Welcome To the Age of Psychopathy
There are many clinical definitions for ‘psychopath,’ but one of the clearest definitions of a ‘psychopath,’ is anyone with a deficient conscience. It doesn’t matter how the deficiency is arrived at. If a person’s conscience is deficient, chances are psychopathic behavior is in the picture.
To a psychopath, ‘guilt’ has no meaning other than as a tool to manipulate others.
The impact of that psychopathy is directly related to the amount of influence the psychopathic person has over others. ‘Guilt’ has no personal meaning to the psychopath. It is an idea or a concept and nothing more- certainly nothing to be reckoned with or to invest any emotion in.
The great power brokers and heads of government have the lives of millions in their hands. That is literally true in the case of tyrants and despots. To them, a few thousand or hundreds of thousands deaths for the cause is trivial compared with the power at stake. The principal effort and focus of any tyrant is to remain at the top of the food chain, and retaining or expanding his power is a tyrant’s primary objective, without regard for the destruction those efforts leave in their wake.
Even the destruction of those who support the tyrant mean nothing.
A clear examination of current reality confirms that as we leave the 20th century’s Era of Narcissism, we are faced with the dawning of an Age of Psychopathy.
Left unchecked, pathology always escalates to a higher level of dysfunction, and narcissism of the malignant variety almost always progresses to frank psychopathy.
In free societies, political discourse has become extreme. In not-so-free societies, it has evolved into denial of reality and calls for violence and even genocide. In the latter societies, people really do believe the most bizarre, horrific and genocidal ideas foisted on them by the dysfunctional regimes that rule them. They willingly construct fantasies and complicated conspiracies to support and buttress those beliefs.
But free societies are not immune or blameless. For example, Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism and 9/11 conspiracies flourish in the Arab world. But the only reason those dysfunctional beliefs continue to be regarded as ‘acceptable and ‘mainstream’ is because there are dysfunctional individuals and groups, even in free societies who give those paranoid ideas credibility and support.
If that sort of cognitive malignancy which can take hold even in a free society were to be denounced and exposed for the cancer it is, the people who hold those beliefs would be marginalized.
The reason such dysfunctional and irrational thinking is not denounced has nothing to do with good and evil, or even right and wrong. The vast majority of people are able to distinguish between right and wrong. But that said, the evils that arise out of the mental dysfunction, and which have underwritten the deaths of millions upon millions, are frequently not denounced because of political agendas and the ideologies that drive them.
We simply don’t want to admit that politics in free nations, expressed by supposedly caring souls, can be as deadly as the ‘politics’ in nations governed by tyrants.
Far too many people, in their support–tacit or overt–of racist and oppressive societies and tyrannical regimes exhibit nothing less than a deficient conscience. They are psychopaths. There is no other word to describe the consequences of their enabling of tyranny; and there can be no whitewashing of reality.
For example, Western media gives female genital mutilation (according to the United Nations, FGM has claimed 100 million plus victims), ‘honor killings’ and various other atrocities, including events in Darfur, relatively little media coverage.
Why? Everyone understands that FGM, ‘honor killings’ and the atrocities in Darfur are ‘absolutes’ in the evil department. But the underlying assumption is that, since morality is ‘relative,’ these ‘cultural expressions’ are not subject to objective analysis and thus cannot be judged outside the culture.
Anti-Semitism, calls for genocide directed at Jews and vitriol directed at free societies and those who support free societies are ideas that to many, seem to have merit, especially those in the media. The disconnect is stunning in magnitude.
Each of us can be separated from reality at times. Sometimes we daydream and sometimes we can picture the seventh level of hell welcoming the telemarketer who calls at dinnertime. Those feelings are normal. They coexist alongside our ability to make logical decisions and analyze our realities and deal with them. They can even influence and magnify our beliefs.
Psychopathic behaviors enter the picture when individuals, confronted by the painful truth about themselves, refuse to acknowledge and deal with that truth and are unable to see others except as extensions of their own wishes, feelings, or needs. A political agenda that embraces hate and racism and then projects that evil onto others, demonizing and dehumanizing them, is a psycho-pathological political agenda.
We are living in an Age of Psychopathy when entire populations imagine that because they have certain beliefs and feelings, those beliefs and feelings are entirely appropriate and their consequences in the real world are perfectly acceptable, no matter how much death and destruction they might generate. The desire to ‘win’ in the political arena trumps everything else. Millions are to be subjected to tyranny and death because evil is given a free pass out of political expediency.
Free nations will endure, despite the new dangers birthed by the Age of Psychopathy. The cost, however, will be high.
Sigmund, Carl and Alfred is the pseudonym adopted by a blogger in North Carolina. He is so busy, he needed three identities. He is a political behavioral analyst, specializing in predicting the behavior of ‘really crazy people.’
I’ve been re-reading a lot of material on Stalin and Hitler lately, plus investing time trying to convince liberal feminist friends that Islamofascism is a real threat to their values.
Siggy, you have summed it up so well.
Dear Sigmund, Carl and Alfred:
THANK YOU for writing this piece; I’m so glad that someone had the wherewithal to not only to utter these words but to describe, deconstruct and demystify this subject that the P.C. crowd have not only refused to acknowledge but have actively swept under the rug. It’s time to stop being afraid of calling a spade, a spade.
I don’t feel comfortable with this emphasis on the psychopath. Perhaps I need to think about it awhile longer. Our Western elties seem far more infected with an instinctive impulse toward suicide. We are perceived as unworthy of defense. The West is deemed vile and disgusting and responsible for spreading misery throughout the world. Terrorist attacks are merely well deserved blowback. The Islamic nihilists allegedly have every reason to be enraged. Such a mindset already dominates most of the Democratic Party and a small number of Republicans. How bad are the Democrats? I now cynically describe them as members of a political organization representing self-hating Americans. And no, I don’t think I’m exaggerating. The last time I checked Joe Lieberman is a marginalized figure.
How does one go about “marginalizing” psychopathic groups or governments, short of shooting great bloody holes in the individuals who comprise the group? Our experience with Hitler’s Nazi regime and Hirohito’s Japanese Empire in WWII seems to point in that direction.
What was the American Civil war, if it was not an exercise in marginalizing the psychopathy of slavery in the United States?
What, short of the use of deadly force, can one do to effectively refute the rather more bizarre domestic psychopathies that are splattered as straight news all over the MSM product every day?
Ponder these questions. Talk amongst yourselves. There will be no pop quiz.
David Thomson accurately summarized the rhetoric of the left, including the Democratic Party. But how long will that hold up when people realize that it applies to them personally? Are Americans of a self-loathing persuasion really going to agree to be slaughtered, bombed, enslaved, or anything else because, after all, we deserve it? Or are they going to scream for the government to defend them at all costs when the danger is very real? Ted Kennedy’s environmental credentials stop short of obstructing his view. It’s very easy to be high minded and impress all your friends, when it’s all just talk and there’s no price to pay.
S, C & A -
Love the article. I’m going to pass it along. I think you should expand further on how the psychopathic society also has a split personality (like you?). This split personality allows for partitioning those conflicting ideas within the same “body”.
Thanks!
Mr Thompson:
The identification and measure of psychopathy can be easily measured.
If when confronted with reality, an individual or group of individuals chooses to deny reality and substitute or retain their fantasies (so as to stubbornly maintain their now upended ‘beliefs,’ not unlike the flat earthers) these people can be referred to as psychopaths. Simply because people ‘question’ 9/11 or the Holocaust under the guise of ‘academic study’ does not mean people who engage in such activities are not psychopaths. Wearing a coat and ties does not mean the person who rapes a woman is less of a danger- or evil- than the person who is not so attired.
It is also true that there are different degrees and severity of psychopathy. Nevertheless, those who refuse to acknowledge reality are psychopaths. It is also true that if left untreated, the psychopathy (like all pathologies) will only worsen.
In the assertion that there are those in the west who seem determined to commit suicide, it is worthwhile to note that healthy people do have such inclinations.
Psychopaths do.
As a society, our embrace of narcissistic tendencies was not only left unchecked, it was encouraged. Media, politics, pop culture, education, the law (dial 1-800 let’s sue and get rich!) and to a great extent, even religious theologies celebrated that narcissism (God became our junior partner. Instead of answering to Him, many theologians came to believe and espouse the idea that He should answers to us).
The slide from narcissism into psychopathy was inevitable- and easy. The climb back into reality will be much more difficult.
We are reaping what we have sown.
Great article.
I’m no psychologist – I’n fact, I’ve been known to compare psychologists psychiatrists to practitioners of voodoo – but malignant narcicism leading to psychopathy does seem to make sense. I had always thought that malignant hedonism could lead to nihlism, but I’d never considered that particular scenario.
It would sure explain the dysfunctional nature of our political class: A bunch of lawyers – a group bound to mediocrity like no other – presuming to know what’s best for us.
“The climb back into reality will be much more difficult.”
Few of these people will ever successfully do so. This is why we must focus primarily on marginalizing them. We must do what is possible to keep these individuals out of power. Coverting them back from the proverbial dark side should be a secondary consideration.
Might I suggest that as a first step in rehabilitation is to ‘take back’ the schools.
As I wrote today, the crisis in the schools has served as a petri dish for failure.
@B Dubya: You could have saved a few electrons by simply saying, “let’s kill all the liberals.”
For all your fancy rhetoric, that’s what your “argument” boils down to: eliminationism.
And if a desire to slaughter one’s political antagonists isn’t psychopathic, I don’t know what is.
pch1013,
“Civil wars” are fought between one side that is psychopathic and another side that is not. Lincoln recognized that he was doing a grave thing, but that it was necessary. Right now, civil war is probably not necessary. Now, I think Julius Caesar was the greatest man who ever lived in Western history and if he wasn’t afraid of civil war, why should I be afraid of one?
As Caesar said of his enemies in Rome, “They wanted this”. Well, it sure does seem like some people want it and I, taking the long view of centuries, think it might not be a bad thing in the long run to give it to them, to avoid losing what is really precious about Western civilization to the current onslaught of all the pathologies identified in the article. Sure, we would cause billions, maybe trillions, in damage, but at the end of the day, one ideology would reign, perhaps even globally, but at least within the West. The current wasted energy spent on bickering ideologically over what are essentially empirical questions (what is the best way to organize society? what is the best way to fight those who would attack us? what do we have a right to demand of those from other cultures who would live among us?), would then be put in the service of actually implementing the policies that are now stalemated by fruitless debate.
When people say “History is written by the winners”, they don’t mean the winners of debates.
pch1013 :
@B Dubya: You could have saved a few electrons by simply saying, “let’s kill all the liberals.”
Its not an argument, sir, it was a series of questions. My point in asking is perhaps not obvious enough for you. (perhaps I wasn;t being compeletely truthful about the pop quiz).
What are we, as realists, willing to do to marginalize those who need their various fantasy ideologies? When this kind of social cancer becomes as powerful as it appears to be here at home, what recourse short of violence, or the threat of violence, have we to check it? When in history, has such pervasive madness been marginalized, except by force of arms wielded by men willing to do the next thing.
Nobody talked Adolf out of power, nor was Joe Stalin dissuaded from his horror show by the spoken word, nor have the Islamofascisti been detered by anything ever said to them.
Michael Savage is correct…Liberalism is a mental disorder…the head coach
There is a lot of psychotic behavior, but it is nothing new, if you know your history, I know just a little, but what little I do know, shows just how psychotic the actions of most power states are. Look at the U.S. now, lost $3 trillion somewhere, no on knows where, uses depleted uranium munitions, maiming and destroying lives not only of its enemies, but its own troops, and on and on the total lack of conscience goes. This is nothing new, it is history repeating itself, over and over. Winston Churchill wanted to use poison gas on recalcitrant Middle Eastern peoples. Then there is Stalin, Mao, Hitler, in recent times, this is nothing new, its an old, old story.
I find it interesting that you white folks never include the unspeakable horror of your european and american ancestors towards africans. the rhodesians, and south africans, and portugese and british, germans, dutch et.al.systematicaly used their military advantage to torture, enslave, brutalize and dont forget THE RAPE for 400 years!!! so many african women have been raped by your white ancestors that it has produced an entire color (coloreds) of peoples in africa and here in the americas,
without hardly a “sorry you guys”. I would say that the writer has defined white society perfectly.