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The psychologist Carl Jung estimated that in every 'society' could be found a 'psychopathic' thirty percent. It's sobering to think that over 60 percent of every society --even those we think most cultured --may be largely 'ruled' by about thirty percent who are utterly lacking the restraints that most of us associate with personal maturity, social cohesion, civilization itself.

A recent article by Dr. Kevin Barrett explores the dysfunctional underbelly of civilization which he says is "... largely the creation of psychopaths: all civilizations, he claims, are built upon 'slavery and mass murder'.

I recently re-discovered the blog called Orcinus, and within it a series of articles by Sara Robinson about authoritarianism. She begins the series (click here) with a summary and review of John Dean's book, Conservatives Without Conscience. I was very much intrigued by this re-discovery, for several reasons. First, I did not realize that John Dean (who was made (in)famous by Watergate, and who is not a relative of mine, so far as I know), wrote about authoritarianism; second, I have not read anything within the academic literature about authoritarianism (see Dr. Robert Altemeyer) for years, probably not since I was in grad school; and, third, I am struck, again, by the very significant overlap between the construct of authoritarianism and the construct of psychopathy (which is an area in which I am quite interested in, click here).

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The following is largely extracted from two articles:

Twilight of the Psychopaths, by Dr. Kevin Barrett and The Trick of the Psychopath's Trade by Silvia Cattori. Both articles are recommended. Both articles reference the book Political Ponerology: A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes, by Andrzej Lobaczewski. Cattori's article is longer and includes an interview with the book's editors, Laura Knight-Jadczyk and Henry See.

I make the effort to share this information because it gives me, at last, a plausible answer to a long-unanswered question: Why, no matter how much intelligent goodwill exists in the world, is there so much war, suffering and injustice? It doesn't seem to matter what creative plan, ideology, religion, or philosophy great minds come up with, nothing seems to improve our lot. Since the dawn of civilization, this pattern repeats itself over and over again.

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This is American culture. And the world better like it...

When I look at the sorry history of this planet I can't help but come to the disturbing conclusion that our notions of human "progress" are grossly overstated. I cannot see how things are any different now than they were three thousand years ago. Sure, the outer forms of oppression have changed: we view ourselves as considerably more civilized than the empires of old; we publicly denounce slavery, genocide, and injustice. But we are the same animal. With only the illusion of freedom and a hypocritical facade of politically correct "humanitarianism", our world is still characterized by the same brutality, close-mindedness, and shameless egoism; people are still tortured in the most horrible ways imaginable; entire peoples are still butchered; and the mass of humanity is as blind and complacent as it ever was.

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Ted Bundy and George Bush. Seperated at birth?

The research of Dr. Hervey Cleckley and Dr. Robert Hare exploring the personality and character traits of psychopaths, when applied to George Bush, shows that Bush fits exactly the profile they developed for the psychopath. Demographis show that Republicanism is much worse than psychopathy.

An excerpt from the book Blood Relations, by Eric Konigsberg, about his great-uncle Harold, a convicted murder:

Hervey Cleckley in his book, The Mask of Sanity, describes the psychopath as a certain type of cruel manipulator whose harmful actions are accompanied by an absence of delusion. The psychopath, he wrote, "does not hear voices. In theory, he can foresee the consequences of injudicious or antisocial acts." A psychopath is a person who knows full well the difference between right and wrong and yet, without compunction, chooses to do wrong. Checkley cited the protagonist of The Incredible Charlie Carewe, a novel by Mary Astor, as a quintessential psychopath. "Charlie is a genius in reverse with dangerous charm. Sisters lie for him, parents defend him, friends obey him. While calmly and casually, Charlie Carewe literally gets away with murder."

Let's try an experiment. Think of opinions you may have formed, beliefs that may have arisen due to one or a group of photographs that were distributed in the media. When you saw those images, did you feel anger, bitterness, or even hate? Were you elated, joyous, or perhaps confused? Were you compelled to somehow change the way you perceived the world based on the emotions that were triggered by an image?

Now imagine for a moment that a certain number of photographs in the media - let's say half, for the sake of this experiment - are forgeries. Would you be compelled to re-evaluate that position if you had learned said photograph was false?

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Josef Fritzl: does he look like his acts?

There's news that Josef Fritzl, the man who imprisoned his daughter for 24 years in a dungeon of his own making, will plead insanity when his case goes to trial. I also saw Glenn Wilson, who works at the IoP on TV speculating that Mr Fritzl is a psychopath.

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So, we've seen Obama being put on the ropes by Hillary over the question of Israel. The two are involved in a spitting match to see who can support Israel in the most rabid and mindless manner.

It seems some influential supporters of Israel had a little get-together back in March to challenge representatives from the three presidential candidates who have Israel's backing to make the most outrageously pro-Israel statements imaginable.

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The infant believes that mother/the breast/ food, everything, is part of itself; it experiences itself solely through neural input.

[T]the problem of group violence, is one of the most important issues facing society. Not only is this a most crucial topic for our American society but we are confronted with events that are occurring all over the globe, on all continents and in all countries...

So said Dr. Ernest Wolf in a talk given to the International Self-Psychology Symposium in Dreieich, Germany, in May of 2001, four months before 9-11.

This essay was recently brought to our attention, having been posted on the SOTT Forum for the express purpose of highlighting Wolf's description of Narcissistic Rage. Frankly, that was the best part of the essay; the rest was hopelessly muddled and naive.

Why?

Well, Dr. Wolf attempts to explain the causes of evil - individual and macro-social - using the framework of Heinz Kohut's theory of "Self Psychology" (or psychoanalytic psychology of the self). With all due respect to Dr. Kohut and Dr. Wolf, we think that this theory isn't bad if you are just talking about normal human beings who are born healthy and live in basically healthy environments. What this theory does not take into account is the role of pathogenic factors in our society - human beings who are carriers of abnormal psychopathological traits - who can infect groups and even entire societies, bringing pandemic evil on macro-social scales. More than that, it seeks to "spread the blame" over all people, to ignore the fact that moral evil and psychobiological evil are, in effect, interlinked via so many causal relationships and mutual influences that they can only be separated by means of abstraction. Yes, the body social must be weakened before it can succumb to an infection, but if there is no infecting pathogen, it will merely be weak and ineffectual.

In short, Wolf's essay amounts to little more than apologia for Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Psychopathy and only adds to the confusion of our times when the problems pressed upon humanity by such types are nothing short of catastrophic.

But, like we said, Wolf has provided one heck of a description of Narcissistic Rage. Since it really is good, let's take a look at it:

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Some people just don't get it.

Ken Gude is a senior advisor to the Institute for Public Policy Research's Commission on National Security in the 21st Century. He wrote a piece called "Tortured Explanations" that ran this weekend in the Guardian. It is a review of a book by Philippe Sands on who drew up the current US torture policy.

Well, in the first paragraph we find this pearl:

Ever since the first horrific images from Abu Ghraib emerged almost exactly four years ago, I have repeatedly asked myself: how in the world could my country be responsible for such terrible things? I know a lot of people out there think that this is not an aberration and believe the worst about the United States, its motives and its actions. The Bush administration has certainly added a lot of fuel to that fire. But in this case, the "hate America" crowd are simply wrong: never before in the modern history of the United States has there been an officially sanctioned, government-wide system of inflicting torture and abuse on detainees. Until now.

Oh, yeah. The "hate America crowd". That group of loony tunes who have this irrational hatred of the US for no reason at all.