THE TEN TYPES OF HUMAN THE TEN TYPES OF HUMAN A New Understanding of Who We Are Dexter Dias WILLIAM HEINEMANN: LONDON 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 William Heinemann 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V 2SA William Heinemann is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com. Copyright © Dexter Dias 2017 Dexter Dias has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published by William Heinemann in 2017 www.penguin.co.uk A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 9781785150166 (Hardcover) ISBN 9781785150173 (Trade paperback) Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, St Ives PLC Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper. For Katie, Fabi and Hermione CONTENTS Author’s note xi Prologue xvii Part I: The Perceiver of Pain 1 1: The Argument 3 2: The 21,000 15 3: Here Be Dragons 21 4: A More Total Darkness 27 5: Once I Was Blind 38 6: The Rule of Effective Invisibility 45 7: The Cognitive Cost of Compassion 52 8: The Promise 64 9: The Blank Face of Oblivion 75 vii the te te o huma Part II: The Ostraciser 87 1: Take Elpinice and Go 89 2: The Wounded City 107 3: Do Not Read This 114 4: The Circle and the Suffering 122 Part III: The Tamer of Terror 137 1: The Time Has Come 139 2: The Broken Circuit 151 3: The Case of Schwarzenegger’s Farm 165 4: The Ice Age 176 5: Facing into the Sun 183 6: A H N T 191 7: Locked Out 202 Part IV: The Beholder 213 1: All They Saw Was My Face 215 2: Penalising Plainness 221 3: The Pool of Fire 230 4: The Water is Rising 241 Part V: The Aggressor 257 1: Ordinance 72.058 259 2: The Golden Box 271 3: Like a Torch 278 4: You’ll Like Him 288 5: How Similar Are You to Small Insects? 298 6: Determination and Delight 307 7: Diamonds 318 8: With Open Eyes 332 viii contents 9: 4GW 341 10: The Burning Country 349 11: A Man of Business 355 12: The Vortex 360 13: 17 Days 365 14: The Great Desert 370 15: The Cave of Hands 378 Part VI: The Tribalist 385 1: The Isle is Full of Noises 387 2: The Pier 397 3: The Dogs 405 4: Like Peeling Fruit 413 Part VII: The Nurturer 431 1: Left, Right 433 2: The Ruthlessness of Rearing 442 3: Cases Like Mine 455 4: The Surface of Civilisation 464 5: The Surrendering 470 6: The Rose 475 7: Life’s Longing 486 8: All the Annas 497 Part VIII: The Romancer 507 1: The Gift 509 2: The Lie 516 3: Carriages and White Horses 525 4: Something Beyond All That 537 5: The Fever 545 ix the te te o huma Part IX: The Rescuer 555 1: He to Hecuba 557 2: The Naming of Parts 565 3: The Cairo 572 4: The Other Side of the Mountain 582 5: The Road 589 6: The Problem of Us 595 7: All the Elaines 604 8: A Place of Myth and Legend 613 9: How it Happens 624 10: The Choice 633 11: The Line to Almaty 641 12: Outliers 644 13: The Turning 649 14: A Year in the Life 654 15: Take the Weather with you 664 Part X: Again came the Kinsman 677 1: The Wolves 679 2: The Storm 688 3: Silent Flight 699 4: For 16 Years 706 5: Always In 717 Epilogue 729 The Sound of the Book 773 A Note on Sources 000 Acknowledgements 000 About the Author 000 x AUTHOR’S NOTE he book you are about to read is part of a project to forge a Tnew understanding of who we are and who we can be. It is based on research that began ten years ago and that has been conducted on four continents. It is also grounded in my practice as a human rights lawyer for over twenty-five years. But the project would not have been possible without the participation, collabora- tion and generous contribution of a great number of people, many of who appear in the course of the text. Later in the book I take the opportunity to pay proper tribute to the debt I owe them and explain the distinctive nature of their indispensable contribution. There I also acknowledge my deep gratitude to the friends and colleagues who have been instrumental in facilitating this endeavour. However, at the outset I must acknowledge the advice and support of close colleagues at Cambridge University, especially Professor Loraine Gelsthorpe, Director of Research at the Centre for Community, Gender and Social Justice, which I am proud to be affiliated to, my academic collaborator Dr Caroline Lanskey at xi the te te o huma the Institute of Criminology, and Dr Nicola Padfield at the Faculty of Law. Equally, at Harvard I am particularly indebted to Professor James Sidanius, the William James Professor of Psychology and Director of the Intergroup Relations Lab, who offered me a resi- dency as Visiting Researcher, Dr Mariska Kappmeier (my next door neighbour on the 14th floor), and Professor Joshua Greene, who kindly invited me to present elements of my research at his groundbreaking Moral Cognition Lab. I am also indebted to numerous colleagues in sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti and Central Asia, in London and New York, at UNICEF (especially the astounding Judith Léveillée and Sabrina Avakian) and at the Bar Human Rights Committee (particularly its Chair, Kirsty Brimelow QC, and my colleague on fighting FGM Zimran Samuel). However, it would be a serious omission not to point out that of the numerous people I’ve interviewed, followed, consulted, contested, travelled with and tormented, during the research for this book, only a small propor- tion actually appear in the text. Nevertheless my other correspond- ents, confrères, intellectual comrades and combatants have informed my thinking and approach and thus are present as well. A compre- hensive list of those I can name appears at the end of the book. However, given the particular nature of this research inquiry, and while many people appear bearing their real names, others have necessarily had their names altered. In respect of several, identifying characteristics and certain circumstances have had to be changed. The reason has been to protect the participants – both in terms of protecting their privacy and in certain instances their personal security, or that of people closely connected to them. Some have been or remain at considerable risk. Others have had their lives threatened. Several have been hurt or injured. A few have taken great risks in telling what they have. They have done so in the hope that it will help others, an aspiration I share and one of the xii author’s note chief animating ideas of the book. Some are embarking on perilous ventures – among the great secret journeys of our age – across treacherous terrain frequented by treacherous people. Others are returning to dangerous countries or regions acknowledged by inter- national agencies to be hazardous and unsafe. Therefore I make it plain that where necessary, as in the unforgettable Love’s Executioner by Irvin Yalom, I have endeavoured to create an impenetrable ‘disguise’ (to use Yalom’s apt phrase). In some cases, as in his book, the best course to safeguard the identity of the participant has been to make what Yalom calls ‘symbolic substitutions’ or to ‘graft’, as he puts it, one person’s background or identity onto another’s, an approach also used by Barack Obama in respect of certain characters in Dreams from My Father. In making such elisions, I have sought to preserve what the great Oliver Sacks in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat calls ‘ the essential “feeling” of their lives’. Where this has been done it is because it has been the only way to ensure that their privacy and personal safety are maximally protected. Thus this book contains the full spectrum of material, from accounts that appear with names and essential details listed as they occurred, to those where there has had to be some or a substantial degree of disguise, to those where accounts have been blended or collaged. In the latter case, my solution has been to create connecting material and endeavour to develop a different kind of writing, melding fictive with non-fiction elements. Throughout, dialogue has had to be redacted for reasons of confidentiality or sensitivity; some dialogue has been modified, reconstructed from memory, condensed or paraphrased for length, or deduced for continuity or coherence from accounts of events provided. I have tried to convey the sense of accents and modes of speech and where – as frequently occurred – discussion took place in more than one language, I have usually (but not always) xiii the o human simplified it into one. Where participants have communicated dialogue or scenes with third parties, I have endeavoured to recon- struct them as authentically as possible and in the spirit of the overall narrative. Where there are gaps in the account or for reasons of confidentiality and/or security I have had to find a substitute, my approach has been informed by that of John Berendt in the seminal Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which is to combine the ‘strict non-fiction’ (his term) with elements constructed with the intention of remaining, as Berendt puts it, ‘faithful to the char- acters and to the essential drift of events’, but those are acts, it is essential to emphasise, that necessarily draw on both the inquisi- tional and imaginative faculties, concisely described by John le Carré (in a different context) as an exercise in ‘blending experience with imagination’.