Pathocrats

And protecting one's own psychological hygiene.

I think we are getting a little better at identifying evil intent that tries to hide behind a façade of good intentions - well some of us at least. But we also seem to have a propensity to want to explain the evil intent in terms of ‘compensating’ or a ‘defence mechanism’ or an outcome of a traumatic childhood. I’ll let George Simon explain why this is so…

[W]e've been pre-programmed to believe that people only exhibit problem behaviors when they're 'troubled' inside or anxious about something. We've also been taught that people aggress only when they're attacked in some way. So, even when our gut tells us that somebody is attacking us and for no good reason, we don't readily accept the notion. We usually start to wonder what's bothering the person so badly 'underneath it all' that's making them act in such a disturbing way. We may even wonder what we may have said or done that 'threatened' them. We almost never think that they might be fighting simply to get something, have their way, or gain the upper hand. So, instead of seeing them as merely fighting, we view them as primarily hurting in some way.

Not only do we often have trouble recognizing the ways people aggress us, but we also have difficulty discerning the distinctly aggressive character of some personalities. The legacy of Sigmund Freud's work has a lot to do with this. Freud's theories (and the theories of others who built upon his work) heavily influenced the psychology of personality for a long time. Elements of the classical theories of personality found their way into many disciplines other than psychology as well as into many of our social institutions and enterprises. The basic tenets of these theories and their hallmark construct, neurosis, have become fairly well etched in the public consciousness.

Psychodynamic theories of personality tend to view everyone, at least to some degree, as neurotic. Neurotic individuals are overly inhibited people who suffer unreasonable fear (anxiety), guilt and shame when it comes to securing their basic wants and needs. The malignant impact of overgeneralizing Freud's observations about a small group of overly inhibited individuals into a broad set of assumptions about the causes of psychological ill-health in everyone cannot be overstated…

Therapists whose training overly indoctrinated them in the theory of neurosis, may 'frame' problems presented to them incorrectly. They may, for example, assume that a person, who all their life has aggressively pursued independence and demonstrated little affinity for others, must necessarily be 'compensating' for a 'fear' of intimacy. In other words, they will view a hardened fighter as a terrified runner, thus misperceiving the core reality of the situation…

We need a completely different theoretical framework if we are to truly understand, deal with, and treat the kinds of people who fight too much as opposed to those who cower or 'run' too much.

George K. Simon, Jr. - In Sheep's Clothing

What if the majority of the sociopathic/psychopathic types are not ‘running’ from anything, not ‘compensating’ for anything, but they are being as true to themselves an anyone could be? “Be yourself” we encourage masses at a wellness seminars and the office staff at the half-yearly retreat. But what if ‘being fully you’ means cold calculating ‘winning at any cost’ that actually costs a lot of people much pain? What if ‘being fully you’ means doing everything in your power to depopulate the world (in a controlled and humane manner of course) for the salvation of the world? Or ‘being true to yourself’ means harnessing the political talent of the world to subjugate the population to technocratic transhumanists - no neurosis, anxiety, or childhood abuse required? What if evil people are just evil people?

I may have an overly empathic and incorrect notion about people who do bad things because of my training in psychology (as Simon points out above). For others to simply see evil for what it is, without overlaying Freudian ideas of neurosis from childhood disturbances, may be more realistic.

That is not to say that damaged people do bad things out of the aberrations of mind that are the unfortunate result of trauma. But as I’ve said before, those people are less likely to have climbed to the top of the social/commercial/political hierarchy where they can do damage at a mass scale.

Time to discern very clearly the nature of the actors centre stage today.