A Nation of Psychopaths

Are we becoming a nation of psychopaths? A psychopath has no feelings for others or understanding of others feelings, a serious emotional dysfunction. Because they are often very calculating and manipulative, they can appear to have feelings for others, but they can kill without remorse. It appears that this pathology is growing in our population. We can see how this plays out in social and political discourse.

Recently, the Republicans have begun to attack empathy; why? It's too crazy to believe that this criticism could be acceptable to anyone. Is it because they have none and are afraid of it? It seems to me that many of the most crackpot right wingnuts fear empathy because deep down beneath their almost nonexistent rational minds they realize if they had any they wouldn't be able to believe their ideology. They say that empathy is personal, emotional and irrational so it has no place in politics and social policy. Yet this belief has a strong dysfunctional emotional attachment. This thought may be one of the most irrational beliefs ever. It is how the Nazi holocaust and all other genocidal politics operates. However, emotions aren't irrational. We have them as a sensory protection, to understand others and to determine what we want. We couldn't survive without them or have functioning families and society. They are what make us human. Certainly, emotions can be driven by irrational urges and programmed by dysfunctional experiences, but that doesn't mean that emotional response is in itself is irrational, only that bad input will produce bad output. And this is what has become of Republican politics – bad input and even worse output. Ours is a very sick country.

Empathy causes us to feel what another human is feeling, a valuable sense to promote understanding among us. When empathy dies only cold psychopathology remains. Anything may be done to serve selfish ends without remorse and responsibility. Individuals become egotistic islands unto themselves, unable to act together for the common good. We see this in the so-called conservative beliefs that wish to drastically reduce the power of government and privatize all social institutions. Nothing is left of a “We, the People”, a common society to which we all belong that supports all human endeavor. It is the beginning of the “War of all against all.”, the death of society. In reality, it is the old justification of authoritarian social status, elites and tyranny of the few “superior” beings who wish to live as they wish off the exploitation and enslavement of the masses.

Republicans are facing the end of their beliefs, beliefs that never could function as a guide to a civil society. It is a fundamental and fundamentalist wrong. If they lose that they lose their identities as human beings as they have known it. This can only be interpreted as a death, not only of the individual, but of society, humanity and all concepts of the right and good. It is the apocalypse, but without salvation.

The right strongly fears their loss of power, both financial and political. They have only been capable of creating a political ideology that is bereft of empathy, therefore inhumane. The instigation of their philosophy at this time is only to exacerbate the growing environmental problems that would most likely lead to the death of human civilization. They appear to know that to save the human race they must lose, but they are unwilling to do that, being primarily concerned with short-term profitable results, black and white fundamentalist thinking or in denial of the harsh realities we face.

This condition is stark raving madness, insanity, spiritual disease. Are we sane enough to stop it? It will take a vast rethinking of the psychological elements of politics and society and realizing that societies can be sick, and if so, can also be healed.