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

Originally posted by RedCairo

Normal people don't WANT to deal with it. We let stupid corrupt evil people govern us for the same reason we let our beautiful husbands, brothers and sons go to war: in order to 'deal with that' it would require we totally refocus our personality on that issue, become strident and driven, and it would change who we are.

We don't want to become them in order to fight them.

That is certainly something I will have to contemplate. You could be right.

My own line of reasoning is more along the lines of, "we are more like them than we want to admit, and having their extreme version of psychopathy allows us to feel that we really arent so bad in comparison."

I see it time and time again. People who when they are victimized howl and cry and bemoan their fate. But when it is someone else, well, thats not really so bad is it? I left business school in my senior year because in ethics class my classmates were arguing that children in the third world didnt really mind working in factories. "Those people" dont mind that, and in fact, we were helping them better themselves by working their children long hours in unsafe working conditions.

I see people here on this site with "love and light" scattered all through their siggys and posts breathing venom on those who they disagree with. I think that underlying most of us, there is that same rage that is so extreme that it gets pushed to emotional coldness, like you describe. I dont know if that is true psychopathy. I think it may be adaptive psychopathy, but like you I suspect psychopathy is more gradient than "on or off."

I suspect that we allow those sorts of people to lead us so that we can reap the benefits of that kind of behavior, without ever really taking responsibility for it ourselves. Like the feminists you mention. However vehement some of them may have seemed, all women benefited to some degree from that zeal. But most can sit back and enjoy the benefits without having had to go to those extremes themselves.

You seem to see us as good, not wanting to become the thing we hate.

I tend to see us as hypocritical. Wanting to benefit from psychopathic behavior, be it corporate or political, while maintaining a thin pretense of being above it all somehow.

I would like you to be right. I think we would have a much better chance of fixing it if you were. But my instinct says that our leaders are exaggerated reflections of our true selves. And that there is a psychopathic core in most, if not all, of us.

RedCairo: As someone who has been on the cold rational side of one's personality, although perhaps not as fully as you account, I can somewhat relate to what you're exposing.

At the end of the day there is psychopathic potential in all of us, we can all detune from our emotional self and become a more rational cold being. Which is to say we become self motivated, our emotions are detuned into serving ourself only and we disconnect from community life because we lack the empathy for it. This can happen from trauma, either physical or emotional. Or out of simple education, which I suspect happens in our elite structures.

This is why killing the psychopaths would not work, in a revolutionary scenario. For one, it's a psychopathic act in itself, uncontemplating of the humanity of another, and yes, even psychos are human, just twisted out of their normal emotional profile. Then there is the risk that becoming what we fear to get rid of what we fear ends up in programing that fear into us permanently. This is why after a revolutionary scenario there is usually a government that is as bad if not worse than the one it deposed.

No, the monster is within us. So we must treat ourselves first, and, if needed, we must deinvest in the power structures run by psychopaths, if we cannot reason and emotionally connect with them. Many times we won't, because the more the power the greater the psychopath who will want to wield it. The more fear based emotions concentrated around that power. This is the true genesis of the war on terror. Psychopathic induced fear memes, broadcast over the minds of the more emotionally balanced people of the earth.

I'm reminded of the case of Kim puter, an american savant with a prodigious memory, to the point he memorises photographically everything he reads. Yet he can't tie his own shoelaces. In his case there is major anatomic malformation, as he pratically only has one cerebral lobe, but the point is that with great menmonic ability always comes some sort of payoff. People with above average memories and mental capacity are usually physically limited in some way, if nothing else because the brain itself is an energy intensive organ which can easily consume half a bodies calories. So we should not assume that a great memory and eloquence is the sign of a superior being, if anything it shows that there is probably something wrong with the individual and we should have great caution.

Good posts, and thank you for your account.

[edit on 23-2-2009 by Zepherian]

Originally posted by RedCairo


We don't want to become them in order to fight them.

Nor should we. The solution to this problem is to know of them but to find ourselves, to be guided by our own healthy emotional profiles and not submit to structures which were thought up by a lesser emotional mind. Thought comes from emotion and unemotional thought, no matter how information rich it is, will never ressonate with the positive energies of nature.

This is how I see it. To unlink from positive emotion, which is to say love based emotions, is to unlink for the correct way of organising one's life and influencing the lives of others. The result, as I mentioned in the post above, is fear based control structures.

I suspect this is physics. Emotions correspond to energy states, and if you don't have the former you'll get the latter. Perhaps true psychopaths can't feal it, perhaps they misswire so that they perceive the negative as positive, which would explain things like human sacrifice or the cremation of care ritual. Perhaps, but what does seem undeniable is that an unhealthy emotional profile will always cause problems if allowed to become dominant in a human society.

You guys say you wanna a revolution without simply replacing the king with the king……well I guess everyone wants to change the world ….but if you include destruction do ya know you can count me out……


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

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

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

He is dead.

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

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

Wait a minute.

That sounds to me like we did have a revaluation, I mean revolution, except the other side won.

We’ve been played.

Those clowns...I mean psychopaths have won again.

[edit on 23-2-2009 by whiteraven]

reply to post by whiteraven


What matters is not how we die but what we did when we lived. If you look back into history you'll realise all the psychopaths die too. Sometimes pretty young too, as was the case with Alexandre the Great. Ghandi died fairly old, so did Mother Teresa, not all loving people die young, not all psychopaths die old.

Everyone dies, it means nothing in the end in how we lived. And, if you believe your own examples, Jesus did come back...

reply to post by Zepherian


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

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

We are choosing these people. We dont have to.

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

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

Great thread.

I've been kind of aware of this phenomenon for a while now. One of the newspapers here in Toronto ran an article on this subject a while back. Anyone who has been out in the working world can look back at their working life and the various bosses they've had and just the general corporate culture to see that psychopaths are everywhere and are responsible for a lot of misery in life.

I think the only cure for the problem is to make as many people as possible aware of the issue, of it's signs and effects. The efforts of psychopaths can be countered if people know what to look for.

I don't know if paranoia is part of psychopathology, but paranoics are another class of people who cause a lot of misery in life, mainly by dominating and suffocating all life around them.

They are the ones who create social gridlock because they can't tolerate a fluid social environment in which something new and unexpected might happen. They amass huge amounts of money, more than they would need in a hundred lives because no financial cushion, no matter how big can ever assuage their paranoia. They stifle and hog innovative developments because they fear change and fear the growth of any rival power.

They are manipulative and merciless. If not psychopaths, they must be next door neighbors. Most oligarchs are probably paranoic.

Family fortunes are founded by psychopaths and maintained by paranoics.

reply to post by Illusionsaregrander


I broadly agree with everything you've said.

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

I've been seeing the standard of life slowly eroding away, but most people don't notice because they are busy paying the monthlys on their flash cars or, in the words of Carlin, are bought off with a mobile phone that can make pancakes. Sooner or later it's going to hit though, this isn't rome or ancient egypt, people are not willing to be flogged, and we're getting closer to that by the decade.

The problem is indeed one of cultural awareness, there has to be critical mass, so that people realize it's not a race or a border issue, more than anything, it's a psychological/psychiatric issue. Redcairo's posts make me think that a lot of these people who are powersick can be brought back into normal emotional patterns, and this would be beneficial to the cure process.

Cheers.

God it took me forever to type responses to the posts. Then I realized I didn't have to do that but I had a ton of text. Now I feel kinda sorry for you and I'm way late going to bed. (And I type like 120wpm which just makes it worse.)

>> Illusionsaregrander

"we are more like them than we want to admit, and having their extreme version of psychopathy allows us to feel that we really arent so bad in comparison." . . .

It is possible that on some... holographic level, we either 'are' or 'project' everything that is; our 'free will' allows us to choose what will be 'in' us vs. 'outside' us. Perhaps between one position and the other is a gradient, and that is why we all may be projecting externally "all things we are not", but some people are genuinely concerned -- daily! -- about the situation with the genetic diversity of a threatened species of giraffe in africa, while I bet most never even considered it until I mentioned it. Yet it exists.

How much it exists "for you" depends less on the seemingly objective state of a thing or situations' existence, than it does on you: your focus, which is what determines the "pattern" you find yourself in. All the components are the same for everyone but what we notice (bring into existence in our experiential reality), and to what degree, is an individual thing. In this model, everything already exists; it is a matter of focus and distribution that determine the 'resultant pattern' in your life.

Imagine a kaleidascope. In this shifting picture (in an advanced one), colors combine in layers to change the result, many shapes and colors hide behind the others, the pattern as a result changes. But really, it's all still the same components; only the 'observed pattern' differs. Yours is not mine. What differs? Mostly it's us, our perspective. Reality is subjective simply because there is no single larger encompassing observer to BE objective (at least, that is talking with us in a way we remember in the morning).

Perhaps humanity as a whole is a sort of fractal, with families spawning into communities spawning into metros/states/countries, a mandelbrot of psychosocial relationships a bit like complex interactive orbits, where math and geometry meet poetry and dance and we end up with something impossibly complex, and individually unpredictable, while still managing to be completely predictable and repetitive in its larger patterns.

I used to be the most cynical human alive. One day I realized cynicism is the tarnish on the gold coin of knowledge; the more I learned about the world and people the darker I got. It was like "my price" for knowledge. But I began to understand that focusing on something, anything, is choosing how to build one's picture of the reality they inhabit. I can choose to be cynical about the world and people "because it is true" (eg, the world sucks and people are evil) but when I do so, by proxy in my psychology that causes suggestion that opposing things are *less* true (eg, the world is beautiful and people are amazing). In reality, both are true; we choose what we focus upon. (You can see a long period of hypnosis/NLP in my life here...)

Perhaps too many people focused upon vice (think media indoctrination from birth though an immature culture doesn't help either) emphasizes a more pervasive 'pattern' of exactly that for our society at large. I am not being metaphysical although I think it gets into that, but only psychological; we are 'modelers/mimickers' as part of our nature, as humans.

(Did I mention that having a baby made me like Barney. It was her beautiful pure little self I wanted only happiness (like Barney) to fill. It was just nauseating. You see what childbirth does to you. Fortunately she grew up and at 12 is now a WoW addict ("kill them all and loot the corpses!") so it's safe to say she outlived his good influence and I recovered my self respect. ;-))

I see it time and time again. People who when they are victimized howl and cry and bemoan their fate.

Most people I know who are bullies are the ones who most cry victim. That's like a psychological focus that holds both polarities. My favorite -- and these people are freakin ever-present it seems -- are the people who chronically bully everyone, but when someone more functional says, "Hey. You're abusing me. Stop that." the bully instantly goes into a full-blown "Oh you're making a victim of me you tyrant!" response. I've seen this so often I'm starting to think that Joseph Chilton Pearce was right in his 'Evolution's End' book. (I read that six months AFTER giving birth, not six months before, alas. I bawled my head off. But for like a week, I was totally "in the zone" with it, and I swear I could (or thought I could) actually SEE, with insight, formative influences in people that must have shaped their current behavior, even strangers in stores, it was pretty odd.)

But when it is someone else, well, thats not really so bad is it? I left business school in my senior year because in ethics class my classmates were arguing that children in the third world didnt really mind working in factories. "Those people" dont mind that, and in fact, we were helping them better themselves by working their children long hours in unsafe working conditions.

I suspect everything is relative. My boyfriend is an A/V tech for highest-end hotels on a resort island. He looks at my job in IT-higher-edu related project management and he says, "That's like the fifth circle of hell baby, I could never put up with all that crap every day, let alone sitting for it all." He'd feel abused and take everything personally and be miserable. To me it's just another day. I once deliberately cut my pay in half to try and keep an entrepreneurial company afloat for the owner/CEO at least long enough for him to sell it (he did) and not lose everything. My friends saw me as victimized, especially since I was working like 100 hours a week for it. I didn't see it that way.

I'm not saying we should totally compare hungry children in bad factory labor conditions to an IT job (although some techs would grok the analogy LOL), I'm sure my example could be better, but I think that people justify that kind of stuff because there is not any "objective" state of justice-fairness for them (as there was for you: to you, it was abominable in any situation, and thinking it was better for them was really huge world-ism, e.g. third world people shouldn't expect what we in the first do), but because they saw the evaluation of it as RELATIVE -- e.g., if the alternative is starving or nearly, and this at least gives them some pitiful income to survive with, they think that makes it more ok to rationalize. (Relative morals are always fascinating.)

You have to ask, in the situation where that IS the only situation, is the no-bad-job better? I'm just saying that kind of logic can be taken to extremes (eg if those kids mostly-starve because we won't abide them having the alternatively lousy conditions).

I would totally agree the REAL question here is those conditions--that's the real issue--but in the active world, we're often not operating with what is right on paper, we're operating with a choice between two bad situations, and insufficient leverage to create an alternative. Like Kirk's Star Fleet Academy test, which some thought he wimped out on by reprogramming the computer so he didn't have to choose one of two paths both doomed to fail; it was the armchair way out, because in the real world, it's often a best-of-the-worst option and you have to make those decisions knowing that.

But I do think I'm getting way off topic here. I certainly can't defend their side of that argument!

I see people here on this site with "love and light" scattered all through their siggys and posts breathing venom on those who they disagree with. I think that underlying most of us, there is that same rage that is so extreme that it gets pushed to emotional coldness, like you describe. I dont know if that is true psychopathy. I think it may be adaptive psychopathy, but like you I suspect psychopathy is more gradient than "on or off."

Yes, I used to call this 'NewAgerbils'. (I once had a brilliant mathematician friend who was also an astrologer; followed some 14th century monk's work; he utterly hated all things 'new age' and that one art was the only thing he had any respect for whatsoever. On the New Age Forum in compuserve, people were always asking him where they should move to. He told them to move to Sedona. Because it was far from him on the East Coast and because secretly, he believed that it was destined to be underwater in the not so distant future. I know it is some terrible and twisted part of me that found this blackly hilarious.)

The love and light people with all the anger aren't usually sociopaths, just ... turbulent and dysfunctional. I think they're seeking what they internally need to find because they don't have it, as this seeming contradiction makes clear. I think Richard Bach once said we "teach best what we most need to learn." (The reason why you should run, not walk, from psych majors. LOL. Teasing. Mostly.)

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

Hugely complicating and aggravating this situation, I personally believe that we are all -- much of the world, but especially the western cultures -- in a deep state of chronic ever-worsening culture shock, and we are so hilariously arrogant that we opine on this about other countries (eg UAE) without even realizing that we are in fact the most startling textbook case of it on earth. What was it McKenna said? More change has happened since 196(2?) than in the previous 1000 years? And more happened since 199(0-something) than in the previous thousand years? Time IS speeding up (don't let me bore you with my Reichian theory about this LOL) at least in a cultural sense.

Put a person in a situation that is moving faster than they can quite keep up and some predictable deformations (paranoia, aggression, defensiveness, all control issues and pathologies) occur. I think we have a planetary version of The Peter Principle. (LOL. Never thought of it that way before.) Maybe it's possible this seems to be getting ever-worse ever-faster because the world is in fact changing ever-faster. In other words, it is possible that some degree of the pathologies we see growing more dominant in our cultures might be what amounts to a reactionary survival skill. (Much like the 'adapative' stuff we were talking about, but I mean on a much larger scale than just individuals here.) We see it as negative--and it is--but there are positive (as in "survival") elements to this behavior as well. I think in many cases what we are genetically hard-wired to react with for survival reasons was more appropriate a long time ago than it is in the world today.

I suspect that we allow those sorts of people to lead us so that we can reap the benefits of that kind of behavior, without ever really taking responsibility for it ourselves.

In line with my line right above that, perhaps on some level we genetically recognize some place for this. For example if culturally things are holographic, then most patterns are seen at the micro and macro level too. So let's take an individual. A certain woman maybe likes a man who makes her feel safe and protected. She may well marry a man who makes her feel that way because of his dominance, strength and aggressiveness, right up until he starts punching her when he's had a bad day. But she's psychologically so grafted "safe/protective" onto him in her mind, that his threat is literally a "cognitive dissonance" to her; it's very difficult psychologically to get through that and by far the most common reaction is denial/avoidance/rationalization.

This may seem an extreme example of dysfunction but it's actually just a more visible example of a really basic, constant human behavior: I see this dynamic in other forms even in the workplace and social clubs. Hell, my F-150 pickup nickle and dime'd me to death because of my irrational attachment to it and mental model of how helpful it was to me when I really needed it LOL.

I'm saying that we may be genetically geared to become and/or allow certain traits in our tribe because no matter what we think of their effect on macro world politics or micro family gatherings, we ('subconsciously'--I hate that word) recognize the 'strength' inherent in them.

One of my best friends was a combat soldier in two tours of Vietnam, in every single one of the famous battles; his stories are so horrible they've kept me awake at night. Many of my friends have been combat soldiers. (I think my childhood gives me some rapport with this.)

They become what the situation makes them become. Then culturally we see them as deranged, dangerous, or dysfunctional (...usually all three). Of course they are--IN our close-the-curtains-honey suburban world, our thin veneer we paste over reality to pretend we're all really civilized; like you implied (I think), perhaps there is some mass-society group-delusion we *choose* to share. They adapted--neurologically, some of this is hardwired not just "psychology"--to a situation because they were survivors. The fact that now they can hardly feel, or need constant trauma to be motivated, or take medication to keep from dreaming, or self-medicate (legit physical issues) with alcohol, or a million other examples, is now their adaptation-to-their-adaptation basically.

I think our planetary experience (including the misfortune of domesticating wild grasses in ancient egypt and becoming agrarian, hence causing population problems and protein/aminos deficiency ever after...) caused some required 'adaptation' in our culture--not our species, it hasn't been long enough for that, but definitely in culture which can be just as affective on the human--and the increasing "novelty" in our world/cultures created some culture shock which added to this, and it is literally "snowballing" throughout time, as the magnitude of it just gets larger.

But it also differs. Notice the closest thing we have to a war at the moment despite the tragic death of so many, even if we go back decades, the dead quantity can't even hold a fraction of a candle to pretty much ANY decent sized war in the last century; we have not increased our penchant for mass killing, despite our technology has made this a great deal easier; however, we have 'compensated' by increasing our scope for *control*. We don't "want" to carpet bomb people; that's just so messy and annoying later; we want a base in their country and a resultant stake in their economy, government, access to their neighbors, etc. I don't want to go too far down this road since I don't want to debate politics; just saying it's a holographic issue.

You seem to see us as good, not wanting to become the thing we hate.

I tend to see us as hypocritical. Wanting to benefit from psychopathic behavior, be it corporate or political, while maintaining a thin pretense of being above it all somehow.

I'm not sure I see these as mutually opposing like we're one or the other--I mean that I think it is entirely possible for both states to exist in one person and perhaps all people. I am generous but I am selfish, I see both these things in myself, and every other polarity. When I make a decision I have one official reason, but when I look calmly at my true motives, I actually see layer upon layer of reasoning, all different, and some polar opposite of the others humorously enough.

Raising a kid (esp as a single mom) really has forced me to look at some of this. I would literally starve to give her food (and have) and many things like that, yet I was so mad that she wanted to color on MY picture when I played with her and you know she'd just scribble all over it when she was 4-- Isn't that hilarious? I've had to fight such ridiculous selfishness, different things all the time as she has gotten older. I sometimes think I'm the most selfish human alive. Yet when I look around me at others and their kids, I realize (and my kid's told me this a zillion times) that I'm a world away from the culture around me; the difference in quality time together, her resultant intelligence and 'depth', what I give/demand of her, her general home life, is completely different; when she's not in puberty drama queen mode (that would be... daily... :-)) she tells me I'm so wonderful and her friends are so jealous. Am I selfish because I am, or unselfish because I fight to become better, or both? I think both. Maybe a little more 'aware' than most people. But I'm sure I have 101 topics I'm oblivious and obnoxious about. ;-)

If you look at reality (via Binah, for the Thelemites or Kabbalists) as a system of polarities being the same on some level, we contain a little of everything; it's a spectrum or gradient, and we all hold the full rainbow of it; you might say (to ref the far-above analogy) that genetically we are the full kaleidascope, and what we manifest of that (genetically or behaviorally), this pattern depends on a lot of things, some more set than others, but even environment makes that vary a little.

(continued)

(continued)

What we 'manifest' (good not wanting to become bad, vs hypocrites in denial projecting bad for convenience) not only is on a sliding scale perhaps, but maybe where on that scale we fall may actually change or slide depending on our circumstance, maturity, and mental and physical health. I mean you hear of modern research where people have major pathologies, phobias, and suddenly they get enough of some vitamin and they're cured, holy cats, so much more is physical than we've dreamed.

I started taking a quality gelcap D3 a few months ago (5K/day) and within about 8 hours my "sense of well-being" increased so markedly I thought I was hallucinating it, in some expectation I hadn't even realized I had, but it turns out this is not uncommon in people who are deficient (if you aren't naked in Argentina, that's probably you).

(Current research differs from the old stuff and most the medical field is way behind the times on everything of course, for a variety of reasons. So this is something to google research and modern specialists on, not your local doc, usually--for testing as well as advice.)

How I behave when I feel better -- compare this to a night of great sex and damn, the next day, everything is so much right-er with the world LOL! -- is different, no matter what causes my internal change. Now we know: if I ate more fish and got more sun I'd be nicer. (Or maybe it really IS that I just need to get laid more, but don't ever mention that to a woman.)

And that kind of brings me back to environment, to media, to immature and ever-worseningly dysfunctional culture, to culture-shock on a planetary level and its rebounding effects, and the effect that all of these things have on people en masse as every half-generation snowballs it forward into a bigger complexity of 'threat' that humans are reacting (and adapting) to.

I suspect we've all got the capacity to heal and kill, to be hypocrites or mercenaries or altruists -- and that we might be all three at different times. I think the point I'm taking so long to get to is that if we all contain the capacity, then the point may not be to look at the 'individual' as the problem, because clearly environmental factors are what's causing individuals (and cultures on a larger scale) to shift, to manifest certain adaptive behaviors.

We are forced to look at individuals simply because we can't change the environment. (We could feed our culture better; that would go a long way in some respects. However since we are worldwide addicted to wheat/sugar/carbs--and as oblivious to this as people were to cigarettes being addictive for so long--that is never going to change I imagine.)


Of course it's also possible that our planet is controlled by intelligences with a larger/longer picture than we've got, a geneticist specialization, and our species is screwed because some of what bought us genetic elements we admire is also what bought us the ability to become sociopaths. They are more brilliant, more psychic, and more adept; they're also more sociopathic.

But I don't think we need to go far there -- you can add the twilight zone theme to that -- but this *is* ATS and it *is* a "possible" alternative in my view that would impact what we're discussing so I thought I'd mention it. ;-)

>> Zepherian

At the end of the day there is psychopathic potential in all of us, we can all detune from our emotional self and become a more rational cold being. Which is to say we become self motivated, our emotions are detuned into serving ourself only and we disconnect from community life because we lack the empathy for it. This can happen from trauma, either physical or emotional. Or out of simple education, which I suspect happens in our elite structures.

I've come to believe -- and I saw you say this elsewhere, I'm not quoting you, merely agreeing -- that pretty much everything negative is based on fear. I go a step further; I believe this is based on a fear of "separation from self." The irony is that the more a person actually *becomes* 'separated from self' [never mind what that entails for now], the greater their fear and frankly the greater their legitimate reason for having that fear. The opposite of fear isn't courage IMO, it's true acceptance. When it all ceases to matter (not because of dissociation but because of acceptance), fear has no place to take root.

This is why killing the psychopaths would not work, in a revolutionary scenario.

LOL! Now that's funny. That's like... raping rapists or something. What it would mostly do is enforce the energy and breed a new generation of people into that.

This is why after a revolutionary scenario there is usually a government that is as bad if not worse than the one it deposed.

Yes, although one of my greatest heroes, Ataturk, introduced to me by some muslim friends from Turkey, negates that stereotype. The man had to behave like the worst; he was a general; he rebelled, he came in with his men and basically hacked his way into the capital seat and took the head of people giving him # about it. But once there, he took women out of the veil, ceased mutilation in the culture, provided education for everybody, radically improved the economy, technology, infrastructure, revolutionized the political international relationships and resources, and much more.

When I met my friend F. she was wearing shorts, beating her husband at tennis; she was just like an American to me; she is an engineer by the way. Her terror related to the fundamentalist BS taking over her country now is horrible to see. Where are people like Ataturk when you need them? In Uganda, it's probably pretty literal, nothing ever gets better. But some do. I see most coups as like chemo on cancer; it kills off so much of the body-politic that it's really just one poison for another. Not unless there is massive effort to rebuild immunity (culture, infrastructure--all the things Ataturk focused on coincidentally) is the body likely to survive. Those are just analogies...

No, the monster is within us. So we must treat ourselves first, and, if needed, we must deinvest in the power structures run by psychopaths, if we cannot reason and emotionally connect with them.

My boyfriend likes to quote something like, "You cannot use reason to persuade a person from a perspective that reason did not bring them to." Few people have beliefs based on logic, I've observed. We think it's logical but we don't know. You only need to play with posthypnotic commands for that. "Why did you leap up, shout 'Geronimo!', take off your shoe and pound it on my desk, run into the hall and shout 'I'm a happy chicken!' and then come back, put on your shoe and sit down?" "Well see there was a rock in my shoe, and then ..." --there's research into this and it's all quite fascinating -- human beings will rationalize literally everything retroactively and invent immense and complex explanations -- to the degree that it makes you wonder if all of reality is just present-time conscious rationalization based on the autonomous subconscious past. In fact this is downright disturbing and I usually prefer not to think about it LOL. But it has made me think that a huge amount of our behaviors are in fact generated by less than conscious impulses, logic or decisions -- but are driven by biochemistry, neurochemistry and habitual patterns in great part, and then we rationalize to ourselves why we are/were doing what we do.

I do think this is changeable, with awareness and deliberate effort. You can work with your own brainwaves, with self hypnosis, with archetype meditations (conscious dreaming, active visualization, the shamanic / Jungian stuff), and have profound changes in yourself and even your reality (as magically impossible as that might seem). The problem becomes that like people growing up in a metro poverty culture of despair, and I've been close to people immersed in that, one set of (mostly environmental/cultural/nutritional) problems caused another set of (physical/psychological/emotional) problems, but those latter problems are the reason that getting them to do what seems like the healthy or logical choice to others like me just doesn't work and can't be expected of them. Me, if my life falls apart and I'm in poverty and I think everybody hates me and I feel like I'm doomed, I am "grim and determined" and I come up with A PLAN. Others hurt (or even kill) themselves, or try to find someone 'strong' to latch onto for some sense of protection, or have other results maybe far more positive than mine.

I, like they, am a product of my environment, upbringing, and genetics, with a little awareness and attempt at more of it than the average bear thrown in. I don't react that way because it's logical. I react that way because that is how I survived previous situations of negative stress/emotions and so I have hardwired into my neurology and biology that adaptive response. (PTSD stems from this. It isn't the "upset about an experience" modern media has made it into, such a joke. REAL PTSD--at least a separate thing with the same name that now needs a new one to disengage it from all the kinder gentler psychology crap that labels every bad experience after-effect with that acronym--is biologically hardwired bigtime. Feel-good psychology can't solve it.) But I think this same physiological process goes on at lesser levels with everybody.

we must deinvest in the power structures run by psychopaths, if we cannot reason and emotionally connect with them.

Well, true psychopaths / sociopaths (anyone like halfway up the 'scale' of itin any case) don't emotionally connect with anybody... that's... kinda the point of course... and we cannot reason with anybody that has no shared sense of values. There has to be a middle ground we can relate on and in those cases the only middle ground is usually their convenience. Don't kill people... prison is a pain in the butt. Give to charity... it makes people suck up to you, then if you ever get busted for something you're officially arguable as a noble guy. (Michael Milliken is considered a *philanthropist*--read Wiki. Where's my bucket?!) No, don't stab him... he'll bleed all over your damn carpet. Sure there are points of reason we can employ with people but most of us have as hard a time relating to those as they do to us.

So your point is good; if you cannot win a battle, you simply must disengage. However, I think people have different ideas of disengage. For some people that means passively standing around to get shot. For some people that means starting an alternative competing line to something. For some people that means arranging or participating in social / economic "shunning". Etc.

Many times we won't, because the more the power the greater the psychopath who will want to wield it. The more fear based emotions concentrated around that power.

I suspect that's true. Although I think many times people get to positions not because they wake up in the morning driven to hold immense power over others, but because circumstances have brought them to that. George Bush Sr. scares the # out of me; his son's a pawn in my view, I don't think he would ever have driven for his position on his own by his nature, I think he was pushed there by a few people including his dad because that was their way of continuing to leverage power. This doesn't contradict your view, only points out that in many situations -- from companies to empires -- the power IN the throne is not all that powerful or persuasive and often themselves a tool, while the powers BEHIND the throne are often the 'greater psychopaths'.

Of course, we blame and kill the ex-king, traditionally, while the evilist emperors that helped put him there and arranged most the evil in his name morph like the reptilian chameleon cannibals they are and continue to weild power directly or indirectly. The top figureheads are rarely the people who truly hold the real power. Unless you're Donald Trump or leader of an arab country I suppose.

This is the true genesis of the war on terror. Psychopathic induced fear memes, broadcast over the minds of the more emotionally balanced people of the earth.

I think I disagree with this in specific. There's more objective factual evidence for good reason to have concern about certain situations than a zillion other topics people wouldn't dream of arguing against. However this leads to politics which is not our topic and I don't want to get into really. I do however agree with this in *general* -- that there is definitely a sort of "herd" and "mass hallucination" potential and commonality in humans. I think many of the people on the far side in favor of that argument are kinda nutcases, but I don't put that argument in the mass hallucination category.

the point is that with great menmonic ability always comes some sort of payoff.

One fellow I read about who never forgot anything, killed himself.

People with above average memories and mental capacity are usually physically limited in some way, if nothing else because the brain itself is an energy intensive organ which can easily consume half a bodies calories.

That's an interesting idea. I'm not sure I agree with that, only because I've known some truly exceptional people who were both mentally and physically and even ethically exceptional; they were just unusually impressive human beings. I actually think that a human in ideal health would be very good in just about all areas. I don't think much of our culture really qualifies for that though. Not only are natal considerations an issue one can't change, but environmental and cultural considerations as well. Truly healthy people are by far the rare exception and usually really stand out when you meet them.

An acquaintance of mine was a rather brilliant stock analyst who got super rich and retired while still very young. Got very interested in an anomalous study and did ridiculously well with it. Then got really into a physical sport and now holds two world records. And is a damn nice guy to boot. I don't really see that tradeoff.

I believe that view is a "belief system" about reality. The idea that there is a limit to everything, such limited resources, and if you have one thing you must suffer in another. Some people apply that model to money (rich people aren't happy, or aren't as spiritual), or to the supernatural (notice that in most great stories about psi there is always some price to pay for it, e.g. in Firestarter, the man who can 'influence' people bleeds a little in the brain every time he does so); or to the socially advantaged (movie stars are so shallow), there's many examples but it's fundamentally a belief in scarcity (limited resources / sacrifice for having 'too much').

You might be right; I'm just sharing my perspective.

So we should not assume that a great memory and eloquence is the sign of a superior being,

I agree. Borderline schizophrenics in fact--just this side of the borderline--tend to be exceptionally intelligent, well spoken, well written, astoundingly convincing (because they believe themselves, so they have the utmost 'sincerity'), and dangerous as hell as a result.

But I do not believe that this implies that anybody with those qualities is borderline.

if anything it shows that there is probably something wrong with the individual and we should have great caution.

LOL. You might be right but I suspect that is taking the logic a little too far. If you follow this line a little farther you will find that most criminals act innocent, and most crime bosses in fact look like altruistic businessmen, so anybody acting innocent or like an altruistic businessman should probably be distrusted. ;-)

This is how I see it. To unlink from positive emotion, which is to say love based emotions, is to unlink for the correct way of organising one's life and influencing the lives of others. The result, as I mentioned in the post above, is fear based control structures.

I agree with that, and like how you put it, however that falls into my metaphysics-philosophy category, not the more psyche-culture-physical category that I usually try to stick with for public discussions.

I suspect this is physics. Emotions correspond to energy states, and if you don't have the former you'll get the latter.

Probably.

Perhaps true psychopaths can't feal it, perhaps they misswire so that they perceive the negative as positive,

I think the issue isn't that they perceive negative as positive, but that they perceive ANY feeling as FEELing which is what they desperately need. How we apply good/bad to 'feeling' is a little bit subjective.

The brave captain of the guard who struggles through an amazing kingdom war and enemy territory and defeats an entire enemy battalion singlehanded and saves two villages from imminent destruction and gives the little girl back her doll is a hero, but on some level, all that adrenalin is a(n addictive) drug, all that fear is a biochemical, and he may have been acting out what he needed to express in order to feel; in fact it may be his need to do that, his lack of feeling generally, which made him capable of surviving what would have sent any other man into so much fear he wouldn't have had the courage for much of what was required. We call him a good guy. But the guy who chops up his neighbors is definitely a bad guy. Maybe he just didn't have a war available and a position in it when he needed one.

Much more subtle ways of being shocking and getting feeling from it exist, less extreme, that go on all the time (eg the wife who sleeps with, oh, the worst imaginable people for the shock value of it, for example). I think these things are acted out all the time and go unrecognized unless actual bloodshed is involved.

People who eat paint don't do it because they like the taste, they just profoundly "know" they need it so they like eating it. 'Feeling' is the point. I have had horrible grief and been euphoric during it because I was feeling something, anything!

I believe aggression at base is positive and the primal root of creativity and more, but violence is an over-exaggerated distortion of it (our dictionary word attributes aggression to a negative now, but that's semantics without a new/different word to fill in the polarity; any positive impelling is also a form of aggression).

I might add that reading about some of the issues with youth in every culture, I think we have really screwed up our cultures by failing to have incredibly challenging "coming of age rituals". I think there is literally some deep genetic need for this and when people don't get it, when you look at the pattern, they begin creating it all over the place, under different names, they fail to rise to maturity in several ways as well.

what does seem undeniable is that an unhealthy emotional profile will always cause problems if allowed to become dominant in a human society.

Well of course. It causes problems when existent in a small family, let alone when dominant in it. (Kinda like saying it's unhealthy to be ruled by the unhealthy. A given. Which reminds me, from experience alas, that working for people with substance abuse problems is (almost) enough to GIVE you a substance abuse problem.)