Understanding Psychopathy For the Future

Psychopathy is probably the most misunderstood, misconstrued, yet most widely used term for a concept in psychology which is at the center of a very vast and somewhat hidden reality that heavily affects just about everything in the immediate world of what humanity has constructed and what humanity has come from. Its definition isn't a simple one, muddled even further as the word often goes beyond its technical definition and general nature of incidence into popular misunderstandings from the term's semantic quality, involving connotations of the occurrence of symptoms such as delirium, mania, hysteria, and psychosis, symptoms which in their pure meanings simply are not at all a part of being a psychopath. To define psychopathy is to define a disorder which has only been defined in not so cohesive medical criteria during the past 60 or so years, a certain kind of medical category, which ranges from conflicting specifications including "antisocial personality disorder" and dissocial personality disorder with confusing subtypes in between like sociopaths and asocial personalities. However, the focus of this article will be on those who fit the term psychopath due to lack of remorse, mercy, honesty, and the ability to get away without anybody noticing for the most part; Those who get into power for the sake of being empowered and not to get into power to use it for empowering the lives of humans in general, and are therefore those who compose the vast majority of persons in positions of power from presidents to policemen, ploying possessive and passive-aggressive pain to the populace by pounding out only partially true paradigms. They manipulate reality in the minds of many by setting up straight lies, by misappropriating and misrepresenting ideals, and suppressing those who stand against them without flinching once.

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." -Lord Acton

This famous phrase was realized in a scientific study called "Power and Perspectives Not Taken". Here's a summary, and the skinny so you don't get distracted by all these links:

Abstract:

Four experiments and a correlational study explored the relationship between power and perspective taking. In Experiment 1, participants primed with high power were more likely than those primed with low power to draw an E on their forehead in a self-oriented direction, demonstrating less of an inclination to spontaneously adopt another person's visual perspective. In Experiments 2a and 2b, high-power participants were less likely than low-power participants to take into account that other people did not possess their privileged knowledge, a result suggesting that power leads individuals to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point, insufficiently adjusting to others' perspectives. In Experiment 3, high-power participants were less accurate than control participants in determining other people's emotion expressions; these results suggest a power-induced impediment to experiencing empathy. An additional study found a negative relationship between individual difference measures of power and perspective taking. Across these studies, power was associated with a reduced tendency to comprehend how other people see, think, and feel.

There's some words whose definitions are starting to become very apparent within the popular consciousness.

From here:

Hegemony: Most simply, hegemony is a state of leadership where a large group of people are dominated by an individual or by a smaller group of people. In this class, it refers more specifically to the ideologies which control the thoughts and behaviors of most people in a large social group. In classical Marxist theory, hegemony is the dominance of the upper class over the working class, and hegemonic ideologies are those ideologies which support this dominance. In contemporary theories, it is emphasized that hegemony is maintained not only by force, but also by popular consensus. In other words, people tend to internalize and willingly embrace those ideologies which are in fact controlling and limiting them. See also ideology.

From wikipedia:
Oligarchy (Greek Ὀλιγαρχία, Oligarkhía) is a form of government where political power effectively rests with a small elite segment of society (whether distinguished by wealth, family or military powers). The word oligarchy is from the Greek words for "few" (ὀλίγον óligon) and "rule" (ἄρχω arkho). Compare with autocracy (rule by one person) and democracy (rule by the majority).

Also from wikipedia:

A hierarchy (in Greek: Ἱεραρχία, derived from ἱερός — hieros, 'sacred', and ἄρχω — arkho, 'rule') is a system of ranking and organizing things or people, where each element of the system (except for the top element) is a subordinate to a single other element.

Social stratification is the processes and systems surrounding the ordering of individuals in a society into social strata (Caste, class, "kind of person"), by means including but not limited to religious and/or social, educational, legal, cultural, informational, and even simply clandestine.

Huffameg points out in the excellent work "On the Revolution" if "redoing, the revolutionary act, necessarily implies destruction" and about the need to look back in history and realize the need for solving the problem of perpetuating "the revolutionary movement that is the will to resistance and prevent it from ever stopping, even in the achieving of the revolutionary goals".

Hate.

Can you hate hate?

Once you realize that it's futile to hate hate, you negate the hate
and replace it with creativity. There really isn't any better option.

If the issue is something that when it comes down to it can be boiled down to a medical condition, we realize that psychopathy is the #1 leading cause of death in the world. Because of psychopathy, we have the many things that are products of the decisions made by psychopathic leadership. The cause of death may have been attributed to a bullet during a war, it may be said to be cancer, it may be credited to diabetes, perhaps the postmortem is malnutrition. However, when you consider a deeper autopsy, it's not these things alone at all. That bullet was commanded by a psychopathic leader, the cancer resultant from mutagenic pollution that wouldn't be there if someone wasn't trying too hard to make more scrilla, the diabetes from someone being convinced by psychopathy-driven advertisement to drink 30 times more pop than water, and the malnutrition as a result of desertification destroying growing land in the case of psychopathy letting climate change expand. In order to find a cure so we can use prevention as the best medicine, I think that our psychopathy-tainted ways of life is the major issue which needs to be considered by the medical establishment.



However, we run into another problem, with the fact that a lot of advancement in the medical establishment seem to be driven by institutions whose leadership indicates psychopathic traits. For a recent example amongst many pertaining to the pharmaceutical industry, evaluate the resignation of Merck's now former CEO Raymond V. Gilmartin over the controversy surrounding Vioxx, an anti-arthritis drug which used an incredibly misleading marketing doctrine which managed to state that the drug was beneficial to the heart while it was known by the company to cause heart attacks and strokes, posing itself as neutral education for doctors while it really was a trained-for-aggressiveness marketing team of 3000; And, as a cherry on top of this dessert, the campaign even managed to name-drop Martin Luther King Jr. and his "I have a dream" speech. How can we trust those who fund the research to find a cure for psychopathy if the ones funding the research are psychopathic themselves?

With this we can infer that much of the things in this world we have developed have developed to serve those who can be labeled psychopathic. Our current system of abstraction of worth is one example. Corporate structure is another, and corporations (as legal persons) have been related to humans with psychopathic traits. You don't blame a person's body for their actions, as the bad behavior comes from the head, yet even in the face of enormous amounts of deaths and misfortunes we're blaming an abstraction of a person while the brains behind it get to skitter off into their giant piles of money. Where is Raymond V. Gilmartin now?



Well, besides not being the chairman of "The United Negro College Fund" (Who Martin Luther King Jr. was aided by, ironically enough) and the "Council on Competitiveness" anymore, he's living pretty nicely doing such fine jobs as being the Professor of Management Practice at Harvard, holds co-chair for the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, is on the board of General Mills, Inc and Microsoft, and many other things that seem a little off when you consider that he left his former company in the middle of the controversy of letting people die in the name of gathering power through money.

Much of the research that has been done is important yet inconclusive due to many factors. The work surrounding defining and diagnosing psychopathy has mainly been lead by Dr. Hare, who came up with the PCL-R checklist for diagnosis of psychopathy (A test which sneaky snakes are often aware enough of to lie on) which is used in applications from in jails to in research. However, important research into the issue has been done extensively and has been published by a less known researcher by the name of Dr. Andrew M. Łobaczewski. Łobaczewski is a polish man who lived through the nazi occupation fighting with the "Armia Krajowa" underground resistance movement, and began research with a team of others working behind the back of the soviet regime on the subject he terms "Ponerology" from the greek word "Poneros" meaning evil. At one point around 60 years ago he and his team had to destroy the manuscripts to avoid their discovery by the soviet government they were analyzing critically under significant danger, with a second manuscript sent to the Vatican never to be replied to. The complete work hasn't even been publicly available until quite recently. This comprehensive work can be found in the book Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes". The book examines "evil" from a psychological and sociological perspective, describing the processes involved in how "evil" takes hold its power, keeping it shut with an iron fist. I'll take a selection of some of his more tangible writings found on this extensive page:

Lobaczewski writes:

The psychological features of each such crisis are unique to the culture and the time, but one common denominator that exists at the beginning of all such “bad times” is an exacerbation of society’s hysterical condition. The emotionalism dominating in individual, collective, and political life, combined with the subconscious selection and substitution of data in reasoning, lead to individual and national egotism. The mania for taking offense at the drop of a hat provokes constant retaliation, taking advantage of hyperirritability and hypocriticality on the part of others. It is this feature, this hystericization of society, that enables pathological plotters, snake charmers, and other primitive deviants to act as essential factors in the processes of the origination of evil on a macro-social scale.

Who, exactly, are the “pathological plotters,” and what can motivate such individuals during times that are generally understood by others as “good?” If times are “good,” why does anyone want to plot and generate evil?

Well, certainly, the current US administration has come up with an answer: “They hate us because of our freedoms.” This is a prime example of “selection and substitution of data in reasoning” which is willingly and gladly accepted as an explanation by the public because of their deficits of psychological skills and moral criticism.

Where does this leave the rest of us who aren't enacting such plots upon everyone they can fool? Some of us show resistance, if only incredibly passively, however a lot of this passive resistance transpires into apathy and avolition towards the entire situation where cynicism and lethargy creating a void of action and therefore change on the issue. This is just another way of control: The suction of the idea that anything can be done about things into a black hole of doubt, through a vacuum created by the growing lack of action on the matter.

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing" - Edmund Burke

So, what can be done?

Action on the matter really just boils down to people telling each other how things really are. If this is an illness, there most certainly isn't a cure, but this brings to mind another quote found through folkert:

The word is now a virus. The flu virus may once have been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the lungs. The word may once have been a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.
—William S Burroughs

There's not really any cures for when it comes to virii, but there is immunization. This is exactly what I propose that the world really needs to solve : Inoculation against the viral, lingual force which has persisted throughout most of human history as the dominant entity driving human action which has ultimately led to pathocracy. We wouldn't have half the problems plaguing humanity (And the rest of the world) if we never learned to talk, and it's this "sub-lingual inner organism" which is the catalyst for everything bad (and good), to the voice saying "kill yourself" to the voice saying "take over the world". Language really is an emergent system with a level of power even higher than any DNA-based organism, which has evolved into multiple branches of ideology and "schools of thought". A heavy thought in the Buddhist philosophy goes like this:

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.

Taking control of our thoughts, which means learning, is the best thing that can be done for keeping yourself from becoming a tool. It's a matter of learning about the methods of how they control and how to counteract to make those methods inviable. Don't just learn, teach. The inner voice telling people to kill themselves and be done with being shitty in a shitty world, the voice telling them to take over the world and control these shitty people, could just as easily be a voice telling them how to change shit for the better and to get that done or else.

I'll wrap this up now to keep things from becoming tl;dr, but that's another thing that needs to be done: These ideas presented in a more appealing format to the masses, digestible yet delicious. Sjef brought up a quote in reply to huffameg's entry and a quote from Aldous Huxley which gives something of a diving board for us to contemplate.

"Throughout history, the really fundamental changes in societies have come about not from dictates of governments and the results of battles but through vast numbers of people changing their minds — sometimes only a little bit.

Some of the changes have amounted to profound transformations — for instance the transition from the Roman Empire to Medieval Europe, or from the Middle Ages to modern times. Others have been more specific, such as the constitution of democratic governments in England and America, or the termination of slavery as an accepted institution. In the latter cases, it is largely a matter of people recalling that no matter how powerful the economic or political or even military institution, it persists because it has legitimacy, and that legitimacy comes from the perceptions of people. People give legitimacy and they can take it away. A challenge to legitimacy is probably the most powerful force for change to be found in history.

To the empowering principle that the people can withhold legitimacy, and thus change the world, we now add another: By deliberately changing the internal image of reality, people can change the world. Perhaps the only limits to the human mind are those we believe in. "

- Willis Harman

"It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison, and yet not free -
to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive,
compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national
state, or of some private interest within the nation, wants him to think,
feel and act.

The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under
constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own
initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a
victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes
himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people.
His servitude is strictly objective."

Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley, 1958

Wed, Apr 2, 2008  Permanent link