Dude, where do I sign up.

sign up for what?
We are just talking about a time and point where people might snap
There is nothing to sign up to here...

spike

I started a thread similar to this... not directly but it gave my reasons for people going about like oblivious mice to starving lions. It's all about status quo; it can't be shifted or everything falls outta place. I don't know why, but it's true.

And annoying.

And dumb.

And frustrating.

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City banks peddled mortgages widely on new farmland they had never seen. A new farmer could sign on in either currency. Then a national money contraction occurred, consolidating the two issues. Farmers took the fall. They were left owing the banks up to twice what they had signed for. Believing in the national promise that hard work brings wealth, they found they only worked and lost money on their slow-producing farms, then worked harder and lost more. Meanwhile, the banks flourished. They grew spectacularly. They argued they were only being patriotic.

Bewildered, farmers actually started trying to understand what was wrong by reading books on economics. The result was a bitter understanding of ‘the money power,’ of lenders rights, of monopolistic control, and of American credit corporations as fortresses of wealth.

In desperation, farmers’ cooperatives started up. They aimed for debtors’ independence. They were made up of plain people seeking self expression. First in the South, this movement swept across Texas, then the Western plains states, attracting farmers by the thousand. Then they joined up with railroad workers who were desperate over low wages and ruinous equipment and who were striking. Eventually the National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union spread far west and north, and at its peak had over a million members. The Populist Party was started. This new party was virulently anti-monopoly, and its hero was the opposite, the poor-but-good worker.
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That era is remembered in history books. But it has been so diluted that Populism is described as an agrarian movement, a protest. Omitted are the rage, the oratory, the fires, the marches, the riots, the militia shooting strikers.

I believe some of the early conditions of that movement are reappearing. But today we are mute. We are back to the dogma that whatever the wealthy do is good for the poor.

So this "widespread stress problem" is not something new in America, as the era of the "Industrial Revolution" was relegated into American history.

Today, as the divide between the "relatively-idle rich" who make money without much effort invested for it & the "hard-working poor" who sees most of their labor going nowhere increases in society, when also seen in the context of the media's portrayal of "good people are rich, bad people are poor" syndrome, it's not hard to see why there's so much societal stress building up.

But now the question comes up: How did it happen that way in history & what needs to be known to correct the mistakes that caused the problem in the first place? It a very accurate truism that "those who fail to learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them."

Only a few modern writers like Christopher Lasch see that the detachment of our modern elites is actually betraying our democracy. Fewer writers, like Charles Derber, are saying the moral decay in this country starts at the top.

We live in a peculiar era. There is said to be no ideology.

What is ideology? It is a visionary assertion of values, goals and aims. It ties a people together, explaining what is bigger and more important than each of us. It is part theory, part speculation. It urges loyalty.

Daniel Bell wrote a book The End of Ideology which says that in the United States, ideology has dissolved.

Bell: Through the last century - at least through the belligerent period of the two World Wars and the 1950s Cold War - the United States had plenty to say about what it stood for, also what it hated. Ideology was sharp and it was national. But with the advent of peace, and especially with the decline of communism, there was suddenly less reason to deliver thunderous speeches about why we are here, what we are ready to die for - the speeches that bring urgency and purpose and meaning to people.

We have drifted since the Vietnam era without an ideological rudder. We exist in a kind of void, in which individualism flourishes, and narcissism, ego, materialism, the pursuit of self, wealth, status and greed - but nothing that moves the masses together.

Bush seems to have solved that immediate problem in the same way that Hitler did...He gave us a direction, but as we in ever-increasing numbers are learning, it's not a direction that's good for us as a nation & society. But what kind of person goes to such lengths to lead his people & nation towards self-destruction? Greed & selfishness, certainly...But clear-minded people who are capable of critical thinking would also realize that a "leader" who forges such a destructive path must also be destroyed by it too. We saw (in history) how Hitler's path destroyed him & we see Bush's apparent "omnipotence" fraying at the edges. We see Bush's low approval ratings (the lowest in American history) & the opinions from other national leaders (almost universally derogatory). We see Bush's eventual destruction in the eyes & words of the ever-increasing numbers of protesters. Can't Bush himself see that he's on the road to self-destruction as well as the destruction of America?

Read on to see more of the pieces of this puzzle assemble.

Very rich people are hidden from us because they want it that way.

Naturalist Richard Conniff uses sociobiology to describe the upper class. He has patiently followed the superrich around (and these folks are above 'junior wealth' which is about $5-10 million) and has interviewed them in their natural environment.

This is the new fashion, to explain what humans do because of their genes and their evolution. The exotic customs of the moneyed class fill his book The Natural History of the Rich. Because he is a naturalist, he unflinchingly compares the people at the top with the alphas (top members) of other animal species.

Conniff says the superrich are an intensely narcissistic and competitive small group. They arrange their lives so that wherever they go (Aspen, Monaco, Paris) they see the same few hundred people. They are self-encapsulated. They regard the rest of us as "irrelevant, uninformed, even subhuman," and they don't like to talk to us. (One fabulously wealthy lady used her cell phone to call her chief-of-staff who was in another country to call her maid to tell the maid what to do next. The maid had a cell phone and was on the opposite side of the room from the lady).

Conniff reports that just like other top animals, the superrich are driven by the quest for status, mating opportunities and dominance - except that the human version constantly denies it.

Top-rungers also flout the basic rules of economics. While average folks purchase more stuff when it becomes less expensive (supply and demand), the leisure class prefers to buy stuff that is more expensive, even when comparable stuff is available for less. The object is to dazzle. Sociologist Thorstein Veblen identified that odd habit back in 1899 and termed it ‘conspicuous consumption.’ It’s waste in order to impress. Conniff points out animals do this too. The cascading tail feathers of alpha male peacocks have no useful function. They are there to impress other peacocks - in fact they are so conspicuous they practically prevent the bird from flying.

More biology: the way the superrich have isolated themselves for centuries now qualifies them as a "pseudospecies". By hanging out and mating only with their own kind, over many generations, they have effectively removed themselves from the gene pool.

Gee, all this & I thought that, with the advent of Eugenic studies & the Human Genome Project, we've already learned the lessons about the dangers of inbreeding. Even as recently as Hitler's Eugenics Programs, people were trying to breed the "perfect human race." The indications of Eugenics were already there in history before Hitler or any other studies in genetics began...From what I understand, some of the earliest farmers were practicing "eugenics" on their crops in order to breed in desirable traits & minimize undesirable traits. But among humans, history is full of examples of the genetic disorders caused by the inbreeding within royal/noble families! Why don't these "old money families" learn the lessons of history? Why do they deny all evidence that what they do is & always has been a perpetual mistake?

Sociobiology is a fairly new division of biology. It’s been around since the 1970s. It holds that human behavior is genetically shaped, like animals which run largely on instinct. It says our behavior is evolved. Sociobiology has a younger sister, evolutionary psychology, which talks more about humans than animals, but in the same way. Evolutionary psychology holds that our daily routines and our choices are not nearly as spontaneous as we think because our behavior and our emotions are determined by the long tracks of natural selection. Both these disciplines are in their infancy. Both are busily looking for parallels between animal behavior and our behavior to show we are more instinct than we think.

So what Conniff does is to illustrate the dominant posturing of top rats versus the belly-crawling of their subordinates, and the bluster of top baboons versus the rump-presenting submissiveness of subordinates - and compares it to the obsequious behavior of human underlings who attend to our superrich. Dominance patterns in this species fit dominance patterns in that. So for instance in both human and walrus communities, the top elite have more. They copulate more, they get more of what they want, and they guard more resources than they need. Conniff states: "Humans seem to be 'ethologically despotic,' like chimpanzees; that is, we have a natural predisposition to hammering other people into submission." Except that in human males this is expressed as a "single-minded determination to impose their vision on the world."

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Why do the rest of us go along with this? We can’t help it. A stare from high authority throws us into rabbit-panic. Lower ranking humans throw themselves into submission, even sacrificing themselves for their high superiors. It’s all biologically evolved behavior.

Inequality is everywhere in the animal kingdom - even animals that can’t do much else, such as chickens, are expert at knowing the ranks of all other chickens. And a low ranking wolf will fight to the death for its pack even while its daily life is made miserable by cruel tormenting from the animals above it because belonging to a hierarchy is everything. According to sociobiologists, hierarchy chains us humans too. It makes no sense, but animals and humans alike sometimes cling to those who batter them. It's in the genes.

Along the way, it would be heartening to learn from sociobiologists that our top people are good people. That part is missing. The ultra rich are likely to have serious mayhem in the family history. Conniff traces this old saying to Balzac: ‘Behind every fortune there’s an undiscovered crime.’ Generations ago, many alpha families originally ascended by force and illegal conquest - and, in his interviews, often show themselves proud of it.

And what of our popular belief the wealthy are that way because they work very hard? Do they? Well, maybe. Conniff interviewed one extremely wealthy woman who told him, "I'm the most normal, normal person, I'm not like most rich people. I work really hard. Most rich people I know don't do anything but eat, drink, sleep, pardon the term, #, and have a good time."
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Daniel Batson writes on this debate. At this point, sociobiology is new and unsure. It keeps issuing statements then correcting itself. Does natural selection exclude group selection? Yes; correct that, no. Does natural selection produce only selfishness? Yes; correct that, no. Actually this is not just a scuffle under the stairs among academics. Because of Darwin’s assumptions, all this threatens the very planks on which the theory of evolution rests. So a lot of people are watching this fight.

When these infant disciplines finally get their sea legs, they will bring home the bogeyman of all questions, because selfishness and altruism are not just behaviors, they are moral values. What’s really lurking behind all this work: is our morality controlled by our genes?
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So the appearance of Conniff’s book waves a flag. Any alliance between biology and big money should keep us nervous. This alliance has a scurrilous history.

A contemporary of Darwin’s was English philosopher Herbert Spencer. Spencer was not only thinking on the same tracks, it was Spencer who invented the term “survival of the fittest.” Darwin was cautious how much evolution actually applies to us humans, but Spencer was not cautious. Spencer applied “the fittest” to the wealthy.

Spencer became very popular with the monied classes towards the end of the nineteen century. On the lecture circuit in America he said humans, like the animals described by Darwin, are all in a competition for survival. This was normal. For wealthy industrialists to exploit and discard hordes of the poor in their factories was also understandable. The poor were the unfit. Nature was ‘red in tooth and claw.’ The industrialist was just hastening nature’s way of weeding out the weak members. Spencer also said welfare - even charity - was a bad idea. It encouraged the poor, who would multiply and spread their unfitness. Overall, did the rich prosper at the expense of the poor? Of course - and in the long run, Spencer said, this was good for a nation.
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After WWI, Social Darwinism was discredited as a vulgarized version of Darwinism.

Whether or not we are actually controlled by our genetics is (obviously) still arguable: But even so, most people who continue to maintain a "pro" stance to these theories are forgetting some basically-profound differences between humans & other animals...More on this below.

Uh, oh! Here comes some warning signs that these inbred psychopaths have really been wrong all along!

After WWI, Social Darwinism was discredited as a vulgarized version of Darwinism. At the time, communist ideology was flourishing in Europe, and the argument that the workers were going to control everything was turning Russia inside out like a glove.
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During this last century, of course, many things changed. Science itself made vast progress, reaching peaks, so that at 2000 it could point back at a moon walk, the atom opened, the defeat of plagues as points on its startling ascent.

Today science has tectonic credibility. It is unimpeachable. If a layman attacks science, nobody listens.

But this topic, Darwinism, will not sit down.

Among the few with credibility to question science are philosophers. Philosophers are carefully trained in logic.
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Philosopher Richard Perry, in the staid journal Ethics, quietly walks up and kicks the struts out from under sociobiology.

Is it really science? Or is it a con?

Perry shows the logic under all sociobiology to be not the grid of deductive logic you would expect in science, but only a patchwork of analogies.

Now there is a certain use for analogies, but analogies do not prove anything, they only show likenesses. The best use of analogies is in the persuasive arts, oratory and poetry.

Analogy is the warp-and-woof of sociobiology. That’s what they do, says Perry. If you want to say humans are aggressive, describe the aggressiveness in rats – show the similarities. If you want to prove humans territorial, talk about the territoriality of mockingbirds - invite the similarities. And so on.

Perry says, but wait. Why these analogies in the first place? - There’s something odd about circling around one species to make pronouncements about another. Why are we studying animals to understand humans? Would you investigate houseflies by studying blue herons? Wouldn’t that distort what we already know about flies?

His article “Sociobiology: Science in the service of ideology” warns us the logic is so bad, sociobiology should be embarrassed. It is more like weaving a net with the study of animals and throwing it over humans. And it should tip us off to ulterior purposes. We should look for what else it does.

Perry urges us to decline trust in sociobiology. It is engaging reading. But it does what Herbert Spencer did. It tells us we don’t have to feel guilty if we are brutal with each other - animals do it. It gives comfort to perpetrators of social injustice.
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The next point in this essay is that Social Darwinism, or some modernized variation, is rising again.

Supported as a science, our neo-Darwinism is fed by hours of exquisite photography on Discovery Channel where we repeatedly watch hungry leopards stalk innocent deer, fell them and gorge on their entrails hour after hour. (What car salesman hasn’t watched, and said to himself, that animal lives in me, I can use any method to drag down fleeing customers?)

Darwinism has a dangerous ally. Another twist in logic, which always gate-crashes the party and says, if it happens in nature, it must be right.

But the problem is, you cannot logically convert a fact into a right. (Example: it’s a fact some kids beat up other kids on the playground, therefore they have a right to do it).

Morality should step in.

It took a long time to get that right in western civilization. Because it’s a fact Charles Darwin reported on a species of slave-making ants, humans do not have a right to make slaves.

Then as now, using analogy as a justification for ignoring human pain and fear, or creating it, is a perversion.

First time I ever heard of someone giving the name of "pervert" to the inbred old-money families...But it fits.

Our human brains have evolved beyond the reliance of acting only to the physical environment. We've evolved the forebrain which is a step beyond the pure instinct of the mid-brain. We still have those more primitive instincts, but our forebrains allow us to think higher-level thoughts & step beyond "instinctive selfishness." We can consciously consider our instinctual thoughts & modify our actions with willpower! We can imagine the pain of others & empathize with their pain, consider & take action that can ease the pain: In other words, we have the capacity for altruism! Arguably, this may be the whole basis for morality & religion & the creation of laws to arbitrate the arguments we have. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

But many who still cling to the "pro-instinct" arguments of human behavior get wide support form the "old money families" who still behave as their instincts drive them...Supporting this theory boosts their own egos, gives them "justification" for not leading with their forebrains & bolsters their own selfishness! Is it so surprising that those "old money families" who have inbred for many generations are those who are would be most likely to deny that humans have actually evolved some forebrains?

Consider this as well: Some people claim that homo sapiens sapiens is the "chief product of evolution." Yet, what they fail to recognize is this: Darwin's Theory of Evolution started on the basis that all higher-order lifeforms evolved from lower-order lifeforms. This means that, as long as the human species continues to survive, we will continue to evolve! In just a few millions years, we've evolved from animal to human...So now that we have the capacity for rational thought, consider that we can still evolve beyond what we are now!

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I say odd combination because these two theories are actually contradictory. Libertarians should look over their shoulders. Biology promotes the opposite point, that we humans don’t have much freedom because our behavior is controlled by our genes. Sociobiologists say even the functioning of our societies is constrained by our genes, so the idea of us choosing to expand our liberties is hilarious to them.

These two theories were also contradictory a hundred years ago. That didn’t stop monopolists then and it will not stop the high-octane business leaders of today - none of whom are exactly intellectuals.

The kind of "liberty" espoused here means that even liberty must have no constraints...Anarchy! They also oppose democracy as being "mob rule," which to some extent is true...If democracy is also left unchecked. And we also see indications on why the "perverts of Nature" will seek to corrupt government under their power.

The Framers of the Constitution limited Anarchy be establishing a set of Natural Rights, which actually does impose a certain level of restriction on liberty: All Rights are equal for all people but also includes the responsibility to not violate the Rights of others! That's what Common (Constitutional) Law was written for in the first place.

Also, even though the Constitution does include some democratic processes, those also are limited by enumerated terms & conditions...Hence, the Constitution represents a "contract of employment" in that the People are Sovereign over government (for the first time in history) & the Constitution itself acts as the binding contract over the performance of the employees (Government Officers). So to call America a democratic government is (& always was) inaccurate...The Constitution itself demands a republic form of government under Constitutional Laws.

Too many people have forgotten that the USA should be the Constitutional Republic of America. The Constitution originally intended to form a government that would uphold Natural Law & abide by it. However, due to the corruption caused by the "Perverts of Nature," that's not what America is anymore. I write this because, if people are going to start "snapping" & there's no true "ideology" to give them any common direction, I think it's best to at least give some knowledge of truth that may restore the "ideology" that's needed to finally break the cycles of history. I truly believe that we can more efficiently move on in our "social evolution" if we can restore our Natural Rights & remain vigilant against the "Perverts of Nature."
I'm not the first person to have this viewpoint:
Thomas Jefferson:
"A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government."
"Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty."

Turn on the television and watch our national leaders talk policy. They explain we are bringing our way of doing business to foreign lands because capitalism brings democracy. We are the bringers of fortune, uplift, goodness, opportunity and freedom for all - the best destiny humanity has to offer.

Just because this argument is delivered from a podium bathed in rotating lights does not make it true. It is also broken logic.

One of the main events in capitalism is the creation of inequality.

We recall that the two basic values of democracy are freedom and equality. They are the two wings on which that exalted bird flies.

And we notice these official speeches on foreign policy promise freedom, but they never promise equality. We cannot export equality. You cannot give away what you haven’t got.

Second, a point always omitted from these speeches is that capitalism comes in different species. One type is authoritarian capitalism and it is decidedly undemocratic. A governing power, sometimes a military dictator, promises businessmen they will make astonishing profits if they just follow his orders. This - the melding of business and state - happens to be one of the elements of fascism. Another defining element of fascism is that inequality is a virtue.

But free market economics are being built everywhere. This is so powerful, it has the face of a titan.

But we must also consider: As the market economy reaches its next "expand or die" plateau, it'll encompass the whole world (ie: the NWO!) because of the scope of our modern technologies. But what will happen when it's reached the limits of our world & the next "expand or die" plateau approaches? How can they possibly expand when the whole world has already been plundered? Our technology isn't sufficient to spread to other worlds yet...At least, not with anything better than multi-generational spaceships.

If they can't expand their NWO, we will die on a planet no longer capable of sustaining us. As it is now, over-population threatens us with the consequences of one of Nature's Laws: Too many of one species will suffer starvation, famine, disease & death until the Natural Balance is restored. Already, the "Perverts of Nature" resort to war, toxic "medicines" & "chemical additives" in foods to help, but these are only stop-gap measures that have little effect on the overall world population. But any person enlightened to the Natural Laws would be more likely to promote appropriate education in the problem & encourage the use of contraceptives & common sense (based on truthful education) family planning. Instead, we see them stifling the truth (in MSM & schooling), poisoning us en mass & sending us out to kill each other in senseless wars...Does this not sound like how psycho/sociopaths would act?

Surely, they have something in mind for this stoppping-block. Perhaps this is why we've been seeing indications that "ET Contact" is gradually being introduced? Of course, once the NWO has claimed the world, they must galvanize humanity against some kind of "threat" in order to maintain their perversions of Nature, but how would this fit in with the knowledge that they must seek out other habitable planets in order to expand past the next "expand or die" plateau? At this point, I'm merely conjecturing & starting to get off track, so I'll leave this line of thought to another time.

Well, we've seen some indications on general types of people to look out for...But what about recognizing the "Perverts of Nature" in our day-to-day lives?

The major musculature of our modern free markets is corporations. They deserve attention.

Corporations are collections of people doing business. Other types of business entities exist, sole proprietorships and partnerships, but corporations are surely the largest. (Some corporations are more wealthy than some countries). They inspire joy in some people, fear in others.

Corporations have been harshly attacked in several books by investigative reporters. For example, Mokhiber and Weissman’s Corporate Predators and Court’s Corporateering warn of the way corporations influence politics (by shifting massive capital around) as well as the way they take away our personal privacy and security. As a rule, they lack transparency. And they seem invulnerable surrounded as they are by walls of lawyers.
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One book, however, written by a lawyer, may make a difference. It translates the stygian legalese and economics into common language. The book is no less frightening.

The author reveals the corporate Achilles heel.
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Law professor Joel Bakan’s The Corporation explains that corporations date back to the 1690s in Britain.

From the start corporations were peculiarities, being bodies that are split into two parts. Directors and managers run the firms, but stockholders own them. And the stockholders are an ever shifting bunch, being owners today, sellers tomorrow.

Most stockholders have no interest in how the firm does business. They only look at the daily value of the stock. Since the only business of a corporation is to make profit, this is a recipe for corruption, because the stock's value can fluctuate on rumor and reputation, and a firm might grow wealthy on lies, or by overcharging, or by selling a dangerous product, or by not doing anything except issuing promises, and the stockholders are just as delighted. Stockholders don’t ask questions.

Second, the corporation has “a legal mandate to pursue, relentlessly and without exception its own self interest” and this “regardless of the harmful consequences it might cause others.” If along the way they have to pay some fines for damage they have done, this is calculated into business expenses. It’s all numbers. And since some corporations make massive profits, they don’t flinch at paying out very large sums to people and environments they have damaged very badly. And then return to do it again.

Anything that is an unfortunate byproduct of making profit, such as stress, lives lost, disease, broken laws, pollution, immorality, ‘collateral damage,’ grief, disruption, riots, is called an ‘externality’ - because it is outside the crisp equation for calculation profit and loss. Most of what we know as morality and humanity are externalities.

This breakage can have enormous effects on the world. Corporations are externalizing machines, says Bakan. Bulldozing through to more profits, they routinely break stuff wherever they go and this single-mindedness has produced what we have today, colossuses of indifference “of such power as to weaken government’s ability to control them,” so that “corporations now govern society perhaps more than governments do.”
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Bakan goes further. He likens corporations to psychopaths (sociopaths). For his book he interviewed Dr. Robert Hare, a psychologist and expert on psychopathy, to get a list of personality traits that psychopaths exhibit (no empathy, asocial behaviors, manipulativeness, no conscience, no remorse) and then tries those out on corporations. They fit. For instance corporations return repeatedly to make profits from things they know are lethal and that strew grief - cigarettes, cars that catch fire in crashes, drugs with devastating side effects - because the money is there. Enough money gives them a “psychopathic contempt for legal constraint.” Or any constraint.
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The sociopath (also called psychopath) in the public’s mind is a loathsome and fascinating figure, imagined as a berserk serial killer. Actually, most sociopaths couldn’t be more different. Suave and charming, manicured starters of conversations, many look like they come from the pages of GQ. (There are plenty of lissome women sociopaths too.) Consummate actors, you melt when they talk to you. They are smooth as glass. They exhibit a tapered arrogance. They are also “persistent, repetitive, remorseless violators of the rights of others, and the rules of society.”

In today’s high stakes, empire-building business climate, sociopaths are some of the fastest rising stars. In corporate maneuvering they have no loyalty, virtually no emotion, and no conscience.
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This is not a new type of personality. But in modern culture, where success has become separated from honor, they thrive. The sole passion they have is to win. The particular combination of sociopathy and high intelligence is a prototype for business success.
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Stout also says there is a genetic base. Sociopathy runs in families and is partly hereditary – she estimates about 50 percent of it is inborn.

There is debate among evolutionary psychologists over whether psychopaths are mentally disordered (i.e. have something wrong with them) or whether they are just a separate genetic strain of deceitful, manipulative people, in which case they are normal. If it is a disorder, psychopaths are notoriously difficult to treat (they don’t voluntarily come in for psychotherapy, and if required to, they don’t change). Either way, because of their “short-term, high mating effort strategies” they produce more offspring, and their genes will spread through the pool. From an evolutionary point of view, this type is becoming more common.
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Our culture is unwilling to stop them. We furiously promote these smooth surfaced, antisocial people when they turn their talents to making money for the company. Then as CEOs and CFOs we give them extraordinary business power.
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Democracy is something a sociopath loathes, because it represents public constraint by ‘little people’ on his autocratic power. And he doesn’t practice democracy inside corporate walls. What he often practices in the corridors and boardrooms is coercion and intimidation. Returning to Conniff’s observations: “Great fortune builders are also often great screamers [who use] the diatribe as a favorite tool…He calls meetings…at which he rages, growls and curses at his weary employees.”

Why is this type so successful? One possibility: because these malignant personalities are at home in the system. And the reason for that is that the system is malignant.

Well, there's another example of the problems with inbreeding, as mentioned earlier...
And according to other information in the source material, it's estimated that 1 in 25 people already pass on their psycho/sociopathic tendencies. If you happen to work in some kind of Big Corporation (that has no sense of "naturally sustainable development"), that 1 in 25 just might be your boss!

I don't believe that there's any coincidence that reports show how single/small group business owners who intentionally keep the business small & manageable on the personal level usually wind up being some of the most well-adjusted & happiest people in society. In short, being your own boss can give you a certain measure of freedom & better enable you to continue in your own "pursuit of happiness" as described in the Constitution Preamble. Some sense of morality & ethics is the key...You know, the forebrain features!

Large corporations sometimes hire high-ranking specialists and managers who come with personal problems which wear everyone down. These people are not just occasional curiosities; they can be found in every large organization. Company owners are aware of these scabrous personalities under the roof, but are startled to find out just how much they are draining the company since their styles affect many other people.

Hollands shows the owners the company they could be making hundreds of thousands of dollars more profit if they got rid of these misfits, but they don’t, partly because of the expense of firing and rehiring.
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These personalities are not easy to confront. They are extremely judgmental, to the point of mild paranoia, and if confronted they turn rabid or wall themselves up in their offices which is devastating to company morale, creating ripples of anxiety across the cubicles. And because coworkers usually back away from them, the offenders interpret this as a win, and they do it again. Hollands points out that this event, “winning,” is highly valued in high-stakes businesses (sales, legal, brokerage) where competitive individualism is prized, so nobody is sure what to do. So the toxic atmosphere spread by these bullies is borne, and everybody dreads going to work.

Talk about voluntarily dismissing the advantage of using the human forebrain features: Corporations give up increased productivity (& profits) in favor of employees that drive productivity (& morale) down...Simply for the relatively small cost of rehiring & training someone better suited for the job.

Adam Smith never talked about these odd personalities. Adams Smith’s main point is that humans are naturally self-centered, and if you allow all people to work in their self-interest, the nation will benefit.

But individual self-interest will not explain everything. You cannot build a successful economy with something like self-interest any more than you can toss a bunch of boards in the air and expect them to come down in the shape of a house. Much is missing.

Which means a search. Requiring a long journey through rarified concepts? No, I believe the search will take us places we already know. And I am swayed by Nietzsche and his habit of scorning academics who want to make things complicated. The great problems of this world, he said, are not in misty metaphysics. They are in the street. Particularly they are in places we don't expect.

We don't care to look down. Is it because that direction is filled with nothing interesting?

The media seems to affirm that. Apparently, time spent on the lives of workers would be gilding a vacuum. If we follow the media, we will always look up.

Now it seems we're getting down to the repercussions that these Perverts of Natural: We need an "organic look" to tie this all together. We need to see how self-contradictory & self-destructive these people are to human society as a whole.

A tree’s height and its depth are connected. Everybody accepts that because the tree is an organic whole. A building is another kind of organic whole, and if the building is built taller, its foundation must go down. But libertarian economists refuse the heights and depths of our own society to be connected – yes, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but that is somehow a coincidence because everybody is free.

In the life of a tree, what happens below determines what happens above. And I believe if we want to understand how an economy creates such high levels of wealth, we will need to look at its soil, and below, even if it is not pretty where the roots are coiling and clenching the rubble.

What do we hear when we hold our ear to the soil?

We can start with the broad question. Why do we work? It is a fair question.

We want to jump in: “To earn a living,” “To support the family,” “To get ahead.” - All partly true, or true for some people.

Actually the broader question stumps professional analysts. The cover story of a 2003 issue of US News and World Report titled “Why we work” wanders around for several pages and is simply evasive, but says: “Some do it for love. Others do it for money. But most of us do it because we have no other choice.”

That doesn’t sound like the freedom shouted up by libertarians.

The goal of businesses is product and profit. If American all produced something new in their work, we would be a prodigious and much happier society. In fact, worksites are often not what we would expect. Huge amounts of work effort are spent overcoming inefficiencies. What inefficiencies? Workers often spend hours trying to find, cleaning up, checking, losing, leaving messages, not connecting with, misunderstanding, delivering to the wrong place, catching up, waiting, repairing, clarifying miscommunications, correcting mistakes - myriad forms of blather and delay – and all exhausted at the end of the day.

So answers to the question “why do we work?” like, to make, or to produce, are part of the myth of work, but to get a little more reality we need to look at things the textbooks don’t talk about.

A part of the answer is supplied by what happens at work.

---------------Continued Below------------

--------------Continued From Above-------------

One thing that never fails to happen on the job is hierarchy. Hierarchy is ever present in manufacturing, service, private, government, military, civilian, inside-work, outside-work, unsuccessful, successful, full time, part time, day, night, sea, land, intense and indifferent jobs. It is much more predictable than - much more reliable across worksites of different kinds than - money, motivation, service, satisfaction, effort, efficiency, profit or product, which vary.

What hierarchy ensures is control. (The US News article does point out that although more workers are using their homes, it is no escape from hierarchy - and the phone and emails don’t stop after 5:00 p.m.)

So if I go to work for someone, I will enter some sort of hierarchy. And if I go to work for someone, somewhere, I am also selling my personal freedom for a wage.

So most work sites create the opposite of the two basic values of democracy, which are freedom and equality.
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Should we say, the more people working, the more satisfied the nation? That would be nice. But realistically, the more people work, the more people are enmeshed in a system of control which is nondemocratic. That’s not such a cheery thing to say, but we are tired of having the world made cheery by the method of painting our windows blue. If we want to see better, we will have to scrape it off.
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Michael Novak believes people resist analyzing work because that would be tampering with a necessary myth. We might find contradictions. Any contradiction would threaten society’s foundations. The value of hard, competitive work is our society, Novak says. It is painstakingly reinforced from birth and “without that myth our society is inconceivable.”

The origins? Generation after generation of young persons are taught that work is the route to personal dignity and worth. For each child this is repeated in one form or another through school and a light is turned on. Success and failure is everything; no ambition is too high. These myths take a deep hold; they have the spiritual power of hope, and by the time a school graduate enters the workforce he is ready for something momentous to happen.

So each worker starts out on a personal quest. If he talks to other workers about his dreams of growth and expansion, they smile, and later he notices old workers at his job doing much the same work and he starts to think, and to keep his inner visions quiet. Gradually he sinks into routines. He dodges the inanities and politics of the workplace. After many years, that inner light, once supple and strong, is changed. Work doesn’t change much. If the child originally dreamed of being in the NBA or being an explorer, working in an office will feel like a cul-de-sac. But he does the work. He becomes a watcher-of-others. Later perhaps he still has hope, but it is in a different form: now he is darkly working on a distant hope of vindication. Even later he changes again. Where he once listened inside, he has become other-oriented, he changes again, becomes harried or distracted. He works because of obligations, or for security, or for the company. If the light goes out, this is the way he will finish his days, in routines, swimming with all the others, in these vast pools of irrelevant direction.

He was from the start harnessed to somebody else’s dream.

Nonetheless, as this person grows up he will stir the same myth in his own children.

Even more than being harnessed to someone else's dream, it was quite possibly the dream of a psycho/sociopath to begin with...And quite possibly never quite realized that fact!

How about a look at someone who actually made the "trip downward" to see what it's really like "on the bottom?" Take note that one of the real psycho/sociopaths would never even consider doing this to themselves...

In 1999 Barbara Ehrenreich, who holds a Ph.D. in Biology, tried an experiment. She changed her clothes and climbed down the social ladder to be a person living on minimum wage. This level of society is called the working poor. Being trained as a scientist, she took careful notes. She detailed her experiences in the book Nickel and Dimed. One after another she took six jobs, for a minimum of a month each, including waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing home aide, and WalMart salesperson. She drove a car, but made herself live each month only on what she could earn – mostly at $6 and $7 an hour. This meant living in the cheapest lodgings (trailer parks, motels, downtown hotels) and eating on a narrow, bland diet.

The jobs were available. Once on the job she was an exemplary worker. But her first finding was that it is almost impossible to work for those wages and survive. For instance, monthly earnings as a waitress in Florida were $1,039. The cheapest rental she could find was a $500 efficiency, and food, gas, laundry, utilities and phone and toiletries came to another $517, leaving her $22 for everything else. She moved to Maine, hired out as a house cleaner, scrubbing young yuppies’ houses, making $6.65, and paying $480 rent for a room, and so on.

Her second finding was that the jobs often involved exhausting effort, and overtime, and in some jobs she literally worked by the sweat of her brow so that all she wanted to do at night was watch TV over her dinner and then fall asleep.

She became socially invisible - interacting with nobody except her immediate supervisors and coworkers; she felt ‘disappeared’ from society. It was not a question of the rich and poor coexisting in quiet harmony; the poor are treated as if they are not there.

She endured humiliation, abuse, and routine violation of privacy, and sometimes had to surrender basic civil rights. As a waitress she was told that her purse could be searched at any time by management. There were rules against talking on the job. Constant surveillance, being written up by the shift supervisor, and being ‘reamed out’ by managers were all customary parts of the job, also being subjected to drug tests (which in some cases included stripping to underwear and urinating in presence of a specimen collector.) After a while, she felt she was not just selling her labor but her life.

Ehrenreich muses that since the people she was around were all hard workers, there seemed no purpose to the authoritarianism of managers except to create a culture of extreme inequality. Demeaning employees sometimes seemed attractive for employers. The repressive management style also produced the feeling of failure and shame, which, she suspects, keeps down wages because eventually workers think so little of their own worth that they accept the low pay.

Ehrenreich is one writer who has paused by this thought. We have a massive cultural contradiction. "We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world’s preeminent democracy, after all, if large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship.”

And this is the basis of the perpetual lie by the government & media that we must commit ourselves to "make the world safe for democracy," when all along, in truth, we should be making the world safe FROM democracy!
"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." -- Thomas Jefferson
This is true for unrestrained democracy. The Constitution set the Bill of Rights as untouchable from Congress (to which ALL legislative power is granted), from the Executive (who cannot enforce anything that Congress doesn't legislate), from Judiciary (who cannot interpret anything less than what is written) & from the People (who cannot legislate & can not even "vote away" anything form the Bill of Rights). The Constitution & Bill of Rights work as a synergistic whole, becoming more than the mere sum of its parts.

To our Western minds, some kinds of inequality are less tolerable than others, less ‘fair.’

Actually there is no human society with perfect equality. All cultures contain some inequality and the big question is the criterion, because some reasons for inequality are seen as unjust. For instance America thinks monarchy and inherited aristocracy are wrong, but in neighboring Canada they are accepted. In some communities, rank is based on brute strength, in others, pureness-of-heart. Nobody likes to be low in any hierarchy.

Societies with inherited rank also find it’s inefficient. The British, for instance, used to give all their top government jobs and high offices to relatives of nobles. The problem was a lot of the nobility and their relatives are not very bright. As a society grows more technological it needs more pure intelligence to run it. So a century ago, the British started awarding important positions by qualifying exams and educational achievement, open to anybody.

But there’s a benefit to being in a hierarchy by birth: being low is not your fault, and it’s not a moral problem.

In America the idea that anybody should be able to rise is old, and a person’s position has always depended more on ability and accomplishments. This is meritocracy. Meritocracy seems more democratic. It is appealing because it seems to be all about self-steered destiny.

But by the same token, meritocracy introduces blame for low rank. If you haven’t accumulated accomplishments during your life, your low rank is a moral problem because you were free and you had the chance.

In America, therefore, the rich are better, the poor should be ashamed.

--------------Continued Below----------

-----------Concluded From Above----------

All this creates a special set of fears called “status anxiety” by de Botton and “fear of sinking” by Kilmer, an obsessive concern with social status.

And this is where "societal stress" kicks out on most people. Especially when the banks & corporations manipulate the economy & the government into widening that gap between social classes, the stress levels become more widely dispersed throughout increasing numbers of people. More homeless people (most of us have at least heard about the "tent cities" already), more unemployment (as jobs get "outsourced" to foreign shores & remaining jobs are increasingly taken by illegal aliens), more war (where our young & healthy are sent off to kill & die, less likely to pass on "better" genes): All caused by the lies & deceptions from the "perverts" to "justify" their own self-contradictions. It's a sort of "enforced reverse Dawinism" that's taking place in society & that's a huge violation of Natural Laws.
When it gets bad enough, people snap.

Whew! Thanks for bearing with me...As can be seen, it took a lot of time without even including my own comments. As long as these excerpts took to read, there's even more at the source.

I can see where you're coming from with Ross' book...One of the points made in my previous posts implies that violent revolutions/rebellions happen in history when the aggrieved people have no ideology to bind them together well enough to accomplish changes in a peaceful manner.

I do see lots of indications that a common ideology is making some headway in the social consciousness & many of them (if not most or all) have some presence on the internet. Yet all of them I've seen so far, while expending a lot of effort, are not making any appreciable headway with peaceful means: Granted, we can see some small indications taking place in the Supreme Court, over-ruling a few Presidential & Congressional gaffes, coupled with a few more small changes in Congress, but I think it's a case of being "too little to late" to make enough difference before a lot of people actually snap.

Thus, I think history will repeat itself once again with yet another would-be empire.

[edit on 16-8-2008 by MidnightDStroyer]

Banks in the UK now own the controlling interest in the Fed. The US dependence on living outside our means has opened us to vulnerability. People become hopeless only when there is no obvious path to getting a leg up in their lives. That is our current situation. The powers that control us are taking that hope of a better life from us and people respond by seeking to regain our liberty the force that gave us the opportunity we have enjoyed back.

The government makes a mistake then they allow fascist to set the agenda. It sets a bad direction for government that ends in the people in revolt. The purpose of the second amendment was to provide the people the ability to decent in a meaningful manner.

The second amendment was designed to provide the US with a means to reinstate the constitution if it was revoked by illegitimate laws that perverted our founding documents to allow tyranny to prevail as they have today with the unconstitutional Patriot Act. Ron Paul is one of the few that voted against it and he is the one person in government that I feel has not breached the contract of a government by the people.

Those who violated the constitution by voting for the unconstitutional so called patriot act should be punished for treason against the United States according to our laws.

-snip-

nevermind, sorry

[edit on 17-8-2008 by Raverous]

Thank you for the great reply midnight,it is the most informative post that i have read by far.
I really puts things in perspective,thanks again for a great reply.

Spike


[edit on 17-8-2008 by Spike Spiegle]

Thanks indeed to MidnightD for this greatly (long) but very truthfull and informative post...

People will snap when McDonalds goes out of business.