MindMatters: Whole Lotta Crazy: Diagnosing Political Ideologies

It's very easy to look at ideology as the cause of societal problems, just as it's easy to look at cancer as the cause of a body's dysfunction. However, ideology, like cancer, is a symptom - proof that imbalance and unmet needs exist. Psychopaths are ideological vectors in an unbalanced social body. They use ideology - an extreme narrowing of focus and perspective - to increase their own effect on the body social, just as the cancer appropriates and narrows the function of other cells in the physical body. In both cases, the host will be destroyed unless balance can be restored. Pathocrats are never ideologues because they are not social beings with social needs, just as cancer cells are never functional parts of the body. The psychopath articulates and advances an ideology for one reason only, and that is to increase his own power. Again, this is analogous to what the cancer cell does. It recruits the cells it invades to its own purposes, thereby increasing its power over the functions of the organism. Psychopaths articulate unmet needs in ideological terms for selfish purposes.

Confusion results if symptoms are misunderstood to be causes. Ideologies are not causes, they are effects. Imbalance and unmet needs create the environment in which ideals can become articulated as ideologies by psychopaths, and as a result, people become radicalized (appropriated for purposes of power.)

Some thoughts this talk brought to mind:

Regarding Harrison's explication of Lobacewski's different pathways to pathocracy: These are, for the most part, historical manifestations of society-wide pathocracy enabled by a strong group identity for the psychopath to manipulate. The first two Harrison talked about (spontaneous social movements and foreign countries imposing their ideologies by force), are no longer reliably effective in western societies. The experience of a homogenous social identity that is necessary for these to infect an entire social fabric is much harder to invoke. The most that can be achieved in modern western society through these methods is increasing factionalism. The third pathway Harrison mentioned, psychological warfare or espionage, is still a more effective pathway, but even that is marginally effective now. We are witnessing, in the guise of pursuit of a unified world order, how much of a struggle it is for pathocrats to whip up unifying rhetoric through false flags and fear tactics. Are people that you know quaking in their boots about the prospect of living under Russian or Chinese rule, or are they quietly strategizing how they could take personal financial advantage of changing power dynamics? I'd estimate that it's close to a 75/25 split - 75% that can be manipulated ideologically, and 25% that cannot. That 25% is pretty much of a wet blanket when it comes to whipping up ideological frenzy.

Pathocratic efforts that are much more effective are ones that ostensibly support individual autonomy, but do it in ways that degrade whatever is left of a collective orientation - identity-based political ideology being the prime example. The supposed autonomy of the 'woke' individual to repudiate group identity just causes more vulnerability and confusion, because people are also repudiating any knowledge of what it means to be a healthy social participant. This creates over-dependence on external authority to legislate morality, and this, in turn, plays directly into the hands of the power-seeker. Trump is the current master of ceremonies of this sort of false individuality. He bills himself as the individual's man - modeling the speech and actions of the individual who calls it as he sees it no matter the social consequences. It is no accident that he does it in the most crude, rude, and simplistic way possible. What he is charged with attacking is the prospect of collective agreements. His opposers try to take up the banner of a moral orientation, but only succeed in enabling and ennobling dysfunctionality because they don't have a developmental perspective to go with their fascination with individual autonomy. Even though the cult of power-seeking political psychopath no longer feels that he needs to hijack non-existent homogenous social groups or commandeer dying nation-states in order to advance ideology with impunity, he can find no ideology that commandeers enough loyalty to provide a platform for world domination. He can only increase factionalism, playing sides against one another. The bottom line, and the good news for the rest of us, is that the New World Order is a dying psychopathic fantasy, though it may die hard. We'll see. Even attempts at monolithic control of nation-states is becoming increasingly problematic. Neofeudalism is the destiny that faces us - the double-edged sword of regional monarchies consisting of personality cults, many of which will be controlled by psychopaths. This psychopathy will motivate increased political and economic conflict and human degradation on a much more personal scale than is experienced in today's world of economic and political monoliths. Say goodbye to the benefits of economies of scale, unlimited freedom of movement, and efficiently-run, large-scale, private enterprise. Our children and grandchildren will not experience them. On the other hand, they won't be plagued with rampant consumerism, ecological destruction wrought by unregulated mega-corporations, and the current unsustainable drain on natural resources. It's an ill will that blows nobody good!

The schizoid, the paranoid, and various other characteropaths usually "deform" the original ideology, movement etc, before the psychopaths move in and take over.

Right. That is an important point. This isn't a one-man show! We all contribute whether it's by commission or omission. The only true innocents are the children.