WINGTV Opinion poll; Day 3 - on Wingtv
Well, again I say, I am always ready and willing to discuss with anyone until they prove themselves to be just playing games. But, as Lisa asks "What IS the point?"
This guy (and so many others like him) try to act a certain way, but so quickly reveal their pathology. It reminds me of a passage in Hervey Cleckley's book about psychopathy: "The Mask of Sanity."
Hervey Cleckley said:
In attempting to account for the abnormal behavior observed in the psychopath, we have found useful the hypothesis that he has a serious and subtle abnormality or defect at deep levels disturbing the integration and normal appreciation of experience and resulting in a pathology that might, in analogy with Henry Head's classifications of the aphasias, he described as semantic. Presuming that such a patient does fail to experience life adequately in its major issues, can we then better account for his clinical manifestations? ...
If the psychopath's life is devoid of higher order stimuli, of primary or serious goals and values, and of intense and meaningful satisfactions, it may be possible for the observer to better understand the patient who, for the trivial excitement of stealing a dollar (or a candy bar), the small gain of forging a $20.00 check, or halfhearted intercourse with an unappealing partner, sacrifices his job, the respect of his friends, or perhaps his marriage. ...
Woolley, in an interesting interpretation of these patients, compared them with an otherwise intact automobile having very defective brakes. Such an analogy suggests accurately an important pathologic defect which seems to exist.
In contrast with an automobile, however, the braking functions of the human organism are built into the personality by reaction to life experience, to reward and punishment, praise and blame, shame, loss, honor, love, and so on.
True as Woolley's hypothesis may be, it seems likely that more fundamental than inadequate powers to refrain is the inadequate emotional reactivity upon which the learning to refrain must be based. Even with good brakes on his car, the driver must have not only knowledge of but also feeling for what will happen otherwise if he is to use them correctly and adequately.
Some of the psychopath's behavior may be fairly well accounted for if we grant a limitation of emotional capacity. Additional factors merit consideration. The psychopath seems to go out of his way to make trouble for himself and for others. ...
If, as we maintain, the big rewards of love, of the hard job well done, of faith kept despite sacrifices, do not enter significantly in the equation, it is not difficult to see that the psychopath is likely to be bored. Being bored, he will seek to cut up more than the ordinary person to relieve the tedium of his unrewarding existence.
If we think of a theater half-filled with ordinary pubertal boys who must sit through a performance of King Lear or of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, we need ask little of either imagination or memory to bring to mind the restless fidgeting, the noisy intercommunication of trivialities, the inappropriate guffaws or catcalls, and perhaps the spitballs or the mischievous application of a pin to the fellow in the next seat.
Apparently blocked from fulfillment at deep levels, the psychopath is not unnaturally pushed toward some sort of divertissement. Even weak impulses, petty and fleeting gratifications, are sufficient to produce in him injudicious, distasteful, and even outlandish misbehavior.
Major positive attractions are not present to compete successfully with whims, and the major negative deterrents (hot, persistent shame, profound regret) do not loom ahead to influence him. If the 12-year-old boys could enjoy King Lear or the Ninth Symphony as much as some people do, they would not be so reckless or unruly. ...
Lacking vital elements in the appreciation of what the family and various bystanders are experiencing, the psychopath finds it hard to understand why they continually criticize, reproach, quarrel with, and interfere with him. ...
Adolescents who feel a need to kick over the traces often seek to do so in unconventional, spectacular, daring and sometimes shocking acts that often are motivated primarily by impulses of defiance. Similar impulses of defiance no doubt contribute to the psychopath's behavior....
It is not necessary to assume great cruelty or conscious hatred in him commensurate with the degree of suffering he deals out to others. Not knowing how it hurts or even where it hurts, he often seems to believe that he has made a relatively mild but appropriate reprimand and that he has done it with humor.
What he believes he needs to protest against turns out to be no small group, no particular institution or set of ideologies, but human life itself. In it he seems to find nothing deeply meaningful or persistently stimulating, but only some transient and relatively petty pleasant caprices, a terribly repetitious series of minor frustrations, and ennui....
Like many teenagers, saints, history-making statesmen, and other notable leaders or geniuses, he shows unrest; he wants to do something about the situation.
Unlike these others, as Lindner has so well and convincingly stressed, he is a "rebel without a cause."
Reacting with something that seems not too much like divine discontent or noble indignation, he finds no cause in the ordinary sense to which, he can devote himself with wholeheartedness or with persistent interest. In certain aspects his essential life seems to be a peevish bickering with the inconsequential.
In other aspects he suggests a man hanging from a ledge who knows if he lets go he will fall, is likely to break a leg, may lose his job and his savings (through the disability and hospital expenses), and perhaps may injure his baby in the carriage just below. He suggests a man in this position who, furthermore, is not very tired and who knows help will arrive in a few minutes, but who, nevertheless, with a charming smile and a wisecrack, releases his hold to light a cigarette, to snatch at a butterfly, or just to thumb his nose at a fellow passing in the street below.
In his work on obsessive disorder, Straus brings out and develops a concept very germane to the present discussion. Beneath severe obsessive disorder he often finds indications of a distaste for life as it is ordinarily lived, a nauseous rejection of what is normally most appealing, and an attitude toward the world that finds in our chief sources of joy the equivalent of decay and filth. These observations are interesting and extraordinarily articulate. They seem to elucidate from an independent viewpoint other and important aspects of what has elsewhere been presented as confusion of love and hate. ...
The lack of aversion to conduct and situations which to the normal person are repulsive is striking and paradoxical in the psychopath. ... the active life rejection believed by Straus to underlie obsession and the indifference to major human values underlying the psychopath's life scheme may themselves be thought of as profoundly pathologic reactions in opposite directions. ...
The suggestion has already been made that his typical activities seem less comprehensible in terms, of life-striving or of a pursuit of joy than as an unrecognized blundering toward the negations of nonexistence.
Some of this, it has been suggested, may be interpreted as the tantrum, like reactions of an inadequate personality balked, as behavior similar to that of the spoiled child who bumps his own head against the wall or holds his breath when he is crossed. It might be thought of as not unlike a man's cutting off his nose to spite not only his face, but also the scheme of life in general, which has turned out to be a game that he cannot play.
Such reactions are, of course, found in nearly all types of personality disorder or inadequacy. It will perhaps be readily granted that they are all regressive.
Behavior against the constructive patterns through which the personality finds expression and seeks fulfillment of its destiny is regressive activity although it may not consist in a return, step by step, or in a partial return to the status of childhood and eventually of infancy. Such reactions appear to be, in a sense, against the grain of life or against the general biologic purpose.
Regressive reactions or processes may all be regarded as disintegrative, as reverse steps in the general process of biologic growth through which a living entity becomes more complex, more highly adapted and specialized, better coordinated, and more capable of dealing successfully or happily with objective or subjective experience.
This scale of increasing complexity exists at points even below the level of living matter. A group of electrons functioning together make up the atom which can indeed be split down again to its components. The atoms joining form molecules which, in turn, coming together in definite orderly arrangement, may become structurally coordinating parts of elaborate crystalline materials; or, in even more specialized and complex fashion, they may form a cell of organic matter. Cells of organic matter may unite and integrate to form the living organism we know as a jellyfish. Always the process is reversible; the organic matter can decompose back into inorganic matter.
Without laboriously following out all the steps of this scale, we might mention the increasing scope of activity, the increasing specialization, and the increasing precariousness of existence at various levels up through vertebrates and mammals to man. All along this scale it is evident that failure to function successfully at a certain level necessitates regression or decomposition to a lower or less complicated one. If the cell membrane of one epithelial unit in a mammalian body becomes imporous and fails to obtain nutriment brought by blood and lymph, it loses its existence as an epithelial cell. If the unwary rabbit fails to perceive the danger of the snare, he soon becomes in rapid succession a dead rabbit, merely a collection of dead organs and supportive structures, protein, fat, and finally, inorganic matter. The fundamental quest for life has been interrupted, and, having been interrupted, the process goes into reverse. ...
Regression, then, in a broad sense may be taken to mean movement from richer and more full life to levels of scantier or less highly developed life. In other words, it is relative death. It is the cessation of existence or maintenance of function at a given level. ...
In a movement (or gravitational drift) from levels where life is vigorous and full to those where it is less so, the tactics of withdrawal predominate.
People with all the outer mechanisms of adaptation intact might, one would think, regress more complexly than can those who react more simply.
The simplest reaction in reverse might be found in a person who straightway blows out his brains.
As a skillful general who has realized that the objective is unobtainable withdraws by feints and utilizes all sorts of delaying actions, so a patient who has much of the outer mechanisms for living may retire, not in obvious rout but skillfully and elaborately, preserving his lines.
The psychopath as we conceive of him in such an interpretation seems to justify the high estimate of his technical abilities as we see them expressed in reverse movement.
Unlike the general with the retreating army in our analogy, he seems not still devoted to the original contest but to other issues and aims that arise in withdrawal. To force the analogy further we might say that the retiring army is now concerning itself with looting the countryside, seeking mischief and light entertainment. The troops have cast off their original loyalties and given up their former aims but have found no other serious ones to replace them. But the effective organization and all of the technical skills are retained.
Withdrawal, or limitation of one's quest in living, appears in many forms. ...
The activity of the psychopath may seem in some respects to accomplish a kind of protracted and elaborate social and spiritual suicide.
Perhaps the complex, sustained, and spectacular undoing of the self may be cherished by him. He seldom allows physical suicide to interrupt it. Be it noted that such a person retains high intelligence and nearly all the outer mechanisms for carrying on the complicated activities of positive life. It is to be expected then that his function in the opposite (regressive) emotional direction might be more subtle than those of a less highly developed biologic entity. The average rooster proceeds at once to leap on the nearest hen and have done with his simple erotic impulse. The complex human lover may pay suit for years to his love object, approaching her through many volumes of poetry, through the building up of financial security in his business, through manifold activities and operations of his personality functions, and with aims and emotions incomparably more complicated and more profound than that of the rooster. When complexly organized functions are devoted to aimless or inconsistent rebellion against the positive goals of life, perhaps they may enable the patient to woo failure and disintegration with similar elaborateness and subtlety. His conscious or outer functioning may at the same time maintain an imitation of life that is uniquely deceptive.
Perhaps the emptiness or superficiality of life without major goals or deep loyalties, or real love, would leave a person with high intelligence and other superior capacities so bored that he would eventually turn to hazardous, self-damaging, outlandish, antisocial, and even self-destructive exploits in order to find something fresh and stimulating in which to apply his relatively useless and unchallenged energies and talents...
The more experience I have with psychopaths over the years, the less likely it seems to me that any dynamic or psychogenic theory is likely to be established by real evidence as the cause of their grave maladaptation.
Increasingly I have come to believe that some subtle and profound defect in the human organism, probably inborn ... plays the chief role in the psychopath's puzzling and spectacular failure to experience life normally and to carry on a career acceptable to society.
Of course, Cleckley didn't have Lobaczewski's work to consider. If he had, he would have been able to peer into a whole new dimension of comprehending just what is going on with gangs like Sonny and the Crackheads. There is, for example, a complete description of the types of deviants and how they "assemble themselves" in Ponerology.
Psychopathy is not, as many people think, so easy to recognize. The problem is that the term "psychopath" has come to be usually applied by the public (due to the influence of the media) to overtly and obviously mad-dog murderers. There is also some confusion regarding psychopathy vis a vis "antisocial personality disorder".
Nice words, aren't they? They sound so clean and clinical; just a person who is "anti-social". It almost suggests a hermit who never bothers anybody. But nothing could be further from the truth. Regarding essential psychopathy, Lobaczewski tells us:
psychologist A. Lobaczewski said:
Let us characterise another heredity-transmitted anomaly whose role in ponerogenic processes on any social scale appears exceptionally great. We should underscore that the need to isolate this phenomenon and examine it in detail became most evident to those researchers who were interested in the macro social scale of genesis of evil because they have witnessed it. I acknowledge my debt to Kasimir Dabrowski in doing this and calling this anomaly an 'essential psychopathy'.
Dr. Hare has written that "psychopaths have little difficulty infiltrating the domains of business, politics, law enforcement, government, academia and other social structures [they] blend into all aspects of society."
Harvard psychologist Martha Stout claims that 4 percent of "ordinary people" (one in 25) often have an "undetected mental disorder, the chief symptom of which is that the person possesses no conscience. He or she has no ability whatsoever to feel shame, guilt, or remorse... they can do literally anything at all and feel absolutely no guilt."
Continuing with Lobaczewski's ponerological view of psychopathy:
Its intensity also varies in scope from a level barely perceptive to an experienced observer to obvious pathological deficiency. Like color-blindness, this anomaly also appears to represent a deficit in stimulus transformation, albeit occurring not on the sensory but on instinctive level. Psychiatrists of the old school used to call such individuals 'Daltonists of human feelings and socio-moral values'.
The psychological picture shows clear deficits among men only; among women it is generally toned down, as by the effect of the second normal allele. This suggests that the anomaly is also inherited via the X chromosome but through a semi-dominating gene. However, the author was unable to confirm this by excluding inheritance from father to son.
Analysis of the different experiential manner demonstrated by these individuals caused us to conclude that their instinctive substratum is also defective, containing certain gaps and lacking the natural syntonic responses commonly evidenced by members of the species Homo sapiens. [...]
Our natural world of concepts then strikes such persons as a nearly incomprehensible convention with no justification in their own psychological experience. They think that normal human customs and principles of decency are a foreign convention invented and imposed by someone else ('probably by priests') silly, onerous, sometimes even ridiculous. At the same time, however, they easily perceive the deficiencies and weaknesses of our natural language of psychological and moral concepts in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the attitude of a contemporary psychologist - except in caricature.
The average intelligence of individuals with the above mentioned deviation, especially if measured via commonly used tests, is somewhat lower than that of normal people, albeit similarly variegated. However, this group does not contain instances of the highest intelligence, nor do we find technical or craftsmanship talents among them. The most gifted members of this kind may thus achieve accomplishments in those sciences which do not require humanistic worldview or practical skills. Whenever we attempt to construct special tests to measure 'life wisdom' or 'socio-moral imagination', even if the difficulties of psychometric evaluation are taken into account, individuals of this type indicate a deficit disproportionate to their personal IQ.
In spite of their deficiencies as regards normal psychological and moral knowledge, they develop and then have at their disposal a knowledge of their own, something lacked by people with a natural worldview.
They learn to recognize each other in a crowd as early as childhood, and they develop an awareness of the existence of other individuals similar to themselves.
They also become conscious of being different from the world of those other people surrounding them. They view us from a certain distance, like a paraspecific variety.
Natural human reactions - which often fail to elicit interest because they are considered self-evident - strike psychopaths as strange and therefore interesting, even comical. They therefore observe us, deriving conclusions, forming their different world of concepts.
They become experts in our weaknesses and sometimes effect heartless experiments upon us. [...] Neither a normal person nor our natural worldview can perceive or properly evaluate the existence of this world of different concepts.
A researcher into such phenomena can glean a similar deviant knowledge through long-term studies of the personalities of such people, using it with some difficulty, like a foreign language. ... [The psychopath] will never be able to incorporate the worldview of a normal person, although they often try to do so all their lives. The product of their efforts is only a role and a mask behind which they hide their deviant reality.
Another myth and role - albeit containing a grain of truth - would be the psychopath's brilliant mind or psychological genius; some of them actually believe in this and attempt to insinuate this belief to others.
When reading the above description, it is almost impossible not to think of Sonny Crack, Roxdog, and the gang (including "livefreeordie") going after Lisa. On many occasions where these creatures have attempted to use words to demonstrate empathy with other human beings, they have failed miserably to convince. Applying Cleckley's analysis of the 'inner workings' of the psychopath, we see that, on these occasions, while realizing that they are lying, Sonny and the Crackheads are also convinced that they are accurately emulating the emotions that they observe in normal human beings and they are frustrated when they fail to convince. The problem, of course, is that people like Sonny and the Crackheads have no capacity to really understand what it is to feel positive emotions like empathy for another, and when they observe the display of such an emotion in other people, they cannot understand how it can be anything other than 'skin-deep'.
Hervey Cleckley said:
His awareness of hypocrisy's opposite is so insubstantially theoretical that it becomes questionable if what we chiefly mean by hypocrisy should be attributed to him. Having no major values himself, can he be said to realize adequately the nature and quality of the outrages his conduct inflicts upon others? A young child who has no impressive memory of severe pain may have been told by his mother it is wrong to cut off the dog's tail. Knowing it is wrong he may proceed with the operation. We need not totally absolve him of responsibility if we say he realized less what he did than an adult who, in full appreciation of physical agony, so uses a knife. Can a person experience the deeper levels of sorrow without considerable knowledge of happiness? Can he achieve evil intention in the full sense without real awareness of evil's opposite? I have no final answer to these questions.
All researchers into psychopathy underline three qualities primarily with regard to this most typical variety: The absence of a sense of guilt for antisocial actions, the inability to love truly, and the tendency to be garrulous in a way which easily deviates from reality.
Lobaczewski said:
A neurotic patient is generally taciturn and has trouble explaining what hurts him most. [...] These patients are capable of decent and enduring love, although they have difficulty expressing it or achieving their dreams. A psychopath's behavior constitutes the antipode of such phenomena and difficulties.
Our first contact [with the psychopath] is characterized by a talkative stream which flows with ease and avoids truly important matters with equal ease if they are uncomfortable for the talker. His train of thought also avoids those matter of human feelings and values whose representation is absent in the psychopathic world view. [...]
From the logical point of view, the flow of thought is ostensibly correct.
[Psychopaths] are virtually unfamiliar with the enduring emotions of love for another person... it constitutes a fairy-tale from that 'other' human world. [For the psychopath] love is an ephemeral phenomenon aimed at sexual adventure. However [the psychopath] is able to play the lover's role well enough for their partners to accept it in good faith. [Moral teachings] also strike them as a similar fairy-tale good only for children and those different 'others'. [...]
The world of normal people whom they hurt is incomprehensible and hostile to them. [...] [
Life to the psychopath] is the pursuit of its immediate attractions, pleasure and power. They meet with failure along this road, along with force and condemnation from the society of those other incomprehensible people.
Lobaczewski next gives us the most important clues as to how and why a truly global conspiracy can and does exist on our planet, though it certainly isn't a conspiracy in the normally accepted sense of the word. You could even say that such conspiracies arise simply as a natural result of the opposition between normal people and deviants. In a certain sense, understanding the view the psychopath has of "normal people", that they are "other" and even "foreign", helps us to realize how such conspiracies can be so "secret" - though that is not the precise word we would like to use. Lobaczewski describes it in the following way:
In any society in this world, psychopathic individuals and some of the other deviants create a ponerogenically active network of common collusions, partially estranged from the community of normal people. Some inspirational role of the essential psychopathy in this network also appears to be a common phenomenon.
They are aware of being different as they obtain their life experience and become familiar with different ways of fighting for their goals. Their world is forever divided into 'us and them' - their world with its own laws and customs and that other foreign world full of presumptuous ideas and customs in light of which they are condemned morally.
Their 'sense of honor' bids them cheat and revile that other human world and its values. In contradiction to the customs of normal people, they feel non-fulfillment of their promises or obligations is customary behavior.
They also learn how their personalities can have traumatizing effects on the personalities of those normal people, and how to take advantage of this root of terror for purposes of reaching their goals.
This dichotomy of worlds is permanent and does not disappear even if they succeed in realizing their dreams of gaining power over the society of normal people. This proves that the separation is biologically conditioned.
In such people a dream emerges like some youthful Utopia of a 'happy' world and a social system which would not reject them or force them to submit to laws and customs whose meaning is incomprehensible to them. They dream of a world in which their simple and radical way of experiencing and perceiving reality would dominate, where they would, of course, be assured safety and prosperity. Those 'others' - different, but also more technically skillful - should be put to work to achieve this goal. 'We', after all, will create a new government, one of justice. They are prepared to fight and suffer for the sake of such a brave new world, and also of course, to inflict suffering upon others. Such a vision justifies killing people whose suffering does not move them to compassion because 'they' are not quite conspecific.
And there it is. Lobaczewski has said outright that psychopaths - from a certain perspective - are a different type of human being, a type that is aware of its difference from childhood. Put this together with his statement that such individuals recognize their own kind, and consider normal people as completely "other", and we can begin to understand why and how conspiracies can and do exist among such individuals. They do, indeed, collect together, with similar worldviews, like fat floating on a bowl of soup. When one of them begins to rant, others like them - or those with brain damage that makes them susceptible - "rally round the flag", so to say. Thus it is, when Robin Ramsay, editor of a conspiracy journal, Lobster magazine wrote to me:
Ultimately it comes down to how you see the world. The kind of conspiracy you are describing, or implying [regarding 9/11], is inconceivable to me: too big, too complex, too likely to go wrong or be discovered, ever to be mounted. What you are describing ... is vastly much bigger - and more complex and more dangerous - than any known mind control/psy ops project. And there is no evidence for it.
He was viewing the world without full knowledge and awareness of psychopaths and their ponerogenic networks.
This, of course, brings us to the subject of associations of deviants which have, for the most part, taken over the 911 Truth Movement. Lobaczewski sketches for us the process by which this takes place.
We shall give the name "ponerogenic association" to any group of people characterized by ponerogenic processes of above-average social intensity, wherein the carriers of various pathological factors function as inspirers, spellbinders, and leaders, and where a proper pathological social structure generates. Smaller, less permanent associations may be called "groups" or "unions".
Such an association gives birth to evil which hurts other people as well as its own members. We could list various names ascribed to such organizations by linguistic tradition: gangs, criminal mobs, mafias, cliques, and coteries, which cunningly avoid collision with the law while seeking to gain their own advantage.
Such unions frequently aspire to political power in order to impose their expedient legislation upon societies in the name of a suitably prepared ideology, deriving advantages in the form of disproportionate prosperity and the satisfaction of their craving for power. [...]
One phenomenon all ponerogenic groups and associations have in common is the fact that their members lose (or have already lost) the capacity to perceive pathological individuals as such, interpreting their behavior in a fascinated, heroic, or melodramatic ways. The opinions, ideas, and judgments of people carrying various psychological deficits are endowed with an importance at least equal to that of outstanding individuals among normal people.
The atrophy of natural critical faculties with respect to pathological individuals becomes an opening to their activities, and, at the same time, a criterion for recognizing the association in concern as ponerogenic. Let us call this the first criterion of ponerogenesis.
Another phenomenon all ponerogenic associations have in common is their statistically high concentration of individuals with various psychological anomalies. Their qualitative composition is crucially important in the formation of the entire union's character, activities, development, or extinction.
Groups dominated by various kinds of characteropathic individuals will develop relatively primitive activities, proving rather easy for a society of normal people to break. However, things are quite different when such unions are inspired by psychopathic individuals. Let us adduce the following example illustrating the roles of two different anomalies, selected from among actual events studied by the author.
In felonious youth gangs, a specific role is played by boys (and occasionally girls) that carry a characteristic deficit that is sometimes left behind by an inflammation of the parotid glands (the mumps). This disease entails brain reactions in some cases, leaving behind a discreet but permanent bleaching of feelings and a slight decrease in general mental skills. Similar results are sometimes left behind after diphtheria. As a result, such people easily succumb to the suggestions and manipulations of a more clever individuals.
When drawn into a felonious group, these constitutionally weakened individuals become faint-critical helpers and executors of the leader's intentions, tools in the hands of more treacherous, usually psychopathic, leaders. Once arrested, they submit to their leaders' insinuated explanations that the higher (paramoral) group ideal demands that they become scapegoats, taking the majority of blame upon themselves. In court, the same leaders who initiated the delinquencies mercilessly dump all the blame onto their less crafty colleagues. Sometimes a judge actually accepts the insinuations.
Individuals with the above-mentioned post-mumps and post-diphtheria traits constitute less than 1.0 % of the population as a whole, but their share reaches 1/4 of juvenile delinquent groups. This represents an inspissation of the order of 30-fold, requiring no further methods of statistical analysis. When studying the contents of ponerogenic unions skillfully enough, we often meet with an inspissation of other psychological anomalies which also speak for themselves.
Two basic types of the above-mentioned unions should be differentiated: Primary ponerogenic and secondary ponerogenic.
Let us describe as primarily ponerogenic a union whose abnormal members were active from the very beginning, playing the role of crystallizing catalysts as early as the process of creation of the group occurred.
We shall call secondarily ponerogenic a union which was founded in the name of some idea with an independent social meaning, generally comprehensible within the categories of the natural world view, but which later succumbed to a certain moral degeneration. This in turn opened the door to infection and activation of the pathological factors within, and later to a ponerization of the group as a whole, or often of its fraction.
From the very outset, a primarily ponerogenic union is a foreign body within the organism of society, its character colliding with the moral values held or respected by the majority. The activities of such groups provoke opposition and disgust and are considered immoral; as a rule, therefore, such groups do not spread large, nor do they metastasize into numerous unions; they finally lose their battle with society.
In order to have a chance to develop into a large ponerogenic association, however, it suffices that some human organization, characterized by social or political goals and an ideology with some creative value, be accepted by a larger number of normal people before it succumbs to a process of ponerogenic malignancy.
The primary tradition and ideological values of such a society may then, for a long time, protect a union which has succumbed to the ponerization process from the awareness of society, especially its less critical components.
When the ponerogenic process touches such a human organization, which originally emerged and acted in the name of political or social goals, and whose causes were conditioned in history and the social situation, the original group's primary values will nourish and protect such a union, in spite of the fact that those primary values succumb to characteristic degeneration, the practical function becoming completely different from the primary one, because the names and symbols are retained. [...]
Ponerogenic unions of the primary variety are mainly of interest to criminology; our main concern will be associations that succumb to a secondary process of poneric malignancy. ...
Within each ponerogenic union, a psychological structure is created which can be considered a counterpart or caricature of the normal structure of society or a normal societal organization. In a normal social organization, individuals with various psychological strengths and weaknesses complement each other's talents and characteristics. This structure is subjected to diachronic modification with regard to changes in the character of the association as whole. The same is true of a ponerogenic union. Individuals with various psychological aberrations also complement each other's talents and characteristics.
The earlier phase of a ponerogenic union's activity is usually dominated by characteropathic, particularly paranoid, individuals, who often play an inspirational or spellbinding role in the ponerization process. Recall here the power of the paranoid characteropath lies in the fact that they easily enslave less critical minds, e.g. people with other kinds of psychological deficiencies, or who have been victims of individuals with character disorders, and, in particular, a large segment of young people.
At this point in time, the union still exhibits certain romantic features and is not yet characterized by excessively brutal behavior. Soon, however, the more normal members are pushed into fringe functions and are excluded from organizational secrets; some of them thereupon leave such a union.
Individuals with inherited deviations then progressively take over the inspirational and leadership positions. The role of essential psychopaths gradually grows, although they like to remain ostensibly in the shadows (e.g. directing small groups), setting the pace as an �minence grise. In ponerogenic unions on the largest social scales, the leadership role is generally played by a different kind of individual, one more easily digestible and representative. Examples include frontal characteropathy, or some more discreet complex of lesser taints.
A spellbinder at first simultaneously plays the role of leader in a ponerogenic group. Later there appears another kind of "leadership talent", a more vital individual who often joined the organization later, once it has already succumbed to ponerization. The spellbinding individual, being weaker, is forced to come to terms with being shunted into the shadows and recognizing the new leader's "genius", or accept the threat of total failure. Roles are parceled out. The spellbinder needs support from the primitive but decisive leader, who in turn needs the spellbinder to uphold the association's ideology, so essential in maintaining the proper attitude on the part of those members of the rank and file who betray a tendency to criticism and doubt of the moral variety.
The spellbinder's job then becomes to repackage the ideology appropriately, sliding new contents in under old titles, so that it can continue fulfilling its propaganda function under ever-changing conditions. He also has to uphold the leader's mystique inside and outside the association. Complete trust cannot exist between the two, however, since the leader secretly has contempt for the spellbinder and his ideology, whereas the spellbinder despises the leader for being such a coarse individual. A showdown is always probable; whoever is weaker becomes the loser.
The structure of such a union undergoes further variegation and specialization. A chasm opens between the somewhat more normal members and the elite initiates who are, as a rule, more pathological. This later subgroup becomes ever more dominated by hereditary pathological factors, the former by the after-effects of various diseases affecting the brain, less typically psychopathic individuals, and people whose malformed personalities were caused by early deprivation or brutal child-rearing methods on the part of pathological individuals. It soon develops that there is less and less room for normal people in the group at all. The leaders' secrets and intentions are kept hidden from the union's proletariat; the products of the spellbinders' work must suffice for this segment.
An observer watching such a union's activities from the outside and using the natural psychological world view will always tend to overestimate the role of the leader and his allegedly autocratic function. The spellbinders and the propaganda apparatus are mobilized to maintain this erroneous outside opinion. The leader, however, is dependent upon the interests of the union, especially the elite initiates, to an extent greater than he himself knows. He wages a constant position-jockeying battle; he is an actor with a director. In macrosocial unions, this position is generally occupied by a more representative individual not deprived of certain critical faculties; initiating him into all those plans and criminal calculations would be counterproductive.
In conjunction with part of the elite, a group of psychopathic individuals hiding behind the scenes steers the leader, the way Borman and his clique steered Hitler. If the leader does not fulfill his assigned role, he generally knows that the clique representing the elite of the union is in a position to kill or otherwise remove him.
We have sketched the properties of unions in which the ponerogenic process has transformed their original generally benevolent content into a pathological counter-part thereof and modified its structure and its later changes, in a manner sufficiently wide-scale to encompass the greatest possible scope of this kind of phenomena, from the smallest to the largest social scale. The general rules governing those phenomena appear to be at least analogous, independent of the quantitative, social, and historical scale of such a phenomenon.
The above description seems to be exactly the process that has occurred within the Republican party in the United States, producing the so-called Neo-Conservatives. The same process is evident in the Democratic Party, though it has not come to full fruition. It might even be said that the Democratic Party, as it exists today, is merely "creature" of the Neocons, though some democrats appear to still cling to the original ideology. And most certainly, it is the process that describes the so-called 911 Truth Movement.
Speaking of networks, we need to take a closer look at how psychopaths affect other human beings whom they use to create the basis for their rule in macro-social dynamics. This highlights the fact that the lack of psychological knowledge among the general public, not to mention the general neurosis of most people, make them vulnerable to such predators. Lobaczewski writes:
Subordinating a normal person to psychologically abnormal individuals has a deforming effect on his personality: it engenders trauma and neurosis. This is accomplished in a manner which generally evades sufficient conscious controls. Such a situation then deprives the person of his natural rights to practice his own mental hygiene, develop a sufficiently autonomous personality, and utilize his common sense. In the light of natural law, it thus constitutes a kind of illegality which can appear in any social scale although it is not mentioned in any code of law.
Psychologist George Simon discusses in his book what he refers to as "Covert-aggressive personalities" which reveal themselves to be members of the psychopathy spectrum. He writes:
Aggressive personalities don't like anyone pushing them to do what they don't want to do or stopping them from doing what they want to do. 'No' is never an answer they accept.
[In some cases], if they can see some benefit in self-restraint, they may internalize inhibitions [and become covertly aggressive].
By refraining from any overt acts of hostility towards others, they manage to convince themselves and others they're not the ruthless people they are. They may observe the letter of a law but violate its spirit with ease. They may exhibit behavioral constraint when it's in their best interest, but they resist truly submitting themselves to any higher authority or set of principles. [They are] striving primarily to conceal their true intentions and aggressive agendas from others. They may behave with civility and propriety when they're closely scrutinized or vulnerable. But when they believe they're immune from detection or retribution, it's an entirely different story. [...]
Dealing with covert-aggressive personalities is like getting whiplash. Often, you really don't know what's hit you until long after the damage is done. [...]
Covert-aggressives are often so expert at exploiting the weaknesses and emotional insecurities of others that almost anyone can be duped...
Covert-aggressives exploit situations in which they are well aware of the vulnerability of their prey. They are often very selective about the kinds of people with whom they will associate or work. They are particularly adept at finding and keeping others in a one-down position. They relish being in positions of power over others. It's my experience that how a person uses power is the most reliable test of their character.
Lobaczewski adds chilling detail:
If a person with a normal instinctive substratum and basic intelligence has already heard and read about such a system of ruthless autocratic rule "based on a fanatical ideology", he feels he has already formed an opinion on the subject. However, direct confrontation with the phenomenon will inevitably produce in him the feeling of intellectual helplessness. All his prior imaginings prove to be virtually useless; they explain next to nothing. This provokes a nagging sensation that he and the society in which he was educated were quite naive....
When the human mind comes into contact with this new reality so different from any experiences encountered by a person raised in a society dominated by normal people, it releases psychophysiological shock symptoms in the human brain with a higher tonus of cortex inhibition and a stifling of feelings, which then sometimes gush forth uncontrollably. The mind then works more slowly and less keenly because the associative mechanisms have become inefficient. Especially when a person has direct contact with psychopathic representatives of the new rule, who use their specific experience so as to traumatize the minds of the "others" with their own personalities, his mind succumbs to a state of short-term catatonia. Their humiliating and arrogant techniques, brutal paramoralizations, and so forth deaden his thought processes and his self-defense capabilities, and their divergent experiential method anchors in his mind. In the presence of this kind of phenomenon, any moralizing evaluation of a person's behavior in such a situation thus becomes inaccurate at best.
Only once these unbelievably unpleasant psychological states have passed, thanks to rest in benevolent company, is it possible to reflect, always a difficult and painful process, or to become aware that one's mind and common sense have been fooled by something which cannot fit into the normal human imagination.
Now, just imagine the 1 in 25 people mentioned by Martha Stout: in
The Sociopath Next Door, being the very ones who seek and achieve positions of power and authority in just about any field of endeavour where power can be had, including the lowlifes seeking power in the 911 Truth Movement, and you begin to understand how truly damaging this can be to an entire society.
And what prepares normal people to be taken over by such deviants? Well, just imagine school teachers with power over your children who are "covert-aggressives". Imagine doctors, psychologists, "ministers of the faith" and politicians - psychopaths all - in such positions and you will begin to understand what is going on in the US of A.
Lobaczewski continues with his discussion of the effect of psychopaths on normal individuals:
We have already discussed the nature of some pathological personalities - characteropathies - that may be 'created' by an individual's exposure to a person with a severe character deformation. Essential psychopathy has exceptionally intense effects in this manner. Something mysterious gnaws into the personality of an individual at the mercy of the psychopath, and it is fought like a demon. His emotions become chilled, his sense of psychological reality is stifled. This leads to decriterialization of thought and a feeling of helplessness culminating in depressive reactions which can be so severe that psychiatrists sometimes misdiagnose them as a manic-depressive psychosis. Many people evidently also rebel much earlier and start searching for some way to liberate themselves from such an influence.
A social structure dominated by normal people and their conceptual world easily appears to the psychopath as a 'system of force and oppression'. If it happens that true injustice does, in fact, exist in that given society, pathological feelings of unfairness and suggestive statements can resonate among those who have truly been treated unfairly. Revolutionary doctrines may then find approval among both groups although their motivations will actually be quite different.
The presence of pathogenic bacteria in our environment is a common phenomenon; however, it is not the single decisive factor as regards whether an individual or a society becomes ill. Similarly, psychopathological factors alone do not decide about the spread of evil. [...]
In other words, at the most basic instinctive level, the psychopath has an effect on normal human beings that is similar to the effect a serpent has on a bird or a small fuzzy creature: paralysis, a freezing of the mind, confusion, followed by an attempt to make sense of something that is just impossible to comprehend: something that looks human but behaves like a predator.
With this understanding, we begin to get an even better idea of how psychopaths can conspire and actually pull it off: in a society where evil is not studied or understood, they easily "rise to the top" and proceed to condition normal people to accept their dominance, to accept their lies without question.
Lobaczewski said:
Long periods of preoccupation with the self and 'accumulating benefits' for the self, diminish the ability to accurately read the environment and other people. [...]It is this feature, this hystericization of society, that enables pathological plotters, snake charmers, and other primitive deviants to act as essential factors in the processes of the origination of evil on a macro-social scale.
We see exactly this pattern of social development in the United States over the past 50 to 60 years or even more. The fact is, many people who may have been born "normal" have become what might be termed "secondary psychopaths" or characteropaths due to the influence of psychopathy on American culture from many fields - including science, medicine, psychology, law, etc. - where they are conscious of what they are doing to "normal" people!
Obviously, since they are being led by pied pipers of deception, that means that there is no possibility that anything positive will come out of the movement in terms of the citizens of the US being able to take back their Republic. In other words, the 911 Untruth movement is just an arm of the Bush Reich, striving to render all the energy of the sincere citizens impotent. Of course, the problem is: since the 911 Truth Movement has been so completely co-opted, what does this betoken for our future?
Lobaczewski said:
When a ponerogenic process encompasses a society's entire ruling class, or nation, or when opposition on the part of normal people's societies is stifled - as a result of the mass character of the phenomenon, or by using spellbinding means and physical compulsion - we are dealing with macro-social ponerologic phenomenon. At that time, however, a society's tragedy, often coupled with that of the researcher's own suffering, are opening before him an entire volume of ponerologic knowledge, where he can read all about the laws governing such process if he is only able to familiarize himself in time with its naturalistic language and its different grammar.
It bears noting here that the similarities between what Lobaczewski is saying in the above paragraph about the effects of a "macro-social ponerologic phenomenon" and what is happening today in the U.S. (and around the world) are striking. It is also somewhat ironic that the activities of this forum, which is operated on the basis of Lobaczewski's research on ponerology and the conditions surrounding the unveiling of "ponerologic knowledge", constitutes an actual unveiling of "ponerologic knowledge".
Lobaczewski said:
It is a common phenomenon for a ponerogenic association or group to contain a particular ideology which always justifies its activities and furnishes motivational propaganda. Even a small-time gang of hoodlums has its own melodramatic ideology and pathological romanticism. Human nature demands that vile matters be haloed by an over-compensatory mystique in order to silence one's conscience and to deceive consciousness and critical faculties, whether one's own or those of others.
If such a ponerogenic union could be stripped of its ideology, nothing would remain except psychological and moral pathology, naked and unattractive. Such stripping would of course provoke "moral outrage", and not only among the members of the union. The fact is, even normal people, who condemn this kind of union along with its ideologies, feel hurt and deprived of something constituting part of their own romanticism, their way of perceiving reality when a widely idealized group is exposed as little more than a gang of criminals. Perhaps even some of the readers of this book will resent the author's stripping evil so unceremoniously of all its literary motifs. The job of effecting such a "strip-tease" may thus turn out to be much more difficult and dangerous than expected.
And so it is, anyone who unceremoniously strips the widely idealized 911 Truth Movement of its ideology, showing that underneath there is nothing but psychological and moral pathology, MUST BE DESTROYED. And for that, they send in the real deviants like Vincent Bridges and Stormbear Williams, and Sonny Crack, Roxdog, and the deviants.
