Eng. 102

Revealing a Psychopath
“If you’re in a room and at one end lies madness and at the other end lies sanity, it is human nature to veer towards the madness end” (Ronson 72). In other words what Jon Ronson is trying to say is that humans by nature are always looking for craziness. One example is a teenage boy always wondering, “What would happen if…” What would happen if I drink one of my dad’s beers instead of the Mountain Dew next to it; would he find out? Or another example when you get your first car, you want to press and investigate what each button or pedal does and you see the accelerator. The first thing that might run to your mind is what would happen if I just press this all the way down? Despite the fact that we know the consequences we still do them because humans by nature veer towards madness as said by Ronson.
After reading Ronsons “The Psychopath Test” I realized that we all have some type of manic tendencies or a disorder in us, yet we are not all considered psychopaths. Once Ronson started reading the DSM he started to diagnose himself with disorders and some of these disorders also pertained to me. The disorders were arithmetic learning disorder and caffeine induced disorder. As a kid I was never the best at math so did that mean I had arithmetic learning disorder? How about when you drink coffee for the first time and you start getting the jitters, does that mean you have caffeine induced disorder? In this section of the book I believe that the procedure on how this book is used was missing and left us a bit scared and clueless if we really had that certain disorder or not. By him writing about how this list is actually used by psychiatrists could have cleared some things up but I believe he didn’t mention it so our minds would be eager to read more. Although Ronson tells a great story about psychopaths, I completely agree with Margarita Tartakovsky; a critic from the website Psychcentral.
To be fair, Ronson raises genuine concerns and investigates key topics such as psychiatry’s mistakes, pseudoscience and the validity of DSM diagnoses. But he doesn’t exactly deliver a balanced view or at least add pieces of information to the contrary. We mainly hear about experiments and diagnoses gone wrong. And again, there’s a dearth of research into psychopathy then and now (Tartakovsky)
Tartakovsky believes that Ronson doesn’t get really deep into the subject yet still gets the readers to agree with his views and I believe this is because he never discusses research or mentions any views from other experts in the field either going against or with his idea.
Every chapter has a story to tell, and it connects to his argument making the reader steer towards his one-sided approach. Making it hard for people who really don’t have a broad education on the subject like myself agree with him. He talks about psychopaths and he goes down the list seeing if they are actually psychopaths or not, most of us agree with of what he says because we don’t have experience using that checklist.
In addition one other thing that I agree with most critics is his dark humor; even though he gives us serious and disturbing topics he somehow knows how to make them quite hilarious it’s a bit unexplainable on how he does this. This dark humor is a tactic Ronson uses to keep us attached to the book. As stated by Will Self in The Guardian “he's undoubtedly a clever and thoughtful man. By constructing his books so that they start off achingly funny then at a certain juncture become naggingly painful”. This quote emphasizes on one of Ronsons tactics used.
At the end of the day the critics and I agreed that Ronson wrote a great book. It kept the reader at the edge of their seats and craving for more after each chapter, sort of like a mystery. I don’t think anyone will look at people the same after reading this novel, I believe we will unknowingly be running through hares check list trying to figure out if the person we are talking to are psychopaths.