Political Ponerology in USA

Psychopaths

How is it D.C. is such a den of iniquity? https://www.thepostil.com/political-ponerology-and-the-rise-of-totalitarianism-in-the-west/

In a normal society, a substantial number of psychopaths are in prison or part of the criminal class. Making up an estimated 1% of the general population, researcher Kent Kiehl argues that the vast majority (over 90%) of adult male psychopaths are either in prison or otherwise caught up in the American criminal justice system, e.g., on parole or probation. A substantial number of “successful” psychopaths can be found working for temp agencies. Needless to say, they make for poor employees.

However, the most gifted successful psychopaths—more intelligent and less impulsive than those found in prison—may con their way into positions of influence and prestige (though, as with the gifted generally, they will be outnumbered by their more mediocre counterparts).

Canadian psychologist Robert D. Hare, the world’s leading expert on psychopathy, once remarked that if didn’t study psychopaths in prison, he would do so at the stock exchange. Such “snakes in suits” may be overrepresented in such places, he writes, “on the assumption that psychopathic entrepreneurs and risk-takers tend to gravitate toward financial watering-holes, particularly those that are enormously lucrative and poorly regulated.” Conning comes naturally to psychopaths: even experts with years of experience interacting with them are regularly fooled. Cleckley called this expertise in impression management a “mask of sanity” (also the title of his classic book on the subject).

In communism, by contrast, Łobaczewski found this reality reversed. Practically all of society’s psychopaths integrated into the new system; the number approached 100%. It was theirpresence and influence that was responsible for alien, brutal, and anti-human nature of totalitarian regimes, their methods, and the surreal quality of the new system. Imagine a system of government where all of these individuals—career criminals, irresponsible freeloaders, incompetent egotists, and savvy manipulators—find themselves in positions of influence within every social institution: at all levels of government, the military, federal and local police, the courts, education, business, factories, homeowners’ associations, youth groups.

A resident of Lijiang, Yunnan, described how this looked in practice during Mao’s revolution:“All the scamps and the village bullies, who had not done a stroke of honest work in their life, suddenly blossomed forth as the accredited members of the Communist Party, and swaggered with special armbands and badges and the peculiar caps … which seemed to be the hallmark of the Chinese Red” (quoted in Frank Dikötter, The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945–1957, p. 197). This process, which took place over decades in China and the USSR, was artificially reproduced in Eastern Europe over the course of about a decade after WWII.

One of the primary questions ponerology seeks to answer is what gives totalitarianism its defining “flavor,” in all its varieties. Though Nazi Germany, the USSR, Mao’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia all had important and sometimes profound differences, the similarities were significant enough that political scientists have tended to classify them all as “totalitarian.” But while the classic studies of totalitarianism have important insights, one can’t escape the feeling that they are missing something important, that they haven’t grasped the crux of the matter. It is like trying to focus on an object that remains forever in your peripheral vision—you know it is there, but can’t quite make out the details.

The common factor, according to Łobaczewski, is psychopathy, which shapes the motivations, goals, and practices of the new system (other personality disorders also play a role). Just as a personal encounter with a psychopath can leave one bewildered, terrorized, and demoralized (and broke)—especially when one does not know what exactly one has just experienced—so too does an encounter with psychopathy on the macrosocial level.