This Ted Talk was given by Jon Ronson, who is a writer and
documentary filmmaker. In his Ted Talk, Ronson discusses how the line between crazy
and sane is unclear. He argues that we try to define people as psychopaths
without paying attention to the normal parts of them, and that we should not “define
people by their maddest edges.” In his Ted Talk, Ronson tells a story of a man
he met named Tony. When Tony was 17, he beat someone up pretty badly, and then
in order to get out of going to jail, he faked being crazy. It worked too well,
and Tony was put into Broadmoor Hospital (an insane asylum). He tried to tell
them that he was not actually insane, but, as he told Ronson, “it’s a lot
harder to convince people you’re sane than it is to convince them you’re crazy.”
Ronson interviewed Tony (for a book Ronson was writing) while
Tony was still in Broadmoor, and Ronson felt that Tony seemed pretty normal.
Tony’s clinician told Ronson that although they did accept the fact that Tony
pretended to be crazy in order to get out of his prison sentence, they assessed
him further and decided he was a psychopath because “faking madness is exactly
the kind of cunning and manipulative act of a psychopath.” There is a list of clinical traits of a psychopath created by Robert Hare.
Tony told Ronson, "You know what, one
of the items on the checklist is ‘lack of remorse,’ but another item on the checklist is ‘cunning,
manipulative.’ So when you say you feel remorse for your
crime, they say, 'Typical of the psychopath to cunningly say he feels remorse when he
doesn't.' It's like witchcraft. They turn everything
upside-down." Eventually Tony was let out of Broadmoor
(after 14 years) because they decided they could not hold him indefinitely just
because he had a higher than average chance of relapsing into criminal behavior.
Ronson says Tony is a “semi- psychopath. He’s a gray area in a world that doesn’t
like gray areas. But gray areas are where you find the complexity, the
humanity, the truth.”
Later in the Ted Talk, Ronson tells another story of how he
interviewed a man named Al Dunlap who worked in corporate business. Hare had told
Ronson that there are many “corporate psychopaths,” so Ronson convinced Dunlap
to go through the Hare checklist with him. Dunlap did fit many traits of the
list, but there were also many traits that did not fit Dunlap. When Ronson was
interviewing Dunlap, he realized that he tended to disregard Dunlap’s normal
answers and to focus on his “crazy” ones. Ronson then discusses how some mental
disorders are over-diagnosed because of this reason. For example, many children
are diagnosed with bipolar disorder because they have temper tantrums. This is
where he realizes that we should not “define people by their maddest edges.”
The purpose of Ronson’s Ted Talk is to discuss the blurred
line between sane and insane. He
suggests that too many people are diagnosed with mental disorders because a
list of traits is used to identify insanity when in reality humans are too
complex to be categorized so easily. Maybe many people do have psychopathic
traits, but their “normal” traits override the bad ones.
So, why should we trust what Jon Ronson has to say? Ronson
wrote a book, called The Psychopath Test,
that explores psychopaths. He has also written other books, articles, and films
that investigate madness and obsession. Ronson also discusses how he went on a psychopath spotting course run by Robert Hare and became a certified
psychopath spotter.
Ronson structures his argument
by telling two stories that support it. The stories are of high quality because
they are about experiences he personally had. Since Ronson told two stories
that support each other, they make his argument more effective and credible.
Ronson also strengthens his argument with factual information like statistics.
For example, he says “one in a hundred regular people is a psychopath.” Ronson
effectively argues his point, but in order to make his argument stronger, he
could have brought in the opinion of other experts or proposed and broken down
a counter argument.
Ronson also uses tactics
to evoke emotion from the audience. First, he makes jokes throughout his Ted
Talk in order to keep the audience interested and probably to keep the tone
lighter as he talks about a darker topic. It makes people more comfortable and
connected to the speaker, which in turn, makes the audience more likely to
agree with the argument. The second way he evokes emotion is not through his
speech, but through music and visual images. As he tells his stories, he has
music and pictures in the background that go with what he is saying. They help
the people in the audience really feel like they are experiencing, first hand, what
is going on in his story.
I chose this Ted Talk
because I find psychology to be very interesting, and anything having to do
with the way the human brain works intrigues me. Also, we have just finished a
unit in English involving insanity where we watched a video about the over
diagnoses of multiple personality disorder, and I am sure the fact that I have just
finished watching Dexter contributes to my continued interest in this topic.
