Involvement in politics may be stealing our souls, or at least some among us.
Danger! Empathy and Psychopathy as Competing Value Systems in Politics and Economics
Four to five percent of the population is born without a capacity for empathy. It is a neurological lack. A psychopath may be a genius and become a multimillionaire, but he will never be able to understand empathetic values. ... Psychopaths treat the empathetic majority as the defective ones and seek relentlessly to remake the world in their own image, to proselytize their viewpoint and values and to “teach” their “defective” empathetic fellows to think like them.
Unfortunately, they can. (!!!!!) A psychopath can never learn to think like an empathetic person. The functioning brain tissue is just not there. But people with a normal capacity for empathy can turn off that capacity and think like psychopaths.
As studies of war, racism and genocide indicate, humans draw what Martha Stout called circles of empathy. They behave empathetically toward those in the circle and psychopathically toward those outside the circle. ...
Normally empathetic human beings need linguistic cues to switch to psychopathy mode ... the language of demonizing hate. The ancient Greeks and the Founders of our country understood the devastating destructiveness of the language of demonizing hate, particularly to democracies. They called the charismatic psychopaths who excelled at its practice “demagogues.”
More recently, neuroscience has provided evidence how demonizing hate radically alters the way the human brain processes information, making subjects immune to reason, increasingly intolerant and even violent and easily manipulated. Most tragically, there is a drug-like pleasure aspect to this process. Subjects in its grip mistake this pleasure for proof they are right and righteous when the opposite is the case.
We do see many high functioning psychopaths in right-wing leadership positions, especially these days as the party has moved farther right than it ever had been.
But we see the language of demonizing hate everywhere in politics, including here.
This call to demonizing hate is supplemented by ideologies that substitute psychopathic values for compassionate values, including the remaking of accepted ideologies by gutting their compassionate content. Basically, the forces of compassion create the institutions and articulate the values and beliefs that advance civilization, and then the forces of psychopathy work relentlessly to take over those institutions and values and remake them in their own image and to their own advantage. This ideological tug of war is an essential dynamic underlying history and the rise and fall of civilizations. ...
This difference between the deeply empathetic values of Adam Smith and the flagrantly psychopathic values of Ayn Rand is also reflected in devastating changes in this country’s business culture, particularly in the structures and values of the management of our largest corporate enterprises.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marcella-mroczkowski/danger-empathy-and-psycho_b_667637.html
Psychopathy (occasionally aka sociopathy):
"So who are psychopaths? Broadly speaking, they are people who use manipulation and intimidation, and sometimes violence, to control others and satisfy selfish needs.
They can be intelligent and highly charismatic but display a chronic inability to feel guilt, remorse or anxiety about any of their actions.
Scientists estimate that 15-25 percent of men and 7-15 percent of women in U.S. prisons display psychopathic behaviors. The condition, however, is hardly restricted to the prison system. Newman estimates that up to 1 percent of the general population could be described as psychopathic. Surprisingly, many who fall into that bracket might lead perfectly conventional lives as doctors, scientists and company CEOs."
http://psychcentral.com/news/2006/07/03/improving-the-definition-of-%E2%80%98psychopath%E2%80%99/64.html
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