The Pathocracy of the Deep State
October 24, 2019
“Politicians
are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths. I think you would find no expert in the field of
sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this…
That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a
bitter pill for our society to swallow — but it does explain a great many
things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one.”—Dr. Martha Stout,
clinical psychologist and former instructor at Harvard Medical School
Twenty years ago, a newspaper headline asked the
question: “What’s the
difference between a politician and a psychopath?”
The answer, then and now, remains the same: None.
There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians.
Nor is there much of a difference between the havoc
wreaked on innocent lives by uncaring, unfeeling, selfish, irresponsible, parasitic
criminals and elected
officials who lie to their constituents, trade political favors for campaign contributions,
turn a blind eye to the wishes of the electorate, cheat taxpayers out of
hard-earned dollars, favor the corporate elite, entrench the military
industrial complex, and spare little thought for the impact their thoughtless
actions and hastily passed legislation might have on defenseless citizens.
Psychopaths and politicians both have a tendency to
be selfish, callous,
remorseless users of others, irresponsible, pathological liars, glib, con artists, lacking in remorse and shallow.
Charismatic politicians, like criminal
psychopaths, exhibit a
failure to accept responsibility for their actions, have a high sense of self-worth, are chronically
unstable, have socially deviant lifestyles, need constant stimulation, have
parasitic lifestyles and possess unrealistic goals.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about
Democrats or Republicans.
Political psychopaths are all largely cut from the
same pathological cloth, brimming with seemingly easy charm and boasting
calculating minds.
Such leaders eventually create pathocracies: totalitarian societies bent on
power, control, and destruction of both freedom in general and those who
exercise their freedoms.
Once psychopaths gain power, the result is usually
some form of totalitarian government or a pathocracy. “At that point, the government
operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups,” author
James G. Long notes. “We are currently witnessing deliberate polarizations of
American citizens, illegal actions, and massive and needless acquisition of
debt. This is typical of
psychopathic systems,
and very similar things happened in the Soviet Union as it overextended and
collapsed.”
In other words, electing a psychopath to public office
is tantamount to national hara-kiri, the ritualized act of self-annihilation,
self-destruction and suicide. It signals the demise of democratic government
and lays the groundwork for a totalitarian regime that is legalistic,
militaristic, inflexible, intolerant and inhuman.
Incredibly, despite clear evidence of the damage that
has already been inflicted on our nation and its citizens by a psychopathic
government, voters continue to elect psychopaths to positions of power and
influence.
According to investigative
journalist Zack Beauchamp, “In 2012, a group of psychologists evaluated every President from
Washington to Bush II using ‘psychopathy trait estimates derived from
personality data completed by historical experts on each president.’ They found
that presidents tended to have the psychopath’s characteristic fearlessness and
low anxiety levels — traits that appear to help Presidents, but also might cause
them to make reckless decisions that hurt other people’s lives.”
The willingness to prioritize power above all else,
including the welfare of their fellow human beings, ruthlessness, callousness
and an utter lack of conscience are among the defining traits of the sociopath.
When our own government no longer sees us as human
beings with dignity and worth but as things to be manipulated, maneuvered,
mined for data, manhandled by police, conned into believing it has our best
interests at heart, mistreated, jailed if we dare step out of line, and then
punished unjustly without remorse—all the while refusing to own up to its
failings—we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic.
Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy:
tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates
against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.”
Worse, psychopathology is not confined to those in
high positions of government. It can spread like a
virus among
the populace. As an academic study into pathocracy concluded, “[T]yranny does not flourish because perpetuators are
helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively
identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.”
People don’t simply line up and salute. It is through
one’s own personal identification with a given leader, party or social order
that they become agents of good or evil.
Much depends on how leaders “cultivate a
sense of identification with their followers,” says Professor Alex Haslam. “I mean one pretty
obvious thing is that leaders talk about ‘we’ rather than ‘I,’ and actually
what leadership is about is cultivating this sense of shared identity about
‘we-ness’ and then getting people to want to act in terms of that ‘we-ness,’ to
promote our collective interests. . . . [We] is the single word that has
increased in the inaugural addresses over the last century . . . and the other
one is ‘America.’”
The goal of the modern corporate state is obvious: to
promote, cultivate, and embed a sense of shared identification among its
citizens. To this end, “we the people” have become “we the police state.”
We are fast becoming slaves in thrall to a faceless,
nameless, bureaucratic totalitarian government machine that relentlessly erodes
our freedoms through countless laws, statutes, and prohibitions.
Any resistance to such regimes depends on the strength
of opinions in the minds of those who choose to fight back. What this means is
that we the citizenry must be very careful that we are not manipulated into
marching in lockstep with an oppressive regime.
Writing for ThinkProgress, Beauchamp
suggests that “one of the
best cures to bad leaders may very well be political democracy.”
But what does this really mean in practical terms?
It means holding politicians accountable for their
actions and the actions of their staff using every available means at our
disposal: through investigative journalism (what used to be referred to as the
Fourth Estate) that enlightens and informs, through whistleblower complaints
that expose corruption, through lawsuits that challenge misconduct, and through
protests and mass political action that remind the powers-that-be that “we the
people” are the ones that call the shots.
Remember, education precedes action. Citizens need to
the do the hard work of educating themselves about what the government is doing
and how to hold it accountable. Don’t allow yourselves to exist exclusively in
an echo chamber that is restricted to views with which you agree. Expose yourself
to multiple media sources, independent and mainstream, and think for yourself.
For that matter, no matter what your political
leanings might be, don’t allow your partisan bias to trump the principles that
serve as the basis for our constitutional republic. As Beauchamp notes, “A
system that actually holds people accountable to the broader conscience of
society may be one of the best ways to keep conscienceless people in check.”
That said, if we allow the ballot box to become our
only means of pushing back against the police state, the battle is already
lost.
Resistance will require a citizenry willing to be
active at the local level.
Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield
America: The War on the American People, if you wait to act until the SWAT team is crashing
through your door, until your name is placed
on a terror watch list, until you are reported for such
outlawed activities as collecting rainwater or letting your children play
outside unsupervised, then it will be too late.
This much I know: we are not faceless numbers. We are
not cogs in the machine. We are not slaves.
We are human beings, and for the moment, we have the
opportunity to remain free—that is, if we tirelessly advocate for our rights
and resist at every turn attempts by the government to place us in chains.
The Founders understood that our freedoms do not flow
from the government. They were not given to us only to be taken away by the
will of the State. They are inherently ours. In the same way, the government’s
appointed purpose is not to threaten or undermine our freedoms, but to
safeguard them.
Until we can get back to this way of thinking, until
we can remind our fellow Americans what it really means to be free,
and until we can stand firm in the face of threats to our freedoms, we will
continue to be treated like slaves in thrall to a bureaucratic police state run
by political psychopaths.
This article was originally published at The Rutherford Institute.
Category: Free Society
This post was written by: John W. Whitehead
John W. Whitehead is a constitutional attorney,
author, and founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. This
article is a revised version of a piece that originally appeared on the
Rutherford Institute website, www.rutherford.org, and is reprinted by
permission.
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Note from the poster:
A form of
government interesting to ponerologists is one they have called pathocracy,
in which individuals with personality
disorders (especially psychopathy) occupy positions of power and influence. The result
is a totalitarian system characterized by a government turned
against its own people. A pathocracy may emerge when a society is
insufficiently guarded against the typical and inevitable minority of such
abnormal pathology, which Łobaczewski asserts is caused by biology or genetics.
He argues that in such cases these individuals infiltrate an institution or
state, prevailing moral values are perverted into their opposite, and a coded
language like Orwell's doublethink circulates into the mainstream, using paralogic
and paramoralism in place of genuine logic and morality.
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