American Psychopathy

Two Definitions –

Psychopath: a person suffering from chronic mental disorder with abnormal or violent social behavior.

Psychopath; a person having an egocentric and antisocial personality marked by a lack of remorse for one’s actions, an absence of empathy for others, and often criminal tendencies.

It’s like after a mass killing or after a serial killer is identified, you always hear people who are interviewed saying, he seemed like such a nice guy, he was always so polite.

Psychopathy has many causes, but America (the United States) has a special version of psychopathy and its main cause is a kind of mass hypnosis. In America an incredible amount of people seem to accept so easily that it’s not really a big deal that the United States is committing atrocities all over the world. Because we are told it’s for the right reasons; and besides I have better things to do.

Occasionally you will hear people question whether the United States should be the world’s policeman. This illustrates the hypnosis. We are the world’s thug; not its police.

America is a hero based culture. The American psychopath lives with a kind of conviction that they are the heroes. They espouse and praise virtue and goodness. They admire integrity. Even though they are none of these things. They have been brainwashed or have brainwashed themselves into believing that because it is a dangerous world, what would be evil, if someone else was doing it, is necessary for them to do, to protect those values.

Somewhere in their brains there must be a mechanism (that they have cultivated to such a point that it itself has become subconscious) that kicks in and heads any introspection, any glimmer of gut human response, off at the pass.

The same goes for most mainstream journalists. These are people who kiss their kids goodbye in the morning, then go to work where their job is to manufacture consent; to lie to their audience and make sure the vast majority of the populace feel that there’s a pretty good reason why their taxes are going to kill people who never did anything to them or even threatened them in any way.

If you had magic glasses that could see the truth, and you put them on while you were looking at most mainstream journalists, you would see blood dripping from their hands.

Sanctions are more evidence of this psychopathy. Congress continually passes (usually with a vast majority) sanctions on countries, as of this writing on 39 countries, affecting 1/3 of the people of the world. Members of Congress know that the only purpose of these sanctions is to destroy the country, to devastate the people to such an extent that they revolt and bring about regime change to one that allows our plunder of their resources. At the very least, if Congressional members don’t acknowledge that, they do it to punish the country, which is just as psychopathic; seeing themselves as some kind of superior being somehow endowed with a supremacy that lets them decide how others (most who have never done anything or even threatened anything at all against the United States) should live.

Recently I had an ongoing email discussion with an old friend who I know down to my bones to be of the highest integrity and honesty. At one point I said I was disappointed with and had no respect for our 2 Oregon (blue liberal state) Senators, because they were 2 of the 75 Senators who signed a letter to Trump urging him not to pull out of Syria and essentially telling him to keep up the good work we’re doing there.

My friend wrote back saying that he’s glad they are our Senators.

I was thinking about it and in my head I was thinking how Ron Wyden (one of our Senators) is a psychopath. Then I imagined saying that to somebody and imagined their shock that I would use such a word to describe Ron Wyden, a good Democratic progressive Senator.

Here’s how I see it.

Imagine there was this man you knew of, didn’t know personally but knew about his ideas and beliefs and political stances and were of the opinion that he was basically a pretty good person.

One day you hear a knock at the door and it’s this man. You invite him in. He steps inside your house and shoots your brother dead. Thinking Ron Wyden is not a psychopath would be like saying about this man, “well, of course I’m opposed to what he did to my brother but on the whole he seems like a pretty regular guy.”

The only difference between that man and Ron Wyden is that the man who shot your brother only killed one person but it’s someone you know and care about as opposed to Ron Wyden being responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees and a country being torn apart.

Ron Wyden has no more of a good reason to support the ongoing death and destruction in Syria than the man who shot your brother has to do what he did. They are both psychopaths; people who kill and somehow have conveniently overridden the circuitry of humanity that most people have.

The actions of Ron Wyden and our Congress both fit the definition of a psychopath being people who have an egocentric personality marked by a lack of remorse for one’s actions, an absence of empathy for others, and often criminal tendencies.

I pick on Ron Wyden because he has the power to directly wield death and destruction. But it should be made clear that Americans who are willing to go along with the Empire’s running amok around the world are also responsible.

It is the infection of the American psychopathy; the belief that we can do whatever we want to do to others that we would never in a million years allow somebody else to do to us.

This psychopathy is historically viewed as and evident in the histories of Genghis Khan, Hitler, the Roman emperors, and perhaps the British empire.

But in the United States now, it is imbedded almost in our culture. Our hero oriented culture makes it easy for the most evil players in the United States government to sell the slaughter by the military or by sanctions to its citizens. It’s a dangerous world and only our heroic efforts can keep you safe and free. And fear is the icing on the cake of the lies told to make the populace compliant. The fear coupled with the message that we must act heroically facilitates the short-circuiting of the human response.

Citizens of the Untied States should find what their country is doing repugnant. Even in a scenario where a violent response is necessary, if a situation has come to the point where we have killed, it should be occasion for remorse and deep reflection. But our conquests are heroic and the victims either evil themselves or they are the unfortunate ones (collateral damage) who must pay the price as we liberate their comrades. No remorse necessary.

Congress repeatedly passes sanctions on Russia, on Venezuela, on Iran, on Syria, on Nicaragua, and many more countries. Most of the votes on these sanctions are unanimous or nearly unanimous. And, again, most of these countries never did a thing to the United States or even threatened us in any way.

Pretty much nearly every United States Congress person is a psychopath. Where is the reflection? Where is the learning? It is now pretty much agreed that the Iraq war was a mistake. But we keep doing it. Where is the humanity?

And where is the humanity in my fellow citizens who aren’t outraged at the actions of our Presidents and our Congress?

This is the hypnosis that is the American psychopathy.

•

In this clip, from the RT show CrossTalk, Wolf Blitzer, CNN’s “lead political anchor”, demonstrates perfectly the American psychopathy. Regarding the ongoing bombing of Yemen, causing the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, he points out that peace has a substantial downside.