Psychopathocracy: forget the NWO, it's psychopaths who run our world

>> White Raven

Yep the circle goes round and round. It is amazing to me that the few who recognized how psychopaths run the world are all dead.

Well, lots and lots of people who didn't recognize it are dead, too. I'm not sure statistically that more good people die than bad, though "only the good die young" does seem accurate when applied to some aging really mean people I know. ;-)

Jesus called out the religious of his day….turned over the local “wall street” near the temple and got himself killed…

And so on. You're right this happened, but I do think you're leaving out the context, though. If I become a soldier or enter politics, it's a given that there is going to be more threat to my life than if I become a housewife, probably. Some is cultural and obvious. Some is just situational: maybe I'll fly on planes 250x as often every year as I would have if I hadn't joined politics. In Jesus's case, he apparently pissed off the authorities because he caused them fear of reprisal they would pay for; much like being about to make your boss look really bad but in a more significant way. The true (roman) authorities didn't give a damn about him; it was the authorities who would be threatened if the rabble-rousing dude caused "the people" to get out of hand that wanted him dead.

That whole "rabble-rousing" element and "early death" do tend to go together unfortunately.

(Kinda like anybody in the situation of 'leader and messiah' -- you know, that just never ends well. A modern lesson we will re-learn I imagine.)

John Lennon did the same…..I mean really he was not allowed to have his Peace In the United States and was forced to Canada like many of the Native Americans during the first waves of wars in British North America.

He is dead.

Being a socialist in a capitalist country has legitimate problems; he was not shot by the FBI for his political views, he was shot by a nutcase. I don't think you can count him for that reasoning.

Malcom X saw peace after being raised an orphan, educated in prison, and then killed.

Malcolm X blew # up as his primary form of communication LOL. Not that I am entirely against this mind you; he was a good foil to King (said himself that people dealt with King so they wouldn't have to deal with him). Peace was hardly his middle name though!

JFK, RFK, MLK all saw ideas of peace and truth. Dead.

True.

Then again my four year old cousin Korbut was eaten by the Kit Kat lion. (True story. OK, mauled. Same result. They had to shoot the lion, dang it, since he was sitting possessively on him and they thought the kid might still be breathing and saveable. That's why the commercials shifted to the two smaller lions after that. My aunt and uncle became alcoholics and died from it, as an end to the story--tragic. I don't think people dying makes any great statement unless you can (a) demonstrate who killed them and why, or (b) demonstrate that their numbers are so much greater -- or their deaths so much at an earlier age -- than others in a similar position but with a differing perspective.

The girl who once wrote the Russian premier and was invited to visit the USSR and became a cute little peace envoy PR dream -- Samantha Smith -- died in a plane crash. Is it a conspiracy? Maybe. But other people die in plane crashes. (Another family tidbit: my cousin once removed was killed in the LAX crash where the larger plane landed right on a smaller plane. Sigh. Brilliant systems analyst and nice guy.) Good people (and bad people) uninvolved with this subject die too.

>> Illusionsaregrander

I think we can have a revolution against psychopaths without killing them, and without becoming them, and without the probability of having another group of psychopaths take their place after the "revolution" as so often happens.

We need to really see it, and stop supporting it. No one can lead without support from others. Kings dont become kings without armies. Politicians dont become president without voters. CEO's dont become captains of industry if people refuse to buy their products because they loathe their business practices.

That's a great point -- that is true.

We are choosing these people. We dont have to.

That's true too but I think there are elements not addressed here that are part of the problem.

Like that the way to hurt a huge company is seldom to boycott them because it is immense effort with little result most of the time. They have too much money which means too much media which means even a massive grassroots effort cannot compete with the numbers.

One way to hurt them is to compete with them in legitimate areas and win. A company with a 'do no evil' motto (perhaps not as literally as google), combined with support by the people, can do far more harm to the bad guys. (Or target their weak spots; if they're a manufacturer, that might be environmental.)

Unfortunately this requires the support of many people to turn away from the mega-advertising of the bad guy and pay a little more maybe for the 5-year-olds-didn't-make-this product of the good guy.

If we're waiting for that to happen in any numbers big enough to count, it's going to be awhile. I realize I'm a bit cynical, but having observed such efforts and their results has brought me there.

And we are hypocritical. When our leaders, and corporate execs are raping other countries, and things are good at home, we dont mind so much that they are psychopaths. When we benefit as a nation from their psychopathy, we tolerate it. We may tsk tsk it, so we can pretend we are better than them, but we silently vote for them anyway.

I don't know about this really -- I honestly think that the vast, vast majority of people are completely oblivious to all that stuff, and when they hear about it, it seems rather difficult to believe. Most the people I know who *do* know even the most minute fraction of this stuff (and believe it) *do* care about it. They are not all carrying picket signs, or avoiding anything made by company X, so maybe it doesn't count.

There is a max on how much you can stress about. I'm a single mom. I'm at my max daily. Right now in a small province in the far east side of North korea, people are starving. Were you worried about that until just now? Why not, are you heartless? --the point I'm making is that a person has to choose what they have the time, energy, and emotional capacity to worry about and nobody can care and act upon everything. People obsessed with saving the whales don't tend to be quite as obsessed about kudzu. It's a matter of individual capacity.

The USA in particular is absolutely-freakin-huge as a country; we're somewhat oblivious to the rest of the world for the fairly good reason that geographically we might as well be even though in modern times, politically, we shouldn't be. I have more problems in my household (my 50 year old house pretty much needs *every* major thing replaced) than I can handle worrying about in a day, let alone my immediate then extended family, let alone my small city, my poor county, my state, my country at a national level -- and the various groups I identify with, the issues I most support -- and my god, the issues at a national level are endless -- I haven't got the time or energy to go investigating what some corporation did in South America. (Or knowing what is true. I have encountered a lot of what turned out to be serious lying on the part of 'activists' in every field.) It is off my radar because it kinda has to be, and it's no more fair to insist it should be there than for the guy supporting the save-the-whales good cause to insist his must be there.

This is not for any secret negative emotional or moral state: It's because my energy and my charity starts at home for survival reasons: add that corporate problem to the whales, the fading giraffe, the starving koreans, and god knows how many other problems; how much capacity does one have? In my world, I cannot stress about the things I do not rationally believe that I can change, that will kill you. I've come close to that, with mega-stress 100+hr working weeks and news-is-freaking-me-out periods along with it -- for my survival (ok and because all the people at the hospital insisted, when my overnight ordered laptop arrived so I could work from my hospital bed -- no type A here, nope! ;-)) I have learned (am still learning) to limit my "emotion-based concern" (as opposed to mere mental disagreement) to things I have some ability to affect.


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Things I can change, I take action on. My corner of the world gets a lot of effort to make it better in many ways I won't bore you with. I'm no saint but I mention this to point out that I do care about supporting good things, good causes, good people, and make more effort frankly than just about any 20 people I know combined who are not in a religious order. Beyond a lot of major things, even at minor levels I care about 'trivia'; I buy cheese that says it doesn't use artificial hormones in the cows solely because I like the idea of not abusing the poor cows any more than the situation probably already does, as one of a million examples. (I could quit contributing to the potential abuse of dairy cows by not buying cheese, and begin contributing more to the chem and more abuse of mass amounts of agricultural land, water systems, plants, and immigrant workers, but I don't see that as a win either.)

I think what you attribute to a negative everyone-secretly-wants-blood sort of tendency, is more like, "I just don't care about all the 8,712,018,766,132,190,003 problems the world has (in the last 10 minutes alone) because I haven't got the time, energy, or emotional capacity to deal with more than about 8 of them at a time, and if I can't feasibly see myself changing them anyway, then what's the point." For every person written off as supporting evil because they are mostly ignorant and a little unconcerned about what an american corporation is doing in brazil, there's 20 people who are deeply concerned about that, but they are obviously supporting evil too because they are doing nothing about the horrible poachers who are killing endangered species just to sell their hands to junk shops, or polluting the rivers in Nigeria that results in tens of thousands dead, or embargoing food to the starving people in Sudan (or killing them en masse) -- or whatever.

What I'm saying is there is no fair way for anybody (person A) to make a claim against the moral purity of another person (person B) just because that person B does not personally share a concern about the specific thing that person A is concerned about. It is injust to levy that against any individual let alone all of society. Eskimos don't care about issues with remote desert conditions because it makes little sense for them to, and this is human nature and probably part of basic biology and survival.

On some level it may have a degree of accuracy as far as "well obviously people don't care enough", but there are some decent reasons why they don't that are less attributable to callous disregard, secret delight in evil, or things like that, than the realities of daily life and human limits. Applied directly to individuals it is not accurate or appropriate IMO.

I dont think the problem will go away until all of us, every single one of us, starts to see psychopathy not only in our leaders, but in the part of ourselves that doesnt mind benefiting from bloodshed, as long as the blood is not directly on our hands. What we do as a society is hire psychopaths to do our dirty work for us, and pretend that hiring psychopaths to do the dirty work is somehow morally superior to being the psychopath. It isnt.

I think in order to address that I'd need a specific for the model. If you are suggesting we employ soldiers to kill people because we don't want to, I agree that we as a culture do this. However, if you are further implying that this is not supportive of our own beliefs so we are just projecting the bad onto 'bad people' who work for us, I disagree with at least a little bit of that. I happen to agree with plenty of situations that, were I a younger man, might see me with a gun in my hand in uniform in a foreign country (or not, but it's not impossible). That is not my particular destiny this life but sometimes, assigning a task to someone is not because a person is projecting the evil away from themselves so much as "task distribution" handled by the people most qualified and most personally motivated to that experience.

I'm also not fighting for the rights of women in Sudan. Even though I'm a woman and I wish they had better lives. Maybe I'm projecting all that evil but mostly I think I just haven't got time to worry about that evil -- despite a shared value -- it's time to have a business meeting, or make breakfast for my kid. The fate of the universe will have to wait till I have time apparently.


People who don't believe in war, are not necessarily supporting it; often they are just unable to do anything about it.

I suggest we stop voting for presidents who support war! -- oh wait. Every single president basically has (even the current one) -- and generally there are only two options rationally worth voting for if one is to have any say at all -- this logic is great on paper but sucks in implementation.

I also don't want to slice people open and mop up blood, so I'm not a surgeon. I could be said to be "projecting this" onto others -- and at a subtle level, that's a given -- but at a 'moral' level, I believe in at least some degree of either what they are doing (which is horrible) or why (which is supportable) and the reason they're doing it is because they're more qualified. I'd do it myself if I had to. That doesn't make it ok, it merely means that I'm not lying to myself merely because someone else is doing it. And people who hate it aren't necessarily lying to themselves just because someone else is doing it and they aren't a hunger strike, either.

If anything, it is slightly worse. Because on top of wanting to benefit from psychopathy, we are also liars about what we are doing. We pretend it isnt us, when in fact, it has to be. They cant do what they do without us.

On paper, I agree; it is a semantic logic; but in reality, in the hands-on of reality-life, I disagree: actually, they totally CAN do what they do without ME. If I cease buying cheese, I cease buying proctor&gamble products, I cease liking that politician from another state who was nice to those mean north korean leaders, it makes no difference whatsoever. None. One may choose behavior because they feel a moral certitude in doing so--"It's the moral of it"--but there is no reason or logic to pursue behavior allegedly for a reason or cause when that behavior actually does not affect a change in that reason or cause at all.

This is basic learning theory. I don't crave strawberries as an answer to why I suck at shooting hoops -- it is pointless for me to pursue that eating behavior in response, as it doesn't change it. Just as pointless as not buying shampoo is from a global company that is totally unaffected by me and even 10,000+^ me's not buying their shampoo. And if they become so they'll just privately invest in a small company of a different name and sell me something else like tortillas or blenders. I might not buy it if I felt it was a 'moral thing', but that is irrational. I'm irrational sometimes. I think everyone has some 'moral points' and plenty of 'not really worried about it' points. Dunno if that makes them evil or just a finite mortal.

>> zepherian

Yes, it's an awareness issue, the majority has to wake up and see the writing on the wall, so that the few of us that do take a stand, and I've done so on several ocasions in my life, don't get thrown in front of the bus.

Now this is the whole crux of the problem.

THE MAJORITY.

So what you mean -- and I totally agree with you AND this cause, but to be fair about this -- what you mean is that we as individuals need to attempt to do a massive influence over tons of people to get them to agree with our perspective and cause some form of harm to those we perceive as enemies.

Wait. Isn't that just what the 'bad guys' do, the very guys in question in fact.

It's competing by playing the same 'negative' game. We are doing whatever we are doing, in an effort to hurt them, marginalize them.

I personally believe it is usually more impactful in reality to make a big effort instead to support something which can compete against them or displace them alternatively. In other words to push a positive, to help something grow, to create. Rather than focus on pushing a negative and helping something lose/die. Positive energy tends to have a lot more result in the world in my observation, without the unintended consequences that the alternative often brings.

Originally posted by Illusionsaregrander

I dont think the problem will go away until all of us, every single one of us, starts to see psychopathy not only in our leaders, but in the part of ourselves that doesnt mind benefiting from bloodshed, as long as the blood is not directly on our hands. What we do as a society is hire psychopaths to do our dirty work for us, and pretend that hiring psychopaths to do the dirty work is somehow morally superior to being the psychopath. It isnt. If anything, it is slightly worse. Because on top of wanting to benefit from psychopathy, we are also liars about what we are doing. We pretend it isnt us, when in fact, it has to be. They cant do what they do without us.

Originally posted by RedCairo

I tend to feel that as a culture, humans (period) are rather immature. The west and east both example serious but slightly different problems but the bottom line is we don't operate from any sense of truth, nor do we tend to teach our children this. Our family culture at large has degraded terribly, to the point where people reach adulthood and childbearing while still being completely unable to effectively be adults themselves, which just makes the problems worse every generation.

Put a person in a situation that is moving faster than they can quite keep up and some predictable deformations (paranoia, aggression, defensiveness, all control issues and pathologies) occur. I think we have a planetary version of The Peter Principle. (LOL. Never thought of it that way before.) Maybe it's possible this seems to be getting ever-worse ever-faster because the world is in fact changing ever-faster. In other words, it is possible that some degree of the pathologies we see growing more dominant in our cultures might be what amounts to a reactionary survival skill.

Two very perceptive insights about the broader problem of enabling or tolerating rule by psychopaths that mesh very convincingly together. The heart of the problem is cultural conditioning, and the vehicle is technological growth, specifically the mass media and particularly television, which is so invasive and hypnotising and allows not primarily for the transmission of information, but the projection of personality.

Psychopathic behaviours are now transmitted with unprecedented effectiveness because of this. It is such a tired truism that much of the debasement of postwar culture can be blamed on the tube, but the tube itself is a neutral technology, it is the intent that drives the debasement, and here, if you are old enough, you can see the (d-)evolution from Murrow and Cronkite to Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. Fox News is a perfect example of the intent to use the MSM to implant and normalize psychopathic thinking in the larger public, and it has been frighteningly effective. The valorization of primal aggression over deliberate thought is exactly what the MIC wants for the masses.

Throughout history, rulers were almost of necessity psychopaths, because their "skillset," for lack of a better word, was a necessity in a violent difficult, and brutal world. The populace, largely ignorant, found solace in (or was given the sop of, depending on your viewpoint) religion, but even religion, at least as practiced by the Church in the Middle Ages, paralleled the psychpathic structure of feudalism.

You still see a great deal of psychopathic mentalities in fundamentalism of whatever stripe today, but television has largely supplanted religion in influencing/manipulating the nonbelieving public. So if you are going to start to make inroads on exposing this behaviour and educating the public, it must start there, with very explicit and determined policies, but unfortunately the psychopaths also know this, thus the unprecedented retooling of the FCC and media policy by the Bush II administration to allow greater ownership concentration and debasing gov't oversight.

We all, on a nearly unconscious level, know that psychopaths are ruling us, and resign ourselves to the fact, most doubtless believing there is no viable alternative, fatalists. And this is where the idea of the Peter Principle comes into play--it is a very compelling idea that, in our contemporary society of relative wealth and ease and creature comforts, we are being coddled and infantalized and emasculated. The gap in strength and determination between the ruling psychopath and the general population grows ever wider, as the psychopath greets the fruit of technological progress as opportunities and tools to advance his control, while most of us are distracted and softened by them. I'll leave it there; the summation looks too depressing and negative to bother to write out.

Originally posted by RedCairo

So what you mean -- and I totally agree with you AND this cause, but to be fair about this -- what you mean is that we as individuals need to attempt to do a massive influence over tons of people to get them to agree with our perspective and cause some form of harm to those we perceive as enemies.

Wait. Isn't that just what the 'bad guys' do, the very guys in question in fact.

It's competing by playing the same 'negative' game. We are doing whatever we are doing, in an effort to hurt them, marginalize them.

I personally believe it is usually more impactful in reality to make a big effort instead to support something which can compete against them or displace them alternatively. In other words to push a positive, to help something grow, to create. Rather than focus on pushing a negative and helping something lose/die. Positive energy tends to have a lot more result in the world in my observation, without the unintended consequences that the alternative often brings.

I said taking a stand, not cutting their heads. I think, in the long run, these people, the elitist psychocrat, would have to have their massive fortunes, at least in the case of banking cartels and organised religions, expropriated, but that's where I personally put the line, redistributions of wealth. Alternatively we could occupy what space we do and work around them, let their own economic structure implode and buy it up for pittance, like they have done to millions throughout history. I'm not sure we can compete with them, since the reform needed to prevent this situation is so deep that it would necesserily downscale the elitist powerbase.

I'm not sure it's harm. It might be what their souls need. And as for negatives, keeping the elitists at their current dimension is more of a negative than the people of the world can take, they need to be downscaled, we simply can't survive as a species with a bunch of genocidal psychopaths at the wheel. How this downscale is achieved is of course important, as the more peacefull and loving it is done the longer the results will last, so yes, positivity is important, but we cannot keep going on this course without negative consequences that far outweigh those that targeting the elites would result in. This is not an eye for an eye, this is just "something has to be done".

Maybe just turning our backs on them and letting them fail is enough, I do not really know. Maybe, in the process, we can save many of them, again I don't know. What I do know is if we ignore them, and let them keep their powerbase, their goal will always be the same, genocide and transhumanism. Their hubris outscales my compassion, although I draw the line before actual physical violence, which would tend to be homicidal, which will only create a vacuum for the next generation of psychos. By your words I suspect we draw the line in a similar place as you seem to agree with this.

[edit on 24-2-2009 by Zepherian]

reply to post by RedCairo


Regarding this post, just let me add that what I say is more of a probabilistic distribution of atributes. Yes, there will be exceptional people that have the same high level of mental abilities as the psychopaths without having lost their humanity in the process of getting them.

But they will gravitate to something else than the powerstructure and will not usually make their presence felt to a mass audience, as they won't be atracted to the power that such a scenario permits.

Another thing to consider is just how far up the scale are we talking about. I, as I've mentioned anecdotely before on ATS, have managed to score up to the 140's in IQ tests. With some effort I could probably get into a group like mensa, by the seat of my pants. This probably puts me in the top 10% percentile, at least in the type of mental atributes these tests score. My experience with multiplayer gaming usually puts me up in the top 10% in whatever scales the games score by. So let's take my case as an example. I am not bragging here, many people scoring lower have more productive lives, it just means I can calculate quickly and expose ideas nicely, nothing more.
Yet, above me on this scale we have people that are hitting the 200 mark, if not more. These people have near photographic memory. President Clinton, for example, is reported to remember the names for pratically everyone he is introduced to, as well as trivia talked about and circumstance. There is clearly another step between someone who is smart to someone who is processing with orders of magnitude more data. And possibly orders of magnitude less feeling...
I have a normal memory, I can't really compete with them. Because there's a lot of stuff my brain has simply chosen to forget, because my emotions have taken me to focus on things that make me happy... I remember my first kiss, not the surname of that lawyer I met 5 years ago.

I still maintain that the people who are too cerebral are dangerous to humanity. The guy who built the coral castle in florida, and I've forgotten the name so I'll let people google from keywords if interested in this quite interesting story, is reported to have said that "knowledge without experience is dangerous". I think this is the key. People who talk the talk but don't walk the walk could be indicative of some form of psychopathy.

Point taken that not all intelligent well spoken people are psychopaths. That was not what I meant to imply. But the psychopaths this thread is about will be intelligent and well spoken, so some caution is due. Wheat and chaff I guess.



[edit on 24-2-2009 by Zepherian]

Originally posted by RedCairo

Unfortunately this requires the support of many people to turn away from the mega-advertising of the bad guy and pay a little more maybe for the 5-year-olds-didn't-make-this product of the good guy.

If we're waiting for that to happen in any numbers big enough to count, it's going to be awhile. I realize I'm a bit cynical, but having observed such efforts and their results has brought me there.

The first paragraph I quote above IS a boycott. You stop buying a product and purchase from another company. And yes it does require a lot of people and, you are right it takes time.

But here is the thing. Our culture didnt get where it is overnight. It isnt going to change overnight. Generations of blacks had to struggle to gain rights here. Women struggled for over a thousand years to gain rights. Big changes dont happen over night, either positive ones, or negative ones.

It doesnt mean the struggle isnt worth it. It just means YOU personally may not benefit from it. Your descendants might. Or maybe their descendants will. But that kind of is what I am talking about. We are every bit as selfish and self centered as our leaders. If we have to sacrifice, and there is a chance we may not immediately benefit, or worse, may never benefit from that sacrifice. Well then it just isnt worth it.

And the suggestion that you can out compete the unethical in business without having a movement of consumers consciously supporting you simply isnt workable. If someone else will cheat, (use child labor, steal resources, dump toxins rather than dispose of them properly) they will always have lower costs than the ethical competitor. And if people are buying on price alone, (their own greed motive) the invisible hand will always select for efficiency. (The company with the lower costs)

Thats the major flaw with a free market. It selects for efficiency. Slavery is highly efficient labor. Incredibly efficient. Which is why so many empires were built on it. (Egypt, Rome, Greece, America, England, etc.) But is that what humans want? Efficiency? I think we need to consider if we want the most efficient culture, or the most humane culture. Because they are not the same thing.

Originally posted by RedCairo

I don't know about this really -- I honestly think that the vast, vast majority of people are completely oblivious to all that stuff, and when they hear about it, it seems rather difficult to believe.

They dont know because they dont want to know. Its hard to believe because they dont want to believe.

Originally posted by RedCairo
Most the people I know who *do* know even the most minute fraction of this stuff (and believe it) *do* care about it. They are not all carrying picket signs, or avoiding anything made by company X, so maybe it doesn't count.

And thats the bottom line. Even the people who DO know wont select against things of that nature by making conscious decisions not to buy from company x if company x has the best prices. I can see not having the time or inclination to carry signs, we do lead busy lives. But doing with less so that you dont support psychopathy? That isnt really hard. I grew up very poor. And even very poor people have crap they dont need that was made possible because of the suffering of others. No one would suggest starving yourself. But maybe buying less "stuff" you want but dont need if it comes from someone elses suffering.

Originally posted by RedCairo
There is a max on how much you can stress about. I'm a single mom. I'm at my max daily.

Knowing and making conscious decisions doesnt have to be stressful. I dont worry (too much) about what I cant do. That is what stress is. Worrying about what you cannot change. I think about what I can do. I can not buy from Wal-Mart. I can drive less. I can make do with not having tons of cheap junk I just "want" and dont need. I cant solve the worlds problems myself. But I can act to minimize my contribution to them. I do think about people in the world who dont have, or who are being exploited by those who do have. I left business school in my senior year at the top of my class looking at at least 45k a year to switch to philosophy where I am qualified to flip burgers because I decided I didnt want to benefit from that system. I would rather be poor than be that unethical. We can all make choices like that, to varying degree. No one is saying everyone has to go to the extreme, but it can be accomplished slowly with little steps, that dont destroy your whole life.

And I do empathize with your situation. It is hard to be poor. I grew up in foster care, and I know poor very well. I struggled to pay my way through school with no grants, no loans. It took a long time. I ate a lot of cheap crappy food, and I have worked a lot of cheap hard crappy jobs. What one is able to do DOES vary from person to person, and from time to time in ones life. But every single human on the planet has the option of doing SOMETHING more ethical each and every day. It isnt an all or nothing proposition. Even if the more ethical thing is just leaving an opening in traffic for the guy who wants to pull over. We can all be less self-centered and more caring. It doesnt have to cost a fortune. It doesnt have to cost anything. It just has to be a motive we have, to do better every chance we get. Rather than to shrug our shoulders and say, "well everyone else is doing it, why shouldnt I?" or "well I cant do much, therefore why bother at all?" Little things add up. And small things influence others. Some of who can do bigger things.

Originally posted by gottago

We all, on a nearly unconscious level, know that psychopaths are ruling us, and resign ourselves to the fact, most doubtless believing there is no viable alternative, fatalists.

I think you are right. Most dont see an alternative. But I dont know how much our "knowing" is unconscious. I tend to suspect it is "we turn a blind eye consciously."

I have been thinking about morals, and why we do tolerate psychopathy due to another thread on primate morals. New studies appear to show that morality is biological. Not cultural. (Although the stories morality comes packaged in may be cultural, like religion, etc.) But the underlying morality most likely developed to enable us to live in groups and cooperate. And over time, groups that were cooperative outperformed those who did not. And all human groups now cooperate. The catch seems to be, cooperate with whom? Well, the answer is "with your own kind." There seems to be variation among humans about who qualifies for "my own kind." Some people limit it to their own flesh and blood. Some to the village. Some to the whole nation. Some very few all humans. Some extremely rare, all living beings. Another subset, whom we call psychopath, says "my own kind is limited to me and me alone."

One would think that groups would weed these psychopaths out. After all, they only take from others, but dont feel the need for altruistic reciprocation. But we havent eliminated them from the gene pool. Every society has them, and as you noted, they are often in certain types of positions. Leadership positions.

Why would a variant of human that can turn on its own kind be allowed to not only survive, but to lead the group?

Easy. They provide an advantage against other groups. When their psychopathic tendencies are directed at competitors, they benefit us. And we know it. We arent slave to them. We arent duped and tricked. We choose them because if to use an obvious example, Iraq is seen as an enemy that could harm us, we want the psychopaths among us to destroy them. Obliterate them.

When their psychopathic behavior harms US, well then it is despicable. Because we have hired them to behave despicably to others, not to us.

I have also been thinking that the only real way that psychopaths could ever be truly selected OUT of the gene pool would be if there were no groups using psychopaths themselves that we had to compete against. (Because obviously a group with a psychopathic leader and the right technology will easily dominate a group with an altruistic leader and the same technology) This "no groups to compete against" is what we are moving towards, (even though many, myself included until I had this thought,) are adamantly opposed to the idea. The whole One World government idea.

Of course initially this one world government would be governed by psychopaths, and having no outside group to fight, they would direct their psychopathy inside the group. Which could provide the impetus for us to decide we really didnt like playing the psychopath game as much as we used to, and could cause us to begin the slow process of eliminating that behavior once and for all.

It would be a natural evolutionary outcome, from the single cell (selfish) organism, to the many celled complex and cooperative organism. Only this time, each human being is a cell and the many celled organism is the species as a whole. Who knows. Too bad I wont be around to see the outcome.



[edit on 24-2-2009 by Illusionsaregrander]

There is a continuum that goes from "pathological narcissism" to "sociopathy" to "psychopathy." The definitions of these terms are all somewhat different (and subjective...googling around a bit will provide you with various conflicting definitions) but they share a similar basic trait of isolation and self-centeredness. In a sense all three are the same type of dysfunction but differ in intensity.

Whatever the case, it cannot be denied that our society as currently constructed awards behavior falling into these three categories.

>> It is such a tired truism that much of the debasement of postwar culture can be blamed on the tube, but the tube itself is a neutral technology, it is the intent that drives the debasement, and here, if you are old enough, you can see the (d-)evolution from Murrow and Cronkite to Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. Fox News is a perfect example of the intent to use the MSM to implant and normalize psychopathic thinking in the larger public, and it has been frighteningly effective.

I did a pretty serious personal study of the news in the mid-late 80s. Kept records of what was said and discovered a few interesting things. The most important thing I concluded, no matter how this nearly fried my brain trying to understand, was that the news is predictive, more than reportive. I thought I was imagining it at first, it seemed impossible, but I finally concluded it was definitely true. Now if I hear the news, I don't think, "Wow, listen to what has happened," I think, "I wonder why they want me to think this way, or about this; I wonder what is coming that this is being set up this way."

It annihilated my respect for news as anything but crafty propaganda. I haven't had a TV (to be more accurate, I've had multiple TVs for DVD/Games and none for 'television channels') since late 1993. I so don't miss it at all. If I want to watch some TV show I buy the DVD at season end or amazon unbox or find it in pieces on the net.

In respect to the latter part of your comment; I consider the entire MSM to be frighteningly stepford, to use it as a verb, and I consider the conservativism in FOX to be a reaction to the vast majority of the MSM being perceived as the opposite extreme; balancing by shifting to the opposite edge. I suspect this is a philosophy-political thing; we would agree to disagree but probably would not see this the same way.

You still see a great deal of psychopathic mentalities in fundamentalism of whatever stripe today, but television has largely supplanted religion in influencing/manipulating the nonbelieving public. So if you are going to start to make inroads on exposing this behaviour and educating the public, it must start there, with very explicit and determined policies, but unfortunately the psychopaths also know this, thus the unprecedented retooling of the FCC and media policy by the Bush II administration to allow greater ownership concentration and debasing gov't oversight.

Just in case you don't know, Bush was not a conservative by any stretch. Only 'compared to' the growing shift the other way in our culture. Most true conservatives can't stand the guy either. In a funny (or not so funny) way, the American government actually demonstrates the consistent principle of "rule by committee": you take people with every opinion, let them fight it out, and in the end, instead of getting the best of 'both ends and the middle', you get some grey-brown plainwrap mutant worst-of-all-worlds result.

Humor: once when working at Lockheed I made this website for the intranet that was one of several designs a committee voted on. They chose my coworker's very different design (no big deal). Then they spent literally six weeks re-re-re-re-spec'ing it by-committee. In the end, the project cost at least 20 times as much and--here's the funny part--the final design was on the verge of being a duplicate of mine, but a little less impressive we agreed--my coworker and I got a laugh out of this. I always felt this so exampled how committees seldom have a good end; mostly, they waste a ton of time and money on stuff and then end up with the very thing they did NOT want to start with. And everybody has agreed to accept it -- but nobody is happy.

In our current society, which we should just relabel corporatism, giving the government any more control than it already has, only in turn gives corporations yet more control, because they are intertwined in innumerable ways (just look at the AMA, FDA, USDA, etc. etc. and all the chemical, commercial food, pharmaceutical, etc. companies--and the fact that their boards of directors and leaders are like a big group of the very same people, cycling through the various outlets, in much the way of politics/mil-industrial leaders). This actually continues to all the major media corporations and other things; it is really disturbing how few people actually control every major power/info source. But back to the topic, giving government more control over anything is IMO never an answer, any more than censorship is ever really an answer.

About 20-25 years ago, when Rolling Stone was actually journalism, there was this excellent cover article that focused on General Electric. It oughtta be required reading. It talked about how the models that we created in the US gov't have been usurped by corporations; lobbying was never designed for corporations, but for people, but people can't begin to compete against it, which takes it OUT of the hands of the people. It talked about the corporate shield, and how shocking stuff gets done all the time around the world, and basically the people responsible for those decisions, as long as it saved or made the company money, are seldom even punished, usually just transferred to some other division--for stuff that would have gotten joe-on-the-street imprisoned or killed if he did it. It was a good look at why the framework that we have currently got in place in the US is basically unworkable except for more of the same, and it's a spiraling-domino-effect on the culture at large.

I don't think we can fix it. I think it's already falling and imploding and we'll crash hard and eventually our descendents will rebuild it hopefully into something slightly better. In the meantime, in the reality I live in -- it's just another day.

And this is where the idea of the Peter Principle comes into play--it is a very compelling idea that, in our contemporary society of relative wealth and ease and creature comforts, we are being coddled and infantalized and emasculated.

The Peter Principle suggests that people tend to rise to their "level of incompetence." If you are a good stock clerk you eventually become a good manager; if you are not all that good at it, you stay stuck there, but if you are good at it, you rise to the next level; if you are not that good at it, you stay stuck there, if you are good at it, you rise to the next level; eventually resulting in pretty much a world of business where a shocking number of people are not really fully competent for the jobs they hold. So they are stressed, paranoid, always trying to catch up, self-protective, and many other behaviors that suck for the people working with them and their business at large.

My idea in using that example is that it's possible many of the behaviors in so-called 'leaders' of our society is a result of exactly that situation, though in a less formal setting than official business in many cases. Sometimes, because the situation (say of government positions) is so impossible that even the most qualified person can't succeed in a way they feel is right; the principle can be invoked not just by the individual and the promotion process, but sometimes by circumstance that make it unlikely anybody in their position could be competent at it.

We all, on a nearly unconscious level, know that psychopaths are ruling us, and resign ourselves to the fact, most doubtless believing there is no viable alternative, fatalists.

The idea of causing change, in my view, usually lies in the hopeless--though charming--delusion that if we just vote in a don't-say-messiah we can all sing kumbaya together and things will be better in the morning 'cause ding-dong the witch is dead!

The current culture and politics and economy is degenerating for interior structural reasons, fundamental problems of rot/deterioration/disease in the infrastructure on several levels; the fact that most of the people in the gov't positions are rabid psychos (from every side) is greatly a side-effect of the structure; good people avoid it or depart it early or burn out to apathy, while bad people adore it. The people are a symptom more than a cause in my view.

We could shoot them all but more bad people would take their place. Not until the nest that breeds them is cleaned up and the environment that houses and nurtures them is cleaned up is the problem going to be addressed. And those problems can't really be addressed at this point; the structure is too complex, too many people are living in it. It will collapse of its own weight eventually or burn to the ground, those are IMO the options.

It's a lot like walking into a company to do mfg line troubleshooting, where there's about 120 bureaucratic harmful if not outright retarded policies and procedures in place, it's a miracle anything gets done and most of it gets done "despite, not because of" executive management; what you see is that some executive basically went through a dozen line managers who worked themselves half to death and left enraged, because the exec was sure if they just got the right guy in the chair he would make it all better. But the fundamental structure was flawed, and the line mgr was not in a position to radically change that structure, only to work within it, so he was as doomed as his predecessors, and the cycle just continues.

I see politics at almost any level as a game that cannot be played by good people in any effective way; we have built a system that precludes and/or burns-to-despair good men who would govern in a worthy way, so I think the problems go deeper than whomever is sitting in the chair. (As for actual psychopaths in ruling positions, I've considered pretty much every president in my 43 years of life to qualify.)

When it takes 1000+++ pages to write up the simplest bill (so no mortal has time to properly concentrate and understand anything let alone everything by voting time), when line-item veto is not an option at any level so you either have to vote against medication for the elderly or in favor of allowing some chem company to pollute the river, multiply that by several hundred items), the only people who CAN do the job are the worst people. The best people go do something far more constructive.

(Or, like Arnold, do exactly what they got voted in promising, but then changed to become instead "what people say they want"; that too, is probably a losing game.)

>>> Zepherian

It might be what their souls need. And as for negatives, keeping the elitists at their current dimension is more of a negative than the people of the world can take, they need to be downscaled, we simply can't survive as a species with a bunch of genocidal psychopaths at the wheel.

I'm an optimist on this! Short of nuclear issues I think we can. The world has been run by genocidal psychopaths at the wheel through all of recorded history. Whether it was some Aztec chief cutting out the heart of 20,000 people a year (a helluva lot in that era esp when there was only walking for transportation) or Pol Pot killing about 25%+ of his own people, or far larger numbers, multi millions killed by several different leaders over the last couple centuries, it always seemed like the end, like if love and light didn't get a stronger grip on the world we were all doomed. So far humanity continues to grow and evolve (technologically) and devolve (in other ways).

I do think that we have one kinda cultural/media problem today; that a growing refusal to 'live in fear' (obviously a good thing to refuse, and stemming from good motives), is occurring in a larger situation in which it's probably not appropriate to go pollyannic at quite this time. It reminds me of that old Star Trek episode, did Isamov write that one?, where they go back in time to earth, there was that woman campaigning for peace that Kirk fell in love with, but they saw that in the timeline she affected, Nazi Germany took over the world; she had exactly the right idea at the unfortunately wrong time. So she was killed (by accident, by fate) and they had to restrain Kirk from saving her life because of the utter destruction that her genuinely loving, intelligent, compassionate approach to politics would have brought as a result of the other-side. I see this as an analogy for what the modern situation faces.

On the bright (or not so bright) side, I suspect planet-level changes (I'm referring to astronomy and geology here) are going to have a big say in the world in the next 15 years and probably a more official (alas) and truly world (alas) war. I don't think who's in the Big Chair can change that. Which is really too bad. I do have some hope that so many people all optimistic about Obama's reign may cause some difference in both his actions and uin his results--almost a metaphysical faith on my part, that 'mass-faith' has a power of its own--but I think he'll be as 'aged' by the experience as every other president, and it was probably a curse as much as an honor to put him there.

The US IMO is too large and growing unstable due to internal erosion and 100 other things I won't get into; you notice we have picked up all these nazi (HOMELAND SECURITY) and soviet (CZARs everywhere!) terms and we are growing more disturbing laws or un-laws, just as the east has been broken apart and is now growing more toward democracy--sort of--or at least anarchy LOL--in any case not the massive 'control' they had. I see it as a kind of yin-yang thing; the wheel is turning, and eventually maybe this country will fragment into either feudalism or totalitarianism (probably both, with the second eventually winning) just as the east is really finding its feet with something better.

OK I have to go stockpile weapons now. (kidding)

How this downscale is achieved is of course important, as the more peacefull and loving it is done the longer the results will last, so yes, positivity is important, but we cannot keep going on this course without negative consequences that far outweigh those that targeting the elites would result in. This is not an eye for an eye, this is just "something has to be done"

I do see the beginning of your sentence as recognizing this issue, but the end leads you to the same place you caveated your way out of in the beginning. ;-)

How do you decide "who" qualifies to be "targeted"? This is fairly important since I've noticed how no matter what the facts appear to be in the world, these do not get in the way of emotional politics (or people decided to be guilty of pretty much every crime on planet earth and all before 9 AM -- while quite literal mass murdering psychopathic lunatics are invited as respected speakers to influence our college youth); I have little faith in the 'decision making ability' of most humans -- that is how we got to where we are, after all -- when it comes to deciding who, and why, and what, is in the "bad guy" seat vs. the "good guy" seat.

Worse, the biggest issue in the modern world is information; we simply don't have even a tiny fraction of the information that most people in powerful decision making positions do. It's entirely possible that if we did have that information, our perspective might be a little different. Even if it wasn't the same, it still might give us a completely different perspective on their decisions. The combination of specialization and secrecy makes it impractical (and sometimes injust) to second-guess decisions. Only some, of course . . . not all.

As an old song once said, "I've learned if you're gonna fight fire with fire, you're gonna get burned twice as bad." Short of a literal miracle that causes "the masses" to see reason -- and when, in the history of man, have "the masses" ever seen reason?? ("When I find myself siding with the majority, I know it is time to reform." - Mark Twain) -- I'm not sure what is DO-able about this problem.

We can all boycott corporations with suckey policies and hope that in about 3 generations we'll have made some small difference--ironic since by then the people doing what we don't like won't even be involved anymore--but that doesn't make a difference in OUR generation (not that this doesn't mean we shouldn't of course). And by that time there's a zillion other factors that will have had far more combined affect on that company and industry than whatever we were doing anyway, possibly rendering even the most robust effect moot anyway. Not saying it's not worth trying; just saying that it's a really sort of sadly-pitiful option, all things considered; from 'bummer' to 'abysmally demoralizing' depending on your level of concern.

I feel there may be influences on our world beyond just independent individuals and their own selfish needs or pathology. Larger visions to which our world of politics and war and famine and culture are more like ... chess. We are the bishops and knights and a whole lotta pawns... if you can't see off the board or into the next dimension, you don't know there's a larger universe or that you're a flatlander. All reasoning about present, future, and the fundamentals of power, shifts radically when the scope of the players does.