Jon Ronson brings his Psychopath Night to Australia, exposing the flaws in the Psychopath Test
Bestselling author Jon Ronson has been having a "Brat girl summer" like the rest of us, listening to Charli xcx, Chappell Roan and Australia's own Amyl and the Sniffers. (Supplied: Emli Bendixen)
Jon Ronson doesn't regret being one of the first people to interview conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
"I do think there's a real value in being there to document Alex at the very beginning of his career," says the Welsh American journalist. "I'm proud of that. Also, the worst things that Alex did, he hadn't done when I was with him."
Those "worst things" include claiming that the mass shooting at Sandy Hook primary school in 2012 — where 26 people, including 20 children, were killed — was a hoax perpetrated by gun-control advocates.
The families of Sandy Hook victims successfully sued Jones for defamation in 2018, with Jones also filing for bankruptcy. That led him to lose control of his media company Infowars; it was reportedly sold to satirical news website The Onion last week.
Ronson first interviewed Jones for his 2001 documentary The Secret Rulers of the World. In the same year he released his book, Them: Adventures with Extremists.
In Them, Ronson tries to find the secret room where the Bilderberg Group meet to control the world, meeting a slew of conspiracy theorists along the way. (Supplied: Pan Macmillan)
In the documentary and book, Ronson recounts how, in 2000, he and Jones snuck into the Californian private gentlemen's club, Bohemian Grove, where Jones believed powerful people — dubbed the Bilderberg Group — were meeting as part of the "New World Order". There, they witnessed the group burn an effigy at the foot of a giant stone owl.
Ronson did feel some misgivings about his light-hearted portrayal of Jones once he started to espouse his most damaging conspiracy theories.
So, the journalist decided to travel to Jones's hometown in Texas to better understand his early life, creating an audio story for This American Life in 2019 "as a slight karmic rebalancing".
Ronson says the only story he feels uncomfortable about having made was the podcast The Last Days of August, about a porn star who died by suicide: "In retrospect, it was too soon after she died." (Supplied)
"The downside of what we do is: can you give people who've done bad things too easy a ride?" says Ronson.
"If somebody has been hurt by that person's actions, that has to be part of [the story], too."
Whether they be conspiracy theorists, culture warriors, soldiers trained as psychics, or people who have been publicly shamed, Ronson always seems to approach his subjects from a position of curiosity and generosity.
"Giving people the space to tell their stories can lead you to really interesting places that adversarial journalism doesn't," he says.
"I often think, if you're being interviewed and the person's yelling at you, what do people learn? [They learn] how somebody responds to being yelled at, which I think is a kind of odd and arbitrary way to judge somebody."
Ronson has gone on to write many bestselling books, including So You've Been Publicly Shamed and The Men Who Stare at Goats, and created the podcasts The Last Days of August, The Butterfly Effect and Things Fell Apart.
Ronson's book The Men Who Stare at Goats was turned into a black comedy movie, starring George Clooney as a soldier trying to harness psychic powers. (Supplied: Sony Pictures)
One of his bestsellers is 2011's The Psychopath Test. Now, Ronson is in Australia touring his show based on the book.
A lack of empathy
In The Psychopath Test, Ronson meets people believed to be psychopaths, including failed businessman Albert J. Dunlap, and a man detained in Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital.
"I'm a humanist," Ronson told ABC Radio Melbourne this week. "I believe that everybody's a complicated mix of positive and negative characteristics. We're all grey areas, we're a mess." (Supplied: Pan Macmillan)
He also met with psychologists, including Robert D. Hare, who created a 20-point checklist to help people determine whether someone has the personality disorder.
According to Hare, the traits of a psychopath include things like a sense of grandiosity, a lack of empathy, pathological lying, superficial charm and promiscuous sexual behaviour.
During the live show, Ronson teaches his audience how to spot a psychopath, before he unravels both the positives and negatives of society's impulse to label — and pathologise — people.
Ronson wanted to return to the subject in his live shows, because he thinks society's understandings of psychopathy and mental disorders have evolved over the past decade.
He's noticed people bandying around terms like obsessive-compulsive disorder, trauma and narcissism, without a professional diagnosis or clinical expertise.
But he's also seen understandings of mental disorders expand to be more inclusive and change lives, including in the case of autism.
"There's been a massive expansion of mental health diagnoses and self-diagnoses, and I think sometimes that's positive, sometimes it's negative," says Ronson.
"But also, on social media now, certain psychopathic traits are widely encouraged. If everybody cares more about ideology than evidence and facts, then that's a form of pathological lying.
"And the highly selective empathy that we display on social media is another way of saying 'lack of empathy', because we only have empathy for the very tiny number of people in our bubble."
This has been highlighted for Ronson recently when it comes to social media discourse over the war in Gaza.
He says he's lost friends over his refusal to say anything publicly about the conflict.
"I've tried to say to them, 'Look, this is not about what I feel about Israel, Gaza. It's about my relationship with social media'.
"I don't want to reduce complicated things to simple statements. If you're lucky enough to be able to write for a living and make documentaries and so on, why screw it all up by posting some simple statement?"
A cheeky, amateur sleuth
Ronson was in his early 20s when he figured out what kind of journalist he wanted to be.
He had started a media degree at the Polytechnic of Central London in the late 80s, but quit to play keyboards in Frank Sidebottom's band – an experience that inspired the movie Frank, starring Michael Fassbender.
Ronson was inspired to write Frank by Chris Sievey's comic persona Frank Sidebottom, with Domhnall Gleeson and Maggie Gyllenhaal starring as members of his band. (Supplied: Madman)
He then began writing for Time Out in London, going off on a series of "mini adventures" that he would turn into his first TV series, The Ronson Mission.
A clarifying moment came for Ronson when he was watching The Leader, His Driver and the Driver's Wife, a 1991 documentary by English director Nick Broomfield.
In it, Broomfield tries to land an interview with Eugène Terre'Blanche, the founder and leader of a neo-Nazi political party in South Africa.
"Nobody had made a documentary about that before," says Ronson. "It was this sort of postmodern way of doing things."
Broomfield does eventually land an interview with Terre'Blanche, but he turns up 10 minutes late, and his subject demands an explanation. From behind the camera, the director answers: "We went for a cup of tea."
"[Watching that] I just thought, 'This is what I want to do with my life. I want to meet Nazis and be cheeky'," says Ronson.
Soon enough, Ronson was meeting neo-Nazis, including for his Channel 4 documentary, The New Klan.
Ronson plans to write his next book about being an ordinary man "at a time when institutions are collapsing". (Supplied: Fane)
The through line in his career now, he suggests, is a desire to be "surprised by a mystery".
"That's the thing I love most of all: there's something I don't understand about the world, and I want to understand it.
"It's like being a sort of amateur sleuth and being aware of my own stupidities in the midst of all of this."
Jon Ronson's Psychopath Night is at Hamer Hall, Melbourne, on November 20, before touring to Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra.