High Profile
Strange but true
For two decades, the journalist Jon Ronson has been
exploring the margins of human nature, from conspiracy theorists to
psychopaths to ‘men who stare at goats’. Nick Thorpe got his number
in New York.
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You’re known as someone who is fascinated by
people on the fringes. Where did that fascination come from? Can
you trace it back to your childhood?
I’ve sometimes thought that because
I didn’t fit in very well in school, maybe I was forced into the
role of an onlooker, and maybe for that reason I identified with
people on the fringes.
You didn’t have a privileged upbringing, did
you?
No, absolutely not. I went to a
private school in Penarth for a little while, until I was 12 or so;
but it was a terrible school – you know, constant beatings. And it
wasn’t fancy. I mean, I think I would have enjoyed the beatings a
little more if the walls had been wood-panelled.
What sort of values did your parents instil
in you?
Well, I did go to synagogue every
week for a little while. We had a car crash in 1975, in which
somebody died in the car in front. (Already I’m telling you stuff
I’ve never told anybody!) It was late and dark and we were in the
fast lane and there was a car in the middle lane and they hadn’t
closed their boot properly and it flew up, and the guy panicked and
drove into the fast lane. My dad said: ‘We’re going to crash.’ I
remember seeing flames on the windscreen – and then my brother and
I were crouching on the verge and our car was completely engulfed
in flames. My dad had broken his back. He ended up in hospital for
months.
And he decided that the reason we
had survived was because of God. So, we were forced to go to
synagogue every week. That’s the punchline to this
story.
And what did you make of that?
I resented it. I know you’re a
Christian, so I apologise for my resentment, but… You know, the men
and women had to sit separately, which seemed ridiculous to me even
then, at the age of eight. And there was all the rituals – I
wouldn’t say they were Hasidic but they were definitely extremely
Orthodox. I had to go to Hebrew school and everything. It was just
a pain in the arse.
What were the influences that eventually
prompted you to go into journalism?
There was an arts centre in Cardiff
that I used to go to all the time and they’d show interesting films
– I remember seeing Woody Allen films and Martin Scorsese’s
[The] King of Comedy, and listening to the
Beatles and the Sex Pistols and Tom Waits. I learnt that there were
mysterious worlds beyond the world of Cardiff that were
explorable – and my way into that was journalism.
You’ve become well known for your faux
naif approach. What led you to that?
I think if I ever was genuinely
faux, it was something I was doing when I was finding my
feet, and my voice. I mean, there isn’t a faux word in
The Psychopath Test,1 for instance.
I go into worlds that I don’t
understand and try and solve the mystery of them. It’s genuine
enquiry, genuine naivety. Faux naivety implies that you
already know the answer and you’re just pretending not to. It
implies a certain duplicity, and I don’t think I’m in the least bit
duplicitous.
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OK, but still there’s a certain calculation
in the way you approach (for example) Noel Edmonds and his game
show Deal or No Deal in your 2006 piece in the
Guardian,2 surely? You’re thinking: This’ll be funny if I
put it like this.
I certainly look for funny lines and
I’m thrilled when I get them – to me, it’s like finding a jewel in
the carpet. As I said in The Psychopath Test, if you want
to get away with wielding truly malevolent power, be boring,
be-cause people like me won’t write about you because we want to
look good, too, with our engaging prose.
At the time when I wrote that
Guardian story, I was having a rotten time with a book I
was trying to write about the credit-card industry – I was
depressed. So, when I was in the middle of the Deal or No
Deal world it was joyful to find the likeable, funny, absurd
human side of all the sadness there was backstage. An awful lot of
people can’t handle the game’s randomness and they try and come up
with structure – psychic ways of trying to work out what’s in the
box, or complex mathematics. So, it became a piece about all these
people trying to control life’s randomness.
You always come across as very open-minded.
You seem to find things in even the most repellent extremists that
you actually quite like.
I certainly try to. I can only think
of one occasion when I have found somebody completely without
merit, and that was a man called Dave McKay, who was the leader of
the Jesus Christians.3 He suggests to his members that maybe they should donate
their spare kidneys to strangers, because Luke [3:11] says: ‘He
who has two coats, let him share with him
who has none.’ An awful lot of them decided that they would and they invited me in
to document it. I didn’t necessarily have a
problem with that aspect of things – in fact, it was incredible
that they did it – but when I began to ask whether Dave was
coercing them into doing it and whether some of them were too
young to make [such a] decision – you know, legitimate questions –
he went crazy, and vicious.
It culminated in him sending me an
email that said that there was this woman in Scotland called
Christine who needed a kidney – and I’d met Christine and liked her
very much – and she’d taken a turn for the worse and he
could instruct one of his members to give her a kidney,
but if he did I would only accuse him of manipulation and so he
had decided to let Christine die and let her death be on my
conscience.
He’s the only person I can think of
in whom I couldn’t find anything to like.
Which is saying something, given that you
have spent time with neo-Nazis and a PR man for the Ku Klux Klan.
Do you find you can feel empathy for these people only by being
less empathetic towards their eventual victims?
I suppose the fact is, when I go in
to meet somebody my natural instinct is to like them. Which I think
is just the way I am, and also probably good for the kind of
writing I do. But of course I’m empathetic to their victims, too.
Long sections of all my books detail the suffering of the victims
of the people I write about.
Do you think you get a
better story by befriending people
rather than being
confrontational like a Jeremy Paxman?
Yeah, I do sometimes. Paxman is all
about pressurising somebody into revealing themselves, hoping that
when they lose their temper, or feel publicly shamed, they’ll say
something outrageous or extreme. You know, I like
watching that as much as anyone, but I
don’t think it’s what I want to dedicate my
life to doing. I want to dedicate my life to getting people’s
nuances. I see myself in the same world as somebody like [Werner]
Herzog.4
Though maybe your humour is more overt than
his…
You know, if I fail to find humour I
think I’ve failed. But I feel very uncomfortable about ridiculing
people.
In 1996-7, for a documentary you were doing,
you spent a year following around Omar Bakri Muhammad, who was then
the leader of the now proscribed organisation al-Muhajiroun. At one
point, you even looked after some money he had collected for Hamas
and Hezbollah.5
Does there ever come a moment, in situations like that,
when you feel you ought to say something?
You have probably pinpointed one of
the most difficult moments I have ever been
through, you know, morally. Omar was
loading the money into his car and he’d forgotten his coat, so he
said: ‘Can you just look after it for me?’ There was about £5,000’s
worth of loose change in these huge plastic novelty Coca-Cola
bottles. If I’d grabbed them and made a run for it, I’d have
probably got to the corner and Omar would have come out and said,
‘What are you doing?’ In that situation, the best I could do – and
actually all I could do – was stand guard for the 30
seconds till he got his coat, and then be completely honest and
write about it and put it out there.
So, do you see what you do primarily as
entertainment, or are you trying to change the world in some
way?
Well, I think both of those things –
and also [I want] to understand the world
better, to understand why people behave the way they do. Quite
often, when I meet psychologists and psychiatrists, they say to
me: ‘We’re all interested in the same thing, aren’t
we?’
I interviewed an ‘extreme porn’ star
the other day and I said to her: ‘Who do you do this for? For you
or for the viewers?’ And she said: ‘I do it
for the world. I
do it for everybody.’ I feel the same way about my wri-ting: I try
and do it for everybody.
You’re the opposite to John Major, I guess,
when he said that we should condemn a little more and understand a
little less.
I’m absolutely the opposite of that.
You know, I have a problem with condemnation, because it implies an
aw-ful lot of self-assurance on the part
of the condemner. Nobody is superhuman. Condemners have to be aware
of their own weaknesses and biases and difficulties.
I found this quotation today from
[the editor of the Daily Mail,] Paul Dacre: ‘Since time
immemorial, public shaming has been a vital element in
defending the parameters of what are considered acceptable
standards of social behaviour, helping ensure that citizens –
rich
and poor – adhere to them for the good of
the greater community.’6 Now, I know what he means, but
the problem is that, for it to work, the ‘public shamers’ have to
be doing it for completely altruistic reasons. The problem is,
quite often they have nefarious intent.
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You’re a populist at heart, aren’t you? Do
you think you simplify things?
No, I think I take things that other
people simplify and I make them complicated.
But, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said
(though it may have been somebody else, I can’t remember): ‘I would
not give a fig for simplicity this side of complexity, but I would
give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity.’ I
certainly feel that.
In your TED talk last year,7 you said that
journalists take ‘the outermost aspects of our interviewees’
personality and we stitch them together [and] leave the
normal
stuff on the floor.’ Is that just the nature of the
genre?
It’s something I think should be
avoided.
Although it does make for funnier reading,
doesn’t it?
Well, as I say, there’s simplicity
this side of complexity and there’s simplicity the other side of
complexity; and one is something to be avoided and one is something
that should be cherished.
What do you say to those who suspect that
sometimes you fictionalise your journalism? Is that
permissible?
When you do anything except publish
the transcript, you’re shaping a story; but there’s a very big
difference between shaping a story and making things up. If
journalists want to make things up, they should become
novelists.
Have you ever written anything you really
regret?
Let me think. Years and years ago, I
made a documentary series about critics for Channel 4 and one of
them was about Christopher Tookey of the Daily Mail trying
to get [the 1997 film] Lolita banned. I felt we turned him
too much into a caricature.
But in general you stay on the right side of
the line?
Well, I certainly feel that the
older I get, the better I get at it. The older you get, the more
you realise that, you know, we’re all filled with flaws and life is
difficult and we’re just trying to get through it. It’s much harder
to go into any kind of non-fiction situation and portray yourself
as better than the people you’re writing about when you realise how
hard life is.
You’ve long taken an interest in other
people’s religious faith. Am I
right that you would call yourself a humanist?
Well, I am a ‘distinguished
supporter’ of the [British] Humanist [Association], but I don’t
necessarily feel I deserve to be. I’m a humanist to the extent
that I believe that people are good and that we should be kind to
each other. But I don’t believe in being Dawkinsish. I don’t
believe in anything that just sort of closes the door.
(I’ve got nothing against Richard
Dawkins personally – in fact, I’ve met him and he seemed nice. And
I think The God Delusion could probably be very helpful to
some people – some kid in some small town in America could get
great comfort from it. But his brand of scepticism isn’t something
I feel comfortable with at all.)
So, is it certainty that’s the problem,
rather than faith?
Yeah. I mean, I think certainty is
one of the great problems in the world. It’s one of life’s great
tyrannies –
and we all succumb to it. You know, we all
hate it when our politicians ‘flip-flop’ –
it’s considered one of the great weaknesses in a
politician.
In 2000, you wrote about going on an Alpha
course.8
I
got the impression that you rather liked Nicky
Gumbel.
Yeah, I did, I liked him very much,
and I loved going on Alpha. In fact, I did
Alpha again for a documentary for Channel 4 a few years later. I
did get Nicky into – well, he got himself into a little bit of
difficulty as a result of that story, though. Somebody asked him:
‘Why does the Bible condemn homosexuality? I have a friend
who’s gay and to him it’s completely
normal.’ And Nicky said: ‘Well, first of
all I want you to know that I have many, many gay friends and
there’s even an Alpha course for gays running in Beverly Hills,
which I think is marvellous; but if a paedophile said
[that paedophilia] was completely normal for him, you wouldn’t
think that was OK. I wouldn’t for a second compare being gay to
being a paedophile, but unfortunately the Bible makes it very
clear that gay people do need to be healed. However, I would
strongly advise against using the word “healed” to them – they hate
that word!’
There was a point when, you said in the
article, you genuinely wondered whether God was speaking to
you.
We had an awful lot of trouble
[conceiving] our son, Joel – I remember a friend of mine who never
managed to have a child saying that every month was like a
funeral without a corpse – and as I was
thinking about this, sitting at the back of
HTB, Nicky quoted from the Book of Joel [2:25]: ‘I will repay you
for the years the locusts have eaten.’ So, afterwards I said to
him: ‘Do you think that was a coincidence or a message from God?’
And he said: ‘You’ll have to decide that.’ And I said: ‘Yeah, but
what would you say?’ And he said: ‘I would say definitely a message
from God.’
I chose not to believe it was a
message from God.
Have you ever had an experience of religion
that made you think, ‘Actually, I could go for this’?
That was the one that made me come
closest.
And what put you off?
Well, [Nicky saying] that gay people
need to be healed. You know, that’s kind of offputting, isn’t it?
The whole sense of… I didn’t want to be involved in anything that
condemns other people’s – I’m not a condemner.
But also I’m not sure I believe in
God…
Gumbel likes to quote CS Lewis’s contention
that Jesus was either the Son of God or else a lunatic – he
couldn’t have been just a great moral teacher. Do you buy
that,
or do you think it’s possible to be a great teacher but still be
mistaken about something as basic as whether or not you are
God?
Yes, I think that is
possible. And in fact one of the things The Psychopath
Test is about is, you know, the madness at the heart of great
thinking.
You talk in that book about the handbook of
mental disorders, DSM-IV, and you say that you reckon you
suffer from 12 of them…
I think that the reason people like
The Psychopath Test so much is because it really comes
from the heart.
Are you really as anxious as it
suggests?
Anxiety is a big part of my life.
Which is why, actually, writing a book about psychopathy was such
a good idea for me, because it is like the neurological opposite
of anxiety. To find a subject that comes from a really important
part of your own life but in a slightly counterintuitive way is
exactly what writers should be doing, so I feel kind of lucky and
blessed that I chanced upon that subject for the book.
Do you know where your anxiety comes
from?
God knows. I veer towards nature
over nurture – you know, towards thinking people are basically born
the way they are. I’m aware that that’s massively
controversial.
It’s comforting in a way, isn’t it, to think
that there is nothing you can do about it and you just have to be
kind to yourself.
I mean, you can do things
about it – you know, [cognitive behavioural therapy] can help
anxiety. Medication, I guess, can help it, although I’ve never
really had any. So, it’s not hopeless.
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Would you describe yourself as an introvert?
I’ve read that you love to go to the cinema on your
own.
I would say I was extremely
introverted – and more so as I get older. I can barely go to
parties – and if I do, I have to go off to the toilet and sit in a
cubicle for a few minutes [every so often] to calm myself
down.
Is introversion sometimes mistaken for lack
of empathy?
Well, if anybody does mistake it,
they’re wrong. I think introverts are extremely
empathetic.
I guess it’s reassuring that you can’t be a
psychopath if you’re anxious – although the expert opinion, you
say, is that almost one in a hundred people are.
What are the key traits of
psychopathy?
Lack of empathy, manipulativeness,
lack of remorse, poor behavioural controls, impulsiveness, a
grandiose sense of self-worth…
Which you realised are all
features of life in the corporate
world.
Yeah – and journalism. In the book,
I detail every time I have to kind of [demonstrate a trait] from
the psychopath checklist9 to make the book work.
But, yes, corporate life, too. I
visited one absolutely ruthless CEO and I went through the
psychopath test with him and, sure enough, he redefined many of the
items on the checklist as ‘business positives’.
So, do we actually need psychopathy in some
ways, if society is to develop and progress?
No, I don’t think so. I don’t see
anything good… I think that if psychopathic character traits were
eradicated from society, society would be better. There is a book
out there called The Wisdom of Psychopaths10 that says the opposite, says
that we can learn from psychopaths; but I’m not sure I buy
that theory – because if you haven’t got any empathy, you’re
malevolent.
Doesn’t capitalism depend on
such traits to some extent?
Well, capitalism in its most
ruthless, extreme manifes-
tation. I mean, I’m living in America at
the moment and everything here’s a fucking market. But does it have
to be like that?
What took you to the United
States?
I guess, the spirit of adventure –
like the early pioneers. We just thought it might be fun for a
while. I do miss Britain.
Is it easier to find – how can I put it? –
extreme people in the US than in Britain, perhaps?
I just look for great stories.
Whether somebody is ‘ex-treme’ or not is
certainly not… Some of my best stories don’t actually involve
extreme people. I think that is one of the ways that my work has
changed over the years – I still want to write stories about people
who light up the page, but it’s much more satisfying, I think, to
write about complicated people.
I see that you’ve published online a piece,
called ‘One Cut’, which is about ordinary people and social
justice.11
I guess that you couldn’t sell it to a newspaper because
it wasn’t extreme.
I couldn’t sell it to a newspaper
for a slightly different reason, actually. I set out to write a
piece that was anti the [public-spending] cuts – it was about what
would happen to the kids who attended a drop-in centre for anxiety
disorders when the place was closed down. So, I spent months
following these kids – and they all got better! And as a
consequence, people who were against the cuts didn’t want to
publish it.
It took me by surprise that the kids
all got better. Obviously, I was, and am, against the cuts; but I
had to write to the truth of what happened in that particular
story, and that’s what happened.
I went to see a TV executive here in
New York recently and he said, ‘Oh my God, I am so bored
of people coming in here saying, “I want to make a documentary
about ethical businesses”! Who cares?’; but I think social-justice
stories are incredibly important and I very much want to write
them. Two of the best stories in Lost at Sea are
social-justice stories – and I’m trying to write one for my new
book about public shaming at the moment.
So, actually I have as much ambition
to write good, well-written, entertaining social-justice stories
as I have any type of story – in fact, more so.
It’s often said that as people get older they
tend to drift to the right. That doesn’t seem to be the case with
you.
I would say the opposite. I mean, I
wouldn’t say I was ever right-wing but I was certainly ambitious
when I was starting out – I wanted to carve out my place in the
world, and that’s sort of right-wing, I suppose. And now I care an
awful lot more about social-justice issues – possibly because I
don’t feel I need to carve out my place in the world so much any
more, because I already have done. But
also, as I said, the older you get the more you realise just how impossibly painful and hard life is
and you want to do something about it.
Are you the kind of person who gets all
tearful during
Les Misérables – or the Olympics?
Oh, yeah. Jesus! I find those things
extremely emotional. I think Jessica Ennis was one of the greatest
things that ever happened to me! I am very moved by culture and
great achievement. Children doing well in theatri-cal situations,
as well – I find that intensely moving…
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What would you like to be remembered for? I
take it that being played by Ewan McGregor in the film of The
Men Who Stare at Goats is not going to be top of your
list.
It’s funny how dissociated I felt
from that movie – it just didn’t feel like an important part of my
life at all.
So, what do you want to leave behind
you?
Entertainingly written, kind of
absurd, funny narrative stories about things that really
matter.
Actually, I am very excited about a
new movie based on one of my stories,
called Frank.12 I think it’s going to
be brilliant. I co-wrote the screenplay – it’s about being in a
band.
Are you an optimist or a
pessimist?
I think I’m an optimist – but I’m
quite unhappy.
At the end of The Psychopath Test,
you observe: ‘There is no evidence that we’ve been placed on this
planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our
unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions,
those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite
often what lead us to do rather interesting things.’
Is that the nearest you come to a
credo?
Well, never in my life have I
written something that was more wish-fulfilment than that – I knew
that as I wrote it. It was like the author writing the happy ending
even though he knows that the happy ending isn’t that easy. But I’m
glad if it provides comfort to people. Our anxieties are so
painful, so upsetting – but if you can’t see things in an
optimistic way, you know, what hope is there?
—
NOTES
1 The Psychopath
Test:
A journey through the madness industry (Picador,
2011)
2 http://bit.ly/7ZiLSL. The
story is included in
the new collection Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson mysteries
(Picador, 2012).
3 The story is told in
Lost at Sea.
4 Interviewed in Third
Way in May 2012
5 The story is told in
Them: Adventures with extremists (Picador, 2001). Omar
Bakri Muhammad was interviewed in Third Way in March
2003.
6 From a speech to the Society
of Editors in November 2008 – see http://bit.ly/TxHgIh.
7
http://bit.ly/RUtJq9
8 http://bit.ly/9AOvI. The
story is included in
Lost at Sea.
9 A psychodiagnostic tool
developed by the criminal psychologist Robert D Hare
10 Kevin Dutton’s The
Wisdom of Psychopaths: What saints, spies, and serial killers can
teach us about success (Scientific American, 2012)
11 http://jonronson.
posterous.com/one-cut
12 It will be released
later this year, starring Michael Fassbender, Maggie Gyllenhaal
and Domhnall Gleeson. It is co-written by Peter Straughan and
directed by Lenny Abrahamson.
—
BIOGRAPHY
Jon Ronson was born in Cardiff in
1967. He attended Cardiff High School and then studied
journalism at the Polytechnic of Central London
(now Westminster University) before dropping out in
1988.
For the next three years, he played keyboards in the
Frank Sidebottom Oh Blimey! Big Band and also managed the indie
band The Man from Delmonte.
In 1991, he started co-presenting with Craig Cash a
late-night radio show on KFM in Stockport. When they were both
sacked in 1994, he was recruited as
a columnist by Time Out.
In 1995, he was allocated £420,000 to make a series
of six half-hour programmes for BBC2 entitled The Ronson
Mission. He was subsequently engaged to make documentaries for
Channel 4: New York to California (1996), Tottenham
Ayatollah and the four-part series Critical Condition
(both 1997), Dr Paisley, I Presume (1998), New
Klan (1999), the five-part series Secret Rulers of the
World (2001), The Double Life of Jonathan King
(2002), Kidneys for Jesus (2003), I Am, Unfortunately,
Randy Newman and the three-part series Crazy Rulers of the
World (both 2004) and Revelations (2009). For More4,
he has made Death in Santaland (2007) and Reverend
Death and Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes (both 2008). From
1996 to ’98, he also presented a late-night chat show for Channel 4
called For the Love of….
His first book, Clubbed Class, was published
in 1994. It was followed by Them (2001), which is to be
filmed by Universal Pictures; The Men Who Stare at Goats
(2004), which in 2009 was turned into a film starring George
Clooney; The Psychopath Test (2011); and Lost at
Sea (2012). He also contributed the memoir
‘A Fantastic Life’ to the 2004 anthology Truth or
Dare.
From 2004 to 2008, he wrote a weekly
column for the Guardian telling ‘true tales of
everyday craziness’, collected as Out of the Ordinary
(2006) and What I Do (2007). Since 2011, he has had a
video column on the Guardian‘s CiF website titled ‘Esc and
Ctrl’.
He produces and presents the BBC Radio 4
seriesJon Ronson on…, which has been nominated four times
for a Sony award, and in the United States he contributes to Public
Radio International, and especially This American
Life.
He currently lives in New York with his wife and
son.
This interview was conducted on January 21,
2013.
