Comment: Comment: Ah yes! The "Dumbing Down of America." This has been going on for the past 30 to 50 years and every now and then a voice crying in the wilderness brings it up, but they are shut down by benevolent government that sought to "democratize" education. What that really meant was taking everything to the lowest common denominator. Studies were reduced to the level of the least competent students and the bright ones were left to rot. That's typical for an emerging pathocracy. As we noted just the other day, Pathocrats come along with "high sounding ideals" such as Dubya's "No Child Left Behind" plan which, only later, turn out to have hidden meaning in the fine print. Instead of actually helping education, the bill was designed to create a database of cannon fodder - America's children - to send off to die in foreign wars of aggression. This is an example of a "paramoralism" writ large. "No Child Left Behind" sounds so benign and even benevolent when you are thinking about education. But, in the end, "No Child Left Behind" means something quite different, though the wording is quite precise. It means just that: no child will be left in America when the wars are finished.

As for the "dumbing down" process, that is precisly why the Neocons can get away with passing such a horrendous act off on the American people. It is not just the society that has been dumbed down, the leaders also suffer in this crisis. Andrew Lobaczewski writes:

Pathocracy is a disease of great social movements followed by entire societies, nations, and empires. In the course of human history, it has affected social, political, and religious movements as well as the accompanying ideologies… and turned them into caricatures of themselves…. This occurred as a result of the … participation of pathological agents in a pathodynamically similar process. That explains why all the pathocracies of the world are, and have been, so similar in their essential properties.[…]

The actions of [pathocracy] affect an entire society, starting with the leaders and infiltrating every town, business, and institution. The pathological social structure gradually covers the entire country creating a “new class” within that nation. This privileged class [of pathocrats] feels permanently threatened by the “others”, i.e. by the majority of normal people. Neither do the pathocrats entertain any illusions about their personal fate should there be a return to the system of normal man. ...

Such a system of government has nowhere to go but down.

Any leadership position - down to village headman and community cooperative mangers, not to mention the directors of police units, and special-services police personnel, and activists in the pathocratic party - must be filled by individuals whose feeling of linkage to such a regime is conditioned by corresponding psychological deviations, which are inherited as a rule. However, such people become more valuable because they constitute a very small percentage of the population. Their intellectual level or professional skills cannot be taken into account, since people representing superior abilities with the requisite psychological deviations - are even harder to find. [...]

If the many managerial positions of a government are assumed by individuals deprived of sufficient abilities to feel and understand most other people and who also have deficiencies as regards technical imagination and practical skills - faculties indispensable for governing economic and political matters - this must result in an exceptionally serious crisis in all areas, both within the country in question and with regard to international relations.

Within, the situation shall become unbearable even for those citizens who were able to feather their nest into a relatively comfortable “modus vivendi”.

Outside, other societies start to feel the pathological quality of the phenomenon quite distinctly. Such a state of affairs cannot last long. One must then be prepared for ever more rapid changes, and also behave with great circumspection.

After such a system has lasted several years, one hundred percent of all the cases of essential psychopathy are involved in pathocratic activity; they are considered the most loyal...

Under such conditions, no area of social life can develop normally, whether in economics, culture, science, technology, administration, etc.

Pathocracy progressively paralyzes everything....

The phenomenon of pathocracy matures during this period: an extensive and active indoctrination system is built, with a suitably refurbished ideology constituting the vehicle of Trojan horse for the process of pathologizing the thought of individuals and society. The goal is never admitted: forcing human minds to incorporate pathological experiential methods and thought patterns, and consequently accepting such rule. ...

[At a certain point, when normal people begin to realize that they have been duped], a new phenomenon occurs: separation between the pathocrats and the society of normal people. The latter have an advantage as regards talent, professional skills, and healthy common sense. They therefore hold certain cards. The pathocracy finally realizes that it must find some “modus vivendi” or relations with the majority of society: “After all, somebody's got to do the work for us.” ...

Goaded by their character, such people thirst for [power] even though it would conflict with their own life interest… They do not understand that a catastrophe would ensue. Germs are not aware that they will be burned alive or buried deep in the ground along with the human body whose death they are causing.

[Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Ph.D. (psychology); Political Ponerology: A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes]