Truth to Power: Psychopaths Rule Our World

by Niall Bradley, SOTT.net

www.sott.net/, Aug 13, 2009

Watching Europe's political class squirm after Ireland's No vote in the Lisbon Treaty referendum last year, I couldn't help but feel that some of them know something we don't: there is an agenda that must be met. The Irish people could not be threatened into sealing the nEU Deal, yet it's business as usual for the fanatical Eurocrats who are adamant nothing will get in their way. Incessant media hype is portending economic ruin lest Ireland vote 'correctly' at the second time of asking this fall.

It is evident, for those with eyes to see, that political discord between rival criminal cartels is purely for public consumption. Bread and circuses. Policy is not shaped by party politics. Decisions are made by a few: everyone else adjusts or starves. Weapons of financial mass destruction deployed by Central Bankers and Disaster-Capitalists, under the guise of protecting the markets and improving the efficiency of the system, vacuum the wealth of the nations - the work people produce - into ever fewer hands.

While we share a symbiotic reality, mutually bound by rules and conventions, theirs is very different. It shadows ours, feeding off the real economy below by manipulating the supply of money, which private banks control. 'Market crashes' are built into the system. Rules designed to regulate economies and prevent volatility are periodically altered. Hysteria is induced in people through repeated media suggestion forecasting impending doom. In the ensuing panic brought on by shock, windows of opportunity open for the few to recast the rules in their favour, extending and entrenching their vice on the real economy.

With all governments indebted to them and most ignorant of their existence, they foment chaos at will, incite or tranquillise populations as required, and maneuver legislation appropriate to their insatiable greed; small change here, incremental change there... until eventually the parameters are radically reset. In this diabolical, yet methodically scientific manner they progress towards neutralising all resistance to the digitised global 'human pen.'

Politicians know not to bite the hand that feeds, lest they disappear down the memory hole. Mere pawns - useful idiots to master strategists - they're hired and fired as perception managers and public relations officers, to give the illusion of freedom of choice. With a supporting cast of trained thugs with cattle prods and secret armies in the wings, the political puppet show offers a veneer of credibility and welcome distraction from inconvenient truths.

The how has a why

Power is an addiction its abusers can neither comprehend nor arrest. They are programmed towards ruthless, hegemonic domination of the 'other'. A useful guide when treading the spider's web they weave: if you can name the institution or put a face to the name, then you're looking at a prop on the stage. The original instigators remain elusive. But unravelling the lies, the paper trail yields simple gems: the 'free market' really means freedom for the few to steal everything from the many. The game is rigged so that the people lose either way.
"We decide something, put it out there, then wait for some time to see if something happens. If there is no big shouting and no rebellions, because most do not understand at all what was decided, then we continue - step by step - until there is no more resistance."

Jean-Claude Juncker, EU Council President in 2005, quoted in Der Spiegel 52/1999
Breathtaking, is it not? And Machiavellian. And immoral. And impetuously childish. How can such callous disregard for others be expressed by those elected to represent the will of the people? Europe, of all places, surely no longer tolerates such anti-democratic mendacity!

But what if it were possible to understand the bizarre behaviour of those who at once stupefy and betray us? Can the laws of nature shed any light on why persons we entrust with ever greater spheres of social control reach ever more depressing depths of hypocrisy and irresponsibility?

The world has only one problem - Psychopaths

Ponerology(*) is a branch of science drawing on psychology, biology and the social sciences. Born in the very setting which it studies, Political Ponerology, A Science of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes was penned by a brilliant psychologist called Andrej Lobaczewski. Stealthily networking with colleagues in Poland and other Nazi and Soviet occupied countries during and after the Second World War, their research bore tremendously valuable fruit that both re-conceptualises and reinforces our understanding of the 'causal factors and processes of the genesis of moral and psycho-biological evil.'

The ponerogenesis of macrosocial phenomena - large scale evil - which constitutes the most important object of this book, appears to be subject to the same laws of nature that operate within human questions on an individual or small-group level. The role of persons with various psychological defects and anomalies of a clinically low level appears to be a perennial characteristic of such a phenomena.

Political Ponerology - p.31

(*) n. division of theology dealing with evil; theological doctrine of wickedness or evil; from the Greek: poneros, meaning 'evil'

These pioneers discovered a blind spot in our perception of the world, which only lent itself to study when historical circumstances transformed their countries from democracies to totalitarian systems, and the underlying pathological factors that produced Rule by Terror were unmasked.

Political Ponerology examines the nature of evil - a condition traditionally considered a theological matter - in light of modern medical knowledge of disease and psychopathy. It proceeds to map out the 'pathodynamics of psychopathology' - how the pathological influence of psychopaths infects conscience throughout society, transforming individuals' behaviour and rendering best intentions into their corrupted opposites. Presenting a panorama of the psychological reality, Ponerology's scientific acumen guides the reader through the previously uncharted dark underbelly of our world.

Lobaczewski & co found that a small but statistically constant 6% of the Polish population comprise various types of deviant personalities. A percentage of these were genetic psychopaths. Yes, you read that correctly. People are born without conscience. Though the least numerous of persons with psychological disorders, their role in 'ponerogenesis', the infection and spread of evil, is exceptionally great. These are true psychopaths; biological machines incapable of empathy.

"It seems that conscience and feelings are related to the abstract concepts of 'future' and 'others.' It is 'spatio-temporal.' We can feel fear, sympathy, empathy, sadness, and so on because we can IMAGINE, in an abstract way, the future based on our own experiences in the past. We can 'predict' how others will react because we are able to 'see ourselves' in them, even though they are 'out there'. In other words, we can not only identify with others spatially, so to speak - but also temporally - in time. The psychopath does not seem to have this capacity."

The Psychopath: The Mask of Sanity - Research Project of the Quantum Future School
It follows that they do not understand what is meant by a 'fact'. Where we rely on facts to interpret reality, adjusting its parameters accordingly with each new fact, reality for psychopaths is whatever they declare it to be. This was wonderfully demonstrated by a member of the Bush administration in an interview with journalist Ron Suskind:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend - but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

From Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush - New York Times magazine, October 17, 2004

While they promote certain ideologies vigorously, psychopaths themselves feel no attachment to the words they utter. Instead they calculate appropriate emotional responses for each situation, enabling them to manipulate one against another, each 'side' in any given conflict providing requisite cover for their hidden strategy. Thus shielded by a Mask of Sanity, the vast majority of them are successful, insofar as their true nature is not realised until it's too late.

Dr Robert Hare, renowned authority on psychopathology, isn't mincing his words when he labels this different type of human an "intra-species predator." His book Without Conscience cites case studies where psychopaths absorbed all attempts to 'cure' them by engaging in psychotherapy to learn new and better ways of manipulating. He once submitted a paper to a scientific journal that included EEGs from several groups of adult men performing a language task. The editor of the journal returned the paper saying, "Those EEGs couldn't have come from real people." In a sense, they didn't. They were the EEGs of psychopaths.

"More and more data are leading to the conclusion that psychopathy has a biological basis, and has many features of a disease."

Sabine Herpertz, psychiatrist at the RWTH-Aachen University, Germany
Quoted from Into the Mind of a Killer - Nature magazine, 15 March, 2001

We unconsciously presume the universality of conscience, exposing ourselves to a predator that can exploit us in myriad ways by appealing to our conscience. Through their trademark pity ploy, psychopaths induct people to subvert the one distinguishing factor - conscience - against themselves! We are imprisoned in a web of guilt, shame and fear that is ultimately of our own making.

Psychopaths need rarely resort to violence to get what they want in one-on-one interactions; the most successful ones keep their murderous impulses in check until they reach the halls of power where opportunities arise for committing mass murder by proxy.

Naturally this can be difficult for some to acknowledge. We so desperately cling to a belief in the inherent goodness of everyone, leaving us blind to what is. But there exists a fundamental schism between our world and theirs that cannot be abridged. Martha Stout, in her seminal book The Sociopath Next Door, concludes that the "Presence or absence of conscience is a deep human division, arguably more significant than intelligence, race, or even gender."

For a long time I would not believe it: they cannot be cured. They do not see themselves as diseased. Rather, we are the disease, the cure for which is full-spectrum warfare levelled not against phantom enemies, but against us.

All it takes is a handful

In the macrosocial phenomenon we shall later call 'pathocracy', a certain hereditary anomaly isolated as 'essential psychopathy'(*) is catalytically and causatively essential for the genesis and survival of large scale social evil.

(*) Born psychopaths

Political Ponerology - p.31

Recognising their own, psychopaths rapidly ascend the social scale and cluster around the governing levers of society, from where their malevolent influence upon whole societies metastasises. 'Negative selection' ensues whereby they actively groom and position more psychopaths and other pathological deviants of lesser degree amenable to their ends until a critical number of persons with pathological disorders is reached and a Pathocracy is born.

Pathocracy survives thanks to the feeling of being threatened by the society of normal people, as well as by other countries wherein various forms of the system of normal man persist. For the rulers, staying on top is therefore the classic problem of "to be or not to be." Thus the biological, psychological, moral and economic destruction of the majority of normal people becomes, for the pathocrats, a 'biological' necessity.

Many means serve this end, starting with concentration camps and including warfare with an obstinate, well-armed foe who will devastate and debilitate the human power thrown at him, namely the very power jeopardizing pathocrats rule: the sons of normal man sent out to fight for an illusionary "noble cause." Once safely dead, the soldiers will then be decreed heroes to be revered in paeans, useful for raising a new generation faithful to the pathocracy and ever willing to go to their deaths to protect it.

Political Ponerology - p.146

Ultimately, they are terrified of the inherently creative nature of humanity. In their relentless drive to conquer this terror, they must subsume that which they cannot have by annihilating humanity, whose mere existence reminds them of their deficit daily.

They dream of a future in which they can revel according to their true nature without fear of persecution from 'those other people'. Government, media, corporations, education, intelligence agencies, ideologies, religions, social and political movements - nothing is immune to their influence and all are harnessed to their goal of world domination, unconsciously or otherwise. The only antidote to infection is knowledge of the disease and its pathodynamics.

It seems Mother Nature opted for species variety when in lieu of conscience, or rather, developmental-potential-towards-conscience, she endowed some with talents for preying on others' weaknesses. The collective traumatic experience of co-existence with our natural predator has finally brought our awareness to the brink of realising that we are not all human. Once awareness of the predator in our midst becomes widespread, the game is over. The psychopaths in power know this. Their shock tactics grow bolder in their urgency to complete the agenda.

None but ourselves can free our minds

With no conscience to impede their hate-fuelled trajectory, the onus is on us to disentangle ourselves from the web by taking responsibility for our own actions. By choosing to believe their lies which promise relief from the pain, we repeatedly surrender our responsibility and give our power away. Thusly we play our part in the genesis of evil. If we are to reclaim this power, we must recognise the predators for what they are, for both self and others.

For now, history is on our side. Each time pathocracy coalesces, it only has one place to go: down. Wishful thinking, the Achilles heel of the Global Pathocracy, suggests it will meet a similar fate. What remains to be seen is how long we will dance with the devil until we remember that our suffering ends when we turn to face Truth.

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