- FIRE THE SOCIOPATHS: Asabiya's dark side

About 70 millions psychopaths and 210 million sociopaths subsist on Earth today. Whenever civilization falters, they take over and wreak havoc on innocent strangers who would instinctively look after each other in their absence. What is their responsibility for the persistent lies, waste and terror of day-to-day politics that we the conscience-driven despise in overwhelming numbers? 

How have one percent and three percent of humanity, bereft of the moral conscience the rest of us take for granted, weaponized five thousand years of world history by twisting our deepest values? How did they manage to make PeaceWorld impossible in practice and “utopian” in theory? 

Why do we submit to their dismal science and disastrous outcomes, since we outnumber them 24 to one? At 24 to one, it would not be war, it would not be revolution or revolt; it would be changing the shitty diaper of a baby. No contest but that of love.

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LEARNER full text (2024) and chapters

All or nothing, PeaceWorld or death

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APPRENTI texte integral (2024) et chapitres

Tout ou rien, Le monde paisible ou la mort

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WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

- FIRE THE SOCIOPATHS, asabiya's dark side -

One of the charms of the fine arts is their immunity from sociopaths. Whether it be the plastic arts, music, dance, drama or creative writing; whether as an interpreter, appreciator or creator; sociopathy is irrelevant. Other skills and talents are called for and ethics don’t matter.

Of course, psychopaths and sociopaths have a long history of art abuse: the murder, censorship and enslavement of artists; the destruction, theft and vandalism of art works across the world. That kind of targeted turmoil is more fun for them than random mayhem. But art, like nature, has always outshone their churlish transgressions.

Sociopaths have infiltrated, corrupted, inverted by decree and eventually taken over almost (?) every human institution: politics, religion, education, justice, philosophy, science, industry and mores. Unlike them, the fine arts are immune to this contamination. The absolute nature of aesthetics trumps the give-or-take lies, routine hypocrisy and corruption taken for granted by human ethics. 

That is why the least creative of sociopaths (like those in Congress) are so hostile to the fine arts, and why Learners must support the arts with all their might. 

My thanks to the late Lloyd Rigler.

Out of all humanity, about three percent of men and one percent of women are sociopaths; one percent are psychopaths. They number around three hundred million and thus equal the sixth largest nation on Earth. 

For purposes of comparison and none other, there are 40 million blind people on Earth. Say you crossed the path of someone blind on the fifteenth of the month and the one prior on the first. During that two-week interval, approximately two psychopaths and six sociopaths crossed your path.

Their passage is marked by the litter that carpets every public space and byway. It is not thoughtlessly cast aside, as one would assume, but carefully sited by young sociopaths of both sexes for maximum ugliness, even when a trashcan is nearby. When they’re not serially littering, they develop their special talents by tormenting helpless playmates and animals, abusing siblings, stealing whatever they can and lying more and more convincingly to parents and teachers.

Depending upon the taxonomy of therapists, those who suffer from psychopathy, sociopathy, antisocial personality disorder and malignant narcissism are more or less interchangeable. 

Don’t bother butting me your buts, you witch doctors. 

Psychopaths tend to be lone wolves often lethal and delusional. Sociopaths are outwardly sane people who join a subculture that promotes their vicious egotism; such as organized crime, criminal justice, politics, corporate and government bureaucracies, religion and the military. And more recently, finance, science and technology: wherever the most money can be got.

More or less one quarter of corporate bosses are psychopaths, and who knows what proportion of politicians and the military? How many preachers are more intent on textual fundamentalism than the spontaneous – and from their point of view, satanic – dictates of personal conscience? Religious dogma is essential to them because they have no internal moral compass to steer their lives by.

Almost a quarter of those in prison are psychopaths; they are at fault for most of the violent crimes penalized. Psycho/sociopathic cops, court officers, legislators and their cronies lock up most other convicts for victimless or one-time crimes; they occasionally conceal proof of their innocence. In extremis, they get them executed. Cops who shoot unarmed suspects and get away with it, and their judges? The rich and their political supporters who rob the poor? Likewise.

Is there a parallel between the finding that 96% of the universe is made up of “dark energy and matter” whereas only four percent is visible, and that 96% of humankind is conscience-driven, whereas four percent is not? Is there ecological demand for a four percent margin of predators and the 96% remainder of prey, to maintain the vigor of the human species, since we don’t have serious predators other than microbes?

Various Ages, or Youga, may have differed in their percentage of psycho- and sociopaths present. Our era, the Iron Age or Kali Youga (Age of Evil), supports as many of them as possible, short of the complete destruction of civilization ― merely now and then for a millennium or so until the next renaissance. The Bronze Age, two-thirds as many; the Silver, one-third; and the Golden, almost none. 

Why these shifting proportions over time? Sociopaths tend to love ‘em and leave ‘em, fathering a long succession of bastards and orphans who often become sociopaths in turn, since they were left to their sad fate and genetically predisposed. Psychopaths love to tyrannize, torture and murder as many conscience-driven people as they can — preferably with patriotic, religious and civic-minded “help” from the conscience-driven themselves. Finally, psychopaths enjoy being led by other psychopaths, contrary to conscientious people who detest such bosses. So they proliferate in positions of responsibility and of preparation for those, like bacteria in a neglected egg dish.

Modern civilization’s predicament is like that of a classroom with too many troubled students; whereas those who lived during a Golden Age went about their business in peaceful harmony, without having to suffer from those fulfilling their evil Karma. 

Some Asian societies only retain one percent of sociopaths, perhaps because of their collectivism and their tendency, as far as the Japanese are concerned, to “hammer the nail that sticks out.” I would rather attribute it to the prevalence of seafood in their diet with its high protein and micronutrient content, plus rice with its lower digestive acidification especially important for growing children. Neglect of proper child nutrition (especially by food corporations run by psychopaths) helps to induce mass sociopathy.

They can tell right from wrong, but suffer no remorse when they commit the latter. They have no conscience, no shame and no love for anyone but themselves and perhaps blood relatives they’ve been taught to care for. They do not recognize those feelings and look down on those duty-bound by them. The truth is a matter of convenience for them, to be twisted to their advantage. Especially the truth about themselves. For example, they are never mistaken or imperfect (think of Trump). Ever.

They can act in good conscience, but must be coached to do so under relentless supervision. In one of his “Culture” science fiction novels, Ian M. Banks foretold that each of them would be escorted full time by an artificial intelligence “slap missile” set to thwart their misdeeds.

Type One sociopaths (with Antisocial Personality Disorder) have no impulse control, they are unmistakable. The Type Twos (standard psychopaths) postpone their most blatant misdeeds and only proceed when they know that no effective resistance will be offered. Today, they run this planet in the dumb name of weapon mentality — the reason why the Golden Rule is violated so commonly everywhere without correction.

Many of their victims find their devil-may-care attitude attractive at first. Charming and debonair when so inclined, they turn vicious and manipulative when they can get away with it. They can “read” like a book the body language and facial expressions of the conscience-driven, fake emotions, seek pity and affection they don’t feel for others, and seduce their victims just prior to exploiting, insulting and injuring them. They use people and discard them, the way you would a Kleenex.

They commit sins without guilt, sins the rest of us would find inconceivable to carry out and painful to recall. They get away with many evils because no-one around them can imagine such complex, aggressive and risky behavior for rewards as trivial as the relief of boredom, idle greed, one-upmanship and simple jealousy of those with superior talents. 

The average psychopath is not bothered by moral conscience, love and their many subconscious calculations. Something like calculations needed to remain upright on a bicycle, but a lot more voluminous and complex. So where there should be a superbrain calculating all the ins and outs of moral conscience, there is a big black hole of nothing. This idle brain burdens him with a permanent state of boredom, only be relieved by risky behavior and the abuse of conscientious inferiors, their torture, humiliation and betrayal.

He usually grows old, sick and broke, shunned by one and all including his family. Many are ruined or slain by the protector of one of their victims or by several of their avengers. Few die in bed surrounded by loved ones. They are pitiable if quite dangerous moral amputees.

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The craft of government consists in keeping most psycho/sociopaths in check as long as possible (that is, moderately well off in exchange for wreaking as little havoc as possible). The tragedy of government is that sooner or later they will take over its highest ranks as well as several rungs below, and will ruin the life of everyone they control, for no good reason.

Recall that their primary motive in life is to sow chaos and revel in it, thus relieving their crushing sense of boredom.

From a peace mentality point of view, good governance must remain calm, fair, generous and permissive. You may do pretty much as you please and not be disturbed by the government (but for taxes) except under special circumstances and with elaborate safeguards. 

Under such minimal constraints, psychopaths thrive upward from below and gradually take over all the bases of wealth and political power. No-one makes a serious effort to identify and impede most of them. They recruit other sociopaths as protégés into dysfunctional or overtly criminal organizations. Once they have taken over most positions of responsibility, they eject the conscience-driven from the rest of them. Their self-serving abuse rots out the rest of society, unavoidably and unarguably, no matter how awful the outcome of their takeover. 


Since most wealth is inherited instead of earned, its long-term inheritors display a random spectrum of behaviors. There will be good inheritors and nasty inheritors of fortune, more or less equally distributed. Then again, you would have to be a seething psychopath, a carnivorous specialist at ripping wealth off, to accumulate it to begin with. So more psychopath offspring inherit great wealth than those psychosane. Regardless of this automatic imbalance in favor of evil, these people, good and bad, will use their wealth in the future to further their principles and scotch those of their powerful rivals. Pretty much a static muddle in favor of minor evil, most of the time.

A decade or so before modern wars (local or world), there will have been a major financial scandal (à la Stavisky or Bernie Madoff). Some kind of ponzi scheme that sucked dry the wealthy pockets of many people of good will. They believed in good faith, since they were themselves motivated by good conscience, no matter how piratically their wealth was accrued in the past, or how stupid their greedy trust in ponzi sweet talk. Their faith in mankind made them vulnerable.

Wealthy psychopaths and sociopaths almost never fall for this sucker bait. After the scandal, they get to regulate the future based on wealth disproportionately redistributed in their favor. Raw wealth, per se, is a slow and clumsy tool of social manipulation on continental scales. A preponderance of wealthy psychopaths will need time to buy up the centers of power and media, to recruit four sociopaths for every new psychopath they recruit, and to get the massed frogs of the conscience driven, habituated to their up and coming boiling bath.

So a massive financial scandal will happen ten or fifteen years before the next war. 

But once the trap is sprung, the result is inevitable (since it happens unnoticed by anyone). Psychopathocracy takes over most sources of power. The psychosane, stripped of funds, die alone, penniless and without influence. Upcoming psychopaths find employment and power; psychosane newbees, less so, then not at all. 
War, the heaven of psychopaths, becomes “inevitable.” 
“Sorry about that, folks! Patriotism forever!”

After a while, the growing resentment of a conscience-driven majority explodes into open revolt. Non-violent and frequent, cripplingly large and clumsy public demonstrations are followed by expert bloodbaths at the hands of elite psychopaths and their sociopathic mercenaries in charge of police suppression. At that point, their opponents and victims, the conscientious revolutionaries, discover the military advantage of a chain of command of psychopaths. They recruit prior outcasts from among them as combat leaders and thus fatally compromise the lofty ideals that triggered the revolt. 

After a psychopath-directed seesaw of revolution and counter-revolution (this chaos, their idea of paradise since it allows them the greatest scope of corruption and terror), the slate is wiped clean. The absolute minority of psychopathic leaders is exterminated. 
So many more casualties accrue among the conscience-driven that their survivors, exhausted and disgusted, will take up once again the temporary reins of government. They will reward surviving psycho/sociopaths at minimal expense to do the least damage, then re-institute more peace, justice and benevolence. You can do pretty much as you please, once again  — and so on. 

Expect not much more from any weapon revolution. Expect it to be a lot worse than the simple, tidy procedure described above, much more torturous, prolonged and malevolent

The following passage describes the takeover of both sides by psychopaths during the Peloponnesian War. It applies to world politics these days, growing more and more extreme and intolerant, and to prior takeovers of both sides of every war by psychopaths throughout world history

3.82 “So bloody was the march of the revolution, and the impression which it made was the greater as it was one of the first to occur. Later on, one may say, the whole Hellenic world was convulsed; struggles being everywhere made by the popular chiefs to bring in the Athenians, and by the oligarchs to introduce the Lacedaemonians. In peace there would have been neither the pretext nor the wish to make such an invitation; but in war, with an alliance always at the command of either faction for the hurt of their adversaries and their own corresponding advantage, opportunities for bringing in the foreigner were never wanting to the revolutionary parties. The sufferings which revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur, as long as the nature of mankind remains the same; though in a severer or milder form, and varying in their symptoms, according to the variety of the particular cases. In peace and prosperity, states and individuals have better sentiments, because they do not find themselves suddenly confronted with imperious necessities; but war takes away the easy supply of daily wants, and so proves a rough master, that brings most men's characters to a level with their fortunes. Revolution thus ran its course from city to city, and the places which it arrived at last, from having heard what had been done before, carried to a still greater excess the refinement of their inventions, as manifested in the cunning of their enterprises and the atrocity of their reprisals. Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot, still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries. In fine, to forestall an intending criminal, or to suggest the idea of a crime where it was wanting, was equally commended until even blood became a weaker tie than party, from the superior readiness of those united by the latter to dare everything without reserve; for such associations had not in view the blessings derivable from established institutions but were formed by ambition for their overthrow; and the confidence of their members in each other rested less on any religious sanction than upon complicity in crime. The fair proposals of an adversary were met with jealous precautions by the stronger of the two, and not with a generous confidence. Revenge also was held of more account than self-preservation. Oaths of reconciliation, being only proffered on either side to meet an immediate difficulty, only held good so long as no other weapon was at hand; but when opportunity offered, he who first ventured to seize it and to take his enemy off his guard, thought this perfidious vengeance sweeter than an open one, since, considerations of safety apart, success by treachery won him the palm of superior intelligence. Indeed it is generally the case that men are readier to call rogues clever than simpletons honest, and are as ashamed of being the second as they are proud of being the first. The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition; and from these passions proceeded the violence of parties once engaged in contention. The leaders in the cities, each provided with the fairest professions, on the one side with the cry of political equality of the people, on the other of a moderate aristocracy, sought prizes for themselves in those public interests which they pretended to cherish, and, recoiling from no means in their struggles for ascendancy engaged in the direst excesses; in their acts of vengeance they went to even greater lengths, not stopping at what justice or the good of the state demanded, but making the party caprice of the moment their only standard, and invoking with equal readiness the condemnation of an unjust verdict or the authority of the strong arm to glut the animosities of the hour. Thus religion was in honour with neither party; but the use of fair phrases to arrive at guilty ends was in high reputation. Meanwhile the moderate part of the citizens perished between the two, either for not joining in the quarrel, or because envy would not suffer them to escape.

3.83 “Thus every form of iniquity took root in the Hellenic countries by reason of the troubles. The ancient simplicity into which honour so largely entered was laughed down and disappeared; and society became divided into camps in which no man trusted his fellow. To put an end to this, there was neither promise to be depended upon, nor oath that could command respect; but all parties dwelling rather in their calculation upon the hopelessness of a permanent state of things, were more intent upon self-defense than capable of confidence. In this contest the blunter wits were most successful. Apprehensive of their own deficiencies and of the cleverness of their antagonists, they feared to be worsted in debate and to be surprised by the combinations of their more versatile opponents, and so at once boldly had recourse to action: while their adversaries, arrogantly thinking that they should know in time, and that it was unnecessary to secure by action what policy afforded, often fell victims to their want of precaution.” 

If your conscience prompts you to pursue good and reduce evil ‒ no matter what race, ethnicity, country, religion, ideology or organization you belong to or reject ‒ half of your rare enemies are on your side and half of your many friends, on the other. The only non-delusional segregation? That between those with a healthy conscience (your real friends) and those without (your enemies). 

It doesn’t matter which “side” you “belong” to, except to justify the bloody-mindedness of that side’s psychopaths otherwise constrained. Thus, war, jihad and crusade fester at random intervals, each one a manhunt for the Other made a monster (even though we are all for the most part the same people), justified by clever psychopath propaganda.

Heed my warning. Pick your friends and sort out your enemies with equal care.

There are dependable psychological tests to identify psychopaths. During brain CAT scans, they react to emotional problems the way most people would to an algebra problem. The same brain volumes light up in both cases. When observing torture films of unspeakable horror, nothing much lights up in their brain, while cerebral fireworks go off in those of conscientious people. 

They rarely yawn after other people do so; they have no fellow feeling.

Their record as a schoolyard bully and animal tormentor gives them away during naïve youth, as does the shameless way they seek pity once they’ve been caught at confirmed serial misdeeds as adults. Let me repeat: they are never wrong and cannot be wrong. It is always someone else’s fault, your fault or their victims’ who deserve their abuse. Their routine speech, absolving themselves and scapegoating others, echoes that of national weapon propaganda since history began.

There is no cure for their disease, nothing chemical or psychoanalytical (perhaps genetic surgery someday?). They do not want to be cured. They consider themselves superior, and the conscience-driven, their social inferiors and legitimate targets. After advanced group therapy sessions targeting their affliction, they emerge with better techniques to simulate emotions they never felt, thus duping their future victims more readily next time.

Track them down, identify them and eject them from positions of authority high and low. A public contact network should be dedicated to their victims, so they can turn in a sociopath tormentor. Investigators would bring the suspect in for testing, the results of which would confirm or deny the necessity of restraining them from positions of responsibility, authority and control over their victims. 

Above all, never allow sociopaths to take over the hunt for sociopaths. If given the slightest opportunity, they will surpass every evil of the Inquisition (another historical Paradise for them), hunting down innocent victims and laughing in their face as they ruin and kill them.

 They should be stroked and cozened, once they are identified, and generously subsidized for life. Experiments have shown that their criminal recidivism can be reduced much more effectively by methodical rewards than by punishments they seem to be immune to.  In addition, that kind of treatment will neutralize a great chunk of the merely lazy and parasitical ones, otherwise inoffensive, at lesser cost than present day laissez-faire. Prison and penal punishments only serve to isolate them from the civilian population; they have little effect on their bad behavior except to worsen it.

Those left at liberty should be given constructive outlets for their immense boredom (demining, commando work, high risk surgery and space exploration, for example) and otherwise peacefully neutralized. They are better qualified for technical tasks that require emotional distancing from the people they interact with, like delicate neurosurgery and violent law enforcement. Under strict supervision and with generous rewards, they will be encouraged along those lines.

The last thing to wish for: that they unite against the rest of the world out of fear for their life and liberty. No other army would be more lethal, no insurrection more destructive, no terrorist group more alarming than that of psycho/sociopaths united because the rest of us attack them. Under most circumstances, they are anarchistic individualists and their organizations stumble because they are so internally competitive, as demonstrated by cutthroat civilian Nazi leadership.

They are most useful in war when they find it easy to commit frightful atrocities, then move on to the next. Unimpeded by moral conscience, they are more technically competent at organized killing and more imaginative in carrying it out. They suffer no remorse from the grim chore of killing the enemy, not even from the pileup of casualties on their own side in order to get the job done. 

Psychopaths commit the first atrocities in war and then drift off to the next, anonymous, invisible and unpunished (if not promoted for their acts). Meanwhile, conscientious people in uniform (or peaceful villagers left behind) hold the ground and get punished in retaliation. If those sociopaths are bossy enough, normal people will obey their insane orders and commit crimes unthinkable under other circumstances. Sociologists have confirmed these outcomes during experiments simulating interactions between fake convicts/prison guards and torture victims/administrators. People tend to fall into the roles of tormentor and victim reflexively.

The crimes against humanity that military psychopaths commit are never attributed to them, but to the country, religion or ideology they belong to, leaving them in the clear of their misdeeds and their victims never properly avenged.

This is how dirty war spreads on both sides.

World War II (sic) in North Africa was fought with relative chivalry because the Nazi SS were not dispatched and the Allies never concentrated their psychopaths in similar, “political” units. On the other hand, combat turned rabid in the USSR because both sides used them (SS versus NKVD).

Dread them like Satan. They and the idiots under their control are responsible for most of the large-scale evils on Earth. In their absence, utopia might draw just within reach without necessitating so many laws and so much paperwork and general constraint. 

Of course, powerful psychopaths have bad-mouthed utopia in all the mass media they could control. They’ve slandered idealists and pacifists so systematically; they’ve turned them into pariahs and made those passions taboo. They’ve produced a whole literary culture that exempts them from responsibility for most crimes, and attributes it to conscientious people who stray (“Anyone is capable of any crime”) even though they commit almost every crime, especially the serious ones — all this with our amiable consent. For thousands of years, we have repeated their vicious lies like brainwashed idiots. 

Beware!

Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door: the Ruthless versus the Rest of Us, Broadway Books, USA, 2005.

Robert D. Hare, Without Conscience: the Disturbing World of the Psychopaths among Us, The Guildford Press, New York, 1999.

http://www.bullyonline.org/workbully/serial.htm

http://www.alienview.net/conspire.html

Another minority may exist, of super-conscientious, super-empathic people: the psychosane and the sociosane (note how we have no such PeaceWorld terms). For people like Buddha, Abraham, Gandhi and quite a few more (mostly women), the suffering of others is more painful to them than their own. They would rather suffer and die, if necessary, than see their fellows harmed. The leadership of PeaceWorld should be drawn from them alone,  even though they’ve been sidelined as “weak-kneed do-gooders” by mainstream WeaponWorld culture, up ‘til now.

Avoid the term “empathetic” instead of empathic.  Empathetic sounds too much like “pathetic” a turn of phrase useful for psychopaths. 

It will be up to Learners to recruit the empathic leadership they require, by means of cooperative procedures distinct from competitive selection dictated by psychopaths.

The historic selection of male leaders of the Iroquois Nation by so-called “senior mothers,” their control of those leaders and potential but absolute veto of their worst decisions, those should be seriously studied, brought up to date and adopted. After all, the first American constitution was made of wampum.

IN FRENCH

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