The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry Read Online Free PDF Page A

except that I’m mentioned in it. I am just an “innocent victim” of the project.
    Yes, Mr. Shand came to my house and delivered a few copies of the odd book, but the rest of his story is sheer fabrication. My daughter was having her French lesson with her French tutor in the living room, so perhaps Mr. Shand espied the two of them and heard them speaking French. Also, I speak Italian at home with my kids, and for all I know, Mr. Shand may have mistaken the sound of Italian for French. The point is, there was certainly no “house filled with beautiful French women”—that’s utter rubbish. He wanted to make his mission sound mysterious and titillating.
    It’s a shame that people do this kind of thing and post it on the Web.
     
     
    Sincerely, Douglas Hofstadter
    I e-mailed back. Much of Levi Shand’s tale didn’t ring true, I said, not only the business of the harem but also the story of how he found the box underneath the railway viaduct. Was it possible that Levi Shand was in fact the author of Being or Nothingness ?
    He replied:
    Levi Shand is certainly not the author of the small white book. I have been sent about 80 copies (70 in English, 10 in Swedish) by its author. They sit untouched in my office. Before the book existed, I received a series of extremely cryptic postcards, all in Swedish (all of which I read, although not carefully, and none of which made the least sense at all). People who are normal (i.e., sane, sensible) don’t try to open lines of communication with total strangers by writing them a series of disjointed, weird, cryptic messages.
    From there on, it only got weirder—first several copies of the book were sent to me in a package, and then, some months later, about 80 copies arrived at my office, and then came the bizarre claim that a bunch of copies “were found under a bridge” on my campus, and then books started arriving at various universities around the world, sent to people in certain disciplines that were vaguely associated with Al, biology, etc. And then there were the scissored-out words (super-weird!), and the taped-in letter, addressed to me. All of it was completely nuts. I could say much more about it all, but I don’t have the time.
    I have a great deal of experience with people who are smart but unbalanced, people who think they have found the key to the universe, etc. It’s a sad thing, but there are many of them out there, and often they are extremely obsessive. This particular case was exceedingly transparent because it was so exceedingly obsessive.
     
    Yes, there was a missing piece of the puzzle, Douglas Hofstadter was saying, but the recipients had gotten it wrong. They assumed the endeavor was brilliant and rational because they were brilliant and rational, and we tend to automatically assume that everybody else is basically just like us. But in fact the missing piece was that the author was a crackpot .
    The book couldn’t be decoded because it was written by a crackpot.
    Hofstadter wrote:
    “Being or Nothingness” was written (and published) by a psychologist (or possibly a psychiatrist) in Göteborg, Sweden, who prefers anonymity and thus goes by the pseudonym of “Joe K.”
     
    “Petter Nordlund?” I thought.
    Was Petter Nordlund the sole perpetrator? It seemed unlikely that such a successful man—a distinguished psychiatrist and a protein chemist, whatever that was, and an advisor to a biotech company specializing in therapeutic peptide discovery and development, whatever that was, was actually, in Hofstadter’s words, extremely obsessive and unbalanced.
    But at seven that evening I was face-to-face with him, and it became quickly obvious that he was, indeed, the culprit. He was tall, in his fifties, with an attractive face, the air of an academic. He wore a tweed jacket. He stood in his doorway with his wife, Lily, at his side. Immediately, I liked him. He had a big, kind, cryptic smile on his face, and he was wringing his hands like a man