There are good reasons why people love the most monstrous psychopaths in TV shows and movies. But it's important that the public learn from these shows and not be inspired by them.

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In Netflix House of Cards series, Kevin Spacey plays Frank Underwood, a treacherous, murderous, conniving, lying, traitorous, vengeful politician who will do ANYTHING to gain power and influence.

The series is a huge hit. 
Of course, there's Walter White, the murderous, lying deceiving, drug kingpin brilliantly portrayed in Breaking Bad, one of the most successful TV series in history.

Clearly, both of these characters are psychopaths and clearly, these shows, built around psychopathic main characters, have been fabulous successes.

I'll take a stab at why the shows are so successful.

Experts estimate that only one percent of the population are psychopaths, and maybe eight percent include psychopaths, sociopaths, narcissists, borderlines and anti-social personality disordered people.

Most people don't act anything like this pathological population. That's a good thing. But, and it's a big "but," a lot of people would like to be able to act like them some of the time.

Psychopaths don't care. They don't experience empathy. That's very handy when it comes to not having to worry about guilt, when you do something wrong, even something profoundly evil.

A lot of people only think of psychopaths as nutcase psychopathic killers-- like Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy. And they exist. But they are just one segment of the psychopathic population. In a way, they are the easy ones to detect and identify. But there are many psychopaths who are smarter and who have better impulse control. That's what we see in House of Cards, in particular, and somewhat in Breaking Bad. Walt has a little bit less impulse control. In fact, having great ability to control emotional expression, to put out an impression of calm strength, even under high stress, is one of the characteristics of a psychopath. That's a characteristic that is desirable for anyone, as well.

Psychopaths are charismatic, very effective influencers who are great at dominating other people. Domination is a complex dimension of a culture that has many nuances. Some people are great at jumping into the role, playing the dominator, pushing the buttons of people who are accustomed to manifesting passivity and deference. Charisma and the ability to feel in control in social settings are also attractive characteristics.

Psychopaths and narcissists feel superior to other people. It can even be programmed into their DNA, literally, with genes that produce aggression, inhibition of fear, even grandiosity in some cases. (Some psychopaths are also bipolar, and grandiosity is a common hypomanic symptom.) Most people would like to feel self-confident.

The problem is the psychopath, with each of these at least somewhat desirable characteristics, adds up to a package that amounts to a monster-- a sometimes deadly, often suffering-inflicting predator who uses these "strengths" in immoral, cruel, vile, evil, hurtful ways. Even if they want to be good people they just can't help some of the mean, uncaring, selfish things they do and the guiltless way they feel about them. I've interviewed a few high functioning psychopaths and even though they want to be seen as good people, they can't help telling a life story that includes actions and decisions that can only be described as psychopathic.

So... there are actually a lot of reasons why people admire psychopaths, or at least some of their abilities. And when we see the these stories about the most adept, smartest, most successful psychopaths, living incredible lives of excitement and success-- at least success by some measures-- we are fascinated by them.

But it's important to use these stories as teaching tools. First, many psychopaths are not stupid, impulsive, alcoholic or drug abusing killers. Many are much higher functioning. Clive Boddy, who literally wrote the book on Corporate Psychopaths, told me in an interview, that some financial organizations actually seek out psychopaths as employees. Part of the reason I became interested in psychopaths and sociopaths is I interviewed Thom Hartmann about his belief that it takes a sociopath to become the CEO of a major multinational corporation.

It's interesting that the writer of the House of Card series, Beau Willimon, spent time working on different political campaigns-- for Howard Dean, Chuck Schumer, Bill Bradley and Hillary Clinton. He described in an interview with Telegraph writer Chris Harvey :

"House of Cards is an extreme view of politics and power... All politicians are murderers or have to be willing to be murderers. Here you have a dramatisation of that thing in them which allows them to do the unspeakable, whether that is facilitating the death of a congressman or sending 100,000 troops to war."

Harvey reports,

"Willimon talks about the political dimension to the war in Iraq, how it was justified "by an outdated and erroneous piece of intelligence" and how there "had to be certain political advantages gained by such an endeavour", such as being seen to respond to 9/11 with a show of strength."I don't have the answer to this," he says, "but I ask the question: with thousands of American soldiers dead and hundreds of thousands of people abroad dead, is that more or less heinous than what we see Francis Underwood do?"

In my interactions and writings as a political blogger and commentator, many commenters have suggested, and I agree, that many politicians fit the profile of psychopaths. A series like House of Cards has the potential to be a very educational exercise in helping people to understand just how powerful and successful psychopaths can be, and that they can reach the highest echelons.

But series like House of Cards and Breaking Bad can also be problematic. One Huffington post writer, Maddie Crum in her article,  10 Fictional Characters Who Just Might Be Psychopaths, And Why We're Drawn To Them , says,

"On Valentine's Day, Netflix Nation's love for House of Cards' Frank Underwood was rekindled, and why not? He's ambitious, he's charming, he's Kevin Spacey, and he's... arguably a psychopath. He's conniving and continually reiterates the uselessness of feeling remorse, and yet, for some reason, we want him to succeed."

Hello!! I don't want him to succeed. I see a monster/predator, more dangerous and destructive than the green, long-clawed monsters we see in slasher horror stories. I see an incredibly dangerous, poisonous creature which destroys so much of what IT touches. Yet I am sure that there are many people who, caught up in the story, in the tsunami of power portrayed, begin rooting for Underwood, rooting for his helpers. That's not such a good thing.

I think that Willimon adds enough "brakes," ie., examples of the despicable depravity of Frank Underwood and his equally psychopathic wife to prevent people from getting too enthusiastic. But I'm sure there are those ten percent of the population-- the psychopaths, sociopaths, narcissists, etc., who are emboldened, inspired and perhaps even encouraged by characters like Frank and Clair Underwood and Walter White.

Even good-hearted, non-pathological people, as they watch these incredibly engaging stories, fall into the hypnotic trance of the story world the writers create. They start thinking like psychopaths would think, anticipating the next moves.

I'm a lefty. When I see politicians talking about cutting the safety net, aiming to cut medicare, reduce social security benefits, take away food stamps, I start seeing psychopathic, heartless behavior. But even I, in anticipating the last episode of the second season of House of Cards, started thinking about who Frank would kill or destroy.

If there's anything that I'd like to come out of these kinds of series it is a heightened public awareness of how powerful and destructive AND EVIL psychopaths can be, that they can be incredibly charismatic and attractive and can get people to like them, and that they can ascend to the highest levels of power, whether in elected office or as plutocratic billionaires using their money and power to profoundly influence and buy elections and whole segments of congress.

We have a terrible disease afflicting humanity. Just going by the one percent estimate, there are three million psychopaths in the US and seventy million of them worldwide. They are predators who don't care who they hurt. Many actually enjoy the hurting, the dominating, the destruction of lives. It makes sense that fictional characters like Underwood and White are so intriguing and make for great entertainment. But let's use the stories and the characters to raise public awareness.

I've spoken to researchers who have led me to believe that the investment in research to understand and deal with psychopaths in ways that protect the public while protecting psychopaths rights is less than twenty million dollars a year. Yet one study, by Kent A. Kiehl and Morris B. Hoffman,  THE CRIMINAL PSYCHOPATH: HISTORY, NEUROSCIENCE, TREATMENT, AND ECONOMICS, estimated in 2011 that the cost of dealing with just the identified criminal psychopaths is at least $460 BILLION dollars a year, stating,

" psychopaths alone are responsible for approximately $460 billion per year in criminal social costs. Note that this $460 billion number does not include the costs of the psychopath's similar overrepresentation in psychiatric hospitals. Nor does it include indirect costs such as treatment for victims and their nonquantifiable emotional suffering"

The article also reports the costs for other "conditions high in the public consciousness:"

"The annual societal cost for alcohol/substance abuse is estimated to be $329 billion, obesity $200 billion, smoking $172 billion... And each of these numbers, unlike our $460 billion for psychopathy, include other institutional costs beside the criminal justice system, primarily hospitalization and treatment, though none include any costs suffered by the victims."

Add the costs of treatment, the costs to the estimated 60 million Americans every year who are victims of psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists they are in relationships with, throw in the costs of corruption in business and government and it's easy to see the cost of psychopaths every year exceeding the costs of the department of defense-- easily more than a trillion dollars a year.

It would be great if these TV series that feature psychopaths would help to wake the public to the need for a massive campaign-- a project, like the Apollo Moon Landing and the Manhattan project, aimed at doing something about psychopaths-- identifying them and preventing them from their predations, from doing the damage and hurt they do to individuals, corporations, government, our culture, while at the same time treating them in as fair and ethical a way as possible. If we're spending hundreds of millions on diseases we should also be spending proportionate amounts on dealing with the costs to society of psychopathy. I think that should be 50 or 100 times what the current estimate is-- one or two billion dollars a year. It's a tiny investment compared to the potential good it could do. Perhaps the problem is there are too many Frank Underwoods in positions of political power who would block any such funding.

Meanwhile, thank goodness for brilliant actors like Kevin Spacey, Robin Wright and Bryan Cranston for doing such a great job of portraying such charming monsters.

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I've been covering psychopaths and sociopaths in articles and interviews for several years. Here's a link to the series.

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

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