Ponerology: The Science of Evil

Sott.net interviews Dr. Lobaczewski

2011-11-28T01:32:00.002+01:00

Is There No Shame?

2011-11-11T18:02:00.003+01:00

Is There No Shame?

Jim Quinn for The Burning Platform

[…] This is an institutional cancer that eats away at the fabric of our society. It is not isolated to Penn State. It is a societal sickness that threatens to overwhelm every facet of our lives. There is a constant thread that runs through every incident that comes to light. In 99% of the cases it is men protecting men. Money and greed always trump morality and truth. The exact circumstances can be observed in the priest abuse scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church in the last five years. Pedophile priests have existed within the Catholic Church for decades. The Penn State situation shows that pedophiles exist everywhere in our society. The bottom line is that they are sick men and need to be locked up and kept away from little boys. […]

Wall Street bankers exhibit the epitome of psychopathic behavior, showing lack of empathy and remorse, shallow emotions, egocentricity, and deceptiveness. Psychopaths are highly prone to antisocial behavior and abusive treatment of others. Though lacking empathy and emotional depth, they often manage to pass themselves off as average individuals by feigning emotions. These Wall Street bankers will never willingly accept responsibility for their actions. They continue to use their wealth and power to control the politicians in Washington DC and the misinformation propagated by the corporate media they control. They own and control the Federal Reserve and will print money until the whole system collapses in a spectacular implosion that destroys our financial system. They only care about their own wealth, influence and status. They have no shame. [...]

(Read the full article here.)

Foxes and Reptiles: Psychopathy and the Financial Meltdown

2011-11-07T21:07:00.002+01:00

Foxes and Reptiles: Psychopathy and the Financial Meltdown

by Jonathan Zap for Reality Sandwich

The present financial meltdown may only be the latest example of the incalculable harm done to civilization, and countless individual lives, by psychopaths, a subspecies of Homo sapiens. The purpose of this essay is twofold. First, I will provide a brief tour of the psychopath subspecies so that you understand who they are and how they operate. You probably already know psychopaths, and it is overwhelmingly likely that at some point in your life a psychopath that you encounter personally will try to harm you. Second, I will draw the correlative between psychopathy and the present financial meltdown and provide a suggestion of a relatively simple change that could decrease the likelihood of the sort of abuses that could lead to future meltdowns.

(Read the full article here)

Review: Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

2011-05-22T01:24:00.006+02:00

Harrison Koehli Sott.net

"I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity?"

So asks Jon Ronson in his latest book, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry. Ronson is probably best known for his book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, which was adapted for the big screen and starred George Clooney. It documented a slightly loony group of American Army men who were convinced they could walk through walls and kill goats by simply glaring at them menacingly (apparently they took the phrase "looking daggers" a tad too literally). He also wrote a book on fundamentalists, extremists and radicals, even tailing David Icke for a spell. For research, of course. Having already spent much of his career peering into the fringe boundaries of normality, The Psychopath Test pushes him further into the sphere of madness and the science that attempts to explain it. The result is entertaining, sometimes informative, yet a mixed-bag that never really answers the questions he set out to tackle.

I'm going to avoid giving a chapter-by-chapter rundown of the book. As I said above, it's an entertaining, and easy, read. I'm not a particularly fast reader but wolfed this one down in three sittings over two days. So if you've the time, cash, and/or inclination, check it out. Rather, I want to focus on what I'll call the good, the bad, and the so-so. Ronson gets a lot of things right. First of all, he's a great writer. The book is peppered with entertaining, funny, and somewhat disturbing accounts of his interviews with people he comes to believe are genuine psychopaths. Pitting a self-described neurotic, over-anxious journalist against some of the world's most dangerous criminals and manipulators is a recipe for a good story, and in this regard, Ronson delivers.

Like Martha Stout (whom Ronson quotes in the book), author of The Sociopath Next Door, Ronson does a great job introducing the concept of psychopathy to readers who otherwise wouldn't be interested in scouring dry textbooks on the subject. He treks across the world interviewing potential candidates: from a convicted UK man who tried to fake madness in order to avoid prison, only to be placed in an institution for the criminally insane; an ex-death squad leader from Haiti who was supported and protected by the CIA; to ex-CEO of Sunbeam, Al "I believe in predators" Dunlap, who gleefully fired thousands before being charged with corporate fraud. Finding them, he confronts his interviewees about their own psychopathy, with surprising results. Many deny it, of course, while not-so-subtly revealing the opposite in their answers to Ronson, who dutifully jots down his diagnoses on his notepad. Dunlap, on the other hand, managed to turn each item of the Psychopathy Checklist into a "Leadership Positive". To Dunlap, hey, being a psychopath ain't that bad at all! More on that below.

Then there was the failed experiment at Oak Ridge, in Canada, where psychopathic offenders were treated with LSD and encouraged to "share their feelings", engaging in group therapy where they acted as each other's psychotherapists. The inmates showed remarkable improvement and were released into the world, reformed beings eager to start life anew. At least, that's what the doctors thought. But the therapy had simply taught them to be better manipulators, and it seemed to have gone to their heads. Their recidivism rates ended up being even higher than ordinary psychopaths. It's good to see this kind of anecdotal knowledge about psychopathy reach the mainstream. As psychopathy expert and author of the Psychopathy Checklist, Bob Hare, says, psychopaths are born psychopaths. You can't treat them. This is one of the highlights of the book: the scattered airport-hotel conversations Ronson had with Hare over the course of his research for the book. For example:

Bob said it's always a nice surprise when a psychopath speaks openly about their inability to feel emotions. Most of them pretend to feel. When they see us non-psychopaths crying or scared or moved by human suffering, or whatever, they think it's fascinating. They study us and learn how to ape us, like space creatures trying to blend in, but if we keep our eyes open, we can spot the fakery. (p. 100-101)
"I should never have done all my research in prisons. I should have spent my time inside the Stock Exchange as well."
I looked at Bob. "Really?" I said.
He nodded.
"But surely stock-market psychopaths can't be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths," I said.
"Serial killers ruin families." Bob shrugged. "Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies."
This--Bob was saying--was the straightforward solution to the greatest mystery of all: Why is the world so unfair? Why all that savage economic injustice, those brutal wars, the everyday corporate cruelty? The answer: psychopaths. That part of the brain that doesn't function right. You're standing on an escalator and you watch the people going past on the opposite escalator. If you could climb inside their brains, you would see we aren't all the same. We aren't all good people just trying to do good. Some of us are psychopaths. And psychopaths are to blame for this brutal, misshapen society. They're the jagged rocks thrown into the still pond. (p. 112)
"If some political or business leader had a psychopathically hoodlum childhood, wouldn't it come out in the press and ruin them?" I said.
"They find ways to bury it," Bob replied. "Anyway, Early Behavior Problems don't necessarily mean ending up in Juvenile Hall. It could mean, say, secretly torturing animals." He paused. "But getting access to people like that can be difficult. Prisoners are easy. They like meeting researchers. It breaks up the monotony of their day. But CEOs, politicians ..." Bob looked at me. "It's a really big story," he said. "It's a story that could change forever the way people see the world." (p. 118)

Later, Ronson confronted Hare with a criticism he'd heard from another professional, saying that Hare talked about psychopaths as if they were a different species. And in what appears to be a one-half "cover-your-ass" and one-half "here's what I really think" reply, Hare said:

"All the research indicates they're not a different species," said Bob. "There's no evidence that they form a different species. So he's [the critic, that is] misinformed on the literature. He should be up to date on the literature. It's dimensional. He must know that. It's dimensional." ...
Bob looked evenly at me. "I'm in the clear on this," he said. There was a silence. "My gut feeling, though, deep down, is that maybe they are different," he added. "But we haven't established that yet." (p. 268)

And in a conversation with Martha Stout, he asked:

"What if the wife of a psychopath reads this?" I asked. "What should she do? Leave?"
"Yes," said Martha. "I would like to say leave. You're not going to hurt someone's feelings because there are no feelings to hurt." She paused. "Sociopaths love power. They love winning. If you take loving kindness out of the human brain, there's not much left except the will to win."
"Which means you'll find a preponderance of them at the top of the tree?" I said.
"Yes," she said. The higher you go up the ladder, the greater the number sociopaths you'll find there."
"So the wars, the injustices, the exploitation, all of these things occur because of that tiny percent of the population up there who are mad in this certain way?" I asked. It sounded like the ripple effect of Petter Nordlund's book, but on a giant scale.
"I think a lot of these things are initiated by them," she said.
"It's a frightening and huge thought," I said, "that the ninety-nine percent of us wandering around down here are having our lives pushed and pulled around by that psychopathic fraction up there."
"It's is a large thought," she said. "It is a thought people don't have very often. Because we're raised to believe that deep down everyone has a conscience." (pp. 113-114)

The reference to Petter Nordlund alludes to the mystery that got Ronson started on the path that led to The Psychopath Test. Several neurologists and other academics had anonymously received a cryptic manuscript entitled Being or Nothingness. One of them contacted Ronson to solve the mystery, which he did. So what was the answer? What was the "missing piece" to make it all make sense and crack the code?

Yes, there was a missing piece of the puzzle ... but the recipients had gotten it wrong. They assumed the endeavor was brilliant and rational because they were brilliant and rational, and we tend to automatically assume that everybody else is basically just like us. But in fact the missing piece was that the author was a crackpot.
"Can't you see it? It's incredibly interesting. Aren't you struck by how much action occurred simply because something went wrong with one man's brain? It's as if the rational world, your world, was a still pond and Petter's brain was a jagged rock thrown into it, creating odd ripples everywhere."
"Petter Nordlund's craziness had had a huge influence on the world. It caused intellectual examination, economic activity, and formed a kind of community. Disparate academics, scattered across continents, had become intrigued and paranoid and narcissistic because of it. They'd met on blogs and mesage boards and had debated for hours, forming conspiracy theories about shadowy Christian organizations, etc. One of them had felt motivated to rendezvous with me in a Costa Coffee. I'd flown to Sweden in an attempt to solve the mystery. And so on." (pp. 28, 31)

Like Martha Stout and Bob Hare told Ronson, we assume that people are the same, all trying to live decent lives and be "good". But that is not the case. And when something totally foreign intrudes on our humanity, when the predator barges into our lives looking for a meal, we grossly misinterpret it, projecting our humanity onto it, reading too much into it (or too little), like the word-salad of some raving eccentric. And it comes to affect us in ways we'd never imagined nor anticipated.

It was this question that prompted Ronson to ask if it could really be true that psychopaths rule our world, that they shape the form and function of our society. Could this simple, yet radical, idea explain it all? From the "brutal excesses of capitalism itself" to the utter callousness of profiting off the destitution of entire industries? As one "enormously wealthy money-man" told Ronson, nothing has changed in recent years. "And it's not just in the U.S. It's everywhere. It's all over the world." (p. 167)

What does this mean? After a chance encounter with psychopathy researcher Essi Viding while researching the mysterious manuscript, a colleague of hers relates this story to Ronson: "She was interviewing a psychopath. She showed him a picture of a frightened face and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn't know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them." (p. 10) Another psychopath said that to him, killing people was like "squashing bugs."

Think about that.

But anyways, that's the good. As for the so-so, Ronson never really comes to an answer to the question of "could it be true?" He just leaves it hanging without actually doing any real digging. Despite the opinions he quotes, which I think make a pretty good case for answering in the definite affirmative, he never comes to a conclusive answer, describing his efforts as leading to mixed results. Early in the book he writes:

"I could really be on to something ... It really could be that many of our political and business leaders suffer from Antisocial or Narcissistic Personality Disorder and they do the harmful, exploitative things they do because of some mad striving for unlimited success and excessive admiration. Their mental disorders might be what rule our lives. This could be a really big story for me if I can think of a way to somehow prove it." (p. 34)

But it looks like Ronson just didn't look hard enough. His search might have led him to another mysterious manuscript, but one with much more importance and which actually gives clinical answers to these "tough" ideas and questions. Of course, I'm talking about Andrew Lobaczewski's Political Ponerology, which just barely made it out of Communist Poland, the first copies destroyed, stolen, and lost and its researchers hunted, arrested, tortured, killed, and silenced. Lobaczewski survived long enough to write the book from memory and contact a publisher who recognized the importance of what he was saying: yes, psychopaths rule the world, and this is how it works. He was saying it before anyone else, too, but his work has been largely ignored and suppressed. Recent books like Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect, Martha Stout's The Paranoia Switch, Hare and Babiak's Snakes in Suits, Barb Oakley's Evil Genes, and Paul Lawrence's Driven to Lead are good and welcome efforts, but they barely scratch the surface of what Lobaczewski presents in Ponerology.

With that said, because Ronson lacked the key to understand what is REALLY going on, I'm going to focus on a few areas where he isn't all that clear and comes to some wishy-washy conclusions. Some of his errors are just "so-so", but some are plain bad.

Ronson starts off with a look at the DSM, the manual for psychiatrists that lists every "known" mental disorder, their symptoms, and the checklists for determining if a person suffers from a particular disorder (or several). Ronson cracked open its pages and "instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones. ... I was much crazier than I had imagined." Indeed, with everything from Arithmetic Learning Disorder, to Parent Child Relational Problem, to Caffeine Induced Disorder and Nightmare Disorder, it seems like the DSM writers "had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder." (pp. 34-35) The disorders end up sounding like the outdated ones of past centuries, for example, drapetomania, "evident only in slaves ... the sole symptom was 'the desire to run away from slavery'" (p. 54)

Ronson meets up with some Scientologists who are vehemently critical of psychiatry. Even the mention of the words "mental disorder" raises eyebrows. One of the Scientologists, Brian, introduces Ronson to Tony, the guy who faked madness in order to avoid prison. According to Brian, "He's completely sane! He faked his way in there! And now he's stuck. Nobody will believe he's sane." Despite the fact that that wasn't exactly true (his doctors knew he was sane, but they also knew he was a psychopath, which is why they were keeping him), it's pretty ironic to read about the Scientologists' zealous crusade against psychiatry. Here's why.

First of all, they've got a point. There is much "gullibility and inexactness [in] the psychiatry profession" (p. 42). The sheer number of disorders, for which there are no scientifically verified etiologies, and number of people "afflicted" by them is enough to raise questions. And it seems that the more complicated human behavior gets, the more it is labeled a disorder. But on the other hand, the Scientologists seemed to be dismissing real problems that cause people and families suffering by reflexively labeling everyone "sane" to suit their ideology. While noticing the contradiction, Ronson gets stuck in the middle-ground, writing in the final chapter:

I think the madness business is filled with people like Tony [a "semi-psychopath" in Ronson's words], reduced to their maddest edges. Some, like Tony, are locked up in DSPD units for scoring too high on Bob's checklist. Others are on TV at nine p.m., their dull, ordinary, non-mad attributes skillfully edited out, benchmarks of how we shouldn't be. There are obviously a lot of very ill people out there. But there are also people in the middle, getting overlabeled, becoming nothing more than a big splurge of madness in the minds of the people who benefit from it. (p. 267)

But Ronson is confusing categories, causing him to come to bad conclusions. In fact, the solution to the problem can be found on page 58 of his own book, in a quote from Tony's doctor, Professor Maden:

I e-mailed Professor Maden: "Isn't that like that scene in the movie Ghost when Whoopi Goldberg pretends to be psychic and then it turns out that she actually can talk to the dead?"
"No," he e-mailed back. "It isn't like that Whoopi Goldberg scene. Tony faked mental illness. That's when you have hallucinations and delusions. Mental illness comes and goes. It can get better with medication. Tony is a psychopath. That doesn't come and go. It is how the person is."

There's a difference between "mental illness" and psychopathy. Mental illness is what non-psychopaths may or may not have: emotional problems caused by trauma, toxins, abuse, etc. Psychopathy is completely different. Yes, psychopaths may have some apparently useful qualities, but they're incidental to the underlying psychopathy. Yes, they may be charming and good talkers, but that's an act. Yes, they may not kill, but they manipulate and harm others in different ways. It's just the way they are, and that's the point Ronson seems to have trouble digesting. And it's those very psychopaths occupying the middle ground that can be so dangerous. They're the Al Dunlaps, the Bernie Madoffs, the Benjamin Netanyahus, the Dominique Strauss-Kahns that wreak havoc on entire economies and societies. Or, if they never get that far to the top, they're the impossible bosses, the abusive husbands, the corrupt lawyers and police officers.

But getting back to the Scientologists, why did I say their zealotry was ironic? Well, it turns out that in 1966 L. Ron Hubbard moved from his home in the UK forever. As a Scientologist told Ronson while visiting Hubbard's home:

"The conclusions he was coming to ..." Bob said. An ominous tone had crept into his voice. ...
"What was the nature of his research?" I asked.
There was a silence. And then Bob quietly said, "The antisocial personality." (p. 52)

Hubbard seems to have identified the problem, but his followers are making the same mistake Ronson does, to the point where they actively petition the release of those very same "antisocial personalities", whom Hubbard said "cannot feel any sense of remorse or shame. They approve only of destructive actions. They appear quite rational. They can be very convincing." Interesting turn of events, eh?

Perhaps that's the problem. "They can be very convincing." We see the ripples in the pond, but the jagged rock remains invisible, cloaked behind a veil of normality. White becomes black, right becomes wrong, peace becomes war, and sanity becomes madness. In fact, that twisting of meanings is a clue to psychopathy. They're masters of "doublespeak", creating verbal traps and impossible situations that leave non-psychopaths bewildered. Perhaps that's the solution to the catch-22 of modern psychiatry? A certain degree of "mental illness" is human, even healthy. Like an immune reaction in the body, it's the normal response to the affront of psychopathy on a healthy mind. Workplace bullying, soul-killing jobs, abusive relationships, economic depression, modern warfare, chronic stress, social hysteria - these are not normal human conditions. They are symptoms and effects of psychopathy.

But the more we react to true madness (of the psychopathic kind), the more we are labelled as mad. And the real enemy goes unnoticed. Could that say more about psychiatry, and those pushing for such an antihuman approach, than the people diagnosed and drugged in response? As Tony told Ronson, "It's like witchcraft. ... They turn everything upside down." (p. 62) Remember drapetomania? Remember Al Dunlap's "Leadership Positives"? He had said of "grandiose sense of self-worth", "If you don't believe in yourself, nobody else will." Manipulative? "I think you could describe that as leadership." Impulsivity? "Quick Analysis." Shallow affect? That "stops you from feeling 'some nonsense emotions.'" Lack of remorse? "[F]rees you up to move forward and achieve more great things." (pp. 156-157) The answer was staring Ronson in the face, but he never made the connections.

Dr. Allen Frances had told Ronson:

"The way the diagnosis [of childhood bipolar] is being made in America was not something we intended ... Kids with extreme irritability and moodiness and temper tantrums are being called bipolar. The drug companies and the advocacy groups have a tremendous influence in propagating the epidemic."
"Psychiatric diagnoses are getting closer and closer to the boundary of normal ... There's a societal push for conformity in all ways ... There's less tolerance of difference." (pp. 244, 245)

Couldn't Ronson see the connection between the "Al Dunlaps" of the economic/corporate world and psychiatric/pharmaceutical drug-pushing world? That the missing key is psychopathy? That that is the reason for this push to label normal people "mentally ill" and keep us and our children drugged up, sick in mind and body, while the truly ill are the ones reaping the benefits?

Ronson was actually on to something when he wrote:

All that talk of snakes adopting human form reminded me of a story I once did about a conspiracy theorist named David Icke, who believed that the secret rulers of the world were giant, blood-drinking, child-sacrificing lizards who had shape-shifted into humans so they could perform their evil on an unsuspecting population. I suddenly realized how similar the two stories were, except in this one the people who spoke of snakes in suits were eminent and utterly sane psychologists, respected around the world. Was this a conspiracy theory that was actually true? (p. 138)

No, they're not lizards. Rather the secret rulers of the world are rich, blood-lusting, child-raping psychopaths. Remember the comments about "squashing bugs"? These people just don't give a shit about mass-murder, raping mothers in front of their children, or children in front of their parents. They don't care about nuclear meltdowns, oil poisoning the Gulf, lung-cancer-causing pollution, disease-causing diets. They are absorbed by it. Fascinated. They get a kick out of making people suffer and driving them crazy. Literally. They're the kind of cretins that will cut themselves and blame it on their wives for custody of children in a divorce, stab their "best friend" in the back if by doing so they can frame someone else and get some kind of payoff. Dirty tricks. Fun and games. They're cunning, manipulative, and ruthless. And this is where Ronson goes from so-so to just plain bad.

Twice in the book he relates his annoyance at being called either a "shill" or "stupid" for not believing the 9/11 and 7/7 conspiracy theories. While Ronson may be a smart guy in many regards, when it comes to "conspiracy theories", I've gotta go with his detractors. In a section on one of the survivors of the 7/7 attacks, Rachel North, he writes: "Only the most extreme magical-thinkers among [the 9/11 truthers] were 7/7 conspiracy theorists, too: while 9/11 obviously wasn't an inside job, 7/7 OBVIOUSLY wasn't an inside job." (p. 183) Yet the only point he ends up demonstrating is that a lot of conspiracy theorists are stupid and grossly misguided. No, the 7/7 attacks weren't a "fake stunt" using "pyrotechnics and stuntmen and actors and special-effect blood." Yes, Rachel North was a real victim of the attacks. Yes, real planes flew into the World Trade Centers. But none of that dismisses the fact that the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks were false-flag operations, using real bombs, causing real death and destruction, ruining lives and bringing devastation to thousands of families. Yes, making light of the atrocities and harassing victims is callous. But no, looking for the truth, paying attention to details like the locations and physical features of the blast holes of 7/7 is not callous. Is a police detective callous because he tries to discern the point of entry and exit of a bullet wound? No, he's just trying to find the truth, so that there can be real justice. Ronson's diatribe against conspiracy theorists is as shameful as those conspiracy theorists who spout nonsense and DO act in callous ways. But even then, there's more to this than meets the eye.

Rachel North's critics accused her (as Ronson's accused him) of being a "shill", a government agent spouting disinformation. Ronson also devotes several pages to a discussion of David Shayler, ex-MI5 officer, 9/11 and 7/7 conspiracy theorist, "no-planer", cross-dresser, and second coming of Jesus. Yes, the guy is completely insane. That's a given. What Ronson ignores is the fact that David Shayler is the real agent in this whole drama! He's the self-professed government agent. He even admitted to dressing as an anarchist at a demonstration during his "stint" with MI5.

Let me spell it out. First let's start from the big picture. Psychopaths rule our world. The experts agree on that. The higher to the top you get, the more psychopaths you find. They're in business, banks, politics, intelligence, military, media, academia. They're also cunning, manipulative and ruthless. They're the evil bastards in Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot novels who get off by killing people and then blaming it on someone else. Now, I'm sure not many will disagree with me when I say: politicians lie, intelligence agencies are secretive. They conduct many "black operations" often involving killing innocent people. Corporate interests steer politicians. They also own the media and do not promote news that would have negative consequences for themselves. Again, psychopaths saturate all these industries. Their leadership often overlaps. They have mutual interests. And again, they're psychopaths. Now, how hard is it to believe that some of these evil bastards would commit real atrocities against their own people and blame it on some boogieman in the interests of global hegemony? Remember Hitler? Remembering Goring and Himmler and Goebbels? They were psychopaths too. Remember the Reichstag fire? Remember the control of the media, the use of scapegoats, the incestuous relationship between corporate, media, military, economic, and political powers? Is it not completely freaking obvious that there is no evil thing these whackos wouldn't do? That they have done such things in the past and will CONTINUE doing them? And don't you think they'd have agents set up to make anyone exposing these deceptions look loony? Yes, there are stupid conspiracy theorists. There are also stupid skeptics and debunkers. That's beside the point of what actually happened.

Whether it's police agents dressed as "anarchists" at protests who instigate violence, UK troops posing as Iraqi insurgents with bombs and guns, Israeli operatives creating fake Al-Qaeda cells, or any other counterintelligence-type operations, this is STANDARD operating procedure. And it's people like Ronson who stare at the ripples in disbelief, unable to see the jagged rock staring them right back in the face.

Anyways, I'm ranting. One more small point before I wrap up. Noting the absence of psychopathy in the DSM, Ronson wonders whether there had been some "backstage schism in the psychopath-defining world". It turns out there was. Lee Robins, a sociologist, rallied to exclude it, focusing only on "overt symptoms" instead of personality traits such as empathy. This is a telling point, which I deal with in this article. In it, I also give my thoughts on the "dimensional vs categorical" debate. My intuition is similar to Hare's. Psychopaths are different. They have the shape of a human, the outer form. They walk, talk, speak, eat, and breathe. They may even collect McDonald's toys or statues of predators, like the psychopaths interviewed by Ronson. But when it comes to the inner essence that makes us human, that part of another that we come to love and appreciate, no, they are not human. They are an intraspecies predator. Not quite human. While Ronson does an admirable job bringing the topic of psychopathy, and the idea that it runs our world, to the mainstream, he never really gets to the meat of the matter. He collects some of the clues, but lacks the key to give a wider understanding. For that, you need Political Ponerology. There may not be anything new in The Psychopath Test for regular readers of SOTT, but I did find it enjoyable for its case studies and Ronson's quirky and engaging style. So check it out. Just be sure to round out your reading with something a bit more substantial.

Time for Change: Why the Corrupt Few Wreak So Much Death, Destruction, and Suffering on the Rest of us

2010-08-22T07:36:00.004+02:00

by Time for Change Democratic Underground
Perhaps the most important question of our time why, throughout human history, have despicable characters repeatedly risen to the pinnacles of power. The 20th Century alone witnessed an estimated 140 million war deaths and another 16 million from genocide. Mass starvation kills millions in an era when there is plenty enough food to feed the world. And not coincidentally, in the world today 40% of the world’s wealth is held in the hands of 1% of its inhabitants, while the bottom 50% owns only 1% of the world’s wealth. That means that the top 1% owns 40 times more than half the world’s population. There are of course numerous reasons for this sorry state of affairs. But certainly the tremendous wealth and power disparity in the world, along with the abuse of that power by so many who have the most of it explains a great deal. Why have so many despicable characters throughout history acquired the ability to inflict so much suffering on the rest of humanity?

I have read two books in particular that provide much insight into this issue: “The Authoritarians” by Bob Altemeyer (This link is to a free electronic version of Altemeyer’s whole book); and, “Political Ponerology – A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes” by Andrew M. Lobaczewski. Both books talk about much the same process, but Altemeyer approaches it from the individual psychological perspective, whereas Lobaczewski approaches it more from the societal level. Both books were recommended to me by fellow DUer Larry Ogg.

Bob Altemeyer is a retired psychology professor who spent most of his life researching authoritarianism. Lobaczewski was a Polish psychiatrist and one of several scientists who took part in the research and the writing of “Political Ponerology”. But he was the only one left alive by the time it was completed. Lobaczewski and his fellow scientists were victims of one of the most evil repressive regimes of world history – Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. Lobaczewski describes the history of the manuscript for the book:

The original manuscript of this book went into the furnace minutes before a secret police raid in Communist Poland. The second copy, painfully reassembled by scientists working under impossible conditions of violence and repression, was sent via courier to the Vatican. Its receipt was never acknowledged – the manuscript and all valuable data lost. In 1984, the third and final copy was written from memory by the last survivor of the original researchers: Andrew Lobaczewski.…After half a century of suppression, this book is finally available.

Altemeyer describes in great detail what he refers to as authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders. Both are required in order to produce what Lobaczewski refers to as a pathocracy, which he defines as a social movement, society, nation, or empire wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people. The pathological minority habitually perpetrates evil deeds on its people and/or other people. In other words, the pathological minority rules society with an iron fist, in their interests alone – and to hell with everyone else: Wars for profit, with massive casualties; millions of refugees; massive destruction of infrastructure; torture; you name it… No price is too high to pay to attain and maintain their own wealth and power. Some people refer to such as system as tyranny. But I think that pathocracy is a more descriptive term.

Authoritarian leaders

Altemeyer’s explanation – The psychopathology of authoritarian leaders
In contemplating the success of the dark forces who create and rule over pathocracies, it behooves us to understand their nature. Altemeyer refers to them alternately as “authoritarian leaders” or “social dominators”. He describes them like this:

High scorers (on the test that measures the traits of authoritarian leaders) are inclined to be intimidating, ruthless, and vengeful. They scorn such noble acts as helping others, and being kind, charitable, and forgiving. Instead they would rather be feared than loved, and be viewed as mean, pitiless, and vengeful. They love power, including the power to hurt in their drive to the top…. Social dominators thus admit, anonymously, to striving to manipulate others, and to being dishonest, two-faced, treacherous, and amoral. It’s as if someone took the Scout Law (“A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, ...”) and turned it completely upside down…

This description is in fact almost identical to what psychologists refer to as the psychopathic personality. These people have two big advantages over the rest of us. First, they have no inclination to be bound by the rules that the rest of us are bound by. And secondly, they have their authoritarian followers (more about them later) to give them lots of aid and support.

Altemeyer gives an example from U.S. politics of how these authoritarian leaders relate to the rest of the world:

A stunning, and widely overlooked example of the arrogance that followed (9/11/01) streaked across the sky in 2002 when the (Bush) administration refused to sign onto the International Criminal Court. This court was established by over a hundred nations, including virtually all of the United States’ allies, to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, and so on when the country for whom they acted would not or could not do the prosecuting itself. It is a “court of last resort” in the human race’s defense against brutality. Why on earth would the United States, as one of the conveners of the Nuremberg Trials and conceivers of the charge, “crimes against humanity,” want nothing to do with this agreement? The motivation did not become clear until later. But not only did America refuse to ratify the treaty, in 2002 Congress passed an act that allowed the United States to punish nations that did join in the international effort to prosecute the worst crimes anyone could commit! Talk about throwing your weight around, and in a way that insulted almost every friend you had on the planet.

Lobaczewski’s explanation
In the preface to Lobaczewski’s book, Laura Knight-Jadczyk explains why we find so many psychopaths in our political system:

In the past several years, there are many more psychologists and psychiatrists and other mental health workers beginning to look at these issues in new ways in response to the questions about the state of our world and the possibility that there is some essential difference between such individuals as George W. Bush and many so-called Neocons, and the rest of us…

We also began to realize that the profiles that emerged also describe rather accurately many individuals who seek positions of power in fields of authority, most particularly politics and commerce. That’s really not so surprising an idea, but it honestly hadn’t occurred to us until we saw the patterns and recognized them in the behaviors of numerous historical figures and, lately, including George W. Bush and members of his administration… Politics, by its very nature, would tend to attract more of the pathological “dominator types” than other fields. That is only logical, and we began to realize that it was not only logical, it was horrifyingly accurate; horrifying because pathology among people in power can have disastrous effects on all of the people under the control of such pathological individuals.

Lobaczewski notes that most psychopaths don’t have much general intelligence or even any particular skills of a productive nature. But the ones who pose great danger to society are quite good at manipulating people and political infighting. Lobaczewski explains:

Once the process of poneric (evil) transformation (to a pathocracy) … has begun and advanced sufficiently, they perceive this fact with almost infallible sensitivity: a circle has been created wherein they can hide their failings and psychological differentness, find a world where they are in power and all those other, “normal people”, are forced into servitude.

A description by Barry Lynn from an economic perspective
Barry Lynn doesn’t talk about psychology or use any psychological terminology. His book, “Cornered – The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction”, is all about economics. It describes how people whom Altemeyer would refer to as Authoritarian Leaders, Lobaczewski would describe as evil, and others would merely call psychopaths or sociopaths have convinced most Americans into accepting an economic system that benefits only the rich, at the expense of everyone else. They call this system the “Free Market”, and its detractors often refer to it as “Free Market Fundamentalism”. But far from being free, it is a system based on “freedom” of corporations to form monopolies, and it is a system created mainly to benefit those who created it. Lynn explains:

In the last generation, we have been taught to believe in a philosophy of what is sometimes called “free-market fundamentalism”… This philosophy is designed not to illuminate real-world phenomena but to hide the real-world use by the rich of such man-made institutions as the corporation and the marketplace – and sometimes even our own government – to seize our properties and our liberties… My goal is to reconnect us with our traditional understanding of how markets operate and what purposes they serve, to thereby restore our ability to use markets to help protect our most important interests.

Human gullibility and sycophancy – The authoritarian followers

Altemeyer’s explanation – The gullibility of authoritarian followers
Gullibility is one of the trademarks of the authoritarian followers, who provide crucial support for their authoritarian leaders. Altemeyer defines authoritarian followers as having three core characteristics: 1) high degree of submission to authority; 2) willingness to attack other people in the name of the authority; and 3) highly conventional attitudes

Altemeyer discusses the submission to authority, lack of independent thinking and need for approval that characterizes the authoritarian followers:

Authoritarian followers seem to have a “Daddy and mommy know best” attitude toward the government. They do not see laws as social standards that apply to all. Instead, they appear to think that authorities are above the law, and can decide which laws apply to them and which do not – just as parents can when one is young…

If you ask subjects to rank the importance of various values in life, authoritarian followers place “being normal” substantially higher than most people do. It’s almost as though they want to disappear as individuals into the vast vat of Ordinaries.

Though they habitually use the rhetoric of righteousness, they tend to be full of hatred, and their behavior quickly turns ugly when they are under stress. Altemeyer explains:

They get off smiting the sinner; they relish being “the arm of the Lord.”… which suggests authoritarian followers have a little volcano of hostility bubbling away inside them looking for a (safe, approved) way to erupt….

They usually avoid anything approaching a fair fight. Instead they aggress when they believe right and might are on their side. “Right” for them means, more than anything else, that their hostility is (in their minds) endorsed by established authority, or supports such authority. “Might” means they have a huge physical advantage over their target, in weaponry say, or in numbers, as in a lynch mob. It’s striking how often authoritarian aggression happens in dark and cowardly ways, in the dark, by cowards who later will do everything they possibly can to avoid responsibility for what they did. Women, children, and others unable to defend themselves are typical victims. Even more striking, the attackers typically feel morally superior to the people they are assaulting in an unfair fight…

Our world and our country are full of these kinds of people. They are the kinds of people who followed, admired and supported Hitler. They are very gullible and easily manipulated by authoritarian leaders. They form the hard core base of support for people like George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and all of FOX News.

Lobaczewki’s explanation – the role of sycophancy
It is more than just gullibility that explains the phenomenon of the authoritarian follower. Can you imagine John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, or David Petraeus going against the will of George W. Bush on any matter when he was in power? That would be highly unlikely because their positions of high power depended entirely on putting all their energy into anticipating the needs of and pleasing their “leader”. George Bush started out the same way. As governor of Texas, all his efforts went into pleasing his corporate cronies. In return, they rewarded him handsomely by ensuring his material wealth and serving as a power base for his climb to the presidency. Lobaczewski describes the process as one of sycophancy:

They initially perform subordinate functions in such a movement and execute the leaders’ orders, especially whenever something needs to be done which inspires revulsion in others. Their evident zealotry and cynicism gives rise to criticism on the part of the more reasonable members, but it also earns the respect of some its more extreme revolutionaries. They thus find protection among those people who earlier played a role in the movement’s ponerization, and repay the favor with compliments or by making things easier for them. Thus they climb up the organizational ladder, gain influence, and almost involuntarily bend the contents of the entire group to their own way of experiencing reality and to the goals derived from their deviant nature.

Carl Boggs’ perspective – The myth of American Exceptionalism
Carl Boggs discusses in his book, “The Crimes of Empire – Rogue Superpower and World Domination”, how American elites have so inculcated the doctrine of American Exceptionalism in the minds of the good majority of Americans that few have the intellectual or moral capacity to resist it:

Whatever occurs under the aegis of Washington decision-making is, by definition, noble, beyond the reach of ethical or legal condemnation. Mistakes are made, but the ends themselves simply cannot be questioned. Some opinion-makers insist that the U.S. represents an entirely new kind of empire, more benign and less exploitative than previous empires. It follows that the actions of a benevolent empire demand more flexible criteria for judgment… Those standing in the way of U.S. power often find themselves depicted as impediments to human progress, as enemies of democracy and Western civilization, perhaps even as the reincarnation of Hitler and the Nazis.

It is symptomatic of this state of mind that Barack Obama, in touting his opposition to the Iraq War while trying to secure the Democratic presidential nomination, repeatedly emphasized that he was not opposed to all wars, but only to stupid wars. He never once claimed opposition to immoral wars – presumably on the assumption that it was unimaginable that his country would ever engage in an immoral war. My point here is that some degree of the authoritarian follower mindset occupies the minds of the good majority of Americans – and probably the good majority of all people.

The role of ideology and human susceptibility to its promises

Lobaczewski writes a lot about the role of ideology for individuals or groups in the ponerogenic process that leads to pathocracies. The ideology itself is usually not inherently evil (although it may be, as in the case of Nazism), and the ideology does not generally characterize the movement or group. Rather, the ideology serves as a mask, to hide the actual intentions of the group. Lobaczewski explains it like this:

It is a common phenomenon for a ponerogenic association or group to contain a particular ideology which always justifies its activities and furnishes motivational propaganda…. Human nature demands that vile matters be haloed by an over-compensatory mystique in order to silence one’s conscience and to deceive consciousness and critical faculties, whether one’s own or those of others.

If such a ponerogenic union could be stripped of its ideology, nothing would remain except psychological and moral pathology, naked and unattractive. Such stripping would of course provoke “moral outrage”, and not only among the members of the union.

The fact is, even normal people, who condemn this kind of union along with its ideologies, feel hurt and deprived of something constituting part of their own romanticism, their way of perceiving reality, when a widely idealized group is exposed as little more than a gang of criminals.

A perfect example of this explanation, in my opinion, is the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. If George Bush and Dick Cheney had told the American public, in their run-up to war, that it was necessary to invade and occupy Iraq in order to open up tens of billions of dollars worth of economic opportunity for their corporate cronies and to gain access to Iraqi oil, the American people and even their corporate news media would have been hard pressed to drum up much enthusiasm for war. Instead, we were provided with (especially after the “weapons of mass destruction” excuse was proven to be a lie) the ideology of democracy (We’re doing it to bring democracy to the Iraqi people) and anti-terrorism (We have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.)

The last paragraph of Lobaczewski’s that I cite above explains why so many normal Americans are willing to accept the lame excuses of psychopaths hiding behind a wall of ideology. Acknowledging that our leaders are no more than criminal thugs and psychopaths is just too painful for most Americans. It is much more comfortable for them to believe that their country goes to war for idealistic and generous purposes.

Let’s now consider how four different ideologies, none of which are inherently evil, have been corrupted for political purposes:

Americanism
One could make a good argument that the U.S. Declaration of Independence, which after all provided the full justification for our country becoming a sovereign nation, contains the true, uncorrupted version of Americanism. There are two salient ideas expressed in that document, which also happen to be the epitome of liberal/progressive values: 1) That everyone has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and 2) Whenever a government becomes destructive of those rights, the people have the right overthrow that government.

For right wing ideologues, “Americanism” has become the ideology that says that the United States of America is so superior to all other nations that any action it takes with respect to other nations should automatically and unquestionably be considered morally right. For an American citizen to think or act otherwise is to border on treason.

“Americanism” in that form has been used to declare wars against nations that pose no threat to us and to overthrow numerous democratically elected governments that likewise posed no threat to us.

Consider this speech:

As long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny – prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder – violence will gather… and raise a mortal threat.

There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends upon the survival of liberty in other lands. The best hope for freedom in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

That speech invokes the best of the American dream and ideals. There was just one problem with it. It was spoken by George W. Bush as a means of justifying an action (the invasion and occupation of Iraq) that had nothing whatsoever to do with the wonderful sentiments expressed in his speech. He was merely using a great ideology as a mask to hide his true motives.

Christianity
Christianity contains some core values that any liberal/progressive could be proud to live by. Jesus Christ preached that we should love our neighbors, treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves, and be charitable towards the poor. In short, he embodied the best of liberal values. Accordingly, Christian groups have done some great things over the centuries, including playing a leading role in the abolition of slavery in the United States.

But Christianity has also often been used to justify evil actions, including wars of aggression and torture of “non-believers” with the aim of getting them to convert to Christianity. Some, even today, still use Christianity to justify slavery, as Patrick Buchanan did in his attempt to put his criticisms of Barack Obama in the best light:

The Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard. And among them are these: First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

Capitalism
Capitalism carries the potential, by means of providing incentives for productivity, to act as an engine of economic growth that provides tremendous benefits to a society. Forget for a moment that there is no such thing as pure capitalism, or that society works best economically when it uses some combination of capitalism and socialism. My only point here is that (I believe) capitalism has the capacity to provide benefits to people when used as one component of an economic system, with sufficient controls.

Yet, capitalism is used as justification for all manner of policies that hurt people, such as George W. Bush’s veto of health insurance for children. Bush (as well as the whole U.S. Republican Party) liked to characterize his view of capitalism as “free market”, and as such he uses that ideology to push for international agreements that primarily benefit his corporate friends.

But in fact, there is nothing “free market” about the Bush administration brand of capitalism, if indeed it can be categorized as capitalism at all. Rather, their favored economic system was one in which their corporate cronies were given billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to perform functions for which they had little expertise, with little or no oversight from government. The result was billions of dollars of missing money, with no investigations to determine where the money went. That’s a mighty strange brand of capitalism.

James Petras, in “Rulers and Ruled”, describes how so-called “capitalism” has worked out in recent years in so many countries:

Given the enormous class and income disparities in Russia, Latin America and China, it is more accurate to describe these countries as “surging billionaires” rather than “emerging markets” because it is not the “free market” but the political power of the billionaires that dictates policy

Countries of “surging billionaires” produce burgeoning poverty, submerging living standards. The making of billionaires means the unmaking of civil society – the weakening of social solidarity, protective social legislation, pensions, vacations, public health programs and education…

The growth of billionaires is hardly a sign of “general prosperity” resulting from the “free market”… In fact it is the product of the illicit seizure of lucrative public resources, built up by the work and struggle of millions of workers… It has little to do with entrepreneurial skills.

Communism
Communism has been defined as “a socioeconomic structure that promotes the establishment of a classless, stateless society based on common ownership of the means of production.” Its initial popularity can be attributed to its promise to greatly reduce economic inequality in societies that were previously characterized by huge levels of economic inequality. That is a worthwhile goal IMO.

My own view is that the best economic system is one that uses a combination of free market incentives to increase productivity, combined with government provision of essential goods and services that don’t respond to free market incentives (such as the running of our elections), progressive taxation, and regulation to ensure such things as worker and environmental protection and the prevention of monopolistic practices. Whether or not pure Communism is capable of providing a viable and productive economic system is a question I can’t answer and is not highly relevant to this discussion.

The Russian Revolution of October 1917 brought Communism to Russia, which it maintained for more than 70 years. However, soon after its introduction it began to be seriously corrupted, to the point where by some time in the 1920s it is probably accurate to say that it wasn’t Communism at all. By that time an empire had evolved (called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) into a solidified Totalitarian system, and a small elite ruled over everyone else with an iron fist and had control over all of the country’s resources. Under the iron rule of Joseph Stalin, economic plans were put in place that resulted in the deaths by starvation of about seven million people. This was not a classless society, nor was it stateless, nor was it based on common ownership of the means of production. Yet the myth of a Communist state prevailed in the USSR until it broke up in 1991.

Pathocracies in perspective – what Americans need to understand

Lobaczewski makes the point that pathocracies cannot be permanent because they contain so many internal contradictions. But we should not take much satisfaction in the inevitable fall of pathocracies, since they so frequently do such tremendous harm before they fall. It would be far better if we could learn to prevent their rise or to counteract them before they do too much harm.

One of the many great insights of the founders of our country is that they anticipated the rise of pathocracy in the nation that they founded. They therefore wrote into its Constitution numerous plans for the balancing of power and for the peaceful removal from office of chief executives or others who proved to put their own needs and desires above those of our nation. It was a great idea. But it can only work to the extent that the American people have the courage to at least open their eyes to the dangers of unscrupulous rulers.

There are many today who would say that the United States of America is fast becoming a pathocracy, or has already become one. It exhibits many of the signs:
It has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world, and that rate is largely racially determined; its annual military expenditures are more than eight times greater than any other nation in the world, and almost as much as the rest of the world combined; it is the world’s greatest contributor to the climate change that threatens to destroy human civilization; it has committed myriad war crimes, including torture and aggressive war, and then refused to investigate them; it refuses to participate in the International Criminal Court – the international community’s tool for preventing and punishing crimes against humanity; and income inequality has increased in recent decades to such unprecedented levels that the U.S. is now the most unequal country of all the “rich” nations of the world.

This would be a much better country if most of us were to adopt the following attitudes:

Be skeptical about what our politicians and other elites say and why they say it. Don’t be fooled into thinking that their professed ideology necessarily has much to do with their true motivations. I’m not saying that they’re all liars. I’m just saying that we need to keep an open, skeptical mind on the subject. So instead of taking their rhetoric at face value, weigh their actions more than their rhetoric. (For example, if we invaded Iraq to bring democracy to them, why did we kill over a million of their civilians, and why didn’t we leave for many years after it became apparent that they wanted us to leave?)

Don’t for a minute believe that the possession of wealth or success in life makes it less likely that a person is a psychopath. Wealthy successful psychopaths are far more dangerous than the ones who end up in jail for drug-related or other charges. And the most dangerous of all are national leaders with psychopathic tendencies.

And for God sake, don’t EVER think that just because the only people who are being abused, tortured, and killed by your government are of some other race, ethnic group, or religion – Muslim, for example – that that means that they (your government) aren’t likely to turn on you next.

Ponerology 101: The Truth Behind the War on Terror

2010-08-22T07:31:00.002+02:00

Human relationships are plagued by fear. This cycle all too often begins in our first relationship with our parents. Too self-absorbed to recognize what their child truly requires of them, many parents betray their own child's weakness and dependency on his caregivers - his emotional need for comfort, security, trust, and the loving acceptance of those closest to him. Having missed out on these important periods of growth, this boy, now a parent himself, may come to feel threatened by the emotional needs of his own child, becoming dependent on his own children and spouse to provide what he never had. The vicious cycle spirals on, and in turn, his own children learn to stifle their needs, deny their own feelings, and live as hollow reflections of the needs of their father. When a child must meet the emotional needs of a parent, and not the other way around, the parent-child relationship is inverted. Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman and Robert Pressman call this the 'narcissistic family dynamic', and the problems it causes are directly relevant to the vast geopolitical problems the world currently faces.

Such children, like their parents, seek some source of comfort, some sense of security, but not knowing where to look and what to look out for, they often find it in all the wrong places: their own children, their lovers, their work, some religious or political cause. As much as they may deny it, they are motivated by the very fears they experienced as children - afraid of being alone, not belonging, uncertain, unloved, confused, abandoned. They find shelter from the pain in some literal or symbolic arms of embrace, yet it is incomplete in some way, like the 'security' of a sinking ship or of a castle built on foundations of sand. Not wanting to let go, and face that pain again, they shore up their defenses - a rallying of troops to give 'the people', their own fragmented personalities, a sense of security. But such a cover-up is built upon and dependent on lies, things half-seen through the lens of denied and distorted emotion. We may be denying that we are in a relationship with a psychopath, someone who, despite the abuse and mental torture they subject us to, offers us some sense of comfort and stability in life. Or we may deny our own betrayal of our loved ones' emotional needs: the child we criticize and deform according to our own twisted ideals or the lover we demand to be someone they are not.

I find it fascinating how these dynamics of a single human soul mirror so well the delusions of the many. Just as we rally our mental forces to hold onto that equilibrium we desperately fear losing, we rally our military forces to protect us from enemies that do not exist, covering up problems at home that dwarf those projected 'out there'. How does this come to be? So far in this series, I've described psychopaths - individuals devoid of conscience, incapable of remorse, and hungry for power - and their infiltration of corporations and politics - two seats of power in the modern era.

Manipulating mass emotion, particularly fear, is their modus operandi. It's commonly said that politicians exploit fear, but what is missing from this truism is an understanding of exactly what motivates them to do so, why they're so good at it, and the extent to which they go about doing so. Psychopaths understand human behavior, often better than we understand ourselves. In the last article I quoted a diagnosed psychopath, Sam Vaknin, describing how he used emotional abuse and insults to break down his victims. It was just one example of the special psychological knowledge possessed by psychopaths, refined after a lifetime of observing and interacting with 'others' whose foreign emotional reactions strike them as so comical and ridiculous. When this special knowledge is translated onto the global stage, you get geopolitics and all the propaganda and lies that accompany it.

Yes, psychopaths crave power and will do anything they can to hold on to it, but even that does not get to the heart of the matter. If a psychopath is not born into a position of influence and power, where he has license to do whatever he feels compelled to do without recourse, he feels like a slave in a system he cannot quite understand. He is hindered by incomprehensible laws, arbitrary social customs and interpersonal rules that make no sense to him. He is not free to be himself. To a psychopath, true freedom is simply license to use, abuse, and torture other people - physically, emotionally and financially. Any hindrance on that bloated sense of entitlement is a nuisance he dreams of removing by instituting a social system of his own creation. This is the true definition of 'totalitarianism', 'fascism', or a 'new world order' - a system of government where the psychopath is not arrested for beating his wife, killing his enemies, making emotional wrecks of his family and close acquaintances, stalking those who know his true nature and threaten to reveal it to more of those 'others' who so persecute him. In our world, the 'war on terror' is the means to this end. New terms like 'homegrown radicalization' and 'extraordinary rendition' are created, while familiar terms are appropriated and special meanings for those 'in the know' are instilled alongside the ordinary meanings understood by the common people.

In an interview in 1989 entitled "Recollections of 23 Years of Service to the US", Pentagon insider Col. Fletcher Prouty described how the days of traditional warfare were over. The new wars would be economic, and the new enemy would be terrorism. This is exactly what has happened (see Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine). But, as many have come to know, there is much more to the 'War on Terror' than meets the eye. The long history of COINTELPRO-type operations in the US, whereby groups deemed to be potential 'dissidents' are infiltrated and co-opted in a direction favorable to the National Security State, along with ECHELON surveillance of anyone deemed a potential 'threat' by the political psychopaths in power, makes it absolutely certain that any potential 'terrorist' group in the US has long since been identified, observed, and infiltrated by US intelligence and law enforcement. In fact, this has been the case the world over.

In the aftermath of WWII, and with the advent of a new 'Cold War', various stay-behind operations were formed in the countries of Europe (see Daniele Ganser's NATO's Secret Armies). These groups formed the basis of national resistance movements against the threat of Communist takeover. Unbeknownst to many involved, they were sponsored largely by NATO and the CIA. When it became clear that the threat of Communist invasion was minimal (these movements were active in such countries as Italy, France, Belgium, and West Germany), the focus shifted from external threats to potential internal threats - local Communists and the 'threat' they posed to the then-current power structures. The CIA funded and supported various extremist right-wing groups in this cause. Neo-Nazi groups and other extremist groups were infiltrated and controlled by the CIA and the secret services of the various European countries.

What was the result? A series of terror attacks struck the civilian populations of these countries. Left-wing groups and individuals were blamed by the governments, who then entrenched their power with the support of terrified populations when they turned to them for 'support' and 'security'. However, the attacks were actually carried out by the very groups that had been infiltrated and controlled by the governments - groups who were then protected by these governments, like in the Milan bombing of 1969 which killed sixteen, or the Tuscany railroad bombings in the early '70s. Similarly, as former BBC Middle East correspondent Alan Hart observes (see his Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews), Israel and its intelligence service, Mossad, has long-since infiltrated every Arab government and 'terrorist' organization. In fact, Mossad had agents tailing several of the alleged 9/11 hijackers in the months prior to the attacks (see Justin Raimondo's The Terror Enigma). Not to mention the fact that Osama Bin Laden had been a CIA asset until the day before 9/11, as had many of his fellow Mujaheddin in their fight against the Soviets.

When you put these facts together, they paint a striking picture. Western intelligence agencies have long had inside access to various 'terrorist' groups and used them in a self-described 'strategy of tension'. And yet the US and its allies are currently fighting an endless war against these nebulous groups that are in fact CIA assets. Why? As Hermann Goering said to his captors at Nuremberg, "It is always a simple matter to drag the people along [to war] ... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." More truthfully, attack them, tell them they have been attacked by 'communists' or 'terrorists', then denounce the 'liberals', 'bleeding hearts', and 'peace-lovers' as 'terrorist sympathizers'.

If we look closely at any 'terrorist attack' in the last 10 years - even the foiled attempts - we see a long list of connected intelligence assets, FBI agents acting as 'Al Qaeda recruiters', informants, and patsies manipulated for the cause. In recent years, Russia, Britain, Israel, and the United States have all been caught red-handed attempting such deceptions. Put simply, political psychopaths are in control of the governments of our world. Goaded on by a disdain for human morality, a drive for power and influence, and a desire to create a world where they are the ones calling the shots, they have created an enemy to strike fear into the hearts of humanity and to exploit the fear that is already present. Terrorism does not exist; at least not in the way governments and the media present it. Terrorist groups have long been infiltrated, created, or otherwise controlled by these political psychopaths. In essence, these men and women have murdered their own civilians and blamed a fictitious enemy in order to gain popular support for a cause that will never be won. The 'War on Terror' is an endless one, because these people do not and cannot see an end to their power. And while we denounce the 'evil terrorists' and the 'homegrown radicalization' of our own citizens, the political psychopaths merely see us as suckers, mindless actors in a play of their own creation. They are like the con man who says, "Well if they were so stupid as to believe me, they deserved it!"

If anything is to change, and if we are ever to end this ridiculous 'war' against an abstract noun, two things are needed. First, we need to take steps towards removing political psychopaths from office, making it impossible for psychopaths to achieve any position of political, corporate, or economic power. Giving psychopaths power and influence and expecting them to be adequate leaders is like expecting a blind man to drive a bus. Psychopaths are color blind when it comes to issues having to do with the well being of humanity. Second, we must come to grips with our true history, and what is really behind the spin of the current 'war on terror'. We are arresting, torturing, and murdering innocent people along with patsies whose controllers get away with everything because they operate behind the scenes. Without ponerology, things will only get worse.

Ponerology 101: The Political Psychopath

2010-07-13T03:37:00.002+02:00

Ponerology 101: The Political Psychopath by Harrison Koehli, sott.net, June 13, 2010 Before their research into corporate psychopathy, Paul Babiak and his colleagues raised several questions in need of answers. They are equally relevant to the study of political psychopathy and can be rephrased as follows:

- How could a psychopath outshine other candidates and achieve success in politics? - Why would a psychopath want to enter politics? - How long could a psychopath successfully operate in such an environment?

Jim Kouri, who served on the National Drug Task Force, has trained police and security officers throughout the United States, and is currently the fifth vice-president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, answers the first question in an editorial for examiner.com:

Quite simply, most [psychopathic] serial killers and many professional politicians must mimic what they believe are appropriate responses to situations they face such as sadness, empathy, sympathy, and other human responses to outside stimuli. ... If violent offenders are psychopathic, they are able to assault, rape, and murder without concern for legal, moral, or social consequences. This allows them to do what they want, whenever they want. Ironically, these same traits exist in men and women who are drawn to high-profile and powerful positions in society including political officeholders.

Politics is a dog-eat-dog world. Not only must politicians be relatively thick-skinned to handle attacks on their character, they must be capable of dishing it out in return. Psychopaths lie with ease; they do not have any moral scruples when it comes to character assassination, empty promises, shameless self-promotion, cutthroat tactics, and using any means to justify the end. These qualities give them the leading edge over their more honest (and often naive) competition. Politics is little different than any other con-job. In a Ponzi scheme, for example, the con artist targets members of an identifiable group, whether religious, racial or age-based. Regardless of whether or not the scammer is a member of the target group he pretends to represent the group. While political psychopaths are instrumental in the rise of totalitarian political groups, they play an equally important role in apparently Democratic governments. Their use of a party mask (no pun intended!) is so common that it can easily be called their primary modus operandi. But why would a psychopath enter politics in the first place? Simply ask the question, "Who is the most powerful person in the world?" and many will answer: 'the President'. Psychopaths seek positions of power and influence, and politics offers publicity, prestige, and other perks. It also provides positions of ultimate authority over military, industry, and entire populations. In a world where psychopaths are understandably viewed as morally repulsive, often finding themselves at home in the criminal world, politics offers an opportunity to create a new world, to be free from the ridiculous (in their minds) moral and legal rules of society. Scanning recent headlines, we regularly see examples of the corruption and fraud typical of white-collar psychopaths:

In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American authorities have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military officers in the misuse of $125bn (£88bn) in a US-directed effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The exact sum missing may never be clear, but a report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50bn, making it an even bigger theft than Bernard Madoff's notorious Ponzi scheme. (Patrick Cockburn, "A 'fraud' bigger than Madoff", The Independent, February 16, 2009) Defense Department Cannot Account For 25% Of Funds - $2.3 Trillion On Sept. 10, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ... said money wasted by the military poses a serious threat. ... "According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," Rumsfeld admitted. ... Rumsfeld promised change but the next day - Sept. 11-- the world changed and in the rush to fund the war on terrorism, the war on waste seems to have been forgotten. ("The War on Waste", CBS, January 29, 2002) Israeli police have recommended charging the country's hard-line foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, with several counts of corruption as part of a bribery investigation, in a move that could lead to his resignation and a significant government reshuffle. Lieberman, head of a popular far-right party, is suspected of bribery, fraud, breach of trust, money laundering and obstruction of justice in a case dating back over nine years. If charged and convicted on all counts he faces up to 31 years in jail. (Rory McCarthy, "Israeli police recommend corruption charges against Avigdor Lieberman", The Guardian, August 2, 2009)

In 2008, Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich came under similar media scrutiny, with several commentators speculating as to his mental health. Blagojevich was impeached for attempting to auction off newly elected President Obama's vacant Senate seat. However, even before his impeachment, the signs were obvious. In his profile of the governor for February 2008 issue of Chicago Magazine, David Bernstein portrayed Blogojevich as narcissistic, arrogant, vindictive, charismatic, irresponsible, impulsive, untrustworthy, and with presidential aspirations (how typical!). After interviewing more than 20 associates of Blagojevich ("from current and former members of the governor's administration and his campaign staff to state lawmakers, Democratic benefactors and operatives, academics, pundits, and political prognosticators"), Bernstein noted that several "resorted to colorful, four-letter language when describing the governor. The list of printable insults included "greedy," "dumb," "paranoid," and "phony."" They described dramatic displays of temper over items as trivial as office stationary, "alleged illegal hiring and political kickback scandals", his unapologetic lateness for meetings and even funerals, and a litany of political failures and embarrassments. As Bernstein puts it, for the man who once bragged of his "testicular virility" in standing up for himself against the offender in the stationary incident, "all the withering criticism, negative newspaper headlines, and next-to-nothing approval ratings should feel like a kick to the groin. But if he's fazed, he doesn't show it. In public, he looks easygoing, unshaken, even self-assured. He still cracks jokes and smiles that big, toothy grin." Cool under pressure, Blagojevich obviously saved his temper for more profitable situations:

"He can't control himself," says Miller. "I've heard people say that on his own staff." A Democratic insider adds, "Rod sometimes just goes out of his way to have a fight, just because he can. It's as though he relishes them." ... Last summer, the downstate newspaper the Peoria Journal Star declared that the governor was "going bonkers." Privately, a few people who know the governor describe him as a "sociopath," and they insist they're not using hyperbole. State representative Joe Lyons, a fellow Democrat from Chicago, told reporters that Blagojevich was a "madman" and "insane." "He shows absolutely no remorse," says Jack Franks, the Democratic state representative. "I don't think he gives a damn about anybody else's feelings. He tries to demonize people who disagree with him; he's got delusions of grandeur."

Called a "liar" and likened to a "used-car salesman" by lawmakers after one incident, "in an unprecedented move, they demanded that Blagojevich put any promises on paper in so-called memorandums of understanding." In fact, he spent much of his time in office "fending off accusations of ethical irregularities within his administration." But despite the rumors, innuendos, and outright accusations, "Blagojevich has claimed - sometimes indignantly - that he has done nothing wrong. He blames the scandals on "a few bad apples who violated the rules" and who deceived him." In short, Blagojevich shows all the hallmarks of a political psychopath, albeit a fairly obvious one. And he surely isn't the only one. Just as the 'best' psychopaths are those who evade detection, living lifetimes of successful crime, the best political psychopaths operate in such a manner as to hold on as long as possible. Robert Hare, in his 1970 book Psychopath: Theory and Research, as well as James Blair, Derek Mitchell, and Karina Blair in their 2005 book The Psychopath: Emotion and the Brain, observe that negative environmental conditions such as low socioeconomic status, abuse, and poor parenting, along with low IQ, are often associated with high psychopathy scores, particularly among those who engage in persistent, violent criminal behavior. These psychopathic offenders are often considered the worst of the worst in courts and prisons. However, these factors seem only to affect the expression of psychopathy. As Dr. Hare says in filmmaker Ian Walker's excellent documentary, I, Psychopath, on the diagnosed psychopath and self-styled narcissism guru, Sam Vaknin, while psychopaths often tell of some traumatic childhood that made them the way they are, psychopaths come from all backgrounds, good or bad. Speaking of successful psychopaths like Vaknin, he says, "If you're very bright, know how to dress well; you have, say, the gift of the gab; you're raised in an affluent family background; [then] you don't go in the bank and rob it, you get in the bank and become a director..." In fact, Vaknin makes a perfect case study for the type of psychopath that is most dangerous to political institutions, and thus entire nations. Best known as an Internet guru for "malignant self-love", Vaknin was arrested in Israel in 1995 for major securities fraud. The documentary follows Walker, Vaknin, and Lidija (Vaknin's wife) as they visit several European institutions to test if Vaknin is indeed a psychopath. Vaknin ends up scoring 18 (out of 24) on the PCL-SV (Screening Version), developed by Dr. Hare, a score higher than the majority of offenders in US correctional facilities, and the cutoff point for psychopathy. However, according Walker, Vaknin, like many of the so-called successful psychopaths now being studied by Hare, Bakiak, and others, is not an "archetypal, textbook" psychopath. Contrary to the criminal populations, Vaknin is never physically violent. He has also been married to the same woman for ten years, while most psychopaths are seemingly incapable of such 'commitment', engaging in a string of short-term relationships. (His emotional treatment of her is another matter, however.) Most interestingly, he is remarkably self-aware, and his insights agree with what the experts have to say. For example, in total seriousness, Vaknin had the following exchange with Walker:

Vaknin: "I like to present a facade of the self-effacing, modest person. It gives people the impression that, underneath it all, I'm human." Walker: "But you are human, aren't you?" Vaknin: "I firmly believe that you want to believe that, yes. ... [The psychopath] regards people as instruments of gratification and as disposable things to be used. ... The vast majority of psychopaths, like an iceberg, are underwater, and like an iceberg, they are inert. They do nothing. They're just there. They torment their spouse by being unempathic, but they don't beat her or kill her. They bully coworkers, but they don't burn the office. They are not dramatic. They are pernicious. Most psychopaths are subtle. They are more like poison than a knife, and they are more like slow-working poison than cyanide."

After subjecting Walker to a series of degrading insults (a regular occurrence during filming), and with Walker still visibly in shock, Vaknin coolly, and with disturbingly sadistic insight, described the process to him:

"Your body was flooded instantly with adrenalin and its relatives like norepinephrine ... Now when these moments pervade the bloodstream, your brain reacts. It shuts down certain centers and activates others. This is called the stress reaction, or stress syndrome, actually. Then when the abuse recedes, the adrenalin levels begin to drop. As they drop, the entire system goes into mayhem. So what bullies usually do, they start and stop, start and stop. That achieves the maximal stress syndrome, and this is the great secret of bullying. Never overdo it. Small doses. The victim will do the rest. - Although you are shaking much less [now] ... I must do something about that."

This type of self-aware psychopath is perhaps the most dangerous to humanity. When his instinctive drive for domination of others is coupled with the means to attain to positions of power, he is not only free of the restraints of conscience by nature, but finds himself largely above (or indeed the architect) of the laws that are meant to protect normal human beings from the the deviant impulses so clearly defined by the psychopathic mind. As a president, politician, military or corporate chief, a vast number of people are literally at his mercy.

Felled by Pathocracy: Rachel Corrie, Palestinians and 20 Newly Killed Humanitarians

2010-06-02T04:42:00.001+02:00

Felled by Pathocracy: Rachel Corrie, Palestinians and 20 Newly Killed Humanitarians

by Rady Ananda / June 1st, 2010

Yesterday, Israel added to its war crimes by attacking a Gaza humanitarian aid ship in international waters. Twenty people are reported dead, and the remaining 700 passengers abducted. Today, on Memorial Day, many of us pause to remember those who died in the cause of social justice, rather than imperial aims. One of those fallen heroes is Rachel Corrie (1979-2003), who has become an international icon for the horrific and ongoing genocide being perpetrated on Palestine by Israel.

Corrie died in Gaza on March 16, 2003 while trying to prevent the genocidal tactic of bulldozing civilian homes.

Just weeks before her murder on March 16th, she wrote to her father:

Coming here is one of the better things I’ve ever done. So when I sound crazy, or if the Israeli military should break with their racist tendency not to injure white people, please pin the reason squarely on the fact that I am in the midst of a genocide which I am also indirectly supporting, and for which my government is largely responsible.

Two days before her murder, she gave this interview to the Middle East Broadcasting Company where she details more genocidal tactics, like bombing the civilian water supply:

Defining Genocide

In 1996, Gregory H. Stanton (now of Genocide Watch) created a working definition of genocide for the US State Department. That resulted in his 7 Stages of Genocide. He explains that the “first stages precede later stages, but continue to operate throughout the genocidal process.”

Classification (us vs. them);
Symbolization (e.g. black fist);
Dehumanization (use of hate speech, nonhuman name-calling);
Organization (the target is always a collective group that is treated as a criminal class, nowadays often labeled “terrorist” organizations);
Polarization (use of extreme, inflammatory language to isolate moderates);
Identification (segregate the targeted population physically or by use of identifying features on national identity cards); and
Extermination (build camps, stockpile weapons, give the order).

In an April 2010 speech, Stanton added an eighth stage, “which is always a part of the genocidal process: Denial.”

Pathocracy in Action

Indeed, after the Israeli attack yesterday on the flotilla which carried 700 passengers from 50 nations and 10,000 tons of food, medicine, water and other essentials:

“Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon blamed the victim … saying the activists themselves were responsible for the massacre and branding them allies of international terrorist organizations,” reported Tehran Times.

Psychopaths are “extremely skilled at rationalizing their behavior, often seeing themselves as the victims (and blaming their real victims),” writes Andrew M. Lobaczewski, author of Political Ponerology.

It is to our benefit to understand the actions of Israel in terms of ‘ponerology’ or, the study of evil. Lobaczewski explains:

Ponerology describes the genesis, existence, and spread of the macrosocial disease called evil. Its causes are traceable and can be repeatedly observed and analyzed. When humanity manages to incorporate this knowledge into its natural worldview, it will have defensive potential as yet unrealized.

He explains that:

Evil can manifest on any societal level. The greater the scope of the psychopath’s influence, the greater harm done. Thus any group of humans can be infected or ‘ponerized’ by their influence. From families, clubs, churches, businesses, and corporations, to entire nations. The most extreme form of such macrosocial evil is called ‘pathocracy.’

In describing some of the ways that a psychopath or a pathocracy can infect a population, he writes of the Israeli occupation of Gaza:

When determining the morality of the occupation of Palestine, many reject that the Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in the Nabka of 1948. Accepting this datum would lead to a correct, albeit disturbing, conclusion regarding the morality of Israeli military occupation…. In the case of Palestine, some groups have convinced themselves that there is no such thing as a Palestinian: Palestine was empty when the Jews found it, they say.

It must be noted that Stanton rejects the use of the term ‘ethnic cleansing.’ He considers it part of the dehumanization stage of genocide. It is as euphemistic as the term ‘kiddie porn’ when discussing child rape and torture.

As each stage of genocide manifests, preventive techniques can be employed. Stanton suggests, for example, that race, religion and ethnicity labels be removed from identity papers. More obviously, when an authoritative body like the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict issues a finding of genocide, “PROSECUTE IT!” Stanton bellowed.

The sane and compassionate bulk of humanity mourns the loss of Rachel Corrie, along with the tens of thousands of lives, including the twenty new people, whom Israel has murdered.

Rachel Corrie in her 5th Grade Speech: I’m here because I care:

Take Action:

The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation has created an action page where you can contact the U.S. Mission to the United Nations to demand that U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice vote to support a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s action and initiating an investigation.

Rady Ananda began blogging in 2004. Her work has appeared in several online and print publications, including three books on election fraud. Most of her career was spent working for lawyers in research, investigations and as a paralegal. She graduated from The Ohio State University’s School of Agriculture with a B.S. in Natural Resources. Read other articles by Rady.

Ponerology 101: Snakes in Suits

2010-05-10T04:54:00.002+02:00

Harrison Koehli Sott.net Wed, 05 May 2010 10:17 EDT

The criminal psychopath has been observed and studied for almost a century. But except for a short mention by Cleckley, the idea of a successful psychopath - ordinary by almost all external standards - has remained shrouded in that pervasive "conspiracy of silence". As this series progresses, it will become clear why this is the case and what exactly are the ramifications of such a dangerous gap in knowledge and awareness. So far the only in-depth presentation of the problem of successful psychopaths has been Paul Babiak's and Robert Hare's book Snakes in Suits, published in 2006. The book is essential reading, and has the potential to save your life, literally. The information it contains is universal and can be applied to interactions on any social level.

Babiak, as an industrial and organizational psychologist, encountered his first corporate psychopath in 1992. By studying operators like "Dave" in the corporate environment, Babiak not only brought into focus the methods by which psychopaths infiltrate and ascend the corporate ladder of success, he shattered previous illusions about what was and wasn't possible for psychopaths to accomplish. Many in the industry thought psychopaths wouldn't be able to succeed in business. They thought that psychopaths' bullying and narcissistic behaviors would be off-putting to potential hirers, and that their abuse and manipulations would inevitably lead to failure within the company. In fact, the so-called "experts" couldn't have been more wrong. They seemed to have neglected the uncanny ability of psychopaths to present an image of extreme normality, and even excellence, to their victims. And that is what we are to them: victims, potential "marks", suckers.

Against the prevailing beliefs and hubristic assumptions, Babiak found that psychopaths were readily accepted into the management ranks of prominent companies, and were even experiencing career success.¹ Their extreme narcissism was apparently mistaken as a "positive leadership trait", and the murky morality and internal chaos typical of the mergers, acquisitions, and takeover environment seemed perfect for their type. Not only would they do well under the pressure - not having the ability to feel fear or stress - the potential personal rewards were too great to refuse, for the business and the psychopath. As Babiak put it, "the lack of specific knowledge about what constitutes psychopathic manipulation and deceit among businesspeople was the corporate con's key to success."² Ironically, the very traits sought by corporations and other powerful entities are often the ones that do bring about their inevitable demise (witness the fall of Bernie Madoff, Enron, Nazism). And they are the traits we have been conditioned to see as ideal. For example, through the "rose-colored glasses" of those who do not know better, conning and manipulative become "persuasive" and "influential"; coldhearted behavior and lack of remorse become "action oriented" and the "ability to make hard decisions"; fearless and impulsive become "courageous" and "high-energy"; lack of emotions becomes "strong" and "controls emotions".³

In short, when we call a psychopath "persuasive and courageous" we should actually be charging a commission for doing the psychopath's PR for him, because that is all it is. It's like selling bleach and calling it holy water! On paper these qualities may look promising, but as coworkers, and especially as bosses, psychopaths are domineering, intimidating, frightening, and dangerous. Quick to take credit for others' work and to hire and fire employees on a whim, they tolerate only praise, are extremely short-sighted, and genuinely lack the insight that makes a good leader. One psychopath, described by Babiak, was "unwilling and perhaps unable to acknowledge that any of her decisions could have any negative consequences for the business."⁴ Even when leading superficially "normal" lives, psychopaths still cause problems in ways that fly under the radar of the law - economically, psychologically, emotionally.

How do they do it? By analyzing corporate cons, Babiak discovered the basic methods psychopaths use to operate in a hierarchical, corporate environment. But no matter in what environment the psychopath finds himself - a romantic relationship, a corporate strategy, a planned heist, an election campaign, a political coup ... the list of possibilities is endless - he uses the same, three-phase "Assessment - Manipulation - Abandonment" routine on his victims. In the first phase, the psychopath assesses the value of his "ally" and potential patsy - what he or she can do to further the psychopath's aims. Psychopaths are experts at identifying and pushing others' "buttons", their "likes and dislikes, motives, needs, weak spots, and vulnerabilities."⁵ Others' strengths are utilized and weaknesses exploited. Next, the psychopath uses messages carefully crafted for the specific target, utilizing information gathered in the Assessment Phase. He then adapts his manipulation to accommodate any new feedback from the target in order to maintain full control. As Babiak and Hare write:

They often make use of the fact that for many people the content of the message is less important than the way it is delivered. A confident, aggressive delivery style - often larded with jargon, clichés, and flowery phrases - makes up for the lack of substance and sincerity in their interactions with others ... they are masters of impression management; their insight into the psyche of others combined with a superficial - but convincing - verbal fluency allows them to change their personas skillfully as it suits the situation and their game plan. They are known for their ability to don many masks, change "who they are" depending upon the person with whom they are interacting, and make themselves appear likable to their intended victim.⁶

Sounds an awful lot like the work done by intelligence agencies, doesn't it?

Psychopaths also use a variety of manipulation techniques, for example, gaslighting. When told a lie often enough, and with seemingly absolute certainty, normal people tend to doubt their own perceptions. "Amazingly, more often than not, victims will eventually come to doubt their own knowledge of the truth and change their own views to believe what the psychopath tells them rather than what they know to be true."⁷ In this phase, the psychopath ruthlessly exploits his victims, using them to acquire money, position, control, and power. When a person has ceased to be useful, they are discarded in the final, Abandonment Phase. Loyal to none, this often has devastating effects on those who were deceived by the psychopath's façade of lies and "good intentions". Whether a spouse who has been drained emotionally, an old woman whose bank account has been emptied, or a "friend" whose connections have finally paid off, the psychopath inevitably throws them out and moves on to the next target.

Within the corporate world, Babiak identified a more elaborate five-phase variation of this dynamic. First, psychopaths use their charm and gift of gab to feign leadership qualities, thus gaining entry into the company. Once hired, they identify possible targets and rivals among coworkers - from talented but naïve peers whose work can be stolen to secretaries who control access to important executives - in the assessment phase. Babiak describes the four groups of people that psychopaths employ in their games. Pawns are ordinary coworkers who have "informal power and influence", and who are deftly manipulated by psychopaths into wanting - or needing - to support and please them. Patrons are high-level individuals with formal power. By developing rapport with patrons, psychopaths secure protection from the attacks of lower-level workers who see through the mask. Patsies are pawns who have lost their usefulness and have thus been discarded. Lastly, organizational police are individuals like auditors, security, and human resources staff who are more experienced in detecting manipulation in the work place.⁸

In the third, manipulation phase, psychopaths create and maintain their "psychopathic fiction", setting up positive disinformation about themselves and negative disinformation about others using the network of pawns, patrons and "useful idiots" that they create. By creating conflict among the other employees, they divert attention away from themselves, preferring to operate behind the scenes and above the storms that they create and manage. In the confrontation phase, psychopaths discard rivals and pawns (now patsies), frequently using techniques of character assassination, framing, and other tactics using so-called "facts" that deviate significantly from the truth. They get away with this by relying on the highly placed patrons with whom they are now cozy. And in the final, ascension phase, they ultimately unseat their patrons, taking for themselves the positions and prestige of those who once supported them.⁹ In the psychopath's game, people exist solely to be manipulated, and he pursues his aims at any cost, even if that means backstabbing everyone who supported him in his ascent.

Interest in corporate psychopaths has risen significantly in the last decade, largely due to the publicity of corporate frauds and scandals like Enron in 2001 and Madoff in 2009. Oddly, given the number of political scandals and their striking similarities to their corporate cousins, the idea that psychopaths infiltrate governments - with disastrous results - has yet to receive the attention it deserves. In fact, the political massacres that are occurring today - the dark aspects of human history that both fascinate and repel us - and the corruption that inevitably leads to them, have their roots in the presence of psychopaths in positions of power and influence.

Psychopaths can be found in prison for all sorts of violent and predatory crimes against individuals, including white-collar crime. University programs, academic societies, conferences, professional textbooks and manuals, all exist to get a handle on the problem and aid in prevention of these sorts of crimes. But what about their role in crimes against humanity? I haven't been able to find one academic paper examining the role of psychopathy in politics, whether in so-called democratic systems or overt dictatorships. Just as researchers at first doubted the ability of psychopaths to succeed in business, and the problem remained unexamined, the problem of psychopathy in politics remains steadfastly ignored. Political scientists refuse to look at psychopathy, and psychopathy experts refuse to look at politics. The results of such blindness are evident in history - and the present - for anyone to see. Genocides, dictatorships, state-sanctioned torture, "war without end", political assassinations, death squads, corruption, blackmail, spying on civilians, "state secrets", illegal "espionage", and on and on.

The situation is odd, considering the fact that experts have made it increasingly clear that psychopaths can occupy prominent positions in all professions: law, business, medicine, psychology, academia, military, entertainment, law enforcement, even - and perhaps especially - politics. As Babiak and Hare explain it, "Many [psychopaths] do manage to graduate from college or obtain professional credentials, but in most cases it is less through hard work and dedication than through cheating, getting others to do their work, and generally 'working the system.'"¹⁰

Bernard Madoff

The Madoff case offers a great many implications concerning not only the Wall Street in general, but the political scene as well. Interestingly, the list of his victims lacks any US banking names or other serious institutional investors, who normally require the type of information that Madoff's firm kept off limits. In fact, the business was suspected as a fraud for nearly a decade, with evidence of misconduct from as far back as the 70s. And yet serious investigations were held off until his sons turned him in. Many knew for years, but remained silent, allowing Madoff to continue the scheme that would ruin thousands. Conveniently, Madoff's niece was married to a senior compliance official at the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2005 and Madoff himself bragged about his close relationships with SEC regulators. Madoff's firm had close ties to Washington's lawmakers and regulators, with Madoff sitting on the board of the Securities Industry Association, and Madoff's brother sitting on the board of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA). In Creswell's and Thomas's piece for the New York Times, a close associate of Madoff's relates that "He once mentioned to me that he spent one-third of his time in Washington in the early 1990s, late 1980s."

Not only was Madoff's fund a perfect money laundry for potential co-conspirators, he was protected by his close ties to the "organizational police" of the SEC and his domineering control over his employees. "Nobody left because they could never get another job that paid as well as this one. Some people, after his arrest, speculated that it was kind of like hush money; nobody asked any questions because the Madoffs were nice, protective, generous." (The Daily Beast) According to Babiak and Hare, "The level and intensity of psychopathic intimidation often keeps those who have been abused from coming forward."¹¹ By controlling underlings and wooing regulators, Madoff protected himself from exposure. It was only after his arrogance got the better of him that it all fell apart.

But Madoff is only a symptom of a systemic problem that affects humanity from the level of interpersonal relationships to heights of political control. The "garden-variety psychopath" maneuvers for control and power in a relatively limited sphere of influence: from his immediate family to the wider group of coworkers and chance victims. Criminally versatile psychopaths move from victim to victim, acquiring a tally of women emotionally and physically destroyed; elderly people bilked of their life savings; charities robbed of their donations; children tortured and mutilated. The corporate psychopath not only affects everyone in the company's staff; his misdeeds have the potential to ruin the lives of thousands. But the political psychopath, in a position of the utmost prestige, power, and influence, has the potential to rule - and ruin - empires. His influence reaches level of society and his decisions have the potential to affect billions.

Notes

Babiak (2007, 413).
Babiak & Hare (2006, xiii).
Babiak (2007, 419).
Babiak & Hare (2006, 12).
Babiak & Hare (2006, 37).
Babiak & Hare (2006, 38).
Babiak & Hare (2006, 51).
Babiak (2007, 417).
Babiak (2007, 418 - 20).
Babiak & Hare (2006, 47).
Babiak & Hare (2006, 52).

Israeli Settler Syndrome? Barry Chamish Barely Groks Ponerology

2010-04-30T00:14:00.001+02:00

Sott.net editors Sott.net April 27, 2010 Investigative journalist and critic of the Israeli government Barry Chamish has recently published a strange and telling review of Andrew Lobaczewski's Political Ponerology. Chamish is best known for his UFO research in Israel and theory that Israel's former minister of Foreign Affairs, Shimon Peres, and the Shin Bet were responsible for the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, not the crazed Israeli "settler" Yigal Amir. He has also been highly critical of Ariel Sharon, the psychopath behind the massacre of Sabra and Shatila. And we at SOTT grew to appreciate his, as it appeared in the past, keen insight into the true nature of Israeli leaders. But his recent review has caused the editors at SOTT.net to ponder some interesting questions. Chamish begins his piece, "The Two Faces of Political Ponerology", with a poorly researched statement:

Ponerology is a term invented by the author and it means the study of the nature of political evil.

While Lobaczewki did invent the term pathocracy to describe a system of government saturated with psychological deviants, he didn't invent the term ponerology. Actually, as Lobaczewski makes clear in his book, ponerology is a theological term that means the study of evil. Lobaczewski adopted it for his own purposes in studying the nature of political evil, thus the title of his book: Political Ponerology. Chamish then writes:

As we shall see, the editor got hold of the rights to an important work and exploited it to push her own agenda, one which has nothing to do with the book itself.

In fact, there are two editors who contributed to the publication of Lobaczewski's book: Laura Knight-Jadczyk and Henry See. So it is odd that Chamish decided to single out one of the editors and direct all criticism in her direction. But does the editors' agenda really have nothing to do with the book? More on that below.

In the editor's introduction, we get a first example of what will give the work unnecessary tension:
(Imagine) a case where the subject spent his childhood blowing up frogs with firecrackers. It is widely known that George W. Bush did this.
From this humble beginning, look what we get!

So was Chamish a supporter of Bush? Or can he just not see the pathology behind Bush's behaviors? If a modern leader shows evidence of psychopathy, which Bush does, it is relevant, especially considering that the book was written in 1984 and is thus significantly out-of-date in regards to the world political scene. We have to wonder why a criticism of George Bush would so irk Chamish? Could it be because of the direction in which his various handlers lead us? We get closer to the point in Chamish's next criticism:

Now watch the editor change the view of the author, who has sheepishly noted that among nations, Jews have the highest rate of schizoids:
The famous writings attributed to the Learned Elders Of Zion begin with a typically schizoidal declaration...We have to remember that 97% of Jews do not manifest this anomaly, and that it also appears among all European nations. 101
To which the editor corrects the author, noting that:
101. The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion is now known to have been a hoaxed attribution to Jews. However, the contents are clearly not hoaxed ideas since a reasonable assessment of the events of the United States over the past fifty years or so gives ample evidence of their application in order to bring about the current Neoconservative administration.
That's setting the author straight. And it just keeps getting worse.

There are several things worth pointing out in the above. First of all, Lobaczewski isn't that sheepish when it comes to pointing out the high rate of schizoidia among Jews. That ellipsis quoted by Chamish contains the following sentence:

The nineteenth century, especially its latter half, appears to have been a time of exceptional activity on the part of schizoidal individuals, often but not always of Jewish descent. (p. 131)

And further on, Lobaczewski writes :

Appearing in its highest frequency among Jews, and due to the exceptional tenacity and persistent nature that characterizes this pathology, it [schizoidia] marks their whole civilization and world view and activity. (p. 231)

So, here we have Lobaczewski noting that Jewish culture is highly schizoidal, largely because of the tenacious and persistent nature of the relatively high number of Jewish schizoids, as well as pointing out that the Protocols are a highly shizoidal and pathocratic document. The editors' footnote points out that the ideas therein are obviously used by pathocrats, and against their own citizens. SOTT.net is left wondering how exactly this is a contradiction or correction? The only contradiction seems to be that Lobaczewski does not note that the document was a hoax designed to falsely associate pathocratic ideals with a "Jewish conspiracy", while the editors do. Chamish continues:

If I was the author, I'd be furious with the editor. She has taken his masterwork and added thoughts outside his worldview.

This is an assumption, and probably evidence that Chamish's reaction is caused by his own discomfort with the parallels. Does he really disagree that the Bush administration was stacked with deviants, or is there something else that bothers him? Chamish seems to be missing a most important point here; it is not that the editors of Political Ponerology have "taken his masterwork and added thoughts outside of [Lobacwezski's] worldview", but that the editors have taken the time and effort to apply Lobacwezski's incisive analysis of pathocracy to the post 9/11 world! A world that is almost unrecognizable compared to the world we all lived in in 1984, a world where the pathocrats now reign supreme. In short, the thesis of Political Ponerology is more relevant today than ever before and the editors have simply pointed that out, with relevant examples. Chamish continues:

And as we shall see, it only gets more intrusive. She has concluded that Bush Jr. is a frog-murdering psychopath. So what does that make his predecessor William Clinton, who used women non-stop and lied about it every time? Or of the current President who has lied about his entire academic past and very likely, even his birth nation?

This is flawed reasoning, and a straw man argument. Chamish suggestively implies that because the editors point out Bush's psychopathy, they must think that Clinton or Obama are untainted by such pathology. Of course, he might be surprised to learn SOTT's view on Clinton, Obama, and many other presidents and world leaders. The nature of politics means there's a good chance you don't get to such heights of power without the ruthlessness typical of psychopaths and other related personality disorders.

[Lobaczewski] Millions of people ponder the dilemma of whether such a ruler could not modify his convictions somewhat and relinquish his dream of conquering the world. 107 [Editors' note] 107. This is especially true in the present day when the leaders and parliaments of many other countries, unhappy with the Bush Neocon administration, think elections in the US will set things right.

Again, how could he disagree? This is the administration that ushered in an endless, global War on Terror for Yahweh's sake! As a person who cares deeply about the fate of his people, we would think that Chamish would be as appalled as we are!

And now, the inevitable punchline, Israel:

Aha! It appears we've found the thorn in Chamish's side. In fact, it's the punchline to his editorial, and shows what's eating him.

As if Arab suicide bombers aren't psychopathic

Again with the straw men! First of all, the comment wasn't about suicide bombers, so Chamish shouldn't presume to know the editors' opinion on such. Second, it's highly unlikely that a psychopath would become a suicide bomber. Psychopaths are all about self-preservation, not blowing themselves up for some "cause". Psychopaths are more likely to collaborate with an occupying force and subjugate their own people, or to stage "suicide bombings" as justification for military operations and further oppression of the alleged suicide bomber's fellow countrymen.

or the belief that Jesus was a Palestinian

According to the story, "Jesus" was born in Palestine, was he not?

or that there was an ancient Palestinian nation doesn't fall into the same disease. Name a Palestinian national leader before Arafat.

Strangely, Chamish includes a hidden justification of nationalism in this remark. As if a region needs a "leader" to justify itself. As Shlomo Sand shows in his work The Invention of the Jewish People, the idea of nationalism (and especially a "Jewish Nation") is a recent phenomenon, and one politically inspired. In short, an exercise in pathocracy.

Strangely, the editor betrays her own knowledge of the broader truth in another footnote:
79. In Muslim cultures, where, if a woman is raped, it is the duty of her male family members to kill her to wipe away the shame from the family name. This act is pathological and criminal.
Whereas, the author does not mention Israel even once.

This is not so strange. The editors of SOTT.net have repeatedly made clear that no culture is entirely free of ponerogenic influences. As for the fact that Lobaczewski does not mention Israel specifically, surely this cannot be taken as evidence that Israel should be excluded from such criticism. After all, as we have already quoted, Lobaczewski did state that "it [schizoidia] marks their whole civilization and world view and activity." How can that not apply to Israel? So what is eating Chamish so much that he writes a review of the book's editorial comments instead of the book itself, or even the possible applications of its content to countries like the US and Israel? Perhaps Chamish's apparent discomfort is caused by his own unconscious recognition of the parallels between the crimes of Bush administration and hideous war crimes perpetuated by a country and culture he loves and defends so much. One of our SOTT contributors personally visited Chamish back in the days when he was still interested in UFO research and after the publication of his book Who killed Yitzhak Rabin. He gave the impression of being over-emotional and somewhat naive, not thinking twice about credibility of documents that were "kindly" left on his doorstep by an anonymous source. In other words, a person who is easily manipulated, similar to the case of John Kaminsky. But he was the only conspiracy theorist Israel had, and granted, he did some good research on Israeli UFO phenomena, so we gave him the benefit of the doubt. (Notably, a couple of years after our contributor's first meeting with Chamish, when asked if he would like to reopen UFO research, he said that he doesn't touch this topic anymore because it damages his political interests and books.) This changed when we noticed how his newsletter became more and more positively biased toward the views of radical Jewish settlers. In fact, this makes us wonder about his entire Rabin theory, since according to the official version, Rabin was killed by a settler. While he did very good research and detailed very well how Israeli leaders are the biggest threat the Israeli people, his information was always used to fit his personal belief, that Jewish settlers are in fact Israel's saviors (not illegal invaders, mind you) and they are the ones that evil Israeli leaders are trying to get rid off. How's that for specious reasoning? See the following, for example:

Barry Chamish is originally from Canada. His upbringing was not Shomer Shabbos, but it was full of Jewish identity, Ahavas Yisroel, and a love for Eretz Yisroel. He left his native country and moved to Eretz Yisroel to serve in the IDF. He felt it was his responsibility. He was not comfortable having other young men defending his land, unless he was doing his part. In Eretz Yisroel he married and began raising a family. To his disillusionment, he kept encountering corrupt and fraudulent behavior. It bothered him. He wanted things in the Holy Land to be Holy, to be righteous and to be just. This desire to live safely in Eretz Yisroel - to rid the land of rampant corruption - is the passion that has led Chamish to be the leader in pursuing the truth underlying political sting operations, that benefit a few and are destroying the country. By doing so he has exposed himself to all forms of rejection, marginalization and humiliation. Despite all this, his research is slowly reaching the masses. After the second attempt on his life, and it was a close call, he has returned to America where he continues his efforts to save the Jews in Eretz Yisroel. One of his ten books is called Save Israel.[...] The Rabin Assassination and the Goldstein 'Massacre' are two events highly responsible for initiating and confirming the wide spread attitude that settlers are illegal squatters and are a hindrance to the peace process. This demonization of settlers is an integral part of the establishment of a terrorist state in the heartland of Eretz Yisroel. Passion to get rid of settlers distracts the public from impending dangers. Uncovering the cover-up stories around these events will uncover corruption in powerful circles in Eretz Yisroel. If public opinion could be awakened, these corrupt circles could brought to stand trial and face justice, and the 'corruption process' supporting the Peace Process would be aborted.

Or this:

I am embarking on a speaking tour of North America. The topic of my lectures is: The Dirty War Against The Settlers. Within, I will prove that the ultimate goal the Gaza withdrawal is the dismemberment by pieces of Israel. I will name the foreigners who devised the Roadmap and I will show their end game plan through their own words. They have oft-stated their intentions, they meant every word of their declarations and they are very busy making chaos throughout the Middle East at this very moment. Lebanon and Syria have now joined Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel in the bloody remaking of the Middle East in their image, and that will finally be a Middle East without borders controlled from abroad. The Gush Katif surrender is stage one in the latest campaign to diminish and eventually eliminate Israel as a sovereign entity. Instead Israel will vanish into a Middle East bloc of nations which will someday meld with the EU, NAFTA etc. into one happy and obedient world parliament. The hard part is getting people to part with their heritage, history and land and agree to this entirely new order. The Gush Katif sellout required an undeclared war against the Jewish residents of Gaza which utilized every psychological trick to wear down a people's will until they give in to a scheme that will spell disaster for them and their nation.

So it appears that Chamish took the editors' comments personally, not only because of his emotional investment in what he refuses to see as a criminal enterprise (i.e. the ethnic cleansing and occupation of Palestine), but probably also because deep inside he can recognize in his friends and even his own behaviors those descriptions made by Lobaczewski. That's why he mentioned that he doesn't think he fits the psychopath description, and perhaps why Ponerology only "almost" changed his political outlook. It took shots at his sacred cow. Chamish might have benefited by taking Lobaczewski's warning more seriously:

In the course of the above-mentioned inquiries, each researcher went through his own period of crisis and frustration when it became evident that the concepts he had trusted thus far proved to be inapplicable. . . . Surviving this period thus required an acceptance of and a respect for a feeling of nescience truly worthy of a philosopher. Every science is born in an area uninhabited by popular imaginings that must be overcome and left behind. In this case, however, the procedure had to be exceptionally radical; we had to venture into any area indicated by systematic analysis of the facts we observed and experienced from within a full-blown condition of macrosocial evil, guided by the light of the requirements of scientific methodology. This had to be upheld in spite of the difficulties caused by extraordinary outside conditions and by our own human personalities. . . . A certain impression of injustice may be conveyed due to the need to leave behind a significant portion of our prior conceptualizations, the feeling that our natural world view is inapplicable, and the expendability of some emotional entanglements. I therefore ask my readers to accept these disturbing feelings in the spirit of the love of knowledge and its redeeming values. (pp. 40, 41)

Lobaczewski's comments on schizoidia, which no doubt influences many Jews' emotional beliefs on "Eretz Yisroel", also provide food for thought. According to Lobaczewski, schizoids are hypersensitive, distrustful, assume extreme positions, are "eager to retaliate for minor offenses", are "sometimes eccentric and odd", "easily become involved in activities which are ostensibly moral, but which actually inflict damage upon themselves and others", are "typically pessimistic regarding human nature", and "easily turn into tools of intrigue in the hands of clever and unscrupulous individuals." (pp. 87-88)

Schizoid characters aim to impose their own conceptual world upon other people or social groups, using relatively controlled pathological egotism and the exceptional tenacity derived from their persistent nature. They are thus eventually able to overpower another individual's personality, which causes the latter's behavior to turn desperately illogical. . . . They are psychological loners who then begin to feel better in some human organization, wherein they become zealots for some ideology, religious bigots, materialists, or adherents of an ideology with satanic features. (pp. 130-131)

In short, Lobaczewski's description of a schizoid sounds like a prototypical Israeli settler! It doesn't look to us that Chamish is a conscious agent. He doesn't appear in control of his emotions and his idealism and naivete make him easily manipulated. He cares so deeply (and shall we say blindly and not objectively) for the Israeli image, that he was offended when his cherished Israel was disparagingly mentioned. What is really sad is that he does appear as a caring person, at least for the fate of 'his people'. And he appears ignorant of the fact that the true danger lies in denying the horrible deeds and the entirely fraudulent nature of an Israeli entity, including illegal settlers. He sees the corruption of the Israeli leaders, but holds on to his mythical notions of Greater Israel. Shattering deep-seated illusions is not an easy thing, but at the moment it appears to be the best solution. Israel is on a fast track toward self destruction, and aims to take the rest of the world with it. Time is rapidly running out, and the only hope Israeli people of conscience have is to take a good and long look at themselves, their culture and their ideals. Doing so they will realize that deception and lies don't start with particular parties or leaders, but they go back in history to when a myth of a Jewish people and Israel as sovereign country were created. A myth that keeps good and kind Jewish people isolated, distrustful and eager to retaliate. They have become their own worst enemy, and none but themselves can help them snap out of this nightmare. Therefore, it deeply saddens us to see that people like Chamish, who go to great lengths to protect their people from injustice or danger, fail to see that their own illusions and sacred cows affect their actions and prevent them from seeing how what they are doing only adds to further harm. Indeed, the road to hell is paved with good intentions!

Ponerology 101: The Psychopath's Mask of Sanity

2010-03-18T00:58:00.006+01:00

A Wall Street Psychopath?

In 1960 Bernie Madoff founded his Wall Street firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. As chairman of its Board of Directors until his arrest in December of 2008, Madoff saw his firm (and himself) rise to prominence on Wall Street, developing the technology that became NASDAQ, the first and largest electronic stock exchange in America, in the process. A multimillionaire with over $800-million in shared assets with his wife and high school sweetheart, Ruth Alpern, Madoff was well-regarded as a financial mastermind and prolific philanthropist. He exuded an aura of wealth, confidence, and connections, and many trusted him as a pillar of the community. Sounds like a great guy, huh?

His humanitarian image was supported by his work for various nonprofit groups like the American Jewish Congress and Yeshiva University in New York, the various commissions and boards on which he sat, and the millions he donated to educational, political, cultural, and medical causes. As his firm's website made clear at the time (it has now been removed): "Clients know that Bernard Madoff has a personal interest in maintaining the unblemished record of value, fair-dealing, and high ethical standards that has always been the firm's hallmark." It's funny how things change with a little perspective and a pattern emerges only in retrospect. It wasn't until December of 2008 that the public became aware that this "personal interest" was anything but one of integrity, and that image stopped being taken for reality.

In a discussion with Condé Nast Portfolio Editor in Chief Joanne Lipman, Holocaust survivor, Nobel laureate and Madoff victim Elie Wiesel said: "I remember that it was a myth that he created around him... that everything was so special, so unique, that it had to be secret. It was like a mystical mythology that nobody could understand... He gave the impression that maybe 100 people belonged to the club. Now we know thousands of them were cheated by him."¹

In what has been described as the largest investor fraud ever committed by single person, Madoff defrauded thousands of investors out of just under $65-billion in an elaborate Ponzi scheme, paying returns to investors from money paid by other investors, not actual profits. By moving funds in such a way, Madoff created an image of money that rivaled his own as a man of good character. The illusion of consistent, high returns, lured thousands into a deal too good to be true, offered by a man too good to be true. According to the media portrayal of events, Madoff described the investment fund as "one big lie" to his sons, who promptly informed the authorities. Madoff was arrested the next day and his assets were frozen (as were those of his wife and sons later on). In the aftermath, Madoff had succeeded in ruining the lives of thousands, driving some victims to suicide. He ended up pleading guilty to eleven counts of fraud, money laundering, and perjury, among others. Although Madoff ran his companies with an iron fist and claimed he was solely responsible for defrauding clients, investigators were unsatisfied that one person alone could hide fraud on such a massive scale for so long. Subsequent investigations have so far placed six former associates under criminal investigation,² while multiple lawsuits are underway against Ruth Madoff and her sons.³

So how did he pull it off? Jerry Reisman, a prominent New York lawyer, described Madoff as "utterly charming. He was a master at meeting people and creating this aura. People looked at him as a superhero."⁴ Even when he was scrambling to secure funds to keep up his dead-end fraud, associates noticed no signs of stress. In a 2007 roundtable conversation, viewable on Youtube⁵, Madoff makes some telling comments. Speaking about modern exchange firms, Madoff coolly says, "By and large, in today's regulatory environment, it's virtually impossible to violate rules. This is something that the public really doesn't understand... It's impossible for a violation to go undetected. Certainly not for a considerable amount of time." This coming from a man who had been doing just that for years and possibly decades! No wonder, given his propensity for deceit, that Madoff and his firm were extremely secretive, finding ways of keeping their illegal activities hidden, for example, refusing to provide clients online access to their accounts and ordering employees - against regulations - to delete email after it had been printed on paper, as reported by Lucinda Franks in her piece for The Daily Beast.⁶

Contrary to his illustrious public persona, in an article by Mark Seal for Vanity Fair⁷, various family friends and insiders present an image of Madoff as a cold-hearted control freak who not only exploited strangers, but also those closest to him. He cultivated ostensibly close friendships with the late Norman F. Levy and philanthropist Carl J. Shapiro while robbing them blind in the process. Madoff spoke of Levy as his "mentor of 40 years" and always deferred to him. In return, Levy considered Madoff his "surrogate son, a member of his family." Carmen Dell'Orefice, Levy's then-girlfriend, remembers, "He always did so much for Norman's comfort in the smallest details." She described Madoff and his wife as quiet and inconspicuous and expressed the cognitive dissonance often experienced by victims of conmen like Madoff when the truth behind the image is finally revealed: "I am accepting that what I was experiencing was a projection of a person who wasn't there... If I didn't take all the pictures I took all those years, I would say 'Carmen, you're delusional'." Levy's son Francis said his father believed in Madoff: "If there's one honorable person," he said, "it's Bernie." Joseph Kavanu, a former law school peer of Madoff's shared similar disbelief with Julie Creswell and Landon Thomas Jr. in their piece for the New York Times: "It doesn't make sense... I cannot take the Bernie I knew and turn him into the Bernie we're hearing about 24/7. It doesn't compute." In reality, there were two Madoffs: the carefully cultivated image of the successful businessman and philanthropist and the reality: a ruthless and remorseless criminal who operated behind a mask of sanity, success, and humanitarianism.

One source described to Seal how Madoff ruled his two sons through "tough love and fear. People were afraid of Bernie. He wielded his influence. They were afraid of his temper." Madoff also ruled his office with an iron fist, controlling the work environment down to the smallest detail. He was obsessed with order and control. A family friend related, "There was a lot of arrogance in that family. Bernie would talk to people who were as rich as he was, but he didn't want to be bothered with the little people." Another insider said, "He was imperial, above it all. If he didn't like the conversation, he would just get up and walk away. It was 'I'm Bernie Madoff and you're not.'" Another said, "Peter [Madoff's brother] is much more religious, more even-keeled. Bernie is more cocky, arrogant, a showman. Shrewd like a fox."

From the descriptions of those who knew and interacted with him, a picture emerges of Bernie Madoff as arrogant, superficially charming, glib, manipulative, deceitful, emotionally cold, domineering, and heartless, in short, all the hallmarks of a successful psychopath. Unsurprisingly, journalists and experts alike have suggested exactly that. J. Reid Meloy, forensic psychologist and author of The Psychopathic Mind, Florida forensic psychologist Phil Heller, and former FBI agent Gregg McCrary, have all said so in print^{8 & 9}, and several prominent researchers including Adrian Raine suggested the same at the 2009 conference for the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy in New Orleans. In what I'll show over the course of this series to be typical psychopathic fashion, Madoff fought his way to the top, wooed the regulators, and built his fortune by conning those he saw as worthless, even screwing over his so-called friends. However, as Meloy told Creswell and Thomas, "the Achilles' heel of the psychopath is his sense of impunity. That is, eventually, what will bring him down."

What Is Psychopathy?

Until the publication of Hervey Cleckley's landmark book The Mask of Sanity in 1941 (along with its subsequent editions), there wasn't much agreement on what exactly psychopathy is. The term had come to describe individuals whose emotional life and social behavior were abnormal, but whose intellectual capacities were undisturbed. In contrast to psychotics whose grip on reality is clearly disturbed, as in paranoid schizophrenia, psychopaths are completely sane. They have a firm grip on reality, can carry on a conversation, and often appear more normal than normal. But at the same time, while talking to you about the weather or the economy, they may be deciding the best way to con you out of your life savings or perhaps get you to a secluded location where they can rape or murder you.

However, while psychopaths may be intellectually aware that their actions grossly violate the limits of normal human behavior, they lack the emotional engagement with others that normally acts as an inhibitor of anti-social acts, like calculated aggression, intentional intimidation, pathological lying and emotional manipulation. In the course of his (or her, as probably one in four psychopaths is female) development, the psychopath's inability to feel and thus identify with the emotions of others blocks the development of a "moral sense" that allows normal individuals to care for others and treat them like thinking and feeling beings. Psychopaths just don't care. To them people are things, objects. When they're no longer useful they can be discarded or destroyed without a second thought.

The jarring disconnect between the absolutely normal (if not more than normal) face with which the psychopath greets the world, and the utterly unfathomable irrationality and inhumanity of his actions has led to their being called "wolves in sheep's clothing" and "snakes in suits". Cleckley coined the phrase "mask of sanity" to illustrate the disparity between the image of normality and the psychopath's essential abnormality. While the label has come to be almost strictly associated with serial killers, rapists and arch-villains, Cleckley was quick to point out that the vast majority of psychopaths are not violent, and "only a small proportion of typical psychopaths are likely to be found in penal institutions, since the typical patient ... is not likely to commit major crimes that result in long prison terms."¹⁰ Their actions are antisocial in that they violate the almost universally agreed upon "rules" of social behavior. Of course, this often takes the form of crime, but many psychopaths operate successfully within the boundaries of the law, wreaking havoc interpersonally or monetarily.

After years of frequently encountering psychopaths in clinical practice and witnessing the immense suffering they inflict upon those who happen to fall within their sphere of influence, Cleckley identified several universal traits. On the one hand psychopaths are superficially charming and of good intelligence. They lack any delusions or other signs of irrational thinking and are free of nervousness and anxiety. In other words, they present an image of good "mental health" that can disarm even the most experienced judge of human character. However, a close analysis of their life history and interactions with others reveals some striking deficits beneath the mask. Psychopaths are also notoriously insincere, liberally inserting lies and innuendo into their talkative stream that usually go unnoticed. They are usually impulsive, acting on whims, and seeming to live entirely in the present, unhindered by concerns for past failures and future consequences. As such they often show remarkably poor judgment and an inability to learn from punishments or the threat of future ones (psychopathic criminals have the highest recidivism rates). They are unreliable, often moving from job to job and city to city, finding new victims and living parasitically off of others' kindness and naiveté. They also have a pathological sense of entitlement. The center of their own universe, they are incapable of love, lack any sense of remorse or shame, and show a general poverty of any deep emotional life. This is the core feature, shared equally by all psychopaths: the inability to feel empathy.

While Cleckley did much to bring light on the issue, in the preface to the fifth and final edition of his book he described "an almost universal conspiracy of evasion" of the topic of psychopathy among North American researchers and clinicians. While institutions exist to deal with illness and crime, when it comes to psychopathy "no measure is taken at all ... nothing exists specifically designed to meet a major and obvious pathologic situation."¹¹ Psychopathy arguably accounts for a grossly disproportionate amount of damage to society. Cleckley was convinced that the first step to deal with this immense problem was to "focus general interest" and "promote awareness of its tremendous importance."¹² Thankfully, significant contributions have been made in recent years towards such a goal by writers like Robert Hare and Paul Babiak, clinicians Martha Stout and Sandra Brown, and popular media portrayals such as the documentaries, The Corporation and I, Psychopath. Unfortunately, even with these efforts, public knowledge about psychopathy still falls far short of ideal, the "conspiracy of evasion" persists, and the problem rages on. For a disorder affecting more people than schizophrenia,¹³ and causing exponentially more harm to society, the fact that psychopathy is not a generally understood concept is alarming.

Robert D. Hare, Professor Emeritus of psychology at the University of British Columbia, wrote a book in 1970 summarizing the research available at the time. Since then, he has been at the forefront of psychopathy research, developing the first valid measure of criminal psychopathy, the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R), and writing two bestsellers on the subject: Without Conscience in 1993 and Snakes in Suits (co-authored with Paul Babiak) in 2006. Working with criminal populations, Hare further refined Cleckley's list of psychopathic traits for the PCL-R, settling on twenty characteristics of a prototypical psychopath.

Whereas Cleckley described his psychopathic patients as "carr[ying] disaster lightly in each hand" and "not deeply vicious",¹⁴ Hare's Without Conscience presents a much more malevolent look into the mind of the criminal psychopath. As he puts it: "Psychopaths have what it takes to defraud and bilk others: They are fast-talking, charming, self-assured, at ease in social situations, cool under pressure, unfazed by the possibility of being found out, and totally ruthless. ... Psychopaths are generally well satisfied with themselves and with their inner landscape, bleak as it may seem to outside observers."¹⁵ They see empathy, remorse, and a sense of responsibility - all the qualities usually considered as the epitome of goodness and humanity - as signs of weakness to be exploited; laws and social rules as inconvenient restrictions on their freedom; and antisocial behavior as deliberate "nonconformity", a refusal to "program" by society's artificial standards. Love, kindness, guilt, and altruism strike the psychopath as comical and childish naiveties for "bleeding hearts", and psychopathic serial murderer Ted Bundy even called guilt "an illusion... a kind of social-control mechanism."¹⁶ While they may convincingly profess to love in the most romantic and meaningful verbosity to their partners, these displays are soon replaced with domination and exploitation, as Sandra Brown shows in her 2009 book Women Who Love Psychopaths.

Psychopaths see normal life as dull and boring, a dog-eat-dog world in which potential enemies (i.e. you and me) are to be manipulated, and aggression used as a tool to establish their superiority and take what is rightfully theirs - to satisfy their grandiose sense of entitlement. Naturally, in a universe of one, Hare observes, "Obligations and commitments mean nothing to psychopaths. ... They do not honor formal or implied commitments to people, organizations, or principles."¹⁷ They may very well ask, "What's so bad about being articulate, self-confident, living a fast-paced life on the edge and in the now, and looking out for number one?" And in our decaying society, many would not disagree. But what the psychopath sees as a carefree life of excitement and entitlement usually amounts to little more than the pursuit of immediate moments of pleasure and feelings of power, whether fleeting or more long-lasting.

With Hare's work, the psychopathic "mask" of sanity and normality acquires a sinister and Machiavellian tone. That's because psychopaths are conscious of being different. They see normal people as inferiors - "others" - to be used and discarded when they are no longer needed. But like a predator among its prey, psychopaths must disguise themselves to evade detection. If they made their motives known, others would be horrified. So, from an early age they learn to fit in by copying normal human reactions and behaviors. They learn when it is appropriate to cry, show grief, guilt, concern, and love. They learn all the facial expressions, common phrases, and social cues for these emotions they do not feel. And as such, they deceive others with false displays of sadness, grief, guilt, concern, and love, and they manipulate our reactions to get what they want. That's how a psychopath is able to con you out of money by playing on your sense of pity and compassion. Normal people, unaware of the differences between psychopaths and themselves, assume that these displays of emotion are evidence of actual emotion, and so the psychopath succeeds in going unnoticed, like a wolf in sheep's clothing. "[T]he truly talented ones have raised their ability to charm people to that of an art, priding themselves on their ability to present a fictional self to others that is convincing, taken at face value, and difficult to penetrate."¹⁸

This "practice" at appearing human is expertly portrayed in Mary Astor's novel The Incredible Charlie Carewe, which Cleckley recommended "should be read not only by every psychiatrist but also by every physician" because of its remarkably accurate portrayal of a psychopath.¹⁹ This "act" is a matter of survival for a psychopath, lest their "inhumanity" be discovered. After all, most people do not react positively to a child or adult who potentially can, as Hare put it, "torture and mutilate [a human being] with about the same sense of concern that we feel when we carve a turkey."²⁰

Psychopaths also keep up their "psychopathic fiction" by being charming conversationalists. They expertly tell "unlikely but convincing" stories about themselves, easily blending truth with lies. Not only can they lie effortlessly, they are completely unfazed when caught in a lie. They simply rework their story, to the befuddlement of those who know the truth. They may feign remorse, but are equally skilled at rationalizing their behavior, often portraying themselves as the victims (and blaming the real victims). One female psychopath complained that no one cared about how she felt, having lost both her children. In fact, she was the one who had murdered them. In cases like this, the mask slips ever so slightly, as when the less intelligent psychopath attempts to use emotional concepts he cannot understand. One inmate told Hare, "Yeah, sure, I feel remorse [for the crime]." However, he didn't "feel bad inside about it."²¹

Even their violent outbursts of "rage" are carefully controlled displays. One relatively self-aware psychopath revealed, "There are emotions - a whole spectrum of them - that I know only through words, through reading and in my immature imagination. I can imagine I feel these emotions (know, therefore, what they are), but I do not."²² Another, confused when asked how he felt, was asked about the physical sensations of emotion and responded, "Of course! I'm not a robot. I really get pumped up when I have sex or when I get into a fight."²³ Capable of only the most primal body-based feelings, the psychopath has no intense emotions to be in control of; any display of such is an act with the intent to manipulate.

As to the causes of this disturbing disorder, researchers are now confident that, contrary to the once common belief that psychopathy must be caused by childhood trauma, there is a substantial genetic and biological basis for psychopathy. In his 2007 update on the last twenty years of psychopathy research, Robert Hare comments: "I might note that the early results from behavioral genetics research are consistent with the evolutionary psychology view that psychopathy is less a result of a neurobiological defect than a heritable, adaptive life-strategy."²⁴ Or, as he put it in Without Conscience:

I think [childhood experiences] play an important role in shaping what nature has provided [i.e. "a profound inability to experience empathy and the complete range of emotions"]. Social factors and parenting practices influence the way the disorder develops and is expressed in behavior. Thus, an individual with a mix of psychopathic personality traits who grows up in a stable family and has access to positive social and educational resources might become a con artist or white-collar criminal, or perhaps a somewhat shady entrepreneur, politician, or professional. Another individual, with much the same personality traits but from a deprived and disturbed background, might become a drifter, mercenary, or violent criminal. ... One implication of this view for the criminal justice system is that the quality of family life has much less influence on the antisocial behaviors of psychopaths than it does on the behavior of most people.²⁵

In line with this understanding, psychopathy can be detected at an early age. By the age of 10 or 12, most psychopaths exhibit serious behavioral problems like persistent lying, cheating, theft, fire setting, truancy, class disruption, substance abuse, vandalism, violence, bullying, running away, precocious sexuality, cruelty to animals. One psychopath smiled when he reminisced to Hare about tying puppies to a rail to use their heads for baseball-batting practice.²⁶ However, the exact causes (and possible steps to prevent it in infancy and early childhood) are still unknown. Children predisposed to psychopathy who do not show obvious signs later in life probably become successful at avoiding detection because of such factors as increased intelligence and abilities to better plan and control their behavior. While the vast majority of research has been conducted on prison populations, because of the relative ease of research opportunities, the concept of the successful psychopath (whether that means he is not criminal or simply doesn't get caught) is a relatively recent topic of interest for specialists and is not yet clearly defined or publicly understood, just as the term "psychopath" was in the early twentieth century.

It is these psychopaths - the ones who avoid detection - who become successful and ruthless politicians and government insiders, as was the case with Hermann Göring and Lavrentiy Beria (who will be discussed in future columns) and is probably the case with contemporary politicians like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, American ex-Vice President Dick Cheney, and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. These men achieve the heights of power, and they are dangerous.

Notes

A transcript of the talk is available here
"Ex-Madoff Operations Director Arrested by FBI", Reuters, February 25, 2010
"Participants in the Madoff investment scandal," Wikipedia, accessed March 17, 2010
Tim Shipman, "Bernard Madoff: how did he get away with it for so long?", telegraph.co.uk, December 20, 2008
YouTube video
Lucinda Franks, "Madoff Employee Breaks Silence", The Daily Beast, March 19, 2009
Mark Seal, "Madoff's World", Vanity Fair, April 2009
Julie Creswell and Landon Thomas Jr., "The Talented Mr. Madoff", New York Times, January 24, 2009
Katy Brace, "Psychologist calls Madoff a psychopath", wptv.com, January 29, 2009
Cleckley, H. 1988 [1941], The Mask of Sanity (Augusta, Georgia: Emily S. Cleckley), 19, PDF available here
Ibid, viii
Ibid, ix
Goldner et al. (2002) put the prevalence of schizophrenia at 0.55% of the general population, and while accurate studies of psychopathy in the general population have yet to be done, recently a few limited studies show that the low limit for psychopathy is 0.6% (Coid et al., 2009). Some estimates go many times higher than that figure, factoring in successful psychopaths.
Cleckley, 33
Hare, R. D. 1999 [1995], Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of Psychopaths Among Us (New York: Guilford Press), 121, 195
Ibid, 41
Ibid, 63
Babiak, P. & Hare, R. D. 2006, Snakes In Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work (New York: ReganBooks), 50
Cleckley, 326
Hare, 45
Ibid, 41
Ibid, 52-3
Ibid, 54
Hare, R. D. 2007, 'Forty Years Aren't Enough: Recollections, Prognostications, and Random Musings,' In Herve, H., and Yuille, J. C. (eds) The Psychopath: Theory, Research, and Practice, pp. 3 - 28 (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), 14. However, recent studies have shown distinct differences in the brain functioning of psychopaths when compared to normal individuals. See Oakley, B. 2007, Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books).
Hare (1999), 173 - 4
Ibid, 66 - 7

Evidence of Pathology in Power

2010-03-11T15:22:00.005+01:00

The following items have been brought to our attention over the past few days.

A Detention Bill You Ought to Read More Carefully Marc Ambinder

Why is the national security community treating the "Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010," introduced by Sens. John McCain and Joseph Lieberman on Thursday as a standard proposal, as a simple response to the administration's choices in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt? A close reading of the bill suggests it would allow the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens without trial indefinitely in the U.S. based on suspected activity. Read the bill here, and then read the summarized points after the jump. According to the summary, the bill sets out a comprehensive policy for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected enemy belligerents who are believed to have engaged in hostilities against the United States by requiring these individuals to be held in military custody, interrogated for their intelligence value and not provided with a Miranda warning.

(There is no distinction between U.S. persons--visa holders or citizens--and non-U.S. persons.)

It would require these "belligerents" to be coded as "high-value detainee[s]" to be held in military custody and interrogated for their intelligence value by a High-Value Detainee Interrogation Team established by the president. (The H.I.G., of course, was established to bring a sophisticated interrogation capacity to the federal justice system.)

Any suspected unprivileged enemy belligerents considered a "high-value detainee" shall not be provided with a Miranda warning.

The bill asks the President to determine criteria for designating an individual as a "high-value detainee" if he/she: (1) poses a threat of an attack on civilians or civilian facilities within the U.S. or U.S. facilities abroad; (2) poses a threat to U.S. military personnel or U.S. military facilities; (3) potential intelligence value; (4) is a member of al Qaeda or a terrorist group affiliated with al Qaeda or (5) such other matters as the President considers appropriate. The President must submit the regulations and guidance to the appropriate committees of Congress no later than 60 days after enactment.

To the extent possible, the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Team must make a preliminary determination whether the detainee is an unprivileged enemy belligerent within 48 hours of taking detainee into custody.

The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Team must submit its determination to the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General after consultation with the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General make a final determination and report the determination to the President and the appropriate committees of Congress. In the case of any disagreement between the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General, the President will make the determination.

Note that the president himself doesn't get to make the call.

And:

9/11 TRUTHERS LOCKED UP FOR LIFE UNDER NEW US LAW

It seems that the Pathocracy that is taking over the world is proceeding according to the diagnostic outline presented byŁobaczewski in Political Ponerology. To wit:

"Any war waged by a pathocratic nation has two fronts, the internal and the external. The internal front is more important for the leaders and the governing elite... Pathocracy has other internal reasons for pursuing expansionism through the use of all means possible. As long... as that “other” world governed by the systems of normal man exists, it inducts into the non-pathological majority a certain sense of direction. The non-pathological majority of the country’s population will never stop dreaming of the reinstatement of the normal man’s system in any possible form. This majority will never stop watching other countries, waiting for the opportune moment; its attention and power must therefore be distracted from this purpose, and the masses must be “educated” and channeled in the direction of imperialist strivings. This goal must be pursued doggedly so that everyone knows what is being fought for and in whose name harsh discipline and poverty must be endured. The latter factor – creating conditions of poverty and hardship - effectively limits the possibility of “subversive” activities on the part of the society of normal people. ...

"The ideology must, of course, furnish a corresponding justification for this alleged right to conquer the world and must therefore be properly elaborated. Expansionism is derived from the very nature of pathocracy, not from ideology, but this fact must be masked by ideology. Whenever this phenomenon has been witnessed in history, imperialism was always its most demonstrative quality. ...

"We need to understand the nature of the macrosocial phenomenon as well as that basic relationship and controversy between the pathological system and those areas of science which describe psychological and psychopathological phenomena. Otherwise, we cannot become fully conscious of the reasons for such a government’s long published behavior.

"A normal person’s actions and reactions, his ideas and moral criteria, all too often strike abnormal individuals as abnormal. For if a person with some psychological deviations considers himself normal, which is of course significantly easier if he possesses authority, then he would consider a normal person different and therefore abnormal, whether in reality or as a result of conversive thinking. That explains why such people’s government shall always have the tendency to treat any dissidents as “mentally abnormal”.

"Operations such as driving a normal person into psychological illness and the use of psychiatric institutions for this purpose take place in many countries in which such institutions exist. Contemporary legislation binding upon normal man’s countries is not based upon an adequate understanding of the psychology of such behavior, and thus does not constitute a sufficient preventive measure against it.

"Within the categories of a normal psychological world view, the motivations for such behavior were variously understood and described: personal and family accounts, property matters, intent to discredit a witness’ testimony, and even political motivations. Such defamatory suggestions are used particularly often by individuals who are themselves not entirely normal, whose behavior has driven someone to a nervous breakdown or to violent protest. Among hysterics, such behavior tends to be a projection onto other people of one’s own self-critical associations. A normal person strikes a psychopath as a naive, smart-alecky believer in barely comprehensible theories; calling him “crazy” is not all that far away. ...

"What happens as a rule is that the idea of driving someone into mental illness issues from minds with various aberrations and psychological defects.... any system in which the abuse of psychiatry for allegedly political reasons has become a common phenomenon should be examined in the light of similar psychological criteria extrapolated onto the macrosocial scale. Any person rebelling internally against a governmental system, which shall always strike him as foreign and difficult to understand, and who is unable to hide this well enough, shall thus easily be designated by the representatives of said government as “mentally abnormal”, someone who should submit to psychiatric treatment. A scientifically and morally degenerate psychiatrist becomes a tool easily used for this purpose. ...

"The abuse of psychiatry for purposes we already know thus derives from the very nature of pathocracy as a macrosocial psychopathological phenomenon. After all, that very area of knowledge and treatment must first be degraded to prevent it from jeopardizing the system itself by pronouncing a dramatic diagnosis, and must then be used as an expedient tool in the hands of the authorities. ...

"The pathocracy feels increasingly threatened by this area whenever the medical and psychological sciences make progress. After all, not only can these sciences knock the weapon of psychological conquest right out of its hands; they can even strike at its very nature, and from inside the empire, at that.

"A specific perception of these matters therefore bids the pathocracy to be “ideationally alert” in this area. This also explains why anyone who is both too knowledgeable in this area and too far outside the immediate reach of such authorities should be accused of anything that can be trumped up, including psychological abnormality.

So, we see where it is going and we can pretty well figure out how it is going to end... Psychopaths are incapable of really learning from history, but maybe this time the normies could figure this out and avoid violence?

Video Review of Ponerology

2010-02-28T22:45:00.003+01:00

Political Ponerology by Andrew M. Lobaczewski

Intolerable Cruelty: Cover Stories and a Culture of Lies

2010-02-09T22:23:00.024+01:00

There was this boy I sent to the 'lectric chair at Huntsville Hill here a while back. My arrest and my testimony. He killt a fourteen-year-old girl. Papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there wasn't any passion to it. Told me that he'd been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he'd do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. "Be there in about fifteen minutes". I don't know what to make of that. I sure don't. The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But, I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say, "O.K., I'll be part of this world."
--Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men

Intolerable Cruelty: Cover Stories and a Culture of Lies by Harrison Koehli

Over the last decades the Coen brothers have repeatedly proven themselves to be masters of portraying the tragicomic realities of American life. From the quirky and trivial to the depths of moral failings and utter depravity, their films often focus on the criminal mind and its varied psychological roots. They get to the heart of human weakness, the tempting lure of a "free lunch", and the inscrutable darkness of the psychopathic mind. Most notable of recent years was Javier Bardem's rendition of Anton Chigurh, the psychopathic killer from the Coens' Academy Award-winning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel, No Country for Old Men. In many ways recalling the Coens' earlier work, Fargo, the audience experiences the film's drama through the eyes and conscience of a county Sheriff in West Texas, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). We share his confusion and pained desire to understand the senseless violence against which he struggles every day.

As I mentioned in my last piece, Pathocracy: Brave New World or 1984, "while the creation of a literary world (or a film one, in this case) can teach us many things, it cannot provide a way out. For that we need accurate knowledge." Because if we go out in this world without that knowledge, as Tommy Lee Jones' character says above, we put our souls at hazard. We must have at least some understanding of what we are to face. That said, the main inspiration for this piece comes from what is probably the Coens' worst movie, Intolerable Cruelty, starring George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones as a pair of shallow, greedy shells of human beings in a comedy of Hollywood infidelity and monetarily inspired marital maneuverings. Clooney plays a highly successful divorce lawyer, schooled in the practice of winning arguments by any means necessary. Zeta-Jones plays a conniving, cold-hearted seductress out to catch, and then divorce, a rich husband for half his money. Both show a stunning facility to lie about anything. Naturally, they end up together, and while the film itself is unremarkable it does have something to say about the highly ponerized qualities of Western culture.

Take this line from Clooney's character, Miles Massey, delivered to a cheating wife whose husband caught her in the act, and who, of course wants "fair" representation:

Hmm... Hmm... Yes, your husband did show remarkable foresight in taking those pictures. And, yes, absent a swimming pool, the presence of a pool man would appear to be suspicious. But, Madam, who is the real victim here? Let me suggest to you the following. Your husband, who on a prior occasion had slapped you, beat you...

While the Coens humorously push this tendency to create one's reality out of thin air throughout the movie, sometimes to a ridiculous degree, the line pretty much captures the modus operandi of the film's characters, and of the entire Western legal system, incidentally, thus brining me to my point. A culture without a popular understanding of psychopathy face a very real danger from the very thing of which they are unaware. A culture without a popular understanding of psychopathy and whose citizens demonstrate an almost inborn tendency to lie, to create personal fictions and to even come to believe those fictions, all to present themselves in a better light, are hurtling so fast towards a self-destruction that is perhaps unavoidable at this point.

There is a phrase to describe the fictions that people like Miles Massey are so adept at conjuring. They are called cover stories, plausible stories made to put the facts in a light completely at odds with the reality of a situation. The motivations are simple. In a legal system it goes as follows: how can I put my client, who is undoubtedly guilty, in a good enough light that the judge or jury will be convinced that they are innocent? How can I lie well enough to convince them that it is my opponent that is lying? How can I make my client's victim look like the guilty party? In other words, it's all about perception-management, creating a version of the "truth" that benefits the client, and playing with "facts" in such a way that the word loses all meaning.

The notion of the cover story maps our reality so well that if we trace its roots we are led directly to the roots of the human condition, that murky territory plumbed with such insight by the best philosophers, mystics, novelists, and poets. From the self-deceptions of everyday life to the "big lies" told scammers who call themselves leaders, most of our notions about life are often little more than cover stories to hide a truth we refuse to see, and often a reality that is too scary to imagine.

So what is the root of the cover story? First and foremost, it has to do with the universal human capacity to dissociate. Not necessarily a bad thing, it is because of this special quality of consciousness that we are even able to function as living, thinking, feeling beings in the world of experience. Dissociation allows us to regulate reality, to focus attention, to not be distracted by the endless expanse of sensory signals barraging our awareness at any given moment. Dissociation is also what makes a harsh reality bearable. We dissociate consciousness during abuse to mute the pain of the ultimate betrayal. We shunt away unnecessary data in a situation where our lives are threatened and narrow focus is essential to our very survival. But this tendency is easily misused. When we become to used to its calming effects, we run the risk of self-deception that places us in danger of even greater harms.

Psychologist and author John F. Schumaker lists the types of dissociative processes in his book The Corruption of Reality:

This evolutionary strategy [i.e. preserving the many advantages of elevated consciousness while simultaneously reducing the emotional impact of that same adaptation] came in the form of the capacity of the brain to dissociate itself from its own data. More specifically, the human brain gained the ability to (a) selectively perceive its environment, (b) selectively process information, (c) selectively store memories, (d) selectively disengage from already stored memories, and (e) selectively replace dissociated data with more "user-friendly" data.

Lobaczewski called these processes subconscious selection and substitution of information, examples of which are easily furnished by playing variations on the theme of the suave divorce lawyer's client. Here's the scenario: the woman's husband comes home early, and is somewhat perplexed to see a pool man's van parked on the driveway of his spacious West Hollywood home, a home by they way, without the pool required to make such services required in the first place. But, the anticipation of "the big game" he's five minutes late for, or perhaps the succulent appeal of the buckwheat sandwich awaiting him in the fridge, causes him to push this paradoxical perception from the purview of his mind's eye. He's got more important things to focus on, after all. He grabs the sandwich, watches the game, and the pool guy slips out on sock-footed feet. That's (a) selective perception. It's not quite denial because the relevant information hasn't been processed well enough to even lead to a conclusion worth denying.

Selective processing (b) is a bit more involved, one example of which is denial, the subconscious blocking of uncomfortable conclusions. In this scenario our unlucky protagonist may arrive home just in time to see the pool guy get in his van and drive away. He manages to free up enough brain power to say to himself, "Wait a minute..." upon seeing the incongruously placed van. For a moment he recalls past instances of the lingering smell of unfamiliar men's cologne on his wife, but he simply shakes his head, "That's ridiculous." On the threshold of entering through the door of truth, he backs away at the last second. And while he blocks the pain of the truth temporarily, he also blocks the benefits gained from passing through that door and the temporary pain it brings.

Subconscious selection of premises occurs a bit earlier in the chain of reasoning. If our minds were police officers, subconscious selection would be like tampering with evidence, that evidence being the data, perceptions, and memories we use to come to logical conclusions about the world, others, and ourselves. It occurs when our mind deletes and represses just that piece of information which was responsible for arriving at the uncomfortable conclusion. We come to a conclusion which is ostensibly and logically correct, but it's "not even wrong" because the premises we use are garbage. In (c) and (d) our memories are simply the data we manipulate. Some memories don't get stored in the first place, others are blocked via trauma, and some simply don't come to mind because otherwise we might be forced to face an uncomfortable truth.

Now, let's say our hypothetical husband enters his home, after seeing the parked van, to find his wife and the much younger pool guy emerge from upstairs with nervous glances and quick breath. They're surprised, but quick on their feet, with a cover story ready, to boot. "Bob, have you met Pool Guy Jim? He's an old friend, and was going door-to-door offering his services when he serendipitously came to our door! We were just catching up."

What a relief! Gone are the slight recollections of manly fragrances (that's selection of premises), now but wisps in the air of the husband's comforted mental landscape. Ignored is the fact that they emerged from what was undoubtedly the bedroom upstairs, an odd place to catch up with a casual acquaintance. It's a plausible story after all, especially in their neighborhood, and Sue was always popular. And, most importantly, it's much more comfortable to believe than the alternative.

The cover story was a success, and the conclusion (she's not cheating) was made possible thanks to the bogus data his wife provided, backed up by Bob's own spurious thinking processes. That's substitution of premises, the most complex process of the bunch, or as Schumaker puts it (e) selectively replacing dissociated data with more "user-friendly" data. Lobaczewski notes that substitution is actually a semi-conscious process, most often helped along collectively, in conversation. It may even occur in one's mental dialogue, "What? Is she cheating? That might explain that cologne... What's that? An old friend? What a relief!" And practiced with enough dedication to cheap imitations of truth, it can become a nasty habit.

And by this vicious cycle of deception we are led back to our main point. When a society develops the habit of twisting the truth, malicious abuse of the truth becomes easy and prevalent. Western culture is asphyxiated by it. What starts as an evolutionarily adaptive brain mechanism becomes a shortcut by which we avoid facing uncomfortable views of ourselves and others. And as the process moves from more automatic and unconscious (denial) to more increasingly conscious (substitution), our thinking becomes increasingly pathological and downright wrong, making us vulnerable to those who take advantage of this face-saving tendency. Lobaczewski writes:

Those people who use conversive operations too often for the purpose of finding convenient conclusions, or constructing some cunning paralogistic or paramoralistic statements, eventually begin to undertake such behavior for ever more trivial reasons, losing the capacity for conscious control over their thought process altogether. This necessarily leads to behavior errors which must be paid for by others as well as themselves.

People who have lost their psychological hygiene and capacity of proper thought along this road also lose their natural critical faculties with regard to the statements and behavior of individuals whose abnormal thought processes were formed on a substratum of pathological anomalies, whether inherited or acquired. Hypocrites stop differentiating between pathological and normal individuals, thus opening an “infection entry” for the ponerologic role of pathological factors. (Political Ponerology, p. 108)

In other words, when we lie to ourselves, we're easy prey for psychopaths who lie to us. We may identify with our nationality to the extent that we filter out negative thoughts about our leaders and our conduct with other countries. We may ignore the atrocities committed in our names. Even worse, we may take the bait offered by our leaders and substitute important data, reaching pseudo-logical and pseudo-moral opinions. "They deserve it, because they hate us." "That massacre wasn't actually a massacre. They fired first after all, and we were only defending ourselves." "The guy had weapons of mass destruction." "They're the ones that want to kill us, we're just making sure they'll never get the chance."

We buy the cover story, hook, line, and sinker. On a cultural level, the process is called myth-making. We create grand histories, semi-mythical founders of nations, charter documents that sustain the false belief that we are something we are not. The process is described at length in several books. Burton Mack's latest, Myth and the Christian Nation, is a good start and Shlomo Sand's bestseller The Invention of the Jewish People, is a great case study of these processes in action. It is by the cultural substitution of data that we come to see ourselves as a people at odds with another people. We twist the facts available to come to mistaken conclusions about who the real enemy of humanity is, and who is responsible for the propagation and manipulation of myths in the first place: psychopaths.

Take the Underwear Bomber. The available facts make it screamingly clear that the kid was a patsy of Western Intelligence Agencies (ahem! Mossad!), but even with most of the pertinent facts and clues published in the mainstream news, it is only the alternative news websites, like sott.net, who come to the logical conclusion: . Everyone else blindly promotes the ludicrous cover story. As the Detroit News reported:

Allowing Adbulmutallab to keep the visa increased chances federal investigators would be able to get closer to apprehending the terror network he is accused of working with, "rather than simply knocking out one soldier in that effort."

Oh, really. And Mossad just happened to have unchecked access and control over security at the airport in question. And the well dressed American with some major pull, who the FBI denied existed for weeks, was just a rich uncle! A quote from Dr. Sidney MacDonald Baker is fitting here:

Empiricists are those of us who believe what we see and rationalists are those who see what we believe. (Detoxification and Healing, p. 50)

An empiricist looks at the data and sees that Adbulmutallab had help, most likely from the very intelligence agencies tasked with "preventing" terrorism. A rationalist operates with several beliefs that distort logical thought processes. "This must be because of this." Or "This must be the explanation." Once this limited thinking becomes habitual, it's common to hear, "I simply don't believe it." "I just can't believe that our government and military would do something like that." But with the proper framework, with accurate data about psychopathology and human psychology, harsh realities are not rejected offhand. Watch this video on the Israeli assault on Gaza in January of 2009 for one such unveiling of truth. It is stark, horrifying, and free of the convoluted mental manuevers used to reject harsh realities.

Last year's critically acclaimed movie about the Iraq war, The Hurt Locker, provides good material for testing these thought processes. The film follows the operations of an elite U.S. army bomb squad as they handle IEDs, car bombs, "body bombs", and investigate the scenes of exploded materials. Its fairly realistic look and narrative (no mention of Blackwater or its antics, however) is probably because it was written and produced by Mark Boal, who spent time embedded with a real bomb squad in Iraq.

The script reveals only what the characters see and experience and for those who are paying attention, the absence of any real explanation for the violence throughout the film is telling. Bombs are discovered, but never their creators. Stashes are found, but never their owners. A young boy is found murdered, a bomb sewn into his abdomen. In fact, except for a sole sniper and his companions, the so-called "enemy" is never seen, only assumed to be real. This is understandable, given the fact that armed resistance is a given in any occupied territory. In fact, the only villains seen in the film are Americans, like the commander who suggestively orders the murder of an Iraqi man with a survivable wound, or the British (SAS?) bounty hunters dressed in Arab clothing who the main characters encounter in the desert.

The noticeable absence of any real "terrorist network" is particularly evident in two scenes. In the first, the bomb squad is called to investigate a suicide bombing in the Green Zone. The team Sergeant is the only one to point out that it was probably a remote detonation. In the second scene, some soldiers encounter a "suicide bomber" with a bomb vest. While the majority of the near-hysterical soldiers want to shoot the man, it's revealed that he was forced against his will, by parties unknown, to wear the vest and approach the soldiers.

In fact, while the film doesn't reveal it, the truth is that the vast majority, if not all, of the "suicide bombings" in Iraq are orchestrated and engineered by U.S., U.K., and Israeli intelligence to give the illusion of a real enemy, thus justifying an extended occupation and a profitable War Without End against a fabled enemy. The thought patterns concerning the war in Iraq, whether of the soldiers themselves or the American and world public, are built on the false premise that there is an enemy. We naturally "fill in the blanks", but only after the key pieces of data have been provided to complete our collective substitution of data. As a result, the absence of a real enemy isn't noticed.

For those readers used to being fed on the unwholesome chaff of the mainstream media rags, these statements may come as a shock. Scoffs of disbelief and the occasional outburst of "Ridiculous!" accompanied by frantic gesticulations are to be expected. But in a society where entire professions rely on people deliberately manipulating the truth in order to "win" an argument, where policing serves politics and quotas and not care and protection of citizens, where people are so used to lying that it is considered normal and perfectly acceptable, is such a reality really so hard to believe?

When we consider some facts that, taken separately, are relatively easy to believe, the situation becomes clearer. Psychopaths thrive in corporations and politics (witness Madoff and Blagojevich), and the violent ones are considered the worst of the worst criminals (most serial killers are psychopaths). And with unlimited black budgets, cannon fodder soldiers, crafty intelligence agencies with generations of experience making murder look like an accident, political psychopaths, simply by virtue of the scope of their influence, are potentially the most dangerous. When you combine these facts with the existence of a public that has lost its ability to think, patently false cover stories find fertile ground in the whitewashed pastures of the Western mind, where truth is buried and artifice taken for authenticity.

Pathocracy: Brave New World or 1984?

2010-01-28T23:43:00.005+01:00

by Harrison Koehli

To those who have grown up in countries considered "free", the vision of George Orwell's 1984 strikes us as a threatening nightmare, a warning of a not-so-distant future where freedom is but a word. Like seed perpetually scorched before it even has a chance to take root, all that it means to be human is actively degraded, denied, and punished at even the smallest display.

The vision of the Party's rule, its inhumanity and utter ruthlessness and mendacity frighten us and we hope it will never come to pass here. But we have no clue how to prevent it, and just like the people in Orwell's fictional world, we are perpetually caught off guard when it comes to pass in our own lives. One day we wake up and realize we are living in a nightmare, and we have been for a long time. "It'll never happen here" and "We've taken every precaution" become "When did it happen" and "How did we get to this point?" This perennial sickness takes hold of a nation and we are at its mercy.

Like any good novelist, Orwell tells a story and he makes it real. For that sheltered portion of humankind who have had the fortune of growing up without the threat of being arrested and tortured for daring to disagree with their inept leaders, the book provides a vicarious experience without which we are left vulnerable to a disease we know nothing about. But while the creation of a literary world can teach us many things, it cannot provide a way out. For that we need accurate knowledge.

1984 is a fictionalized account of pathocracy, as defined in Political Ponerology, and the reason it scares us is because it is completely outside our normal frame of reference. We have the same reaction to news accounts of senseless violence. Parents murdered by their 14-year-old son because they asked him to do his chores, after which he played video games. An 18-year-old woman disappears and is later found dead, beaten to death and wrapped in plastic. A trucker and his son admit to torturing a 20-year-old man in their basement, suffocating him and wrapping wire around his neck. A young boy is kidnapped, tortured, executed, and his organs harvested by forces of occupation before his body is returned to his parents.

The common theme, of course, is psychopathy. Psychopaths lack conscience and hunger for the darkness. They are sadistic in a way which, for us, is near impossible to fathom. The evil which they bring is not unintended, as when we realize only after the fact that our actions have caused another harm. Instead, their lives are spent feeding on the misery that they inflict on others. Whether the sexual sadism of serial rapist-torturer, or the subtle draining of a "toxic co-worker" who uses you, abuses you, and wears you down until you lose all grip on reality. We may even ask in desperation, "Why are you doing this to me?" The psychopath simply smirks. And in a world ruled by psychopaths we ask, "Why are you doing this to us?"

1984 frightens us because psychopathy frightens us. The key feature of a pathocracy is that psychopaths influence the economic, military, political, and cultural agenda of a nation. Like chameleons, they mask themselves in the features of their surroundings. Within those parameters they stage dramas, creating a new reality according to their desires. And this reality is one of deception, terror, ruthless expansion and complete heartlessness.

In the corporate world a psychopath gets ahead by destroying the careers of those who stand in his way, exploiting the work of others, starting rumors, creating conflicts. He always benefits from these, of course. A competitor falls out of favor. The psychopath is credited with the work of another. The bosses take his word over another who sees that he is a snake. An "enemy" finds herself without a job, blamed for something she didn't do. All the while the psychopath stage-manages. The man behind the curtain.

In politics, the pawns are the people, the chessboard is the world stage. Strategic countries are invaded because of the "threat" they pose. This threat is 0f course created by the psychopaths in charge using the vast resources of intelligence services. "Terrorist threats" are fabricated. Atrocities are committed and then pinned on imaginary "terrorist groups". Orwell had it right. Emmanuel Goldstein was a creation of the Party. The bombings blamed on him and his followers were committed by the Party itself for the purpose of keeping the population afraid and compliant.

Today, torture photos are "leaked" not to expose State brutality, but to show the people what happens to those who oppose the system. After all, you're either "with us" or you're "with the terrorists". That's some option. Dissent is conflated with terrorism. Terrorists are tortured and assassinated. The President of the United States even sanctions the assassination of U.S. citizens labeled "terrorists". "They are part of they enemy", after all. Some respond with shock that a country could willingly kill its own citizens, as if killing another country's citizens is any more human. Of course, the two options are equally atrocious, but to a psychopath, what's the difference? If you have a conscience, you are a threat. Your leaders hold you in as much disdain as any other "bleeding heart".

So what can be done? The first step is awareness of the reality of what goes on behind the scenes of political power: the workings of intelligence agencies, counterterrorism, foreign policy groups, etc. This can only be understood by applying ponerology, which identifies the source of the problem, and the exact social and psychological processes which push along the global pathocratic agenda. Psychopaths have been running the show for a long time, and they've been doing so because we haven't known what to look for. Commies, terrorists, Nazis, anarchists... All red herrings.

The true enemy hides in plain sight.

Narcissism Support Resources: Sam Vaknin: Diagnosed Psychopath

2009-04-30T14:15:00.000+02:00

Narcissism Support Resources: Sam Vaknin: Diagnosed Psychopath

Psychopathy: Continuous or Categorical?

2008-08-04T01:25:00.004+02:00

I've been thinking about the "continuous vs categorical" debate in relation to psychopathy. I just started reading a book called "Thinking about Psychopaths and Psychopathy" edited by Ellsworth Lapham Fersch. It's a collection of questions and answers from seminars he's given on psychopathy, with contributions by various academics. Based on Fersch's introduction, it looks is promising and insightful. However, I wonder if Fersch really "gets it". While he talks about the importance of psychopathy quite eloquently and identifies the problems inherent in the conflation of psychopathy with antisocial personality disorder, there is a question and answer in the first chapter that is puzzling. (It is possible one of his colleagues answered this question, as the individual author is not listed for each section.)

In this question on the debate between psychopathy as either categorical (i.e. you either have it or you don't, like Turner's syndrome) or continuous (the extreme end of traits shared by everyone, e.g. someone with very high intelligence), he firmly takes the "continuous" side. However, I get the impression that he does so without understanding the crux of the matter, the implications of such a position.

He concludes that psychopathy is continuous because the PCL-R gives results on a spectrum (0 being "least psychopathic", 40 being "most psychopathic"), and because people can score low on the checklist (and thus, technically, have "psychopathic" traits), that people are only "more or less" psychopathic. In other words, because non-psychopaths can score more than 0 on the test and not be considered psychopaths, Fersch concludes that psychopaths only have extreme degrees of more or less "normal" human traits.

I think he is correct, but not for the reasons he would argue, because his argument is fairly weak and susceptible to distortion. First of all, the fact that the PCL-R measures a spectrum of traits does NOT mean that it is measuring a disorder which is itself a "spectrum". The fact that there is no definite "cut off point" on the scale does NOT mean that psychopathy is not categorical. It could just as well mean that we do not yet have the means of identifying an exact cut off point, or that there could be two distinct taxons (normal and psychopathic) that can overlap on the scale.

It is also possible that psychopathy is both categorical and continuous, i.e. that a person is either a psychopath or not, and that those who are psychopaths show a spectrum of indicators of psychopathy (theoretically, all psychopaths would have a majority, perhaps all, of the traits listed in the PCL-R, but they may not be detectable by known personal history and interview).

A thought experiment will make this clearer. Imagine that scientists create a robotic human with artificial intelligence, which will then be tested using a variation on the Turing test, which we will call the "human" test. Questions are asked to the robot based on a checklist of human traits. A normal human, responding to the test, will receive a score of 30 to 40, while primitive forms of AI will receive a low score. Severely mentally ill people may score in the mid-range.

Let us say that our new robot scores 26. It would be fallacious to say that, because the test is continuous, that this implies that the robot is "more or less" human. All it shows is that it shares traits with a human, and these traits may be mere programs. They are algorithms, not experiences with syntactical content. They only give the appearance of humanity.

In this example, one is either a human or not. A human will score mid- to high-range on on the scale, depending on various factors. A non-human will score low- to mid-range. In addition to this categorical difference (human or not), there is a spectrum of how "close" to human a non-human can test. Some robots will test 0 on the scale, while those with complex programming may score fairly high. However, this just shows the limits of the method of testing. Conclusions about the nature of the phenomenon cannot be discerned from measurements of a limited test.

So how do we account for seemingly psychopathic traits in non-psychopaths? I think this can be explained fairly easily. Lobaczewski describes psychopathy as a deficit, NOT an excess. That is, psychopathy is a LACK of certain essential human qualities, and this lack gives rise to the peculiarities of psychopathy. In the case of psychopathy, this lack is syntonic (social) emotions: those responsible for bonding and empathy. Because of this lack, psychopaths see people as objects and a lifestyle develops that makes use of these objects (parasitic, manipulative). Lacking "other-centered" emotions, psychopaths are wholly self-centered (traits which normal humans DO possess, in varying strengths when compared to their other-centered emotions), and thus grandiose, not able to take responsibility. They are unable to feel guilt.

The LACK is what categorically makes them psychopaths, the cause which gives rise to their psychopathic traits WHICH NORMAL HUMANS CAN SHARE. Dabrowski, a contemporary of Lobaczewski, and his concept of multilevelness of emotional functions, provides the necessary context. Normal humanity DOES exist on a spectrum. Many exist with a low level of emotional development, what Dabrowski called primary integration, thus they can be extremely self-centered and even possess many psychopathic traits. As such, normal people can have very poorly developed "other-centered" emotions (and thus the possibility to develop them), the difference being that psychopaths LACK these emotions.

It is also possible that non-psychopathic individuals can originally have such a potential for growth, yet at some point in their lives acquire brain damage that severely alters their emotions and behavior. They can also "learn" psychopathic behaviors. These people may even achieve the same score on the PCL-R as a real psychopath, but people like Fersch don't seem to see this possibility: that the PCL-R is not a perfect measure of psychopathy. It is very effective, but it is not 100% accurate. So the fact that the scale is continuous does NOT imply that the disorder is continuous.

That said, it seems that other factors may be responsible for the continuity WITHIN psychopathy, for example, hippocampus size. Successful psychopaths are perhaps just better at masking their traits, so that an interview and personal history would not necessarily reveal these traits. If we had omniscience, perhaps we would be able to make an accurate diagnosis for these cases, but a mid-range PCL-R score does not necessarily mean that a person is not psychopathic. It could simply be the result of insufficient data.

So it is important to make a distinction between the continuous nature of the PCL-R as an instrument of measurement, and and the nature of psychopathy as a categorical disorder, or taxon. To ignore this distinction is dangerous. As Lobaczewski related from his experience in Poland, pathocratic authorities muddy the waters of psychopathy research so as to evade detection. They do this by creating a "catch-all" phrase for criminal deviance. We have seen this phenomenon in American psychiatry where the official DSM-IV only recognizes "antisocial personality disorder", a catchall label that can apply to both psychopaths and non-psychpoaths. Psychopathy is NOT included in the DSM-IV, and is thus not officially recognized as a valid personality disorder by the Manual.

This might have been enough in pathocracies such as in the Soviet empire, thus providing "cover" for psychopaths who do not fit the diagnosis of "antisocial personality disorder". However, the concept of psychopathy, thanks to Cleckley and Hare, seems too well established in the scientific literature to be so easily embargoed. Thus, a new tactic was needed. Viewing psychopathy as simply an "extreme" form of normality robs us of any real understanding of the disorder.

The entire makeup of a psychopath is qualitatively different from a normal human: their thinking, their worldview, their behavior. It is this "otherness" that is responsible for their dreams of Empire and world domination. By bracketing the true nature of psychopathy from our awareness, we give up any hope of identifying the root cause of the social disease which threatens to choke humanity's life in the near future.

Moral Endo-skeletons and Exo-skeletons: A Perspective on America’s Cultural Divide and Current Crisis

2008-08-03T13:36:00.003+02:00

In the months after the 2004 election, when the Red States were said to have voted on the basis of their “moral values,” it was noted by many observers that the sleazy TV and movies the traditionalist and Christian right denounce so energetically also tend to get their highest ratings in the same parts of the country most populated by such people. (It was noted, as well, that some of the family pathologies that traditionalists decry are found at high rates among these most vocal proponents of “family values.”)

Some took this as a clear indication of the hypocrisy of the conservatives: what they denounce, they also secretly enjoy. They are not as concerned about morality, this critique declared, as they pretend to be. A posture of devotion to righteousness, all the while indulging forbidden impulses in hidden ways.

Read the Entire Article by Andrew Bard Schmookler

US: At least 245 cases of taser deaths between June 2001 and June 2007, but don't talk about it!

2008-05-12T20:18:00.001+02:00

SOTT Editors
12 May 2008

Well, it looks like something fishy is going on with a topic that has been in the news for quite awhile now: deaths due to Tasers.

We begin our little story with an article from NorthCountryGazette.org:

Pinellas County Taser Deaths - Excusable Or Not?

June Maxam
North Country Gazette
7 May 2008

Between June 2001 and June 2007, there were at least 245 cases of deaths of subjects soon after having been shocked using Tasers. Of these cases, in seven cases, medical examiners said tasers were a cause or a contributing factor or could not be ruled out as a cause of death.

In 16 cases, coroners and other officials stated that a taser was a secondary or contributory factor of death.

In dozens of cases, coroners cited excited delirium as cause of death. Excited delirium has been questioned as a medical diagnosis.

Several deaths occurred as a result of injuries sustained in struggles. In a few of these cases, head injury due to falling after being shocked contributed to later death.

In 2005, a medical examiner ruled for the first time that a taser was the primary factor in a death. [...]

Fabulous. So what's the big deal? The day after we posted this article under our Fair Use Policy, we received an e-mail as follows:

From: Sasha (at) acegm2.com
Date: 11-May-08

As a first time reader at SOT [sic], I found a story about my county in the headlines.

I was appalled. Your headline: Florida, US: At least 245 cases of tase deaths in Pinellas County

Then I went and looked at the original story from the North Country Gazette which states:

"Between June 2001 and June 2007, nationwide there were at least 245 cases of deaths of subjects soon after having been shocked using Tasers. Of these cases, in seven cases, medical examiners said Tasers were a cause or a contributing factor or could not be ruled out as a cause of death." [emphasis ours]

which is a FAR CRY from there being 245 cases of taser deaths in Pinellas County.

So now I doubt the integrity of your entire site...

Sasha

The problem here is that the word "nationwide" (bolded red text above) was not in the original article. So, was the article changed after we posted it, and then changed again to remove the word "nationwide"?

No. As it turns out, there are TWO articles. The first one is Death In Pinellas County - Excited Delirium Or Murder? This article, does, indeed, say:

Between June 2001 and June 2007, nationwide there were at least 245 cases of deaths of subjects soon after having been shocked using Tasers. Of these cases, in seven cases, medical examiners said Tasers were a cause or a contributing factor or could not be ruled out as a cause of death.

The second article, entitled Pinellas County Taser Deaths - Excusable Or Not? nowhere includes the word "nationwide." (We have taken a screenshot of it just in case it morphs!)

A bit of digging reveals that, according to Amnesty International, the 245 taser deaths were for the entire US, not just Pinellas County, Florida.

However, SOTT.net did not catch this error until after it was brought to our attention by Sasha. After all, the article we used was copy/pasted in toto, as it was and we were relying on the journalist who wrote it to at least have checked out the basic facts! In this case, not only did she not check out the basic facts, she did not even quote the article she was commenting on accurately! So, we must thank Sasha for bringing this to our attention. The end result was, of course, that the title of the article on the North Country Gazette site which is "Pinellas County Taser Deaths - Excusable Or Not?", and the content certainly does make it seem like the 245 deaths occurred in Pinellas County only.

After responding to Sasha and pointing out that the word "nationwide" is no longer (or perhaps never was) in the article text, we received another e-mail:

From: news(at)northcountrygazette.org
Date: 12-May-08

Please remove my copyrighted work from your website. You do not have permission to reprint my entire original work.

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/155956-
Florida-US-At-least-245-cases-of-tase-deaths-
in-Pinellas-County

June Maxam, Publisher
North Country Gazette

Obviously, it seems highly likely that June Maxam didn't even bother to go to our web site to check out the placement and context or even the Fair Use notice (that sott.net is a research database). How do we know? Well, she included the SOTT link with the old title. After having the error pointed out to us by Sasha, we had changed the title to "US: At least 245 cases of taser deaths between June 2001 and June 2007". This suggests to us that someone alerted her to the fact that her work was being quoted, that it was wrong, and Ms. Maxam decided to do damage control.

Normally, we would simply point correspondents such as Ms. Maxam to our Fair Use Policy. In this case, however, we now think it's pretty safe to say that the article on the North Country Gazette is really not up to SOTT.net standards anyway, so we are happy to remove it. Again, we have to thank Sasha for that, though Sasha does not seem to be a happy camper. She wrote again today as follows:

Subject:Re: Not very happy with your site - MAJOR ERROR
IN YOUR HEADLINES
Date: Mon, 12 May 2008 09:22:26 -0400
From: sasha2
To: SOTT.NET

First of all, ANY "articles" from the North Country Gazette seem to be "commentaries" which means no one is reporting the facts. YOUR headline read that 245 deaths from tasers were in PINELLAS COUNTY - the other article says there are 245 deaths NATIONWIDE. LINK- who or what are they "commenting" on?

Since we have already dealt with this above, noting that there are TWO articles on the North Country Gazette website, Sasha is beating a dead horse here. But, she continues:

So who's irresponsible here? If you are "reporting the news" you need to report the news - not just quote some commentary or change the original content.

Again, we note that there are two articles as indicated above, so Sasha's charge that we changed the content is in error. She has not investigated very thoroughly before charging SOTT with malfeasance. She continues:

There is an article in the SP Times in August 2005 that reported ONE death IN PINELLAS and NO deaths in HILLSBOROUGH at that time from tasers. That article I consider to be accurate. So would that then mean that those 245 deaths occurred between 2005 and June 2007 (which I seriously doubt)? There would be an UPROAR in the SP Times had this been occurring. LINK

****Here is an Amnesty International article dated March 28, 2006 stating that there had been only 152 taser deaths IN THE UNITED STATES from June 2001 through Feb 2006. LINK

It seems that they are the agency diligently tracking these deaths. In fact, they report 290 deaths in the UNITED STATES as of late 2007. LINK

What I am saying here is that on a first visit to your site, I have found a "sensational" headline that would cause any sane, logical person to question the credibility of ANY of the content in your site(s). All COMMENTARIES from North Country are suspect and need to be investigated unless they take one to an original report done by a credible entity.

There is certainly enough bad crap going on the world without you having to make it appear to be worse.

Sasha

Sasha is certainly entitled to her opinion about SOTT, however, as we have noted above, there is a quite simple explanation for the problem: there are two items on the referenced website, Sasha was reading one, and we had included the other on SOTT. And, for the record, as our regular readers already note, we do not just report news, we also carry a great deal of commentary.

In the end, what we can say with a high degree of certainty is that taser deaths are a serious problem in our pathocratic world, and we'll continue to bring you any news and commentary we find on the topic.

For all our readers concerned with any potential decrease in accuracy here on SOTT.net, rest assured that the editor who posted this article has agreed to exile in Siberia.

For the time being, just type "taser" in the Search box above, and you'll get plenty of food for thought! SOTT doesn't need to try to make things appear to be worse than they really are. We might also mention that it is knee-jerk reactions like Sasha's that create many of those problems. Sorry SOTT.net doesn't suit you - don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Also see: Man Files Patent For Taser-Proof Clothing

Via Golden Nuggets - Sexing Up An Iranian War

A Thousand Words

2008-05-10T21:26:00.001+02:00

A couple of pictures via Dave Neiwert's Orcinus blog:

©Unknown

Merkel blames the victim

2008-04-19T01:28:00.001+02:00

Speechless. Stunned. We've heard some incredible statements in the last few years, since the coup d'etat of 911, but this one is unbelievable even by the standards of GW. Listen to Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, explain why there is a food shortage:

Bad policy, not biofuel, drive food prices - Merkel

BERLIN (Reuters) - Bad agricultural policies and changing eating habits in developing nations are primarily to blame for rising food prices, not biofuel production as some critics claim, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday...

But Merkel, whose country is Europe's largest biofuel producer, said the rise in food prices was not mainly due to biofuels but to "inadequate agricultural policies in developing countries" as well as "insufficient forecasts of changes in nutritional habits" in emerging markets.

"If you travel to India these days, then a main part of the debate is about the 'second meal'," Merkel said.

"People are eating twice a day, and if a third of one billion people in India do that, it adds up to 300 million people. That's a large part of the European Union," she said.

"And if they suddenly consume twice as much food as before and if 100 million Chinese start drinking milk too, then of course our milk quotas become skewed, and much else too," she said referring to EU limits on dairy production....

Merkel is blaming the food crisis on the poorest people, the ones who are the victims. They are eating two meals a day instead of one. And, gosh, if those Chinese start drinking milk, then we'll really be in trouble!

I'm sorry, but how can this be reported on a major news service and not provoke an outcry from anyone with a conscience! Could there be any clearer expression of disdain and contempt? Any more gut-wrenching glimpse into the psyche of the deviant?

What about the headline: "Bad policy, not biofuel, drive food prices - Merkel". Bad policy? It is bad policy when people start eating two meals a day? How many meals does Merkel eat?

And all of this is going on in public, in front of our noses!

When we say that these people are not like you and me, we aren't kidding. Could you ever think something like that?

Via SOTT

Human mind product of chaotic evolutionary path, NYU psychology professor concludes in new book

2008-04-14T00:10:00.001+02:00

The question of mind is probably as old as we are. Today, the analogy of choice is with computers:

The fundamental difference between computers and the human mind is in the basic organization of memory, Marcus observes. While computers organize everything they store according to physical or logical locations, the human brain stores millions of memories, but has no idea where they are located - information is retrieved not by knowing where it is, but by using cues or clues that hint at what we are looking for.

One hundred years ago, the ubiquitous technology was the stream engine. What did Freud use as his model for the workings of our psyche? The steam engine. We think of our minds as computers because it is the ubiquitous technology of our day. They are everywhere, in everything, and we have internalized the concepts. We have direct experience with the ideas of input and output, with buffers and RAM and storage. We are comfortable with them. But let's not get so comfortable that we forget they are nothing more than an analogy. Via SOTT.

Genetics key to teen violence

2008-04-14T00:03:00.001+02:00

More evidence on the genetic component to what we think of as "evil". :

Whether a criminal teenager turns into a violent adult or grows out of crime, may be related to how low his ears are set or the types of food he was given as a child. International research shows antisocial behaviour in young adults can be written into their genetic code, and made worse by bad parenting. Indicators that an antisocial child may turn into a life-long violent criminal can be picked up in kindergarten, according to research summarised in this week's New Scientist magazine... Learning to fear punishment or recognise someone else's fear or sadness is difficult for psychopaths, he said. "If they want something and punching someone in the face is the way to extract it, they might be more likely to engage in that kind of behaviour," he said. Mr Blair says there are few signs that these psychopathic traits are caused by external factors like poor parenting or abuse, but they could be triggered by social forces like poverty.

Via SOTT

How Societies Regress to Become Pathocracies

2008-04-11T17:36:00.001+02:00

The third in a series of articles introducing the concepts of ponerology written by a member of Democratic Underground.

Time for Change
Friday, April 11, 2008

A pathocracy is a social movement, society, nation, or empire wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people. The pathological minority habitually perpetrates evil deeds on its people and/or other people.

Almost everyone knows that pathocracies have been responsible for tremendous death and destruction throughout history. What less people are willing to acknowledge is that pathocracies continue to perpetrate death and destruction today. Billions of people throughout the world live in perpetual poverty and hunger or lack access to safe water, despite the fact that the resources exist to provide adequate food and safe water to all of the world's citizens. Millions of others are perpetually exposed to the horrors of war.

Therefore, it would behoove us all to understand how pathocracies develop and perpetrate their damage, and how to recognize them. A book on that subject, titled Political Ponerology - A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, was written by Andrew M. Lobaczewski. Lobaczewski, a psychiatrist, began the research that eventually led to the book more than half a century ago, in collaboration with other researchers, all who are all now dead. The research was conducted in secret, as the researchers were all victims of Joseph Stalin's totalitarian regime, which obviously provided fodder for much of the book's content.

I've previously posted twice on DU on this subject, drawing heavily from Lobaczewski's book. My first post was titled "Political Ponerology: A Science of Evil Applied for Political Purposes". In that post I discussed human evil and its effects, why many people find evil so difficult to recognize, and psychopaths in position of great power.

In my second post on the subject, titled "The Role of Ideologies in the Development of Evil Regimes (Pathocracies)", I briefly summarized the first post and emphasized the role of ideology in the development of pathocracies. The main thing to understand about that is that the ideology serves as a mask, to hide the actual intentions of the group, and as a motivational factor for group members. Lobaczewski explains:

Human nature demands that vile matters be haloed by an over-compensatory mystique in order to silence one's conscience and to deceive consciousness and critical faculties, whether one's own or those of others. If such a ponerogenic union could be stripped of its ideology, nothing would remain except psychological and moral pathology, naked and unattractive. Such stripping would of course provoke "moral outrage", and not only among the members of the union.

In this post I go into much more detail about the development of pathocracies (referred to in Lobaczewski's book as the ponerogenic process). Since much of the material in the book is somewhat abstract, my goal here is to relate the principles he discusses to current day (and past) examples, in order to help make them more understandable. Lobaczewski speaks both in terms of small group processes and large scale (macrosocial) processes. It seems that most of the basic principles are similar regardless of the scale of the process.

An overview of the development of pathocracy

I thought it best to start with an overview and then come back to the specifics. This is what Lobaczewski has to say about the general process of a society regressing into a pathocracy:

Disparagement of one's "inferiors"

Children of the privileged classes learn to repress from their field of consciousness the uncomfortable ideas suggesting that they and their parents are benefiting from injustice against others. Such young people learn to disqualify and disparage the moral and mental values of anyone whose work they are using to over-advantage.

When you read this, think of the slave masters who justified their treatment of their slaves by explaining to their children that white supremacy over black people is natural because black people are inherently inferior or uncivilized. And think of the fact that the deaths of over a million Iraq civilians resulting from our invasion and occupation of their country have barely entered our national discussion. Some Harvard economists explain the long-lasting effects of racism in our country with respect to current economic policies:

Racial discord plays a critical role in determining beliefs about the poor. Since minorities are highly over-represented amongst the poorest Americans, any income-based redistribution measures will redistribute particularly minorities. The opponents of redistribution have regularly used race based rhetoric to fight left-wing policies... America's troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state.

Growing hysteria

Lobaczewski continues his description of the initial stages of developing pathocracy:

Young minds thus ingest habits of subconscious selection and substitution of data, which leads to a hysterical conversion economy of reasoning. They grow up to be somewhat hysterical adults who... transmit their hysteria to the next generation... The hysterical patterns for experience and behavior grow and spread downwards from the privileged classes until crossing the boundary.

Does that remind you of the state of Congress under Republican rule, and the general attitude of radical conservatives? Alan Wolf describes the mood of conservatives over the last couple of decades:

Conservatives have viewed politics as an extension of war, complete with no-holds barred treatment of the enemy, iron-clad discipline in the ranks, cries of treason against those who do not support the effort with full-throated vigor, and total control over any spoils won.

Contempt for truth and objective thinking

Lobaczewski continues:

When the habits of subconscious selection and substitution of thought-data spread to the macrosocial level, a society tends to develop contempt for factual criticism and to humiliate anyone sounding an alarm. Contempt is also shown for other nations which have maintained normal thought-patterns and for their opinions.

Think about the how radical conservatives disparage the patriotism of anyone who disagrees with our current imperial course. Think about the firing of Phil Donohue for daring to criticize the invasion of Iraq. Think about the aggressive targeting of Cynthia McKinney's House seat for daring to question George Bush's handling of the 9-11 attacks on our country. Think about the muzzling of Sybil Edmunds. Think about "freedom fries". Think about George Bush's war on science. And think about how so many subjects are barely mentionable in our country today.

The disintegration of society

Lobaczewski's description of societal disintegration under pathocracies reminds me of the ever expanding income gap in our country, and should serve as a warning that things can get a whole lot worse for us than they are now:

The feeling of social links and responsibility toward others disappear, and the society in question splinters into groups ever more hostile to each other... This opens the door for activation of the pathological factors of a various nature to enter in... A huge bloody tragedy can be the result....

Individual psychopath

Now let's consider the process from the standpoint of the individual psychopath. Laura Knight-Jadczyk, the editor of Lobaczewski's book, quotes Martha Stout, noting that the defining characteristic of a psychopath is a lack of conscience:

Imagine - if you can - not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken. And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.

The defining talents of the average psychopath

Most psychopaths don't have much general intelligence or even any particular skills of a productive nature. But the ones who pose great danger to society are quite good at manipulating people and political infighting. Lobaczewski explains:

Once the process of poneric transformation... has begun and advanced sufficiently, they perceive this fact with almost infallible sensitivity: a circle has been created wherein they can hide their failings and psychological differentness, find a world where they are in power and all those other, "normal people", are forced into servitude.

This reminds me of a biography of Joseph Stalin. One by one, over a period of several years, he isolated and the eliminated all of his minions who posed the slightest danger to his unchallengeable power. So by 1937 Stalin's purges had eliminated all of the original Russian Communist Party but himself.

The role of sycophancy

Can you imagine John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, or David Petraeus going against the will of George Bush on any matter? Of course not. Their positions of high power depend entirely on putting all their energy into anticipating the needs of and pleasing the "leader". George Bush started out the same way. As governor of Texas, all his efforts went into pleasing his corporate cronies. In return, they rewarded him handsomely by ensuring his material wealth and serving as a power base for his climb to the presidency. Lobaczewski describes the process:

They initially perform subordinate functions in such a movement and execute the leaders' orders, especially whenever something needs to be done which inspires revulsion in others. Their evident zealotry and cynicism gives rise to criticism on the part of the union's more reasonable members, but it also earns the respect of some its more extreme revolutionaries. They thus find protection among those people who earlier played a role in the movement's ponerization, and repay the favor with compliments or by making things easier for them. Thus they climb up the organizational ladder, gain influence, and almost involuntarily bend the contents of the entire group to their own way of experiencing reality and to the goals derived from their deviant nature.

Psychopaths after they've climbed to the pinnacle of power

Lobaczewski explains that psychopaths always feel terribly insecure, even after they've climbed to the pinnacle of power:

The pathological social structure gradually covers the entire country, creating a "new class" within the nation. This privileged class of deviants feels permanently threatened by the "others", i.e. by the majority of normal people. Neither do the pathocrats entertain any illusions about their personal fate should there be a return to the system of normal man.... Pathocrats never possessed any solid practical talent, and the time frame of their rule eliminates any residual possibilities of adapting to the demands of normal work. If the laws of normal man were to be reinstated, they and theirs could be subjected to judgment... they would be threatened by a loss of freedom and life, not merely a loss of position and privilege. Since they are incapable of any kind of sacrifice, the survival of a system which is the best for them becomes a moral imperative. Such a threat must be battled by means of any and all cunning and implemented with a lack of scruples with regard to those other "inferior" people that can be shocking in its depravity.

In other words, we should all be very worried about the lengths to which the Bush administration will go to ensure that either a Republican with benign intentions towards the Bush clique is installed as our next president or that no elections take place at all.

Turning reality upside down

As previously noted, psychopaths of any stripe or level of power cannot afford to allow others to perceive the reality of their character. Therefore, a prerequisite of attaining power is to throw everyone else into a state of confusion. Some of them are quite good at that. Lobaczewski explains:

Any human group affected by the process described herein is characterized by its increasing regression from... the ability to perceive psychological reality.... A ponerological analysis of this process indicates that pressure is being applied to the more normal part of the association by pathological factors present in certain individuals who have been allowed to participate in the group because the lack of good psychological knowledge has not mandated their exclusion....

An extensive and active indoctrination system is built, with a suitably refurbished ideology constituting the vehicle or Trojan horse for the purpose of pathogolizing the thought process of normal individuals and society. The goal - forcing human minds to incorporate pathological experiential methods and thought patterns, and consequently accepting such rule - is never openly admitted.

Thus it was that Hitler needed his Goebbels to indoctrinate the German people into a way of thinking that was conducive to Nazi attainment and maintenance of power. Thus it is that the Bush administration uses taxpayer money to provide us with propaganda disguised as news. And thus it is that we repeatedly hear "We have to fight them over there if we don't want to fight them here", while our confused and sycophantic corporate news media rarely challenges such inanely stupid assertions.

I often wonder if this phenomenon also partially explains why Congress is so reluctant to proceed with impeachment. Could it be that they are so confused or intimidated that they can't differentiate reality from the fairy tales spewed out by the Bush administration?

The marginalization and exclusion of normal people

Psychopaths cannot tolerate the presence of normal people because normal people are not at all conducive to their plans. Lobaczewski explains:

Rigorous selective measures of a clearly psychological kind are applied to new members. So as to exclude the possibility of becoming sidetracked by defectors, people are observed and tested to eliminate those characterized by excessive mental independence or psychological normality... Individuals manifesting doubt or criticism are subject to paramoral condemnation... Leadership discusses opinions and intentions which are psychologically and morally pathological....

A mysterious disease is already raging inside the union. The adherents of the original ideology feel ever more constricted by powers they do not understand; they start fighting with demons and making mistakes....

If such a movement triumphs by revolutionary means and in the name of freedom, the welfare of the people, and social justice, this only brings about further transformation of a governmental system thus created into a macrosocial pathological phenomenon. Within this system, the common man is blamed for not having been born a psychopath, and is considered good for nothing except hard work, fighting and dying to protect a system of government he can neither sufficiently comprehend nor ever consider to be his own. An ever-strengthening network of psychopathic and related individuals gradually starts to dominate, overshadowing the others. Characteropathic individuals who played an essential role in ponerizing the movement and preparing for revolution, are also eliminated. Adherents of the revolutionary ideology are unscrupulously "pushed into a counter-revolutionary position". They are now condemned for "moral" reasons in the name of new criteria whose paramoralistic essence they are not in a position to comprehend. Violent negative selection of the original group now ensues.... It remains characteristic for the entire future of this macrosocial pathological phenomenon.

Think about the Stalin purges, the Bush administration firing of any federal attorneys who wouldn't play ball with it, the resignations of high military leaders whose opinions were not in synch with George Bush, the firing of Phil Donohue, and the targeting of Cynthia McKinney. And more ominously, think about Paul Wellstone's plane crash, the assassination of JFK and Martin Luther King, and the "suicides" of J. H. Hatfield, Cliff Baxter, Raymond Lemme, David Kelly, Ted Westhusing and Gary Webb.

The response of normal individuals

Even though psychopaths are greatly outnumbered in the general population (about 4% - 6%), the development of pathocracies are an all too frequent phenomenon in world history. Clearly, normal individuals frequently fail to adequately counteract the problem. One of their biggest mistakes is to adopt an uncritical attitude towards psychopaths, as Lobaczewski explains:

Thus, whenever we observe some group member being treated with no critical distance, although he betrays one of the psychological anomalies familiar to us, and his opinions being treated as at least equal to those of normal people, although they are based on a characteristically different view of human, we must derive the conclusion that this human group is affected by a ponerogenic process and if measures are not taken the process shall continue to its logical conclusion.

As I've previously noted, exposure to psychopaths is frequently a very disorienting event for normal people. They can respond in one of three ways: adopt the alternate reality of the group; leave; or, remain confused and in a state of psychological terror. Lobaczewski describes the situation:

Once a group has inhaled a sufficient dose of pathological material to give birth to the conviction that these not-quite-normal people are unique geniuses, it starts subjecting its more normal members to pressure characterized by corresponding paralogical and paramoral elements. For many people, such pressure of collective opinion takes on attributes of a moral criterion; for others, it represents a kind of psychological terror ever more difficult to endure... Individuals with a more normal sense of psychological reality leave after entering into conflict with the newly modified group; simultaneously, individuals with various psychological anomalies join the group and easily find a way of life there.

What normal members of the group need

Lobaczewski explains what normal people need under such circumstances (and this applies for whole societies as well as small groups):

What they need is good psychological information in order to find the path of reason and measure. Based on a ponerologic understanding of their condition, psychotherapy could provide rapid positive results.

And I will add here that this is why so many of us DUers love people like Dennis Kucinich (who publicly told us the obvious but unmentionable reason for the Iraq War), Keith Olbermann, Naomi Klein, and Naomi Wolf. Many or most normal people sense that something terrible is happening, but they just can't bring themselves to acknowledge it even to themselves. But when some brave soul has the courage to announce that the emperor has no clothes after all, that helps to bring a sense of reality back to anyone who has the courage to listen. As an example, here is a quote from one of Keith Olbermann's special comments:

Were there any remaining lingering doubt otherwise... it ended yesterday when Mr. Bush commuted the prison sentence of one of his own staffers... In that moment, Mr. Bush, you broke that fundamental compact between yourself and the majority of this nation's citizens... you ceased to be the president of the United States... You became merely the president of a rabid and irresponsible corner of the Republican Party. And this is too important a time, sir, to have a commander in chief who puts party over nation. This has been, of course, the gathering legacy of this administration...

Our leaders in Congress ... must now live up to those standards which echo through our history: ... Impeach - get you, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney, two men who are now perilous to our democracy, away from the helm.

The terror phase

As a society regresses to pathocracy, it is inevitable that at some point the majority of normal members of society will catch on. The salient question is whether they will do so before it is too late to prevent massive and irreparable harm. Lobaczewski explains this process:

The rejected majority and the very forces which naively created such power to begin with, start mobilizing against the block of psychopaths who have taken over. Ruthless confrontation with these forces is seen by the psychopathic block as the only way to safeguard the long-term survival of the pathological authority. We must thus consider the bloody triumph of a pathological minority over the movement's majority to be a transitional phase during which the new contents of the phenomenon coagulate. The entire life of a society thus affected then becomes subordinated to deviant thought criteria....

To mitigate the threat to their power, the pathocrats must employ any and all methods of terror and exterminatory policies against individuals known for their patriotic feelings. Individuals lacking the natural feeling of being linked to normal society become irreplaceable...

As an example, Naomi Klein, in Shock Therapy - The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, describes the terror that encompassed Chile in 1973 following the CIA sponsored overthrow of their president:

The generals knew that their hold on power depended on Chileans being truly terrified...The trail of blood left behind over those four days came to be known as the Caravan of Death. In short order the entire country had gotten the message: resistance is deadly... In all, more than 3,200 people were disappeared or executed, at least 80,000 were imprisoned, and 200,000 fled the country.

Nor was that the end of it. Over the next several months and years, anyone whose independent thoughts were considered to pose a danger to Pinochet's regime were systematically tortured or eliminated.

Why pathocracy cannot be permanent

Pathocracies cannot be permanent, because of their many inherent deficiencies. Lobaczewski explains:

The achievement of absolute domination by pathocrats in the government of a country cannot be permanent since large sectors of the society become disaffected by such rule and eventually find some way of toppling it. This is part of the historical cycle. Such a system of government has nowhere to go but down. In a pathocracy, all leadership positions must be filled by individuals with corresponding psychological deviations... However, such people constitute a very small percentage of the population and this makes them more valuable to the pathocrats. Their intellectual level or professional skills cannot be taken into account, since people representing superior abilities are even harder to find.....

Under such conditions, no area of social life can develop normally... Pathocracy progressively paralyzes everything. Normal people must develop a level of patience... pathocracy progressively intrudes everywhere and dulls everything. Thus, the pathological minority's attempts to retain power will be threatened by the society of normal people, whose criticism keeps growing....

The entire effort only results in producing a general stifling of intellectual development and deep rooted protest against hypocrisy. The authors and executors of this program are incapable of understanding that the decisive factor making their work difficult is the fundamental nature of normal human beings - the majority. The entire system of force, terror, and forced indoctrination, or, rather, pathologization, thus proves effectively unfeasible... Reality places a question mark on their conviction that such methods can change people in such fundamental ways so that they can eventually recognize this pathocratic kind of government as a normal state......

Pathocracies in perspective

But we should not take much satisfaction in the inevitable fall of pathocracies, since they so frequently do such tremendous harm before they fall. It would be far better if we could learn to prevent their rise in the first place.

One of the many great insights of the founders of our country is that they anticipated the rise of pathocracy in the nation that they founded. They therefore wrote into its Constitution numerous plans for the balancing of power and for the peaceful removal from office of chief executives or others who proved to put their own needs and desires above those of our nation.

It was a great idea. But it can only work to the extent that our elected government officials have the courage to open their eyes to the danger and take action against it, as so clearly prescribed in our Constitution. It is now long past the time that those with open eyes and minds should have seen and understood the gathering danger.

If our Congress fails to take the appropriate action, they'll have set a terrible precedent for our nation. In that event, even if our current government does not perpetrate substantially more harm to us before they leave, Congress will have left the door wide open for future governments to do so.

The Role of Ideology in the Development of Evil Regimes (Pathocracies)

2008-04-10T04:10:00.001+02:00

The second in a series of articles that have appeared at Democratic Underground. Be sure to join the discussion.

Time for change Democratic Underground Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:22 EDT

Last week I posted on DU "Political Ponerology: A Science of Evil Applied for Political Purposes". Most of the material for that post was taken from "Political Ponerology - A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes", by Andrew M. Lobaczewski. Lobaczewski, a psychiatrist, began the research that eventually led to the book more than half a century ago, in collaboration with other researchers, all who are now dead.

The research was conducted in secret, as the researchers were all victims of Joseph Stalin's totalitarian regime, which obviously provided fodder for much of the book's content.

In my previous post, I began with some comments from the book's editor, Laura Knight-Jadczyk, on the importance of evil in today's world:

At the social level, hatred, envy, greed and strife multiply exponentially. Crime increases faster than the population. Combined with wars, insurrections and political purges, multiplied millions across the globe are without adequate food or shelter due to political actions... The totality of human suffering is a dreadful thing...

Jadczyk noted the defining characteristic of a psychopath to be the lack of conscience:

They can imitate feelings, but the only real feelings they seem to have... is a sort of "predatorial hunger" for what they want. All else - all activity - is subsumed to this drive. In short, the psychopath is a predator. If we think about the interactions of predators with their prey in the animal kingdom, we can come to some idea of what is behind the "mask of sanity" of the psychopath. This leads us to an important question: what does the psychopath really get from their victims? It's easy to see what they are after when they lie and manipulate for money or material goods or power. But in many instances... we can only say that it seems to be that the psychopath enjoys making others suffer.

I noted in my last post four reasons why many evil people are so difficult to identify:

1) Many psychopaths develop the ability to make themselves appear normal.

2) Denial: Many normal people find it very difficult to acknowledge the presence of evil.

3) Many normal (though naïve) people believe that psychopaths are found only in prison.

4) Racism, etc: When evil is perpetrated on "others", many have a tendency to ignore it.

And I talked at some length about the tremendous damage that is often inflicted on society when psychopaths climb to positions of great power.

In this post I expand on my previous one by discussing the role of ideology in assisting some psychopaths in their quest to acquire control over groups or even whole societies, despite their small numbers in all human populations. An understanding of this process by normal people is very important because the first and most important step in preventing these tragedies is to recognize them in their early stages. But first a word about labeling:

A few words on the labeling of evil

A minority of DU posters responded to my previous post with great concern over the idea of labeling people as "evil". Their concern appeared to be related to the potential for such labeling to lead to something akin to genocide, as has occurred so frequently during the past century. I understand the concern, but I believe it to be misplaced. I have the following responses to that concern.

First, genocides occur when groups of people are labeled as being inferior or evil based on race or other superficial characteristic. In marked contrast, a proper labeling of people as evil is based on behavior, rather than on any superficial characteristics.

Furthermore, Lobaczewski's approach to the issue is the opposite of an approach that would be likely to lead to violence. He repeatedly stresses the need to use an objective and scientific approach rather than a moralistic approach to the issue of evil (I myself have difficulty viewing evil through an objective rather than a moralistic approach, but that's just me). He does not believe in the death penalty. And he repeatedly stresses a preventive rather than a punitive approach. The preventive approach that Lobaczewski discusses emphasizes the need to keep psychopaths out of positions of power where they have the potential to do great harm to other people.

Is there potential for abuse if people are labeled as "evil"? I'm sure there is some potential for that, just like anything else can potentially be abused. Currently we label people with such words as "criminal", "traitor", "sex offender", or many other equally inflammatory terms when a person's behavior is legally (or otherwise) determined to fit those categories.

The reason why I and Lobaczewski believe it is important to pursue scientific inquiry into the causes and recognition of evil, and how to prevent its widespread perpetration on human populations, is as follows: When psychopaths gain control over societies, the potential for war, death and destruction is tremendous. Such occurrences have been way too frequent in both the distant and the recent historical record. Labels are necessary if we are to have the ability to talk about a subject. For example, lithium has been used with great success to treat people with manic-depressive illness. It would be very awkward and perhaps impossible to develop and use treatment against a disease that we were prohibited from naming. How are the results of scientific research to be shared with regard to a subject that has no name? The understanding of evil is way too important to allow it to be shackled in that manner.

The role of ideology in the ponerogenic process

Lobaczewski writes a lot about the role of ideology for individuals or groups in the ponerogenic process that leads to pathocracies*. The ideology itself is usually not inherently evil (although it may be, as in the case of Nazism), and the ideology does not generally characterize the movement or group. Rather, the ideology serves as a mask, to hide the actual intentions of the group. Lobaczewski explains it like this:

It is a common phenomenon for a ponerogenic association or group to contain a particular ideology which always justifies its activities and furnishes motivational propaganda.... Human nature demands that vile matters be haloed by an over-compensatory mystique in order to silence one's conscience and to deceive consciousness and critical faculties, whether one's own or those of others.

If such a ponerogenic union could be stripped of its ideology, nothing would remain except psychological and moral pathology, naked and unattractive. Such stripping would of course provoke "moral outrage", and not only among the members of the union.

The fact is, even normal people, who condemn this kind of union along with its ideologies, feel hurt and deprived of something constituting part of their own romanticism, their way of perceiving reality when a widely idealized group is exposed as little more than a gang of criminals.

The last paragraph of Lobaczewski's that I cite above explains why so many normal Americans are willing to accept the Bush administration's lame excuses. Acknowledging that our President and Vice President are no more than criminal thugs and psychopaths is just too painful for most Americans. It is much more comfortable for them to believe that their country goes to war for idealistic and generous purposes.

Let's now consider how four different ideologies, none of which are inherently evil, have been corrupted for political purposes:

* A pathocracy is a social movement, society, nation, or empire that is controlled by evil individuals and habitually perpetrates evil deeds on its people and/or other people. The "ponerogenic process" leads to the development of a pathocracy.

Americanism

One could make a good argument that the U.S. Declaration of Independence, which after all provided the full justification for our country becoming a sovereign nation, contains the true, uncorrupted version of Americanism. There are two salient ideas expressed in that document, which also happen to be the epitome of liberal/progressive values: 1) That everyone has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and 2) Whenever a government becomes destructive of those rights, the people have the right overthrow that government. I am in 100% agreement with those ideas.

Unfortunately, however, that ideology has become badly corrupted, especially under the current presidential administration. For George Bush, Dick Cheney, and the right wing ideologues who support them, "Americanism" has become the ideology that says that the United States of America is so superior to all other nations that any action it takes with respect to other nations should automatically and unquestionably be considered morally right. For an American citizen to think or act otherwise is to border on treason.

"Americanism" in that form has been used to declare wars against nations that pose no threat to us and to overthrow numerous democratically elected governments that likewise posed no threat to us.

Consider this speech:

As long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny - prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder - violence will gather... and raise a mortal threat.

There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends upon the survival of liberty in other lands. The best hope for freedom in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

That speech invokes the best of the American dream and ideals. There was just one problem with it. It was spoken by George Bush as a means of justifying an action (the invasion and occupation of Iraq) that had nothing whatsoever to do with the wonderful sentiments expressed in his speech. He was merely using a great ideology as a mask to hide his true motives.

Christianity

Christianity contains some core values that any liberal/progressive could be proud to live by. Jesus Christ preached that we should love our neighbors, treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves, and be charitable towards the poor. In short, he embodied the best of liberal values. Accordingly, Christian groups have done some great things over the centuries, including playing a leading role in the abolition of slavery in the United States.

One could say, I suppose, that the Christian Bible contains the full content of Christian doctrine. Looked at in that way I suppose that one could say that it states some ideas that are patently absurd (such as the Earth being four thousand years old) or even contain the seeds of evil. I won't go into that, mainly because different people interpret it in very different ways.

But Christianity has also often been used to justify evil actions, including wars of aggression and torture of "non-believers" with the aim of getting them to convert to Christianity. Some, even today, still use Christianity to justify slavery, as Patrick Buchanan recently did in his attempt to put his criticisms of Barack Obama in the best light:

The Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard. And among them are these: First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

Capitalism

Capitalism carries the potential, by means of providing incentives for productivity, to act as an engine of economic growth that provides tremendous benefits to a society. Forget for a moment that there is no such thing as pure capitalism, or that society works best economically when it uses some combination of capitalism and socialism. My only point here is that (I believe) capitalism has the capacity to provide substantial benefits to people when used as one component of an economic system.

Capitalism is one of the main ideologies used by the Bush/Cheney administration, and it is used as justification for all manner of policies that hurt people, such as George Bush's veto of health insurance for children. Bush likes to characterize his view of capitalism as "free market", and as such he uses that ideology to push for international agreements that primarily benefit his corporate friends.

But in fact, there is nothing "free market" about the Bush/Cheney brand of capitalism, if indeed it can be categorized as capitalism at all. Rather, their favored economic system is one in which their corporate cronies are given billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to perform functions for which they have little expertise, with little or no oversight from government. The result has been billions of dollars of missing money, with no investigations to determine where the money went. That's a mighty strange brand of capitalism.

James Petras, in "Rulers and Ruled", describes how so-called "capitalism" has worked out in recent years in so many countries:

Given the enormous class and income disparities in Russia, Latin America and China, it is more accurate to describe these countries as "surging billionaires" rather than "emerging markets" because it is not the "free market" but the political power of the billionaires that dictates policy

Countries of "surging billionaires" produce burgeoning poverty, submerging living standards. The making of billionaires means the unmaking of civil society - the weakening of social solidarity, protective social legislation, pensions, vacations, public health programs and education...

The growth of billionaires is hardly a sign of "general prosperity" resulting from the "free market"... In fact it is the product of the illicit seizure of lucrative public resources, built up by the work and struggle of millions of workers... It has little to do with entrepreneurial skills.

Communism

Communism has been defined as "a socioeconomic structure that promotes the establishment of a classless, stateless society based on common ownership of the means of production." Its initial popularity can be attributed to its promise to greatly reduce economic inequality in societies that were previously characterized by huge levels of economic inequality. That is a worthwhile goal IMO.

My own view is that the best economic system is one that uses a combination of free market incentives to increase productivity, combined with government provision of essential goods and services, goods and services that don't respond to free market incentives (such as the running of our elections), progressive taxation, and regulation to ensure such things as worker and environmental protection and the prevention of monopolistic practices. Whether or not pure Communism is capable of providing a viable and productive economic system is a question I can't answer and is not highly relevant to this discussion.

The Russian Revolution of October 1917 brought Communism to Russia, which it maintained for more than 70 years. However, soon after its introduction it began to be seriously corrupted, to the point where by some time in the 1920s it is probably accurate to say that it wasn't Communism at all. By that time an empire had evolved (called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) into a solidified Totalitarian system, and a small elite ruled over everyone else with an iron fist and had control over all of the country's resources. Under the iron rule of Joseph Stalin, economic plans were put in place that resulted in the deaths by starvation of about seven million people. This was not a classless society, nor was it stateless, nor was it based on common ownership of the means of production. Yet the myth of a Communist state prevailed in the USSR until it broke up in 1991.

The lessons we should learn from the role of ideologies in the ponerogenic process

In my opinion this is one of the most important issues dealt with in Lobaczewski's book. There are two major lessons that it should teach us.

First, it should teach us that we should never uncritically accept that an individual's or a group's purpose is what they say it is, especially when matters as important as war and peace are at stake.

Second, we should not uncritically blame an ideology for the fact that a group uses it for their own nefarious ends. The great ideals of the American dream, as expressed in its Declaration of Independence, should not be blamed for the fact that our current American leaders justify aggressive war, widespread violation of human rights, and wholesale violation of the U.S. Constitution that they swore to preserve and protect - all in the name of the United States of America. Christianity should not be blamed for the fact that various elites throughout history have used it as an excuse for war, torture, and pilfering other lands - all in the name of Christianity. Capitalism should not be blamed for the corruption it has undergone under our current leaders and the so-called Neoliberal economists, who use it mainly to increase the wealth of small elites, at the expense of everyone else - all in the name of "free market capitalism". And Communism should not be blamed for the Communist rulers who tyrannized and impoverished the nations that they led - in the name of Communism.

More on the use of ideology in the ponerogenic process leading to pathocracy

In this post I have covered only a portion of Lobaczewski's description of the ponerogenic process that leads to the development of pathocracies - though I believe it is the most important portion. I intend to cover more of it in a later post.

In my first thread on this subject, some DUers told me that they were looking forward to a follow-up post where I would talk more about how to identify evil. This is a very complex subject. The portions of Lobaczewski's description of the ponerogenic process that I have omitted from this post deal with that issue in quite a bit of detail. However, the details are very difficult to grasp, especially for people who are not familiar with mental health issues. For example, here is some of Lobaczewski's continued description of the role of ideologies in the ponerogenic process:

Characteropathic individuals adopt ideologies created by doctrinaire, often schizoidal people, recast them into an active propaganda form, and disseminate it with their characteristic pathological egotism and paranoid intolerance for any philosophies which may differ from their own. They also inspire further transformation of this ideology into its pathological counterpart.... The ideology continuously affects the movement's activities and remains a justifying motivation for many... The carriers of other pathological factors become engaged in this already sick social movement and proceed with the work of final transformation of the contents... in such a way that it becomes a pathological caricature of its original ideology... Such a situation eventually engenders a wholesale showdown: the adherents of the original ideology are shunted aside or terminated... The ideological motivations and the double talk they created then are utilized to hide the actual new contents of the phenomenon....

In summary: An ideology is used as a mask to hide the true, psychopathic motives of the psychopaths, serving simultaneously to inspire some of the more honest (normal) members of the group. But the psychopaths transform the ideology beyond recognition, to serve their own sick needs, while continuing to use the ideology's original name so as to hide their true motives. When the true adherents of the ideology realize what's really going on, they may rebel, and if they do they probably will be shoved aside or much worse.

The identification of evil

So, back to the critical question: How does one identify evil? One of the most important things to understand about this is that most people - perhaps the great majority of people - don't really want to identify it.

Recall the reasons why evil is so difficult to identify, which I discussed in some detail in my last post and summarized in this post. Three of the four reasons relate to things that apply much less to most DUers than they do to most of the rest of the U.S. population: denial, stereotypical ideas that reject the possibility of finding evil in highly successful people, and racism.

Lobaczewski notes how terribly disorienting and confusing it is for normal people to be exposed to psychopaths and ponerogenic processes:

People who have been thus thrown out of a ponerogenic association because they were too normal suffer bitterly; they are unable to understand their specific state. Their ideal, the reason they joined the group, which constituted a part of the meaning of life for them, has now been degraded, although they cannot find a rational basis for this fact. They feel wronged; they "fight against demons" they are not in a position to identify. The fact is their personalities have already been modified to a certain extent due to saturation by abnormal psychological material, especially psychopathic material.

As I re-read this, the first thing that comes to my mind is members of the U.S. Congress - notwithstanding the fact that they haven't yet been "thrown out". Think about it. Maybe this is closely related to the reason why no impeachment effort has taken place.

So this is what I believe is the most important thing to keep in mind when trying to identify evil:

Be skeptical about what people, especially politicians, say and why they say it. Don't be fooled into thinking that a politician's professed ideology necessarily has much to do with his/her true motivations. I'm not saying that they're all liars. I'm just saying that we need to keep an open, skeptical mind on the subject. So instead of taking their rhetoric at face value, weigh their actions more than their rhetoric. (For example, if we invaded Iraq to bring democracy to them, why did we kill over a million of their civilians, and why don't we leave when they want us to leave?)

Don't for a minute believe that the possession of wealth or success in life makes it less likely that a person is a psychopath. Wealthy successful psychopaths are far more dangerous than the ones who end up in jail. And the most dangerous of all are national leaders.

And for God sake, don't EVER think that just because the only people who are being abused, tortured, and killed by your government are of some other race, ethnic group, or religion - Muslim, for example - that that means that they (your government) aren't evil and aren't likely to turn on you next.

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Political Ponerology: A Science of Evil Applied for Political Purposes

2008-04-10T04:07:00.001+02:00

The following article appeared on Democratic Underground last week. It is an excellent introduction to the subject. Be sure to check out the discussion.

Time for Change Democratic Underground Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:45 EDT

"Many people believe that man is evolving; society is evolving; and that we now have control over the arbitrary evil of our environment; or at least we will have it after George Bush and his Neocons have about 25 years to fight the endless War against Terror"

Laura Knight-Jadczyk, from the Editor's Preface to Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, by Andrew M. Lobaczewski

For all of my life, one of my greatest interests has been to understand the nature of human evil. And I have always believed that it is one of the most important subjects that mankind needs to understand. So thank you to fellow DUer Larry Ogg for referring me to Lobaczewski's book on Political Ponerology (and for your ideas on how to present this information).

Laura Knight-Jadczyk, in her Editor's Preface to Political Ponerology, puts today's world in perspective:

At the social level, hatred, envy, greed and strife multiply exponentially. Crime increases faster than the population. Combined with wars, insurrections and political purges, multiplied millions across the globe are without adequate food or shelter due to political actions. The totality of human suffering is a dreadful thing.

The woeful status of today's world, as depicted in that brief but cogent summary, is due to human evil more than it is due to any other factor. Furthermore, humanity's historical record in dealing with human evil has been abysmal.

So we need to do much better on that score. And that is the main reason for Lobaczewski's book. For, as Knight-Jadczyk says in her Editor's Preface, there is a lot that can be done to combat evil, and "the very first thing we can do is learn about it".

Descriptions and definitions of human evil

Before one can understand how evil functions at the macro-level, that is, how it affects entire societies, it is necessary to understand how it operates in individuals. There are differing opinions on this issue, but most of them have a good deal in common. Knight-Jadczyk quotes from Martha Stout, who has worked extensively with the victims of psychopaths, on this issue.

Imagine - if you can - not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken. And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.

Knight-Jadczyk expands on that description:

They can imitate feelings, but the only real feelings they seem to have: is a sort of 'predatorial hunger' for what they want. All else - all activity - is subsumed to this drive. In short, the psychopath is a predator. If we think about the interactions of predators with their prey in the animal kingdom, we can come to some idea of what is behind the "mask of sanity" of the psychopath.

This leads us to an important question: what does the psychopath really get from their victims? It's easy to see what they are after when they lie and manipulate for money or material goods or power. But in many instances we can only say that it seems to be that the psychopath enjoys making others suffer.

Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, in People of the Lie, defined an evil person as someone who is totally unwilling to admit fault or to try to understand him or herself. It's just too painful. So, in order to avoid having to do that, the evil person spends his or her whole life trying to make other people and himself see himself as he would like to be seen, rather than as he really is. That means pretending, lying, killing, or whatever it takes. Therefore, no fault of an evil person can ever be corrected because that would mean having to admit that it exists. Here is Peck's somewhat more technical definition:

Truly evil people, on the other hand, actively rather than passively avoid extending themselves. They will take any action in their power to protect their own laziness, to preserve the integrity of their sick self. Rather than nurturing others, they will actually destroy others in this cause. If necessary, they will even kill to escape the pain of their own spiritual growth. As the integrity of their sick self is threatened by the spiritual health of those around them, they will seek by all manner of means to crush and demolish the spiritual health that may exist near them.

I define evil, then, as the exercise of political power - that is, the imposition of one's will upon others by overt or covert coercion - in order to avoid extending one's self for the purpose of nurturing spiritual growth. Ordinary laziness is non-love; evil is anti-love.

The many difficulties in recognizing human evil

Various estimates in Lobaczewski's book put the prevalence of evil individuals at somewhere between 4% and 6% of the population*, with no known differences by culture, nation, or race (but generally thought to be about ten times more prevalent in males than in females.) So, if it only occurs in a small minority of the population, that raises the question as to why whole societies come under the control of these people, thereby sustaining tremendous damage, for long periods of time. Perhaps the most important answer to that question is that relatively normal people often fail to consciously recognize evil in their midst, for several reasons:

The appearance of normality As indicated by the title of Dr. Peck's book on evil (People of the Lie), deception is one of the primary characteristics of evil people. It is essential to them if they are to avoid being shunned by the good majority of humanity, and some of them are quite good it. Many of them are even quite good at inspiring trust and confidence. Martha Stout continues her description of psychopaths (noted above) as follows:

Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless. You are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience that they seldom even guess at your condition. Your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences, will most likely remain undiscovered.

Denial Denial is a very common psychological defense mechanism that people use in order to avoid the psychological pain of having to face something that is very unpleasant to them. It is so common that all humans use it to one degree or another on occasion. But as we grow we learn to face things that were previously too difficult for us to face, and that is part of the process of emotional maturation. Mastering this process gives us the strength to face the world as it really is, rather than as we would like it to be. With regard to the denial of evil, Knight-Jadczyk notes:

Human beings have been accustomed to assume that other human beings are - at the very least - trying to 'do right' and 'be good' and fair and honest. And so, very often, we do not take the time to use due diligence in order to determine if a person who has entered our life is, in fact, a 'good person'.

Denial also takes place at the national level. There are many things that the United States as a nation denies (i.e., things that most Americans deny). For example, we talk about concepts like freedom and democracy without full awareness of the many historical (and current) examples where we have denied these gifts to other people. Probably the most difficult thing for Americans to admit to as a nation is that their President is evil.

Looking for evil in the wrong places - class prejudice For many, perhaps most people, evil is something you find in prisons or slums. They simply do not think of people who have money and dress nicely as being evil. But successful psychopaths do not end up in prisons or slums. They can be bankers, physicians, professionals of any stripe, politicians, even leaders of nations.

Racism, nationalism, or other isms When evil is perpetrated on persons of other nationalities or races people often turn a blind eye, especially when it is justified by their leaders. For example, in the United States slavery was justified by the slave owners for many decades, despite the 'All men are created equal' proclamation of our Declaration of Independence. More recently, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths have been justified in order to excuse our invasion and occupation of their country. Our leaders and journalists don't justify it in any direct straight forward manner, but rather they justify it by virtue of their virtually complete silence on the matter. Or they justify it by saying such things as "We didn't start this war", as if hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians were responsible for the 9-11 attacks on our country. Noam Chomsky sums up this phenomenon succinctly in What we Say Goes Conversations on U.S. Power in a Changing World:

When you conquer somebody and suppress them, you have to have a reason. You can't just say, "I'm a son of a bitch and want to rob them". You have to say it's for their good, they deserve it, or they actually benefit from it. That was the attitude of the slave owners. Most of them didn't say, "Look, I'm enslaving these people because I want easily exploitable cheap labor for my own benefit."

Yet, when a U.S. President gives the American people an excuse for a war of aggression they buy into those rationalizations way to often.

* Scott Peck estimates a prevalence of evil of less than 20 times this amount - about 2 cases per thousand people. The difference probably has to do with the fact that Peck doesn't classify "ordinary psychopaths" as being evil, unless they very actively seek to do substantial damage to others. This is more in line with Lobaczewski's "essential psychopathy", which he defines as someone whose role in the ponerogenic process is 'exceptionally great'.

The effects of evil on individuals and society

For those who believe that evil people are almost always found in prisons or slums, the criminologist Georgette Bennett notes:

The consequences to the average citizen from business crimes are staggering: The combined burglary, mugging and other property losses induced by the country's street punks come to about $4 billion a year. However, the seemingly upstanding citizens in our corporate board rooms and the humble clerks in our retail stores bilk us out of between $40 and $200 billion a year.

But the damage goes far beyond monetary losses. Lobaczewski notes:

When (normal) human beings fall into a certain state: the psychopaths, like a virulent pathogen in a body, strike at their weaknesses, and the entire society is plunged into conditions that lead to horror and tragedy on a very large scale.

Whether or not or how much damage a psychopath actually does is dependent upon circumstances. Martha Stout explains:

If you are born at the right time, with some access to family fortune, and you have a special talent for whipping up other people's hatred and sense of deprivation, you can arrange to kill large numbers of unsuspecting people. With enough money, you can accomplish this from far away, and you can sit back safely and watch in satisfaction.

In such cases evil individuals or cabals may take control of a whole nation, and then the destruction often becomes enormous, in the form of genocides or other mass murders. James Petras explains in Rulers and Ruled in the U.S. Empire:

Explanations of genocides that focus on "irrational mass behavior", overlook the central importance of elite manipulation, anchored in the state, the economy and civil society. In none of the genocides of the 20th and 21st Century were the "masses" in a position to initiate, organize and direct them, though, certainly, sectors of the lower classes carried out the policies.

Psychopaths in position of great power

My belief that George Bush and his administration are evil is not based on any single incident, but rather on a pervasive pattern. This is a man who blew up frogs when he was younger. As Governor of Texas he mocked a woman (Carla Faye Tucker) who pleaded for her life with him, mimicking her desperate pleas in discussions with other people. In the midst of a national disaster, with people dying by the thousands he sat around and partied. And then, when he finally got to New Orleans he ordered firemen to wait around and do nothing rather than save the dying people, just so that he could pose for a photo-op with them. Virtually every act of his presidency has been calculated to increase the wealth and power of his benefactors at the expense of the vast majority of Americans, many of whom have consequently been driven into poverty. He created a war that has resulted in over a million Iraqi civilian deaths and over four thousand deaths of American soldiers - and for no apparent reason other than to increase the wealth and power of his benefactors. He unilaterally decided that he is not subject to the laws of our country. And worst of all, he presides over the indefinite incarceration without charges or trial, and the torture of our prisoners of war - for no apparent reason at all.

DUers aren't the only people who are open to acknowledging the relationship of evil to political power in their own country. The preface to Political Ponerology not only notes this relationship but attempts an explanation, and is not hesitant to point out the role of George W. Bush:

In the past several years, there are many more psychologists and psychiatrists and other mental health workers beginning to look at these issues in new ways in response to the questions about the state of our world and the possibility that there is some essential difference between such individuals as George W. Bush and many so-called Neocons, and the rest of us.

Dr. Stout describes a 'composite' case where the subject spent his childhood blowing up frogs with fire-crackers. It is widely known that George W. Bush did this, so one naturally wonders...

We also began to realize that the profiles that emerged also describe rather accurately many individuals who seek positions of power in fields of authority, most particularly politics and commerce. That's really not so surprising an idea, but it honestly hadn't occurred to us until we saw the patterns and recognized them in the behaviors of numerous historical figures and, lately, including George W. Bush and members of his administration. Politics, by its very nature, would tend to attract more of the pathological 'dominator types' than other fields. That is only logical, and we began to realize that it was not only logical, it was horrifyingly accurate; horrifying because pathology among people in power can have disastrous effects on all of the people under the control of such pathological individuals.

The origins of Lobaczewski's Political Ponerology

As Laura Knight-Jadczyk and her colleagues came more and more to recognize the vast potential for psychopaths in position of political power to inflict destruction on whole societies, they published their thoughts and findings on the Internet. Consequently, they received an e-mail from Andrew Lobaczewski, of whom they had not previously known:

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen: I have got your Special Research Project on psychopathy by my computer. You are doing a most important and valuable work for the future of nations. I am a very aged clinical psychologist. Forty years ago I took part in a secret investigation of the real nature and psychopathology of the macro-social phenomenon. I am able to provide you with a most valuable scientific document, useful for your purposes. It is my book Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes.

Lobaczewski was just one of several scientists who took part in the research and the writing of the book. But he was the only one left alive. The reason that the book had to be researched and written in secret was that Lobaczewski and his fellow scientists were victims of one of the most evil and repressive regimes of world history. Lobaczewski describes the history of the manuscript for the book:

The original manuscript of this book went into the furnace minutes before a secret police raid in Communist Poland. The second copy, painfully reassembled by scientists working under impossible conditions of violence and repression, was sent via courier to the Vatican. Its receipt was never acknowledged - the manuscript and all valuable data lost. In 1984, the third and final copy was written from memory by the last survivor of the original researchers: Andrew Lobaczewski. After half a century of suppression, this book is finally available.

Knight-Jadczyk describes her reaction to the receipt of Lobaczewski's manuscript:

As I read, I realized that what I was holding in my hand was essentially a chronicle of a descent into hell, transformation, and triumphant return to the world with knowledge of that hell that was priceless for the rest of us, particularly in this day and time when it seems evident that a similar hell is enveloping the planet. The risks that were taken by the group of scientists that did the research on which this book is based are beyond the comprehension of most of us. Many of them were young, just starting in their careers when the Nazis began to stride in their hundred league jack-boots across Europe. These researchers lived through that, and then when the Nazis were driven out and replaced by the Communists under the heel of Stalin, they faced years of oppression the likes of which one cannot even imagine.

A few more words about Lobaczewski's book and our need to understand its subject

What I've written here sets the stage for the latter part of Lobaczewski's book, in which he describes the characteristics of pathocracies (which he defines as social movements, societies, nations or empires that are taken over by psychopaths), how they originate, and the various threats that are posed to them, among other things. I chose not to provide much detail on those issues in this post because I felt that would make it too long. If there is a fair amount of interest in this post I will follow it up with the above noted issues in a few days.

The major theme of Lobaczewski's book is that if world civilization is to survive and thrive it must learn how to deal with evil individuals who seek its destruction. To that end, he believes that it is essential that objective scientific studies continue be pursued in order that humanity may come to recognize evil when they see it and learn how to combat it (I said something very similar to that about a year and a half ago, in a post titled Evil Must Be Recognized for What it Is Rather than Denied).

Along those lines, Lobaczewski believes that it is essential that we take a strictly objective and scientific view towards evil individuals rather than a moralistic attitude towards them. I'm not sure I'm capable of doing that, but I certainly do agree with him that this is a subject of monumental importance, and we need to learn much more about it.

The last paragraph of Lobaczewski's web site sums up why he considers the subject to be of such great importance:

Morality and humanism cannot long withstand the predations of this evil. Knowledge of its nature - and its insidious effect on both individuals and groups - is the only antidote.

Knight-Jadczyk, at the end of her Editor's Preface, puts that theme in the context of the current day:

Based on the syndrome that describes the onset of the disease (pathocracy), it seems that the United States in particular, and perhaps the entire world, will soon enter into 'bad times' of such horror and despair that the Holocaust of World War II will seem like just a practice run. And so, since they were there, and they lived through it and brought back information to the rest of us, it may well save our lives to have a map to guide us in the falling darkness.

Original

'Ruthlessness gene' discovered

2008-04-10T04:01:00.001+02:00

Researchers claim they have found "a genetic link to ruthlessness" according to an article by Michael Hopkin in Nature:

Selfish dictators may owe their behaviour partly to their genes, according to a study that claims to have found a genetic link to ruthlessness. The study might help to explain the money-grabbing tendencies of those with a Machiavellian streak - from national dictators down to 'little Hitlers' found in workplaces the world over.

The idea that psychopathy could have a genetic component frightens many people. For the religious, it upsets the idea that God made everyone equal and in his image. For others, it disturbs the idea that we all have some evil in us, a dark side. Yet as we continue to repeat, there is a difference between the violence committed in a moment of emotional upheaval and the cold, planned, instrumental violence of the invasion of Iraq or the genocide of the Palestinians. Psychopaths want to obscure the boundaries between their deviance and our misguided passion. Who has never felt so anger they have wished someone dead? But how many of us would actually go through with it? We know that we do have a dark side, but the psychopath would have us believe that ours and theirs are the same thing. They are not.

Maslow the schizoidal humanist

2008-02-19T13:09:00.001+01:00

"Peak performance", "human potential". These terms have entered our vocabulary thanks to the work in humanistic psychologist of Abraham Maslow.

The book Fascism And Democracy In The Human Mind: A Bridge Between The Mind And Society by Israel Charny includes some excerpts from the diary Maslow that reveal a rather disturbing mindset.

Seems he may have had a rather good mask of a very warped mind.

From pg 42-44 of Charny:

An excellent and sadly shattering example of the way the mind of a devoted humanistic psychologist can move along the same track of the fascist paradigm to a point where he calls for execution [sic] of the nonbelievers -- in this case, nonbelievers in humanism! -- is found in the posthumously published writings of no less than Abraham Maslow, recognized and beloved as the founder of modern humanistic psychology! The same Maslow who conceptualized the unfolding development of the mind and personality of a person as the highest state of human development, and who attributed to the "self-actualized" person an ethical and empathic orientation toward other human beings and the society in which he lives, was revealed after his death to be a highly self-involved, bitter loner filled with contempt and rage at the many people who did not appreciate him or his ideas, and who dared to conceive on a broader community level the identification and execution of those who opposed proposed humanistic policies for the betterment of society.

The following are shocking, almost unbelievable excerpts from Maslow's posthumously published writings:

Humanistic psychology absolutely needs a doctrine of an elite, degrees of humanness, health and sickness, winners and losers, aggridants (whether by heredity or by learning), good specimens, no equal votes, non-equal weighting. The taste or judgment of one superior can and should outweigh 1000 or a million blind ones.

The Third-Force philosophy is antideath-wish, anti-exploiting of others, antistunting or crippling, antivalue-destroying, antibaby-crippling and diminishing; anti-unrealism = antifake.... We keep alive many of the people whom nature left to itself would kill off. So we are hurting the human gene pool, which must be deteriorating. We can certainly continue to do this, to be compassionate with anyone living, but this right to reproduce might very well be limited. In the immediate future -- within the next century -- we must anyway cut hack the population of the world. The right to reproduce must surely become rather a privilege which is socially controlled and socially granted.... One could speculate that the worsening gene pool is partly responsible for the large number of naysayers, death-wishers and born losers and schlemiels.

I find myself secretly entertaining all sorts of "cold-blooded" possibilities... drug users are performing a kind of biologically unselfish act, a sort of noblesse oblige for the good of the species and voluntarily killing themselves "for the good of the gene pool." ... Sooner or later, after the catastrophes force us to pace theoverpopulation, we'll stop with all the crap about more food, or better strains of rice {which just produce more people). How can we give up on humanitarianism? But how can we not permit voluntary (or maybe involuntary) euthanasia and suicide? One day we'll have to talk about the exposure or killing of monster-babies, or even of healthy surplus babies.

As with some, nothing will work ultimately but shooting.

These are terrifying statements from anyone, let alone a great psychologist, especially one who is recognized as one of the fathers of "humanistic psychology." Maslow's fascist intolerance of lesser beings and his readiness to call for real murderous actions on behalf of a super race of humanists is a powerful warning to all of us to look for the corresponding readiness in us, and to overcome such readiness with what we will be describing as a democratic mindset.

Sounds like Maslow was in agreement with what Łobaczewski calls the schizoidal declaration, so let's look at the traits of the schizoidal type:

Literature provides us with descriptions of several varieties of this anomaly, whose existence can be attributed either to changes in the genetic factor or to differences in other individual characteristics of a non-pathological nature. Let us thus sketch these sub-species’ common features.

Carriers of this anomaly are hypersensitive and distrustful, while, at the same time, pay little attention to the feelings of others. They tend to assume extreme positions, and are eager to retaliate for minor offenses. Sometimes they are eccentric and odd. Their poor sense of psychological situation and reality leads them to superimpose erroneous, pejorative interpretations upon other people’s intentions. They easily become involved in activities which are ostensibly moral, but which actually inflict damage upon themselves and others. Their impoverished psy- chological worldview makes them typically pessimistic regarding human nature. We frequently find expressions of their characteristic attitudes in their statements and writings: “Human nature is so bad that order in human society can only be maintained by a strong power created by highly qualified individuals in the name of some higher idea.” Let us call this typical expression the “schizoid declaration”.

Human nature does in fact tend to be naughty, especially when the schizoids embitter other people’s lives. When they become wrapped up in situations of serious stress, however, the schizoid’s failings cause them to collapse easily. The capacity for thought is thereupon characteristically stifled, and frequently the schizoids fall into reactive psychotic states so similar in appearance to schizophrenia that they lead to misdiagnoses.

The common factor in the varieties of this anomaly is a dull pallor of emotion and lack of feeling for the psychological realities, an essential factor in basic intelligence. This can be attributed to some incomplete quality of the instinctive substratum, which works as though founded on shifting sand. Low emotional pressure enables them to develop proper speculative reasoning, which is useful in non-humanistic spheres of activity, but because of their one-sidedness, they tend to consider themselves intellectually superior to “ordinary” people.

I wonder how many other "great psychologists" are as sick as Maslow? And they are the ones setting the standards by which the rest of us are measured! It is amazing that someone with such a distorted capacity for psychological insight could become such a highly regarded psychologist. But in a world where deviant values rule, up is down and right is left.

What's all the fuss about your rights?

2008-02-19T01:55:00.001+01:00

Bush wants to get his wiretap bill renewed. It's called the 'Protect America Act' and it gives him the right to continue with warrantless wiretapping. You gotta love that Orwellian name. According to this story, News: What's all this fuss over FISA? | bill, court, fisa, intelligence, government - OCRegister.com, the Republicans want Bush to have a free hand:

"It's not dumb luck that we haven't been hit since 9/11," says Rep. Ed Royce. The Fullerton Republican says that the government needs to continue to intercept the phone calls and other communications. He says those methods have thus far thwarted attempts to get money transferred to terrorist organizations, stopped terrorists from obtaining guns and ammunition and stopped attempts to plan future terrorists attacks in the United States, England, France, the Middle East and Pakistan.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher brought the issue closer to home.

"Just think about shutting down the interceptions because of some misplaced notion about protecting American rights and we end up with families being murdered at Disneyland because some messages weren't intercepted," said Rohrabacher, R-Huntington Beach."

I guess the message is to stay away from Disneyland.

The Trick of the Psychopath's Trade: Make Us Believe that Evil Comes from Others

2008-02-01T16:13:00.001+01:00

Silvia Cattori

After reading the book Political Ponerology, A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes by Andrzej Łobaczewski, I wished to interview the author. However, given that he was sick, he was unable to respond to my questions except in the shortest way, a single paragraph. Fortunately, I was able to interview Laura Knight-Jadczyk and Henry See, editors of the book who discussed the questions with him via telephone and were thus able to speak on his behalf.

I think everyone should read this book because it provides the keys necessary for understanding events that we often can't comprehend. The book describes the origins of "Evil", its true nature, and illustrates how it spreads throughout society.

Mr. Łobaczewski spent years observing those in power whose actions were the incarnation of evil, people described in psychological terms as anti-social, psychopaths, or sociopaths.

Silvia Cattori: Here is what a Swiss psychiatrist said to me about the book Political Ponerology:

I have never read anywhere else the things Łobaczewski speaks about. No other book has treated the subject in this way. It was immediately useful for me in my work. The things he affirms about perverse/pathological behaviour - in conflicts in business as well as in the political sphere where we see more and more conflicts and more and more people of this type - immediately helped me to better understand, for example, the functioning of these individuals who create conflicts in their work and who, wherever they go, pollute the atmosphere.

Why did he choose a title that is so hermetic, Political Ponerology, for a book that should interest not only psychologists and psychiatrists but everyone?

Laura: First of all, let me say that a very strong emotional bond exists between us and Dr. Łobaczewski and we have communicated with him regarding this interview. He is very elderly and his health has been very poor for the past year or so and he regrets that he is not able to respond personally; he made an attempt, but he is presently not even strong enough to write more than the briefest answers to written questions. Even then, after a few minutes of concentration, he is exhausted and his focus wanders. We very much want to protect his health and well-being, but we also wanted to satisfy the request for responses to important issues. Andrzej pointed out to me on the phone that he has full confidence in our understanding of the subject. He repeated that, as he said when he wrote to us, he was looking for someone who was going in the same direction, thinking the same way, that he could hand his work on to - more or less pass the torch, and of all the work had been passed to him by others. He spent years looking for someone and it was our work that met the criteria.

Having said that, let me try to answer your question: Why did Łobaczewski choose that title? The first thing is that the work was originally a series of documents, technical and academic, originating from various sources. As Łobaczewski explains in his introduction, very little of the work is original to him, he is just the compiler. Academics tend to choose titles for their papers that are phrased in academic terminology, and scientists consider it their prerogative to make up new terms to describe their discoveries, (such as physicists coming up with words like quarks, muons, leptons, and so on), so in that sense, the title is entirely understandable. The term, "ponerology" is an obscure theological term that means the study of evil. Andrzej knew this, and decided to reclaim and rehabilitate this word for scientific use since, as it happens, our science really doesn't have a word for the study of "evil," per se. We need one.

Henry: When Łobaczewski sent us the manuscript for his book, we were stunned. We had been preoccupied with the question of why, no matter how much good will there is in the world, there is so much war, suffering and injustice. It doesn't seem to matter what plan, ideology, religion, or philosophy great minds come up with, nothing seems to improve our lot. And it has been that way for thousands of years, repeating over and over again.

We had also been researching the question of psychopathy for several years, and had published many articles on the subject on our web sites. We had also transcribed an electronic edition for research of the seminal work on psychopathy by Dr. Hervey Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity, with the permission of the copyright holders because it had gone out of print. It is such an important and seminal text that we made it freely available for download. So we had a good grounding in the question and had some inkling that the question of psychopathy and the dire situation we are facing on the planet were related.

Laura: Let me add that the reason we had been researching psychopathy was, as mentioned above, because we had encountered the phenomenon first hand. We were engaged in working with groups of people and the phenomena that Ponerology addresses in terms of groups and how they are corrupted by pathological deviants insinuating themselves into a group under the guise of normality, was very familiar to us on a small social scale. We had observed it and dealt with it time and again, though in the early days, we were just flying by the seat of our pants. We knew that something strange was going on, we just did not have labels and categories for it. We found some of those labels and categories in texts about psychopathology, but it still did not address the social dynamic.

Henry: But Political Ponerology presents the subject in a radically different way from other texts about psychopathy, suggesting that the influence of psychopaths and other deviants isn't just one of many influences working on society, but, under the appropriate circumstances, can be the primary influence that shapes the way we live, what we think, and how we judge what is going on around us. When you understand the true nature of that influence, that it is conscienceless, emotionless, selfish, cold and calculating, and devoid of any moral or ethical standards, you are horrified, but at the same time everything suddenly begins to makes sense. Our society is ever more soulless because the people who lead it and who set the example are soulless - they literally have no conscience.

SC: When you come to understand that the reins of political and economic power are in the hands of people who have no conscience, who have no capacity for empathy, it opens up a completely new way of looking at what we call "evil". Evil is no longer only a moral issue; it can now be analyzed and understood scientifically.

Laura: With Łobaczewski, the word "Ponerology" has been reclaimed from its religious connotations where it never did society as a whole much good, and is the science of evil, of understanding its origins scientifically, and how it can infect individuals and societies like a disease.

When psychopaths are the policy makers in government and the CEOs of big business, the way they think and reason - their 'morality' - becomes the common culture and 'morality' of the population over which they preside. When this happens, the mind of the population is infected in the way a pathogen infects a physical body. The only way to protect ourselves against this pathological thinking is to inoculate ourselves against it, and that is done by learning as much as possible about the nature of psychopathy and its influence on us. Essentially, this particular 'disease' thrives in an environment where its very existence is denied, and this denial is planned and deliberate.

While the title of the book may seem hermetic, it must be understood in the context of the great difficulty Andrej had in getting his work published at all. The first two manuscripts were lost, as he describes in his preface. One was burned minutes before the arrival of the police in a raid on his home, and the second was sent to the Vatican via an intermediary, never to be seen again. The third version, the one published by Red Pill Press, was written while Andrzej was living in the US during the Reagan years. Zbigniew Brzeszinki had offered to help him find a publisher, but after several months, it became clear that he was at best doing nothing and at worst actively working to ensure it never got published. So the manuscript sat in a drawer for over twenty years. It was written for a professional audience and the title was chosen in that context. This is also the reason that the text itself is very dense, and the title accurately reflects that it was not written for the layperson. It was written for professionals and in an academic style reflecting his background.

We are currently working on a more popular version of his ideas.

SC: Łobaczewski has studied these people not from a political point of view, but from a psychological point of view. He has managed to understand how it happens that mad people, ideologues, and repressive powers, in spite of their inhumanity, can obtain the support of large populations. Does not everyone have a perverse/pathological basis, periods when they pass through a perverse/pathological life?

Henry: First of all, it needs to be said that "mad people" don't need the support of large populations, only a powerful minority that can both "drive" the population and control it. Look at the polls in the United States. Bush has been hovering around 30% popularity for years - and that is the population as a whole. But because he is backed by a very powerful minority, the people who own the media, the arms industry and their military supporters, the oil companies, among others, popular discontent doesn't matter. And as long as Bush's politics don't overtly affect the ordinary American negatively, they don't care enough to do anything about it.

Laura: In the U.S. - and elsewhere in the world - even the most oppressed and unfairly treated people are easily controlled by fear, by threats to their affordable materialism: entertainment, sports, gambling, so on. Even the failure of schools, medical care, social safety nets, do not drive people to really question what is going on. It is, as Aldous Huxley wrote, a scientific dictatorship: bread and circuses. In short, most Americans are aware of their oppression, and express this in polls, but those in power have successfully drugged them with a plethora of distractions - fear and pleasure - sufficient to keep them under control.

Henry: There is the carrot and the stick. As long as people can continue living in the illusion, they will do so. When the illusion starts to crack, then the stick comes in.

Laura: People are afraid of making waves for fear of losing what they have, of losing their peace, of having to exert effort to resist. After all, it does take all their time to keep the illusion going, they must slave daily to keep the SUV from being repossessed, and they want to have time for the football game on Saturday.

Henry: They also figure that Bush only has a couple of years left anyway. The system will take care of itself. Łobaczewski's book shows us why this is an extremely naïve way of thinking. The system that is in place is a pathological system that is at odds in a very profound way with the being or nature of most people. People of conscience are being ruled by people with no conscience. This fact is the primary injustice and is the basis for the other ills of society.

Laura: For many years this system has been covert because there were still people in high positions with conscience, but over time, they have all been replaced or disposed of in one way or another, and now the pathology of the system is out in the open, but nobody cares. If you look back over the history of the past fifty years or so, you will find that nearly every public figure who has died tragically was one who had conscience, concern for people, and influence enough to make waves against the pathological types.

Henry: The second part of your question is very important, because it is this idea that we are all somehow perverse or pathological in some ways, that we all have a shadow side as Jung put it, that serves as a major prop to the pathocratic system and makes it possible for psychopaths to hide in the general population. We have been convinced that we are all just animals and that each of us is capable of becoming a Hitler or a Bush or a Mengele, given the right circumstances. We buy into this because we have all done things in our lives for which we are ashamed, for which we feel a sense of remorse. We know those thoughts that come to us in moments of heated emotion, thoughts we wouldn't want anyone else to know or to hear. We sense that we do have this shadow side, a part of ourselves of which we aren't proud. Because we feel this sense of shame and remorse about this aspect of ourselves, we project onto others that they have the same capacity. This projection is where we make the fatal mistake.

There are two issues this raises. First, there is a world of difference between someone who, in the heat of an argument with a significant other, for example, loses control and physically or psychologically abuses that person, and someone who coldly, with calculation and forethought, carries out the same thing. The acts are wrong in both cases. I am not trying to diminish the abuse done in a moment of emotion. But that same person, who loses control momentarily, would be unable to think through and coldly plan out the same act. Something inside of him or her would recoil. In the psychopath, that voice of conscience does not exist. Psychopaths are capable of plotting out the genocide of a people, such as the Palestinians; people of conscience are not. One person may be killed in a heated argument. Many thousands can die from cold calculation.

Laura: One way of understanding this is that studies show that psychopaths not only have higher rates of violent crime, they commit different types of violent crimes than non-psychopaths. One study showed that two thirds of the victims of psychopaths were male strangers while two thirds of the victims of non-psychopaths were female family members or acquaintances - crimes of passion. Normal people can commit acts of violence while in states of extreme emotional arousal, but psychopaths cold-bloodedly select their victims for revenge or retribution or to achieve some end. That is to say that psychopathic violence is instrumental, a means to an end, predatory.

Henry: Secondly, in a society dominated by pathological values, if one can call them that, the existence of a small group of conscienceless people promoting a culture of greed and selfishness creates an environment where the pathological becomes the norm. In a society, such as the United States today, where the president can lie with impunity on matters of life and death, a pathological environment is created where lying becomes acceptable. Violence is acceptable. Greed is acceptable. It is part and parcel of the ideology of the American Dream, that anyone can be a success no matter who you have to hurt to do it. And, it is in what they must do to actually succeed that the seeds of pathology are sown. In that environment, people of conscience who are weak and easily influenced take on the characteristics of the pathological in order to survive and succeed. They see that their leaders lie and cheat, and they figure that if they want to get ahead, then they can lie and cheat as well.

Laura: I call it "Official Culture." Linda Mealey of the Department of Psychology at the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, Minnesota, proposes that a competitive society - capitalism, for example - is one where psychopathy is adaptive and likely to increase.

Psychopathy is an adaptive life strategy that is extremely successful in American society, and thus has increased in the population. What is more, as a consequence of a society that is adaptive for psychopathy, many individuals who are NOT genetic psychopaths have similarly adapted, becoming "effective" psychopaths, or "secondary sociopaths." In other words, in a world of psychopaths, those who are not genetic psychopaths, are induced to behave like psychopaths simply to survive. When the rules are set up to make a society "adaptive" to psychopathy, it makes psychopaths of everyone.

Henry: Were that pathological influence removed from society by putting psychopaths into quarantine, by educating people of conscience on the signs of pathology, of what to look for and how to deal with manipulation, by changing the systems created by psychopaths; if through such methods we were able to remove this ponerogenic influence, then the other pole, that of conscience, would be the more influential of the two, and people would gravitate towards altruism and truth rather than selfishness and lies.

If we were able to remove the pathological influence, we might find that our conceptions of "human nature" are wrong and are weighted wrongly because we accept those who are genetically without conscience as "human". Remove them and their acts from the data set, remove their influence from society as a whole, and the higher qualities of human nature capable of conscience might find room for expression in ways that we have never dreamed possible.

SC: How can we distinguish between psychopaths and healthy people? Can you give us the portrait of a true psychopath? Which of their faculties have problems?

Laura: The simplest, clearest and truest portrait of the psychopath is given in the titles of three seminal works on the subject: Without Conscience by Robert Hare, The Mask of Sanity by Hervey Cleckley, and Snakes in Suits by Hare and Paul Babiak. A psychopath is exactly that: conscienceless. The most important thing to remember is that this is hidden from view behind a mask of normality that is often so convincing that even experts are deceived and, as a result, they become the Snakes in Suits that control our world. That's the short answer.

Henry: Popular culture sees psychopaths as characters such as Hannibal Lector from Silence of the Lambs, that is, as serial killers. However, while a certain number of psychopaths are criminals and have had run-ins with the law and some are, in fact, serial killers, there are a great number of them that never fall afoul of the law. These are the smarter ones, and they are the ones that are the most dangerous because they have found ways of working the system to their advantage.

There are a number of traits that we find in psychopaths: An obvious trait is the complete lack of conscience. They lack any sense of remorse or empathy with others. They can be extremely charming and are experts at using talk to charm and hypnotize their prey. They are also irresponsible. Nothing is ever their fault; someone else or the world at large is always to blame for all of their 'problems' or their mistakes. Martha Stout, in her book The Sociopath Next Door, identifies what she calls the pity ploy. Psychopaths use pity to manipulate. They convince you to give them one more chance, and to not tell anyone about what they have done. So another trait - and a very important one - is their ability to control the flow of information.

They are also incapable of deep emotions. In fact, when Hare, a Canadian psychologist who spent his career studying psychopathy, did brain scans on psychopaths while showing them two sets of words, one set of neutral words with no emotional associations and a second set with emotionally charged words, while different areas of the brain lit up in the non-psychopathic control group, in the psychopaths, both sets were processed in the same area of the brain, the area that deals with language. They did not have an immediate emotional reaction.

Our whole emotional life is a mystery to them, while at the same time providing a tremendous tool for them to manipulate us. Think of those moments when we are strongly affected by our emotions and how our ability to think is impaired. Now imagine that you were able to feign such emotion, remaining cool and calculating, while the person you were exchanging with was really trapped in an emotional cauldron. You could use tears or shouting to get what you wanted, while your victim was driven to despair by the emotions they were living.

They also seem to have no real conception of past or future, living entirely for their immediate needs and desires. Because of the barren quality of their inner life, they are often seeking new thrills, anything from feeling the power of manipulating others to engaging in illegal activities simply for the rush of adrenaline.

Another trait of the psychopath is what Łobaczewski calls their "special psychological knowledge" of normal people. They have studied us. They know us better than we know ourselves. They are experts in knowing how to push our buttons, to use our emotions against us. But beyond that, they even seem to have some sort of hypnotic power over us. When we begin to get caught up in the web of the psychopath, our ability to think deteriorates, gets muddied. They seem to cast some sort of spell over us. It is only later when we are no longer in their presence, out of their spell, that the clarity of thought returns and we find ourselves wondering how it was that we were unable to respond or counter what they were doing.

Many of the books written in English on psychopathy talk about psychopaths as a group which share a common constellation of traits. The most widely used scale for measuring psychopathy was developed by Dr Hare. It is the PCL-R. It lists twenty traits that are found in the personality. If the trait is found sometimes, then it is given a 1; if the trait is prominent in the personality, then it is given a 2. The highest total then is 40. People who have more than 30 on the PCL-R scale are considered as psychopaths.

But what Łobaczewski has done is to go further and give a taxonomy of different types of psychopaths and other pathological types, and he shows how their deviations work together to form a pathological system. He has brought out some work from psychologists in Europe that were lost during the years of communism.

Laura: Diagnosis is a contentious issue ; there is a controversy that needs to be explained in order to understand the possibilities of detection. [1]

Łobaczewski discusses the fact that in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, the psychological sciences were co-opted to support totalitarian regimes and that this was done by psychopaths in power who then set about destroying any possibility of accurate information about the condition being widely propagated. He points out that any regime that is composed primarily of pathological deviants cannot allow the science of psychology to develop and flourish freely because the result would be that the regime itself would be diagnosed as pathological thus revealing "the man behind the curtain."

Based on first hand observations of the phenomenon in question, Łobaczewski states that the repression of knowledge is undertaken in the typical manner of the psychopath: covertly and behind a "Mask of Sanity." In order to be able to control the psychological sciences, one must know or be able to sense what is going on and which fragments of psychopathology are most dangerous. A pathological political regime locates those individuals in the field who are psychopaths, (usually very mediocre scientists), facilitates their academic studies and degrees and the obtaining of key positions with supervisory capacity over scientific and cultural organizations. They are then in position to knock down more talented persons, governed both by self-interest and that typical jealousy which characterizes a psychopath's attitude toward normal people. They are the ones monitoring scientific papers for their "proper ideology" and attempting to ensure that a good specialist will be denied the scientific literature he needs.

The fact is that, over the past 50 years, the concept of psychopathy has been narrowed sharply and now refers to a specific personality disorder though there have been attempts to do away with the classification entirely, switching to "Antisocial Personality Disorder" which can embrace a wide variety of behaviors without necessarily requiring the clinical diagnosis of psychopathy. Robert Hare insists that it is important to understand that psychopathy is not synonymous with criminality or violence; not all psychopaths engage in violence and criminal behavior. At the same time, not all violent persons or criminals are psychopaths.

According to Robert Hare et al, Cleckley, Łobaczewski, and many other experts in psychopathy, a diagnosis of psychopathy cannot be made on the basis of visible behavioral symptoms to the exclusion of interpersonal and affective symptoms because such a procedure essentially makes psychopaths of many people who are simply injured by life or society and allows the true psychopaths who have a well-constructed "mask of sanity" to escape detection. Based on a growing body of literature, many (or most) psychopaths grow up in stable, well-to-do families, and become white collar criminals who, because of money and position, never have their private destructive behaviors exposed to public view and repeatedly avoid contact with the justice system.

Now, getting down to diagnosis and/or detection specifically: There are a number of theories on the The Etiology of Psychopathy such as Psychopathy as an adaptive strategy, as a variant of normal personality, a brain dysfunction, an expression of attachment or pathology in early childhood, a learning disorder, and so on. There is very little empirical evidence to support the idea that the true psychopath is the result of an abused childhood, and much empirical evidence to support that it is genetic. The neurobiological model offers us the greatest hope of being able to detect even the most devious psychopath.

As Henry has mentioned, in a study of reaction times to various words, emotional, neutral, pseudo words, it was noted that the Event-Related brain Potentials (ERP) in lexical decision tasks among non-criminals indicate that responses to both positive and negative words are more accurate and faster than are those to neutral words. In the brains of these subjects, the central and parietal sites indicated early and late ERP components in respect of emotional words. The late components of the ERP were thought to indicate continued processing of the word.

In this same study, non-psychopathic criminals also demonstrated sensitivity to the emotion laden words. The psychopaths, however, failed to show any reaction time or ERP differences between neutral and emotional words. More than that, the morphology of their ERPs was strikingly different from that of non-psychopaths. The late component of the ERP that was long and large in non-psychopaths was small and brief in psychopaths. It is thought that this reflects the fact that psychopaths make lexical decisions and process information in a shallow way. This is supported by recent brain-imaging studies which show that psychopathic substance abusers have less cerebral activity during performance of a lexical decision task than non-psychopathic substance abusers.

Hare and others have also discovered that the ERP anomalies of psychopaths are not specific to affective language but also include abstract language. Another curious finding noted in two separate studies was an unusually large negative wave that swept over the frontal areas of the brain. A tentative interpretation of this is that it is a reflection of a profound cognitive and affective processing anomaly.

Other recent studies lead to similar results and conclusions: that psychopaths have great difficulty processing verbal and nonverbal affective (emotional) material, that they tend to confuse the emotional significance of events, and most importantly, that these deficits show up in brain scans. Psychopaths exhibit unusual inter-hemispheric distribution of processing resources, have difficulty in appreciating the subtle meanings and nuances of language such as proverbs, metaphors, and so forth, have poor olfactory discrimination, possibly because of orbito-frontal dysfunction, and may have what appears to be a sub-clinical form of thought disorder characterized by a lack of cohesion and coherence in speech. All of these cognitive and affective anomalies cannot be explained by any of the other models of psychopathy, and they can be detected with brain scans.

The latter issue: the thought disorder problem, is something that we have been working on, trying to find some general rules so that the average person can make personal assessments after applying some covert tests during discussions with anyone they may suspect has some reason to deceive or manipulate them.

But this is a loaded issue. As Łobaczewski points out, if a psychopath considers himself normal, which is of course significantly easier if he possesses authority, then he would consider a normal person different and therefore abnormal. A normal person's actions and reactions, his ideas and moral criteria, strike psychopaths as abnormal. A normal person strikes a psychopath as a naive, smart-alecky believer in barely comprehensible theories about love and honor and conscience; calling him "crazy" is not all that far away.That explains why pathological governments always have considered dissidents as "mentally abnormal".

The legal system is not set up to deal with this because, of course, the legal system is often a creation of pathological individuals, or at least administered by them. Well - thought out legislation should require scientific testing of individuals whose claims that someone else is psychologically abnormal are too insistent or too doubtfully founded.

On the other hand, any pathological social or ruling system in which psychiatry is used for political reasons presents additional problems. Any person rebelling against a governmental system, which strikes him as foreign and immoral, can easily be designated by the representatives of said government as "mentally abnormal", someone who has a "personality disorder" and who should submit to psychiatric treatment and there are plenty of ways for them to gain control of the testing system. A scientifically and morally degenerate psychiatrist can be found for this.

So, this is a thorny issue.

SC: What are some of the different types identified by Łobaczewski?

Henry: As with most researchers, he makes an initial distinction between inherited deviations and acquired deviations, that is, those who are born with the pathology and those who become pathological because of injuries to brain tissue or traumas when young. Injury to brain tissue can leave scars that then change the individual's ability to perceive and to feel. Those sections of the brain meant to handle those functions can't do it, so the data is rerouted to other areas that were meant for other tasks. He calls those whose characters evolve in distorted ways due to injuries or trauma characteropaths. He then lists several forms of characteropathies: the paranoid characteropath (he cites Lenin as an example); frontal characteropathy, a deviation due to injuries in the frontal areas of the cerebral cortex (Stalin is an example of this type), drug-induced characteropthy, caused by the use of drugs that damage the central nervous system. Then, there are pathogen (disease) induced characteropaths (he suggests that Franklin D. Roosevelt may have suffered from this disorder), as well as certain people with epilepsy (he cites Caesar and Napoleon).

The inherited disorders are: schizoidia or schizoidal psychopathy, essential psychopathy, asthenic psychopathy, anankastic, hysterical, and skirtoidal psychopathy, and those whom he labels 'jackals', that is, individuals who end up as hired guns or mercenary killers. Łobaczewski speculates that this type is a mix of the other types. To give an idea, I'll just touch on two types.

Schizoidal psychopathy is a deviation that produces people who are hypersensitive and distrustful and disregard the feelings of others. They are attracted to high-sounding ideas, but their impoverished psychological nature severely limits their perceptions and turns their so-called "good intentions" into influences for evil. Their idea of human nature ends up perverting their attempts. As Łobaczewski says the typical expression of their attitude to humanity is expressed in what he calls the "schizoidal declaration": "Human nature is so bad that order in human society can only be maintained by a strong power created by highly qualified individuals in the name of some higher idea". How many movements, from fascism to communism on to the neoconservatism we see today are based upon that idea! One could easily imagine this statement coming from Leo Strauss, for example.

Essential psychopaths are the type that is closest to the idea of psychopathy discussed by Cleckley, Hare, Babiak, and others. Łobaczewski makes the frightening remark that "They learn to recognize each other in a crowd as early as childhood, and they develop an awareness of the existence of other individuals similar to them. They also become conscious of being different from the world of those other people surrounding them. They view us from a certain distance, like a para-specific variety."

Think about the ramifications of this statement: They are, to some extent, self-aware as a group even in childhood! Recognizing their fundamental difference from the rest of humanity, their allegiance would be to others of their kind, that is, to other psychopaths. Łobaczewski points out that, in any society in this world, psychopathic individuals often create an active network of common collusion, estranged from the community of normal people to some extent. They are aware of being different. Their world is forever divided into "us and them"; their world with its own laws and customs and that other "foreign world" of normal people that they consider to be full of presumptuous ideas and customs about truth and honor and decency in light of which they know they are condemned morally. Their own twisted sense of honor compels them to cheat and revile non-psychopaths and their values. In contradiction to the ideals of normal people, psychopaths feel breaking promises and agreements is normal behavior. Not only do they covet possessions and power and feel they have the right to them just because they exist and can take them, but they gain special pleasure in usurping and taking from others; what they can plagiarize, swindle, and extort are fruits far sweeter than those they can earn through honest labor. They also learn very early how their personalities can have traumatizing effects on the personalities of non-psychopaths, and how to take advantage of this root of terror for purposes of achieving their goals.

So now imagine how human beings who are totally in the dark about this can be deceived and manipulated by these individuals if they were in power in different countries, pretending to be loyal to the local populations while at the same time playing up obvious and easily discernable physical differences between groups (such as race, skin colour, religion, etc). Psychologically normal humans would be set against one another on the basis of unimportant differences while the deviants in power, with a fundamental difference from the rest of us, a lack of conscience, an inability to feel for another human being, reaped the benefits and pulled the strings.

I think that pretty accurately describes the situation we are confronted with today.

SC: Can you give us examples that will help us understand more generally the problem?

Henry: Łobaczewski's contribution is his analysis of the way the different types of psychopathic types work together to form a system where people who are clinically pathological have the positions of power and rule over people who are psychologically normal.

Early in the book, Łobaczewski describes his experiences in university where he first encountered the phenomenon. He went into the library to get some books on the question of psychopathy and found to his amazement that they had all been removed! This fact demonstrates a self-awareness of their difference amongst at least some of them, and in the case of Poland under communism, of those in a position of power highly enough placed to get books removed from the university library. Laura said reading that passage made the hair stand up on her neck! The implications of this fact are far-reaching in understanding our world, how it got that way, and what we need to do to change it.

But here are some examples of psychopathic behaviour as reported by other authors:

A mother plays a game of hide and seek with her 4 year old daughter. She is holding a large kitchen knife in her hand. She tells the daughter, I am going to count to one hundred, and if I find you, then I am going to cut off your thumbs. The girl, terrified, hides in her closet, and the mother, knowing that is likely where she will be, lets her stay there, terrified, frightened, traumatized, until the very end. When the mother opens the door, she bends down over her daughter and cuts the skin under one of her thumbs.

A family has two sons. One of them commits suicide using a hunting rifle. The next Christmas, the parents offer the very same gun to their other son as his Christmas gift. When asked about why, they respond, "It was a perfectly good gun."

How does such behaviour fit into a belief system that we all have some divine spark within us or that everyone has a conscience? Can you imagine doing such things to your own children?

Our moralizing doesn't give us any means of treating this sickness. It must be understood for what it is. These people cannot be 'healed'. Imagine that same individual in a position of power and you can explain scandals like Enron. Hare reports on psychopaths who go after the elderly. Say an elderly person has been conned out of his or her life savings - obviously by a psychopath. There are other psychopaths who will contact the victim, claiming to be a lawyer who, for a fee, can get the money back. The victim will then borrow money from a friend or relative and lose that to the shyster lawyer.

Laura: One of the main factors to consider in terms of how a society can be taken over by a group of pathological deviants is that the only limitation is that of the participation of susceptible individuals within that given society. Łobaczewski gives an average figure for the most active deviants of approximately 6% of a given population. Of course, this figure will vary from country to country depending on many variables. Western society has a broad selection of susceptible individuals.

The essential psychopath is at the center of the web. The other psychopathies and characteropathies described by Łobaczewski and others form the first tier of the Pathological Control System and it should be noted that they are far more numerous than the essential psychopaths. So, this group is about 6% of a given population. (1% essential psychopath and up to 5% other psychopathies and characteropathies.)

The next tier of such a system is composed of individuals who were born normal, but are either already warped by long-term exposure to psychopathic material via familial or social influences, or who, through psychic weakness have chosen to meet the demands of psychopathy for their own selfish ends. Numerically, according to Łobaczewski, this group is about 12% of a given population under normal conditions. It is difficult, as Łobaczewski points out, to draw a distinct boundary between these latter types and the genetic deviants without the input of genuine, non-psychopathic, science. At this point, the distinctions can only be descriptive.

So it is that approximately 18% of any given population is active in the creation and imposition of a Pathocracy (or the attempt to create and impose same). The 6% group constitute the Pathocratic nobility and the 12% group forms the new bourgeoisie, whose economic situation is the most advantageous.

Once set up, the elitist psychopathic system corrodes the entire social organism, wasting its skills and power. Once a Pathocracy has been established, it follows a certain course and has certain "attractive" powers. In a Pathocracy, the socioeconomic system arises from the social structure which is created by the system of political power, which is a product of the particular elitist world view of pathological deviants. Thus it is that a Pathocracy is more a macrosocial disease process created by human pathogens, and it can come to affect an entire nation to a degree that is equivalent to a cancer metastasizing. And just as the process of cancer in a body follows a characteristic pathodynamic process, so does the macrosocial disease of Pathocracy.

It is impossible to comprehend such a pathological phenomenon using the methods of "normal" people which do not take into account the deviant thought processes of human pathogens. Certainly it could be said that the entire world has been governed by a "covert pathocracy" (or cryptopathocracy) for a very long time. Many researchers suggest that there has always been a "secret government" that operates even though the "out in the open" government is not, technically, a Pathocracy. The suggestion is that psychopaths are technically ALWAYS in the background, even in the cycles of history that are NOT pathocracies (i.e. during "good times" in what Łobaczewski describes as the foundation for a hysteroidal cycle that opens the door to an overt Pathocracy).

If we use the term pathocracy for "secret government rule", then all of history becomes a "pathocracy" and the word loses its meaning, so it is important to note that the term "Pathocracy" is the specific phenomenon that comes as a result of the hedonism of good times, and that it is characterized by 100% of essential psychopaths assuming some type of leadership position, out in the open, as occurred in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia and Eastern Europe. And, I should add, is occurring now.

One cannot really designate the issues that confront us today as "political", using the ordinary names of political ideologies because, as noted above, pathological deviants operate behind a complete mask, by deception and other psychological tricks which they practice with great cunning. If we think or believe that any political group that has such and such a name is heterogeneous with regard to its true nature, we will not be able to identify the causes and properties of the disease. Any ideology will be used to cloak the pathological qualities from the minds of both experts and ordinary people. So, trying to refer to this or that as "left" or "right" or "center" or "socialist", "democratic," "communist," "democrat" or "republican," and so on, will never help us to understand the pathological self-reproduction and its expansionist external influences. As Łobaczewski says, Ignota nulla curatio morbi! No movement will ever succeed that does not factor psychopathy and ponerology into its considerations!

SC: The perverse are those who in the face of problems they have created say, "It is the fault of others. I have nothing to do with it."

Henry: Exactly. One example that comes to mind is of the psychopath cited by Hare who killed his parents and then pleaded for sympathy because he was an orphan!

Nothing is ever their fault. They are never responsible for anything.

Laura: I'd like to explain this phenomenon a bit more. The psychopath is an individual who divides the world into black and white, good and evil, and this division is very rigid. The psychopathic structure is organized around a very simple structure: "feels good, is good / feels bad, is bad." But, just because this structure is rigid, that doesn't mean it is rational or stable! Things are good or bad, but what is good or bad depends on the immediate circumstances, i.e. what the psychopath wants at the moment.

But this is not a "defense mechanism," it is just simply that, for the psychopath, the locus of reality is centered in what "feels good" with no reference to any other human being at all except as objects that can serve this need. You might almost say that the psychological structure of the psychopath is equivalent to a newborn infant, and it never develops, never grows up.

An infant has no internal self other than being at the center of a bundle of neurological inputs and outputs that seek pleasure and reject discomfort. Of course, with a grown up psychopath, there are highly developed neurological circuits that have developed in the process of learning what works to get his needs and demands met.

Under the influence of this internal structure, the psychopath is not able to appreciate the wants or needs of other human beings, the subtle shades of a situation or to tolerate ambiguity. The entire external reality is filtered through - made to conform to - this rigid and primitive internal structure.

When the psychopath is frustrated, what they seem to feel is that everything in the world "out there" is against them and they are, good, long-suffering and only seeking the ideal of love, peace, safety, beauty, warmth and comfort. That is, when a psychopath is confronted with something displeasing or threatening, that object (person, idea, group, whatever), is placed in the "all bad" category because, of course, if the psychopath does not like it, it cannot be good!

Now, here's the kicker: when the evidence mounts that some choice or act of the psychopath created a problem or made a situation worse, this, too, must be denied as part of the self and projected as coming from "out there."

That is, anything that is defined as "bad" is projected onto someone or something else because the internal structure of the psychopath will admit to no wrong, nothing bad, no errors. And keep in mind that this is not because they choose to do that, it is because they cannot do otherwise. That is the way they are made. They are like a cat that enjoys torturing a mouse before eating it. That's just what they do.

Psychopaths are masters of Projective Identification. That is, they project into others everything that is bad (remembering that "bad" changes according to what the psychopath wants), and seek in manipulative ways to induce in that other person what is being projected, and seek to control the other person who is perceived as manifesting those "bad" characteristics. In this way, the psychopath gains enjoyment and feels "in control."

Keep in mind that what the psychopath considers to be good has nothing to do with truth, honor, decency, consideration for others, or any other thing than what the psychopath wants at any given moment. In this way, any violation of the rights of others, any foul, evil deed, can be perpetrated by a psychopath and he will still sleep like a baby (literally) at night because he has done nothing wrong!

George Bush and the Neocons can destroy Iraq and call it "bringing democracy" and actually feel good about it. Israeli psychopaths can steal Palestine, murder Palestinians, and justify it with the Bible and feel good about it. Of course they know they are lying when they lie, but inside, they believe that true good is what makes them feel good and safe in this world. And they know that beings such as they are will be morally condemned and attacked by the majority of other human beings if they do not conceal their drive for what they want behind a mask of some high sounding justification.

SC: Is this to suggest that the modern pathocrats, operating in today's so-called 'information society' are no different than the supporters of Hitler? Except that they are more dangerous because they have more sophisticated tools and are able to use the various means of communication in a more conscious way?

Laura: That sums it up very well.

Henry: The pathocratic system, that is, a government staffed by psychological deviants, will produce similar effects whether it is hidden behind the mask of fascism, communism, or capitalism. The ideology itself is unimportant. It merely serves as a cover and a rallying point for a certain percentage of the population who are needed as a support base. This support group believe the slogans and are unable to see behind the mask. A certain percentage of them will interpret the ideological slogans with the eyes of conscience and believe that the aim is to improve our lot. Therefore we get slogans about the brotherhood of man, or of the exploited, empty phrases about justice and freedom, bringing democracy to Iraq, and so on, while the reality is one of powerlessness, division, and enslavement. As certain individuals who support the ideology come to see the gulf between the ideals and the actions of the leaders or Party, some will leave to be replaced by others.

In the world today where information is controlled by a small number of media outlets, and those media outlets have much in common with the pathological governments, greater numbers of people can be influenced and infected with pathological thinking. An example of this is the famous remark made by Madeleine Albright back in 1996 when she was asked about the 500,000 deaths in Iraq, mostly of children, due to the embargo. She responded that she thought 'It was worth it', that is, those deaths were the necessary price to pay to bring down Saddam. That is unquestionably pathological logic, and yet how many Americans would have heard that response and thought nothing of it? Anyone who, on hearing that statement, was not outraged has been infected with pathological thinking, they have been ponerized. Their thinking has become distorted by the pathological infection.

SC: Are the absence of conscience and insensitivity to suffering what distinguishes psychopaths from normal people?

Henry: That is probably the key point that people need to understand. For years artists, writers, philosophers, and others have attempted to understand how it is that our world is an endless stream of suffering. They have attempted to find moralistic explanations. Łobaczewski spends the first part of his book discussing the futility of this approach, suggesting instead a scientific approach based upon an understanding of evil as a societal disease, as the actions of pathological deviants within a society. Without the ability to empathize with others, these people cannot feel that suffering, any more than a cat feels the suffering of a mouse when it toys with it prior to killing it. Bush can order thousands of American troops into Iraq or Afghanistan where they will be killed or permanently maimed, and where they will kill thousands and destroy an entire country, can sanction the torturing of prisoners, can support the actions of Israel in the Occupied territories or Lebanon, and none of the suffering he is causing is real to him. There is no hardware in these people that can process these emotions. They are incapable at the physiological levels of doing so.

Laura: They don't have the hardware to run that program.

Henry: The only suffering the psychopath knows is when his food is taken away from him, and I am using food in a symbolic sense: that is, when he doesn't get what he wants. That is the depth of their emotional life. Anything else that we would read into them comes from our own imagination projecting back onto them our own internal reality.

And we do it all the time because it is very difficult to really grasp that there are people who do not have the rich inner lives that normal people have.

Laura: Actually, when we project our own inner structure onto the psychopath, we are behaving most psychopathically! We are then in a "black and white" world where the nuances of human existence are not being considered. The fact is, everyone is not created equal in terms of intelligence, talent, physical appearance, and so on. And just as everyone looks different, so are they different in their psychological make-up even if there are certain things that are shared as a species. Łobaczewski points out that it is a universal law of nature that the higher a given species' psychological organization, the greater the psychological differences among individual units. Man is the most highly organized species; hence, these variations between individuals are the greatest. Both qualitatively and quantitatively, psychological differences occur in all structures of the pattern of human personality.

Experience teaches us that psychological differences among people are often the cause of problems. We can overcome these problems only if we accept psychological differences as a law of nature and appreciate their creative value. These differences are a great gift to humanity, enabling human societies to develop their complex structures and to be highly creative at both the individual and collective level. Thanks to psychological variety, the creative potential of any society is many times higher than it could possibly be if our species were psychologically more homogeneous.

The normal human personality is in constant flux, learning, growing, changing. A lifelong evolutionary process is the normal state of affairs. Some political and religious systems attempt to induce excessive stability and homogeneity in our personalities, but this is unhealthy for the individual and society from a psychological point of view.

A society that is properly educated, psychologically, will know about and understand differences, and will also know about the main thing that normal humans have in common: the ability to develop a mature conscience. In this way, differences can be celebrated and the creative potential fully optimized.

SC: If we find more and more manipulators and perverse people at all levels, is it because our society favours narcissists and individualists?

Henry: Isn't that what we see with the values of the neoliberals? The entire idea of capitalism is a narcissistic idea. In the United States, which is the model that is held up to the rest of the world, we are told "anyone can become president". It is the myth of individual success. "Look out for Number 1." "If only you work hard enough, you, too, can become rich and successful." "Failure is your own fault."

Faced with this mythology, with this ideology, psychopaths are better prepared to succeed than people of conscience because they have no ethical or moral sensitivities that will put a brake on their actions. They are quite willing to step on anyone necessary to get to the top: backstabbing, lying, spreading stories about their rivals, are fine, with never a moment lost in remorse.

The pushing of neoliberalism on the rest of the world is also a way to ponerize greater portions of the globe. It is a pathological ideology hiding behind an economic pseudo-science.

SC: Are we making a mistake when we imagine that the suffering created by Israel in Palestine and the US in Afghanistan and Iraq would end the day that Bush or Olmert, or any individual, leave power? That the causes are systemic and are even impervious to changes of political party and government?

Henry: Yes. Look at the United States. The two parties are mirror images of each other. To preserve the image of democracy, both are needed, both serve the same masters. But there are no leaders in the US who are standing up and speaking about the genocide of the Palestinians. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are passed over in silence. There is no room for conscience in the US government, in either party, and the control of the press, not to mention other means such as blackmail and threats, ensure that those who might speak up, don't.

Israel is a state founded upon a great lie: that some supreme being declared a small group of people to be "his chosen people" and gave them a bit of real estate in the Middle East thousands of years ago. The great lie of Israel and Judaism is also the foundational lie of Christianity and Islam, the two other monotheistic religions. So we have a great part of the world living since thousands of years with belief systems that are patently preposterous - if the teachings are taken literally and not seen as distorted expressions of some greater, underlying spiritual truth.

How is changing any individual player in this system going to change a dynamic that has been unfolding over thousands of years? The pathocratic structure described by Łobaczewski applies not only to governments, but also to other groups and organizations: anywhere that power accrues. So religious organizations and liberation movements can become ponerized, and what, at its origin, may well have been a tool of liberation becomes a tool of enslavement.

If, as Łobaczewski suggests, the essential psychopaths recognize each other and are able to work together to achieve common aims for their "para-specific species", as opposed to our interests, then we even have a mechanism for explaining a control structure that extends back in time, back into the mists when the first psychopaths set up the first pathocracy. All of a sudden, theories which until now have been belittled as "conspiracy theories" can be looked at in a new light, with a new means of explaining how they could exist. This, I think, is a very important area for further research.

Another question that can be asked is the following: what is the effect on the personality of believing a lie? Is there a pathology that has as its basis accepting a fundamental lie as the cornerstone of a belief system? There have been studies done on "belief" and the character of true believers. But what if the original error is not so much belief as belief in a lie? Is any belief a belief in a lie because our knowledge is imperfect, and once we become fixed on "believing" no matter what, does our personality become distorted?

But to come back to your question, Israel appears to have a special place in the world today. It can ignore international law and not worry it will be called to account. It can unleash brutal attacks on the Palestinians and yet it is always portrayed as the victim - a typical psychopathic tactic. Attacks against Jews across the globe are catalogued and denounced while the same acts committed against Arabs and Moslems are acceptable - another psychopathic trait. We have speculated in other books we have published, such as 911: The Ultimate Truth, that the psychopaths at the top of the pyramid have chosen to use the Jews for a special role in unleashing a great culling of the human population. The idea that there is a great Jewish conspiracy is the cover story put out by the psychopathic pathocrats to cover their own plans. There is a conspiracy, but it isn't Jewish; it is pathological.

SC: Can things only get worse because macrosocial Evil is the same Evil that has been affecting humanity since of the dawn of time? An evil somehow inherent in human nature before which we are impotent?

Henry: The evil is not inherent in human nature - at least not in normal humans who have been educated properly. This issue is one of the most important points made by Łobaczewski in his analysis of the pathocratic system. This systemic evil comes from a small group of people who have no conscience, either because they were born that way, that is, they are genetic psychopaths, or because, due to injuries when young or due to upbringing, their conscience died or withered away.

For example, Łobaczewski thinks that Stalin was a characteropath. That is, he was not born a psychopath, but the pathological traits developed due to injuries when he was young. His type of pathology can be identified. So in fact Łobaczewski's research is liberating because it frees us from the idea that these horrible acts of evil are part of normal "human nature". These individuals are like disease pathogens in a body - like a cancer on society, or like leprosy. Certainly, a body can be eaten up and destroyed by the disease, but it is the disease doing it, not the body itself.

We won't really know what human nature is until the pathocratic influence is removed and a truly human society, that is, one led by and with values in accordance with our highest nature, our conscience, is able to be founded.

SC: We have seen the ease with which a George Bush or a Tony Blair are able to lie. They don't even bat an eye, lying without any shame. Do you think liars like Bush and Blair, who present the traits of the narcissist and the manipulator, are born perverse/pathological?

Henry: We are not psychologists, and we are not going to give any diagnosis of individuals. We note, however, that there have been stories that Bush used to blow up frogs with firecrackers when he was a kid. He is also completely irresponsible. Nothing is ever his fault. Blair has the smooth charm that is remarked upon so frequently by psychologists researching the question of psychopathy. They are, as far as I am concerned, pathological figures. But what is important is the system, the pathocratic system. Individuals perform different roles in the system according to type.

Are these traits intrinsic to the individual and can they be corrected?

Henry: Correction depends on many variables.. Before we can think about correcting these abnormalities, we need to find ways of protecting ourselves from their influence. That means first admitting that such people exist and are found in positions of power, and second, learning to recognize the signs of their manipulations and the pathological traits of our own thinking in order to free ourselves from their influence.

Laura: As Henry says, there are many variables. When speaking of psychopaths, specifically, the general consensus today is that they are not only incurable, they are un-treatable.

The first problem is that if you want to treat a problem, you have to have a patient. The word patient comes from Latin, and means "to suffer." A patient, by definition, is someone who is suffering and seeks treatment.

Psychopaths do not experience distress and do not think that anything is wrong with them, they do not suffer stress or neuroses, and do not seek out treatment voluntarily. They do not consider their attitudes and behavior to be at all wrong, and do not benefit from the many treatment programs that have been set up to help them "develop empathy" and interpersonal skills. The psychopath recognizes no flaw in his psyche, no need for change. They will, however, participate in treatment programs in prisons in order to gain their release.

When the recidivism rate of psychopaths and other offenders who had been in treatment was examined, it was found that the rate of general recidivism was equally high in the treated and untreated group, 87% and 90% respectively, however the rate of violent recidivism was significantly higher in the treated group than the untreated group; 77% and 55% respectively. In contrast, the treated non-psychopaths had significantly lower rates of general and violent recidivism; 44% and 22% respectively, than did untreated psychopaths, 58% and 39%. So it seems that treatment programs work for non-psychopaths, but actually make true psychopaths worse.

A Canadian journalist reporting on this study wrote: "After their release, it was found that those who had scored highest in terms of 'good treatment behaviour' and who had the highest "empathy" scores were the ones who were more likely to reoffend after release."

That's the psychopath for you: they can fake anything to get what they want.

The question is: how can therapy make someone worse? Robert Hare's conjecture is that group therapy and insight-oriented therapy actually help psychopaths to develop better ways of manipulating, deceiving and using people but do nothing to help them understand themselves.

Freud argued psychopaths are untreatable in psychotherapy precisely because having a conscience is a prerequisite for being able to use psychotherapy. It is the conscience, and the related capacity for concern for others, that drives the serious scrutiny of one's motives, which underlie one's behaviour. Yet psychopaths lack conscience and concern by definition.

SC: How can one tell if one is not himself a psychopath? That we haven't been influenced ourselves by the effects of their perversion/pathology while they occupy positions of power in an administration where we find ourselves - in a trade union, a political party or elsewhere?

Laura: As to the first part of your question, let me just say that it's not an unusual question - for a normal human - but by now you probably have figured out that if a person thinks they might have something "wrong" with them, they aren't a psychopath! Remember: The psychopath simply cannot conceive of anything being wrong with him or herself.

Henry: It is very possible - in fact, terrifyingly common - to become ponerized, as Łobaczewski puts it, that is, to become infected with this evil. It happens when you begin to accept pathological thinking as normal. We used the example of Madeleine Albright above. Look at professional sport, for another example. It is now accepted as normal that intimidation on the field is a legitimate part of a sport like football. We saw during the World Cup last year that Materazzi provoked Zidane ruthlessly during the final match. People think nothing of it. They accept it is part of the game today. However, such verbal violence has nothing to do with the game of football. It is only a part of the game because the world of professional sport, and by example, the world of sport as a whole, has become ponerized. What is pathological has become accepted as normal.

And as soon as one area is accepted, that infection spreads. When we begin to accept pathological forms of thought as our own, as normal, our ability to think degenerates.

SC: When you say there are about 6% of these perverse/pathological in the human population, how did you arrive at this number?

Henry: Łobaczewski's 6% comes from his analysis and that of the other members of the group with whom he was working. But that was for Poland. It is possible that the numbers differ from country to country depending upon their particular histories. If we look at North America or Australia, areas colonized to some extent by people either being forced to leave their homes, criminals, or adventurers, we can ask whether or not the prospect of conquering continents might not have appealed to certain types more than others. Does the history of the American west for example, and the genocide of the indigenous peoples, not point to a higher incidence of psychopathy? Perhaps the level in the United States is higher today because of it.

Laura: A recent study of a university population suggested that perhaps 5% or more of this sample might be deemed psychopathic. This was a careful study designed to ferret out psychopaths that are not criminal but are, instead, successful individuals within the community. This study also demonstrated that psychopathy does occur in the community and at what might be a higher than expected rate; and psychopathy appears to have little overlap with personality disorders aside from Antisocial Personality Disorder. Obviously, work needs to be done in order to understand what factors differentiate the law abiding (although not moral-abiding) psychopath from the law-breaking psychopath. This highlights one of the major problems of the research to date which has focused primarily on forensic samples.

SC: Does it include men and women in general?

Laura: Although the vast majority of psychopaths are male, there are female psychopaths. The ratio is more than 1/10 males versus approximately 1/100 females according to one estimate.

SC: How did you establish that it was more frequent among men? This means that in the general population, almost one person in ten has tendencies, more or less strong - to create a climate of conflict?

Laura: This has been established as an average from various studies. As the study cited above, a university population (psychology students, by the way, which ought to give us pause!) gives a figure of 5% or more, we might think that it was the sample - people involved in studying psychology, an easy way to power over others - that gave such high numbers. On the other hand, this study may have netted individuals with psychopathic behaviors who were not necessarily true psychopaths. Of course, the figure could be higher in one place than another, higher in one profession than another, and so on. The one thing that needs to be kept in mind is that psychopaths, because of their nature, rise to the top in whatever milieu they find themselves. So do not imagine that they are down there, in the gutters of society, and that you will not encounter them or be affected by them.

SC: This percentage seems very low. Does it cover only the perverse who have a dominant position and who sow discord and disorder wherever they go?

Henry: It may seem low because in a ponerized society, many people become infected with the disease. They see what others are doing, and not being strong enough themselves to follow their own moral code, if that code differs from that of their neighbours, they follow the herd. These people are the support base for the status quo. They may not be psychopaths themselves, but they support and defend it.

Another aspect to maintaining the support base is the use of fear, from overt threats of imprisonment and torture to the kind of fear from being marked as different, as "opposing the president" and the like.

Laura: Also keep in mind the 12% of individuals who are susceptible to the influence and thinking style of the psychopaths. In the end, you have a total of 18% or more of any given population that seeks to subdue and control the rest. If you then consider that remainder, the 82%, and keep in mind the bell curve, at least 80% of the remainder will follow whoever is in charge. And since psychopaths have no limitations on what they can or will do to get to the top, the ones in charge are generally pathological. It is not power that corrupts, it is that corrupt individuals seek power.

SC: Conflict seems to be a form of food for this type of perverse/pathological personality. Because it permits them to project their aggression, their violence on others and avoid to put themselves into question?

Henry: You might say that, having no emotions of their own, they feed off of their power to stir up the emotions of others. They get a kick out of the power it gives them. It makes them feel superior to be "above" such emotional displays.

SC: Łobaczewski's analysis of lying is very powerful. When he demonstrates that the liar is always right, he is very convincing. There is in this a new matrices for understanding how psychopaths function. He explains very well this mechanism of the lie. The lie is their way of functioning and winning. I would like to know more about this mechanism of the lie and its effects. How does it work? Are these liars in all fields?

Henry: Lying is a very successful strategy because very few people think that there are hardcore liars in society who lie as a matter of course.

Think of a divorce or some other case before a judge and jury. Most of us will go into the proceedings with the idea that the truth is somewhere in the middle. The two opposing sides in a case will tell their stories, each embellishing their story a bit, each putting themselves in the best light, and the judge or jury will assume the truth is somewhere in the middle.

But what happens when one of the people is a liar and the other is a person telling the truth? The liar is at an advantage because the judge or jury will still expect that the truth is somewhere in the middle. So someone who is the victim of a liar and manipulator cannot come out ahead. Telling the truth cannot get that person 100% of the justice he or she deserves, while lying will always get the perpetrator something.

Daily life is like that trial. We are always going to give others the benefit of the doubt, if you are a moral person. The liar and manipulator will never do that and will use the good will of the person of conscience against him.

Lying is therefore always a winning strategy. That, in itself, can be an indicator that we are living in a pathological system!

Laura: When you consider the infantile internal structure of the psychopath, it's not so difficult to understand the lying aspect. The psychopath isn't really even lying, he is just "creating reality" so that it conforms to what he wants.

Let me try to explain. The psychopathic reality exists by fiat: they declare things to be so. To them, these declarations represent what reality is. The present declaration may contradict what they said a moment ago. This means nothing to them. They make no attempt to deal with the contradiction because, for them, there is no contradiction. Remember, the psychopath cannot process abstractions such as space and time, and what they said a moment ago, under one set of influences, is now past, and therefore no longer exists.

Psychopaths demonstrate a total lack of understanding of what we call "facts." Normal humans really have difficulty conceiving of this because to us, facts are a basic part of our lives. We live by them, base our assessments and decisions on them. We establish facts, and then test things and establish more facts. When we debate, we start with facts and show how we derive our conclusions from those facts.

Psychopaths do not do that. But, because they are projecting their own internal structure onto the psychopath, most people do not understand this. Normal humans who are thinking psychopathically try to convince themselves that there is some other reason for this bizarre mental condition. When psychopaths do not deal with facts, we think that they are doing it intentionally, that they are playing a game with us. We think that they do know what facts are but don't want to admit it.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Psychopaths do not know what facts are. The concept of a fact is, in fact, an abstraction that they cannot grasp. One example of this is a case cited by a psychotherapist. He asked his patient, a psychopath, to look at a chair which was situated about six feet away near a wall. He then asked her to describe the chair. She did, in rather complete detail, except for the legs. The chair she described had no legs.

The therapist pointed this out, and asked how the chair could be suspended in air, with no legs to support it. She said: "I put it there." Therapist asked: "If you look away, will it fall to the floor?" She said: "No. If I look away, the chair is no longer there." Therapist asked: "If you look away - and it turns out the chair is still there?" She ignored the question.

The popular "you create your own reality" idea of the New Age is one example of how psychopathic thinking has permeated our society. The principle is: "If enough people believe something to be true, then what they believe is what reality IS."

In response to this, one can rightly point out: "There was a time when everyone, as far as we know, believed the sun revolved around the earth. That didn't make it so." But, if you ask a psychopath: "Are you saying at that time the sun did, in fact, revolve around the earth - and it was only in obedience to a change in what people believed that the earth came to revolve around the sun?" you will be ignored or accused of twisting the "facts." A normal human would naturally think that the psychopath's refusal to answer the question, their shift to attacking you for misrepresenting the facts and them, is a tacit admission that what they are saying is wrong. But you would be wrong about that. They go right on making declarations and pronouncements about what they are insisting is reality in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Ron Suskind, former Wall Street Journal reporter and author of The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, wrote:

"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend - but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

They aren't really lying - they're creating "new realities." Nothing of what we call reality is real to them. When a normal human being talks about a chair, the reference is to a chair that sits there on its own legs. It's there whether anyone sees it or not, whether anyone mentions it or not, whether anyone "declares" it to be there or not. It has its own sovereign existence. But that is not so for the true psychopath. The psychopath with his/her infantile internal structure cannot comprehend that anything else exists on its own separate from them. It is only their acknowledgement that makes it real, and they only acknowledge what is significant to them in terms of what they want, what will make them feel good.

When a normal human demands that the declarations of the psychopath should be evaluated, the psychopath will declare that the one making such a demand has no integrity which really means that their position - the psychopath's declaration - is not being supported !

From the psychopathic point of view, the world is like a holodeck. They "declare" things into being. Everything is a hologram. They program the holograms. They interact with them in any way they choose. They have them under total control. When they decide to cancel a hologram, it vanishes.

A hologram is not supposed to think for itself. A hologram is not supposed to measure, evaluate, appraise, etc. Most importantly, a hologram is not supposed to critique its master.

When this does happen, they first chastise it to bring it back into line. If that doesn't work, they "vanish" it. And if they must kill it to do so, that's what happens.

Experience has shown no matter what we say, no matter what we point out, no matter how much evidence is given, it has no meaning for psychopaths. They have one goal: to fool us into classifying them as normal humans so they can continue to deceive us, control us and use us for their own power and glory because that is what makes them feel good.

SC: There is therefore a constant interaction; the perverse/pathological cannot dominate alone and need allies. Therefore he must form clans and unite them, offering advantages to those who serve his interests? Advantages that then tie them to them, keep them in their pockets? In other words, if the system is perverse, then everyone becomes perverse and all is lost?!

Henry: Yes, and no. There are inherent weaknesses in the pathocratic system. What it takes is time. Łobaczewski describes the dynamic in the Eastern countries under communism. The pathocrats are incapable of anything genuinely creative. They depend upon people of conscience for their creativity. Now, a society without creativity will eventually perish. When the major positions of power in that society, in government, in industry, in business are filled by pathocrats, the downward cycle begins.

At the same time, normal people begin to see the society for what it is and devise survival strategies. They begin to recognize that their leaders are not like them.

Unfortunately, as one society comes to its senses, there is another ideology masking another set - or even the same set - of deviants ready to take its place. When communism fell in the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries, the capitalist pathocrats were ready and waiting to take the spoils, and even some of the communist pathocrats were able to find a comfortable new home in the "new" capitalist democracies.

The question is, has such a process already started in the US, which we would suggest is the centre of gravity for the pathocracy today. Given that the pathocrats seem driven by an agenda to reduce the population of the world by millions if not billions of people by war or other means, we have to ask if we will have time for this cycle to play out. We are not very optimistic.

But even if a particular expression of the pathocracy falls, the system itself remains in place, rearing its head elsewhere, in the new "centre".

SC: The example that goes in this direction is Iraq. Bush wanted war at any price. Bush lies and he wins. He finds allies of the same stripe as himself, like Blair and Berlusconi. The people who denounce their crimes and fight them lose. It seems to be a perfect example of what he is describing in his book. It is hard to believe sometimes how it is that there are so few people capable of seeing what is going on and able to denounce the consequences. Is it impossible to say no to these monsters?

Henry: How do you say "no" when the media is completely controlled by other pathocrats? You can take to the streets, as millions of people did before the invasion of Iraq, but that doesn't matter because the pathocratic political leaders really don't care what people think. They could care less if there are thousands or millions of people protesting their policies - they have the military and scary weapons at their disposal. The media, then, distorted the message of those who dissented and painted them as traitors. They are still painted as traitors four years on and after it has become plain as day that the war was wrong and that Bush and company lied on every point.

Yet the United States is still in Iraq and it is politically impossible to demand more than that future troop reduction should be "discussed".

So one issue is how many people, in such a controlled environment, see reality, and the second is in such a reality, how do people who do see the lies react and respond to bring about change?

The majority of people have had their consciences crushed, have accepted so many compromises, that they are incapable of thinking or feeling things correctly. They believe that there are countless numbers of Islamic fundamentalists ready to bomb their homes and schools, no matter how absurd that idea really is, and in spite of the fact that the majority of such bombings are false flag operations. The well established fact that intelligence agencies carry out bombings and then blame their opponents - it is impossible to argue that this type of thing is not regular practice - becomes less believable to people in the United States, the UK, and elsewhere, than the fairy tale that there are hundreds of Islamic fundamentalists ready to blow themselves up in the name of Allah!

Think back to what Łobaczewski writes about the befuddled thinking that occurs when someone is in the presence of a psychopath. Via the media, that befuddlement spreads beyond immediate personal contact and becomes a plague on society as a whole. Society itself becomes diseased.

And for those who are struggling to find their mental health, who see the lies, the force they are facing is so overwhelming that they may easily give up. The job appears too great.

Laura: Is it impossible to say "no" to these monsters? No. Difficult? Yes.

Those individuals who think that change can be effected via legal or political processes fail to understand that both the law and politics, by and large, are created and controlled by pathological types, and are set up for their benefit, not the benefit of the ordinary human being. So it is that law and politics are insufficient avenues for counteracting a pathological society that has been created by the efforts and influence of deviants.

Another important thing to remember in regards to seeking solutions via legal or political means is that the cunning of the pathological deviant is far superior to that of normal human beings. Most people are familiar with the idea of the exceptional cunning of the madman, but psychopathy, in its several varieties, has an additional element: the Mask of Sanity.

Recently we saw Cindy Sheehan wake up to the fact that the Democratic Party is just another ideology behind which psychopathy operates. She decamped and has now, as I understand it, decided that the 911 Truth Movement is the right place to be. I'm sorry to have to inform her that psychopaths are vectoring that show also. You didn't really think they would commit crimes like 911 and not cover their backsides by instigating and controlling a "truth movement," did you?

Again and again I receive letters from political action groups asking for money and support. I've given money and support and also written endless letters and emails telling them that their "political actions" aren't going to amount to a hill of beans if they do not factor psychopathy into the equation. They were all so sure that getting the Democrats back in control was going to change everything, and the fact is, nothing has changed. All that money and effort wasted. And now people are realizing it even though we have been saying it all along.

So, I'll say it again - and keep saying it - until the knowledge and awareness of pathological human beings is given the attention it deserves and becomes part of the general knowledge of all human beings, there is no way that things can be changed in any way that is effective and long-lasting. That is the first order of business and if half the people agitating for Truth or stopping the war or Bush or whatever would focus their efforts, time and money on exposing psychopathy, we might get somewhere.

In the end, again, the real problem is that the knowledge of psychopathy and how psychopaths rule the world has been effectively hidden and people do not have the adequate, nuanced knowledge they need to really make a change from the bottom up. Again and again, throughout history it has been "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

When you are dealing with psychopaths, you are dealing with the criminal mind and when such minds are in positions of absolute power - as they are today - there is nothing to restrain them - and nothing will restrain them, you can take that to the bank.

Bush (or, more precisely, his handlers) have almost absolute control of all the branches of government. You can notice this if you observe carefully that no matter what illegal thing Bush does, no one will really take him to task. All of the "scandals" that have come up, any one of which would have taken down any other administration, are just farces played out for the public, to distract them, to make them think that the democracy is still working.

There are only two things that can bring a psychopath under submission: 1) a bigger psychopath; 2) the non-violent, absolute refusal of all others to submit to their controls no matter the consequences. If every single normal person in the U.S. (and elsewhere) simply sat down and refused to lift a hand to further one single aim of the psychopathic agenda, en masse, if people refused to pay taxes, if soldiers refused to fight, if government workers and corporate drones refused to go to work, if doctors refused to treat psychopathic elites and their families, the whole system would grind to a screeching halt.

But that can only happen if the masses of people KNOW about psychopathy in all its horrible details. Only if they know that they are dealing with creatures that really aren't human can they have the understanding of what they must do. And only when they get miserable enough that the misery that the psychopath will inflict on them in the beginning of their resistance pales in comparison, will they have the will to do this. That, or the understanding of the world the psychopaths are creating for their children in which case love for the future of humanity will motivate them to resist.

SC: Did Chirac, after saying no for Iraq, make major concessions to Bush for fear of becoming the straw man? Do the perverse need straw men?

Henry: Imagine that you are a politician with a conscience facing a world dominated by people who are willing to use every trick in the book to retain power: blackmail, intimidation, threats. To what extent was the scandal in France over Chirac's finances while he was mayor of Paris used to bring him into line? We can only speculate.

We know that Bush was illegally spying on US citizens. Was he doing this to collect data that could be used to blackmail and intimidate opposition politicians or journalists who were asking too many questions? I think it would be naïve not to consider this possibility.

Laura: I sometimes joke that nowadays, you can probably figure out who the good guys are by who gets the worst press! But it really isn't that simple. We can't forget that the real war is between the Controlling Psychopathic Elite and Normal Humans. Do the perverse need straw men? Sure, it's part of the show that they all put on for the rest of us. Just as it is one of their tricks to create false flag attacks to direct hatred against those they wish to destroy, so is it entirely within their style of operation to play "good cop vs bad cop." That's Machiavelli 101.

SC: The dynamic you describe is also apparent in the use of the media. Journalists who uphold the tenets of the Tel Aviv-Washington Axis have complete freedom for supporting these wars. Are they, too, part of the monsters? Should we put these liars in the media among the 6%? How is it that the public doesn't see that they are impostors?

Henry: Once the system is in place, those who are morally weak will rally to defend it in exchange for personal privileges. Their self-interest makes them open to contagion. Therefore it is not necessary for every individual to be one of the many types listed by Łobaczewski. There are thousands of morally corrupt and weak individuals willing to do the bidding of those in power if it means fame and fortune or even just a decent living and being left alone.

Which is not to say that the media is free of psychopaths, characteropaths, or the other types delineated by Łobaczewski.

SC: To protect ourselves from evil, then, it seems that each of us must ask ourselves if we are in the presence of one of these twisted people who lie and are only out for their personal interest. But people can't believe that these perverse/pathological are people who feed on evil, who feed on conflicts. Your book describes this expertly: conflicts are their food; they love this conflict, they need this conflict to exist. A normal person cannot imagine that in society there are a certain number of people who cannot do other than feed on evil. Do you think that normal people sense that something is not right but they can't quite understand they are victims and that they suffer because of the lies and manipulations of the perverse/pathological?

Henry: Yes. But it takes someone with a strong character to stand for what he or she knows is right in the face of widespread social opposition. We also have the tendency to give others the benefit of the doubt because we project our own ways of thinking and behaving on them. If we are not aware that there are people who are either genetically incapable of empathy and feeling for another, or whose conscience has been crushed and destroyed because of their life experience, (and they cannot be fixed), and if we do not know how they function and manipulate, we will remain victims.

As someone who has been part of organizations and associations working for social change, you have probably seen the same dynamic play out. The good and sincere work of many can be destroyed by the actions of one person. That doesn't give good odds in bringing some sort of justice to the planet! Only when those who are psychologically normal come to understand that we have a natural predator, a group of people who view us as 'a para-specific variety', will they be open to learning about this human-like race.

Laura: If there is any work that is deserving of full time efforts and devotion for the sake of helping humanity in this present dark time, it is the study of psychopathy and propagation of that information as far and wide as possible. For anyone who wants to really do something, let's get the knowledge of social pathogens out to the people, let's learn how to identify them first, and then we can decide how to proceed from there.

SC: Normal people, those who have a conscience, work to find a compromise between the two. Would you say that being kindly towards them is a mistake because the perverse/pathological have no conscience whatsoever, are without scruples, and are not shy about taking positions of power, even if they are incompetent?

Henry: We talked about this earlier when we described society as a trial, with everyone looking for the truth somewhere in the middle. As long as there is some idea of compromise, the people of conscience will always lose. These psychological deviants have to be removed from any position of power over people of conscience, period. People must be made aware that such individuals exist and must learn how to spot them and their manipulations. The hard part is that one must also struggle against those tendencies to mercy and kindness in oneself in order not to become prey.

SC: Normal people need to retain the awareness that not all people are fundamentally good and don't necessarily take decisions that are good for society. The perverse/pathological don't care at all about morality, for them, only their personal objectives count. They can lie without feeling the least bit implicated in what they say. Taking the case of Bush for example. He can say anything at all and is not at all ashamed about lying. The perverse/pathological have no scruples about lying, about destroying a country, an entire people, as long as it serves their interests?

Henry: The idea that "all men are created equal" and we are all fundamentally good is drummed into us from the time we are born. We are taught that God made us in his image, and that we all have the divine spark within us.

But science is showing us that this religious fairy tale is not true. Mankind has a natural predator, the psychopath, and this predator is invisible because there are no easily discernible markings that set him apart.

Moreover, throughout history we have been divided into groups on the basis of physical, cultural, religious, or whatever other easily recognizable distinctions psychopaths can point out to us, while our real enemy has remained masked.

We have even come across books about psychopathy that attempt to present the case that we are all psychopaths! So we see that there is a move towards damage control. Łobaczewski discusses the use of psychology and psychiatry as a tool of the pathocracy under communism. Well, we see the same thing today in the United States. There are deviants who become psychologists or psychiatrists and who try to rewrite psychology from the viewpoint of the pathological!

SC: Is one of the weak points of our society the tolerance with which we view these monsters? This permits them to create more conflicts and kill more innocents.

Henry: Is it tolerance or ignorance? People are not aware that there exist a category of people, people we sometimes call 'almost human', who look like us, who work with us, who are found in every race, every culture, speaking every language, but who are lacking conscience - and if there is anything that really separates humans from animals, I would suggest it is that: conscience.

We are tolerant of others, in spite of the most horrible crimes, because we project our own inner states on them, assuming that when they go through the motions of expressing remorse, they are remorseful. But for these deviants, there is no remorse, there is only play-acting, a bit of theatre designed to fool us into thinking they are 'like us'.

SC: The only thing to do, then, is to continue to speak the truth. And to tell ourselves that even if those who lie always win against the truth, that in the long run, when more and more people are saying the same thing, little by little this truth may be able to get people to think?

Henry: The truth is the only thing worth working towards. What separates us from the psychopath is our conscience, and our conscience must become the voice of truth. True conscience - if we listen to it - raises us above the example of animal behaviour set by the pathocrats. Think of the horrors at Abu Ghraib. Had the conscience of those soldiers not been sleeping (assuming they had them), they would have refused to carry out those atrocities. If the voice of conscience could be heard by the billions of people who have one, there would be no more war. Other means would be found to resolve differences. If we listened to our conscience, there would be no hunger because we would feel the pain and suffering of those dying without food and we would be unable to not do something about it. And we need to think in our own lives of the ways we kill our own conscience and begin to make painful choices to listen to it before it goes out forever.

If we could really understand the difference between someone with conscience and someone without, we could see how our world has been infected with this pathology throughout its history. With this knowledge, and an application of this knowledge in full conscience of what we are doing, a new world could truly be born.

SC: In conclusion, there are manipulators everywhere. They form a part of society that is structured according to this model, a structure that permits them to behave according to this perverse psychological functioning anywhere they intervene. They are twisted people, held by no moral code, ready to do anything to defend their interests. They are more and more numerous. They are not necessarily linked to any specific ideology. And at the moment when we begin to suspect that someone is part of this percentage of twisted people, do we need to take a different attitude?

Henry: Yes. We need to learn how to say no to the manipulations. That means we need to learn the ways we are manipulated and refuse to do the dance.

Laura: On the whole, a capacity to cheat, to compete and to lie has proven to be a stupendously successful adaptation. Thus the idea that selection pressure could ever cause saintliness to spread in a society looks implausible in practice. It doesn't seem feasible to out-compete genes which promote competitiveness. "Nice guys" get eaten or out-bred. Happy people who are unaware get eaten or out-bred. Happiness and niceness today is vanishingly rare, and the misery and suffering of those who are able to truly feel, who are empathic toward other human beings, who have a conscience, is all too common. And the psychopathic manipulations are designed to make psychopaths of us all.

Nevertheless, a predisposition to, conscience, ethics, can prevail if and when it is also able to implement the deepest level of altruism: making the object of its empathy the higher ideal of enhancing freedom and altruism in the abstract sense, for the sake of others, including our descendants.

In short, our "self-interest" ought to be vested in collectively ensuring that all others are happy and well-disposed too; and in ensuring that children we bring into the world have the option of being constitutionally happy and benevolent toward one another.

This means that if psychopathy threatens the well-being of the group future - which it is doing - then it can be only be dealt with by widespread refusal to allow the self to be dominated by it on an individual, personal basis. Preserving freedom for the self in the practical sense, ultimately preserves freedom for others. Protection of our own rights AS the rights of others, underwrites the free will position and potential for happiness of all. If mutant psychopaths pose a potential danger, then true empathy, true ethics, true conscience, dictates using prophylactic therapy against psychopaths.

And so it is that identifying the psychopath, ceasing our interaction with them, cutting them off from our society, making ourselves unavailable to them as "food" or objects to be conned and used, is the single most effective strategy that we can play.

Notes

1. On one side of the controversy, there is the traditional description of psychopathy derived from the old European tradition discussed by Łobaczewski, combined with the North American Tradition of Hervey Cleckley, Robert Hare and others. This is in general agreement with the experiences of practicing psychiatrists, psychologists, criminal justice personnel, experimental psychopathologists, and even members of the lay public who have had personal encounters with psychopathy.

On the other side of the issue, is what is called a "neo-Kraepelinian" (named after Emil Kraepelin) movement in psychodiagnosis which is closely associated with research coming out of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. This latter view is most closely aligned with the diagnostic criteria of the U.S. psychiatric manual known as the DSM-III, DSM-III-R, and DSM-IV. The fundamental approach of this school is that assessment of a psychopath rests almost entirely on publicly observable or known behaviors which flies directly in the face of what is actually known about psychopaths: their ability to mask their true nature. The argument is that a clinician is incapable of reliably assessing interpersonal or affective characteristics. Another assumption is that early onset delinquency is a cardinal symptom of ASPD. This tends to put heavy emphasis on delinquent and antisocial behavior, i.e., publicly observable behaviors that may have no bearing on the internal make-up of the individual.

Anyway, the DSM-III decided that psychopaths belong in the classification "Anti-social Personality Disorder."

The criteria of the DSM-III for ASPD was decided by a committee of the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-III Task Force and was revised only slightly by another committee for the DSM_III-R. The DSM-IV criteria were also decided by committee, with little regard for empirical research. These criteria are less behaviorally focused and thus, somewhat resemble the criteria for other DSM-IV personality disorders.

Because of the problems with the DSM-III and DSM-III-R diagnosis of ASPD, the American Psychiatric Association carried out a muti-site trial to gather data in preparation for DSM-IV. The field trial was designed to determine if personality traits could be included in the criteria for ASPD (which relies only on publicly viewable behavior), without reducing reliability. The intention of those clinicians who lobbied for this was to bring ASPD back into line with clinical tradition and to end the confusion between ASPD and Psychopathy.

The results of the field trials demonstrated that most of the personality traits that reflect the symptoms of psychopathy were as reliable as the behavior specific DSM-III-R items, thus invalidating the original premise for excluding personality from the diagnosis of ASPD/psychopathy. More than that, that Hare's PCL-R actually measures the latent trait of psychopathy across its entire range! Similar analyses of the field trial data show that the ASPD criteria was less discriminating of the psychopathy trait, particularly at high levels of the trait! In other words, the ASPD criteria set up by the DSM-III-R was designed - intentionally or not - to exclude the most psychopathic psychopaths!

Despite the fact that, after this study, there was an empirical basis for increasing the content-related criteria of ASPD in DSM-IV, this did not happen ; the criteria adopted for DSM-IV were not even evaluated in the field trial.

The DSM-IV text description of ASPD (which it says is "also known as psychopathy") contains references to traditional features of psychopathy but is incongruent with the formal diagnostic criteria in many ways.

One of the consequences of the ambiguity inherent in DSM-IV ASPD/ psychopathy criteria is that it leaves the door open for court cases wherein one clinician can say that the defendant meets the DSM-IV definition of ASPD, and another clinician can say he does not, and both can be right! The first clinician can use the formal diagnostic criteria exclusively while the second clinician can say "yes, the defendant may meet the formal criteria, but he or she does not have the personality traits described in the "Associated Features" section of the DSM-IV text". In other words, a good psychopath with a good lawyer can commit any crime and get away with it. This failure of the DSM-IV to differentiate between psychopathy and ASPD can (and undoubtedly will) have very serious consequences for society.