December 26, 2014
Psychopathy and Politics
By James G. LongEarly in my career I worked for two military officers and soon after for two industrial managers, all four of whom I thought must be seriously crazy. Each of them was threatening and erratic, and created massive personnel turnover within their units, including an uncommon number of demotions, terminations, and serious illnesses. Regardless, these worthies maintained the confidence of their superiors for a time, though two of them were eventually and abruptly terminated from their positions. These characters were so far removed from my normal experience that they have significantly defined my life -- led me to further my education, wrote a book (long outdated), gave seminars, and did major study and research with most of it outside conventional channels.
It took me thirty years to discover that my four crazy bosses were in fact psychopaths, and I now have professional confirmation that I worked for four different psychopath-type personalities. Psychopathy was largely unrecognized and was poorly understood when I first observed the phenomenon, and it is poorly understood now, forty-nine years later. Only the Federal Bureau of Investigation, of all the government entities, fully understands and utilizes psychopathy, and then only in regards to criminal cases.
Psychopathy as a psychological discipline concentrates on the behaviors and misbehaviors of personalities; psychopathy is one of several personality disorders, as opposed to thinking disorders (psychoses) and mood disorders (depression, bi-polar). These three disorder types are often confused with one another. The major characteristics of psychopaths are a pathological need for control over other people, coupled with a total absence of conscience. Psychopaths have been characterized as bold, disinhibited, and mean, though psychopaths typically adopt attractive, charismatic, but fake personas for use when they want to impress someone in particular, such as a new girlfriend, upper management, or voters. Bullying is a common description of a psychopath when he is not on his best behavior.
Psychopaths operate on all scales from families and local communities to nation-states. There has been remarkably little comment on totalitarian dictators as psychopaths, though totalitarian dictators have the same corrupt and destructive characteristics as local psychopaths who operate on a smaller scale. Slavery and colonialism are manifestations of psychopathic-type control on a national or international scale, and are recently prevalent in psychopathic national systems today.
Psychopathy is the most destructive of the mental disorders, but the initial clinical description of psychopathy, by Dr. Hervey Cleckley in 1941, was little noted at the time and had almost no immediate effect. Psychopaths hide in plain sight, and it is difficult for an untrained or inexperienced person to identify a psychopath due to the fake-but-charming personas that psychopaths adopt. Psychopathy finally gained large-scale public attention as a result of a series of serial murder psychopaths in the 1970s (Robert Maudsley, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Dean Corll) and serial-murder psychopaths have largely defined the popular image of psychopathy for the past forty years. ... more
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/12/psychopathy_and_politics.html
