Why Someone Would Risk It All
Science offers good new clues about the reasons certain people are reckless
However imperfect the perspectives of psychiatry, they help structure a possible account of what goes wrong when a man in the public eye takes foolish risks. What you get when you mix propensities for risk taking, hyperthymia, and narcissism in the right proportions is a damn good politician--creative, energetic, able to use others well. At the same time, you get a man for whom the sex act is a compulsion and a constant gamble: What is at stake is precisely his grandiosity--if his naughtiness escapes punishment, the fates still adore him.
Of course, this line of thought may be unnecessarily complicated. To a Darwinist, that a powerful male should seek frequent sex hardly requires explanation. When I spoke to the evolutionary psychiatrist, John K. Pearce, he said that the real psychiatric angle is the way everyone "understands" the Clinton case. Sexually driven men "understand" how a president might indulge an impulse. Insecure women "understand" how a young intern might gossip about her conquests. Pearce noted how likely people are to believe that others are just like them. That limitation has its own evolutionary function. It allows the needy older man to believe that, deep down, the young woman is also in it for the sex; and it allows the needy acolyte to believe that, deep down, the seductive leader cares for her.
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