POLITICS, PSYCHOPATHY, PATHOCRACY

IN DEFENSE OF NORMIES

Those with the unsavory disposition to roam about in the dubious corners of the internet may have noticed a recent trend of various types, which might be included under a broad umbrella definition of the right, debating the merits of communism. I’ve seen lengthy debates on YouTube involving two alt-righters, a couple of libertarians, and an objectivist, all debating this hot topic. And yet, is it really a hot topic, or really a topic of any importance at all?[1]

These sort of “how many angels on the head of a pin” type arguments strike me as peculiarly misdirected. And especially so once one appreciates that they only serve to deflect attention from what is the real important point about the current relevance of communist agitprop. Whether communism is the promise of the human dream realized, in theory, or whether it’s even ever been really tried, according to the expressed expectations of Karl Marx, is all irrelevant drivel. All that should be of any importance to anyone considering this matter is that communism has been consistently, and tragically, the “mask of sanity” used by psychopaths to inflict the most egregious atrocities in recent human history.[2]

A relatively small, but slowly growing, literature has been documenting the role that gangs of clinical psychopaths have played in visiting genocidal hell upon numerous societies for years, or even decades, at a time. Of course, communism is not the exclusive mask for such pathocracy: Nazism acted similarly. But communism has by far been the most widely used cover for pathocratic atrocity. In his book, Disordered Minds, Ian Hughes has gone through the biographical literature on the main leadership circles surrounding Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Pol Pot, finding them infested with psychopathic personalities.[3] These are societies which were captured by pathocracy, suffering the horrors that such capture entails.

But, of course, that could never happen here.

One of the pioneers in the study of pathocracy, Andrew M. Lobaczewski, in his book Political Ponerology, emphasizes the role of social chaos in creating the conditions for pathocracy: i.e., the rule of psychopaths and others with psychopathological personalities. Under socially stable conditions, clinically normal people maintain effective social trust and communication. Their common sense about the world, while certainly imperfect, provides an effective enough guide to reality-based action to allow them to operate successfully in the world. Under such conditions, psychopaths are at a disadvantage. Their remorseless, cold blooded manipulation of others is too easily recognized and so subject to censure. This is particularly true of the more ruthless, sadistic and impulsive psychopaths.[4]

There’s a long tradition, going back at least until 1941, in the clinical diagnosis of psychopathy.[5] There remain numerous areas of difference over the causes, symptoms and appropriate diagnostic frameworks for assessing psychopathy. For those more familiar with the DSM definitions, in broad terms, you can think of the use of the term psychopathy here as covering those personality disorders identified as cluster B. Also, there has been some useful granularity added with the introduction of the dark triad framework, distinguishing between Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy. However, overall, with some nuance, the set of traits associated with this framework are covered by psychopathy within the Cleckley-Hare diagnostic school.[6] All of this, including the question of whether such personalities, strictly speaking, even are disorders, will all be addressed by this Substack, in the future. The broad strokes, however, are widely agreed upon. The personalities identified as psychopathic in the Cleckley-Hare school are marked by a lack of conscience and empathy, often narcissism, and famously occasioned by sadism and/or impulsiveness.

Where things get tricky for appreciating the dangers of pathocracy is the tendency in popular culture to restrict perception of the psychopath to the arena of clear-cut criminality. There has long been a popular fascination with criminal psychopaths: the serial killers, the Ponzi scheme fraudsters, the cult leaders. And, no doubt, a great many psychopaths spend a very great deal of time safely imprisoned, so we can comfortably produce lurid documentaries about their crimes, which many in the public watch with perverse fascination from the security of their couch. However, this framing of psychopathy is dangerously misleading. For all the criminal psychopaths, with their low impulse control, there is another subset of them who are very effective at keeping out of jail. In their book on psychopaths in the workplace, Snakes in Suits, Babiak and Hare distinguish between the classic, or aggressive, psychopath and the manipulative psychopath. These latter are the ones without the impulsiveness, particularly those with high verbal abilities. These are the ones who manage to infiltrate large business organizations. Their conscience-free ruthlessness, combined with their empathy-free disregard for the impact of their actions upon others, allows them to manipulate their way up through the ranks of business organizations, leaving behind a trail of victims – often too embarrassed or afraid to denounce the psychopath. In one study discussed in their book, Babiak and Hare found that while about one percent of the overall population are full blown psychopaths, a limited survey of over 200 management executives produced a number that was over three percent.[7]

As illustrative as is Babiak and Hare’s study on the psychopath in business, and while they give passing reference to the prospect, they never address head-on the full role and impact of psychopaths in politics. The big difference between the two milieux is that, as Babiak and Hare concede, there’s a potential limiting principle at work in private, corporate organizational environments, disciplined by market forces. In business, work is expected to be done; and psychopaths have no interest in the mundane work requirements of producing real results. This can be their Achilles heel, as when they’re discovered to be frauds and parasites when the work deadline is consistently missed, or they are revealed as having stolen credit for the product of co-workers. As Babiak and Hare emphasis, by no means does this limiting principle ensure the weeding out of psychopaths, but it offers some means of eventual remedy.

It’s not clear such a limiting principle operates in the realm of politics. Even in democracies, as along as the politician can sufficiently charm the voters in each election, without a strict, explicit standard of production to be met, it’s unclear there can ever be a limit to the constant renewal of the psychopathic politician’s power. And, of course, if psychopaths get into the civil service, again, without firm market-based discipline, it would seem even easier for them to lie and cheat their way to increasing power and influence than the “successful” psychopaths operating in the private sector, as revealed in Babiak and Hare’s research. Even less objective regulation acts to control or reveal psychopaths who gain political power through movement advocacy, including many academics and journalists who take on this role.  

So, that psychopaths can infiltrate politics seems indisputable. The scholarly literature is continuing to find increasing evidence that psychopathy, as defined here, is associated with: desire to enter political life; confidence in one’s ability to be successful in politics; political participation; and a tendency to vote for candidates with the same psychopathic personality traits. Plus, consistent with what might be predicted from such research results, a study of psychopathy across the contiguous U.S. states observed the highest psychopathy ranking in the District of Columbia.[8] For the psychopath, though, there’s still the problem mentioned above. In a relatively stable social order, the psychopath is always in danger of being discovered, exposed, denounced, censured, and possibly even jailed.

As both Lobaczewski and Hughes have emphasized and illustrated, social chaos is the preferred social condition of the psychopath.[9] Only then do the trust and communicative bonds between the clinically normal people start to crumble. Only then do the clinically normal people start becoming susceptible to being unmoored from their confidence in their common sense. It’s unsurprising then that not only does a growth of social chaos facilitate the power and aggrandizement of pathocracy, but upon closer examination we find that psychopaths positively encourage such social chaos. The routine purges of the supposedly faithful true believers in thoroughly pathocratic regimes, like Stalin’s USSR or Mao’s China, illustrate the importance to political psychopaths of maintaining such chaos.[10] Similarly, the groundwork for future expansion of pathocracy largely depends upon incurring such pervasive social chaos.

Viewing these matters through the lens of current conditions, it is striking that precisely as the very kind of social chaos that facilitates pathocracy grows, focused analysis of psychopaths in current political parties and movements notably lags kindred research. On the social chaos, and undermining of common sense, that creates conducive pathocratic conditions, a brief list would include such items as the denial of biological realities, which not long ago would have been considered obvious to most normal people: e.g., we’re supposed to believe that among an anisogamous sexually reproducing species, heterosexuality, and indeed sex and gender, are socially constructed; that the different races and sexes, despite tens of thousands of years, in the first case, and a billion in the second, of being subjected to different evolutionary pressures, if not for pernicious racism and sexism, would be no different from each other; that men can be born into woman’s bodies, and women can be born into men’s bodies; that only bigots would be concerned about situations in which men who purported to feel like women would be allowed, and even institutionally encouraged, to enter female-exclusive spaces such as women’s sports, refuge shelters, changerooms and prisons; that organizing social events and using language that distinguishes and ranks people by race is anti-racism; and that science, mathematics, empirical data, and efficiency are manifestations of patriarchy or white supremacy. These examples only scratch the surface of the ludicrous propositions of a pseudo-reality that the normies of the world are not only expected to pretend to believe but are in danger of having their life destroyed, through denial of employment and banking and other services, and possibly even at risk of violent assault, if they do not play along.[11]

In addition to all that now routine reality denial, we have been subjected for nearly two years to the COVID hysteria, in which, despite the sweeping changes in standards, endlessly moving the goalposts, leading to redefinitions of valid testing, cases and causes of death that inflate the numbers, we’re expected to believe – or at least pretend that we believe – that we are under existential threat from a socially catastrophic virus.[12]  Anxiety about the virus has been exacerbated by frequent, erratic revisions in claims about the necessity and efficacy of a wide variety of measures, including those related to masks, lockdowns, vaccine safety and reliability, and the imposition of vaccine mandates. All this – combined with relentless inaccurate sensationalism, gaslighting, censorship of scientific and medical opinions disputing official policies, and deliberate government initiatives to leverage behavioural psychology to incur widespread fear and anxiety – provided the ingredients for the social chaos engulfing much of the world today.[13]

All of this has given rise to precisely the kind of social chaos that serves as a Petrie dish for pathocracy. The question is, has the way been led by the chicken or the egg? Has all this been merely the innocent confluence of circumstances that raises the danger of pathocracy, or in fact have too many manipulative psychopaths gained political power – institutional, movement, or otherwise – and actively promoted such social chaos; are such people deliberately generating the conditions to facilitate the rise of the very pathocracy in which they have historically thrived? And which, as discussed above, have ultimately resulted in humanity’s most horrific genocidal atrocities. Attempting an answer to that question is premature for this initial post. It is oddly striking though that even as there is a growing literature on the role of manipulative or successful psychopaths in business, and even some research, such as Hughes’ book, on the historical role of psychopaths and the awful historical consequences of pathocracy, there remains a dearth of research applying what we know about indicators of psychopathy to the personalities of today’s political actors.[14]

Considering what we know about where pathocracy leads, this seems like no small oversight. There is of course a real danger of mislabeling people, and this is especially so when there is political motivation to do so. The way the allegation of racist has been weaponized by actual racists to smear their critics is an all too telling warning.[15] Still, there have been objective techniques and measurements developed for assessing psychopathy that could be used to identify such malignant influences and insulate political life from them. These include Hare’s original diagnostic checklist, the elaborated B-Span instrument introduced by Babiak and Hare, as well – unsurprising to anyone who understands the polygenic and pleiotropic nature of genetic processes – it appears that psychopaths can be identified by distinctive facial features. There’s also evidence that psychopaths inadvertently reveal themselves through verbal “ticks,” which can be picked up on by trained observers, often leading to an uncanny feeling of mismatch between verbal and facial expression even for the untrained observer.[16] This latter “tell” though may be more apparent in the less verbally fluent psychopaths – those less likely to successfully infiltrate business or politics.  

So, as we’ve seen, the normie world is under assault. The rugs of objective truth, common sense and traditional social norms are being vigorously and viciously ranked out from beneath their feet. The term normie is used in a disparaging way in many corners of the politicized internet. And, certainly, there are associations to normies which are of some concern. Normies do tend to be excessively conformist, often buttressing their conformity with an all too willing resort to authority fallacies, conformation bias and motivated reasoning.[17] In the process, they all too easily make themselves cannon fodder for the most dangerous social processes, including the spread of social chaos and the rise of pathocracy. However, at the same time, it is the world of the normies – a world of common decency; commitment to the bonds of family, community, fellowship and church; and belief in the roughly empirical grounding of common sense – which is our only bulwark against the ever-encroaching danger of the social chaos that marches lockstep with pathocracy. It is the values and commitments of the normie world that is our best assurance of a society that may keep the psychopaths at bay and preserve us from the genocidal atrocities which rain misery upon human life, whenever pathocracy triumphs.

Among the missions of this Substack is a modest contribution to the preservation of the normie world: humanity’s last candle against the danger of a shrieking darkness.     

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[1] Personally, on such matters, I’m a multi-level selectionist, with an emergent order bent. If communal property turns out to provide sufficient fitness benefits to those social groups that practice it, over the benefits of other options practiced by other groups, those fitness benefits over the long run will manifest in the evolutionary triumph of the social practice of communal property. If not, then not.

[2] The “mask of sanity” is a popular and useful meme taken from the title of the 1941 book by Hervey Cleckley, emphasizing the way in which psychopaths learn to read the normal human emotions and responses, to which they have no psychological access, and learn to mimic them for purposes of better blending into normal society: Hervey Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues about the So-Called Psychopathic Personality (Brattleboro, Vermont: Echo Point Books & Media, 2015).

[3] Ian Hughes, Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities Are Destroying Democracy (Winchester, UK ; Washington, USA: Zero Books, 2018). Other sources worth looking at, here, are: Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him, Illustrated edition (New York, N.Y.: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2005); G. M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary, Reprint edition (New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 1995). Though his genocidal body count may not be as steep as these others, Fidel Castro’s communist pathocracy must be included, as well. While their focus does not put psychopathy or pathocracy at the centre of their analysis, those familiar with the work of Lobaczewski and Hughes will recognize all the telltale signs, including the emphasis on followers with similar personality traits and the importance of unstable environments as conditions of possibility for the “destructive leaders” of pathocracy: Art Padilla, Robert Hogan, and Robert B. Kaiser, “The Toxic Triangle: Destructive Leaders, Susceptible Followers, and Conducive Environments,” The Leadership Quarterly, Destructive Leadership, 18, no. 3 (June 1, 2007): 176–94, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.03.001.

[4] Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, ed. Laura Knight-Jadczyk, 2 edition (Grande Prairie, AB: Red Pill Press, 2007).

[5] Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity. Originally published in 1941, Cleckley’s book provides a review of the history of the study of psychopathy up to that time.

[6] Many make the mistake of conflating psychopathy with antisocial personality disorder. But as Hare observes in Without Conscience, the former refers to criminal and other antisocial behaviour. Psychopathy though, Hare observed, is a broader diagnosis that also refers to many individuals with psychopathic traits who are socially competent enough to not only avoid jail, but to actually achieve apparent social success. See, for instance: Dr Paul Babiak and Dr Robert D. Hare, Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work, Reprint edition (New York, NY: Harper Business, 2007).

[7] Babiak and Hare.

[8] William Hart, Kyle Richardson, and Gregory K. Tortoriello, “Dark Personality Voters Find Dark Politicians More Relatable and Fit for Office,” Journal of Research in Personality 75 (August 1, 2018): 59–68, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2018.05.007; Rolfe Daus Peterson and Carl L. Palmer, “The Dark Triad and Nascent Political Ambition,” Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, August 29, 2019, 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2019.1660354; Philip Chen, Scott Pruysers, and Julie Blais, “The Dark Side of Politics: Participation and the Dark Triad,” Political Studies, April 28, 2020, 0032321720911566, https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720911566; Ryan H. Murphy, “Psychopathy by U.S. State: A Translation of Regional Measures of the Big Five Personality Traits to Regional Measures of Psychopathy,” Heliyon 5, no. 3 (March 1, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2019.e01306.

[9] See also, Barbora Nevicka et al., “Uncertainty Enhances the Preference for Narcissistic Leaders,” European Journal of Social Psychology 43, no. 5 (2013): 370–80, https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.1943.

[10] Hughes, Disordered Minds.

[11] While the literature is simply too vast for an exhaustive list of sources, one might begin with these: Frank Miele and Vincent Sarich, Race: The Reality of Human Differences (New York: Routledge, 2004); Bo Winegard, Brian Boutwell, and Ben Winegard, “On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism,” Quillette (blog), June 23, 2016, http://quillette.com/2016/06/23/on-the-reality-of-race-and-the-abhorrence-of-racism/; Philippe J. Rushton, Race, Evolution & Behavior (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1995); Robert Trivers, “Parental Investment and Sexual Selection,” in Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man, 1871-1971, ed. B. Campbell (Chicago: Aldine Transaction, 1972); D. Schmitt et al., “Why Can’t a Man Be More like a Woman? Sex Differences in Big Five Personality Traits across 55 Cultures,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94, no. 1 (2008): 168–82; David Buss, “Sex Differences in Human Mate Preferences: Evolutionary Hypotheses Tested in 37 Cultures,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (March 1, 1989): 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00023992; Lee Ellis, “Identifying and Explaining Apparent Universal Sex Differences in Cognition and Behavior,” Personality and Individual Differences 51, no. 5 (October 1, 2011): 552–61, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2011.04.004; Jussi Lehtonen and Geoff A. Parker, “Gamete Competition, Gamete Limitation, and the Evolution of the Two Sexes,” Molecular Human Reproduction: Basic Science of Reproductive Medicine 20, no. 12 (December 1, 2014): 1161–68, https://doi.org/10.1093/molehr/gau068; Madhura Ingalhalikar et al., “Fundamental Sex Difference in Human Brain Architecture,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 2 (January 2014): 577–78, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1320954111; Jussi Lehtonen, Hanna Kokko, and Geoff A. Parker, “What Do Isogamous Organisms Teach Us about Sex and the Two Sexes?,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 371, no. 1706 (October 19, 2016): 20150532, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0532; Rong Su, James Rounds, and Patrick Ian Armstrong, “Men and Things, Women and People: A Meta-Analysis of Sex Differences in Interests,” Psychological Bulletin 135, no. 6 (November 2009): 859–84, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017364; Michael McConkey, Darwinian Liberalism (Vancouver, B.C.: Biological Realist Publications, 2018).

[12] The truth is of course that the great majority of fatalities were focused within a very narrow demographic range. Except for the U.S., across industrialized western countries the mean age of death from COVID was in the 80s and often as high or higher than the average lifespan: “Studies on Covid-19 Lethality,” Swiss Policy Research, May 11, 2020, https://swprs.org/studies-on-covid-19-lethality/. Far more rational, less chaotic solutions appropriate to the actual nature of the virus were widely acknowledged as available and superior: “Great Barrington Declaration,” accessed October 21, 2021, https://gbdeclaration.org/.

[13] John Stossel, “Coronavirus Censorship by Social Media,” Fremont News-Messenger, accessed October 21, 2021, https://www.thenews-messenger.com/story/opinion/2021/08/21/john-stossel-coronavirus-censorship-social-media/8177410002/; The Editorial Board, “Opinion | Fact-Checking Facebook’s Fact Checkers,” Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2021, sec. Opinion, https://www.wsj.com/articles/fact-checking-facebooks-fact-checkers-11614987375; Rachel Emmanuel, “Concern Mounts over Censorship of Canadian Doctors,” IPolitics (blog), March 9, 2021, https://ipolitics.ca/2021/03/09/concern-mounts-over-censorship-of-canadian-doctors/; “Declaration of Canadian Physicians for Science and Truth,” accessed October 21, 2021, https://canadianphysicians.org/; John P. A. Ioannidis, “Coronavirus Disease 2019: The Harms of Exaggerated Information and Non-Evidence-Based Measures,” European Journal of Clinical Investigation 50, no. 4 (2020): e13222, https://doi.org/10.1111/eci.13222; Laura Dodsworth, A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear during the Covid-19 Pandemic, 1st edition (London, UK: Pinter & Martin, 2021).

[14] There have been a few modest exceptions in this regard. And modest recognition of the importance of the problem of screening public leaders for psychopathy: Scott O. Lilienfeld et al., “Fearless Dominance and the U.S. Presidency: Implications of Psychopathic Personality Traits for Successful and Unsuccessful Political Leadership,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 103, no. 3 (September 2012): 489–505, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029392; Clive Roland Boddy, “Psychopathy Screening for Public Leadership,” International Journal of Public Leadership 12, no. 4 (January 1, 2016): 254–74, https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPL-08-2015-0023; Clive Boddy, “Populism and Political Personality: What Can We Learn from The Dark Triad Personality of Hermann Goering?,” The Journal of Psychohistory 49, no. 1 (Summer 2021): 12–31.

[15] Parenthetically, the pertinence of this concern is on full display in the relevant literature published over the last five years, that all sing from the same hymn book that Donald Trump is the epitome of the narcissistic, toxic, destructive leader, because he “suppressed” the media and “scapegoated” racial minorities. Yet there’s surprisingly little from such authors about the hundreds of thousands – including untold thousands of children – killed thanks to Barack Obama’s aggressive war policy, which for all his shortcomings is not true of Trump. Apparently, the standards of toxic and destructive leadership are somewhat narrowly construed. Given what is known about the leftwing bias of academia, this can hardly be surprising. Though, as I’ve clarified elsewhere, this is not a left-right issue, but a question of a middle American populist insurgency against the rule of the managerial class, which has destroyed their families and communities. (At the time of writing, I wasn’t alerted to the potential role of pathocracy in such events.) But being members of that managerial class, one can hardly expect most academics or journalists to exhibit any self-awareness or contrition on this front. Which, nonetheless, does put an exclamation mark on the point made in the text about how pathocratic analysis can be expected to be weaponized – and predictably by psychopaths: Lee Jussim, “Liberal Privilege in Academic Psychology and the Social Sciences: Commentary on Inbar & Lammers (2012),” Perspectives on Psychological Science 7, no. 5 (September 1, 2012): 504–7, https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691612455205; José L. Duarte et al., “Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 38 (2015), https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X14000430; Michael McConkey, The Managerial Class on Trial (Vancouver, B.C.: Biological Realist Publications, 2021).

[16] Robert D. Hare, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, 1st edition (New York: The Guilford Press, 1999); Babiak and Hare, Snakes in Suits; Nicholas S. Holtzman, “Facing a Psychopath: Detecting the Dark Triad from Emotionally-Neutral Faces, Using Prototypes from the Personality Faceaurus,” Journal of Research in Personality 45, no. 6 (December 1, 2011): 648–54, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2011.09.002; Sinan Alper, Fatih Bayrak, and Onurcan Yilmaz, “Inferring Political and Religious Attitudes from Composite Faces Perceived to Be Related to the Dark Triad Personality Traits,” Personality and Individual Differences 182 (November 1, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2021.111070; Leanne ten Brinke et al., “An Examination of the Communication Styles Associated with Psychopathy and Their Influence on Observer Impressions,” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 41, no. 3 (September 1, 2017): 269–87, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-017-0252-5.

[17] These things are of course true for very good evolutionary reasons: Richard D. Alexander, “The Evolution of Social Behavior,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 5 (January 1, 1974): 325–83; Richard D. Alexander, The Biology of Moral Systems (Hawthorne, N.Y: Aldine Transaction, 1987); Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, “Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34, no. 2 (2011): 57–74; Michael McConkey, Biological Realism: Foundations and Applications (Vancouver, B.C.: Biological Realist Publications, 2020).