Psychos in the C-Suite

"It is my impression we're making more psychopaths. I can't back this up with statistics because doctors don't write "total psycho" on the diagnosis line. Psychopathy isn't a diagnostic category and is largely viewed as part of a cluster of antisocial personality disorders. But doctors commonly use the term and it has defined characteristics. 

The American Psychological Association calls it a chronic disposition to disregard the rights of others. Manifestations include a tendency to exploit, to be deceitful, to disregard norms and laws, to be impulsive and reckless, and, most important, to lack guilt, remorse and empathy. 

The APA has reported 15% to 25% of prison inmates show characteristics of psychopathology, far more than in the general adult population.

But that's where I see growth. Subtle psychopaths, the kind who don't stab you, are often intelligent, charming and accomplished. I believe two are currently in the news. (I confine myself to the business sphere, leaving out the equally rich field of politics.)

Elizabeth Holmes was just sentenced to 11 years in federal prison for defrauding investors in her famous Theranos scam. People used to ask why she did it. By now that's clear. She did it to be important. She wanted to be admired. She wished to be thought a genius, a pioneer. She no doubt wanted money, though part of her con was to live relatively modestly -- she wore the same black turtleneck and trousers most days. She wanted status, then and now as Tom Wolfe said the great subject of American life. And she seemed to think she deserved these things -- that she merited them, simply by walking in. One thing you pick up as you read John Carreyrou's great reporting, in these pages and his book, is that she seemed not at all concerned with the negative effects of her actions on others. She didn't seem to care that investors lost hundreds of millions, people lost jobs, the great men she invited on her board were humiliated.

Sam Bankman-Fried's cryptocurrency-trading firm, FTX, collapsed last month. We're still in the why-did-he-do-it phase -- Was it deliberate deception? Untidy bookkeeping? Visionaries often leave the details to others! We make mysteries where there aren't any. He had a great life while it worked! He made himself famous, rich, admired -- friend of presidents and prime ministers, the darling of a major political party. To the Democrats he was the biggest thing since George Soros.

But somehow a valuation of $32 billion was, in a matter of weeks, turned into, or revealed as, nothing. FTX filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11, and FTX's new CEO, John Ray, said he believed gross negligence was involved and a "substantial portion" of FTX customers' assets may be "missing or stolen." Soon after, the crypto firm BlockFi filed for bankruptcy in New Jersey and Bermuda.

A peculiarity of subtle psychopaths is that while they don't seem to feel shame, they are preoccupied with being thought of as highly moral. Ms. Holmes was simply trying to help sick people get their blood tested more easily. This was part of her origin myth -- a relative's illness made her sensitive to the needs of the suffering. Mr. Bankman-Fried gave away millions and became the public face of a movement called effective altruism. He was just trying to help the less fortunate live better lives! And he was so modest about it, eschewing material things, clad in rough sandals, a thin T-shirt, shorts. Like the young St. Francis, stripping himself naked that his robes might be sold for the poor.

Mr. Bankman-Fried stood for selflessness and "responsible" regulation of crypto. Ms. Holmes stood for thinking outside the box and breaking through false limits. They all believe in something.

But again, most interesting in psychopaths is the lack of remorse. They don't like being caught -- that upsets them -- but they don't mind causing others harm. It's their superpower. They're not hemmed in by what limits you.

Which is a conscience. People often refer to their consciences -- they say things like "My conscience is clear." It's not an unknown entity to them. But they seem to think it's something they were born with, like a sense of smell. When actually a conscience has to be formed and developed or it doesn't work.

Every major faith in the world has thoughts here. In Catholic teaching, says Father Roger Landry, Columbia University's Catholic chaplain, the traditional definition of conscience is "a judgment of the practical reason applying moral principles to concrete circumstances leading to the conclusion to do or not do something."

"Many people today confuse their conscience with their opinion or even with their feelings about what is the right thing to do or avoid," he said in an email. "Many think that if their intentions were good, and they desired a good outcome, then the action would be morally fine. But, as is obvious, sometimes we will feel good about doing something wrong ('I stole, but he was rich'; 'I insulted her, but she deserved it.')" A conscience must be informed "with the truth that comes from God -- the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes, corporal and spiritual works of mercy, other passages in Sacred Scripture, the moral teachings of the Church." These things "illumine our eyes so that we may see things more clearly."

"Conscience can make erroneous judgments, either because it identifies wrong principles (e.g., personal autonomy as the supreme value), or has the right principles in a disordered rank (prioritizing not hurting others' feelings over helping the person give up drugs.)" But to form a conscience we have a duty "to tune into God's frequency rather than our own echo chamber, or the confused noise that can come from culture."

We need better consciences. If we got them, we'd have fewer psychopaths." [1]

1. Declarations: Psychos in the C-Suite
Noonan, Peggy. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 03 Dec 2022: A.17.

Laisvųjų menų „savižudybė“

"– Pone Džonai, jūs atėnietis ar spartietis? Grupė Irako studentų uždavė šį klausimą Johnui Agresto 2003 m., kai jis buvo Bagdade ir siekė atstatyti Irako universitetinę sistemą Koalicijos laikinajai valdžiai. Po diskusijos apie Tukididą klasėje jis sako: „Maniau, kad žinau, į kur jie vairuoja. Todėl pasakiau: „Tikiuosi, esu atėnietis, kultūringas ir rafinuotas. Nenoriu būti spartiets, šiurkštus ir karingas“.

 

    Būtent tokio atsakymo ieškojo studentai, tačiau ponas Agresto neteisingai suprato klausimą. Jie norėjo sužinoti, ar amerikiečiai yra kaip spartiečiai. „Spartiečiai daug kalbėjo apie garbę, savo sąjungas ir draugus“, – sako jis. "Ir tada jie juos išdavė. "Ar tu taip su mumis padarysi?" Šiandienos pedagogai mėgsta kalbėti apie "aktualių" tekstų skaitymą. Šiems jauniems irakiečiams nieko nebuvo aktualesnio už „Peloponeso karo istoriją“.

 

    76 metų P. Agresto yra visą gyvenimą trunkančio laisvųjų menų ugdymo čempionas – jo naujos knygos „Mokymosi mirtis: kaip amerikietiškas išsilavinimas žlugo mūsų studentams ir ką su juo daryti“ tema. 

 

Tai nepopuliari priežastis: JAV Švietimo departamento duomenimis, 2020 m. studentai, besimokantys anglų kalbos, istorijos, filosofijos, užsienio kalbų ar literatūros, sudarė tik 4 % kolegijų absolventų. Kiekvienoje iš šių disciplinų suteiktų laipsnių skaičius sumažėjo nuo 15 % iki 34 % 2012–2020 m., o bendras laipsnių skaičius išaugo 14 %.

 

    Daugelis jaunų amerikiečių – ir senų – nemato laisvųjų menų prasmės: „Esame įtarūs, nes nežinome, kuo jie naudingi, ir nežinome, kokia jų nauda“, – sakė p. Agresto sako „Zoom“ interviu. Tačiau tiems studentams Irake tai buvo pirmas kartas, kai jiems buvo „leista pagalvoti apie tai, kaip jūs kuriate demokratiją, kokia yra religijos vieta visuomenėje arba koks yra mano laisvo ir smalsaus proto vaidmuo“, kartu būnant "žmogumi, kuris paklūsta tam, ką sako imamas." Kai jie paragavo laisvųjų menų, tai viską pakeitė."

 

    P. Agresto gyvena Santa Fė, N.M., bet išlaiko pakankamai savo gimtojo Bruklino (JAV) akcento, kad primintų klausytojams, jog jis kilęs ne iš išretėjusio aukštojo mokslo pasaulio. Jo seneliai italai imigrantai nemokėjo skaityti, o tėvai namuose nelaikė knygų. Jis nusivylęs, kad šiandien per daug studentų neturi galimybių giliai skaityti, kokios jam buvo pasiūlytos katalikiškoje vidurinėje mokykloje, jau nekalbant apie Bostono koledžą ir Kornelį.

 

    Jis laisvųjų menų mirtį priskiria „savižudybei“, o ne „žudymui“. Amerikiečiai, laikydami save „praktiškais“ žmonėmis, visada įtariai žiūrėjo į laisvuosius menus, sako A. Agresto. 

 

Šiandieninės išpūstos kainos daro juos dar labiau tokiais: „Liberalus išsilavinimas, begalinės universitetų ir kolegijų administratorių išminties dėka, kainuoja tiek pat, kiek ir gauti inžinieriaus laipsnį, bet mažai tikintis saugaus atlygio ateityje“, – rašo jis.

 

    Naujausios tendencijos akademijoje paaštrino problemą. Pradėkite nuo „specializacijos“, ypač augančios neaiškios teorijos ir kritikos, kuri linkusi išstumti puikiausius darbus. Knygoje jis klausia: „Jei kažkada baigusiam kolegijos vyresniajam buvo sunku įtikinti būsimą darbdavį, kad Šekspyro ir Cicerono studijos buvo naudingos, tai kiek sunkesnė užduotis, kai aspirantūros pakraščiai nustumiami į bakalauro studijų programą?"

 

    Mūsų interviu jis pasakoja apie vidurinės mokyklos mokinį, kuris jam pasakė: "Aš taip jaudinuosi dėl istorijos. Mokausi mąstyti kaip istorikas." Tai sukrėtė poną Agresto. „Ar mes taip profesionalizavome laisvuosius menus? jis sako. „Mūsų dėstymo tikslas nėra padaryti mažą mane“ – ne kiekvieną studentą paversti profesoriumi. 

 

„Gerai turėti medicinos ar inžinerijos profesionalumą, bet laisviesiems menams noriu mėgėjų“, – sako jis. "Atominės bombos kūrimo specializacija yra gerai. Chaucer skaitymo specializacija - ne."

 

    Jis nerimauja, kad studentai „per anksti susisiaurina“, rinkdamiesi specialybę, prieš tai neįgiję plataus išsilavinimo. Jis tvirtina, kad nesvarbu, kuo tu norėtum tapti – viena iš jo dukterų yra slaugytoja; kita valdo švyturį – laisvieji menai turi ko išmokyti. „Turėtume išmokyti paprastus žmones mokytis įprastų dalykų“, – sako jis, pavyzdžiui, „Rožių karas, Amerikos revoliucija“ ir „kas buvo Platonas ir Dekartas“. Ir ne tik todėl, kad tai yra dalykai, kuriuos turėtų žinoti išsilavinęs žmogus, arba dėl to, kad jie gali padėti jums susirasti darbą, bet ir todėl, kad jie gali padėti atsakyti į „vaikiškus klausimus“.

 

    Jis vardina tokių klausimų sąrašą: "Kaip man gyventi? Kas yra teisingumas? Ką esame skolingi mums patiems? Ką esame skolingi kitiems? Ar demokratija yra geriausias gyvenimo būdas? Kas yra meilė?" Tai skamba. kaip gilūs filosofiniai klausimai. Ar jis tikrai nori juos vadinti vaikiškais? „Lažinkitės, - sako jis. "Yra sunku rast tokį vaiką , kuris nenori kelti šių klausimų." Ir tai yra "toks klausimas, kurį kelia literatūra, istorija, filosofija ir klasikinės studijos".

 

    Agresto sako, kad kredencialų akcentavimas sukuria vidutinybę. Laipsnis mažai pasako apie tai, ką žino jo savininkas. Kalbėdamas apie ginčą dėl to, ar pirmoji ponia Jill Biden dėl jos išsilavinimo daktaro laipsnio turėtų būti vadinama „daktere Biden“, J. Agresto sako nesuprantantis, kodėl ji tokia nori būti. „Geriausias dėstytojas, kurį turėjau kolegijoje, neturėjo daktaro laipsnio“, – sako jis. Kai G. Agresto buvo St. John's College, nedidelės Didžiųjų knygų mokyklos, prezidentu, jos kataloge buvo rašoma: „Nors mes tikimės, kad dauguma mūsų profesorių turi daktaro laipsnius, tikimės, kad jie pakils aukščiau."

 

    P. Agresto priekaištauja ir polinkiui vertinti istorines asmenybes pagal šių dienų standartus. Nedaugelis skaito Platoną, Rousseau ar Madisoną be įvadinio gerklų glostymo apie tai, kaip jie gyveno kitais laikais, kai žmonės laikėsi atsilikusių pažiūrų. „Manau, kad pastangos įtraukti knygas, literatūrą, autorius, valstybininkus į istorinį kontekstą yra būdas stengtis būti maloniam“, – sako p. Agresto – galbūt, jis pats bando būti malonus, priskirdamas savo objektams gerus motyvus.  "Tai yra būdas pasakyti: "Taip, visi turi nesėkmių. Jie tikrai turėjo molio pėdas. Bet tada visi turėjo jas. Taigi jie niekuo nesiskiria. Jie yra tik žmonės, susiję su savo laiku ir vieta".

 

    Bėda ta, kad tai nustumia didžiuosius vyrus nuo jų aktualumo: „Vaikai sakys: „Aš gyvenu ne tuo laiku ir vietoje. Kodėl man tai turėtų rūpėti?“ Tai taip pat „būdas pasipūsti. Studentai gali pasakyti: „Džefersonas? Koks veidmainis, aš geresnis už jį. . . . Tada jie buvo neblaivūs ir ne tokie protingi. Mes žinome daugiau, nei tai“.

 

    Tokios nuotaikos lydėjo studentų požiūrio pasikeitimą, kurį J. Agresto pastebėjo per pusę amžiaus trukusią profesoriaus ir administratoriaus karjerą: „Jie tapo paklusnūs, neįdomūs ir nuožmiai kovingi“. Jis retai nesutinka su Allanu Bloomu, kuris jam dėstė Kornelyje, tačiau mano, kad Bloomas klydo savo 1987 m. knygoje „Amerikietiško proto uždarymas“, kai dėl aukštojo mokslo nuosmukio kaltino reliatyvizmą. „Žmonės, kurie griauna universitetus, žudo laisvuosius menus, jie nėra reliatyvistai“, – sako p. Agresto. „Jie „žino“, kas yra tiesa, ir ketina tai primesti“.

 

    P. Agresto sužavėjo reakcija prieš cenzūrą universiteto miestelyje. Tačiau jis mano, kad nors žodžio laisvė yra būtina, jos nepakanka. "Ne tai yra kolegija ir aukštoji mokykla, o priešingų požiūrių studijos. Tai literatūros ir istorijos studijos."

 

    „Šekspyras nagrinėja visus dalykus, kuriuos norime išnagrinėti: teisingumą tarp tautų, teisingumą tarp skirtingų etninių grupių, ką reiškia būti visiškai žmogumi, ką reiškia išduoti draugą, ką reiškia mirti už draugą." P. Agresto žavesio dalis yra tai, kad pradėjęs nagrinėti šiuos klausimus jis sunkiai gali sustoti: „Kodėl Cordelia myli jos tėvą? - jis svarsto apie karalių Lyrą. „Jis yra velniškai kvailas, bet atrodo, kad ji vis dar jį myli, bet keistu būdu, tokiu būdu, kuris ne tik jam pasiduoda, bet ir bando jį pakelti.

 

    Tai šiek tiek panašu į P. Agresto santykį su aukštuoju mokslu. Ten pilna prakeiktų kvailių, bet jam tai patinka ir jis nori jį pakelti.

    ---

    Ponia Riley yra Amerikos įmonių instituto vyresnioji bendradarbė ir knygos „Blogas elgesys su vaiku“ autorė."  [1]

1. The Weekend Interview with John Agresto: The 'Suicide' of the Liberal Arts
Naomi Schaefer Riley. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 03 Dec 2022: A.15.

The 'Suicide' of the Liberal Arts

"'Mr. John, are you an Athenian or a Spartan?" A group of Iraqi students put that question to John Agresto in 2003, when he was in Baghdad working to rebuild Iraq's university system for the Coalition Provisional Authority. After a classroom discussion of Thucydides, he says, "I thought I knew what they were driving at. So I said, 'I hope I'm an Athenian, cultured and sophisticated. I don't want to be a Spartan, rough and warlike.'"

That was the answer the students were looking for -- but Mr. Agresto had misunderstood the question. They wanted to know if Americans were like the Spartans. "The Spartans talked a lot about honor, their alliances and their friends," he says. "And then they betrayed them. 'Are you going to do that to us?'" Today's educators like to talk about reading texts that are "relevant." Nothing was more relevant to these young Iraqis than the "History of the Peloponnesian War."

Mr. Agresto, 76, is a lifelong champion of liberal-arts education -- the subject of his new book, "The Death of Learning: How American Education Has Failed Our Students and What to Do About It." It's an unpopular cause: According to U.S. Education Department data, students who majored in English, history, philosophy, foreign languages or literature constituted only 4% of college graduates in 2020. The number of degrees awarded in each of these disciplines declined by between 15% and 34% between 2012 and 2020, while the total number of degrees rose by 14%.

Many young Americans -- old ones, too -- don't see the point of liberal arts: "We are suspicious, because we don't know what good they are and we don't know what use they are," Mr. Agresto says in a Zoom interview. But for those students in Iraq, this was the first time they were "allowed to think about how you build a democracy, or what's the place of religion in society or what is the role of my having a free and inquisitive mind" while also being "a person who obeys what the imam says. Once they got a taste of the liberal arts, that changed everything."

Mr. Agresto lives in Santa Fe, N.M., but retains enough of his native Brooklyn, N.Y., accent to remind listeners that he didn't come from the rarefied world of higher education. His Italian immigrant grandparents didn't know how to read, and his parents kept no books in the house. He is disappointed that too many students today don't have the opportunities for deep reading he was offered at his Catholic high school, let alone at Boston College and Cornell.

He classifies the death of the liberal arts as "suicide," not "murder." Americans, regarding themselves as a "practical" people, have always been suspicious of the liberal arts, Mr. Agresto says. Today's inflated prices make them even more so: "A liberal education, thanks to the infinite wisdom of university and college administrators, costs as much as getting an engineering degrees, but with little in the hope of secure future recompense," he writes.

Recent trends within the academy have exacerbated the problem. Start with "specialization," especially the growing prevalence of obscure theory and criticism, which tends to crowd out great works. In the book he asks: "If it was once hard for a graduating college senior to convince a prospective employer that studying Shakespeare and Cicero was useful, how much more difficult is the task when the fringes of graduate school are pushed down into the undergraduate curriculum?"

In our interview, he tells the story of a high-school student who told him: "I am so excited about history. I am learning how to think like a historian." That distressed Mr. Agresto. "Have we so vocationalized the liberal arts?" he says. "The object of our teaching is not to make mini-me's" -- not to turn every student into a professor. "It's fine to have the professionalization of medicine or engineering, but for liberal arts, I want amateurs," he says. "Specialization in building an atom bomb is fine. Specialization in reading Chaucer is not."

He worries that students are "making themselves small too soon" by picking a major without first getting a broad education. He contends that no matter what you want to become -- one of his daughters is a nurse; the other operates a lighthouse -- the liberal arts have something to teach you. "We should teach ordinary people to learn ordinary things," he says, such as "the War of the Roses, the American Revolution" and "who Plato and Descartes were." And not only because these are things an educated person should know, or because they may help you land a job, but because they can help answer "childish questions."

He rattles off a list of such questions: "How should I live my life? What is justice? What do we owe ourselves? What do we owe others? Is democracy the best way of life? What is love?" These sound like deep philosophical inquiries. Does he really mean to call them childish? "You bet," he says. "There's hardly a child that doesn't want to ask these questions." And they are "the kind of questions that literature and history and philosophy and classical studies raise."

The emphasis on credentials produces mediocrity, Mr. Agresto says. A degree tells you little about what its holder knows. Referring to the controversy over whether First Lady Jill Biden should be addressed as "Dr. Biden" because of her doctorate in education, Mr. Agresto says he doesn't understand why she wants to be. "The best teacher I had in college didn't have a Ph.D.," he says. When Mr. Agresto was president of St. John's College, a small Great Books school, its catalog said: "While we expect most of our professors have Ph.D.s, we hope they rise above it."

Mr. Agresto also faults the tendency to judge historical figures by today's standards. Few read Plato, Rousseau or Madison anymore without introductory throat-clearing about how they lived in a different time when people held backward views. "I think the effort to put books, literature, authors, statesmen, in the historical context is a way of trying to be nice," Mr. Agresto says -- perhaps trying to be nice himself by attributing benign motives to the objects of his criticism. "It's a way of saying, 'Yeah, everybody has failings. They surely had feet of clay. But back then everybody had those. And so they're no different. They're just people connected to their time and place.'"

The trouble with that is that it strips great men of their relevance: "The kids will say, 'I don't live in that time and place. Why should I care?'" It's also "a way of puffing ourselves up. Students can say, "Jefferson? What a hypocrite, I'm better than he is. . . . Back then, they were benighted and not so smart. We know more than that."

Sentiments like these have accompanied a change in the attitude of students, which Mr. Agresto has noticed over his half-century career as a professor and administrator: "They have gone from docile to uninterested to fiercely combative." He rarely disagrees with Allan Bloom, who taught him at Cornell, but he thinks Bloom was wrong in his 1987 book, "The Closing of the American Mind," when he blamed higher education's decline on relativism. "The people who are destroying the universities, who have killed the liberal arts, they're not relativists," Mr. Agresto says. "They 'know' what's true, and they're going to impose it."

Mr. Agresto has been heartened by the backlash against censorship on campus. But he thinks that while free speech is necessary, it's insufficient. "That's not what college and high school are about, the study of clashing views. It's the study of literature and history."

"Shakespeare examines all the stuff we want to examine: justice between nations, justice between different ethnicities, what it means to be fully human, what it means to betray your friend, what it means to die for your friend." It is part of Mr. Agresto's charm that once he starts on these questions he can hardly stop: "Why does Cordelia love her father?" he muses about King Lear. "He's a damn fool, but she still seems to love him, but in an odd way, in a way that doesn't just give in to him, but that tries to raise him up."

It's a little like Mr. Agresto's relationship with higher education. It's full of damn fools, but he loves it and wants to raise it up.

---

Ms. Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of "No Way to Treat a Child."" [1]

1. The Weekend Interview with John Agresto: The 'Suicide' of the Liberal Arts
Naomi Schaefer Riley. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 03 Dec 2022: A.15.