Four to five percent of the population is born without a capacity for empathy. It is a neurological lack. A psychopath may be a genius and become a multimillionaire, but he will never be able to understand empathetic values. In fact, because of the grandiosity of these personalities and consequent intense denial they have toward their shortcomings, they are arguably less capable of understanding empathy than a congenitally deaf person is of understanding music. Their minds are closed. Psychopaths treat the empathetic majority as the defective ones and seek relentlessly to remake the world in their own image, to proselytize their viewpoint and values and to "teach" their "defective" empathetic fellows to think like them.
Unfortunately, they can. A psychopath can never learn to think like an empathetic person. The functioning brain tissue is just not there. But people with a normal capacity for empathy can turn off that capacity and think like psychopaths.
To a certain extent, the empathetic do this as a matter of evolution. As studies of war, racism and genocide indicate, humans draw what Martha Stout called circles of empathy. They behave empathetically toward those in the circle and psychopathically toward those outside the circle. However, we are not hardwired for xenophobic violence like chimps. For us it is a function of learning and culture.
Normally empathetic human beings need linguistic cues to switch to psychopathy mode. The alarm cry of the animal world morphed into the language of demonizing hate. The ancient Greeks and the Founders of our country understood the devastating destructiveness of the language of demonizing hate, particularly to democracies. They called the charismatic psychopaths who excelled at its practice "demagogues." More recently, neuroscience has provided evidence how demonizing hate radically alters the way the human brain processes information, making subjects immune to reason, increasingly intolerant and even violent and easily manipulated. Most tragically, there is a drug-like pleasure aspect to this process. Subjects in its grip mistake this pleasure for proof they are right and righteous when the opposite is the case.
This call to demonizing hate is supplemented by ideologies that substitute psychopathic values for compassionate values, including the remaking of accepted ideologies by gutting their compassionate content. Basically, the forces of compassion create the institutions and articulate the values and beliefs that advance civilization, and then the forces of psychopathy work relentlessly to take over those institutions and values and remake them in their own image and to their own advantage. This ideological tug of war is an essential dynamic underlying history and the rise and fall of civilizations.
The calling card of the psychopathic value system is its Manichean worldview -- idealized me versus demonized him, idealized us versus demonized them, reflecting the Echo-Other worldview of the pathological narcissist, of which psychopaths are the most pathological subset.
This relentless effort to supplant empathetic values with psychopathic values is blatantly evident in the rightwing campaign to convince people that Adam Smith and Ayn Rand share the same beliefs. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Ayn Rand's Objectivism is basically a how-to manual designed to teach a normal person to think like a psychopath. First, Objectivism teaches the pupil the basic thinking of the pathological narcissist, to regard his own viewpoint as absolute, objective reality and any other person's viewpoint, to the extent it conflicts, as a figment, a fantasy that he need not consider at all. Objectivism then proceeds to "elevate" the pupil to true malignant narcissism by demonizing "altruism" -- Rand's term of art for all the empathetic values -- and lionizing sadism.
Adam Smith was a deeply compassionate moral philosopher whose other great work besides The Wealth of Nations was The Theory of Moral Sentiments. His concept of the free market was not at all that of Ayn Rand or other laissez-faire advocates. Adam Smith did not regard an unregulated market as a true free market: the ruthless and powerful would quickly rig it. Like the Founders, Smith worked to expand and secure the rights of the less powerful. Though Smith and the Founders were minimalists as to government power -- what's the least amount and type of government power necessary to achieve desirable and legitimate ends -- they were not anarchists. And they did not go to so much trouble to articulate and defend the rights of ordinary citizens and to design governments that would protect the rights of those ordinary citizens only to throw those citizens and their rights under the bus in the face of the abuse of private power.
One problem we have in this study is that Smith and the Founders wrote and worked a century or more before the founding of modern psychology and psychiatry. The words "empathy" and "altruism" did not yet exist, although the concept embodied in those terms, in the form of the Golden Rule, is as old as human nature and appears in almost all cultures and religions. The language with which they spoke of these values is somewhat different than the contemporary idiom and this has posed some obstacles to scholarship. It is not difficult to overcome and it must be overcome. This minor linguistic obstacle has also unfortunately provided the advocates of the psychopathic worldview with another advantage.
This difference between the deeply empathetic values of Adam Smith and the flagrantly psychopathic values of Ayn Rand is also reflected in devastating changes in this country's business culture, particularly in the structures and values of the management of our largest corporate enterprises.
The executives of the Greatest Generation, forged by their experiences in the Great Depression and World War II, were much more compassionate. The structures of corporate governance were built on a system of checks and balances that reflected the institutions of democratic governance. Truly independent boards of directors, empowered shareholders and union-empowered employees acted as a check on management. Liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, the executives of the Greatest Generation believed they were building a great nation, not just great companies, and that they had a responsibility to use their power to make this a better nation for all its people, not just line their pockets. Though we started from a much poorer place, the morality of their leadership helped make possible exponential growth in both prosperity and civil rights that uplifted the middle class, the working class and the poor.
By contrast, today's large corporations are run like banana republics by tin-pot dictators. The checks and balances are gone. The replacement of the Greatest Generation's empathetic values with psychopathic values is evident in the manner in which executive salaries have skyrocketed past all possible justification while rank and file wages and benefits have been eviscerated and jobs ruthlessly outsourced. The devastation they have wrought on lives and communities is further exacerbated by their relentless corruption of government at all levels into a kleptocratic source of revenue. They have become intolerable parasites.
And it is all empowered and reinforced by an ideological juggernaut of psychopathic values and the media machinery of demonizing hate -- the very demagoguery that Plato's Republic and the Federalist Papers warned us would destroy our republic.
The contemporary right has also relinquished any claim to represent the original intent of the Constitution, because they are traitors to its value system.
Whenever I despair, I remember that the way of truth and love has always won. There may be tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they may seem invincible, but in the end, they always fail. Think of it: always. Mohandas K. Gandhi
Time wounds all heels. John Lennon
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I think you are confusing rational egoism with egotism.
All of Rand's political ideas come from the idea that the initiation of physical force is immoral.
Your article makes you look very funny.
"Eventually, as a society, we should perhaps consider making psychopathy screening mandatory before any politician or public servant presents his/her candidacy for office, any military recruits are enlisted, and before any candidates to any position of power that has any public influence are even considered. In the same way we would not allow a color-blind person to safely work, for example, as an air-traffic controller (since the inability to discern certain colors would put large numbers of unsuspecting people at high risk for disaster...), society probably shouldn't let a clinically-diagnosed psychopath be in a position of power (again, don't give the pyromaniac the matches or put a pedophile in charge of the day-care center)."
from http://www.corbettreport.com/articles/20090706_ponerology.htm
Some good overviews of psychopathy for those interested in learning more:
http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=28940
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/10/081110fa_fact_seabrook
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy
http://www.fraud-magazine.com/article.aspx?id=404&terms=hare
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA9-RB3runE&feature=related
These ideas have really been a revelation to me, it describes so precisely what is happening in our society. With a few simple changes we could literally have a more peaceful world overnight.
Patrick
http://www.ponerology.com/
I'm uncomfortable with the terms "psychopath" or sociopath. I do think some people involved in the "tougher", "meaner" kind of politics may be straight-up sociopaths, but I think a lot of people with other mental disorders are attracted to a simplified world view of pure competition, pure egotism, and the Wisdom of the Marketplace, and so forth.
I don't know the answer, but I think you are starting to get a little handle on the question. It's just so offputting to call your opponents psychopaths -- however much explanatory power that happens to have.
This one is put up by Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig: http://www.callaconvention.org
This site is a national group: http://www.foavc.org
This is the database of state applications for the Article V Convention, all fifty have applied, and thus according to the rule of law, it's currently mandated: http://foavc.org/file.php/1/Amendments
Here are some articles by Justices Van Sickle and Brennan on the subject:
http://www.foa5c.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=163
http://www.foa5c.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=165
http://www.foa5c.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=166
At the opposite end of the scale from Goedel's nit-picky "I still don't know exactly what you mean" way of relating, are the empathetic humans who DO know just what you mean, often with little elaboration. So why did humans evolve empathy, and sympathy, and co-operation?
In my research on psychopaths I have noticed they never really "invent" anything new. Their inability to resonate with other people, creatures and nature itself prevents them from coming up with something new. Newton stands on the shoulders of giants, Einstein the great humanitarian, just as a climbing ivy can't grow to the top of the house if it's an annual, but it can if it's a perennial.
Many years ago someone came up with the idea of "pay me money and tell me your secrets while you're alive and I'll guarantee you an easy time while you're dead." The psychos have seized on that invented congame and milked it ever since. But other than thinking up ways to steal and poison, the psychopaths are a remarkably uncreative lot. It's because they can't relate.
Rand's Objectivism is not your father's philosophy - it is a fascinating, subtle synthesis of many fields, among them psychology, cognitive science, and economics. It takes time to understand it - time that most writers (such as this one) do not bother to expend. The truly open-minded will go to the source to find out what she really said. Given this article, this would not be a bad place to start: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/altruism.html.
Also, Rand's theory of objectivism is, psychologically speaking, a flat earth theory. Since Rand wrote, psychology has moved light years in its understanding of bias and other distortions affecting our perceptions. Rand's concept of objectivity is a non-existent entity. Time to consider the new evidence and move on.
So he valued his family more than travelling? This is perfectly in line with Objectivist thought. As an Ayn Rand fan, I take umbrage to you saying I am a psycopath and have no empathy for my family, my friends, my neighbours, those WHOM I VALUE. You want me to value every crack addicted, overweight, unemployed deadbeat the same as I would my loved ones? Why do you want to force me to sacrifice my property to people I do not know? Your Forced Altruism is a cancer on individual freedom.
Roger Zimmerman Had it 100% correct:
"The author claims that Rand used "altruism" as a catch all for "all the empathic values". This is wrong. She used the term as it was defined by its philosophical originator - Auguste Compte - to mean "sacrifice of a higher value to a lower one"
You probably read this and have Zero empathy for my position, Thanks!
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WOW
Talk about a total reversal of the idea you are supposedly describing! In Objectivism, it is objective reality and reason which are absolutes, and your own personal viewpoint is to be reexamined and reevaluated whenever it is found to conflict with either. You either have no understanding of the ideas you feebly attempt to bash, or you are intentionally slandering them. Either way, this is just plain pathetic.
When a human under an MRI machine is asked to recount an emotional experience, emotional centers of their brain light up. When a diablo is asked, areas that deal with the processing of math and logic problems light up.
So if you want to test if someone is a diablo, ask them in public to recount the time when they were most hurt, or most humiliated, or felt most deeply another's pain. They will give an obviously phony answer.
I've gone to Tea Party rallies and the Calif. Republican Convention to talk about what empathy means to the participants there.. Most all say they value empathy. We need to engage more in this conversation with republicans and dialogue about the importance of empathy.
here's a video of me at a heated demonstration asking people about empathy. On the side bar are links to the Tea party and GOP videos on empathy I took.
http://cultureofempathy.com/Projects/Interviews/2010-07-19-Walnut-Creek/Index.htm
Gloria Steinem say 'empathy is the most revolutionary feeling. and the ends are the means.'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YOspcDAbxE
Hate speech doesn't convert normal people into complete psychopaths. As Martha Stout observed, hate speech makes them draw the circle of empathy tightly around them while denying it to those outside the circle. It is the drawing of that circle tighter and tighter, and demonizing those outside that circle that turns them into a lethal force for converting a democracy into a dictatorship.
Stout's circle of empathy also accounts for Hannah Arendt's thesis - the Banality of Evil - how ordinary, seemingly decent people could be drawn into being cogs in an evil machine.
I visited Dachau in 1971, with a spontaneous group from the Munich youth hostel - including a Pakistani Muslim & an Indian Hindu - best friends just old enough to remember the violent partition of their countries - and a group of Burmese Muslims who had fled after the military junta killed many of their fellow students. On the way we walked through tidy suburbs old enough to have been there when the camp was an active killing field. Later on, I watched the Muslim and Hindu best friends weep as we watched the documentary on the injustice done the Jews. Each of these smart, vibrant, strapping young men stared straight ahead, arms folded across brawny young chests, as if in fear the other would see him weeping and without any awareness that his friend was weeping too.
The next year, at the Munich Olympics, Palestinian terrorists kidnapped and killed unarmed Israeli athletes.
I think the flip commenters who pick out some pat political stance as the cause and/or solution are entirely off the mark. I think we are, most of us, like the proverbial wife who is the last to see what is happening under her very nose, and even fewer of us will find the insight and strength of character to preserve the marriage and make it better than ever. Rather, most will remain deluded, in denial, or raging at ghosts and scapegoats, bent on destruction which turns out to be self-destruction.
It is most brave of the author to speak. Let us hope that the nation is listening.