Could complaints about his abusive behavior help Britain's prime minister get re-elected?

Bullies are usually tyrants and tyrants are psychopaths!

http://www.slate.com/id/2245871/

Bully for Brown
Could complaints about his abusive behavior help Britain's prime minister get re-elected?
By June Thomas
Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010

Like most things related to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the material was rather dull. On Sunday, the Observer newspaper ran an excerpt from columnist Andrew Rawnsley's new book The End of the Party, about Labor's rule since 2001. The 8,000-word selection rehashed familiar episodes from recent history, such as Brown's inability to make up his mind about calling an early election in the fall of 2007 and his rapprochement with longtime political rival Lord Peter Mandelson. It was in the Observer'sseparate front-page story about the book that things got more interesting: "Gordon Brown's abusive behaviour and volcanic eruptions of foul temper left Downing Street staff so frightened that he received an unprecedented reprimand from the head of the civil service," the article began. It further claimed that "Sir Gus O'Donnell, the cabinet secretary, became so alarmed by the prime minister's behaviour that he launched his own investigations when he received reports of Brown's bullying of staff."

The prime minister and his allies (and Sir Gus) denied the allegations. His former adversary Lord Mandelson told the press, "I don't think [Brown] so much bullies people as he is very demanding of people. He's demanding of himself." Few people thought there was much new in Rawnsley's portrait of the prime minister. As the Guardian's Michael White put it in a podcast Tuesday, "You only have to look at Gordon Brown to realize that he's not a little ray of sunshine."

That might have been the end of the story if it hadn't been for Christine Pratt. What she did not only extended the story for a few more chapters; it may even have helped the Labor cause less than three months before a general election whose outcome is surprisingly hard to predict. It also provoked near-unprecedented agreement from commentators across the political spectrum: Brits, they say, need to toughen up and quit their complaining.

Pratt is the founder of a small British charity, the National Bullying Helpline, who contacted the BBC after hearing the reports and claimed: "Over recent months we have had several inquiries from staff within Gordon Brown's office. Some have downloaded information; some have actually called our helpline directly and I have spoken to staff in his office." She continued, "We are not suggesting that Gordon Brown is a bully, what we are saying is staff in his office working directly with him have issues, and have concerns, and have contacted our helpline."

Pratt's allegations had two effects: She was attacked for the breaching the confidentiality of hotline callers—at least three high-profile patrons, including an outspoken Tory MP, broke with the charity over her gaffe—and the press, including many of the prime minister's harshest critics, rushed to defend Brown against interfering tittle-tattles.

As Libby Purves put it in the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times, "Any mild disapproval of Gordon Brown banging and roaring round Downing Street like Godzilla is now eclipsed by disgust at the prim, self-aggrandising whiners of the victim industry." She roared on, "This is Downing Street, the heart of government in an age of recession, terrorism, war and electioneering. It is not a sheltered workshop for the emotionally frail."

In the true-blue Tory Daily Mail, A.N. Wilson declared: "By all means, if you will, say that he has been a lousy Prime Minister. But Brown's bad temper is not a reason for discrediting him—any more than his having the sight of only one eye, or his having a Scottish accent."

Of course, the focus on Brown's personality—and that of his main rivals, Conservative Party leader David Cameron and, to a lesser extent, the Liberal Democrats' Nick Clegg—is all about the upcoming election, which is expected to be called for May 6. The latest polls show the Conservative lead shrinking, and most commentators now predict a hung Parliament. None of the parties cares to linger on the issues—particularly the trickiest, public spending and the need to make cuts in Britain's generous entitlement programs—so it suits everyone to prioritize the personal.

In the last few weeks, the famously private and dour Brown has submitted to several sit-downs. In a TV interview with Piers Morgan that aired on Valentine's Day, he talked about proposing to his wife and cried when he discussed his daughter, Jennifer, who died 10 days after her birth, and his concerns for his son Fraser, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. According to the Daily Mail, during the interview he also admitted that "he lost his temper sometimes, but denied he had ever hit any of his aides."

Few would claim that the prime minister's charisma deficit is a strength. But these days, Britain's best-known political operative is Malcolm Tucker, the foul-mouthed short-tempered Scotsman from the movie In the Loop and the TV show that spawned it, The Thick of It. Perhaps it's better for a politician to be seen as a badass than a bungler. In the last three years, Gordon Brown has survived three palace coups in which underlings tried to oust him from the top spot in the Labor Party. Last November, he was harangued by a bereaved mother who complained about his penmanship in a 13-minute phone call, which was later made public by the Sun newspaper. Now he is the action hero of a CGI animation from Taiwan's Apple Daily.

No one likes or wants to elect a bully, but it won't hurt Brown to be seen as a serious, hardworking politician who cares enough to lose his temper. As one of the commentators on the Observer Web site put it, referring to Rawnsley's claim that Brown "would habitually stab the seat back with his black marker pen" when he was angry: "[I]f he was honest and acted like this when in public he would storm the election. Less creepy smiles more biro stabbing."

Ayn Rand, Hugely Popular Author and Inspiration to Right-Wing Leaders, Was a Big Admirer of Serial Killer

She wasn't a sociopath. She was a psychopath! Much more evil!

Ayn Rand, Hugely Popular Author and Inspiration to Right-Wing Leaders, Was a Big Admirer of Serial Killer
By Mark Ames, AlterNet
February 26, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145819/

There's something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people froth at the mouth at the idea of giving health care to the tens of millions of Americans who don't have it, or who take pleasure at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare. It might not be as hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of the population who thought like this, but the US is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude?

It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who exerts a huge influence over much of the right-wing and libertarian crowd, but whose influence is only starting to spread out of the US.

One reason why most countries don't find the time to embrace her thinking is that Ayn Rand is a textbook sociopath. Literally a sociopath: Ayn Rand, in her notebooks, worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of "ideal man" that Rand promoted in her more famous books -- ideas which were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America's most recent economic catastrophe -- former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox -- along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

The loudest of all the Republicans, right-wing attack-dog pundits and the Teabagger mobs fighting to kill health care reform and eviscerate "entitlement programs" increasingly hold up Ayn Rand as their guru. Sales of her books have soared in the past couple of years; one poll ranked "Atlas Shrugged" as the second most influential book of the 20th century, after The Bible.

So what, and who, was Ayn Rand for and against? The best way to get to the bottom of it is to take a look at how she developed the superhero of her novel, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt. Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten by Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation -- Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street -- on him.

What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: "Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should," she wrote, gushing that Hickman had "no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'"

This echoes almost word for word Rand's later description of her character Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead: "He was born without the ability to consider others."

The Fountainhead is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's favorite book -- he even requires his clerks to read it.

I'll get to where Rand picked up her silly Superman blather from later -- but first, let's meet William Hickman, the "genuinely beautiful soul" and inspiration to Ayn Rand. What you will read below -- the real story, details included, of what made Hickman a "Superman" in Ayn Rand's eyes -- is extremely gory and upsetting, even if you're well acquainted with true crime stories -- so prepare yourself. But it's necessary to read this to understand Rand, and to repeat this over and over until all of America understands what made her mind tick, because Rand's influence over the very people leading the fight to kill social programs, and her ideological influence on so many powerful bankers, regulators and businessmen who brought the financial markets crashing down, means her ideas are affecting all of our lives in the worst way imaginable.

Rand fell for William Edward Hickman in the late 1920s, as the shocking story of Hickman's crime started to grip the nation. His crime, trial and case was a non-stop headline grabber for months; the OJ Simpson of his day:

Hickman, who was only 19 when he was arrested for murder, was the son of a paranoid-schizophrenic mother and grandmother. His schoolmates said that as a kid Hickman liked to strangle cats and snap the necks of chickens for fun -- most of the kids thought he was a budding manic, though the adults gave him good marks for behavior, a typical sign of sociopathic cunning. He enrolled in college but quickly dropped out, and quickly turned to violent crime largely driven by the thrill and arrogance typical of sociopaths: in a brief and wild crime spree that grew increasingly violent, Hickman knocked over dozens of gas stations and drug stores across the Midwest and west to California. Along the way it's believed he strangled a girl in Milwaukee, and killed his crime partner's grandfather in Pasadena, tossing his body over a bridge after taking his money. Hickman's partner later told police that Hickman told him how much he'd like to kill and dismember a victim someday -- and that day did come for Hickman.

One afternoon, Hickman drove up to Mount Vernon Junior High school in Los Angeles, and told administrators that he'd come to pick up "the Parker girl" -- her father, Perry Parker, was a prominent banker. Hickman didn't know the girl's first name, so when he was asked which of the two Parker twins -- Hickman answered, "the younger daughter." And then he corrected himself: "The smaller one." The school administrator fetched young Marion, and brought her out to Hickman. No one suspected his motive; Marion obediently followed Hickman to his car as she was told, where he promptly kidnapped her. He wrote a ransom note to Marian's father, demanding $1,500 for her return, promising that the girl would be left unharmed. Marian was terrified into passivity -- she even waited in the car for Hickman when he went to mail his letter to her father. Hickman's extreme narcissism comes through in his ransom letters, as he refers to himself as a "master mind [sic]" and "not a common crook." Hickman signed his letters "The Fox" because he admired his own cunning: "Fox is my name, very sly you know." And then he threatened: "Get this straight. Your daughter's life hangs by a thread."

Hickman and the girl's father exchanged letters over the next few days as they arranged the terms of the ransom, while Marion obediently followed her captor's demands. She never tried to escape the hotel where he kept her; Hickman even took her to a movie, and she never screamed for help. She remained quiet and still as told when Hickman tied her to the chair -- he didn't even bother gagging her because there was no need to, right up to the gruesome end.

Hickman's last ransom note to Marion's father is where this story reaches its disturbing: Hickman fills the letter with hurt anger over her father's suggestion that Hickman might deceive him, and "ask you for your $1500 for a lifeless mass of flesh I am base and low but won't stoop to that depth " What Hickman didn't say was that as he wrote the letter, Marion was already several chopped-up lifeless masses of flesh. Why taunt the father? Why feign outrage? This sort of bizarre taunting was all part of the serial killer's thrill, maximizing the sadistic pleasure he got from knowing that he was deceiving the father before the father even knew what happened to his daughter. But this was nothing compared to the thrill Hickman got from murdering the helpless 12-year-old Marion Parker. Here is an old newspaper description of the murder, taken from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on December 27, 1927:

"It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me," he continued, "and I just couldn't help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marian. Then before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly. I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. "When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. "I knew she was dead. "Well, after she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out."
Another newspaper account dryly explained what Hickman did next:

Then he took a pocket knife and cut a hole in her throat. Then he cut off each arm to the elbow. Then he cut her legs off at the knees. He put the limbs in a cabinet. He cut up the body in his room at the Bellevue Arms Apartments. Then he removed the clothing and cut the body through at the waist. He put it on a shelf in the dressing room. He placed a towel in the body to drain the blood. He wrapped up the exposed ends of the arms and waist with paper. He combed back her hair, powdered her face and then with a needle fixed her eyelids. He did this because he realized that he would lose the reward if he did not have the body to produce to her father.
Hickman packed her body, limbs and entrails into a car, and drove to the drop-off point to pick up his ransom; along his way he tossed out wrapped-up limbs and innards scattering them around Los Angeles. When he arrived at the meeting point, Hickman pulled Miriam's head and torso out of a suitcase and propped her up, her torso wrapped tightly, to look like she was alive--he sewed wires into her eyelids to keep them open, so that she'd appear to be awake and alive. When Miriam's father arrived, Hickman pointed a sawed-off shotgun at him, showed Miriam's head with the eyes sewn open (it would have been hard to see for certain that she was dead), and then took the ransom money and sped away. As he sped away, he threw Miriam's head and torso out of the car, and that's when the father ran up and saw his daughter--and screamed.
This is the "amazing picture" Ayn Rand -- guru to the Republican/Tea Party right-wing -- admired when she wrote in her notebook that Hickman represented "the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should."

Other people don't exist for Ayn, either. Part of her ideas are nothing more than a ditzy dilettante's bastardized Nietzsche -- but even this was plagiarized from the same pulp newspaper accounts of the time. According to an LA Times article in late December 1927, headlined "Behavioralism Gets The Blame," a pastor and others close to the Hickman case denounce the cheap trendy Nietzschean ideas that Hickman and others latch onto as a defense:

"Behavioristic philosophic teachings of eminent philosophers such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer have built the foundation for William Edward Hickman's original rebellion against society," the article begins.

The fear that some felt at the time was that these philosophers' dangerous, yet nuanced ideas would fall into the hands of lesser minds, who would bastardize Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and poison the rest of us. Which aptly fits the description of Ayn Rand, whose philosophy developed out of her admiration for "Supermen" like Hickman. Rand's philosophy can be summed up by the title of one of her best-known books: The Virtue of Selfishness. She argues that all selfishness is a moral good, and all altruism is a moral evil, even "moral cannibalism" to use her words. To her, those who aren't like-minded sociopaths are "parasites" and "lice" and "looters."

But with Rand, there's something more pathological at work. She's out to make the world more sociopath-friendly so that people like Ayn and her hero William Hickman can reach their full potential, not held back by the morality of the "weak," whom Rand despised.

That's what makes it so creepy how Rand and her followers clearly get off on hating and bashing those they perceived as weak--Rand and her followers have a kind of fetish for classifying weaker, poorer people as "parasites" and "lice" who need to swept away. This is exactly the sort of sadism, bashing the helpless for kicks, that Rand's hero Hickman would have appreciated. What's really unsettling is that even former Central Bank chief Alan Greenspan, whose relationship with Rand dated back to the 1950s, did some parasite-bashing of his own. In response to a 1958 New York Times book review slamming Atlas Shrugged, Greenspan, defending his mentor, published a letter to the editor that ends: "Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should. Alan Greenspan."

As much as Ayn Rand detested human "parasites," there is one thing she strongly believed in: creating conditions that increase the productivity of her Supermen - the William Hickmans who rule her idealized America: "If [people] place such things as friendship and family ties above their own productive work, yes, then they are immoral. Friendship, family life and human relationships are not primary in a man's life. A man who places others first, above his own creative work, is an emotional parasite."

And yet Republican faithful like GOP Congressman Paul Ryan read Ayn Rand and make declare, with pride, "Rand makes the best case for the morality of democratic capitalism." Indeed. Except that Ayn Rand also despised democracy, as she declared: "Democracy, in short, is a form of collectivism, which denies individual rights: the majority can do whatever it wants with no restrictions. In principle, the democratic government is all-powerful. Democracy is a totalitarian manifestation; it is not a form of freedom."

"Collectivism" is another one of those Randian epithets popular among her followers. Here for example is another Republican member of Congress, the one with the freaky thousand-yard-stare, Michelle Bachman, parroting the Ayn Rand ideological line, rto explain her reasoning for wanting to kill social programs:

"As much as the collectivist says to each according to his ability to each according to his need, that's not how mankind is wired. They want to make the best possible deal for themselves."

Whenever you hear politicians or Tea Baggers dividing up the world between "producers" and "collectivism," just know that those ideas and words more likely than not are derived from the deranged mind of a serial-killer groupie. When you hear them threaten to "Go John Galt," hide your daughters and tell them not to talk to any strangers -- or Tea Party Republicans. And when you see them taking their razor blades to the last remaining programs protecting the middle class from total abject destitution -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- and brag about their plans to slash them for "moral" reasons, just remember Ayn's morality and who inspired her.

Too many critics of Ayn Rand-- until I was one of them -- would rather dismiss her books and ideas as laughable, childish, hackneyed. But it can't be dismissed because Rand is the name that keeps bubbling up from the Teabagger crowd and the elite conservative circuit in Washington as The Big Inspiration. The only way to protect ourselves from this thinking is the way you protect yourself from serial killers: smoke the Rand followers out, make them answer for following the crazed ideology of a serial-killer-groupie, and run them the hell out of town and out of our hemisphere.

Read more of Mark Ames at eXiledonline.com. He is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond.

Video Book Review: Political Ponerology by Andrew M. Lobaczewski

I read Political Ponerology by Andrew M. Lobaczewski. A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes. It was translated by Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, Ph. D. and edited with notes and commentary by Laura Knight-Jadczyk and Henry See. This is the second edition. Copyright 1998, 2006. It was published in Canada by Red Pill Press.

This book was kind of hard for me to read. I read it twice and I still don’t really understand it.

The guy Zbigniew Brzezinski didn’t want Political Ponerology to be published. He’s the guy who wrote The Grand Chessboard and Between Two Ages. The publisher says:

There are a number of ways of preventing the circulation and distribution of ideas that are considered dangerous to the ensconced powers. The first is to work to prevent their publication. Lobaczewski describes how Zbigniew Bzrezinski, while singing words of praise for the manuscript and saying he would see it published, in fact did his best, successfully, to see the book did not get into print. [p. 223]


A good quote to kind of start off this video is from the publisher:

Human history is the tale of powers and regimes rising and falling. Behind many of them stand individuals that fit the descriptions of pathological types in this book. While Lobaczewski offers us, perhaps for the first time in recorded history, the key to understanding this process, for coming to grips with the true nature of human evil in our world, it is obvious that the key will only unlock more horror and suffering if it is held by those types described in the pages of this book. Only if normal people, the billions of normal people of conscience in our world, can be made aware of the real threat we face and can learn to immunize themselves, do we stand a chance of breaking the cycle. [p. 224]

Another good quote to help start this video off is from the editor’s preface:

Andrew Lobaczewski addresses the problem of the psychopath and their extremely significant contribution to our macrosocial evils, their ability to act as the éminence grise behind the very structure of our society. [p. 15]

So who is Andrew M. Lobaczewski? He’s the author. More on him . . .

I [, Andrew M. Lobaczewski,] am a very aged clinical psychologist. Forty years ago I took part in a secret investigation of the real nature and psychopathology of the macro-social phenomenon called “Communism”. [p. 19]

What is “ponerology”? Some quotes . . .

Nevertheless, based on the work of myself and others in that past tragic time, a new discipline arose that became our beacon; two Greek philologists/monks baptized it “PONEROLOGY” from the Greek poneros = evil. The process of the genesis of evil was called, correspondingly, “ponerogenesis”. [p. 71]

A ponerological approach facilitates an understanding of some of mankind’s more dramatic difficulties on both levels, the macrosocial and the individual human scale. This new discipline will make it possible to achieve first theoretical, and then practical, solutions for problems we have been attempting to solve by ineffective traditional means, resulting in feelings of helplessness against the tides of history. These latter means are based on historiographical concepts and excessively moralizing attitudes, which makes them overrate force as a means of counteracting evil. Ponerology can help equalize such one-sidedness by means of modern naturalistic thinking, supplementing our comprehension of the causes and genesis of evil with the facts necessary to build a more stable foundation for practical inhibition of the processes of ponerogenesis and counteraction of their results. [p. 125]

Ponerology was born in the crucible of attempts to understand, scientifically, a macro-social phenomenon of what can only be called extreme and excessive evil: Fascism and Soviet Communism. [p. 234]

The ponerogenesis of macrosocial phenomena — large scale evil — which constitutes the most important object of this book, appears to be subject to the same laws of nature that operate within human questions on an individual or small-group level. The role of persons with various psychological defects and anomalies of a clinically low level appears to be a perennial characteristic of such phenomena. In the macrosocial phenomenon we shall later call “pathocracy”, a certain hereditary anomaly isolated as “essential psychopathy” is catalytically and causatively essential for the genesis and survival of large scale social evil. [p. 31]

A cool quote on evil:

Evil in the world, in fact, constitutes a continuum: one kind opens the door to another, irrespective of its qualitative essence or the ideological slogans cloaking it. [p. 198]

Quotes on psychopaths:

Martha Stout, [in The Sociopath Next Door (Broadway, 2005),] who has worked extensively with victims of psychopaths, writes:

Imagine — if you can — not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken.
And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.
Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless.

. . .

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

Crazy and frightening — and real, in about 4 percent of the population. . . .

The prevalence rate for anorexic eating disorders is estimated a 3.43 percent, deemed to be nearly epidemic, and yet this figure is a fraction lower than the rate for antisocial personality. The high-profile disorders classed as schizophrenia occur in only about 1 percent of [the population] — a mere quarter of the rate of antisocial personality — and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that the rate of colon cancer in the United States, considered “alarmingly high,” is about 40 per 100,000 — one hundred times lower than the rate of antisocial personality.

The high incidence of sociopathy in human society has a profound effect on the rest of us who must live on this planet, too, even those of us who have not been clinically traumatized. The individuals who constitute this 4 percent drain our relationships, our bank accounts, our accomplishments, our self-esteem, our very peace on earth.

[pp. 10-11]

“Likeable”, “Charming”, “Intelligent”, “Alert”, “Impressive”, “Confidence-inspiring,” and “A great success with the ladies”. This is how Hervey Cleckley described most of his subjects in The Mask of Sanity. It seems that, in spite of the fact that their actions prove them to be “irresponsible” and “self-destructive”, psychopaths seem to have in abundance the very traits most desired by normal persons. The smooth self-assurance acts as an almost supernatural magnet to normal people who have to read self-help books or go to counseling to be able to interact with others in an untroubled way. The psychopath, on the contrary, never has any neuroses, no self-doubts, never experiences angst, and is what “normal” people seek to be. What’s more, even if they aren’t that attractive, they are “babe magnets”.
Cleckley’s seminal hypothesis is that the psychopath suffers from profound and incurable affective deficit. If he really feels anything at all, they are emotions of only the shallowest kind. He is able to do whatever he wants, based on whatever whim strikes him, because consequences that would fill the ordinary man with shame, self-loathing, and embarrassment simply do not affect the psychopath at all. What to others would be a horror or a disaster is to him merely a fleeting inconvenience. [p. 14]

Hervey Cleckley actually comes very close to suggesting that psychopaths are human in every respect — but that they lack a soul. This lack of “soul quality” makes them very efficient “machines”. They can write scholarly works, imitate the words of emotion, but over time, it becomes clear that their words do not match their actions. They are the type of person who can claim that they are devastated by grief who then attend a party “to forget”. The problem is: they really do forget. [p. 15]

In short, the psychopath is a predator. If we think about the interactions of predators with their prey in the animal kingdom, we can come to some idea of what is behind the “mask of sanity” of the psychopath. Just as an animal predator will adopt all kinds of stealthy functions in order to stalk their prey, cut them out of the herd, get close to them, and reduce their resistance, so does the psychopath construct all kinds of elaborate camouflage composed of words and appearances — lies and manipulations — in order to “assimilate” their prey. [p. 17]

Familiarity with this common weakness of human nature and the normal person’s “naÏveté” is part of the specific knowledge we find in many psychopathic individuals . . . [p. 103]

Psychopaths are conscious of being different from normal people. That is why the “political system” inspired by their nature is able to conceal this awareness of being different. They wear a personal mask of sanity and know how to create a macrosocial mask of the same dissimulating nature. When we observe the role of ideology in this macrosocial phenomenon, quite conscious of the existence of this specific awareness of the psychopath, we can then understand why ideology is relegated to a tool-like role: something useful in dealing with those other naive people and nations. Pathocrats must nevertheless appreciate the function of ideology as being something essential in any ponerogenic group, especially in the macrosocial phenomenon which is their “homeland”. [p. 143-144]

Lobaczewski talks about how in a system there’s a group of 6% that make up the nobility and a group of 12% that make up the bourgeoisie. The rest of the population makes up the 82%. And it’s the 18% that controls the 82% I guess.

You can think of it like a triangle:



The 6% group constitute the new nobility; the 12% group gradually forms the new bourgeoisie, whose economic situation is the most advantageous. Adapting to the new conditions, not without conflicts of conscience, transforms this latter group into both dodgers and, simultaneously, intermediaries between the oppositional society and the active ponerological group, whom they can talk to in the appropriate language. They play such a crucial role within this system that both sides must take them into account. Since their technical capacities and skills are better than those of the active pathocratic group, they assume various managerial positions. Normal people see them as persons they can approach, generally without being subjected to pathological arrogance.
So it is that only 18% of the country’s population is in favor of the new system of government; but concerning the layer we have called the bourgeoisie, we may even be doubtful of the sincerity of their attitudes. This is the situation in the author’s homeland. This proportion can be variously estimated in other countries, from 15% in Hungary to 21% in Bulgaria, but it is never more than a relatively small minority. [pp. 157-158]

It was relatively easy to determine the environments and origins of the people who succumbed to this process, which I then called “transpersonification”. They came from all social groups, including aristocratic and fervently religious families and caused a break in our student solidarity to the order of some 6%. The remaining majority suffered varying degrees of personality disintegration which gave rise to individual searching for the values necessary to find ourselves again; the results were varied and sometimes creative.
Even then, we had no doubts as to the pathological nature of this “transpersonification” process, which ran similar but not identical in all cases. The duration of the results of this phenomenon also varied. Some of these people later became zealots. Others later took advantage of various circumstances to withdraw and re-establish their lost links to the society of normal people. They were replaced. The only constant value of the new social system was the magic number of 6%. [p. 26]

The first conclusion which suggested itself soon after meeting with the “professor” introduced at the beginning of this volume, was that the phenomenon’s development is limited by nature in terms of the participation of susceptible individuals within a given society. The initial evaluation of approximately 6% amenable individuals proved realistic; progressively collected detailed statistical data assembled later were unable to refute it. This value varies from country to country in the magnitude of about one percentage point upward or downward. Quantitatively speaking, this number is broken down into 0.6% essential psychopaths, i.e. about 1/10 of this 6%. However, this anomaly plays a disproportionate role compared to the numbers by saturating the phenomenon as a whole with its own quality of thought and experience. [p. 156]

Neurosis develops in people under pathocratic rule.

. . . neurosis is human nature’s normal response to being subjugated to a pathological system. [p. 200]

Every person in the span of his life, and particularly during childhood and youth, assimilates psychological material from others through mental resonance, identification, imitation, and other communicative means, thereupon transforming it to build his own personality and world view. If such material is contaminated by pathological factors and deformities, personality development shall also be deformed. There product will be a person unable to understand correctly either himself and others, normal human relations and morals; he develops into a person who commits evil acts with a poor feeling of being faulty. Is he really at fault? [p. 73]

Neurosis is a natural response of human nature if a normal person is subordinated to domination of pathological people. The same applies to the subordination of a society and its members to a pathological system of authority. In a pathocratic state, every person with a normal nature thus exhibits a certain chronic neurotic state, controlled by the efforts of reason. The intensity of these states, varies among individuals, depending upon different circumstances, usually more serious in direct proportion to the individual’s intelligence. Psychotherapy upon such people is only possible and effective if we can rely on adequate familiarity with the causes of these states. Western educated psychologists thus prove completely impractical with regard to such patients. [p. 177]

Some quotes about “happy times”:

In general, most people are horrified by such literature; in hedonistic societies particularly, people have the tendency to escape into ignorance or naive doctrines. Some people even feel contempt for suffering persons. The influence of such books can thus be partially harmful; we should counteract that influence by indicating what the authors had to leave out because our ordinary world of concepts and imaginings cannot contain it. [p. 29]

Perception of the truth about the real environment, especially an understanding of the human personality and its values, ceases to be a virtue during the so-called “happy” times; thoughtful doubters are decried as meddlers who cannot leave well enough alone. This, in turn, leads to an impoverishment of psychological knowledge, the capacity of differentiating the properties of human nature and personality, and the ability to mold minds creatively. The cult of power thus supplants those mental values so essential for maintaining law and order by peaceful means. A nation’s enrichment or involution regarding its psychological world view could be considered an indicator of whether its future will be good or bad.
During “good” times, the search for truth becomes uncomfortable because it reveals inconvenient facts. It is better to think about easier and more pleasant things. Unconscious elimination of data which are, or appear to be, inexpedient gradually turns into habit, and then becomes a custom accepted by society at large. The problem is that any thought process based on such truncated information cannot possibly give rise to correct conclusions; it further leads to subconscious substitution of inconvenient premises by more convenient ones, thereby approaching the boundaries of psychopathy.
. . . Catastrophe waits in the wings. In such times, the capacity for logical and disciplined thought, born of necessity during difficult times, begins to fade. When communities lose the capacity for psychological reason and moral criticism, the processes of the generation of evil are intensified at every social scale, whether individual or macrosocial, until everything reverts to “bad” times.
. . .
When a few generations’ worth of “good-time” insouciance results in societal deficit regarding psychological skill and moral criticism, this paves the way for pathological plotters, snake-charmers, and even more primitive impostors to act and merge into the processes of the origination of evil. They are essential factors in its synthesis. In the next chapter I shall attempt to persuade my readers that the participation of pathological factors, so underrated by the social sciences, is a common phenomenon in the processes of the origin of evil.
Those times which many people later recall as the “good old days” thus provide fertile soil for future tragedy because of the progressive devolution of moral, intellectual, and personality values which give rise to Rasputin-like eras.
. . .
When bad times arrive and people are overwhelmed by an excess of evil, they must gather all their physical and mental strength to fight for existence and protect human reason. The search for some way out of the difficulties and dangers rekindles long-buried powers of discretion. Such people have the initial tendency to rely on force in order to counteract the threat; they may, for instance, become “trigger-happy” or dependent upon armies.
Slowly and laboriously, however, they discover the advantages conferred by mental effort; improved understanding of the psychological situation in particular, better differentiation of human characters and personalities, and, finally, comprehension of one’s adversaries. During such times, virtues which former generations relegated to literary motifs regain their real and useful substance and become prized for their value. A wise person capable of furnishing sound advice is highly respected. [pp. 62-64]

The cycle of happy, peaceful times favors a narrowing of the world view and an increase in egotism; societies become subject to progressive hysteria and to that final stage, descriptively known to historians, which finally produces times of despondency and confusion, that have lasted for millennia and continue to do so. The recession of mind and personality which is a feature of ostensibly happy times varies from one nation to another; thus some countries manage to survive the results of such crises with minor losses, whereas others lose nations and empires. Geopolitical factors have also played a decisive role. [p. 64]

In “happy times” especially, the tendency for conversive thinking generally intensifies. It appears accompanied by a rising wave of hysteria in said society. Those who try to maintain common sense and proper reasoning finally wind up in the minority, feeling wronged because their human right to maintain psychological hygiene is violated by pressure from all sides. This means that unhappy times are not far away. [p. 109]

Quotes that I thought were cool:

Carriers of this anomaly [, schizoidia or schizoidal psychopathy,] are hypersensitive and distrustful, while, at the same time, pay little attention to the feelings of others. They tend to assume extreme positions, and are eager to retaliate for minor offenses. Sometimes they are eccentric and odd. Their poor sense of psychological situation and reality leads them to superimpose erroneous, pejorative interpretations upon other people’s intentions. They easily become involved in activities which are ostensibly moral, but which actually inflict damage upon themselves and others. Their impoverished psychological worldview makes them typically pessimistic regarding human nature. We frequently find expressions of their characteristic attitudes in their statements and writings: “Human nature is so bad that order in human society can only be maintained by a strong power created by highly qualified individuals in the name of some higher idea.” Let us call this typical expression the “schizoid declaration”. [pp. 87-88]

In the psychopath, a dream emerges like some Utopia of a “happy” world and a social system which does not reject them or force them to submit to laws and customs whose meaning is incomprehensible to them. They dream of a world in which their simple and radical way of experiencing and perceiving reality would dominate; where they would, of course, be assured safety and prosperity. In this Utopian dream, they imagine that those “others”, different, but also more technically skillful than they are, should be put to work to achieve this goal for the psychopaths and others of their kin. “We”, they say, “after all, will create a new government, one of justice”. They are prepared to fight and to suffer for the sake of such a brave new world, and also, of course, to inflict suffering upon others. Such a vision justifies killing people, whose suffering does not move them to compassion because “they” are not quite conspecific. They do not realize that they will consequently meet with opposition which can last for generations. [pp. 98-99]

Pathocracy survives thanks to the feeling of being threatened by the society of normal people, as well as by other countries wherein various forms of the system of normal man persist. For the rulers, staying on the top is therefore the classic problem of “to be or not to be”. [p. 146]

. . . the practical value of our natural world view generally ends where psychopathology begins. [p. 103]

Nothing poisons the human soul and deprives us of our capacity to understand reality more objectively than this very obedience to that common human tendency to take a moralistic view of human behavior. [p. 105]

Deficiently faithful people have been and are a factor of the pathocratic system’s internal weakness. [p. 140]

Whenever a society contains serious social problems, there will also be some group of sensible people striving to improve the social situation by means of energetic reforms, so as to eliminate the cause of social tension. Others consider it their duty to bring about a moral rejuvenation of society. Elimination of social injustice and reconstruction of the country’s morals and civilization could deprive a pathocracy of an chance to take over. Such reformers and moralists must therefore be consistently neutralized by means of liberal or conservative positions and appropriately suggestive catchwords and paramoralisms; if necessary, the best among them has to be murdered.
Psychological warfare strategists must decide rather early on which ideology would be most efficient in a particular country because of its adaptability to said nation’s traditions. After all, the appropriately adapted ideology must perform the function of a Trojan horse, transporting pathocracy into the country. These various ideologies are then gradually conformed to one’s own original master plan. Finally, off comes the mask.
At the right time, local partisans are organized and armed, with recruits picked from dissatisfied localities; leadership is provided by trained officers familiar with the secret idea as well as the operative idea concocted for propagation in the country in question. Assistance must then be given so groups of conspirators adhering to the concocted ideology can stage a coup d’état, whereupon an iron-fisted government is installed. Once this has been brought about, the diversionary partisans’ activities are stymied — they are made out to be patsies — so that the new authorities can take credit for bringing about internal peace. Any hoodlum who cannot or will not submit to the new decrees is “gently” invited before his former leader and shot in the back of the head. This is the new reality.
This is how such governmental systems are born. A network of pathological ponerogenical factors is already active, as is the inspirational role of essential psychopathy. However, that does not yet represent a complete picture of pathocracy. Many local leaders and adherents persist in their original convictions which, albeit radical, strike them as serving the good of a much larger proportion of formerly abused persons, not just a few percent of pathocrats and the interests of a would-be world wide empire. [pp. 153-154]

Persons less distinctly inclined in the pathocratic direction include those affected by some states caused by the toxic activities of certain substances such as ether, carbon monoxide, and possibly some endotoxins, under the condition that this occurred in childhood. [p. 156]

Still, so many people with a religious upbringing change their world view to that of the Pathocrats very quickly. [p. 158]

Such a great review of individual, social, and historical world views in this search for meaning of life and history is a product of unhappy times and will help along the way back to happy ones. [p. 175]

As Mme. de Stael wrote: “Tout comprendere, c’est tout pardoner”. [Translation: “To understand all is to forgive all.”] [p. 175]

We must be convinced that the Truth can endure such a washing in modern detergent; not only will it not lose its eternal values, but it will actually regain its original freshness and noble colors. [p. 194]

. . . everything begins and ends within the human psyche. [p. 218]

One last quote . . .

When Man can look suffering and even death in the eye with the required calm, a dangerous weapon falls out of the ruler’s hands. [p. 173]

Daniel Kemp

Blame The "Big Business Thugs!"

Thuggery is tyranny and most tyrants are psychopaths! Whenever someone uses force (physical or otherwise), it is psychopathy!!!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Blame-The-Big-Business-Th-by-Susan-Strong-100217-757.html

February 18, 2010
Blame The "Big Business Thugs!"
By Susan Strong

In December, 2009, President Obama said, "the buck stops with me," when the Homeland Security Department he inherited from Bush & Co. failed to prevent the Christmas bomber's attempt. But the four alarm mess the Bushies dumped on Obama and the rest of us, including the badly pasted together Homeland Security Department, is not a "buck" he should pick up. Sure, he has to make a big effort to clean up their mess, despite the fact that they are doing everything they can to block him at every turn. But the "buck" still stops with the Right and their backers: the "big business thugs."

Of course the president can't get away with openly blaming "big business thugs" for the gridlock we're stuck in. The stock market will go down again if he does, and then even more of the peoples' pension funds vanish. Naming the blame correctly and succinctly is our job. It's time we answered the Right's scare tactic of "big government" with the truth about what's really scary in the land: it's the "big business thugs" who blackmail Congress. Of course, it's not all big businesses and certainly not all business in general. Small businesses usually aren't trying to obstruct or bleed the citizens they serve either. The "big business thugs" I'm thinking of are those companies and sectors of the economy that continually and actively obstruct the American people's health and well-being in every way they can--big investment banking, the health insurance industry, big pharma, oil companies, big agriculture, and so on.

Like all thugs, they use behind the scenes threats, manipulation, bribes, and above all, passing the buck. It's often been said that the Right is good at framing, in the sense of messaging, but they are even better at framing in the criminal sense: shifting the blame to someone else, and making "you and him fight." Big business thugs are the ones who really betray our democracy and abuse working Americans. And to their gang of captive conservatives in Congress they add worked-over individual Democrats, however progressive those hapless folks might wish to be.

A minute ago I said it's our job to bring all of this up. In a recent piece in Tikkun, ("Why Are Americans Passive as Millions Lose. . .?" January/February 2010 issue, http://www.alternet.org/media/145481 ) psychotherapist Harriet Fraad laid out a brilliant analysis of why Americans have been so passive while big business thugs gutted our economy and our democracy, starting with the Reagan administration. In conclusion, she suggests some excellent new organizing tactics based on her current research. I think there is real cause for hope now too. The American public is hopping mad, and not just the tea party folks either. Let's give them all the whole truth, in phrases that could easily spread, about who's really to blame for our troubles. We could turn the newly aroused creativity of "a can do America" loose again. After all, this would not be the first time in American history that the American people have had to take our country back from big business thugs.

Japan opens lid on mass grave

http://www.smh.com.au/world/japan-opens-lid-on-mass-grave-20100215-o2v5.html

Julian Ryall
Sdyney Morning Herald
Tue, 16 Feb 2010 02:30 EST

Tokyo: More than 60 years after the end of World War II, the name Unit 731 still has the power to generate shock, revulsion and denial in Japan.

The Imperial Japanese Army's notorious medical research team carried out secret human experiments regarded as some of the worst war crimes in history.

It subjected more than 10,000 people a year to grotesque torture in the name of science. Russian soldiers and downed American aircrews were among the victims.

Experiments included hanging people upside down until they choked, burying them alive and injecting air into their veins. Some victims were subject to vivisection.

New details could be revealed after the authorities in Tokyo announced plans to open an investigation into human bones thought to have come from the unit.

The bones of up to 100 people were discovered in a mass grave in 1989 during construction work. They bore the marks of saws and some of the skulls had drill holes and portions of the bone cut out. But the issue is so controversial in Japan that the remains have since been stored in a repository.

Acting on information from a former nurse, the authorities have said they will re-examine the bones to determine whether they were part of the experiments carried out by Unit 731 in the last days of the war.

Toyo Ishii came forward to say that during the weeks after Japan's surrender in August 1945, she and her colleagues at an army hospital were ordered to bury corpses, bones and body parts before the Allies arrived.

She claimed that the hospital had three mortuaries where bodies with numbered tags around their necks were stored in a pool of formalin to preserve them before they were dissected. Organs and other body parts were preserved in glass jars.

The sites that Mrs Ishii pinpointed as mass graves will now be excavated. The area is an apartment complex in the Shinjuku district of the city which is scheduled for redevelopment.

An investigation after the remains were found in 1989 concluded they were mostly non-Japanese Asians and had probably been used in ''medical education'' or taken to the medical school from battlefields overseas for analysis. The health ministry has repeatedly denied requests from several Chinese whose relatives are believed to have died in Unit 731 experiments to have DNA tests carried out on the bones.

Unit 731 was mostly active in China, where it carried out biological, bacteriological and chemical weapons tests on civilians and prisoners of war.

Intolerable Cruelty: Cover Stories and a Culture of Lies

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/202789-Intolerable-Cruelty-Cover-Stories-and-a-Culture-of-Lies

Harrison Koehli
Sott.net
Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:23 EST

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

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

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

Take this line from Clooney's character, Miles Massey, delivered to a cheating wife whose husband caught her in the act, and who, of course wants "fair" representation:
Hmm... Hmm... Yes, your husband did show remarkable foresight in taking those pictures. And, yes, absent a swimming pool, the presence of a pool man would appear to be suspicious. But, Madam, who is the real victim here? Let me suggest to you the following. Your husband, who on a prior occasion had slapped you, beat you...
While the Coens humorously push this tendency to create one's reality out of thin air throughout the movie, sometimes to a ridiculous degree, the line pretty much captures the modus operandi of the film's characters, and of the entire Western legal system, incidentally, thus brining me to my point. A culture without a popular understanding of psychopathy faces a very real danger from the very thing of which they are unaware. A culture without a popular understanding of psychopathy and whose citizens demonstrate an almost inborn tendency to lie, to create personal fictions and to even come to believe those fictions, all to present themselves in a better light, is hurtling so fast towards self-destruction that is perhaps unavoidable at this point.

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

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

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

Psychologist and author John F. Schumaker lists the types of dissociative processes in his book The Corruption of Reality:
This evolutionary strategy [i.e. preserving the many advantages of elevated consciousness while simultaneously reducing the emotional impact of that same adaptation] came in the form of the capacity of the brain to dissociate itself from its own data. More specifically, the human brain gained the ability to (a) selectively perceive its environment, (b) selectively process information, (c) selectively store memories, (d) selectively disengage from already stored memories, and (e) selectively replace dissociated data with more "user-friendly" data.
Lobaczewski called these processes subconscious selection and substitution of information, examples of which are easily furnished by playing variations on the theme of the suave divorce lawyer's client. Here's the scenario: the woman's husband comes home early, and is somewhat perplexed to see a pool man's van parked on the driveway of his spacious West Hollywood home, a home by they way, without the pool required to make such services required in the first place. But, the anticipation of "the big game" he's five minutes late for, or perhaps the succulent appeal of the buckwheat sandwich awaiting him in the fridge, causes him to push this paradoxical perception from the purview of his mind's eye. He's got more important things to focus on, after all. He grabs the sandwich, watches the game, and the pool guy slips out on sock-footed feet. That's (a) selective perception. It's not quite denial because the relevant information hasn't been processed well enough to even lead to a conclusion worth denying.

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

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

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

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

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

And by this vicious cycle of deception we are led back to our main point. When a society develops the habit of twisting the truth, malicious abuse of the truth becomes easy and prevalent. Western culture is asphyxiated by it. What starts as an evolutionarily adaptive brain mechanism becomes a shortcut by which we avoid facing uncomfortable views of ourselves and others. And as the process moves from more automatic and unconscious (denial) to more increasingly conscious (substitution), our thinking becomes increasingly pathological and downright wrong, making us vulnerable to those who take advantage of this face-saving tendency. Lobaczewski writes:
Those people who use conversive operations too often for the purpose of finding convenient conclusions, or constructing some cunning paralogistic or paramoralistic statements, eventually begin to undertake such behavior for ever more trivial reasons, losing the capacity for conscious control over their thought process altogether. This necessarily leads to behavior errors which must be paid for by others as well as themselves.

People who have lost their psychological hygiene and capacity of proper thought along this road also lose their natural critical faculties with regard to the statements and behavior of individuals whose abnormal thought processes were formed on a substratum of pathological anomalies, whether inherited or acquired. Hypocrites stop differentiating between pathological and normal individuals, thus opening an "infection entry" for the ponerologic role of pathological factors. (Political Ponerology, p. 108)
In other words, when we lie to ourselves, we're easy prey for psychopaths who lie to us. We may identify with our nationality to the extent that we filter out negative thoughts about our leaders and our conduct with other countries. We may ignore the atrocities committed in our names. Even worse, we may take the bait offered by our leaders and substitute important data, reaching pseudo-logical and pseudo-moral opinions. "Theydeserve it, because they hate us." "That massacre wasn't actually a massacre. They fired first after all, and we were only defending ourselves." "The guy had weapons of mass destruction." "They're the ones that want to kill us, we're just making sure they'll never get the chance."

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

Take the Underwear Bomber. The available facts make it screamingly clear that the kid was a patsy of Western Intelligence Agencies (ahem! Mossad!), but even with most of the pertinent facts and clues published in the mainstream news, it is only the alternative news websites, like sott.net, who come to the logical conclusion. Everyone else blindly promotes the ludicrous cover story. As the Detroit News reported:
Allowing Adbulmutallab to keep the visa increased chances federal investigators would be able to get closer to apprehending the terror network he is accused of working with, "rather than simply knocking out one soldier in that effort."
Oh, really. And Mossad just happened to have unchecked access and control over security at the airport in question. And the well dressed American with some major pull, who the FBI denied existed for weeks, was just a rich uncle! A quote from Dr. Sidney MacDonald Baker is fitting here:
Empiricists are those of us who believe what we see and rationalists are those who see what we believe. (Detoxification and Healing, p. 50)
An empiricist looks at the data and sees that Adbulmutallab had help, most likely from the very intelligence agencies tasked with "preventing" terrorism. A rationalist operates with several beliefs that distort logical thought processes. "This must be because of this." Or "This must be the explanation." Once this limited thinking becomes habitual, it's common to hear, "I simply don't believe it." "I just can't believe that our government and military would do something like that." But with the proper framework, with accurate data about psychopathology and human psychology, harsh realities are not rejected offhand. Watchthis video on the Israeli assault on Gaza in January of 2009 for one such unveiling of truth. It is stark, horrifying, and free of the convoluted mental manuevers used to reject harsh realities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Psychopathic thinking: How to save the Obama presidency - bomb Iran

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=167618

Psychopathic thinking: How to save the Obama presidency - bomb Iran
Daniel Pipes
The Jerusalem Post
Tue, 02 Feb 2010

I do not customarily offer advice to a president whose election I opposed, whose goals I fear and whose policies I work against. But here is a way for Barack Obama to salvage his tottering administration by taking a step that protects the US and its allies.

If Obama's personality, identity and celebrity captivated a majority of the American electorate in 2008, those qualities proved ruefully deficient in 2009. He failed to deliver on employment and health care, he failed in foreign policy forays small (e.g., landing the 2016 Olympics) and large (relations with China and Japan). His counterterrorism record barely passes the laugh test.

This poor performance has caused an unprecedented collapse in the polls and the loss of three major by-elections, culminating two weeks ago in an astonishing senatorial defeat in Massachusetts. Obama's attempts to "reset" his presidency will likely fail if he focuses on economics, where he is just one of many players.

He needs a dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a lightweight, bumbling ideologue, preferably in an arena where the stakes are high, where he can take charge and where he can trump expectations.

Such an opportunity does exist: Obama can order the US military to destroy Iran's nuclear weapons capacity.

Circumstances are propitious. First, US intelligence agencies have reversed the preposterous 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that claimed with "high confidence" that Teheran had "halted its nuclear weapons program." No one (other than the Iranian rulers and their agents) denies that the regime is rushing headlong to build a nuclear arsenal.

Second, if the apocalyptic-minded leaders in Teheran get the Bomb, they render the Middle East yet more volatile and dangerous. They might deploy these weapons in the region, leading to massive death and destruction. Or they could launch an electromagnetic pulse attack on the US, devastating the country. By eliminating the Iranian nuclear threat, Obama protects the homeland and sends a message to America's friends and enemies.

Third, polling shows long-standing American backing for an attack on the Iranian nuclear infrastructure.
A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll in January 2006 found that 57% of Americans favored military intervention if Teheran pursues a program that could enable it to build nuclear arms.

A Zogby International poll in October 2007 found that 52% of likely voters supported a US military strike to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon; 29% opposed such a step.

McLaughlin & Associates in May 2009 asked whether people would support "using the [US] military to attack and destroy the facilities in Iran which are necessary to produce a nuclear weapon"; 58% of 600 likely voters supported the use of force and 30% opposed it.

Fox News in September 2009 asked: "Do you support or oppose the United States taking military action to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons?" Sixty-one percent of 900 registered voters supported military action and 28% opposed it.

Pew Research Center in October 2009 asked which is more important, "to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, even if it means taking military action" or "to avoid a military conflict with Iran, even if it means they may develop nuclear weapons"; of 1,500 respondents, 61% favored the first reply and 24% the second.
Not only does a strong majority - 57%, 52%, 58%, 61% and 61% - already favor using force, but after a strike Americans will presumably rally around the flag, pushing that number much higher.

Fourth, were the US strike limited to taking out Iran's nuclear facilities, and not aspiring to regime change, it would require few "boots on the ground" and entail relatively few casualties, making an attack politically more palatable.

Just as 9/11 caused voters to forget George W. Bush's meandering early months, a strike on the Iranian facilities would dispatch Obama's feckless first year down the memory hole and transform the domestic political scene. It would sideline health care, prompt Republicans to work with Democrats, make netroots squeal, independents reconsider and conservatives swoon.

But the chance to do good and do well is fleeting. As the Iranians improve their defenses and approach weaponization, the window of opportunity is closing. The time to act is now or, on Obama's watch, the world will soon become a much more dangerous place.