Homestead mailing list

[bobf <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>]

Thanks Lynn, I had not yet heard that audio..  I ran across this essay on STR 
this am.  He has a line near the end in bold characters that made me chuckle. 
 I don't know if it will show bold on this cut and paste...

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
 

Why Does the World Feel Wrong?

by Will Groves

 

Consider these events:   

1.  A president who started two aggressive wars, who bears responsibility for 
the loss of thousands of American lives along with hundreds of thousands of 
Iraqi and Afghan lives, leaves office as a free man without a felony record 
or any negative repercussions. 

2.  Meanwhile, the same populace that has intimate experience with lying 
politicians appears utterly smitten with a smooth-talking new president 
promising change and demanding sacrifice. 

3.  The Congress, which had an approval rate of 14% and which just passed a 
$700 billion bailout over the objections of a majority of Americans, had a 
re-election rate exceeding 95%. 

4.  Untold millions of Americans voice support of military troops as these 
very people are needlessly killed, injured, and separated from their families 
and productive work at home. 

5.  A general populace believed that buying unproductive assets, like 
housing, could make them wealthy, forever, without any coherent explanation 
why. 

6.  Researchers who pursue alternative explanations for AIDS and cancer get 
their funding cut and have the results of their research squelched, while 
others who try to improve life by providing healthful foods find themselves 
under attack.   

Overt criminality by leaders and passive, unclear thinking by the proles have 
become the norm.  The two go together, creating a symbiotic ecosystem of 
tyranny.  Fraud, theft, and murder have become widespread, just as the scale 
of lies told and believed have reached new heights.  Irresponsibility has 
become socialized while people in the honest pursuit of good get thwarted.    

Those of us who want little more than peace and freedom don’t run the world.  
Pursuing freedom contradicts controlling others, so we can reason that people 
who pursue power have some motivations separate from our own.   

I have not fully comprehended the implications of this until recently.   
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I had assumed that the people who 
wield power feel similarly about moral issues as I do—I just couldn’t see why 
they commit and justify unethical behavior.  I already knew that states 
operate according to a code that the rest of us don’t follow in our own 
lives.  Nevertheless, I assumed that a man who acts without regard to moral 
laws must feel guilty about it.  Then, one day, I stumbled onto this idea:  
Suppose he doesn’t.      

With only small ambitions, he probably behaves like a common criminal, a 
predator.  He lies to gain advantage, uses force to get his way, and steals 
without conscience.  Not feeling guilty about unethical behavior motivates 
him to instigate further criminal acts.   

Small crime operations have one big problem, namely, the risk of getting 
caught.  The prospect of prison appears unappealing, yet even with the high 
likelihood of arrest and capture during a career, common criminals approach 
their field with little sophistication and often pay the price.  Other 
like-minded people see ways to avoid these problems.  Just as normal people 
develop interests growing up and figure out how to pursue them at higher 
levels, a criminal mind can do the same.  With greater intelligence and 
patience, he can pursue an ambitious career of criminality.  With this 
objective in sight, one can easily see the state as the most expedient means 
to accomplish it.   

Once a criminal joins forces with the state by becoming an employee, he can 
lie to his advantage, use force to get his way, and steal without conscience, 
just as the small-time operator does.  The opportunities for mischief have no 
limits through thoughtful job selection.  For example, if a man took pleasure 
in making innocent people squirm, he could become a police officer and plant 
evidence.  For another, if he wanted to murder people, he could become a 
military officer and “accidentally” call in the coordinates of a house he’d 
like to see bombed.  Whatever they do, the state shields them from the 
natural consequences of their actions.  In all likelihood, if smart, they 
never get caught, never get punished, and probably get commended.   

Too often, I have assumed that the people working for the state take the jobs 
only because of the easy hours and good pay, benefits, and retirement.  For 
the predator, though, it offers all these things with the appetizing fringe 
benefit of satisfying their criminal urges without the risk of retribution.   
 

It turns out this personality type has a scientific name:  psychopathic.  
Lest you think I merely kid you, I quote from Scientific American:   

Superficially charming, psychopaths tend to make a good first impression on 
others and often strike observers as remarkably normal. Yet they are 
self-centered, dishonest and undependable, and at times they engage in 
irresponsible behavior for no apparent reason other than the sheer fun of it. 
Largely devoid of guilt, empathy and love, they have casual and callous 
interpersonal and romantic relationships. Psychopaths routinely offer excuses 
for their reckless and often outrageous actions, placing blame on others 
instead. They rarely learn from their mistakes or benefit from negative 
feedback, and they have difficulty inhibiting their impulses.   

This seems like a nearly perfect description of those who seek political 
power.  That same article goes on to say that fields over-represented by 
psychopaths may include “politics, business and entertainment. Yet the 
scientific evidence for this intriguing conjecture is preliminary.”  It turns 
out that much stronger evidence for this exists than the article lets on.    

In the book Political Ponerology, Andrew Lobaczewski claims that about 6% of 
the people within a population have psychopathic characters.  The 
implications of this, which he recognized soon after World War II, stagger 
the mind.  Moreover, he suggests that another 12% of the population has high 
susceptibility to psychopathic thought.  In a world dominated by hierarchical 
structures, these people sieze control of the key positions and create a 
so-called “pathocracy.”  Lobaczewski continues, writing in ways that clearly 
anticipate the current reality:   

Within this [pathocratic] system, the common man is blamed for not having 
been born a psychopath, and is considered good for nothing except hard work, 
fighting and dying to protect a system of government he can neither 
sufficiently comprehend nor ever consider to be his own. An 
ever-strengthening network of psychopathic and related individuals gradually 
starts to dominate, overshadowing the others.   

Normal people have not considered the possibility that some people who seem 
ordinary could have no moral inhibitions.  They default to believing that 
their leaders have good intentions.  Employees of psychopaths thus carry out 
plans of their bosses blinded to the reality.  No matter the scope of the 
“failure,” the leadership can always point back to their stated good 
intentions and shield themselves from the gallows.  In fact, the more harm 
they create, the stronger the call becomes to vest more power in their failed 
agency so they can “prevent” anything of the sort from ever happening again.  
 

Their MO focuses on figuring out how much they can get away with, and we see 
no signs they have begun to approach the limits the public will accept.  
Irrespective of the ordeals they create, the vast majority of people give 
them the benefit of the doubt time and time again and continue in their 
support of the system.  This belief among good people led to the democide of 
the 20th Century that continues unabated today.   

After considering the possibility that psychopaths have taken control of 
society, we find volumes of evidence to support the hypothesis.  Did Hitler, 
Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot sympathize with their victims or have any sense of 
guilt?  More recently, among Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, or Clinton , can 
we point to one who even exhibits a façade resembling normality?  Obviously 
not—these lists name one person after another who has zero accountability to 
a rational morality.  If people like this could make their way to the highest 
levels of power, what does that say about lower offices?   

It suggests people like this have control over the levers of power 
everywhere.  We live at a time when the population at large cannot achieve 
its wants, yet few seem to know why.  As one example, polls consistently 
indicate that educational matters concern the public, yet decade after 
decade, schooling gets quantitatively worse.  What a mystery!  Evidently, if 
we believe our well-meaning masters, 2,000 years of Western civilization has 
not yet determined effective ways to transmit key knowledge to younger 
generations.   However, what happens if we suspend our belief in their 
benevolence for a moment and consider other possibilities?  If schools fail 
to achieve their stated goals over several decades, might some groups see 
this as a success?   

Inhibiting critical thinking in the masses obviously benefits the state and 
psychopaths.  When overtly self-serving, irresponsible, illegal, immoral, 
irrational behavior gets treated as normal, we can conclude that the 
educational system works quite well for our masters.  I have given but one 
example, yet the multitude of state functions exists to provide every variety 
of psychopathic interest with a job.  Moreover, we should consider that the 
state not only acts like a recruitment center for psychopaths, but that 
psychopaths probably invented the state to take advantage of the rest of us.  
I can give you no better explanation for the existence of an organization 
that fails in every ethical dimension and invokes psychopathic thinking at 
every turn than this.   

Our battle for liberty appears not just as a conflict between those who want 
freedom versus those who want control, but instead as the battle between 
normal people and the psychopaths.  I have found incredible explanatory power 
of our world within the psychopathic hypothesis:  The world feels wrong 
because psychopaths run it.  In a country trained to discount and ridicule 
all ideas more than a standard deviation from the average, coherent 
explanations of observable social phenomena don’t get much press.   Without 
understanding physical laws, we would never have gained the massive 
improvements in our quality of life from technological developments.  
Similarly, without understanding our social systems, we will never escape 
from the tyranny unleashed on us by psychopaths.  We should spread the word 
and explore this rich vein of thought with vigor. 


 
 

Will Groves is an old-school craftsman who knows good work when he sees it.   
  


--------------------------------------------------------------------- 



--- On Fri, 2/6/09, Lynn Wigglesworth <lynnw1366 AT hotmail.com> wrote:

> From: Lynn Wigglesworth <lynnw1366 AT hotmail.com>
> Subject: [Homestead] For Revolutionaries
> To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
> Date: Friday, February 6, 2009, 7:00 AM
> More from Ron Paul.
> 
> http://www.campaignforliberty.com/index.php
>