The disturbed psychopaths running this world

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About Steve Jobs: Apple founder, idol of success and indicated as a model for young enterprising. Many of his employees have admitted that "working with him was a hell"; Jobs grew grasp of irrepressible anger, insulted, "de-motivated". When someone was summoned to his office, "it was like climbing to the guillotine".

Psychopaths in charge to shape the "society of malevolence"

by Maurizio Blondet

About Steve Jobs: Apple founder, idol of success and indicated as a model for young enterprising. Many of his employees have admitted that "working with him was a hell"; Jobs grew grasp of irrepressible anger, insulted, "de-motivated". When someone was summoned to his office, "it was like climbing to the guillotine". Those who knew him spoke of him as "an asshole", a rude unbearable (jerk). One of his best friends, Jony Ive that worked by his side, told to Business Insider: "When he was frustrated, his way to get to the catharsis was to hurt someone. Thinking of entitlement. As if social norms did not apply to him".

Those evoked here are stretches of a real psychopath, an "antisocial personality disorder" or a "narcissistic personality disorder". Hurt, devaluation, disdain subordinates, it is part of the main features of this type of disturbed: the total lack of empathy and compassion, that is to put yourself in the shoes of others and the inability to have remorse for the harm you do to others.

Mental hospital or prison

In the most serious and overt cases, these types of people end up in a mental hospital or in a prison. Indeed, there is "a natural affinity between the pathological narcissist and the criminal" (as Dr. Sam Vaknin, an expert of corporate psychologies), united by the same "lack of empathy and compassion, deficient social skills, contempt for the moral and legal norms" . But in attenuated forms, certain psychopathies make those who are affected highly "functioning", and take him, paradoxically, to the success in multinational companies and heads of States (or churches).

The most psychiatric studies in fact concern the prisoners. "The detainees are easy, love meet researchers, this breaks the monotony of their days," says the psychiatrist Robert Hare: "We know much less about the corporate psychopathies and their consequences: CEOs, politicians, ministers - these sharks - they do not make to examine for sure. " Robert Hare, with colleague Paul Babiak, led one of the very few studies on the topic: P. Babiak, c.s. Neumann, R.D. Hare, "Corporate psychopathy: Talking the walk".

Both agree: at the head of large companies and financial corporations, psychopaths are one in twenty, or 4 percent of: if it seems little, think it's an incidence of disturbed four times higher than in the general population. According to them, "Wall Street could count one in 10, attracted by the regulatory gaps that allow big profits".

Lack of empathy and guilt

Thus let's see what identikit Hare makes of these powerful: "A superficial charm, a boundless ego, pathological lying, cunning cold and calculated to achieve the prey. Often impulsive and irresponsible, show lack of empathy and lack of guilt, have no regrets. Their danger is accentuated by other characters, such as the criminal versatility and a strong ability to manipulate [ie: subjugating the will of others], deceive and control".

These are the characters, say, of a successful gangster, of Al Capone who becames the big boss, has the official Chicago at his feet, and then ends up in jail. "They are the features that allow psychopaths to ascend to the top positions of power and influence. To absolute power" in large companies or organizations. That elicit expressions like "That bastard! Clever ... but that asshole!".

It does not surprise Professor Joel Bakan, a professor of law at the University of British Columbia (Canada) that has contributed to a study entitled "Do Psychopats Run the World?"

What does a law professor in the issue of psychopathy? Got to do, if you listen to what the jurist has to say. "Although for the most part at the head of companies there are moral people, it is also true that leaders must first of all serve the interests of the company they managed. They manage money that is not theirs: they can not use them to heal the sick.... "Then? "In the business world, good people are encouraged to misbehave. After all, the company, like the psychopathic personality that resembles, is programmed to exploit others for profit purposes".

This applies to the joint stock company, as for today's society in general. Darrell West of the Brookings Institution, for example, stressed the responsibility just of faculties of law and business administration - from which future business leaders, Wall Street speculators and CEOs of listed multinationals exit - in forming (or attracting) psychopaths in power. There, explained West, is nailed in the head of the students the concept that Milton Friedman, the economist of the total liberalism, wrote in 1970: "Maximizing shareholder value is the sole responsibility of a company - The only social responsibility of  a company is to maximize profits. At the end of the studies, the new graduates - we see it from the questionnaires that we submit - see the shareholder interest as the most important social goal". This is compounded, it recognizes the scholar, by the fact that just the most prestigious schools that give the finest masters in business administration economy and trade have distinct courses "that provide general conceptions on the task of business in society", are schools that teach techniques. And they make indifferent to morality.

Fact to ponder. For centuries, until recently even in the British world, schools preparing ruling classes to assume positions of power, were classical schools: Eton, Oxford ... humanities courses, where they taught Latin and Greek, Greek and Roman history, history of philosophy , and not "management technique"; this they learned during their career. Today is the Friedman's ideology that has shaped multinational executives and opinion leaders, educating them to the lack of responsibility towards others.

The psychopath "pretends moral action to use it as a tool to manipulate others"; similarly, the "bastard" of success, makes profits without scruples and is "motivated by the moral justification that his culture and environment must supply it with," says Hare: white collar criminals. Oh yeah. They "thrive because the characters that define their psychic disorder are actually valued". When the great speculators are caught in a criminal organization, especially in the banking and financial world, "what do you do? A slap on the hand, a prohibition to operate on the Stock Exchange of six months, a fine....", sighed the psychiatrist.

At this point it is difficult to distinguish a "bastard" approved by a psychopath. Both are motivated by moral justification that draw from their environment. "This means the ability of a psychopathic system to conform his leadership," reflects Nick Parkins, philosopher.

A sinister proof is just in the rare studies of Hare and Babiak on disturbed that have reached top of careers. Though they are objectively poor managers, with little team spirit and receive a bad performance evaluations by employees (as it is logical: they are mentally ill, they don't know how to work well), just those that have high clinical "scores" as psychopaths are brought in the palm of your hand by their immediate superiors as "creative and innovative, good communicators and strategic thinkers".

A tragic misunderstanding but explained: who has these personality disorders "has communication, persuasion, the interpersonal relations skills to overcome all the downfalls in their career".

"In some companies the psychopaths managements are seen as having leadership skills, in spite of the poor performance and adverse notes from subordinates," said Babiak. It's a long time known to psychiatrists that psychopaths of this kind have a great power to manipulate the decision-makers: "an unerring ability of the psychopath to seek and prioritize relations with the highest in authority and show a tremendous ability to influence them" (Dennis Doren, Understanding and Treating the Psychopath, Wile, 1987). They have a quality of chameleons to mimic their environment by reading and influencing superiors with the art of deception, with self-promotion or thin persuasion.

Moreover, even on social media, individuals who had scored high in narcissistic personality test "had more friends on Facebook", of course, because "they updated more regularly their profile", with many photos of themselves (D. Pearse , "Facebook's dark side: study finds link to socially aggressive narcissism," The Guardian, 17 March 2012). An example of that their special "competence".

A look at the history, we realize that John D. Rockefeller, the famous oil tycoon and "robber baron", capable of ruining without scruples competitors, proclaiming (pious): "My money has given me by God ", he had traits of psychopathic personality. So Mayer Rothschild and J.P. Morgan, famous investment bankers admired on the financial scene that also sowed destruction and suffering around them.

These characters have found in the American environment and in its "freedom" and "individualism" the ideal place to flourish: at the same time, have shaped the American way of thinking so that, say, the poor are poor by their fault, they are undeserving supporting. Today triumphs in USA an ideology that does not recognize itself, that in the absence of better we call "evilism". They range from Hillary Clinton who cackles for Gaddafi's killing ( "I came, I saw, and he died") or asking "if there is a drone to kill Assange", to Nuland of the "fuck Europe", to Senator McCain that intends with the bloodiest terrorists in Syria and tirelessly seeks war with Russia, to the directors of the CIA who openly threaten to kill this and that; without forgetting that Obama has killed hundreds of humans in the world, choosing them from lists submitted to him by the services in extrajudicial killings with drones.

"Delicious ruining people"

On Wall Street and in the world of business this feeling is cultivated with enjoyment. "The idea of ruining people is simply delicious: nothing personal, it's food. The power is all that really interested me in life - the destructive power, the knowledge, the invisible influence": so a successful woman confessed, who described her illness - of which it has become aware - under the pseudonym ME: Thomas, "Confessions of a sociopathic. Journey into the mind of a manipulative "(published in Italy by Marsilio, 2013).

But to prove that the evilism, crossed the Atlantic, has become the ideology of the ruling oligarchies in Europe, are enough certain statements by Mario Monti ("We are effectively destroying domestic demand, never waste a good crisis"), or the words of Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa on the true meaning of the "reforms" imposed by UE:

"In continental Europe, a comprehensive program of structural reform [...] pension, health, labor market, education.., must be guided by a single principle: attenuate that diaphragm protections that during the twentieth century have gradually removed the individual from the direct contact with the harshness of life, with the setbacks, with the sanction or the prize to his defects or quality".

Not to mention the brutal lack of compassion that Berlin and Brussels use against the Greeks. Thus, the entire Western "civilization" has reached the point described by the essayist Michael Ellner: "Let's just try to look. Everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information and religions destroy spirituality "[see Bergoglio, see Wahhabism, ed.]

Add to this world upside down the most chilling connotation: pedophilia. Vice concealed of the highest elites, from Jimmy Savile, BBC's showman (now deceased), who raped children and even dead bodies and conducted Satanic rituals, while his superiors closed their eyes, until the recent and suppressed Pizzagate scandal, in the environment maximally "evilist" of the Podesta brothers and Comet Ping Pong. Because certainly in those acts, the powerful they know themselves as unpunished and do not care of criminal laws have the "delight of ruining people".

So there is "a systemic malevolence hidden in society" that selects the psychopaths for the vertices of power and is conformed by psychopaths? Where "psychopathy works as an integral part of the system" and psychopaths are adored and imitated by the masses for their achievements? Question the philosopher Nick Parkins. Which concludes: "All of a sudden, the term psychopathy seems no longer enough".

Maybe. Maybe it's to reassure us that we give clinical names to realities that come from regions darkest and more abysmal; maybe this society in which we practice scandalously a limitless freedom, is delivered voluntarily to the Anomos. The Evilist par excellence. The primary Narcissist, one who proclaimed, in a timeless night: "Non serviam".

 

[Note of Maurizio Blondet: The article is loosely based on the essay by Nick Parkins on New Dawn: Do psycopaths run the world?]

 

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Original article by Maurizio Blondet:

 

 

Translation by Costantino Ceoldo - Pravda freelance