Tucson, Arizona August 2, 2002: - Watching the latest installments of Must CEO TV - disgraced corporate execs carted off in handcuffs or robotically taking the Fifth in front of congressional committees - I found myself thinking: Instead of the usual talk show pundits, it would be more useful to convene a roundtable discussion on the subject featuring Dr. Phil, Dr. Jung and Dr. Freud. Call it "The Three Doctors." I'd love to hear what these legendary explorers of the human psyche would make of the likes of John Rigas, Dennis Kozlowski, Bernie Ebbers, Sam Waksal and those Three Horsemen of the Enron Apocalypse, Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling and Andy Fastow. What led these men to do the despicable things they did? In "Without Conscience," renowned criminologist Dr. Robert Hare identified the key emotional traits of psychopaths: The inability to feel remorse, a grossly inflated view of oneself, a pronounced indifference to the suffering of others and a pattern of deceitful behavior. Sound like anyone you've read about recently? Could there be any better example of a person with a grandiose - and sociopathic - sense of entitlement, of feeling that the rules that mere mortals live by don't apply to him, than John Rigas? He thought nothing of "borrowing" $3.1 billion from his shareholders so he and his sons could live like sultans.

And if you're wondering what the inability to feel regret or shame looks like, meet Dennis Kozlowski. Tyco shareholders may be out $80 billion in market value, and he may be facing criminal trial for tax cheating, but "Deal-a-Day Dennis" refused to let a few unfortunate details like these stop him from hosting a lavish and boisterous holiday bash this Fourth of July, featuring cases of vintage wine and rides around Nantucket Harbor on his antique $25 million yacht. But before we get too comfortable - and self-righteous - pointing our Monday-morning fingers at these white-collar crooks without a conscience, we need to admit that their anti-social behavior couldn't have flourished in a vacuum. We allowed it. Even celebrated it. Like the klepto-CEOs, our culture also suffered a severe empathy shortage during the irrationally exuberant '90s. How many, for instance, cared that, even at the height of the bull market, 14 million children were still living in poverty? But who had time to notice, especially when another hot new IPO was about to turn some 20-something computer geek into a dot-com billionaire? And just as Enron's Jeff Skilling, who abandoned Enron's sinking ship, exhibits the psychopath's profound proclivity for denial - continuing to insist he "made the right decisions"- so, too, did our culture. During the '90s, denial replaced baseball as the national pastime. We stuck our heads in the sand - unwilling to question the integrity of the bulls rushing down Wall Street for fear it might jeopardize the 30 percent rate of return we had come to see as our birthright. And the buoyant pronouncements of our political leaders only served to hammer home the communal delusion that the party would go on forever. "Never has the promise of prosperity been so vivid," said candidate George W. Bush in the days leading up to the 2000 election, while his opponent, Al Gore, blithely hailed "the greatest prosperity ever" and promised voters: "You ain't seen nothing yet." For his part, Bill Clinton, in his final economic report to Congress, assured the nation that "the expansion will continue"- even though economic growth had already slowed by 60 percent. This shared denial provided convenient camouflage for corrupt CEOs. In America, we keep score with money and the trappings of wealth - so the psychopaths fit right in. Also, just as our culture-at-large celebrated shallowness, so too did the corporate culture. It started putting a premium on charismatic CEOs who looked good on the cover of Forbes and Business Week or being interviewed on TV by Katie Couric and Larry King - and ushered in the era of the rock star CEO. It turns out, of course, that far too many of these preening, pampered, overpaid, egocentric boardroom golden boys were good on the tube or glad-handing Wall Street but tended to overlook mundane little things like where to list the assets and where to list the liabilities on the balance sheet. Reckless grandiosity? Grotesque delusion? Sheer madness? Paging Dr. Freud.