By John W. Whitehead
“Politicians
are more likely than people in the general
population to be sociopaths. I think you
would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial
personality disorder who would dispute this...
That a small minority of human beings literally
have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for
our society to swallow — but it does explain a
great many things, shamelessly deceitful
political behavior being one.”—Dr. Martha Stout,
clinical psychologist and former instructor at
Harvard Medical School
October 22, 2019 "Information
Clearing House" - Twenty years
ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: “What’s
the difference between a politician and a
psychopath?”
The answer, then and now, remains the same:
None.
There is
no difference between psychopaths and
politicians.
Nor is there much of a difference between the
havoc wreaked on innocent lives by uncaring,
unfeeling, selfish, irresponsible, parasitic
criminals and
elected officials who lie to their constituents,
trade political favors for campaign contributions,
turn a blind eye to the wishes of the electorate,
cheat taxpayers out of hard-earned dollars, favor
the corporate elite, entrench the military
industrial complex, and spare little thought for the
impact their thoughtless actions and hastily passed
legislation might have on defenseless citizens.
Psychopaths and politicians both have a tendency
to be
selfish, callous, remorseless users of others,
irresponsible, pathological liars, glib, con
artists, lacking in remorse and shallow.
Charismatic politicians, like criminal
psychopaths,
exhibit a failure to accept responsibility for their
actions, have a high sense of self-worth, are
chronically unstable, have socially deviant
lifestyles, need constant stimulation, have
parasitic lifestyles and possess unrealistic goals.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about
Democrats or Republicans.
Political psychopaths are all largely cut from
the same pathological cloth, brimming with
seemingly easy charm and boasting calculating minds.
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Such leaders eventually create
pathocracies: totalitarian societies
bent on power, control, and destruction
of both freedom in general and those who
exercise their freedoms.
Once psychopaths gain power, the result is
usually some form of totalitarian government or a
pathocracy. “At that point, the
government operates against the interests of its
own people except for favoring certain
groups,” author James G. Long notes. “We are
currently witnessing deliberate polarizations of
American citizens, illegal actions, and massive and
needless acquisition of debt. This is
typical of psychopathic systems, and very
similar things happened in the Soviet Union as it
overextended and collapsed.”
In other words, electing a psychopath to public
office is tantamount to national hara-kiri, the
ritualized act of self-annihilation,
self-destruction and suicide. It signals the demise
of democratic government and lays the groundwork for
a totalitarian regime that is legalistic,
militaristic, inflexible, intolerant and inhuman.
Incredibly, despite clear evidence of the damage
that has already been inflicted on our nation and
its citizens by a psychopathic government, voters
continue to elect psychopaths to positions of power
and influence.
According to
investigative journalist Zack Beauchamp, “In
2012, a group of psychologists evaluated every
President from Washington to Bush II using ‘psychopathy
trait estimates derived from personality data
completed by historical experts on each president.’
They found that presidents tended to have the
psychopath’s characteristic fearlessness and low
anxiety levels — traits that appear to help
Presidents, but also might
cause them to make reckless decisions that hurt
other people’s lives.”
The willingness to prioritize power above all
else, including the welfare of their fellow human
beings, ruthlessness, callousness and an
utter lack of conscience are among the defining
traits of the sociopath.
When our own government no longer sees us as
human beings with dignity and worth but as things to
be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data,
manhandled by police, conned into believing it has
our best interests at heart, mistreated, jailed if
we dare step out of line, and then punished unjustly
without remorse—all the while refusing to own up to
its failings—we are no longer operating under a
constitutional republic.
Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy:
tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government,
which “operates
against the interests of its own people except for
favoring certain groups.”
Worse, psychopathology is not confined to those
in high positions of government. It can
spread like a virus among the populace. As an
academic study into pathocracy
concluded, “[T]yranny does not flourish because
perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their
actions. It flourishes because they actively
identify with those who promote vicious acts as
virtuous.”
People don’t simply line up and salute. It is
through one’s own personal identification with a
given leader, party or social order that they become
agents of good or evil.
Much depends on how leaders “cultivate
a sense of identification with their followers,”
says Professor Alex Haslam. “I mean one pretty
obvious thing is that leaders talk about ‘we’ rather
than ‘I,’ and actually what leadership is about is
cultivating this sense of shared identity about
‘we-ness’ and then getting people to want to act in
terms of that ‘we-ness,’ to promote our collective
interests. . . . [We] is the single word that has
increased in the inaugural addresses over the last
century . . . and the other one is ‘America.’”
The goal of the modern corporate state is
obvious: to promote, cultivate, and embed a sense of
shared identification among its citizens. To this
end, “we the people” have become “we the police
state.”
We are fast becoming slaves in thrall to a
faceless, nameless, bureaucratic totalitarian
government machine that relentlessly erodes our
freedoms through countless laws, statutes, and
prohibitions.
Any resistance to such regimes depends on the
strength of opinions in the minds of those who
choose to fight back. What this means is that we the
citizenry must be very careful that we are not
manipulated into marching in lockstep with an
oppressive regime.
Writing for ThinkProgress, Beauchamp
suggests that “one
of the best cures to bad leaders may very well be
political democracy.”
But what does this really mean in practical
terms?
It means holding politicians accountable for
their actions and the actions of their staff using
every available means at our disposal: through
investigative journalism (what used to be referred
to as the Fourth Estate) that enlightens and
informs, through whistleblower complaints that
expose corruption, through lawsuits that challenge
misconduct, and through protests and mass political
action that remind the powers-that-be that “we the
people” are the ones that call the shots.
Remember, education precedes action. Citizens
need to the do the hard work of educating themselves
about what the government is doing and how to hold
it accountable. Don’t allow yourselves to exist
exclusively in an echo chamber that is restricted to
views with which you agree. Expose yourself to
multiple media sources, independent and mainstream,
and think for yourself.
For that matter, no matter what your political
leanings might be, don’t allow your partisan bias to
trump the principles that serve as the basis for our
constitutional republic. As Beauchamp notes, “A
system that actually holds people accountable to the
broader conscience of society may be one of the best
ways to keep conscienceless people in check.”
That said, if we allow the ballot box to become
our only means of pushing back against the police
state, the battle is already lost.
Resistance will require a citizenry willing to be
active at the local level.
Yet as I point out in my book
Battlefield America: The War on the American
People, if you wait to act until the SWAT
team is crashing through your door, until
your name is placed on a terror watch list,
until you are reported for such outlawed
activities as collecting rainwater or letting your
children play outside unsupervised, then it will be
too late.
This much I know: we are not faceless numbers. We
are not cogs in the machine. We are not slaves.
We are human beings, and for the moment, we have
the opportunity to remain free—that is, if we
tirelessly advocate for our rights and resist at
every turn attempts by the government to place us in
chains.
The Founders understood that our freedoms do not
flow from the government. They were not given to us
only to be taken away by the will of the State. They
are inherently ours. In the same way, the
government’s appointed purpose is not to threaten or
undermine our freedoms, but to safeguard them.
Until we can get back to this way of thinking,
until we can remind our fellow Americans what it
really means to be free, and until we can
stand firm in the face of threats to our freedoms,
we will continue to be treated like slaves in thrall
to a bureaucratic police state run by political
psychopaths.
Constitutional attorney and author John W.
Whitehead is founder and president of The
Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield
America: The War on the American People
is available at
www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be
contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.
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