Monthly Archives: March 2017
Evil is a Point of View
“Evil is a point of view. We are immortal. And what we have before us are the rich feasts that conscience cannot appreciate and mortal men cannot know without regret. God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves, dark angels not confined to the stinking limits of hell but wandering His earth and all its kingdoms.”
Anne Rice, Interview With the Vampire, spoken by Lestat
“I am evil with infinite gradations and without guilt.”
Anne Rice, Interview With the Vampire, spoken by Armand
“But some ‘anti-psychiatrists,’ notably Thomas Szasz, would argue that mental illness is itself a myth; and that therefore terms such as ‘sociopath’ and ‘Antisocial Personality Disorder’ are themselves just moral judgments disguised as empirically verifiable psychiatric disorders. ‘We call people mentally ill,’ argues Szasz, ‘when their personal conduct violates certain ethical, political, and social norms.’ Is this view correct? Is calling someone a sociopath, or saying that the person has Antisocial Personality Disorder, merely a concealed way of calling the person evil?”
Elliot D. Cohen
“Most especially, the term (character disorder) has been used to reflect those aspects of an individual’s personality that indicate the degree to which his or her personality traits reflect socially desirable qualities such as self-control, ethics, loyalty, fortitude, etc. So, the term ‘character’ generally refers to the extent of one’s virtuousness and social conscientiousness.”
George Simon
Imagine my surprise the first time I saw psychopathy and narcissism described as character disorders instead of personality disorders. I started wondering what is happening to the “science” or psychiatry/psychology. Have these fields gone back to theology from whence they came? Psychology was supposed to remove the moral judgement from behavior by explaining it as a “sickness” or “condition.” Now they are signs of bad character again? What’s going on?
Once societies were very homogenic. Everyone practices the same religion (or were outcasts). When society became more diverse, “truth” also became more problematic. Different values were claiming legitimacy and we were told not to judge other cultures. Of course, that only came about after some bloody wars as society tried to remain homogeneous. Finally, they realized they didn’t have to all be Catholic or protestant or Muslim. But there were core values that most people seemed to accept.
Medical science deals with the difference between a healthy body and a sick one. There isn’t much dispute about what health looks like. Healthy people feel good and function well. Sickness is whatever interferes with that state of health. It’s pretty easy to recognize sickness when it strikes.
Medical science has expanded to cover the human psyche. Sickness and health are more complicated in this realm. We usually agree on what is a healthy body. But we have less consensus on what is a healthy psyche. Of course, there are phenomena that are clearly examples of an unhealthy psyche. For example, schizophrenia makes people often unable to function and most have said that psychosis didn’t feel good at all. In the realm of sanity, there are phenomena called neurosis which involve impairment of functioning and a certain degree of discomfort.
Psychiatry has also defined what it calls personality disorders. They are divided into three categories or clusters, A, known as the weird cluster, B, known as the dramatic cluster and C, the anxious cluster. People with these disorders usually suffer to some degree although some don’t feel that anything is wrong. Some people feel discomforted by behavior of people with certain “disorders” and much of what is written concerns “spotting” these people, defending oneself against them and recovering from “abuse” by these people. Here, subtly or not so subtly the people with the disorder become the problem rather than the disorder being a problem for them.
Some writers, some of them psychiatrists, have started referring to character disorders. Dr. George Simon writes, “The word ‘character’ derives from both French and Greek words meaning to engrave or furrow a distinctive mark. The word has been used to denote the most distinguishing traits of an individual that define or ‘mark’ them as a person. Most especially, the term has been used to reflect those aspects of an individual’s personality that indicate the degree to which his or her personality traits reflect socially desirable qualities such as self-control, ethics, loyalty, fortitude, etc. So, the term ‘character’ generally refers to the extent of one’s virtuousness and social conscientiousness.” This is getting dangerously close to moral judgment rather than medical analysis.
When psychiatry started, “bad behavior” was explained as representing an illness or malfunction in the person and was intended as an alternative to moral judgement. Now, it seems to have gone full circle and is saying, “yes, these people are evil after all.” Some folks are relieved to see things brought back to morality. They never felt comfortable with letting bad people off with the excuse that they are “sick.” Others divide the condition from behavior. In other words, someone may be a pedophile, have sexual feelings for children but, unless he acts on it, he is not evil. This is oddly reminiscent of a solution offered to “homosexuals” by Christians. It’s alright to be gay as long as you don’t practice your proclivities.
I notice that most articles about “character disorder” are by George Simon so his views can 
be taken as his own, individual opinion, not the voice of psychiatry, per se.
Neurotics have well-developed and overactive consciences (i.e. superegos), whereas disordered characters have consciences that are under-developed and impaired. Neurotics have a huge sense of right and wrong and always want to do the right thing. They often set standards for themselves that are so high they’re virtually impossible to meet, causing themselves a significant amount of stress. They tend to judge themselves overly harshly when they fail to meet expectations. They take on inordinate burdens, proverbially carrying the “weight of the world” on their shoulders. When something goes wrong, they quickly ask themselves what more they can do to help make a situation better.
Most disturbed characters don’t hear that little voice in their heads that urge most of us to do right or admonish most of us when we’re contemplating doing wrong. They don’t “push” themselves to take on responsibilities and don’t “arrest” themselves when they want something they shouldn’t have. Any qualms of conscience they might experience can be eliminated with great ease. In the most severe disturbances of character (i.e. the psychopath or sociopath), conscience is not simply weak, underdeveloped, or flawed, but can be absent altogether.
So the crux of “character disorder” for George Simon seems to be lack of conscience (or diminished one). I explored this in my Free to Choose blog post. The fact that psychopaths don’t have a conscience and are therefore free to do whatever we want really scares people. But they don’t realize the don’t always want to do the worst possible things.
People seem to feel safer when they know others are restrained by the straight jacket of conscience. Strange they should think that since people with consciences have done such atrocious things. Conscience or no conscience, society condemns some behavior. I guess it’s just self-preservation. We tend to condemn anything that threatens us.
Links
- Science Has Limits: A few things that science does not do
- Are Evil People Crazy? by Elliot D. Cohen
- Am I Evil? by yours truly
- What is Character Disorder? by George Simon
- Neurotics vs. Character Disorder? George Simon
Character - Free to Choose. by yours truly
- Political Ponerology. Andrew M. Lobaczewski
- Simon Sez. “Morality” vs. Science.
Beware of Scapegoating
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could discover one cause of all the pain and discord in the world? Then all we would have to do is route it out. Not that people haven’t tried to find the single root problem. In the 18th Century, a nefarious little document called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was published in Russia. This work of fiction convinced masses of ordinary people that the Jews were behind all their problems. Another antisemitic conspiracy theory involves the Rothschild family. The Rothschilds are and have long been a very wealthy family. In the 19th Century, they were the richest. Now they have to share that distinction with other wealthy families, such as the Waltons, the Kochs, the Rockefellers. Yet we still hear, ad nauseum, about the Rothschilds. They are blamed for all the economic woes of mankind. Another conspiracy theory popular on the internet is of the Illuminati, a group that existed in Bavaria in the 18th Century to resist the clerical forces of its time and have not existed for many years (unless someone decides to name a group after them for the glamor of it all).
Someone to Blame
I won’t bore you with an exhaustive list of all the conspiracy theories. Just pointing out that people have long sought to find a single cause for misery. The theory this blog is concerned with is not as popular as the ones above but is very energetically being promoted. The cause of human misery, asserts this theory, is the psychopath. Since psychopaths are thought to consist of only 1% of the population, we must be a very powerful and resourceful little group to 
have accomplished so much. BEWARE THE PSYCHOPATH, MY SON appears in today’s, March 9, 2017, issue of The Psychopathic Times, published by Tina Taylor. The article was written in 2015 by Clinton Callahan but republished. It is “extracted” from two other articles, The Twilight of the Psychopaths by Kevin Barrett and The Trick of the Psychopath’s Trade: Make Us Believe that Evil Comes from Others by Silvia Cattori. He also references Political Ponerology (a science of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes).
Without further ado, let us go through the first captioned article and see how the theory works. “Why, no matter how much intelligent goodwill exists in the world, is there so much war, suffering and injustice?” asks the author(s). The answer is not that mankind has defects and human nature often defeats many noble plants. No. “The answer is that civilization, as we know it, is largely the creation of psychopaths.” We created civilization? That’s a lot of credit to give us. Psychopaths took humanity out of the primordial slime into fancy high-rises? Psychopaths built civilizations that gave birth to the works of Shakespeare? Beethoven? How did we do it? “Psychopaths have played a disproportionate role in the development of civilization, 
because they are hard-wired to lie, kill, cheat, steal, torture, manipulate, and generally inflict great suffering on other humans without feeling any remorse, in order to establish their own sense of security through domination.” So civilization was created by lying, cheating, stealing, torture and manipulation? Many anthropologists think otherwise. They would credit mankind’s ability to cooperate. “The inventor of civilization – the first tribal chieftain who successfully brainwashed an army of controlled mass murderers – was almost certainly a genetic psychopath.”
It doesn’t seem as if our author knows much about primitive tribes. One of the most primitive available to modern man for study is the aborigines of Australia. But these were the most peaceful people one could imagine. Their society was non-hierarchical. Theft was unknown to these people. They could leave a possession unguarded without worry. It was only after a surplus was achieved that hierarchy and all the discord that goes with it first emerged. At least that’s what experts say. 
I’m not an expert. However, it does make sense that hierarchy could only exist when there is something to hoard and stockpile. As long as a tribe only gathered enough to survive, there was no way someone could take more than his share. It could have endangered the tribe. Experiments on animals have shown that the ability to own more than one needs at a time can change non-human animals as well. Chimps who learned how to operate a vending machine with tokens began to hoard the tokens. They also developed ulcers and other symptoms of anxiety.
| Meanwhile, the Twilight of Psychopaths book adds this pithy observation: “So-called conspiracy theorists, some of whom deserve the pejorative connotation of that much-abused term, often imagine that secret societies of Jews, Jesuits, bankers, communists, Bilderbergers, Muslim extremists, papists, and so on, are secretly controlling history, doing dastardly deeds, and/or threatening to take over the world. As a leading “conspiracy theorist” according to Wikipedia, I feel eminently qualified to offer an alternative conspiracy theory which, like the alternative conspiracy theory of 9/11, is both simpler and more accurate than the prevailing wisdom: The only conspiracy that matters is the conspiracy of the psychopaths against the rest of us.” So how come I’ve never been invited to any of those meetings?
Oh. I see. You have to join Skull and Bones first: “Consider how gangs and secret societies (psychopaths’ guilds in disguise) recruit new members. Some criminal gangs and satanist covens demand that candidates for admission commit a murder to “earn their stripes.” Skull and Bones, the Yale-based secret society that supplies the CIA with drug-runners, mind-rapists, child abusers and professional killers, requires neophytes to lie naked in a coffin and masturbate in front of older members while reciting the candidate’s entire sexual history.” But this gets even better. “If ‘love’ is embedded in the Revolution Ron Paul heralds, that is because Dr. Paul — a kindly, soft-spoken physician who has delivered more than 4,000 babies — implicitly recognizes that government is the invention and tool of psychopaths, and therefore must be strictly limited in scope and subjected to a rigorous system of checks and balances, lest the psychopath’s tools, fear and hatred, replace love as the glue that binds society together.” That “kindly” Ron Paul would deprive every poor American of health care. |
The author acknowledges, “The terrorism of searching through hierarchies for 
anyone deviating from normal is no different from witch hunts or Inquisitions. You must remember that hierarchies thrive on such low dramas, torturing victims until they confess to evil beliefs. Not so long ago the church and state ongoingly acquired significant income and property through witch hunts and Inquisitions. This continued for over two hundred and fifty years. Ten generations of Europeans understood pogrom as normal life. Let us not return to that nightmare. Testing for normal is guaranteed to backfire in our face. There is no normal. But there is conscience.” No. They won’t torture us into confessing our psychopathy. But they are still looking for those without conscience. He happens to know exactly how to find us.
Today, thanks to new information technologies, we are on the brink of unmasking the psychopaths and building a civilization of, by and for the healthy human being – a civilization without war, a civilization based on truth, a civilization in which the saintly few rather than the diabolical few would gravitate to positions of power. We already have the knowledge necessary to diagnose psychopathic personalities and keep them out of power. We have the knowledge necessary to dismantle the institutions in which psychopaths especially flourish – militaries, intelligence agencies, large corporations, and secret societies. We simply need to disseminate this knowledge, and the will to use it, as widely and as quickly as possible.
It seems there’s an application available to those who use Apple which can be downloaded for a price. It is described as a: “Psychopath detector tool. This simple tool will help you identify psychopaths around you. If you have a suspicion that someone you know — your boyfriend/girlfriend or boss — may have psychopathic tendencies, use this tool and answer the following 15 simple questions as best as you can.” Gosh! We ‘paths better watch out! In lieu of that, there’s always the good old brain scan. Armed with these tools, the article insists that humanity finally has the ability to rid itself of our menace. “If the 
general voting public is not aware that there exists a category of people we sometimes perceive as almost human,” (!almost human?!) “who look like us, who work with us, who are found in every race, every culture, speaking every language, but who are lacking conscience, how can the general public take care to block them from taking over the hierarchies? General ignorance of psychopathology may prove to be the downfall of civilization. We stand by like grazing sheep as political / corporate elites throw armies of our innocent sons and daughters against fabricated enemies as a way of generating trillions in profits, vying against each other for pathological hegemony.”
So the public can somehow enact a law to force all people in authority to take a brain scan in order to get rid of the psychopaths? How do they propose to do that? If Congress is already in the hands of psychopaths, how can they get them to pass such a law? Do you think the ACLU will stand by idly and allow such a witch hunt to take place? Yes, it still is a witch hunt even if the tools of detection of the witches are 100% accurate. However, “if psychopaths dominate political hierarchies, is it any wonder that peaceful demonstrations have zero impact on the outcome of political decisions?” But if peaceful demonstrations “have zero impact,” what does he propose?
Only when the 75% of humanity with a healthy conscience come to understand that we have a natural predator, a group of people who live amongst us, viewing us as powerless victims to be freely fed upon for achieving their inhuman ends, only then will we take the fierce and immediate actions needed to defend what is preciously human. Psychological deviants have to be removed from any position of power over people of conscience, period. People must be made aware that such individuals exist and must learn how to spot them and their manipulations. The hard part is that one must also struggle against those tendencies to mercy and kindness in oneself in order not to become prey.
Well, I guess we’re safe. When has 75% of the population ever agreed on anything. In case Mr. Callahan has failed to notice, people are deeply stupid. They are manipulated by the system whether that system was created by psychopaths or not. White supremacy is a very powerful tool for keeping the idiots in line. As long as someone is lower than (this idiot), the system is worth defending. What has been the greatest fear in passing generalized healthcare? That someone with less might grab more of the goodies that are available in only limited amount. We have only to look at the result of the election to see that. If only 1% of the population are psychopaths and (Callahan estimates) 6% have some psychopathic traits and work with the pure psychos than white and male supremacy can’t just be psychos!
Callahan wisely omitted the bizarre claims from Twilight enclosed in the table. Good idea. Because he might be accused of wearing a “mask of sanity,” himself.
The cure is worse than the disease. I agree that society is very wrongheaded. Blaming it on psychopaths is not only wrong. It is a ludicrous form of scapegoating. No! Jews are not the problem. Nor is the Illuminati. And nor is it psychopaths.
Links
- Mythbusting psychopathy (Part I), by James
- Mythbusting psychopathy (Part II), by James
- Psychopaths: The Jews of Today
- She’s Got the Blood of Reptile. Why do people hate reptiles?
- The War of the Sexes. Is dating a psychopath “lovefraud?”
- A Psychopath’s Guide to Haters. Haters gonna hate…
Monsters
Nothing is True. Everything is Permitted.
When I was a child, I dreamed once I turned into a monster and I had to kill my parents because they 
saw I was a monster and would kill me if I let them live.
Monster is defined as something strange and horrible or something unusually large. Thus, the word carries both pejorative and positive connotations. The one constant is that a monster is outside the norm. While they are usually considered something bad, there is often an aura of awesomeness about them too. The monsters discussed here are either historical figures or just an attitude society condemns but which many of us discover in ourselves whether we admit it or not. It has to do with either ignoring the rules or with a lack of compassion or mercy. All that is monstrous.
out of the norm…
Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade
Most of us have been raised to believe that humans have rights. When someone transgresses these rights, we are shocked. But it hasn’t always been that way. Imagine a world in which there is no recognition of human rights. Need help picturing it? Read 120 Days in Sodom by the Marquis de Sade. Four extreme sadists round up beautiful victims for torture. They had absolute power over their prisoners. The original book was written in 1904 but the movie based on it set in 1944.
De Sade, himself, was a practicing sadist, although the word wasn’t in use (in fact, it was derived from his name). He called himself a libertine. He had a whole philosophy in which he preached unfettered freedom to do whatever to anyone to whom he could. He had a castle like any good aristocrat and used it as a place where he could conveniently practice his proclivities. Although people 
were scandalized by his sexual perversion(s), people were a lot more upset about his anti-clerical behavior. More recently, de Sade’s name was defended by Simone de Beauvoir who wrote, Must We Burn Sade?
According to Wikipedia,
In his 1988 Political Theory and Modernity, William E. Connolly analyzes Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom as an argument against earlier political philosophers, notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes, and their attempts to reconcile nature, reason, and virtue as bases of ordered society. Similarly, Camille Paglia[24] argued that Sade can be best
understood as a satirist, responding “point by point” to Rousseau’s claims that society inhibits and corrupts mankind’s innate goodness: Paglia notes that Sade wrote in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when Rousseauist Jacobins instituted the bloody Reign of Terror and Rousseau’s predictions were brutally disproved.
In The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography (1979), Angela Carter provides a feminist reading of Sade, seeing him as a “moral pornographer” who creates spaces for women. Similarly, Susan Sontag defended both Sade and Georges Bataille‘s Histoire de l’oeil (Story of the Eye) in her essay “The Pornographic Imagination” (1967) on the basis their works were transgressive texts, and argued that neither should be censored. By contrast, Andrea Dworkin saw Sade as the exemplary woman-hating pornographer, supporting her theory that pornography inevitably leads to violence against women. One chapter of her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1979) is devoted to an analysis of Sade. Susie Bright claims that Dworkin’s first novel Ice and Fire, which is rife with violence and abuse, can be seen as a modern retelling of Sade’s Juliette.
Τὸ Μέγα Θηρίον Aleister Crowley
Another name seems to fall at will beside that of the “divine marquis.” Aleister Crowley, had the distinction of being known as “the wickedest man in the world.” He called himself “the Beast 666.” He was actually an occultist, philosopher and practitioner of yoga. He channeled (or wrote if you prefer) The Book of the Law whose slogan is often misquoted as “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” The rest of that statement is “Love is the law, love under Will,” which meant doing one’s “true will,” as opposed to mere flighty whim, was putting oneself in harmony with the Will of the universe. But the individual, himself, determines if he is doing his “true will.” One way of knowing was that the entire momentum of the universe would be in the favor of one who was really doing his (true) will.
Crowley was a true free-soul. He made his own rules and lived life on his own terms. Of course, he became notorious. Like de Sade, Crowley also owned a castle, Boleskine, in the Loch Ness. (Does that make him the Loch Ness Monster?) Instead of conducting orgies, as de Sade did in his castle, Crowley conducted magical workings. Boleskine burned down when Crowley was away and speculation was that his reckless magical workings had something to do with it. But both Crowley’s and de Sade’s hostility to Christianity seemed to draw greater notoriety to their reputations than anything else they did.
If his castle at Boleskine was a source of wagging tongues, his Thelema Abby even more so. He was a member of the Golden Dawn but had a falling out. His novel, Moonchild, has Golden Dawn members satirized as black magicians. He joined OTO, Ordo Templi Orientis and was immediately initiated into the 9th Degree, the highest one, after they read his Book of Lies which revealed the fact that he already knew their highest magical secrets.
The Democratic Republic of Congo
One of the worst places in the world for exploitation is the Democratic Republic of Congo where they mine cobalt used to make cell phones. Of course, that’s not the only place children are used as slave labor. This video was seen on Facebook. “Am I supposed to feel bad?” wonders Anna Berry, “I really want to write, well thank you, since I enjoy my phone, but I am smart enough to know that will make me look like an asshole and so I refrain.” More callously, Julian Ishida says, “Oh well, thanks Dorsel, mobile phones are pretty great.”
Lady Elizabeth Bathory
Lady Elizabeth Bathory was a Hungarian countess in the 16th and 17th Centuries. She believed that by bathing in the blood of young women, she would be able to stay young forever. In 1585, a woman of wealth and social standing could literally take girls to her castle and kill them.
- The Legend of Elizabeth Bathory.
- Rejected Princesses.
- Bathory’s torturous escapades are exposed.
- Infameous Lady.
She has inspired no fewer than 10 movies.
Haiti
French colonialists enslaved the people of Haiti between 1791 and 1804. The slaves rose up and overthrew their oppressors. The Haitian revolution has been called “the largest and most successful slave rebellion in the Western Hemisphere. Slaves initiated the rebellion in 1791 and by 1803 they had succeeded in ending not just slavery but French control over the colony.” But what about the ridiculous financial debt imposed on the newly independent Haiti by France. “Reparations” for their loss when deprived of slaves. Boo hoo! Since when do people have the right to own other people? And why should these people have to pay for the right to be free? If anything, France should have paid Haiti reparations for their stolen labor. It’s outrageous.
Haiti’s current economic crisis and political turmoil have their roots in the “odious debt” of 150 million gold francs (later reduced to 90 million) which France imposed on the newborn republic with gunboats in 1825.
The sum was supposed to compensate French planters for their losses of slaves and property during Haiti’s 1791-1804 revolution, which gave birth to the world’s first slavery-free, and hence truly free, republic. It is the only case in world history where the victor of a major war paid the loser reparations.
In fact, French colonial losses were only an estimated 100 million gold francs, if one stoops to placing monetary value on human slaves.
This extortion, perhaps more than any other 19th century agreement, laid bare the hypocrisy of France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, modeled on the 1776 American Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed: “Men are born free and remain free and equal in rights.” The U.S., which assumed the debt in 1922, proved itself equally insincere in respecting this fundamental democratic principle for which it claims paternity.
It took Haiti 122 years, until 1947, to pay off both the original ransom to France and the tens of millions more in interest payments borrowed from French banks to meet the deadlines.
HAITI: Independence Debt, Reparations for Slavery and Colonialism
The more we look around, the more obvious it becomes that the recognition of “human rights” and justice are the exception, not the rule. What is justice? Man’s attempt to impose order on chaos? As long as people insist on the insane delusion that they can “own” land, much less people, there can be no justice. I say, to hell with the social contract. We owe society nothing. Anti-Social Personality Disorder? How about Anti-Social Personality Enhancement?
CLUSTER B 