Sociopaths at the top - Wanda Arnold

Hound notes: Wanda Arnold wrote the following to me in relation to my article from this past Saturday, August 2, 2014 - The Master BSer

Thom, I want to share with you two articles I read yesterday along the same lines as your post. In the first by Paul Rosenberg on July 24, 2014, “They Walk among Us,” Rosenberg describes the sociopath. Two percent of the human population are sociopaths (psychopaths in the clinical literature). Of these 75% are male and 25% female. Plenty of research has been done on these people and it has been proven that they have different brains, thus their difference is organic and can’t be cured. The part of the brain associated with emotional reactions and decision making is abnormally small.

The sociopath cannot feel empathy for other people, thus they feel no remorse. To a sociopath, remorse is weakness. They can readily do whatever gets them what they want because they have no conscience. They understand that they are different and will try to hide this defect by faking emotion, but if you are alert you can detect that something is not quite right about their responses.

They are also excellent liars. They are so good at lying that often they pass lie detector tests. They do not have the internal feedback system that most people have. They never feel embarrassed. A sociopath will work in calculated ways to maintain other people’s good opinions of him and often maintain a group of people around them who believe wholeheartedly that he is a good, kind, honest person.

Like most people, I had the tendency to think that all people have some good in them, but now I see that while this is true of 98% of the population, there are those that have absolutely no good and should be thought of as evil. I was also unaware that there are so many sociopaths in the general population. We should expect one person in 50 to be this way.

The part of the article that really struck me was this: “Governments, like all hierarchies, are havens for sociopaths. And governments, over the last century, killed approximately 260 million people.” This is a rational explanation for those willing to send our young people to war for profit, who kill millions and call it “collateral damage,” the cowards who send drones to do the dirty work, the people who offshored all of our jobs for bigger profit and ruined the employment for Americans, the people who tax the poor and middle class but exempt themselves, the people who poison our food and water, the people who are destroying the American Constitution to pull more and more control into their own hands.

The second article explains why our government is currently in such a state. “No Matter Who Wins, a Sociopath Is Elected,” by Doug French, a contributing editor of the Doug Casey newsletter. He states the obvious, that politicians don’t seek office for the money. Most of them already have money. Even those who start with the best of intentions and are clearly outstanding in other fields of endeavor will soon see that success in politics will require lying, cheating, manipulating, stealing and killing. All ethics are suspended and good sense departs.

So why do these people seek office? Over-sized egos, desire for public adulation, control over other people, need for status, fame, recognition, attention…the ends justify the means. French goes on to say, “What Doug Casey calls the “moral rot” in Washington, DC and every statehouse around the country is due to, as Casey writes, ‘a certain class of people—sociopaths—being fully in control of major American institutions. Their beliefs and attitudes are insinuated throughout the economic, political, intellectual, and psychological/spiritual fabric of the US.’

So it won’t do us much good to naively search for just the “right candidate.” Maybe we need to concentrate on other ways to keep the sociopaths on the sidelines: small government, term limits, transparency, strict enforcement of the Bill of Rights, getting money out of politics, protection of whistleblowers, freedom of the Internet, and educational control at the local level.

In conclusion, we need to remember that 98% of the people around us are good people. We far outnumber the 2%. Only when we come to understand what the problem is (sociopaths are running our government at the top) can we begin to do something about it. Only when we refuse to cooperate with evil can any progress be made.