99.9% Of US Politicians Are Actual Psychopaths? Sociopaths? You choose!

“POLITICIANS ARE MORE LIKELY THAN PEOPLE IN THE GENERAL POPULATION TO BE SOCIOPATHS.

I THINK YOU WOULD FIND NO EXPERT IN THE FIELD OF SOCIOPATHY/PSYCHOPATHY/ANTISOCIAL PERSONALITY DISORDER WHO WOULD DISPUTE THIS… THAT A SMALL MINORITY OF HUMAN BEINGS LITERALLY HAVE NO CONSCIENCE WAS AND IS A BITTER PILL FOR OUR SOCIETY TO SWALLOW — BUT IT DOES EXPLAIN A GREAT MANY THINGS, SHAMELESSLY DECEITFUL POLITICAL BEHAVIOR BEING ONE.”—DR. MARTHA STOUT, CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST AND FORMER INSTRUCTOR AT HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL

Twenty years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: “What’s the difference between a politician and a psychopath?” The answer, then and now, remains the same: None. There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians.

Nor is there much of a difference between the havoc wreaked on innocent lives by uncaring, unfeeling, selfish, irresponsible, parasitic criminals and elected officials who lie to their constituents, trade political favors for campaign contributions, turn a blind eye to the wishes of the electorate, cheat taxpayers out of hard-earned dollars, favor the corporate elite, entrench the military industrial complex, and spare little thought for the impact their thoughtless actions and hastily passed legislation might have on defenseless citizens.

Psychopaths and politicians both have a tendency to be selfish, callous, remorseless users of others, irresponsible, pathological liars, glib, con artists, lacking in remorse and shallow.

Charismatic politicians, like criminal psychopaths, exhibit a failure to accept responsibility for their actions, have a high sense of self-worth, are chronically unstable, have socially deviant lifestyle, need constant stimulation, have parasitic lifestyles and possess unrealistic goals.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans.

Political psychopaths are all largely cut from the same pathological cloth, brimming with seemingly easy charm and boasting calculating minds. Such leaders eventually create pathocracies—totalitarian societies bent on power, control, and destruction of both freedom in general and those who exercise their freedoms.

Once psychopaths gain power, the result is usually some form of totalitarian government or a pathocracy. “At that point, the government operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups,” author James G. Long notes. “We are currently witnessing deliberate polarizations of American citizens, illegal actions, and massive and needless acquisition of debt. This is typical of psychopathic systems, and very similar things happened in the Soviet Union as it overextended and collapsed.”

In other words, electing a psychopath to public office is tantamount to national hara-kiri, the ritualized act of self-annihilation, self-destruction and suicide. It signals the demise of democratic government and lays the groundwork for a totalitarian regime that is legalistic, militaristic, inflexible, intolerant and inhuman.

So why do we keep doing it over and over again?

There’s no shortage of dire warnings about the devastation that could be wrought if any one of the current crop of candidates running for the White House gets elected. Yet where the doomsayers go wrong is by ignoring the damage that has already been inflicted on our nation and its citizens by a psychopathic government.

According to investigative journalist Zack Beauchamp, “In 2012, a group of psychologists evaluated every President from Washington to Bush II using ‘psychopathy trait estimates derived from personality data completed by historical experts on each president.’ They found that presidents tended to have the psychopath’s characteristic fearlessness and low anxiety levels — traits that appear to help Presidents, but also might cause them to make reckless decisions that hurt other people’s lives.”

The willingness to prioritize power above all else, including the welfare of their fellow human beings, ruthlessness, callousness and an utter lack of conscience are among the defining traits of the sociopath.

When our own government no longer sees us as human beings with dignity and worth but as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police, conned into believing it has our best interests at heart, mistreated, jailed if we dare step out of line, and then punished unjustly without remorse—all the while refusing to own up to its failings—we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic.

Instead, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.”

Worse, psychopathology is not confined to those in high positions of government. It can spread like a virus among the populace. As an academic study into pathocracy concluded, “[T]yranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.”

People don’t simply line up and salute. It is through one’s own personal identification with a given leader, party or social order that they become agents of good or evil.

Much depends on how leaders “cultivate a sense of identification with their followers,” says Professor Alex Haslam. “I mean one pretty obvious thing is that leaders talk about ‘we’ rather than ‘I,’ and actually what leadership is about is cultivating this sense of shared identity about ‘we-ness’ and then getting people to want to act in terms of that ‘we-ness,’ to promote our collective interests. . . . [We] is the single word that has increased in the inaugural addresses over the last century . . . and the other one is ‘America.’”

The goal of the modern corporate state is obvious: to promote, cultivate, and embed a sense of shared identification among its citizens. To this end, “we the people” have become “we the police state.”

We are fast becoming slaves in thrall to a faceless, nameless, bureaucratic totalitarian government machine that relentlessly erodes our freedoms through countless laws, statutes, and prohibitions.

Any resistance to such regimes depends on the strength of opinions in the minds of those who choose to fight back. What this means is that we the citizenry must be very careful that we are not manipulated into marching in lockstep with an oppressive regime.

Writing for ThinkProgress, Beauchamp suggests that “one of the best cures to bad leaders may very well be political democracy.” He advocates for the media holding politicians accountable for their actions and the actions of their staff. While psychopaths may not care about how their actions harm other people, notes Beauchamp, “they very much do care about being able to hold on to their positions of power. A system that actually holds people accountable to the broader conscience of society may be one of the best ways to keep conscienceless people in check.”

That said, if we allow the ballot box to become our only means of pushing back against the police state, the battle is already lost.

Resistance will require a citizenry willing to be active at the local level.

If you wait to act until the SWAT team is crashing through your door, until your name is placed on a terror watch list, until you are reported for such outlawed activities as collecting rainwater or letting your children play outside unsupervised, then it will be too late.

This much I know: we are not faceless numbers. We are not cogs in the machine. We are not slaves.

We are human beings, and for the moment, we have the opportunity to remain free—that is, if we tirelessly advocate for our rights and resist at every turn attempts by the government to place us in chains.

The Founders understood that our freedoms do not flow from the government. They were not given to us only to be taken away by the will of the State. They are inherently ours. In the same way, the government’s appointed purpose is not to threaten or undermine our freedoms, but to safeguard them.

Until we can get back to this way of thinking, until we can remind our fellow Americans what it really means to be a free American, and until we can learn to stand our ground in the face of threats to those freedoms and encourage our fellow citizens to stop being cogs in the machine, we will continue to be treated like slaves in thrall to a bureaucratic police state run by political psychopaths.

Article reposted with permission from The Rutherford Institute

99.9% Of US Politicians Are Actual Psychopaths. By: Daniel Newton @NeonNettle on 22nd June 2018

The new analysis ranked 48 continental states and the District of Columbia.

A new study published by the Social Science Research Network has revealed that 99.9% of all politicians in the USA are actual psychopaths. The question is, are politicians already psychopaths, or does the line of work change them as such?

The new analysis ranked 48 continental states and the District of Columbia by measuring the psychopathic personality of their residents. The leader of the study, Ryan Murphy, told Newsweek: “These results are the first estimates we have, to the best of my knowledge, on the degree of psychopathy found in each state. “Murphy claimed that each state’s ranking was computed on a previous study that ranked each state on the “Big Five” personality traits: Agreeableness Extraversion Openness Conscientiousness neuroticism

According to Miamiherald.com: This was done by analyzing the results of personality surveys given to thousands of residents in each state. People tended to have different levels of each of the “Big 5” traits depending on where they lived. That previous study, which was published in 2013, aimed at separating the United States into broad regions of personality. The states in the mid-Atlantic and northeast were classified as “temperamental and uninhibited.” Those in middle America were “friendly and conventional,” while those in the west coast, Rocky Mountains, and Sunbelt region were “relaxed and creative.”

”Psychopaths tend to be extroverted and charming yet largely devoid of guilt, empathy, and love,” according to Scientific American They do things purely for their own interests, have shallow relationships and place blame on others when things go wrong, according to the magazine.

Murphy used the data on personality from the previous study and used it to calculate a new score based on personality traits that indicated psychopathy, according to Quartz. After all the number crunching, what was the top psychopath hot spot? Washington D.C. “The top five observations in psychopathy are the District of Columbia, Connecticut, California, New Jersey, and a tie of New York and Wyoming for fifth. The states that are least psychopathic are West Virginia, Vermont, Tennessee, North Carolina, and New Mexico,” Murphy wrote.

Murphy wrote that people should take the capitol’s top spot with a little bit of skepticism. The D.C. area is small and entirely urban, so it is inherently different than comparing a state, which has a more diverse geography and population, he wrote. Still, Murphy said in his study that the finding is consistent with a different study that found “psychopaths are likely to be effective in the political sphere” and could be tempted to work in the “literal seat of power.”

”In general, Murphy writes that areas of the northeast are the most psychopathic, while rural areas are the least psychopathic, and that D.C. appears to be “far more” psychopathic on its own than any state in the country. “My own speculations would be that the urban/rural distinctions drive a lot of the variation, and the historical distribution of cultures within the United States have a lot to do with it as well,” Murphy told Newsweek.