A reflection on ‘The Psychopath Test: a journey through the madness industry’, by Jon Ronson. Jon is fantastic at weaving unrelated interviews into a maddening riddle. The Pyschopath Test is a bizzare collection of stories from 9/11 deniers, to wrongly accused pyschopaths, to new and upcoming messiah’s. Each new piece shocks me or leaves me dumbfounded. And then there’s Jon, always processing each fact with a good amount of skepticism. Both of us fall helplessly further into a world we don’t understand. It introduces new information and then smudges that understanding until you and the author are at a loss as to what to make of it. After while, I started to question whether I was going to learn anything from Jon’s mystery van road trip. Jon pauses often to reflect on his thoughts. He becomes fixated on the parralels between diagnosing humans with pyschopathy, and the challenges of trying to capture human nature in words as a journalist. Jon even questions if he was the best person to have unpacked the madness industry. Jon’s like...
