The Ascendence of Sociopaths in US Governance
An International Man lives and does business wherever he finds
conditions most advantageous, regardless of arbitrary borders. He's diversified
globally, with passports from multiple countries, assets in several
jurisdictions and his residence in yet another. He doesn't depend absolutely on
any country and regards all of them as competitors for his capital and
expertise.
Living as an international man used to be just an interesting
possibility. But few Americans opted for it, since the US used to reward those
who settled in and put down roots. In fact, it rewarded them better than any
other country in the world, so there was nothing pressing about becoming an
international man.
Things change, however, and being rooted like a plant, at least
if you have a choice, is a suboptimal strategy for surviving and prospering.
Throughout history, almost every place has at some point become dangerous for
those who were stuck there. It may be America's turn.
For those who can take up the life of an international man, it's
no longer just an interesting lifestyle decision. It has become, at a minimum,
an asset saver, and it could be a life saver. That said, I understand the
hesitation you may feel about taking action; pulling up one's roots (or at
least grafting some of them to a new location) can be almost as traumatic to a
man as to a vegetable.
As any intelligent observer surveys the world's economic and
political landscape, he has to be disturbed – even dismayed and a bit
frightened – by the gravity and number of problems that mark the horizon. We're
confronted by economic depression, looming financial chaos, serious currency
inflation, onerous taxation, crippling regulation, developing police states
and, worst of all, the prospect of a major war. It seems almost unbelievable
that we are talking of the US – which historically has been the land of the
free.
How did we get here? An argument can be made that
miscalculation, accident, inattention and the like are why things go bad. Those
elements do have a role, but it is minor. Potential catastrophe across the
board can't be the result of happenstance. When things go wrong on a grand
scale, it's not just bad luck or inadvertence. It's because of serious
character flaws in one or many – or even all – of the players.
So is there a root cause of all the problems I've cited? If we
can find it, it may tell us how we personally can best respond to the problems.
In this article, I'm going to argue that the US government, in
particular, is being overrun by the wrong kind of person. It's a trend that's
been in motion for many years but has now reached a point of no return. In
other words, a type of moral rot has become so prevalent that it's
institutional in nature. There is not going to be, therefore, any serious
change in the direction in which the US is headed until a genuine crisis
topples the existing order. Until then, the trend will accelerate.
The reason is that a certain class of people – sociopaths – are
now fully in control of major American institutions. Their beliefs and
attitudes are insinuated throughout the economic, political, intellectual and
psychological/spiritual fabric of the US.
What does this mean to the individual? It depends on your
character. Are you the kind of person who supports "my country right or
wrong," as did most Germans in the 1930s and 1940s, or the kind who dodges
the duty to be a helpmate to murderers? The type of passenger who goes down
with the ship or the type who puts on his vest and looks for a life boat? The
type of individual who supports the merchants who offer the fairest deal or the
type who is gulled by splashy TV commercials?
What the ascendancy of sociopaths means isn't an academic
question. Throughout history, the question has been a matter of life and death.
That's one reason America grew; every American (or any ex-colonial) has
forebears who confronted the issue and decided to uproot themselves to go
somewhere with better prospects. The losers were those who delayed thinking
about the question until the last minute.
I have often described myself, and those I prefer to associate
with, as gamma rats. You may recall the ethologist's characterization of the
social interaction of rats as being between a few alpha rats and many beta
rats, the alpha rats being dominant and the beta rats submissive. In addition,
a small percentage are gamma rats that stake out prime territory and mates,
like the alphas, but are not interested in dominating the betas. The people
most inclined to leave for the wide world outside and seek fortune elsewhere
are typically gamma personalities.
You may be thinking that what happened in places like Nazi
Germany, the Soviet Union, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia and scores of other
countries in recent history could not, for some reason, happen in the US.
Actually, there's no reason it won't at this point. All the institutions that
made America exceptional – including a belief in capitalism, individualism,
self-reliance and the restraints of the Constitution – are now only historical
artifacts.
On the other hand, the distribution of sociopaths is completely
uniform across both space and time. Per capita, there were no more evil people
in Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, Mao's China, Amin's Uganda, Ceausescu's
Romania or Pol Pot's Cambodia than there are today in the US. All you need is
favorable conditions for them to bloom, much as mushrooms do after a rainstorm.
Conditions for them in the US are becoming quite favorable. Have
you ever wondered where the 50,000 people employed by the TSA to inspect and
degrade you came from? Most of them are middle-aged. Did they have jobs before
they started doing something that any normal person would consider demeaning?
Most did, but they were attracted to – not repelled by – a job where they wear
a costume and abuse their fellow citizens all day.
Few of them can imagine that they're shepherding in a police
state as they play their roles in security theater. (A reinforced door on the
pilots' cabin is probably all that's actually needed, although the most
effective solution would be to hold each airline responsible for its own
security and for the harm done if it fails to protect passengers and third
parties.) But the 50,000 newly employed are exactly the same type of people who
joined the Gestapo – eager to help in the project of controlling everyone.
Nobody was drafted into the Gestapo.
What's going on here is an instance of Pareto's Law. That's the
80-20 rule that tells us, for example, that 80% of your sales come from 20% of
your salesmen or that 20% of the population are responsible for 80% of the
crime.
As I see it, 80% of people are basically decent; their basic
instincts are to live by the Boy Scout virtues. 20% of people, however, are
what you might call potential trouble sources, inclined toward doing the wrong
thing when the opportunity presents itself. They might now be shoe clerks,
mailmen or waitresses – they seem perfectly benign in normal times. They play
baseball on weekends and pet the family dog. However, given the chance, they
will sign up for the Gestapo, the Stasi, the KGB, the TSA, Homeland Security or
whatever. Many are well intentioned but likely to favor force as the solution
to any problem.
But it doesn't end there, because 20% of that 20% are really bad
actors. They are drawn to government and other positions where they can work
their will on other people and, because they're enthusiastic about government,
they rise to leadership positions. They remake the culture of the organizations
they run in their own image. Gradually, non-sociopaths can no longer stand
being there. They leave. Soon the whole barrel is full of bad apples. That's
what's happening today in the US.
It's a pity that Bush, when he was in office, made such a big
deal of evil. He discredited the concept. He made Boobus americanus think
it only existed in a distant axis, in places like North Korea, Iraq and Iran –
which were and still are irrelevant backwaters and arbitrarily chosen enemies.
Bush trivialized the concept of evil and made it seem banal because he was such
a fool. All the while real evil, very immediate and powerful, was growing right
around him, and he lacked the awareness to see he was fertilizing it by turning
the US into a national security state after 9/11.
Now, I believe, it's out of control. The US is already in a
truly major depression and on the edge of financial chaos and a currency
meltdown. The sociopaths in government will react by redoubling the pace toward
a police state domestically and starting a major war abroad. To me, this is
completely predictable. It's what sociopaths do.
There are seven characteristics I can think of that define a
sociopath, although I'm sure the list could be extended.
- Sociopaths
completely lack a conscience or any capacity for real regret about hurting
people. Although they pretend the opposite.
- Sociopaths
put their own desires and wants on a totally different level from those of
other people. Their wants are incommensurate. They truly believe their
ends justify their means. Although they pretend the opposite.
- Sociopaths
consider themselves superior to everyone else, because they aren't
burdened by the emotions and ethics others have – they're above all that.
They're arrogant. Although they pretend the opposite.
- Sociopaths
never accept the slightest responsibility for anything that goes wrong,
even though they're responsible for almost everything that goes wrong.
You'll never hear a sincere apology from them.
- Sociopaths
have a lopsided notion of property rights. What's theirs is theirs, and
what's yours is theirs too. They therefore defend currency inflation and
taxation as good things.
- Sociopaths
usually pick the wrong target to attack. If they lose their wallet, they
kick the dog. If 16 Saudis fly planes into buildings, they attack
Afghanistan.
- Sociopaths
traffic in disturbing news, they love to pass on destructive rumors and
they'll falsify information to damage others.
The fact that they're chronic, extremely convincing and even
enthusiastic liars, who often believe their own lies, means they aren't easy to
spot, because normal people naturally assume another person is telling the
truth. They rarely have handlebar mustaches or chortle like Snidely Whiplash.
Instead, they cultivate a social veneer or a mask of sanity that diverts
suspicion. You can rely on them to be "politically correct" in
public. How could a congressman or senator who avidly supports charities
possibly be a bad guy? They're expert at using facades to disguise reality, and
they feel no guilt about it.
Political elites are primarily, and sometimes exclusively,
composed of sociopaths. It's not just that they aren't normal human beings.
They're barely even human, a separate subspecies, differentiated by their
psychological qualities. A normal human can mate with them spiritually and
psychologically about as fruitfully as a modern human could mate physically
with a Neanderthal; it can be done, but the results won't be good.
It's a serious problem when a society becomes highly
politicized, as is now the case in the US and Europe. In normal times, a
sociopath stays under the radar. Perhaps he'll commit a common crime when he
thinks he can get away with it, but social mores keep him reined in. However,
once the government changes its emphasis from protecting citizens from force to
initiating force with laws and taxes, those social mores break down. Peer
pressure, social approbation and moral opprobrium, the forces that keep a
healthy society orderly, are replaced by regulations enforced by cops and
funded by taxes. Sociopaths sense this, start coming out of the woodwork and
are drawn to the State and its bureaucracies and regulatory agencies, where
they can get licensed and paid to do what they've always wanted to do.
It's very simple, really. There are two ways people can relate
to each other: voluntarily or coercively. The government is pure coercion, and
sociopaths are drawn to its power and force.
The majority of Americans will accept the situation for two
reasons: One, they have no philosophical anchor to keep them from being washed
up onto the rocks. They no longer have any real core beliefs, and most of their
opinions – e.g., "We need national health care," "Our brave
troops should fight evil over there so we don't have to fight it over
here," "The rich should pay their fair share" – are reactive and
comforting. The whole point of spin doctors is to produce comforting sound
bites that elude testing against reality. And, two, they've become too pampered
and comfortable, a nation of overfed losers, mooches and coasters who like the
status quo without wondering how long it can possibly last.
It's nonsensical to blather about the Land of the Free and Home
of the Brave when reality TV and Walmart riots are much closer
to the truth. The majority of Americans are, of course, where the rot
originates – the presidential candidates are spending millions taking their
pulse in surveys and polls and then regurgitating to them what they seem to
want to hear. Once a country buys into the idea that an above-average,
privileged lifestyle is everyone's minimum due, when the fortunate few can
lobby for special deals to rake something off the table as they squeeze wealth
out of others by force, that country is on the decline. Lobbying and taxation
rather than production and innovation have never been able to sustain
prosperity. The wealth being squeezed took centuries to produce, but it is not
inexhaustible.
In that light, it was interesting to hear Mitt Romney, the
presumptive Republican nominee, speak about the lower, middle and
upper classes recently. Romney is an empty suit, only marginally better than
the last Republican nominee, the hostile and mildly demented John
McCain. In any event, Romney is right about the poor, in a way – there is a
"safety net," now holding 50 million people on Medicaid and 46
million on food stamps, among many other supposed benefits. And he's right
about the rich; there's no need to worry about them at the moment – at least
until the revolution starts. He claims to worry about the middle class, not
that his worries will do anything to help them. But he's right that the middle
class is where the problem lies. It's just a different kind of problem than he
thinks.
People generally fall into an economic class because of their
psychology and their values. Each of the three classes has a characteristic
psychological profile. For the lower class, it's apathy. They have nothing,
they're ground down and they don't really care. They're not in the game, and
they aren't going to do anything; they're resigned to their fate. For the upper
class, it's greed and arrogance. They have everything, and they think they
deserve it – whether they do or not. The middle class – at least in today's
world – is run by fear. Fear that they're only a paycheck away from falling
into the lower class. Fear that they can't pay their debts or borrow more. Fear
that they don't have a realistic prospect of improving themselves.
The problem is that fear is a negative, dangerous and
potentially explosive emotion. It can easily morph into anger and violence.
Exactly where it will lead is unpredictable, but it's not a good place. One
thing that exacerbates the situation is that all three classes now rely on the
government, albeit in different ways. Bankruptcy of the government will affect
them all drastically.
With sociopaths in charge, we could very well see the Milgram
experiment reenacted on a national scale. In the experiment, you may recall,
researchers asked members of the public to torture subjects (who, unbeknownst
to the people being recruited, were paid actors) with electric shocks, all the
way up to what they believed were lethal doses. Most of them did as asked,
after being assured that it was "alright" and "necessary"
by men in authority. The men in authority today are mostly sociopaths.
WHAT TO DO
One practical issue worth thinking about is how you, as someone
with libertarian values, will manage in a future increasingly controlled by sociopaths.
My guess is poorly, unless you take action to insulate yourself. That's because
of the way almost all creatures are programmed by nature. There's one
imperative common to all of them: Survive! People obviously want to do that as
individuals. And as families. In fact, they want all the groups that they're
members of to survive, simply because (everything else being equal) it should
help them to survive as individuals. So individual Marines want the Marine
Corps to survive. Individual Rotarians want the Rotary Club to prosper.
Individual Catholics leap to the defense of the Church of Rome.
That's why individual Germans during World War II were, as has
been asserted, "willing executioners" – they were supporting the
Reich for the same reasons the Marines, the Rotarians and the Catholics support
their groups. Except more so, because the Reich was under attack from all
sides. So of course they followed orders and turned in their neighbors who
seemed less than enthusiastic. Failing to support the Reich – even if they knew
it had some rather unsavory aspects – seemed an invitation to invading armies
to come and rape their daughters, steal their property and probably kill them.
So of course the Germans closed ranks around their leaders, even though
everyone at the top was a sociopath. You can expect Americans to do the same.
Americans have done so before, when the country was far less
degraded. During the War Between the States, even saying something against the
war was a criminal offense. The same was true during World War I. In World War
II, the Japanese were all put in concentration camps on groundless, racially
based suspicions of disloyalty. During the early years of the Cold War,
McCarthyism was rampant. The examples are legion among humans, and the US was
never an exception. It's even true among chickens. If a bird has a feather out
of place, the others will peck at it, eventually killing it. That out-of-place
feather is deemed a badge of otherness announcing that its owner isn't part of
the group. Chicken Autre must die.
Libertarians, who tend to be more intelligent, better informed
and very definitely more independent than average, are going to be in a touchy
situation as the crisis deepens. Most aren't going to buy into the groupthink
that inevitably accompanies war and other major crises. As such, they'll be
seen as unreliable, even traitors. As Bush said, "If you're not with us,
you're against us." And, he might have added, "the Constitution be
damned." But of course that document is no longer even given lip service;
it's now a completely dead letter.
It's very hard for an individualist to keep his mouth shut when
he sees these things going on. But he'd better keep quiet, as even HL Mencken
wisely did during both world wars. In today's world, just keeping quiet won't
be enough; the national security state has an extensive, and growing, file on
everybody. They believe they know exactly what your beliefs, desires, fears and
associations are, or may be. What we're now facing is likely to be more
dangerous than past crises. If you're wise, you'll relocate someplace where
you're something of an outsider and, by virtue of that fact, are allowed a
measure of eccentric opinion. That's why I spend an increasing amount of time
in Latin America. In truth, however, security is going to be hard
to find anywhere in the years to come. The most you can hope for is to tilt the
odds in your favor.
The best way to do that is by diversifying your assets
internationally. Allocating your wealth into real assets. Linking up with
sound, like-minded people who share your values. And staying alert for the
high-potential speculations that inevitably arise during chaotic times.
[Another puzzle piece that sadly fits in place for the fall of
the US is its astounding debt crisis.
Those
with the foresight to take advantage of the shifting trends it triggers can not
just survive, but thrive during the challenging times ahead.]
Source: Casey Research, Doug Casey, Chairman, March 21, 2012
