Sociopaths And Politics

Shining a Light on the Sociopaths in Politics

There are at least seven characteristics that define a sociopath, although I’m sure the list could be extended:

1. Sociopaths completely lack a conscience or any capacity for real regret about hurting people. Although they pretend the opposite.
2. Sociopaths put their own desires and wants on a totally different level from those of other people. Their wants are incommensurate. They truly believe their ends justify their means. Although they pretend the opposite.
3. Sociopaths consider themselves superior to everyone else, because they aren’t burdened by the emotions and ethics others have – they’re above all that. They’re arrogant. Although they pretend the opposite.
4. Sociopaths never accept the slightest responsibility for anything that goes wrong, even though they’re responsible for almost everything that goes wrong. You’ll never hear a sincere apology from them.
5. Sociopaths have a lopsided notion of property rights. What’s theirs is theirs, and what’s yours is theirs too. They therefore defend currency inflation and taxation as good things.
6. Sociopaths usually pick the wrong target to attack. If they lose their wallet, they kick the dog. If 16 Saudis fly planes into buildings, they attack Afghanistan.
7. Sociopaths traffic in disturbing news, they love to pass on destructive rumors, and they’ll falsify information to damage others.

They’re chronic, extremely convincing, and even enthusiastic liars, who often believe their own lies. That means they aren’t easy to spot, because normal people naturally assume another person is telling the truth. They rarely have handlebar mustaches or chortle like Snidely Whiplash. Instead, they cultivate a social veneer or a mask of sanity that diverts suspicion. You can rely on them to be “politically correct” in public. How could a congressman or senator who avidly supports charities possibly be a bad guy? How could someone who claims he just wants the U.S. to defend some foreign minority possibly be a warmonger? They’re expert at using facades to disguise reality, and they feel no guilt about it.

Political elites are primarily, and sometimes exclusively, composed of sociopaths. It’s not just that they aren’t normal human beings. They’re barely even human, a separate subspecies, differentiated by their psychological qualities. A normal human can mate with them spiritually and psychologically about as fruitfully as a modern human could mate physically with a Neanderthal; it can be done, but the results will be problematical.

It’s a serious problem when a society becomes highly politicized, as is now the case in the U.S. and Europe. In normal times, a sociopath stays under the radar. Perhaps he’ll commit a common crime when he thinks he can get away with it, but social mores keep him reined in. However, once the government changes its emphasis from protecting citizens from force to initiating force with laws and taxes, those social mores break down. Peer pressure, social approbation, and moral opprobrium, the forces that keep a healthy society orderly, are replaced by regulations enforced by cops and funded by taxes. Sociopaths sense this, start coming out of the woodwork, and are drawn to the State and its bureaucracies and regulatory agencies, where they can get licensed and paid to do what they’ve always wanted to do.

It’s very simple, really. There are two ways people can relate to each other: Voluntarily or coercively. The government is pure coercion, and sociopaths are drawn to its power and force.

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