The End Of the World
WEEK FIFTEEN
By James Leavey
According to Robert Hare, who teaches at the University of British
Columbia and recently addressed a police conference in New York, one per
cent of the world's population are clinical psychopaths, i.e.
individuals who display early behavioural problems that later become
anti-social.
He also blames the recent blue-chip
accounting scandals at WorldCom and Enron on psychopathic chief
executive officers, who are easily recognized by their deceit,
short-temper, irresponsibility and craving for excitement. Such people,
he says, are usually callous and cold-blooded and don't care that anyone
else, especially underlings, may have thoughts and feelings. They also
have no sense of remorse or guilt.
Goodness gracious me! That almost
describes to a 'T' many of the anti-smoking born-again puritans most
smokers get on the wrong side of every day.
The good news is that Hare is now working
on producing a check-list that will enable companies to screen their
employees for psychopathic tendencies. What a pity it isn't already in
place, for President Bush, Prime Minister Tony Blair and several of
their more hawkish cronies should have been screened years ago. It may
have stopped them deciding to start a war that, in the words of the
Arabs, will "open the gates of hell" in the Middle East. And, by the by,
it's a war they haven't yet actually bothered to give the rest of us any
serious, objective evidence on the 'imminent threat' posed by Iraq - not
that Saddam Hussein is a pussycat, but that's not the point.
Meanwhile, research conducted at the
University of Maastricht in the Netherlands apparently uncovered
'dramatic evidence' proving that marijuana is not only dangerous but it
can also cause serious psychotic disorders in people with no history of
mental illness. Indeed, the university's results suggest that smoking
cannabis can actually treble the risk of mental instability.
What no one seems to have picked up on is
that most people who smoke a joint, tend to diffuse the hash with loose
tobacco. It's only a matter of time before somebody else makes the
connection and then we shall hear that not only does smoking kill you,
directly and passively and via the internet, no doubt, but it also, with
a little help from cannabis, will send you round the bend.
And it will probably be a bloody-minded
psychopathic director of an anti-smoking cartel indirectly sponsored by
taxes on tobacco who promotes the message.
The fact is that, whether we like it or
not, most psychos seems to succeed at work, mainly because they are
usually arrogant, manipulative bastards who are paid huge sums of money
to make quick vital decisions without worrying about the potential
impact on the rest of us.
That's why I blow smoke, anyway I can, just to get up their noses. For a
smoke a day may keep the psychos at bay.
PS I wrote this column before
reading an impressive interview with Norman Mailer in this week's Sunday
Times Magazine, in which Mailer described Bush as "a bit of a civilised
psychopath." Glad to know it's not just me who thinks this...
