It was not, mind you, a ceremonial act for the hundredth anniversary of the Republic’s founding, but in retrospect it is a dignified gift. My brother and I teamed up, worked on it for a year, and the result is a charming little book.

THE TIME OF PSYCHOPATHS

a 335-page book that Dr. Houdek published for us last week at Galén publishing.

The word psychopath may have been dropped from the professional lexicon, yet it is still euphonic, and so it is no wonder that many people make sure it does not disappear. Starting with pioneer Hervey Cleckley, followed by his successor Robert Hare and Kevin Dutton, who expanded the concept, through Gerhard Blickle, Nora Schütte, Chris Patrick, and on to Associate Professor Radek Ptáček. One of the connoisseurs and creators of the term, deprivant, has recently gone off the rails (or another process ran through his brain) and publicly announces that the USA organizes and conducts controlled migration in order to destabilize Europe—so we will not be dealing with that here.

Experts in this field, at the boundary of psychopathology, would like to reserve the term psychopath for roughly one percent of our fellow humans, whose essential difference is the absence of fear: they do not realize it and they do not experience it, which brings a completely different perception of connections, emotion, value formation, and action. Try to imagine for a moment that you absolutely do not know what fear is, and if you have a decent imagination, based on this trait you will quickly arrive at a feeling of omnipotence, i.e. omnipotence. In addition, when fear or dread is missing, it allows one to carry out everything with robotic precision. You are also attractive to those around you, you are not afraid to take risks, you fear nothing, and you can therefore do everything!

And now it is only a matter of how much aggression, asocial and antisocial impulses, traits, and personality characteristics you have, how greedy you are, and how much excitement you need in that endless boredom without fear: whether smuggling cocaine is enough for you or you need, for a thrill, to steal, kill, gamble for millions on the stock market, or conversely to rescue endangered people, conquer space, spread faith, or operate the brain.

Thanks to these traits (and the preposition “thanks” truly belongs here), psychopaths more or less automatically end up in leadership roles wherever the wind carries them. They are instinctively seen as leaders of the herd, and the two-thirds of our fellow citizens who cannot tolerate freedom and are grateful for any authority willingly submit to them (as Čapek’s sheep put it: Even to the slaughterhouse, as long as we are being led). Sometimes I wonder whether nature produces them intentionally. Their number still remains roughly the same, even though sex is one of their favorite activities. It seems that nature places this one percent in society as potential “leaders” (the natural size of a human group is around 96 members), just as it assigns another stable percentage of “madmen,” who, in turn, take care of the progress of science, technology, and art.

Although it is not exactly halfway, I only briefly ventured into history in the joint work; I handled the psychosocial side, while my brother František, a trained historian, reached into our past for several heroes whose careers in Czech, and sometimes European, history were indisputably associated with this personality trait, and yet his entry in the first half is also clearly visible. Together we demolished a few myths and defamed several national heroes, starting with the primordial Czech and ending with the communist murderer Urválek. My brother finally used part of his rich collection of historical postcards, and therefore the text is accompanied by over 70 color reproductions, including a selfie of the other brother, this time Žižka, in a double version with an entirely new patch across the eyes. More precisely over the eyes! Once over the left and once over the right. So it was not easy to obey the warning: Krejž holého!

We left the present and its nasty characters alone, aware that if we were to omit anyone—nature forbid— we would cause them unbearable misery, which would grieve us, for we are both very sensitive, and beneath our tough shells hide souls as tender as forget-me-nots.

MUDr. Radkin Honzák psychiatrist Author’s blog: http://blog.aktualne.cz/blogy/radkin-honzak.php

About the publication: The Time of Psychopaths Publisher: Galén ISBN: 9788074923845 Number of pages: 335 Edition: first, 2018