Who are the psychopaths? | Health/Medicine |Axisoflogic.com

Recently we heard that the Australian government plans on destroying and burning protected remnant old growth forests to make electricity and wood chips; and before that we discovered the US government's open secret of founding and supporting ISIL in Syria after failing to gather public support for a war against Assad! Every day we have been watching the Palm-Oil Mafia commit industrial scale ecocide on all our remaining tropical forests in Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Brazil etc; We have all been witness to that blatant event where the USA has instigated a NAZI coup d'etat against the duly elected government of the Ukraine while blaming Russia for destabilising its own front doorstep. For decades now we have watched the Zionists continue to freely torture and commit gradual genocide against the ethnic Palestinian populations with the support and complicity of the USA and its vassals. What, besides their blatant cruelty, ruthlessness, irrationality and affront to our humanity do these events have in common?

The answer is that they are all products of classic psychopathic behaviour, or if you like: psychopaths have initiated all these actions; Psychopaths in places of critical decision-making; Psychopaths in high places.

At 5% of the population, there are AT LEAST 16 Million psychopaths in the USA alone -- most are, at first, effectively clinically undetectable from the main population. The few, who are incarcerated in institutions, and available as clinical objects of study, represent the "failed" psychopath -- the one who has been "found out" by the system. Most have not only gotten away with their pernicious and predatory tactics on humanity and the planet, but have actually prospered in power, money and position.

The true effect of 16 million psychopaths on US society, its structures, dynamics and even its goals appears to be lost in the dense forest of competition, chaos and sophistry that continually surrounds us on a massive scale. But this brings us to my point: It's in fact this "dense forest" of competition, chaos, sophistry and ultimately destruction that is the TRUE EFFECT of the psychopath and provides his "home" environment and his selectively nurturing matrix; in reality, a perverse, self-generating mental ecosystem.

Allow me to extrapolate this issue from an even more forthright perspective? ALL of the primary structures, processes and objectives of our societies that have evolved through history have arisen insidiously and opportunistically from the minds of psychopaths and they all overwhelmingly favour and support their behavioural characteristics and tactics.

This leaves the non-psychopathic or empathetically developing members of society with few choices:

to move towards the edges of the psychopathically compromised society and attempt to develop an authentically human existence of creativity, mutuality and prosperity;
or to criticise and act against every perpetrated psychopathic injustice while trying to tweak the morality of the system;
or to simply continue to tolerate and compromise, mimicking a sufficient number of the psychopath's tactics and behaviours to survive in the competitive environment then trying to offset this affront to conscience by practicing gestures of mutuality with family, friends and neighbours.

These choices and their dynamics have produced the patterns of behaviour between psychopaths and their host communities for millennia. Fortunately there may be other alternatives

Let's look at an working ontogenic hypothesis:

Humans as primates are hardwired to develop somewhat mutually beneficial relationships. Humans have psychologically developed to define, explore and even codify the nature of these relationships. Part of our "preparation" for exploring these relationship potentials comes from our infancy; our high dependency years; where being incapable of providing for ourselves or for successfully interpreting the world around us causes us to meet such needs via an intermediary or mediator, more likely our mother.

Gradually those initially dependent relationships should ideally psychologically mature and transform us through increasing degrees of independence and self-sufficiency, tempered by our memories of own experiences of infancy which help us retain and develop an empathetic gratitude and an authentic understanding of discerning and meeting the needs of others.

The psychopath, through some probable peri-natal or early infancy psycho-neurological trauma, compounded possibly by a genetic propensity becomes locked into the infantile cognitive-emotional template and never moves down the path of developing empathy through exploring mutually beneficial relationships.

The psychopathic mind severely limited by the infantile cognitive/emotional template depends on amplifying the mind tools immediately useful to it, the significant ones being:

Associative recall; with some minor Functional Association; The "monkey see monkey do" mimicking faculty; and the primitive capacity for manipulating potential intermediaries in his environment through emotionally invoking their intervention.

Although the Psychopath acquires higher cognitive functions throughout his life he will invariably never use them in his day to day cognitive processes except for IQ tests and maybe solving puzzles. Instead he amplifies through trial and error those 3 infantile mental tools: Mimicking; Associative Recall (memorising) and the manipulation of others by using seduction, rejection and menace.

Unfortunately modern education has evolved largely based on the exact same cognitive template as that of the psychopath. It trains us to think like a psychopath and without any restraint, to become somewhat sociopathic.

Because the psychopath's thinking has evolved to overwhelmingly dominate in competitive and conflict-based environments and because we have accepted competition as our default economic and even social dynamic, modern education attempts to equip us to become competent under those sociopathic rules and conditions.

So then modern education by default, to offset the effects of our main competitive liability, namely empathy, attempts to camouflage or sanitise to varying degrees: competition, opportunism, single-mindedness, egocentricity, ruthlessness, manipulativeness, deviousness, sophistry, hierarchy and exploitation ("winning") all the characteristics that allow psychopaths to prevail as predators.

The educational system requires rote learning which circumvents the higher brain functions where moral and ethical thinking and analysis of behavior take place.

The psychopathic personality is the ideal evolutionary adaption to conflict or competitive environments, even to chaotic environments. His tactic as an opportunistic ruthless "head kicker" lets him move fast by making self-serving decisions unhindered by concerns of any further levels of consequence which may well be borne by others or the environment, i.e. "Collateral Damage".

Having Tar Sands extraction destroy the Athabasca River system; or 1.5 million people die to "rid Iraq of its WMD"; or to cut and burn millions of hectares of Tropical Rainforest in order to create plantations for Palm Oil; or even bring in increased quarterly profits by firing staff, increasing workloads and reducing wages -- No consequences beyond the original self-serving intention are actually considered and when any further issues arise, mostly unforeseen, they are dealt with poorly and episodically - one at a time.

The cognitive tactics of the psychopath make him the ideal battlefield warrior and as such he has been with us from time immemorial both causing and defending in conflicts- His ruthless aggression, opportunism, single-mindedness, lack of conscience and fast but simplistic thinking make him useful to defend the tribe during an attack by the psychopath's tribe next door, but then trying to put him in a box when wise decisions need to be made during peace time became the overwhelming problem.

We can assume that spinning the idea of terror from without or within with his deviousness, manipulativeness and skilful sophistry would help keep him in a leadership position, despite a morbid inability to deal with relationships and complexity and despite his general lack of proficiency with all things peaceful! And therein lays the secret source of the continual failure to reach our extraordinary potential as a social species.

Psychopaths freely and actively operating in societies keep it in continual conflict, competition and infantilism with all their attending poverty, crime, waste, inefficiency, pollution, and general exploitation of the peaceful by the more aggressive. Psychopaths promote sociopathy arising among those not empathetically retarded, as the rest of society mimic their behaviours in an attempt to compete and survive. The price we pay is that all our organs of society such as education, economics, governance, welfare, health and even science, have evolved to operate at the cognitive level and processes of the psychopath. Even more so, collective organisations like for instance, the corporation, with its goals, structures and processes are modeled largely on the workings of the psychopathic mind!

Duncan MacMartin is a researcher in cognitive/empathetic development trying to work out how we can save the world from the psychopaths who have risen to positions of control.

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