Right wingers versus lefties. Conservatives versus liberals. Citizens versus crazies.
It is a binary set situation, with very little overlap on the Venn diagram. Clinical studies demonstrate conservative minds, corporate mentality, right wingers, labels are optional, operate from a basis of fear, rage, and hate; resentment, envy, and greed. They are the zero sum thinkers who think others must lose for them to gain, or that others gaining means they are losing something. They are the banksters, the greedy CEOs, and the republicant wreckers of democracy and regulated Keynesian capitalism. They operate out of fear and hate, greed and narcissism.
The others reverse these views, and operate for the common good. We might call them altruists.
Good news is, the psychopaths are only about 19% of us. They exist at the far right side of the spectrum, or scale, of sociopathy. Of course, on the opposite extreme, at the other narrow end of the Bell curve, true altruists are also a small percent.
This leaves the majority of us, and while we sure do like getting our share and then some, we are also down with the notion of helping everyone out, so we can all improve. The better for all, the better for us. That is heartening.
What is disheartening is how the psychopaths will do and say literally anything, and stop at nothing, to impose their draconian will upon us all. You cannot reform, rehabilitate, or socialize them. You cannot help them but must isolate them from society, in order to keep society safe.
How do we identify such extreme threats to the common good? It is not difficult. There exists a 44 point scale, usually presented in the form of a checklist or inventory test, that can with fair accuracy determine the extent and degree of a person’s sociopathy. One does not even require the cooperation of a subject to apply the test. Observation suffices. If a person or entity, (for we must include corporations, governments, and other groups that act autonomously), exhibits a sufficient number of the 44 traits, sociopathy is diagnosed, and some idea of its degree is also pegged.
We all have some of the traits, at least some of the time. Few of us have all. We can easily observe, too, which professions attract sociopaths and psychopaths more consistently. (For purposes of this essay, sociopath means without conscience in obtaining things, while psychopath adds a willingness to do violence to gratify wishes.) Our tribal jokes elicit both laughter and knowing glances by identifying these very things. Consider jokes about used car salesmen, politicians, and surgeons, for example. Such humor focuses on their lack of empathy, their willingness to lie and cheat and manipulate, their emotional coldness and uncaring response to suffering.
In Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and the Ridley Scott movie BLADE RUNNER, a Voit-Kampff test is administered to diagnose humans, who have empathy and compassion responses, sympathetic thoughts, and genuine reactions to suffering, and to sift out the merely human-SHAPED, the androids, the replicants. (Republicants…)
By such a metaphorical way, PKD and RS were demonstrating that genuine people care, while sociopaths and the scarier, wilder, more violent psychopaths do not. Most recidivists in violent crime categories comprise only a small percentage of incarcerated people, yet they’re 75% more likely to commit violent crimes than the other prisoners. We know who they are. We can see from their records of past behavior and, often, from developmental problems and environmental factors such as being homeless, in poverty, or raised amidst squalor, drug abuse, and violence. Most exhibit lesions on their brains, but not all. Most are sad, frustrated people unable to escape the cage of fear, hate, and violence they’ve made for themselves. It’s all they know and to expect much else from them is like trying to sail a shoe across a stormy ocean. Some crazy billionaire might figure out a way to do it, but it just isn’t realistic.
Separating these extreme people from society would go a long way toward keeping our world stable and safe for creativity, collective advancement, and the common good. By “our world” I refer to the physical, demonstrable one we all share, not the one (or ones) spiraling like moths in each locked skull.
We see the harm done by such extremists every day, and each of us suffers from their actions, their depredations upon the commonwealth, and their wanton disregard for how their rejection of scientific, rational reality corrodes everyone else’s lives. We speak here of both religious and political ideologues, yes, but also of business ideologues, too. We speak here of the Strauss/Friedman Chicago School of Economics who have demolished the civilized world on the basis of fundamentally flawed math and bizarre ideal beliefs without merit or defensible evidence supporting them. We speak here of those who have systematically subverted democracy in order to put into place a regime of deceit, embraced ignorance, and steeply reduced capacity for compassion, learning, and advancement.
My friends and I talk of the 3C or C3 religion. By this we used to mean Christianity, Conservatism, and Capitalism. It is now a 4C system, adding in Corporatism. These are what combine to destroy the American democratic republic and its social and financial systems for the profit of the 400 wealthiest, the 1%.
We all know it’s right, and everybody knows it’s wrong, as Aerosmith sang. Eat the rich, they also sang, perhaps not including themselves. It is not, after all, the rich, nor wealth that corrodes freedom, liberty, and equality under a rule of law. It is wealth used as a weapon by those who oppose those things, which used to be called the Aristos. The would-be aristocrats last held sway like this during what Mark Twain dubbed the Gilded Age, a mocking reference to how even their shit was dipped in gold. Wealth inequality was atrocious then, worse than what Dickens wrote so effectively about. It is worse now, in all measurable ways.
As for workhouses, poorhouses, and punishment for the crime of being poor, which is inflicted upon any class below the 1% to the extent possible as a form of culture war allowing the top to continue its status quo, those are called for again, openly. Already we have prisons-for-profit, judges selling criminals to private prisons at a flat fee per conviction, with longer sentences paying more. Already we see child labor demanded and women’s rights eroded. Already we see unconscionable depredation of natural resources, destruction of wilderness areas, and pollution of land, sea, and air by oil, chemical, and other corporations, without consequence and often rewarded by their cronies and sock puppets in government. Already we see Too Big To Fail and banksters exacting extortion from taxpayers for squandering investments and siphoning off all profit for themselves tax free. Already we see that no big corporation pays taxes in the USA yet call for further cuts to social programs. Already we have states taken over by cabals in steep minority, who defy and punish the vast majority of their so-called constituents in mad pursuit of ideological ideals. They consider voting something to be discouraged and eliminated if possible, and gerrymandering is the least of it, with blatant voting machine fraud and active suppression of votes by elimination of eligibility and by placing polling places in remote, impossible venues common practice among what we call red states.
Red for alarm. Red for emergency. Red for blood. Red for republicant and right wing and reprehensible. This cancer must be cut out and stopped before it destroys what has been so far an all-too-tolerant host.
Blue and green must unite and rise up now: RUN – Are You In?
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