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The Rise of the Second-String Psychopaths
The great writer Kurt Vonnegut titled his final book A Man without a Country. He was the man; the country was the United States of America. Vonnegut felt that his country had disappeared right under his – and the Constitution’s – feet, through what he called “the sleaziest, low-comedy Keystone Cops-style coup d’état imaginable.” He was talking about the Bush administration. Were Vonnegut still alive in the post-Bush era, he would not have felt that his country had returned.
How had our country disappeared? Vonnegut proposed that among the contributing factors was that it had been invaded – as if by the Martians – by people with a particularly frightening mental illness. People with this illness were termed psychopaths. (The term nowadays is anti-social personality disorder.) These are terms for people who are smart, personable, and engaging, but who have no consciences. They are not guided by a sense of right or wrong. They seem to be unaffected by the feelings of others, including feelings of distress caused by their actions. Straying from a decent way of treating people, or violating ethical codes causes no anxiety, the anxiety which is what causes the rest of us to moderate our more greedy impulses. If most children feel anxiety when they are pilfering the forbidden cookie jar, psychopaths feel just fine. They can devour the cookies, shatter the jar as evidence and stuff it in the trash can. When accused, they can argue with apparent sincerity that the cookie jar has been missing for at least a week. There suffer no remorse, no guilt, no shame. They are free to do anything, no matter how harmful.
Psychopaths can be very tricky to recognize. As psychiatrist Dr. Hervey Cleckly wrote in his classic The Mask of Sanity in 1941, psychopaths are not technically insane. They don’t have a psychosis, like schizophrenia. They are experts in appearing normal. They can act the role of a caring, concerned executive, even though they actually do not seem to experience such feelings. If they hurt somebody, they don’t modify their behavior.
The United States corporate and government spheres have become, Vonnegut suggested, a perfect habitat for psychopaths. What has allowed so many psychopaths to rise so high in corporations, and then government, he wrote,
“is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin’ day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don’t give a fuck what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich!"
In a country in which much of human culture has been rendered into machines for the manufacture of money, psychopaths are the ideal leaders. They are very focused. They are outcome oriented. They are frequently charming, and usually very bright and able. They can lay off thousands of people, or deny people health care, or have them waterboarded, and it does not disturb their sleep. They can be impressively confident. Psychopaths can be dynamic leaders of enterprises, but are handicapped by their lack of feelings for relationships. They may be accomplished captains of industry, or senators, or surgeons, but their families are frequently abused and miserable. Most psychotherapists have seen the wives or husband or children of such accomplished people.
Since psychopaths are usually very smart, they can be quite competent at impersonating regular human beings in positions of power. Since they don’t care how their actions affect people, they can rise to great height in enterprises dealing with power and money. They can manufacture bombs or run hospitals. Whatever the undertaking, it is all the same to them. It’s just business.
The economic system that remains after the destruction of American local cultures has created an excellent employment picture for psychopaths. But the opportunities open to them are now so vast that there is apparently now an actual labor shortage. At least that is the only explanation I can find for the rise of a cadre of psychopathic leaders who resemble the usual type in all ways but one: they’re simply not that smart. One has only to look at right-wing not-so-Christian fundamentalists to see the peculiar emergence of a second-string of psychopaths.
The US has been endowed with abundant resources, and there have always been a more than sufficient supply of psychopaths of the first intellectual grade to supply corporate suites and their subsidiary, the Congress. Why is there now a downgrade to the dumb ones, like the lowering of standards for military recruits to deal with a shortage of cannon fodder?
It is no secret that the Koch brothers and others of the super-rich seem to have undertaken a final push to consolidate control through the conversion of a marginally democratic to an essentially fascist state; extreme right-wing, authoritarian, and demagogic. This kind of government is ideal for control of a populace by the moneyed elite. To carry this out requires the employment of many ‘kept’ politicians to excite and misdirect scared and angry – and ignorant – voters. Lest the citizenry realize who stole their money and storm their castles with torches, the rapacious elite need politicians who will carry out the work of re-directing anger at teachers, or labor unions, or the poor. I can only conclude that the people who now own the country couldn’t find any first-rate psychopaths to carry out their work. Or maybe the smart ones were all occupied. So they had to go to second-stringers, people who could actually believe what they were told to say.
We are a country who has become second-best, even in the quality of our psychopaths.
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159 Comments so far
Show AllWe're #2. We are second-rate psychopaths. But we try harder.....
Great article. Great comments.
Giovanna, 1:06 PM, mentioned Robert Hare's classic "Without Conscience". Jon Ronson recently wrote a book, "The Psychopath Test", which is about Ronson's interviews with psychopaths and with Hare. The essential problem is apparently with a part of the brain - the amygdala. (Its primary role is in the processing and memory of emotional reactions.) Maybe a "Manhatten Project" to determine meaningful diagnosis and treatment of this defect would be worth the cost.
"Don't be afraid of the unknown. It's the known that's frightening."
That's what I said to my mother on her deathbed.
She had claimed that she didn't fear dying.
She feared, instead, what came after.
Agreed,
I also wish he had made an effort to show that PTSD in our soldiers is the result of normal human biengs forced in the military to engage in psycopathic, conscienseless behavior.
But then the ones who didn't get PTSD while engaging in psycopathic behavior would then have to be singled out.
We can't have our foreign policy, including those who initiate it and those who carry it out, labelled psycopathic, now can we?
We can't have our media and psychiatrists celebrating the humanity of the those with PTSD, now can we?
No, the system is just fine, thank you. The system is not sick or evil. It's those with PTSD that just can't cut it, right?
Biscuit teams in Guantanamo were not composed of psychologist psychopaths. Oh no. They were just carrying out our noble foreign policy...
*Comment deleted by site administrators for using all capital letters*
see: http://www.commondreams.org/comment-policy
Your comments are better when you're not trying to counter the condescending, obscurantist, Pollyannaism of other posters ; )
awesome article! for everyone one has not read it, I can't recommend it enough: http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
'the authoritarians'
another analysis of similar people.
Can a Civilized Person be a psychopath? If not, then does it hold that every Barbarian is a psychopath? And does it really matter if there are 1st and 2nd string Barbarians?
They're psychopath wannabees who just don't have the right stuff.
FREE AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY (DIRECT) DEMOCRACY
Excellent article detailing the disproportionate and inordinate amount of power and control a relatively small number of domineering psychopaths can exert upon the U.S. and the world. They may have the money and the power...for now...but they are vastly outnumbered.
'Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few. Percy Bysshe Shelley
Why does Dr.Schwartz use the term "psychopath" and not "sociopath"? I thought a psychopath was someone who was delusional and harmful, whereas a sociopath was one whose relationship was based on selfish, cold-blooded manipulations (also harmful).
Reread the second paragraph while understanding he's taking a cue from Vonnegut.
The Democrats and the Republicans are both "right", not left.
They are both obeying their corporate masters. Only the rhetoric differs.
I agree with Dr. Schwartz. About a year ago Investor's Daily, of all publications, had a lengthy article on sociopaths. Fortunately or unfortunately, the positions of CEO/CFO had the highest rate of sociopaths per capita of any of the white-collar jobs. They arrived at this by tabulating meticulous surveys of a large sampling of major corporate office holders. It went on the explain that it made sense; that these people had little thought or care for the people they undermined and climbed over on their way to the top. So, the top psycho/sociopaths today are likely the captains of industry, on Wall Street and in the White House. Bush, who called himself an oilman but took two oil companies bust, is the ideal second-rate sociopath who did the Right's bidding along with his own selfish whims with no apparent misgivings.
Maybe the difference between first and second rate is that the first-rate psychopaths blaze trails, erect the structures, and the second-rate just benefit from the work done before them. Bush 2.0, Trump, etc.
Another problem is that these psycho/sociopaths look strong, decisive, purposeful, hard-working, confident. It kind of relates to why some women go for bad boys - they appear confident and daring. Maybe people in general make the same mistake by trusting p/s-paths as leaders. Maybe people buy into the act in order to gain some kind of benefit for themselves, thereby contributing to the problem.
Without reading any other comments, I submit that the "psychopath" indeed fears ... very, very, very deeply .... SO deeply that it barely registers on a conscious level.
What is feared is Truth, because the psychopath (indeed most of us) fears the most is the Truth about ourselves. So, we spend our lives twisting and distorting with the goal of avoiding Truth: the game is called DENIAL.
Brothers and sisters, ONLY the Truth shall set you free! Fear not!
The only response to psychopaths that makes sense to me is compassion. Also it is the only thing that will heal the psychopath.
The reason there so many psychopaths risen to positions of power is that the economic system the United States of America has chosen to adopt is one that favors such behaviour.
And the elite educational system: think of all the psychopaths Harvard Business School sh*ts out on a regular basis.
GwNorth
I couldn't have said it better myself. Thank you.
The most important thing left unsaid by Vonnegut and Schwartz is that these psychopaths are the conservative beast.
I don't think brand of politics has anything to do with it.
Look at the O Bomb 'Em administration. They've done for the banking industry what eight years of that Son Of A Bush did for the oil industry.
The US has a one-party system with two corporate wings.
Vonnegut was right. And I'm glad Schwartz is reminding us of Vonnegut's very well described assessment of who's running "our" country.
I thought all the second rate psychopaths were on Fox News.
Does not FOX news boast it has the HIGHEST ratings?
Obama= first string
Bush= Second String
Clinton= First string
Excellent psychoanalysis.
Jeez-Louise, the psycho-babble - maybe they should just change the name of this site to Common Delusions and get it over with.
Check out the latest findings in neuroscience. These "psychopaths," brains have actually evolved into a mutant subspecies of humans. Believe their lies to your peril.
I believe the "second-string" could more accurately be refered to as "sociopaths?"
This first-string second-string stuff becomes more clear if we remember that psychopathy is at one end of *one* spectrum, with something like selflessness at the other end. The other basic spectrum we're dealing with is the skein of abilities that we lump together as "intelligence".
So down at the psychopathic end, we have the "obligative" psychopaths, who totally lack the ability to experience empathy. To them, other living creatures *truly* might as well be made of cardboard.
If those ones aren't smart, they'll eff up pretty quickly and end in prison. But if they are smart, they'll learn to feign the feelings they don't have. They'll learn the right words, facial expressions, etc. for any given situation and use them as a tool.
Further toward the middle of the spectrum, we have those who *do* feel, but not very deeply. They don't have the ethical "tin ear" that the obligatives have. They hear the music, they just don't always pay attention to it. They behave badly toward others whenever they think they can get away with it. The politicians who sell us out, the judges who take bribes, the brutal cops, the professionals who charge for unnecessary - and often unperformed - work, the priests who molest children, et lengthy cetera are in this category. They do it because they can.
The DSM has a big table of diagnostic criteria for "antisocial personality disorder". But it lets the rich off the hook because it's considered normal for the rich to treat the poor badly and the DSM addresses disruptive deviation from cultural norms rather than illness. Someone could be delusional as hell and if they are able to avoid being socially disruptive, they won't get a diagnosis.
So the real differential diagnosis for psychopathy, obfuscated by the DSM, boils down to just one question: does this individual routinely disregard, without remorse, the legitimate rights of other living creatures?
The "second string" psychopaths are the ones who don't have to be, and who know that they're not smart enough (or not quite depraved enough) to get away with it usually. They come out from the woodwork when the political environment has become so corrupted that even they can get away with it, as now.
("psychopath" and "sociopath" are synonyms. Some professionals distinguish them, but few agree on how)
The terms are similar but not synonyms. As you seem to have pointed out there is a difference and I've always seen that. Psychopaths have always stood out because they are rarely suspected of having the anti-social behaviors they harbor while sociopaths have generally been seen as odd characters and nobody is surprised when they set fire to a cat or do something worse. I think the distinction is important because I feel the psychopaths are more dangerous because they appear so mainstream and normal much like Kevin Costner's character in "Mr. Brooks."
This makes for interesting conversation when discussed with people and their thoughts about various characters in the numerous vampire movies and TV shows. These shows are relevant because they are basically dealing with race and morality issues and how people feel about those "other" people. In general there is a dichotomy of psychopath vampires wanting to appear mainstream but most likely have killed numerous humans in their past for food, and the sociopath vampires who don't care what anybody thinks, demonstrate classic deviant self labeling, and openly admit to not caring about the human "blood bags."
The terms are similar but not synonyms. ... Psychopaths have always stood out because they are rarely suspected of having the anti-social behaviors they harbor while sociopaths have generally been seen as odd characters and nobody is surprised when they set fire to a cat or do something worse.
-----------------------------------------
It depends on who's talking.
There's no clear dividing line that everyone agrees on. That's the key reason why most people in psychology consider them synonymous. If nobody can agree on how to distinguish a psychopath from a sociopath, then it's not useful to have two terms.
The distinctions you identify in your post are not differences in the position on the psychopathy spectrum, but rather the position on some other spectrum, intelligence perhaps, or socialisation, or adjustment. There are many, many "odd" people - the socially indifferent, the socially inept, the "furriners", the people clinging by their fingernails over the abyss of psychosis, etc - and most of them are just as empathetic as "normal" people.
So being "odd" isn't diagnostic of psychopathy even though many very conventional, authoritarian people are made nervous by "odd" people and believe their nervousness says something about the other people rather than about themselves.
I'll have to disagree because there are is enough differences to come to the same conclusion I have made. Of course being "odd" isn't a diagnostic of psychopathy (you meant to say sociopath because that was more my point). I would argue that Dennis Rader was a psychopath while Jeffrey Dahmer was a sociopath. Reviewing these cases we clearly see that someone like Rader seemed to live a normal life and was involved in several community social gatherings like church and scouting and was married for a long time with a couple of children. Jeffrey Dahmer was an alcoholic since he was a teenager. I could argue that a clear difference could also be the "shock factor." Its clearly a shock that the a person that had been the president of their church turned out to be the BTK killer. It wasn't as much a shock that an alcoholic teenager who'd collected dead animals and cut them up and had no social interests became a serial killer.
Good article. I take issue with the suggestion that psychopaths act like "normal people in positions of power." As far as I've seen, most people in positions of power are psychopaths; as Frank Herbert said, it's not so much that power corrupts as that power attracts the corruptible. People in positions of power are by definition not "normal."
They act like normal people to the extent that they (usually!) don't grab and rape their secretary when feeling randy. They maintain their front.
But indeed, many -perhaps most- individuals who've sought and gained immense power are diagnosable, since most unimpaired people value other things in life and aren't interested in power.
Another example of psychopathic hubris: Weiner sending pictures of his "package" to strangers.
If we presume he's not psychotic - i.e., that he knows the difference between his fantasies and consensual reality - then the only other explanation is hubris, the kind of hubris characteristic of psychopaths: "I can do whatever I want to without cost because I'm *ME*!"
The way the powerful force us to treat them encourages them to believe that their desires are ipso facto an expression of natural law, and that they can always walk away clean. They really come to believe, those that don't start out that way, that they're better than us, and that they deserve everything good while we deserve nothing.
This is a nifty piece of writing. A great way of looking at the problem.
I have looked at the problem in the light of a decline of professionalism, without really knowing why the decline has occurred. Certainly there was a time when professionals acted first in the interests of their clients and let their own self-interest be served as a positive outcome of that service. Physicians, lawyers, teachers, clergymen, and, unfortunately, journalists, have all swerved and helped make their professions into industries. As a result, for example, we can't reform health care because it would kill jobs in an industry that takes a sixth of our economy's resources. We can't develop green energy because it would hurt the oil industry. The professionals who should be delivering health care and energy now focus on profits and forget service.
In the case of businessmen, I would not use the term professional. I have never trusted people in business to do the right thing. When they do, it is a pleasant surprise.
What is perplexing is why this kind of evil cream rises to the top in places where the consuming public has a vote on the matter. I can see that my buying a Dixie Cup helps the Koch Brothers, but it's a relatively mindless decision to buy the Dixie Cup. How does that explain the rise of psychopathic people into elected positions or other positions where popular support is critical to success--e.g. radio and TV "personalities" like Rush Limbaugh?
Why do ordinary people choose to elevate psychopaths by rewarding them with their adulation? Are we all psychopaths?
Most of us are *able*, if we lose the north for a moment, to behave psychopathically, i.e. without regard to the legitimate rights of others, but we're not psychopaths, who do it as often as they can and almost never feel remorse. Psychopaths might feel *regret*, but it's on their own behalf if they get caught, not on behalf of their victims.
The psychopaths who get popular support get it because most people are used to psychopaths treating them badly, and so they've come to think of it as normal. Naturally the psychopaths themselves encourage this.
The Limbaughs and their ilk prey on the grotty bits that nearly everyone has in their emotional cellar. The little fears, hates, and other trash that we'd feel embarrassed to have exposed in public. Those psychopaths legitimise it ("they wouldn't let him say things like that on the air if it weren't true"), and gain support because they give people a focus for their anger. The wrong focus, of course, but that's not a problem--for them.
Our world would be a very different place if we locked up the psychopaths instead of letting them gain power.
If we don't watch it we'll wind up with Side Show Ron Paul, I honestly don't know how to categorize that man, deluded, evil, deluded and evil... evilly deluded...?
I do believe it is a part of most people that can be brought out, without self control.. A hysteria of fear, greed and selfishness as this country has been sliding into, fueled by media and entertainment (much of reality TV) cultural perceptions, ignorance and complacency, has put this tribe in to, to much control of power. We, all of us, have allowed this to ferment and ooze to the surface.
Perhaps many of the older cultures and civilizations had/have curbed this excess with stringent, and enforceable codes of honor.
Liberals always get outraged whenever they think any evil is not being done competently well.
Schwartz has obviously failed to observe the obvious (a sure indication that he has the diseased mind of a liberal). Most of the greater evil that's been accomplished (generally over the past 78 years, and particularly over the past 18 years) has been accomplished exceptionally well, by the 1st string psychopaths (Democrats).
You seem to have specific things in mind. Care to explain what this post even means?
Consider this, for my perspective on what liberals have accomplished:
The Violence of "Nonviolence":
http://chenangogreens.org/home/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=492&Itemid=1
(link may need to be copied and pasted, because CD's formating forced it into two lines)
Thanks for the explaination. I could not be certain from which way (left or right) you were approaching the label, though I had some idea that was correct. Surely in my own mind these realizations over some years have provoked a great deal of thought as to what a label such as liberal even means. Well thought essay you have there.
Every 1 in 25 are psychopathic in the general population.
This doesn't surprise me.
That's either not true or inexact, depending on the state of your kidney.
The actual proportion is indeterminate, because the willingness to behave psychopathically exists at one end of one continuum, and diminishes as it goes along.
So the number of "always-on" psychopaths is very small, maybe 1 in 100 tops, but the number of "elective" psychopaths varies with circumstance, specifically the amount and kind of psychopathic behavior that's rewarded.
Right now, in the US, quite a lot of such behavior is rewarded. More and more every week.
"This distancing from our humanity, or alienation, affects everyone forced to live under capitalism" Posted by 'Tom Larsen'.
This is very true, and heavily evidenced. But in fact it is a very broad issue, it's simply the way we run things cohesively in America.
The amount of research that has been stacking up against the American system is now too large to ignore. Empathy rates are significantly lower now than they were just a few decades ago; the majority of modern children are classified as mentally unstable per 1950s psychiatric standards (both research articles appeared on Science Daily, not some conspiratorial website); violence is linked to both a) a lack of trust in government and, b) economic inequality (violence is more strongly linked to the latter).
The new Zeitgiest: Moving Forward does an effective job of covering a lot of the sociological issues in America today - it is much less conspiracy oriented than its antecedents and focuses more on sociology.
The question then becomes, "What happens now?". I assume Americans will be forced to make the choice popularized by Emerson: Truth or Repose. Repose is reflected in this essay, I'm fairly confident it means denial of everything that is really happening, resulting in self-contradictory insanity in the 'Warmongering Christian' sense... a slice of the old cognitive dissonance pie.
Those who want this Country to be second class can pack their bags and leave anytime. Veterans from the Revolutionary War until today have paid way to much a price to see our Country regress.
I left in 1971 but doubt this had any effect.