I’m not convinced the elites are psychopathic though the parallel is persuasive in terms of their extraordinary inability to show more than token concern for the terrible human suffering in Ukraine and Gaza. Where is the left wing press which ought to be holding these elites to account? I go to the Guardian, for example, expecting to see those in government being hauled over the tiles - and there is nothing. Just trivia about Kate Middleton, racial remarks made by a Tory donor, and some mixed up dead people in a Hull funeral home. When I learned about the holocaust at school the incomprehensible factor was why no one did anything. And here we are united in silence with only a few courageous individuals on the fringe taking to the streets, disrupting events, or declaiming those responsible on X. Here in Morocco - where I live - it’s the same. National interest in keeping on the right side of the U.S. and Israel because they recognised Morocco’s claim to the Sahara effectively muzzles the press and keeps the populace quiet. We’ve had a couple of demonstrations but they just make people more placid because they were able to express themselves in a carefully controlled context and now we feel we can all go home having ‘done our bit’. The mechanisms by which we are controlled and contained are truly dystopian, and as just one ordinary citizen watching people get on with their day to day lives I just despair. I’m an atheist but God bless George Galloway, Jeffrey Sachs, John Meersheimer, Alastair Crooke, and - of course- Thomas Fazi! We need the sanity of principled academics, journalists - and all those unafraid to ‘speak truth to power’. We are living a nightmare.
Too fight. I think our political system effectively selects for psychopathy. In my lifetime there have been admirable and successful politicians but over last ~ 20 years only successful ones. I think it’s down to the grooming programs established to foster “young leaders.” I would expect to find a lot of secret service input into these programs.
I am just not sure if a recourse to pathology explains the present political system. As you have explained in your article on the EU — it might be a systemic neoliberalism more than psychological pathology (whatever that might be).
As a typical western elite, (a Florida homeowner with a positive net worth) I can explain my lack of shame or guilt over Gaza because Gaza is a manufactured news headline that primarily threatens the real elites, not me.
If we define western elites as people who hold power: financial, ideological, coercive or administrative, then most Americans are going to fit into the first bucket, e.g.: by virtue of their paycheck or their home value, we hold financial power.
However, my little $300K American net worth is dwarfed by the billionaires net worth. There’s actually greater diversity amongst “Elites“ than there is among the Poor (those who hold no power).
Mass casualty warfare will have the greatest impact on the top 1% of elite because it will destroy the physical infrastructure which with which they make goods and deliver services.
Most of the value of elite wealth comes from stock ownership in the companies that own those assets.
The extent which you believe headlines such as Gaza, Ukraine, a China invasion or immigration across the Mexican border is a threat to your lifestyle is the degree to which you have bought into media-driven narrative.
I’m not saying that any of these events are “fake news“ just that they are not the news that is relevant to your lifestyle and your livelihood.
Participation in a city council meetingor a school board meeting would probably have a much greater, immediate impact on your life and your child’s lives than paying attention to presidential or international politics.
Well, Western leaders may be the bold, nihilistic psychopaths you portray.
But from where I stand, they look more like dithering incompetents.
Partly because they've lived their lives in privileged cocoons, more sheltered from misfortune - and from reality in general - than, say, Louis XIV of France.
Applying the concept of psychopathy to behavior that is heavily determined by institutional commitments leads to an underappreciation of what the term means psychoanalytically. The psychopath's lack of empathy and instrumentalization of others goes all the way down to their immediate interpersonal relationships. They delight in having ridded themselves of a conscience across the board, with the establishment of genuinely perverse "alternative" value systems as part of the mix (Hannibal Lecter is an extreme example, but his character is useful to clarify what mental agencies we need to consider and just how far the experience of another person can disintegrate into "part objects.") Further, institutional psychopathy can be grounded in a sincere embrace of values that are pursued in a "resolute" strategic fashion in which the ends justify the means, etc etc. If you're on the receiving end of institutional psychopathy this distinction may not matter much, but for the sake of using concepts to actually understand the world it does. Let's avoid another episode of excitable conceptualizing like we've seen around the use of "fascism."
Yes, I WAS calling them "psychopaths," but I got some persons who did not seem to like it. And I stopped using the term. For example, instead of looking at economics the usual way, we can look at the psychologies of the persons in the economic system. This I was calling "psychological economics," and I wrote a few posts about it, here and on Medium.com before I was thrown off for asking whether a TRANS writer was a male or a female person. Just asking got me canceled from there.
Anyway, in "psychological economics" what matters is not how many customers want "x" product at what price---who cares about that? The question is that of whether all the buyers and sellers are in their right mind or not. It is about the psychological condition of the economic actors. Are buyers sane or are they psychotic? Many of the products sold today indicate the buyers as well as the sellers have gone crazy. And look at the advertisements, and the insistence on jamming my computer with ads I have never paid any attention to. So, why would it be necessary to keep sending me thousands of ads when I have never responded to a single one in my life? That's crazy.
But they keep doing it, and presumably make a living doing this even though I have paid them zero. That sounds a bit like psychological economics, not something that comes from products anyone actually needs, or even products that actually get sold. When the economy is controlled by psychopaths, what kind of "economy" is that? Where are we now?
I’m not convinced the elites are psychopathic though the parallel is persuasive in terms of their extraordinary inability to show more than token concern for the terrible human suffering in Ukraine and Gaza. Where is the left wing press which ought to be holding these elites to account? I go to the Guardian, for example, expecting to see those in government being hauled over the tiles - and there is nothing. Just trivia about Kate Middleton, racial remarks made by a Tory donor, and some mixed up dead people in a Hull funeral home. When I learned about the holocaust at school the incomprehensible factor was why no one did anything. And here we are united in silence with only a few courageous individuals on the fringe taking to the streets, disrupting events, or declaiming those responsible on X. Here in Morocco - where I live - it’s the same. National interest in keeping on the right side of the U.S. and Israel because they recognised Morocco’s claim to the Sahara effectively muzzles the press and keeps the populace quiet. We’ve had a couple of demonstrations but they just make people more placid because they were able to express themselves in a carefully controlled context and now we feel we can all go home having ‘done our bit’. The mechanisms by which we are controlled and contained are truly dystopian, and as just one ordinary citizen watching people get on with their day to day lives I just despair. I’m an atheist but God bless George Galloway, Jeffrey Sachs, John Meersheimer, Alastair Crooke, and - of course- Thomas Fazi! We need the sanity of principled academics, journalists - and all those unafraid to ‘speak truth to power’. We are living a nightmare.
Too fight. I think our political system effectively selects for psychopathy. In my lifetime there have been admirable and successful politicians but over last ~ 20 years only successful ones. I think it’s down to the grooming programs established to foster “young leaders.” I would expect to find a lot of secret service input into these programs.
I am just not sure if a recourse to pathology explains the present political system. As you have explained in your article on the EU — it might be a systemic neoliberalism more than psychological pathology (whatever that might be).
As a typical western elite, (a Florida homeowner with a positive net worth) I can explain my lack of shame or guilt over Gaza because Gaza is a manufactured news headline that primarily threatens the real elites, not me.
If we define western elites as people who hold power: financial, ideological, coercive or administrative, then most Americans are going to fit into the first bucket, e.g.: by virtue of their paycheck or their home value, we hold financial power.
However, my little $300K American net worth is dwarfed by the billionaires net worth. There’s actually greater diversity amongst “Elites“ than there is among the Poor (those who hold no power).
Mass casualty warfare will have the greatest impact on the top 1% of elite because it will destroy the physical infrastructure which with which they make goods and deliver services.
Most of the value of elite wealth comes from stock ownership in the companies that own those assets.
The extent which you believe headlines such as Gaza, Ukraine, a China invasion or immigration across the Mexican border is a threat to your lifestyle is the degree to which you have bought into media-driven narrative.
I’m not saying that any of these events are “fake news“ just that they are not the news that is relevant to your lifestyle and your livelihood.
Participation in a city council meetingor a school board meeting would probably have a much greater, immediate impact on your life and your child’s lives than paying attention to presidential or international politics.
Don’t believe the Elite headlines!
Well, Western leaders may be the bold, nihilistic psychopaths you portray.
But from where I stand, they look more like dithering incompetents.
Partly because they've lived their lives in privileged cocoons, more sheltered from misfortune - and from reality in general - than, say, Louis XIV of France.
Applying the concept of psychopathy to behavior that is heavily determined by institutional commitments leads to an underappreciation of what the term means psychoanalytically. The psychopath's lack of empathy and instrumentalization of others goes all the way down to their immediate interpersonal relationships. They delight in having ridded themselves of a conscience across the board, with the establishment of genuinely perverse "alternative" value systems as part of the mix (Hannibal Lecter is an extreme example, but his character is useful to clarify what mental agencies we need to consider and just how far the experience of another person can disintegrate into "part objects.") Further, institutional psychopathy can be grounded in a sincere embrace of values that are pursued in a "resolute" strategic fashion in which the ends justify the means, etc etc. If you're on the receiving end of institutional psychopathy this distinction may not matter much, but for the sake of using concepts to actually understand the world it does. Let's avoid another episode of excitable conceptualizing like we've seen around the use of "fascism."
Yes, I WAS calling them "psychopaths," but I got some persons who did not seem to like it. And I stopped using the term. For example, instead of looking at economics the usual way, we can look at the psychologies of the persons in the economic system. This I was calling "psychological economics," and I wrote a few posts about it, here and on Medium.com before I was thrown off for asking whether a TRANS writer was a male or a female person. Just asking got me canceled from there.
Anyway, in "psychological economics" what matters is not how many customers want "x" product at what price---who cares about that? The question is that of whether all the buyers and sellers are in their right mind or not. It is about the psychological condition of the economic actors. Are buyers sane or are they psychotic? Many of the products sold today indicate the buyers as well as the sellers have gone crazy. And look at the advertisements, and the insistence on jamming my computer with ads I have never paid any attention to. So, why would it be necessary to keep sending me thousands of ads when I have never responded to a single one in my life? That's crazy.
But they keep doing it, and presumably make a living doing this even though I have paid them zero. That sounds a bit like psychological economics, not something that comes from products anyone actually needs, or even products that actually get sold. When the economy is controlled by psychopaths, what kind of "economy" is that? Where are we now?