The Rise of the Political Psychopath
John & Nisha Whitehead
“When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
Richard Nixon
Many 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. 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.
Indeed, a study from Southern Methodist University found that Washington, DC—our nation’s capital and the seat of power for our so-called representatives—ranks highest on the list of regions that are populated by psychopaths.
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 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.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, 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 book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected]. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
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Many truths here, John and Nisha. A main trouble, it seems, is our inability to identify psychopaths, which opens the door to them infiltrating our stabilizing and civilizing institutions. Also to consider is that we have, to a large degree, allowed Psychopaths to define Psychopathic behavior for us. The history of Psychiatry is something to look into. Documentaries by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights give useful data. Fearlessness and lack of anxiety can be very good things in many cases, in many people, but not in the Psychopath. A complete inability to take responsibility for ones actions is one of their traits. But none of us are perfect. So what IS a psychopath? Let us assume we should not be taking advice on the matter from “experts” who have failed to produce effective results. Another trait is a tendency to lie, stop truth and spread rumors. But who hasn’t at one time? They have a number of destructive characteristics and cannot restrain themselves from such. Although they don’t feel guilt, they attempt to prevent being found out, simply to prevent being stopped from destructive acts. So…if they can get others to kill and destroy for them, they can escape being halted in their obsession to destroy. There is a great deal to know about the characteristics of a Psychopath and what makes them different from the vast majority of us who desire to live and let live.
RE: “A main trouble, it seems, is our inability to identify psychopaths, which opens the door to them infiltrating our stabilizing and civilizing institutions. Also to consider is that we have, to a large degree, allowed Psychopaths to define Psychopathic behavior for us.”
It is NOT our “inability,” it is mainly our CHOSEN ignorance of reality, our opted denial of reality, of what’s right in front of our noses in plain sight. One ramification of this self-defeating WILLFUL behavior is that we “allowed Psychopaths to define Psychopathic behavior for us.” So at the bottom is a systemic WILLFUL decision in favor of truth oblivion and a denial of reality, GOING ON FOR CENTURIES AND MILLENNIA — read The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room –The Holocaustal Covid-19 Coronavirus Madness: A Sociological Perspective & Historical Assessment Of The Covid “Phenomenon”
“First the truth will upset you, but then it will set you free.” — Matt Landman, independent filmmaker
“Citizens need to the do the hard work of educating themselves about what the government is doing and how to hold it accountable…”
—
made possible after they’ve learnt to hold themselves accountable for their actions toward their fellow citizens.
Can a good and honest person go into a thoroughly corrupt and vile organisation, and change it from within?
No. Only naïve children with no life experience can believe this is possible.
There are a few in politics who say they can, but they are either stupid or simply dishonest.
An honest man or woman could not function in such an environment. They would either be sacked or completely ineffective. The only honourable thing would be to resign once they come to their senses.
The challenge is knowing which organisations are corrupt and vile before entering them.
Everyone has a threshold definition for ‘corrupt’ and ‘vile’ .
My definition of ‘corrupt and vile’ are women refusing to work under a man, forcing them out and then expecting them to work for them for nothing when they have found alternative employment (you will not be surprised to hear that I did nothing of the sort).
It is women making false claims of sexual harassment as a power play to sideline innocent males.
It is women in the top 1% of earners getting £100k of rent reductions from spooks and evading paying tax on those benefits-in-kind.
Everyone has their own definition…..
I believe that Plato suggested something ‘similar’ in The Republic.
The J-cult money-printers understood that money controlled everything, so guess what?? … ‘they’ print the money for you and by pure chance, own everything.
So, the next time you vote, or deal with any govt. bureaucracy, remember who owns the lot … Comforting, isn’t it?
When i was younger i thought both my parents were
psychopaths…later i was told “How would you know ?
You’re not an Expert !” I still think so…
Point is, though there’s probably a Scientific definition
Experts agree on, we all know effin’ psychopaths, dont
we !! Many Experts often come across as effin’
psychopathic, dont they !
Everyone knows what parents should never do to their children, things that only psychopaths would do…..
You don’t need expertise to be aware of your visceral- and instinctive reactions to parental behaviour…..
The Founders. Not the conspirators who locked themselves behind doors to usurp the Articles of Confederation with a constitutional coup for ruling class control of commerce, currency, and continental expansion, insatiable appetite for empire with all the predictable results of pathological lying, robbing, and killing.
It’s kleptocracy, kakistocracy, kakastocracy…you name it!, as well. Here’s one standard symptom of sociopathy set to take us by storm again in political theater among presidential psychopaths:
Shouldn’t that read ‘Ruin the Country’, or am I just being naive?
Whitehead’s hasbara-soaked article appears on the same day as https://www.unz.com/runz/jews-and-antisemitism-at-harvard-university/.
Reading or listening to Ron there, I see off the bat who is living in US reality and it is not Whitehead.
Gvt got off track since the founding and was captured by the financial federal reserve and its proxy fighters like Israel.
Difficult to say if it can be reversed.
“Democracy has been good for us.”
Billionaires’ paean…(anon)
Unfortunately this description could be placed on quite a lot of voters too, and these voters have a side defect that they usually project their own lack of backbone and weakness onto politicians.
Try it! “Politicians are always going after sucking the coffers dry”.
Then you look yourself in the mirror, and see who is always going after the money…..YOURSELF!
I know I will get at least a 30-40 minus thumbs downs from angry co-commentators but I am only telling the truth, and the truth must out in the free where it belongs.
Spot on .
Everyone has to take same responsibility for accepting and participating in the system.
The psychopaths rule with majority’s consent.
We live in a culture where people are intellectually dishonest and lazy and have chosen to worship “ experts”.
A culture based on BS-olgy that claims to follow science.
Few want truth, it is like a game .
So obvious with the alternative circles and most critics that are keeping the most obvious irrefutable fact alive ie. the scientific fraud alive ie.
The many critics just keep the scientific fraud alive by selling us different falsehoods out of vested interest interest or inflated egos that love their new found popularity and “saviour” status.
Few have the intellectual honesty to admit that the materialistic scientific concepts on which our “ modern” worldview is based and started with misconceptions had evolved into widespread fraud at all level.
And from comments on alternative sites it is obvious that people want truth and accept different versions of falsehoods and more fairytale in the name of the worldwide cult of scientism.
I have come to see society as tripartite:
On the top, the inconceivably superrich who can do what the fuck they want and think of all beneath them as scum. These, you never see. Not on the media and certainly not in real life.
On the bottom, the pitiful punters scrambling to make a living however they can. These you meet face-to-face for the very good reason that you are one of them But they never show up on the media except in little snippets that are carefully stage managed.
And in the middle – the “executive class”. These you rarely meet in real life. But they are on the media all the time. They are the most visible sector. They are the politicians, trade union leaders, academics, journalists, editors, entertainers etc. Everybody who is famous is one of them. This doesn’t mean they are all part of one big club. Nor does it mean that they have absolutely no freedom to express themselves. They do have such freedom – but only to a severly limited degree. And if any of them step too far out of line, then they’ll soon know all about it.
And this constraint holds for the politicians to a far greater degree.
Because – and this is the main point! – the function of this executive class is to represent the system, to propagandise for the establishment – which means ultimately to serve the superrich.
And if this function is “diluted” in most of this executive class, it is concentrated in the core members i.e. the politicians.
That’s why politicians are almost invariably psychopathic. It is their calling to be psychopathic. To put it another way, the system selects for psychopaths.
And the way it happens is that every one of these aspiring little states-people know the way they must behave to get to the top.
It’s neat!
Beautifully stated and perfectly observed George.
Truth becomes obvious as we diminish our learned ignorance:
Your description of the “executive class” is the very description of what I have long referred to as “the cool-kids’ club.”
“So, we begin, pondering our condition, and trying to understand our place. As we work through this, day-by-day, we sooner or later ask – who is in charge here? And the answer is the same for all of us. It is Caesar. Caesar is in charge, and this world is his domain.
Who is Caesar?
A core part of Caesar’s strategy is that you can never clearly identify him. When his name is first mentioned we recall a guy from two thousand years ago – Gaius Julius Caesar – the general who seized power in the last days of the Roman Republic and became its first dictator. But his name, Caesar, transformed into a title for all the many Emperors that followed him, eventually becoming Kaiser and Tsar, with such titles still in active use today.
In all these cases, the person of any individual Caesar is irrelevant, for Caesar lives on symbolically wherever earthly power is exercised. The truth is therefore unavoidable; there is not just one but millions of Caesars, all servants to the One Caesar, all exercising POWER in the OUTER WORLD over SPACE-TIME-EVENTS. This is the definition we must constantly bear in mind for Caesar is present wherever there is ownership, trade, currency, hierarchy, and law. And he (but sometimes she) always demands tribute.
Caesar rules the capitalist system. But he also rules the communist system. He is a socialist, marxist, libertarian, and conservative, all at the same time. He is a registered Republican and a campaigning Democrat, and will encourage you to support any side of an election or referendum that suits his ends. In truth then all political parties belong to him, but because Caesar is no fool he covers his bases by also being the ruler of all revolutionary movements as well as all the authorities and bureaucracies which prop up his status quo. He is the system, and the anti-system.
Caesar is personified in every greying, aging, defunct and bankrupt government as well as every bright new hope. He is a supporter of every ‘Better Way’ and an affiliate of every tradition. Certainly, different Caesars will distribute power, money, property, and opportunity in different ways. One Caesar will definitely benefit one section of society, while another will prioritise elsewhere. This is the way that Caesar ensures that he never loses control and that all changes of government operate Caesar’s rules for Caesar’s benefit. Revolutions to overturn Caesar always result in the proclamation of a New Caesar. It is always true that once the King is dead the new proclamation is ‘Long live the King!’
Every aspect of the human Outer World is in Caesar’s domain. He exerts control over business, industry, government, and charities. He presides over the military as well as maintaining a militia of police and government agencies. He determines, through his servants in the media, what is and is not discussed, but makes sure to offer up the illusion of conversation and enquiry on his fake-play-acting-stages known as radio, TV, and the Internet. He exerts his authority more subtly at festivals, conferences and symposiums where he knows he will find a rich seam of compliant people whom he can scare into doing his bidding. He extends his power further by creating institutions, guilds, unions, and associations to act as his gatekeepers, making sure that they regulate human thought and behaviour across a million sectors of human life.
Different faiths are consecrated in any one of Caesar’s many names, for he is clever enough to know that full control of his human stock can easily be established if people believe themselves free to choose – when all the while Caesar has pre-determined the options available for selection.
Caesar’s goal in all this is to make YOU reliant on HIM, for all the essentials of life. He demands that you relinquish your ability to HEAL YOURSELF and bow before his anointed priests, whom he calls doctors. He intends that you abandon all attempts to EDUCATE YOURSELF and wants you to hand yourself over to his appointed clerics called TEACHERS. He certainly does not want you to FEED YOURSELF nor SUSTAIN YOURSELF in any way. He wants you to become totally dependent upon him and his minions. And he is in no special hurry to achieve this; after all, he has been busy with this for thousands of years.
Already this picture of Caesar will be too much for most people to bear, which is why the TIME OF ADJUSTMENT tends to bring only partial visions of Caesar. Early realisations that something is profoundly wrong tend to occur as a result of a bad experience at the hands of one kind of Caesar. The loss of a job might seed resentment against Capitalist Caesar and draw the victim into social action or resistance of some kind. But equally if one’s awakening occurs while queuing for hours for food then the Marxist Caesar may be identified as the enemy. Yet both these visions are two sides of the same Coin of Caesar. There are many Caesars to rebel against, but if we do so only partially, then we are in danger of swapping one form of external control for another. There is, however, another way, if we can bear it.”
“Political Caesars
Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the IRA, the KKK, Baader Meinhof, ETA, Bolsheviks, Cromwell’s Roundheads – no matter age or circumstance there will always be new Political Caesars. Most antisystem movements whizz up like rockets, make a tremendous impact, and then fall to the ground. But some – the Nazi Party of Germany, the British Labour Party, France’s En Marche – seize control of the citadel, only for their followers to learn that Caesar always reigns in THIS DOMAIN.
Communism is Caesar covering his bets, and social justice equity movements are Caesar doubling down that same bet, for he will never relinquish power, though he will willingly change those who guard his city, according to the times.
The mob, as well as the police who resist them, are both Caesar simultaneously, for they each form part of the ant-hill, hierarchical, top-down power structure that Caesar so relies upon.”
Extract from “Who is Caesar, and why should we care?”: https://www.thehermitage.org.uk/blog/who-is-caesar-and-why-should-we-care
I prefer my hero’s to be alive, too many dead ones to choose from.
Great Link.
Reminds me of this short video.
What’s an Elite Education?
John Taylor Gatto
6 min
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=obFPLRuP41w
Elite eduction
They learn several things but they all lead to one thing, the management of crowds, the management of masses.
Caesar’s Gallic Wars
How a small discipline force can overwhelm a huge brave force 50 times larger than itself by finding the cracks in the organization , flipping them this side and that side to finally get this political ideological hornets nest stirred up where the only way to survive is to hang out with the romans.
Leviathan -Thomas Hobbes ~ year 1640
Contains pulling back the curtain so one can see the machinery.
‘Where power seems to exist, it never exists there’.
None of the politicians are in charge, you get figure head positions to draw flag.
No-one is in charge in the Senate of the house either. Those are satellite , subordinate , figure head positions to blame , write to, support and back even financially.
365 years ago everybody who was anybody knew that this was one of the biggest manual on how to see the reality that existed .
We live in a Kakistocracy a society ruled by the most corrupt, immoral, psychopathic, deviant and ruthless among us, whose lust for power and megalomania drive them to commit unspeakable atrocities while mouthing pious platitudes about “freedom, progress and the pursuit of happiness. The “Founding Fathers” spoke of freedom while perpetuating and profiting from a system that held people in brutal bondage. They spoke of representative government while excluding all women, all non property owning males, all Native peoples and all enslaved and indentured folks from participating in the process.
The writer suggests education as a solution and this is true; but we must recognize we have been indoctrinated, programmed and entrained not educated. So the first steps are mental decolonization, intellectual stimulation, expansion and freedom.
These psychopathic plutocrats will use technology to further their megalomaniacal goals. They are psychopaths so they will have no remorse or compunction against doing evil as we have witnessed and experienced during their COVID PSY-OP/depopulation campaign.
The really tragic aspect of all of this is, these psychopaths will neither be held accountable nor punished because this is their system and it was/is designed to protect them from us.
“There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians.”
Depends on the politician and depends on the situation.
We Humans, being mammals and living in herds, naturally play Follow the Leader. We need Leaders.
The 19th century Russian evolutionist, Prince Kropotkin, observed that Leaders of the Reindeer were the ones who could show the the way to fresh grazing land before the Siberian winter hardened. On the other hand, Ants do not seem to have Leaders: they may have instincts and specialized castes, honed to perfection by a billion years of survival experience.
We poor humans with our over-developed brains enjoy neither the simple ecology of Reindeer nor the ancient tradition of ants. We must do the best we can with the Leaders we have. There are many psychopaths in high places of course; but I believe there were a few politicians who did some good, even in my short lifetime and limited environment: Smuts, Lenin, Roosevelt, Gandi, Stalin, Attlee, MacMillan, Wilson, Mandela and Putin.
“Oh it’s Tommy this and Tommy that and Tommy, go away;
But it’s Thank you Mister Atkins, when the band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
Oh it’s “Thank you Mister Atkins, when the band begins to play.” — Rudyard Kipling.
“Life is not a walk in the park” — Pasternak, Dr.Life.
There are no leaders. They’ve been replaced by managers.
They are all ZOG:
They do psychological testing for police, why not politicians?
Oops, more than half would fail empathy testing!
Btw, libertarians forget that the same thing happens in companies… Sociopaths rise to the top of the dominance hierarchy. That’s why during the “booming” times, there were company towns and other horrors.
Psychopaths can rule over groups even smaller than a “company town”. A psychiatrist of my acquaintance once sighed; “Dostoevsky and Kafka read like childrens stories compared to some patients’ account of their family”.
There are good parents and bad parents, good bosses and bad bosses, good politicians and bad politicians, good armies and bad armies.
“The real battleground is in the human heart” — Einstein on Peace.
Gimme a break – empathy testing for a cop job?
It would be a good idea to have empathy if you worked in a vice unit – empathy for the victims….
Good to have empathy if you work relocating missing persons….lots of fraught friends and relatives needing calming words without lying about progress….
Cops? Empathy?
That’s the oxymoron of the year.