WHO ARE THE SOCIOPATHS?

SOCIOPATHOCRACY

By Professor Steven Yates
April 28, 2012

Two recent articles by Doug Casey, the investing and financial planning strategist who founded Casey Research, probably qualify as Keepers (they are here and here) Every American ought to read these articles and print copies for future reference.

Begin with Pareto’s Law, the infamous 80-20 principle which says that 80 percent of the work in any organization is done by 20 percent of its people. Twenty percent of a sales force achieves 80 percent of its sales. Likewise, 20 percent of any population is responsible for around 80 percent of its crime rate. In my experience in the classroom, I would estimate that approximately 20 percent of students accomplish 80 percent of whatever is accomplished in one of my philosophy classes. I wouldn’t be surprised if 80 percent of all advances of Western civilization can be attributed to 20 percent of the population. The rest are just along for the ride.

Pareto’s Law, according to Casey, has applications in social ethics, and personal motivation. Eighty percent of us humans are basically decent and mean well. Even if we sin, we are not overtly malicious and will not purposefully harm others except to defend ourselves and our own. We have an inner moral compass that checks our behavior, at least most of the time.

The other 20 percent lacks this moral compass. Most of this other 20 percent act benign most of the time. They don’t torture animals, for example. They don’t go out of their way to look for trouble, and if no opportunities arise, they won’t act differently from the 80 percent. But in the last analysis they are opportunists. They identify with authority. They are attracted to occupations and positions that allow them to wield unchecked power over others. They may work to gain your trust, and then stab you in the back when you become an inconvenience; they will enjoy having done it.

Have you ever wondered where the TSA finds the thousands whose job description involves treating their fellow citizens like potential terrorists? Or where the Fullerton, Calif. police department found the men who beat, kicked and Tasered a mentally retarded homeless man to death last summer? Or, for that matter, why our nation, with the largest percentage of its population incarcerated of any advanced nation in the world, seems to have little trouble staffing its facilities? I sometimes read about shortages of nurses. I never hear about shortages of prison guards.

Of the opportunistic 20 percent, 80 percent of its number is checked by social norms and others’ expectations most of the time. Not every TSA agent is looking to humiliate someone, for example. I’d wager, around 80 percent are not. Not every cop or prison guard is a sadist. But 20 percent of the opportunistic 20 percent are the truly bad apples, Casey writes. These are the people truly drawn to power, and will use opportunities to abuse others to advance their interests. They are capable of killing without remorse. Some, indeed, are evil through and through. Twenty percent of 20 percent being four percent of the whole, this means four percent of any population qualifies as sociopathic.

Casey lists seven key characteristics of sociopaths. He didn’t invest this list. I’ve seen variations on it elsewhere. Based on my own experiences and observations I’ve reworded it for this article:

(1) Sociopaths have no conscience or sincere empathy with others. They are fundamentally conniving, and will lie without hesitation to achieve their goals. They have no qualms or regrets about having hurt others. They can, of course, pretend they do. Some are very good at this. They may, however, exhibit Jekyll and Hyde personalities, being charming in public but flying into rages behind closed doors. The shallowness of their emotional lives makes love impossible. They are capable of marriage as they can pretend; but then ruin their spouse’s life, and that of any children involved.

(2) Sociopaths believe their wants are a completely different level from those of others, and will use or step on others to get what they want. They believe the ends justify the means. As we just said, they will kill to advance their goals or to protect their interests if they believe they can get away with it.

(3) Sociopaths see themselves—implicitly if not explicitly—as superior, because they don’t have “emotional” or “juvenile” ethics problems. They’re above all that, beyond good and evil. Again, though, they can pretend, and sound very convincing.

(4) Sociopaths are unable to accept responsibility if things go wrong. They never apologize for anything.

(5) The sociopathic notion of property rights runs something like this: what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine, too, if I want it. They will defend government (or anyone else’s) measures that seize other people’s property if they believe they will reap benefits.

(6) When disaster strikes, sociopaths in power become unhinged and lash out with an attack against the wrong target. Example: Bill Clinton would order an overseas bombing to detract attention from whatever trouble he was in over here (lying under oath to a grand jury, in one instance). Example: 19 Saudis are blamed for flying planes into the Twin Towers on 9/11. The Bush II regime attacks Iraq.

(7) Sociopaths enjoy bullying and inflicting pain on others. They will spread libelous rumors, and for sport will pass off unfounded allegations as true in order to hurt someone they regard as a foe. This is particularly true in ideological quarrels, although sociopathy itself knows no ideology.

In a healthy society, the sociopathic four percent finds itself marginalized—these are the people seen by the rest of society as “no good.” They’ve lied, stolen, double-crossed, or in some other way proved to those around them they can’t be trusted. Their fellows eventually refuse to have anything to do with them. They often end up in the slammer. In the America of decades past, of course, all towns had such people. Everyone steered clear of them. Parents instructed their children to stay away from the sociopath’s kids, if he had any.

 

Think of the common bully, who may have discovered as a first grader that he got an actual rush from pulling the pigtails of the girl in the desk in front of him until he made her cry, and then, a year later, got the same rush from inflicting petty indignities on smaller children. Obviously, as sociopaths get older the more intelligent get far more sophisticated in getting their jollies. They may attempt to gain a victim’s trust, and then take advantage of him. They will often seem to be doing something noble—but it invariably ends with someone getting hurt. Arguably, once these people enter their teens their patterns of behavior are fixed for life, and made worse by the fact that they don’t see themselves as doing anything wrong. They may see others as persecuting them, in fact.

Today, the equation has changed in a major way. Population growth and technological change have created a much more anonymous society. High mobility has weakened communities. People move around so much they never get to know their neighbors. Therefore they won’t know who not to trust. Obviously, too, ideological feminism, no-fault divorce, loosened sexual mores, and the dollar’s loss in purchasing power forcing both parents to work have all weakened the family as a unit, so there is less instruction in the basics of right versus wrong in the home (and children almost assuredly aren’t going to get it in their government schools!).

In other words, today despite our technological sophistication and creature comforts we have fewer opportunities for forming the long-term relationships between persons, families, churches, small businesses, etc., that make up the warp and woof of a healthy community, and passing them on to the next generation. In big cities, these ties are almost nonexistent for a lot of people. Large numbers of business transactions today essentially anonymous, one-time affairs. Buyer is focused on product or service; seller is focused on money. The idea of establishing human contact never occurs to either party. Years ago, when gassing up your vehicle, you went indoors to pay and could interact with the clerk, at least to say hello. Today, the majority of drivers “pay at the pump” and never see the human being behind the counter inside. At banks, they use ATM machines. They never see the teller.

Like it or not, sociopaths thrive in this kind of environment. And they are much harder to spot! Consider how the notorious serial killers Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy appeared not just functional and normal, but as pillars of their workplaces and communities. Nothing marked them as different. But obviously, no one really knew them except superficially. Sociopathic killers seem visibly normal—until they get caught. These are the extreme cases. This tells us volumes about the problems spotting the “sociopath next door.”

Many sociopaths are attracted to government, because it enables them to deal with people by force. They don’t have to hide. Others are attracted to big business because they realize that big business is often as drawn to power as big government; it achieves power via ties to government, and to other corporations. “Robber barons” could lock out competitors, as did John D. Rockefeller Sr. in the late 1800s who was probably a sociopath. As for money, that’s just how the business sociopath keeps score.

The major dictators of the past were clearly sociopaths: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao Tse-Tung, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Kim Jong-Il; also lesser figures such as Saddam Hussein and Moammar Qhadafy.

As our government has moved further and further from its Constitutional roots and into police state territory as well as into partnerships with the corporations, it has become a haven for sociopaths. There are no means to keep them out!

The Clintons are sociopaths. If the accounts told by Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Gennifer Flowers and Paul Jones—among others—are true, “Slick Willie” was a sexual predator of the first order, and this was known long before the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Back in the late 1990s, I wondered where the radical feminists were. Had Clinton been a conservative, they would have been on him like white on rice. But radical feminism has always been about ideology, not justice for women. (Most academic-left radicals are sociopaths, but not all academic sociopaths have radical-left politics. Some will purposefully torpedo the careers of hardworking younger colleagues they perceive as potential threats. I have encountered a few of the latter in my day! What I’ve learned about the academic sociopath can be summed up in one sentence: don’t ever turn your back!)

Bush II (and Cheney) were probably a sociopaths—especially if, as some believe, they knew in advance that the 9/11 attacks were going to happen. This is, after all, the best explanation for Bush’s odd reaction in the grade school room that day, as when told of the attacks he allegedly paused, stared into space for a brief period, then went back to reading to a group of children. A far more normal reaction to news that the country of which he was Commander-in-Chief had just been hit by the worst terrorist attack in its history would have been to rise to his feet and explain to his young listeners that something had come up requiring his immediate attention. 

Saddam Hussein was a sociopath. The U.S. government basically put him in power at the beginning of the 1980s. But sociopaths don’t have friends, just alliances of convenience, and these can come to an end on very short notice, as Saddam learned the hard way in the first Gulf War (Bush I, too, was also sociopath after all). The Iraq War of the 2000, then, was an act by one sociopath taking out another sociopath whose usefulness had ended, and whose own agenda (moving to sell oil in euros instead of dollars, for example) had become a threat.

Obama is most assuredly a sociopath. He ran a campaign promising change from the Bush years. He proved to be a very convincing and effective speaker who had audiences in the palms of his hands—skills at which extroverted sociopaths excel. He’s not only continued the Bush wars and the Bush domestic police state, he’s taken them several magnitudes further! Under his watch two U.S. citizens were literally executed by a drone attack in a foreign country, without benefit of arrest, charges, or trial. Most readers will be familiar with his acts of the past few months, signing legislation (NDAA) that opens the door to the arrest and incarceration without charges, legal counsel or trial of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil who can be accused, on impossibly vague grounds, of aiding “enemies” of the United States. Since then we’ve seen one executive order that effectively guts the First Amendment by criminalizing protests (free speech, freedom of assembly) in the presence of federal officials and another allowing the federal government to seize control over all natural (and human) resources.

I’ve already stated my belief that Obama will be re-elected, both because the super-elite approve of his performance to date and because Republicans cannot get their act together. If by some chance I am wrong, Mitt Romney will become president. Will he turn out to be another sociopath? Let’s look at matters this way. The super-elite aren’t supporting him as the token opposition because they think he’s Mother Teresa.

For all practical purposes, much of the world now lives under sociopathocracy: government by sociopaths. The globalist super-elite consists of generations of sociopaths who are raised from childhood to see themselves as superior to the human cattle whose livelihoods they destroy with no more thought than one of us would give to kicking over an anthill, whether from the wars they foment to the economic dislocations their corporations create. Sociopaths clearly dominate Europe and have for decades; today, they impose “austerity” on their masses, as the latter pay the costs of the destructive policies of their governments and banking leviathans. Sociopaths permeate our political class and its enforcement subordinates, extending from the White House and Congress on down to your county and city officials who get their jollies from destroying the life of an Andrew Wordes. The sociopathocracy gets support from those in the larger portion of that opportunistic 15 percent remainder who identify with authority and don’t mind helping destroy a man’s life to advance their own standing with the powers-that-be.

In my book Four Cardinal Errors I argue that the third of the errors there documented was the replacement of Christianity as a societal worldview with materialism as a societal worldview. According to materialism the whole of reality is just physical reality; the universe is just physical entities in motion, uncreated, and—on the largest scale—of no moral significance. Human life, in this case, ceases to have transcendent moral significance; it has no moral significance beyond what we can give it, in this life which lasts less than an instant given the vast expanse of cosmic time.

The individual dies; the state and corporations, however, go on. Those in power answer to no One Higher than each other, or themselves. Human beings are just language-using animals who occasionally speak the language of morality, which has no transcendent source or grounding. The best such moral codes are likely to produce is preference utilitarianism: pursue the greatest amount of pleasure for the greatest number, while letting everyone decide for themselves what gives them pleasure. These ideas begin with intellectuals who play influential roles in universities and in government. Variations on them or applications of them have received support from large corporations or tax-exempt foundations such as Rockefeller. Eventually they reach the public via cultural osmosis. Materialistic ideas are embodied in literature, in popular songs (think of Madonna’s “Material Girl”), in art, and eventually built into the framework of education which, by this time, is far more about the social engineering of compliance. When enough people are operational materialists—their being “Sunday Christians” will do!—we have a materialistic society, the main focus of which is on the pleasures of the present and how best to maximize them. Some of these pleasures turn out to be personally and socially destructive, of course, and so the culture begins to crumble from the inside out. When unbridled greed dominates the financial world, efforts to accumulate massive amounts of wealth grow increasingly reckless until they threaten economic stability. Then, unfortunately, and only then, do people begin to look up from their couches and ask questions.

Materialism by itself doesn’t give us sociopaths, of course, but a materialistic society, in combination with the anonymity noted above, tends to work against the moral compass of its people, rendering persons and institutions vulnerable to sociopaths. As the sociopathic mindset controls more and more of the warp and woof of society, morality and honesty consistently work against a person, who eventually grows cold and cynical himself.

Regrettably, many libertarians have fallen into some variation of this philosophical cul-de-sac, arguing that reason requires rejection of God and other transcendent realities, and that liberty requires only a rejection of the initiation of force, and not the purposeful application of principles (e.g., the objective worth of the individual person) the only possible grounding of which is in a transcendent reality. Sociopaths know how to exploit naïve secular philosophies. They instinctively recognize their cardinal weaknesses, such as the absence of any injunction against sacrificing the few to benefit the many (as happened in the ghastly Tuskegee Experiment). As sociopaths rise to power this gets turned around to sacrificing the many to benefit the few with the most money and power! In the end, under materialism there is no means of keeping sociopaths from accumulating power. The telos of materialism, one might say, is a totally controlled society under a totalitarian corporate-state.

Arguably, sociopathocracy has become a dominant mindset within the country—whether we are talking about government or large corporations, especially the “too big to fail” banks which are larger and more powerful today than they were before the Meltdown of 2008. Those in government are busy tightening down the screws in the name of “national security” and the “war on terror.” There isn’t, of course, the slightest reason to believe the sociopathocracy is interested in the security of the American people, or they would have secured our border with Mexico long ago! The above-noted legislation and executive orders more than suggest that the “national security” state isn’t worried about al Qaeda. It is worried about rising civil unrest among U.S. citizens many of whom are awakening to what is going on, sometimes from having studied how the superelite operates via Internet articles like this one, or having themselves been targeted by cold and sociopathic bureaucrats.

The real question is whether and how freedom-minded and independent-minded people can survive under sociopathocracy, while growing our numbers. We are a threat to sociopaths in power, in that not only do we not simply follow orders without question, more and more of us know who and what they are. The sociopathocracy has tremendous resources at its disposal, far more than any of us. Its denizens own the leviathan banking establishments including the Federal Reserve. Arguably its hands control the upper echelons of Hollywood and mainstream media. They dictate terms within major universities, and lesser ones follow the trends—not to mention their presence at every level within government schools.

Today, it is increasingly difficult to obtain reliable employment in the U.S. without either cooperating directly with the sociopathic mentality or joining with its opportunistic fellow travelers. Yet unless you plan to relocate outside this country—as more and more are doing each year—you might have to learn to do so, to pretend to be at least part of the penumbra of that 20 percent without the inner moral compass. Your only other alternative is to “hunker down” hopefully with like-minded others. Hopefully you can protect your assets as best as you can, link up with others doing the same, keep your heads down and agree to have each others’ backs—because remember: sociopathic rulers have no qualms about grabbing what you have if they know about it and decide they want it. They are more than capable of cooperating. Are we?

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SOCIOPATHY IS RUNNING THE US – Part Two

By Doug Casey, Casey Research

 

 

 

I recently wrote an article that addresses the subject of sociopaths and how they insinuate themselves into society. Although the subject doesn’t speak directly to what stock you should buy or sell to increase your wealth, I think it’s critical to success in the markets. It goes a long way towards explaining what goes on in the heads of people like Bernie Madoff and therefore how you can avoid being hurt by them.

But there’s a lot more to the story. At this point, it seems as if society at large has been captured by Madoff clones. If that’s true, the consequences can’t be good. So what I want to do here is probe a little deeper into the realm of abnormal psychology and see how it relates to economics and where the world is heading.

If I’m correct in my assessment, it would imply that the prospects are dim for conventional investments – most stocks, bonds and real estate. Those things tend to do well when society is growing in prosperity. And prosperity is fostered by peace, low taxes, minimal regulation and a sound currency. It’s also fostered by a cultural atmosphere where sociopaths are precluded from positions of power and intellectual and moral ideas promoting free minds and free markets rule. Unfortunately, it seems that doesn’t describe the trend that the world at large and the US in particular are embarked upon.

In essence, we’re headed towards economic and financial bankruptcy. But that’s mostly because society has been largely intellectually and morally bankrupt for some time. I don’t believe a society can rise to real prosperity without a sound intellectual and moral foundation – that’s why the US was so uniquely prosperous for so long, because it had such a foundation. And it’s also why societies like Saudi Arabia will collapse as soon as the exogenous things that support them are pulled away. It’s why the USSR collapsed. It’s the reason why countries everywhere across time reach a peak (if they ever do), then stagnate and decline.

This isn’t a matter of academic contemplation, for the same reason that it doesn’t matter much if you’re in a first-class cabin when the ship it’s in is taking on water.

Economics and Evil

When I was a sophomore in college, I asked my father – a worldly wise man but one of few words – some cosmic question, as sophomores are famous for doing. His answer was, “It’s all a matter of economics.” Some months later I asked him another, similar question. His answer: “It’s all a matter of psychology.” They were unsatisfactory to me at the time, but those simple answers stuck in my mind. And I’ve since come to the conclusion that they comprehend most of what drives human action.

Let’s look at the “matter of economics” only briefly, because it’s covered at length elsewhere and because it’s not nearly as significant as the “matter of psychology.”

One definition of economics is: The study of who gets what, and how, in the material world. Unfortunately, it’s been distorted over the years into the study of who determines who gets what, and how, in the material world. In other words, economic power has gradually been transferred from producers to political allocators. This has had predictably bad results, including not only the bankruptcy of the US government but of large segments of US society.

But what’s happening today is much more serious than an economic bankruptcy; you can recover from financial woes by cultivating better habits. We’re talking about psychological and spiritual bankruptcy. The word psychology comes from psyche, which is Greek for soul. When you look at the word’s origin, it’s clear that psychology is about much more than mental peculiarities. It’s not just about what a person has or what he does. It’s about what he is. The real essence of a man, his soul, is revealed by his philosophy and his beliefs.

In any event, it’s rare that anyone goes bankrupt because of a single bad decision. It takes many missteps, and consistently bad decisions aren’t accidents. Consistently bad decisions are the product of a flawed moral philosophy. Moral philosophy guides you as to what is right or wrong. The prevailing moral philosophy has so degenerated that Americans think it’s OK to invade other countries that not only haven’t attacked it but can’t even credibly threaten to attack it. I’m not talking just about Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya – pitiful non-entities on the other side of the world. They were preceded by even weaker prey, closer to home, like Granada, Panama, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Not only that, but they think coercion should be used to steal wealth from the people who produce it, and give it to those who’ve done absolutely nothing to deserve it.

It’s hard to pick an exact time America’s moral bankruptcy started; perhaps the draconian Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 were the first real breach in the country’s ethical armor – but they were quickly repealed and subsequently served as an example of what not to do for many years. There were real moral problems that arose because of the Mexican War, the War between the States and the Indian Wars. There were early attempts to create a central bank, but they fortunately failed. But I believe the real change in direction came with the Spanish-American War, which resulted in the accretion of an overseas empire, particularly in the Philippines where 200,000 locals were killed. As Randolph Bourne said, “War is the health of the state.”

Then came the creation of both the Federal Reserve and the income tax in the very unlucky year of 1913, which made it possible to finance the country’s completely pointless entry into World War 1. From there, with the New Deal, World War 2, Korea, the Great Society, Vietnam and so on, the US has gradually descended into becoming a very aggressive welfare/warfare state. It now has an overt government policy of inflating the currency, which constitutes a fraud, and running up the national debt, which is a swindle because it will never be repaid.

America is not the first to start with moral failure and move on to economic failure. In all the examples history provides, economic bankruptcy and political tyranny are invariably preceded by moral bankruptcy. It’s bad enough that these things have happened. But it’s even worse that they’re celebrated and taught to students as triumphs. That guarantees that the trend will accelerate towards a real disaster. Most people accept what they’re taught in school uncritically.

The pattern is no secret to historians. Machiavelli noted in his Florentine Histories (1532): “It may be observed that provinces, among the vicissitudes to which they are accustomed, pass from order to confusion, and afterwards pass again into a state of order. The way of the world doesn’t allow things to continue on an even course; as soon as they arrive at their greatest perfection, they again start to decline. Likewise, having sunk to their utmost state of depression, unable to descend lower, they necessarily reascend. And so from good, they naturally decline to evil. Valor produces peace, and peace repose; repose, disorder; disorder, ruin. From ruin order again springs, and from order virtue, and from this glory, and good fortune.”

This isn’t the place to deconstruct Machiavelli, but he makes a couple of points that are worth pondering. Does “good … naturally decline to evil”? In politics (which is his subject) it does, because politics necessarily attracts evil people, and evil necessarily brings ruin. Then order reasserts itself, because people despise chaos. And from order virtue arises, and from that good fortune. Machiavelli is right. Virtue does bring good fortune, and evil brings ruin. I believe it would be clear to Machiavelli that in the US virtue is vanishing and evil is on the rise. And Machiavelli would predict that things aren’t going to get better at this point until they “sink to their utmost state of depression, unable to descend lower, they necessarily reascend.”

In general, he’s correct. But sometimes it takes quite a while for a society to reset. After the collapse of Rome, real civilization didn’t return to the West until the Italian Renaissance, which was when Machiavelli lived. Interestingly, culture in Italy started a rapid decline in the 1490s, and the peninsula became a backwater – a quaint theme park at best – for hundreds of years. You can argue Italy is still headed downhill today. Perhaps it simply has to do with the nature of entropy: all complex systems eventually wind down, no flame can burn forever. But that’s another subject. It would have been nice, though, to keep the flame of America burning for longer than turned out to be the case.

Moral and Intellectual Bankruptcy

One element of moral bankruptcy is intellectual bankruptcy, to wit, belief in the effectiveness of statism and collectivism. This is one reason why I counsel kids who are thinking of going to college (unless it’s to acquire very specific knowledge in science, engineering, medicine or the like) to do something more intelligent with their time and money. The higher education system is totally controlled and populated by morally and intellectually bankrupt instructors who are believers in socialism.

It’s said Obama is a socialist. I don’t doubt he’s sympathetic to socialism but, to be true to the meanings of words, he’s a fascist.

Let’s define these terms and two others with a little help from Karl Marx. His recommended solutions are part of the world’s problems, but his analysis of conditions was often quite astute. As Marx pointed out, political systems are all about the ownership and control of goods, whether consumer goods (houses, cars, clothes, toothbrushes) or capital goods (farms, factories and other means of production). Although he didn’t break it down this way, his analysis gives us four possible economic systems – communism, socialism, fascism and capitalism.

A communist advocates state ownership and control of all the means of production and all consumer goods. That’s a practical impossibility, of course, even in the most primitive aboriginal bands. The idea is even more absurd and preposterous for an industrial society. But that doesn’t keep professors and politicians from pretending that it’s a good idea, even if just in theory.

A socialist advocates state ownership of society’s means of production but accepts private ownership (with state control) of consumer goods. While it’s a big improvement over communism, socialism is also completely impractical and always either collapses or evolves into fascism. North Korea and (now to a lesser degree) Cuba are the world’s only socialist states.

A fascist advocates nominal private ownership of both the means of production and consumer goods – but with strong state control over both. In other words, you can own mines, farms, and factories – but the state reserves the right to tax, regulate or even expropriate them. Fascism has nothing to do with jackboots and black uniforms; you can have those in communist and socialist states as well. It has to do with a corporate state and a revolving door between business and government, with each protecting and enriching the other. Fascism can be maintained for a long time but necessarily entails all the problems we now face. Almost all the world’s states are fascist today; they differ only in degree and detail.

A capitalist advocates the private ownership of everything. An extreme capitalist may be an anarchist, who believes that anything people need or want should be, and would be, provided by entrepreneurs at a profit.

No country provides a perfect example of any of these four arrangements. But every government promotes one or the other as a theoretical ideal. In most places, certainly including the US, the “mixed economy” is put forward as a good thing; the “mixed economy” is a polite way of describing fascism. Nobody wants to call fascism by its name today because of its strong association with Hitler’s “National Socialists.” In any event, look and analyze closely before you use these words and attach any of the four tags to any country.

In that light, it’s funny how the Chinese are still referred to as communists, even though communism was tried only briefly, under Mao. In fact, up to the mid-’80s, China was a socialist state. Now it’s a fascist state. China’s Communist Party? It’s just a scam enabling its members to live high off the hog.

Sweden is usually referred to as socialist, but it’s always been a fascist country. All of its means of production – businesses, factories, farms, mines and so forth – have always been privately owned but heavily taxed and regulated. The presence of lots of “free” welfare benefits is incidental. People often conflate a welfare state with socialism, but they’re two different things. Socialist states necessarily become too poor to provide any welfare. Fascist states can better afford it and usually offer some in order to help justify the government’s costly and annoying depredations.

There is no truly capitalist state in the world today; perhaps Hong Kong comes closest (although not very close).The early US came quite close in some regards. In fact, the West as a whole was quite free in the century from the fall of Napoleon in 1815 to the start of World War 1 in 1914. Almost everywhere taxes were low and regulations few; there was no inflation because gold was currency everywhere; there were almost no serious wars and passports hardly existed, which enabled most anyone to travel almost anywhere without permission. It’s no accident that, in percentage terms, the 19th century saw far greater and wider advances in prosperity than any time before or since. Capitalism is both natural and ideal – but, oddly, it doesn’t exist anywhere. Why not? I’ll explore that shortly.

One sign of intellectual bankruptcy in the US is the absence of serious discussion about capitalism (except in small, specialized forums). Nearly all political debate is about how to fine-tune a fascist system to best suit those who benefit from it – or who think they do. Almost everyone in the public eye is a political statist and an economic collectivist. Those who start attacking the heart of the matter, like Andrew Napolitano or even Pat Buchanan, are quickly evicted from their bully pulpits.

In reality, there’s little philosophical difference between the Republicrats and the Demopublicans; they’re really just two wings of the same party. The left wing of the party claims to believe in social freedom (but doesn’t) and overtly disbelieves in economic freedom. The right wing says it believes in economic freedom (but doesn’t) and overtly disbelieves in social freedom. The right wing uses more aggressive rhetoric to build the warfare state, and the left wing talks more about the welfare state. But the net difference between them is minuscule. That’s because they share the same corrupt intellectual and moral views.

What made America unique was its foundation in a philosophy of freedom. That word, however, has become so corrupted that the younger Bush was able to use it two dozen times in some of his early speeches without being laughed off the stage or targeted with shoes and rotten vegetables. Perversely but predictably, Bush is today presented in the mainstream media as a free-marketeer, in order to pin blame for the current depression on the free market. This is as much of a hoax as calling Hoover a supporter of the free market. One is forced to acknowledge a bit of respect for Obama’s intellectual honesty, in that he almost never speaks of “freedom” or “liberty.”

But pointing out the sad state of the world today serves little purpose. It’s rare that an intellectual argument changes anyone’s mind. Opinions are mostly a matter of psychology. But it’s almost impossible to change someone’s psychology and the attitude with which he views the world, simply by presenting facts and arguments. A person’s beliefs have much more to do with his character and spiritual essence than anything else.

You’ll hear some of the candidates for the upcoming elections talk about “American exceptionalism.” The phrase makes me wince because it’s so anachronistic. In the first place, America was only incidentally a place, a piece of geography. In essence, America was an idea, and an excellent one, that was unique in world history. But now America has morphed into the US, which is essentially no different than the other 200 nation-states that cover the face of the planet like a skin disease.

It’s funny, actually, to see how quickly and profoundly things have changed in the US. Back in the ’50s and ’60s, kids used to say, when one of us did something the others didn’t approve of, “Hey, it’s a free country.” I’ll bet you haven’t heard that expression for many years. Back in the ’70s, there used to be a joke: “America will never have concentration camps. We’ll call them something else.” Guantanamo, and the long rumored FEMA detention centers, are proof that it wasn’t a joke after all.

It’s all a matter of mass psychology, which is to say a moral acceptance of collectivism and statism. These systems actually aren’t serious intellectual proposals, despite being doctrine at almost every university in the Western world. They’re psychological or spiritual disorders on a grand scale.

It’s important to gain an intellectual understanding of why freedom is good and collectivism is bad, why freedom works and government doesn’t. It’s important – but it doesn’t strike at the root of the problem. The root of the problem is psychological, not intellectual. Do you think for a moment that if you could make Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or any of the other sociopaths who control the state sit down and listen to intellectual arguments, it would change their attitudes? The chances of that are Slim and None. And Slim’s anorexic.

Why am I so certain of that? It’s not because these people have low IQs and can’t understand the arguments. It’s because most of the people at high levels of government are sociopaths. They’re susceptible to reasoned argument against a police state to about the same degree that a cat can be convinced he shouldn’t torment a mouse before killing it. People like Obama, Hillary or Cheney – which is to say most people with real power in Washington and every other government – do what they do because it’s their nature. They’re as cold, unemotional and predatory as reptiles, even though they look like people.

You may think I’m kidding or exaggerating for effect. I’m not. It’s been said that power corrupts, and that’s true. But it’s more to the point to say that the corrupt seek power. A good case can be made that anyone who wants to be in a position of power should be precluded from it simply because he wants it. As a purely practical matter, the US would be far better off – assuming a Congress and a Senate are even needed – if their 525 members were randomly selected from a list of taxpayers. But that’s impossible in today’s poisonous environment because it would leave over half the population – those who only receive government largess and don’t pay any income taxes – ineligible. This last fact is a further assurance that the situation in the US is now beyond the point of no return.

There are lots of ways to divide people into two classes: rich/poor, male/female, smart/dumb, etc. But from the perspective of political morality, I’d say the most useful dichotomy may be people who want to control the material world vs. those who want to control other people. The former are scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs; the latter are politicians, bureaucrats and assorted busybodies. Guess which group inevitably – necessarily – gravitate toward government? And I might also add, toward big corporations and the media. Big corporations are political arenas where the prize is economic power, and they’re heavily populated by backslappers and backstabbers. The media specialize in a different type of power, manipulating opinion; one way they do that is by promoting an atmosphere of bad news, threats and general paranoia for which they imply government action is needed. Government, mega-corps and media – they are the triumvirate ruling today’s world.

Stupidity

You may be thinking: Sure, I can see that Obama or Hillary or Cheney may be evil. But how about Bush or Vice President Biden or Prime Minister Cameron of the UK? It’s sometimes hard to tell whether one is dealing with a knave or a fool. The fool does destructive things that may make him seem knavish. And the knave can do stupid things that make him seem like a fool. Isn’t it a mistake to accuse someone of malevolence when Occam’s Razor might indicate stupidity as a more likely answer? They seem more like fools than knaves. Pity the poor fools.

Stupidity certainly can account for many of the world’s problems. As Einstein said, after hydrogen, stupidity is the most common thing in the universe. Unfortunately, the word “stupidity” is thrown about too carelessly, usually as a pejorative, and then often by stupid people. Let’s define the word. It’s important to be precise in the use of words, because if you’re not, then how can you possibly say you know what you’re talking about? A failure to define words properly invites sloppy thinking.

Most of the time people use “stupidity” to mean low intelligence. That’s accurate, but it’s a synonym, not an explanation. So it’s not terribly helpful, because it doesn’t really tell us anything we don’t already know. Just look at how stupid the average person is (they’re thick underfoot on Jay Leno’s many “Jay Walking” segments) and then figure that, by definition, half of the electorate are lower than average.

It’s helpful to use an example, and since we’re talking about politics, let’s pick a well-known political figure. George W. Bush was president recently enough that everyone can still remember him clearly. I’ve always said that the Baby Bush was stupid. Technically speaking, I believe he’s actually a borderline moron. You may or may not know that a moron, an imbecile and an idiot are not at all the same thing – even though in common usage, the words are more or less interchangeable. In fact, these terms have clinical definitions.

Briefly, an idiot is so dim that he may have to be institutionalized. An imbecile functions at a higher level; he can get by in normal life, given some assistance. A moron does even better. He can conduct himself quite well in day-to-day society and even be liked and respected – a little bit like the character Chauncey Gardiner (who, as it turned out, was being groomed to become the president) in Peter Sellers’ movie Being There.

A moron can carry on a conversation about the weather, the state of the roads, sports, TV sitcoms or even, with a bit of coaching – as Bush proved – the economy or a war. Bush seemed more or less normal, even though I suspect he only has an IQ of around 90. I’m not saying that just to be offensive to Bush fans. I believe I can back up that assertion, even if Bush could actually score above 100 on a standard test, by showing you some more practical definitions of stupidity.

Let me give you two of them. One is: an unwitting tendency to self-destruction. Another is: an inability to correlate cause and effect and thereby anticipate the consequences of an act. I would suggest to you that almost everything Bush has done, it seems his entire life, but absolutely while he was the president, would fit those definitions of stupidity precisely.

A moron can see the immediate and direct consequences of actions, even though the indirect and delayed consequences escape his understanding. At least to a cynic, that would seem to indicate that not only Bush but the average American voter is likely not just a moron but an imbecile. Such a deficit of intelligence almost guarantees that we’ll see controls of all types – absolutely including foreign exchange controls – imposed as the Greater Depression unfolds. In fact, when the next 9/11-style incident, real or imagined, occurs, they’re going to lock the US down like one of their numerous new federal prisons. It’s going to be, as I’ve gotten in the habit of saying, worse than even I think it’s going to be.

But stupidity is clearly only a partial explanation of Bush’s character, just as it was only a partial explanation of Hitler’s. Please don’t misapprehend me on this. Bush wasn’t in the same class as Hitler. Hitler was a criminal genius. But criminals, even so-called criminal geniuses, are basically stupid, according to our definitions – they show an unwitting tendency toward self-destruction. How stupid was it of Hitler to attack Russia, especially while he still had a front open with Britain? How stupid was it to declare war against the US shortly after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor? How stupid was it to murder six million innocents in concentration camps? How stupid was it to throw the Wehrmacht’s Sixth Army into Stalingrad? It’s a long list.

Stalin provides another example. How stupid was Stalin to murder several million of the most productive farmers when Russians already lacked enough to eat? How stupid was it to liquidate half of the Red Army’s most experienced officers and higher NCOs just before WW2? Or Roosevelt. How stupid was it of him to pour milk into the gutter and slaughter livestock in order to drive up prices while millions were hungry? How stupid was it to burden the US, in the middle of the last depression, with huge taxes and a score of new regulatory agencies?

A catalog of stupidities of these and most other famous political leaders fills libraries. As Gibbon said, history is little more than a chronicle of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.

There are different types of intelligence – emotional, athletic, mathematical and literary intelligence, for instance. A person can be a genius in one and an idiot in the others. The same is true of stupidity; it comes in flavors. I think a case can be made that liberty cultivates intelligence, because it rewards seeing the distant and indirect consequences of actions.

Conversely, statism and collectivism, by restricting liberty, tend to reward stupidity. Remember that political leaders are oriented toward controlling other people; they’re clever about it, but they’re basically stupid about the rest of reality. Nonetheless, their animal shrewdness is enough for them to gain and keep power over others. The immediate and direct consequences of that political power are gratifying for those who have it; the indirect and delayed consequences, however, are disastrous for everyone.

But wait. It sounds like stupidity is related to evil. Which it is. Stupidity is a signpost of evil. It’s why it often takes a while, when things are going badly, to determine whether you’re dealing with a knave or just a fool.

In that regard, Robert S. McNamara offers something of a counterpoint to Bush. When you look at the disasters he caused throughout his life – almost destroying Ford, then almost destroying the US with the Vietnam war, then doing immense damage to the world at large with the World Bank – one might say he was stupid. In fact, he had an extremely high IQ. McNamara underlines the often fine distinction between stupidity and evil. He was clearly a sociopath, but he’s held in high regard among the ruling class. Henry Kissinger is a similar case.

Evil

I would like to suggest that what really distinguishes political elites from normal people is not just a predilection for stupidity but a real capacity for evil. Evil might best be defined as the intentional and usually gratuitous commission of acts that are cruel or unjust. A person who commits many evil acts is a sociopath. The sociopaths who are naturally drawn to government eventually come to dominate it. They’re very dangerous people. They reset the social mores of the country they control. After a certain point, a critical mass is reached, and it’s GAME OVER. I suspect we’re approaching that point.

[The US – and many other countries – face severe problems. However, for the prepared contrarian investor, those problems mean great opportunities. There has never been a better time to become one of the prepared – but you must act today or tomorrow.]

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