Twilight of the Psychopaths, by Kevin Barrett

[moodforaday]

Fantastic article by Kevin Barrett, accompanied by one of the best toons ever.

Twilight of the Psychopaths

"In On Killing, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman has re-written military history, to highlight what other histories hide: The fact that military science is less about strategy and technology, than about overcoming the instinctive human reluctance to kill members of our own species. The true “Revolution in Military Affairs” was not Donald Rumsfeld’s move to high-tech in 2001, but Brigadier Gen. S.L.A. Marshall’s discovery in the 1940s that only 15-20% of World War II soldiers along the line of fire would use their weapons: “Those (80-85%) who did not fire did not run or hide (in many cases they were willing to risk great danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages), but they simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy, even when faced with repeated waves of banzai charges” (Grossman, p. 4).

Marshall’s discovery and subsequent research, proved that in all previous wars, a tiny minority of soldiers — the 5% who are natural-born psychopaths, and perhaps a few temporarily-insane imitators—did almost all the killing. Normal men just went through the motions and, if at all possible, refused to take the life of an enemy soldier, even if that meant giving up their own. The implication: Wars are ritualized mass murders by psychopaths of non-psychopaths. (This cannot be good for humanity’s genetic endowment!)

Marshall’s work, brought a Copernican revolution to military science. In the past, everyone believed that the soldier willing to kill for his country was the (heroic) norm, while one who refused to fight was a (cowardly) aberration. The truth, as it turned out, was that the normative soldier hailed from the psychopathic five percent. The sane majority, would rather die than fight.

The implication, too frightening for even the likes of Marshall and Grossman to fully digest, was that the norms for soldiers’ behaviour in battle had been set by psychopaths. That meant that psychopaths were in control of the military as an institution. Worse, it meant that psychopaths were in control of society’s perception of military affairs. Evidently, psychopaths exercised an enormous amount of power in seemingly sane, normal society.

More at
http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2008/01/02/02073.html

On edit: just to reflect that we indeed seem to have built ourselves a culture which awards psychopathic behavior. We know psychopathic tendencies make better stock traders, and that corporations act in clinically psychopathic / sociopathic ways (google The Corporation by Joel Bakan, if you're unfamiliar with the book and the movie). The same behaviors can easily be observed in politics. And now Barrett's article is yet another part of the same story.

[dtotire]

1. Timothy McVeigh was one

He was the one who set off a bomb in Oklahoma City. I understand that during Desert Storm, he took pleasure in killing Iraqis who surrendered.

[moodforaday]

2. Well there you are.

I knew he was a vet, but didn't know anything else about that part. Thanks!

[Warpy]

3. Most of the guys my age who were in Vietnam

and who talked about it would talk about laying down fire as a cover but I never heard of anyone aiming at another human being and killing him intentionally. It was always a side effect of just blasting away to cause the other side to take cover or retreat.

Either they wouldn't fess up to it when I was in earshot or Marshall is onto something.

All were decent guys who had various degrees of trouble adjusting to the peacetime world afterwards.

[tanyev]

4. Wow, that is very interesting.

[Prophet 451]

5. That's fascinating

I wonder if he's factored in "indirect" deaths, that is, where you toss a grenade or fire your weapon in a random direction which happens to kill an enemy...

[roscoeroscoe]

12. indirect fire is key.

... like air attack. it's easier to pull the trigger when the target is 10 miles away... which brings us to the unmanned planes with weapons. the trigger is pulled hundreds of miles away... looking at a video screen at 'bad guys.'

yikes.

[Hekate]

6. I wonder how technology is affecting this, by which I mean the video games...

...and the remote weaponry that mimics video games. The Army has a downloadable game for boys, too...

Hekate

[bonzotex]

11. Dave Grossman certainly thinks so...

Google Lt Col Dave Grossman and video games to read all you want on both sides.

Personally I have a hard time believing violent video games really desensitize kids or adults enough to overcome their innate resistance to committing murder. Some borderline personalities are perhaps drawn to violent sports, occupations, literature, games. Many non-psychopaths are as well and they don't become psychopathic.

Grossman's book, On Killing, and his follow up books argue pretty strongly that for most people, overcoming the resistance to kill require intense and nearly constant training and desensitization. There are the 5-10% that don't require that at all. That small percentage rule has been around a lot longer than violent video games. I'm frankly surprised that he argues against the games. On the other hand, his objections to the games are pretty mild compared to some of the spittle-flecked freak outs by would-be censors.

Violent crime per capita in the US is and has been in a long term decline, despite the advent of violent "first-person-shooter" games. I would argue that easy access to guns by all citizens. including psychopaths, is a greater threat than all the video games ever made.

[Beregond2]

7. There is a lot of truth

in this, but there is also some malarkey. Like all conspiracy theorists, he has no tolerance for ambiguity, and wants to reduce everything to one explanation.

However, I agree completely that our social systems have tended to reward psychopathic behavior. I also think we MUST be more vigilant in detecting these types, and denying them access to the levers of power.

I have been saying for years that democracy and standing armys are incompatible. Nothing is more likely to attract and reward psychopaths than military organizations.

However, the very selfish, destructive nature of psychopathology makes it impossible for any organization to be entirely in their hands, so it is foolish to overgeneralize about institutions. There will always be a blend of personality types present.

A good book on this topic is "People of the Lie" by Scott Peck.

[Beam Me Up]

8. Yes, this is why 9/11 was one of those "necessary illusions" n/t

[VioletLake]

9. The article is a vehicle to plug Ron Paul.

It appears that at least one psychopath has a sense of humor.

[moodforaday]

16. That's true and I admit

I didn't get to that last paragraph before posting. The whole Ron Paul meme doesn't even make sense in the context of the article. Still, leaving out that angle as well as the conspiracy angle in the article, just the hard data about troop behavior is fascinating.

There is a much better - more detailed and factual - article on the issue here:

The Trick of the Psychopath's Trade: Make Us Believe that Evil Comes from Others
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/148141-The-Trick-%20of-the-Psychopath-s-Trade-Make-Us-Believe-that-Evil-Comes-from-Others

It is in the form of a lengthy interview with two editors of a book on the subject, titled "Political Ponerology", by a Polish researcher Andrzej Lobaczewski. The author was not available for in terview due to his old age and ill health, so the interview is with the editors. The book out of print on Amazon, alas, and the impenetrable title relegates it to a limited scientific circle, which is a shame. The interview itself is absolutely fascinating and frightening, too. A few excerpts:

But Political Ponerology presents the subject in a radically different way from other texts about psychopathy, suggesting that the influence of psychopaths and other deviants isn't just one of many influences working on society, but, under the appropriate circumstances, can be the primary influence that shapes the way we live, what we think, and how we judge what is going on around us. When you understand the true nature of that influence, that it is conscienceless, emotionless, selfish, cold and calculating, and devoid of any moral or ethical standards, you are horrified, but at the same time everything suddenly begins to makes sense. Our society is ever more soulless because the people who lead it and who set the example are soulless - they literally have no conscience.
(...)

Early in the book, Łobaczewski describes his experiences in university where he first encountered the phenomenon. He went into the library to get some books on the question of psychopathy and found to his amazement that they had all been removed! This fact demonstrates a self-awareness of their difference amongst at least some of them, and in the case of Poland under communism, of those in a position of power highly enough placed to get books removed from the university library. Laura said reading that passage made the hair stand up on her neck! The implications of this fact are far-reaching in understanding our world, how it got that way, and what we need to do to change it.
(...)

So now imagine how human beings who are totally in the dark about this can be deceived and manipulated by these individuals if they were in power in different countries, pretending to be loyal to the local populations while at the same time playing up obvious and easily discernable physical differences between groups (such as race, skin colour, religion, etc). Psychologically normal humans would be set against one another on the basis of unimportant differences while the deviants in power, with a fundamental difference from the rest of us, a lack of conscience, an inability to feel for another human being, reaped the benefits and pulled the strings.
(...)

...and here it ties back into "The Power of NIghtmares" and the whole neoconservative thing:

Schizoidal psychopathy is a deviation that produces people who are hypersensitive and distrustful and disregard the feelings of others. They are attracted to high-sounding ideas, but their impoverished psychological nature severely limits their perceptions and turns their so-called "good intentions" into influences for evil. Their idea of human nature ends up perverting their attempts. As Łobaczewski says the typical expression of their attitude to humanity is expressed in what he calls the "schizoidal declaration": "Human nature is so bad that order in human society can only be maintained by a strong power created by highly qualified individuals in the name of some higher idea". How many movements, from fascism to communism on to the neoconservatism we see today are based upon that idea! One could easily imagine this statement coming from Leo Strauss, for example.

I should have posted that article instead of Barrett's, but I found it later.

[bonzotex]

10. Barrett is not a great source IMO...

His Wiki entry is pretty fair as to where he is coming from.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Barrett

On Killing, by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman is an excellent book for anyone trying to understand military history and issues. I highly recommend it. Dr Barrett takes Grossman's findings and ideas and runs as fast as he can off into the weeds. I read his article and could sort of agree with him until he starts veering off into NWO 9/11 MIHOP la-la land.

His implied concept of "psychopathy" is ridiculously broad. He takes the somewhat narrow focus of Grossman's book and applies it to the global hierarchies that Barrett feels runs the world and planned and executed 9/11.

This is core conspiracy theory practice. Take some actual truth and insight, real scholarship done by others and use it to justify whatever you already want to believe. Having waded through Barrett's website for a bit I just feel sad. I think he genuinely has some good motives, but he has fallen so far down the 9/11 truther rabbit-hole that he really can't have any objectivity.

[yurbud]

13. I stumbled across ON KILLING browsing in a bookstore, and read it just about from cover to cover

while I was standing there.

[yurbud]

14. once the military realized that most don't kill, they figured out how to desensitize them

by having them shoot at human shaped targets, etc. which increased the percentage who would actually kill.

That's probably what brought us our PTSD vets from Vietnam and now Iraq--decent people can't live with themselves after they and are afraid that they won't be able to turn it off.

[petgoat]

15. May the Curtain of Darkness Fall on the Psychopaths. May they become wise, and change. nt

[Sequoia]

17. I have that bogus "movie" poster ! Thanks for the article.