles on
meditation, mindfulness and Engaged Buddhism, as well as
poems, childrens stories, and commentaries on ancient Buddhist
texts. He has sold over three million books in America alone,
some of the best-known include Peace Is Every Step, The Miracle
of Mindfulness, The Art of Power, True Love and Anger.
594.
595.
Thich Nhat Hanh has been a pioneer in bringing Buddhism
to the West, founding six monasteries and dozens of practice
centers in America and Europe, as well as over 1,000 local
mindfulness practice communities, known as sanghas.
596.
597.
He has built a thriving community of over 600 monks and
nuns worldwide, who, together with his tens of thousands of lay
students, apply his teachings on mindfulness, peace-making and
community-building in schools, workplaces, businesses and
even prisons throughout the world.
598.
599.
Thich Nhat Hanh, now in his 88th year, is a gentle, humble
monk the man Martin Luther King called An Apostle of peace
and nonviolence. The media has called him The Father of
Mindfulness, The Other Dalai Lama and The Zen Master Who
Fills Stadiums.
600.

601. Section III

602. Leadership: A Positive
Perspective
603.

604.Life
605.
606. The adventure of life is
to learn.
607. The purpose of life is
to grow.
608. The nature of life is to
change.
609. The challenge of life is
to overcome.
610. The opportunity of life
is to serve.
611. The secret of life is to
dare.
612. The spice of life is to
befriend.
613. The beauty of life is to
give.

614. The joy of life is to

love.
615.
616. William Arthur Ward
617.

618.The Code of
Humanity
619.
620. I choose to communicate truth.
621.
622. I choose the reality of life.
623.
624. I choose to heal, not hurt.
625.
626. I choose education over
ignorance.
627.
628. I choose the power of peace.
629.
630. I choose to love God (or Good)
and see God (or Good) in all
humanity.
631.
632. I choose to seek the soul in all
things.
633. I choose to link to the world of
inspiration.
634.

635. I choose the principle of

sharing.
636.
637. I choose to become a co-creator
in life and live it more abundantly.

638.

639. --From creativegroup.org

640.Charter for
Compassion
641.
642.
The principle of compassion lies at the heart of
all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us
always to treat all others as we wish to be treated
ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to
alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to
dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put
another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of
every single human being, treating everybody, without
exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.
643.
644.
It is also necessary in both public and private
life to refrain consistently and empathically from
inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite,
chauvinism, or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or
deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by
denigrating otherseven our enemiesis a denial of
our common humanity. We acknowledge that we have
failed to live compassionately and that some have even
increased the sum of human misery in the name of
religion.

We therefore call upon all men and women to

restore compassion to the centre of morality and
religion--to return to the ancient principle that any
interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred
or disdain is illegitimate--to ensure that youth are given
accurate and respectful information about other
traditions, religions and cultures--to encourage a
positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity-to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of
all human beingseven those regarded as enemies.

We urgently need to make compassion a clear,

luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world.
Rooted in a principled determination to transcend
selfishness, compassion can break down political,
dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of
our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to
human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the
path to enlightenment, and indispensable to the
creation of a just economy and a peaceful global
community.
645.

646.

--From charterforcompassion.org

647. The Sages Code:

Twelve Transformative
Noetic Essentials
648.

649. I am developing a curriculum based on the 12 points listed below.

I envision this course to be the core philosophy regarding the
positive personal potentials vis-a-vis a noetic approach to human
life. Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.
1. Play
2. Wonder
3. Gratitude
4. Beauty
5. Joy
6. Optimism
7. Reason
8. Purpose
9. Harmony
10.Compassion
11. Generosity
12. Spirituality
650.
651.

1) Play: A Serious Puzzle

652.
653.
The first item in my list of twelve transformative noetic
essentials is the notion of play. I find play to be a difficult
essential to define. Commonly, much is included in play such as
ruthlessly competitive sports, aggressively pursued games, and
activities which involve struggles for dominance or deceptive
activities.
654.
655.
For me play is a pursuit which lacks obsessive agendas or
tightly structured strategies. For me play is a condition of delight

involving a number of people or even solo enjoyment of nature.

Fun and relaxation are the essentials of play; a delight in the
common place and an intuitive appreciation of social warmth and
natural wonders.
656.
657.
I could only generate a short list of books supporting this
notion. I would appreciate additional suggestions.
658.
- The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram
659.
- Music Lesson, by Victor L. Wooten
660.
- The Hand, by Frank R. Wilson

661.
662.

2) Wonder: How, Why

663.
Wonder is the number two transformative noetic essential
in my list of twelve. Wonder is a quality of the human condition
which drives the curiosity which expands human culture. This
curiosity can be cosmic in nature or deeply personal.
664.
665.
I have chosen a literature base for wonder, which explores
the miraculous and the mysterious from cosmology to
consciousness. I am listing five diverse books which if read in
sequence explores the full dimension of human curiosity. And
they are:
666.
667.
- The Fifth Miracle, by Paul Davies
668.
- Nature Via Nurture, by Matt Ridley
669.
- The Ape and Sushi Master, by Frans de Waal
670.
- Peripheral Visions, by Mary Catherine Bateson
671.
- Spectrum of Consciousness, by Ken Wilber

672.
673.

3) Gratitude: A Self-Vitalizing Essential

674.
Gratitude is the third in my list of twelve transformative
noetic essentials. Western culture, through its Christian
traditions, has through the century confused the concept of
gratitude with bargaining, pleading, triumphalism and an array of
negative baggage.
675.
676.
I am attempting in this offering to approach gratitude in a
self-vitalizing and multi-dimensional mental, emotional profile. I
have created a graphic entitled Seven Mental/Emotional
Polarities to give shape to my understanding of gratitude.
677.
Gratitude is the culmination of emotional insight and
enlightened comprehension regarding gratitude as the ultimate
self-vitalizing mental/emotional profile.

678.
679.

Seven Mental/Emotional Polarities

680.

Self-

681.

Self- Vitalizing Profile

Poisoning
Profile

682.

Anger

683.

Self-Awareness

684.

Fear

685.

Self-Confidence

686.

Ignorance

687.

Enlightenment

688.

Self-Doubt

689.

Self-Esteem

690.

Resentment

691.

Joy

692.

Guilt

693.

Tranquility

694.

Greed

695.

Gratitude

696.
697.
The list of five books approaches this subject with the
above points in mind. They give depth and perspective to my
graphic.
698.
699.
- Doubt and Certainty, by Tony Rothman and George
Sudarshan
700.
- Becoming Animal, by David Abram
701.
- A Passion for the Possible, by Jean Houston
702.
- Emotional Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman
703.
- My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor

704.
705.

4) Beauty Will Save the World

706.
707.
Recently, I entered twelve transformative noetic essentials
as a base configuration for a course on the transformative
dimensions of the noetic realm. The fourth item in the list is
beauty. That concept does stir fundamental and crucial notions
about the human condition. Writers such as David Abram and
Oliver Sacks, beautifully explore the interplay of noetic and biotic
forces. Frequently the terms biosphere and noesphere are used
to express the same idea as the biotic and noetic realm.
708.
709.
A powerful Russian literary tradition evoked by Fyodor
Dostoyevsky and reinvigorated by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
proclaims the transformative power of beauty and beauty's

ultimate capacity to be a force of salvation for human kind. I

invite contributions to this discussion.

710.

5) Joy Happiness

711.
712.
Number five in my list of twelve transformative noetic
essentials is the notion of joy. Joy, happiness, exuberance are
conceptually intertwined as a state of being.
713.
714.
Unfortunately, this noetic essential is easily sabotaged by
hidden angers and crippling fears. Obsessions and ephemeral
guilt are likewise poisonous to joy. If these negative emotions can
be flushed from your consciousness, then joy can be released in
a tide of healing and buoyant noetic transformations.
715.
716.
I have selected five particularly valuable books for
developing and understanding of joy, happiness, exuberance. I
would recommend these books be read in the order in which they
are presented for the sake of continuity.
717.
718.
- Dancing In The Streets, by Barbara Ehrenreich
719.
- The Geography of Bliss, by Eric Weiner
720.
- The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt
721.
- Happy for No Reason, by Marci Shimoff
722.
- Exuberance, by Kay Redfield Jamison

723.
724.
6) Optimism: Hope, Creativity, and Positive
Intuition
725.
726.
In my profile of twelve transformative noetic essentials,
number six is Optimism. Without doubt, one of the most healing
and generative forces possessed by the human mind is the
capacity for optimism. Optimism suffuses creativity, hope, and
positive awareness.
727.
728.
Learning to use subconscious resources for maximizing the
transformative power of optimism is crucial. The list of books
presented below provide a wealth of insight for creatively using
the subconscious mind. The eight books, when read in sequence,
move from subconscious resources to active and concrete
everyday behaviour.
729.
730.
- How To Enjoy Your Life In Spite of It All, by Ken Keyes, Jr.
731.
- Peace Is Every Step, by Thich Nhat Hanh

732.
- The Knack of Using Your Subconscious Mind, by John K.
Williams
733.
- Your Maximum Mind, by Herbert Benson
734.
- The Act of Creation, by Arthur Koestler
735.
- Treat Yourself to Life, by Raymond Charles Barker
736.
- Head First, by Norman Cousins
737.
- Positive Living and Health, by the editors of Prevention
magazine

738.
7) Reason: Logic, Empiricism, Science,
Knowledge, Wisdom
739.
740.
Number seven in my list of transformative noetic essentials
is Reason. I have connected reason with such intellectual
pursuits as logic, and wisdom. All of these interwoven ideas
listed in the title are supportive of the human quest for cultural
enrichment and technical accomplishments. Reason needs to be
appreciated as a historical dynamic as well as an epistemological
accomplishment. The noetic realm is energized by reason and
constructively builds civilization.
741.
742.
The eight books listed below, when read in sequence,
explores reason and the corollary concepts mentioned in the
title. Many more books could be added to the list, yet these eight
are extraordinarily brilliant and thorough.
743.
744.
- The Dream of Reason, by Anthony Gottlieb
745.
- Ingenious Pursuits, by Lisa Jardine
746.
- Science, Order, and Creativity, by David Bohm and F.
David Peat
747.
- Return to Reason, by Stephen Toulmin
748.
- Towards a New World View, by Russel E. Di Carlo
749.
- Intellectual Capital, by Thomas A. Stewart
750.
- From Knowledge to Wisdom, by Nicholas Maxwell
751.
- A Passion for Wisdom, by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen
M Higgins

752.

8) Purpose Leadership

753.
754.
The eighth transformative noetic essential I have listed as
Purpose. It seems reasonable to me to link purpose with
leadership.
755.
756.
All human endeavours, whether small scale personal
matters, or massive scale national issues, are all fed in a healthy
state by creative purpose and constructive leadership.

757.
758.
I have selected seven books relevant to this topic which I
will list in a sequence for building a coherent approach to
purpose and leadership.
759.
- The Power of Four, by Joseph Marshall III
760.
- Making Waves and Riding the Currents, by Charles
Halpern
761.
- Leading with Kindness, by William Baker and Michael
O'Malley
762.
- Leadership and the New Science, by Margaret Wheatley
763.
- Managing for the Future, by Peter Drucker
764.
- Microtrends, by Mark Penn
765.
- The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
766.

767.

9) Harmony: From the Personal to the Global

768.
769.
For at least two and a half millennia, Taoism has energized
Oriental culture with the theme of harmony vis-a-vis humanity
with nature vis-a-vis the personal with the communal. In recent
generations, western intellectuals have borrowed from the east
to enrich the west. This process has been troubled with the cross
currents of war and civil disturbances of every kind.
770.
771.
Now more than ever the west needs to ingest harmony as
an ethos and build personal as well as communal life on the
energy of harmony.
772.
773.
The books listed below build on this line of thought, from
the personal to the global.
774.
- Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl
775.
- Love Is Letting Go of Fear, by Gerald G. Jampolsky
776.
- No Boundary, by Ken Wilber
777.
- The Roots of Coincidence, by Arthur Koestler
778.
- The Phenomenon of Man, by Teilhard de Chardin
779.
- The Book of Balance and Harmony, by Thomas Cleary
780.
- Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu
781.
- Speeches That Changed the World, introduction by Simon
Sebag Montefiore
782.
- Civil Society in Question, by Jamie Swift
783.

784.
10) Compassion: Empathy, Civility, Respect, and
Tolerance
785.

786.
In my list of twelve noetic transformative essentials,
compassion is number ten. For untold centuries, Buddhism has
focused on compassion as a central theme. For well over a
century, western thought has been borrowing from eastern
philosophical streams. Recently, compassion has become a
mainstream line of social analysis and even scientific research.
Many concepts are woven together related to compassion. I
believe compassion is the most active perception of such ideas,
however, there are more passive conceptions such as tolerance.
787.
788.
I have chosen seven books which develop this line of
thought in North American culture. If read in sequence as
presented, these seven books provide a powerful shift in the
view of the human condition with potential salvational
implications for the future.
789.
790.
- Born for Love, by Maia Szalavitz and Bruce Perry
791.
- Born to be Good, by Dacher Keltner
792.
- The Age of Empathy, by Frans de Waal
793.
- The Empathic Civilization, by Jeremy Rifkin
794.
- Wired to Care, by Dev Patnaik
795.
- A Paradise Built in Hell, by Rebecca Solnit
796.
- The Moral Landscape, by Sam Harris
797.
798.
799.

800.
11) Generosity: A Necessary Essential for the
Successful Evolution of the Noosphere
801.
802.
No essential in the noetic realm (noosphere) is more crucial
than generosity. Humanity is hard wired for sharing as a
necessary condition for human survival from the origins of Homo
sapiens over 100,000 years ago to the civilized order of
contemporary urban life.
803.
804.
The literature base chosen for this essential consists of 4
anthropologists, 2 economists and 3 historians of religion.
Whether the subject is paleoanthropology or massive nation
states, all authors chosen provide powerful arguments for the
role of generosity as the essential necessary for human survival
in any environmental or organizational context.
805.
806.
The previous essential, compassion, linked with this
essential, generosity, characterize the caring and sharing
necessary to the noetic realm even though many scientists may

fail to appreciate this reality. Without sharing and caring there is

no humanity.
807.
808.
- Origins, by Richard E. Leaky
809.
- Women's Work, by Elizabeth Wayland Barber
810.
- When God Was a Woman, by Merlin Stone
811.
- The Way of the Shaman, by Michael Harner
812.
- The Spirit of Shamanism, by Roger N. Walsh
813.
- A Seat at the Table, by Huston Smith
814.
- The Invisible Heart, by Nancy Folbre
815.
- Systems of Survival, by Jane Jacobs
816.
- Buddha, by Karen Armstrong
817.

818.
12) Spirituality: The Interplay of the Human
Mind and the Divine Realm
819.
820.
Spirituality, the twelfth and last of the transformative
noetic essentials, is a realm of inquiry which brings the entire
profile into focus.
821.
822.
This noetic essential stimulates an inquiry into five of the
most important questions which need to be addressed by any
civilization.
823.
824.
1) What is the nature of the cosmos?
825.
2) What is a truly healthy relationship with the
environment?
826.
3) What is a generative and vital ethical framework for any
civil order?
827.
4) What is an intuitive and insightful understanding of
oneself?
828.
5) How does the human mind engage with the
metaphysical dimensions of mind with the mystical essence of
spirit?
829.
830.
The twelve books presented below attempt answers in an
organic and multidimensional manner to these fundamental
questions. The interplay of science and religion, and a rich
understanding of history as well as a thorough appreciation for
cultural anthropology, help to conclude this profile in a thoughtful
and clarifying manner.
831.
832.
- The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning
of Life, by Paul Davies
833.
- The Physics of Immortality, by Frank J. Tipler

834.
- Belonging to the Universe, by Fritjof Capra & David
Steindl-Rast
835.
- The Great Transformation, by Karen Armstrong
836.
- Gnosis, by Kurt Rudolph
837.
- Essays on World Religion, by Huston Smith
838.
- Shamanism, by Shirley Nicholson
839.
- States of Grace, by Charlene Spretnak
840.
- Peace, Love & Healing, by Bernie S. Siegel
841.
- Gaia & God, by Rosemary Radford Ruether
842.
- An Altar in the World, by Barbara Brown Taylor
843. - The Best Buddhist Writing series, edited by Melvin
McLeod
844.