What Do Politics Have to Do With Psychopathy?

"Why do you get into politics?", you might ask.

For a very, very good reason.

As we mentioned on the introductory page, discerning who is or is not a genetic psychopath can be problematical because there is a lot of diagnostic confusion. Remember, a genetic psychopath cannot be "cured." Someone who is behaving psychopathically or narcissistically could be doing so because of various reactions to events in their lives, either during their formative years or in the present. If there is such an apparent epidemic of narcissism and psychopathy, then we need to begin to examine our society very closely. And societies are created by governing systems. Thus it is that political systems may function very much like psychopaths; charming, eloquent, persuasive, all the while lying, manipulating and betraying.

It is quite evident that psychopaths have achieved positions of political power with global implications more than once in human history. Since one of the most typical actions of the psychopath is to blame the victim for the evil that the psychopath him/herself commits, if you apply the rules of discerning psychopathy to political systems, you may be surprised at what you see. The United States may be experiencing just such a period at this moment.

Read the article entitled Political Ponerology: The Science of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes for an overview of how psychopaths come to power and twist a society so that more and more people begin to behave psychopathically. And consider the words of Kurt Vonnegut, excerpted from Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@:

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs.”

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it!

PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.

What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!

All in all, the reader will find that psychopathy has a more profound effect on human society than they ever imagined. There are psychopaths in all levels of society, and the characteristics that enable a person to succeed in a capitalistic society, such as the U.S.A. are, sadly, very often the chief characteristics of a psychopath. Since the condition is genetic, those who become very wealthy and very powerful generally pass the genes on to their children. So, imagine the psychopath you have just encountered with unlimited wealth and family connections. What will he or she do? Become president?

If a bright and educated person can be taken in, why not an entire country?