We are privileged to be living witnesses to, and more importantly, participants in, the Death of the Age of Psychopaths. This is a brief summary of what and why this is. This is deliberately not an academic treatise; it is a personal reflection on over 30 years of research, absorption, experience, intuition and assessment. I will leave academic form for other articles – this is a ‘readers digest’ for relatively straightforward processing. I believe there is an important place for this kind of approach – the academic approach is excellent for drilling down into detail, but all too often this is at the expense of overview – the big picture.
I am certain that I am not alone in having grown up feeling increasingly disenchanted by the incomprehensible insanity of the human world I was born into. In truth I believe that anyone who hasn’t experienced such disenchantment simply isn’t paying attention. On a personal level, exposure to casual brutality and cruelty was a challenge right from the outset. As we grow and adapt to this world, we have to adapt to this harsh reality – from mean-spirited treatment to blatant violence and intimidation. Most of us learn to live with these external impositions – we adjust our expectations of others, we adjust our self-image, our feelings of self-worth, and our sense of what is possible for us. We adapt.
Some of us do not survive our adaptation.
I believe that as a juvenile self-aware species we have a tendency to assume our initial ‘adaptation’ as an objective assessment of the actual world as it really is, rather than the more mature position of reflecting upon and processing initial impressions from a deeper perspective – indeed, from a bigger picture. For some this apparently inevitable set of assumptions (which could be characterised the ‘common sense world of the 16-year-old’), reinforced by our manipulated culture, can indeed be deadly. Those of us who do survive, mature reflection or not, take our turn indoctrinating the generations of humans surrounding and following us. We share it all, from the darkest evils to the highest aspirations. We influence powerfully through our children, but our impact is much wider, through all of our interactions in this human landscape of dreams and experiences. One day we smile at a stranger and they carry it with them into the stream of their day. On other days we are withdrawn, or cold, defensive and hostile. All of these ripples flow out from our being here; we are awash in each other, and nothing goes unregistered, whether we like it or not.
When we adapt to the realities of this world, we find as many strategies for coping as there are individuals on this earth. Each of us is unique, born in essentially incomparable circumstances, with distinct capacities and potentials. At the same time there are indeed generalisations of the wider field, and shared viable solutions and strategies for generic problems. If I am bullied as a child I may run away and hide for days on end, adapting to living in fear. I may confront the bully immediately and directly. This may work well, or result in a savage beating. I may emerge from my encounter with the bully emboldened and confident in myself, or devastated and withdrawn and distrusting the world. I may become a savage bully myself, as what seems like an eminently practical and sensible strategy to avoid being victimised, to feel better about myself, to feel empowered rather than powerless. For each of us, our solution to the challenge of being here, at any given time, will seem like the most obvious strategy given who we believe we are, where we are, and what is possible for us. This is why critiquing others; telling others how to be, what to think – and how they are wrong – is so double-edged and potentially counterproductive.
As a culture we are indeed very young. Just four or five generations ago, here in the West, untold dark, brief, brutal lives of unbelievable squalor and degradation were lived as the norm. Now billions still survive this way… but things are changing at a dramatic and accelerating pace.
As our knowledge expansion has begun to accelerate, our collective self-understanding has grown in turn, and what once were deemed axiomatic solutions to the challenges of our world have been exposed for what they are. For example, two generations ago in the West it was a truism that children should be physically disciplined to ensure that they become balanced and productive members of adult society. “Spare the rod, spoil the child” was common sense, and those few who disavowed this strategy were considered eccentric and naive at best. At worst they were denigrated as child abusers worthy of severe censure. I still consider it the deepest of irony that just 35 years ago I was thrashed with a long stick by a ‘teacher’ to force me to learn that violence is unacceptable – my actual violence had been pure self-defence, a fact that was never contended. The violence perpetrated by this teacher was not self-defence, it was a calculated assault. This same action by that teacher today against my own child could result in the termination of their career, and even imprisonment. This is a dizzying rate of social change by any historical standard.
We are all familiar with stories of ‘gangsters’ and ‘organised crime’. At a basic level the recent development of human society globally is a history of organised crime – a pattern that repeats itself right to the present day: A given society is fractured and dysfunctional, law and order is broken, people want to feel safe and ensure their survival and the survival of their families. A ‘strongman’ gathers a gang of followers to empower themselves at everyone else’s expense. ‘Protection’ is then offered (usually it is mandatory) to the wider community – the gang grows, taking with it the primary myth that justifies all state power. Some strongmen (it is usually but not exclusively men) become warlords, controlling whole regions. Some meld regions into nations. Some join nations into republics, unions, empires… The underlying logic and dynamic is the same, the rest is history...
The victors write the history, the losers are scrubbed. Victors rationalise and mythologise their power and privilege, and condemn those who did or would oppose them. They attempt to control what is said about them, they try to control what is thought about them. In our own recent histories, for millennia, power itself was its own justification, eulogised as divinely ordained. Knowledge is far easier to control when most people are illiterate and utterly dependent for their understanding on the literate few and their masters, the controllers of material resources and the means of life. This commenced with rulers (ordained by God/s) and the priestly class (interpreters of Gods’ dictates), and little has really changed; our current rulers (to whom we all ‘consent’ because of so-called democracy) bolstered by our professional authorities in media, academia, civil service, church, corporations, etc., lend pseudo-legitimacy to existing power relations. We are expected to trust our experts - they know what is best for us - the alternative is anarchy (alleged lack of safety).
Yet this foundational dynamic is dying, right before our eyes. I claim that it has been dying for centuries now; a revolution initiated by the mass printing of books, making the dissemination of knowledge less and less amenable to brute control. The incredible and accelerating changes since the genesis of mass printing are no coincidence – and when viewed through the lens of deep history the time that has passed since Gutenberg is but the blink of an eye.
We now live at the beginning of an age where each and every human alive has the potential to read anything that has ever been written, mere seconds after formulating any question. And each and every human can also potentially mass publish their own thoughts in those same seconds. I am just into middle age: when I was a child this would have seemed a ridiculous fantasy.
This changes everything.
The substantive inheritors of the ruler/priest class mentality – the victors behind the curtains of outward social organisation and function – are self-evidently those who thrive in our society. They control most of the resources, and wield the most influence over public policy. Their thoughts and world-views are drummed into us all as unquestionable common sense – though what they actually believe and what they want us to believe are far from necessarily the same. They may not be the most visible people, but they are the most powerful. Visibility significantly increases the risks of exposure, and those we publicly identify as elites are in the main store-front puppets for their actual paymasters. We need to follow the money. These are not the great mass of journalists, teachers, politicians, managers and bishops; such are the minions who quickly find themselves unemployed and marginalised if they do not comply with their 'Overton window', the common sense requirements of their professions. The actual rulers traditionally dictated such ‘common sense’, dragging along with them the boundaries of countless lives through calculated manipulations of ideas, money, conflict, reward and punishment.
Is this conspiracy theory? Well of course it is. One of the most successful conspiracies of recent times has been the deliberate introduction of the meme that ‘conspiracy theory’ means crazy and flaky and false. But conspiracy is nothing more than people getting together and controlling information flow to achieve a common goal. Every war ever fought is justified by a conspiracy theory. This is history itself. History is Conspiracy – and the only time this could possibly be untrue is when all information flow, everywhere, is transparent and open to universal scrutiny.
My core observation here is that this Age is nearly upon us, and the arbiters of this age are mass access to information, combined with blockchain technology. I will not defend this position here; I claim it as self-evident fact. Both phenomena have too much importance and utility to now withdraw from the 'common-wealth', this Pandora’s Box is irreversibly unlocked, and neither can ultimately be sufficiently controlled by any existing self-serving faction. It is a done deal. I remain of course open to pertinent critique on this.
Let’s be crystal clear about this: you do not get to be a warlord – particularly a successful warlord whose reach is inter-generational – without being a psychopath. The logic is simple; the nice guy in the gang, the one who baulks at gangster pragmatics like murder, torture, intimidation and cruelty, will not take over the gang. In our more complex modern societies the reality of this dynamic is more obfuscated (the myths defending legitimate power, in mass media and academia, are more elaborate and convoluted), but the truth remains the truth. Psychopaths ‘rise’ to the ‘top’, and then they redesign the ladder to secure their position. Most psychopaths are of course utter failures in life in all dimensions – but an unfortunate few have particularly matched qualities that permit their climb in our juvenile cultures. If any reader doubts this at all, I would direct your attention to the work of Lobaczewski and Political Ponerology. I characterise cultures like ours as juvenile because a mature society recognises the danger posed by psychopathy, and takes effective countermeasures. Some earlier isolated human cultures have done this – until they were overrun in turn by psychopath-dominated outsiders in the past ten millennia (for an excellent interpretation of this topic see Steve Taylor’s ‘The Fall’).
And in our vast, sprawling, unfathomably complex modern societies, our contemporary warlords have to disguise themselves carefully as fellow sheeple. They have known, for several centuries now, that appearing as the wolves they are is inviting their own destruction; there are simply far too many of us compared to them. Their bag of control tricks has long since been supplemented from the original assemblage of lies, manipulation, intimidation and brutal violence, honed historically by natural selection, to far subtler shrewdness. The sheeple are persuaded that they are not sheeple at all; that they have real power in ‘democracy’, that there are no barbed-wire fences (only common sense limitations) and there are no guards or patrols (only agreed upon security services and courts and legitimate prisons and judges) – all to keep us all safe of course.
Our current global culture rewards specific flavours of vicious psychopathy with untold riches and influence. The successful Wall Street/City entrepreneur does not hesitate to ruthlessly destroy the financial lives of millions as long as there is a benefit to their own ambitions. And from their point of view, this is an eminently sensible attitude given the world they believe they live in. The rulers of the military-industrial-intelligence complex have a vested interest in instigating, selling and perpetuating war and conflict as widely as possible – a perfect recipe for ensuring a steady flow of power, influence and resources, and guaranteeing the replenishment of their own ranks of psychopathic controllers, preserving their legacy. Promoting peace and harmony is anathema to such people; it is interpreted as the futile naivety of inferior sheeple – profoundly unrealistic, idealistic and dangerous. The recent treatment of Russia (and indeed the rest of the world) by the US arm of this bloated global conspiracy-by-default* is a perfect encapsulation of this in action.
(*The public evidence is explainable as a global conspiracy of convenience and common purpose - survival - rather than any overarching dastardly plan. I do not deny that such a dastardly plan may exist in principle though, I just doubt that the inter-generational intelligence of dumb-as-bricks human psychopathy would be a sufficient explanation for our predicament.)
The high functioning, highly positioned psychopath is also a perfect example of an unfortunately ubiquitous phenomenon of our species, even amongst non-psychopaths - a blinkered and fragmented personality who is convinced of their own superiority, and is ultimately too stupid to actually realise just how stupid they really are. Watch political news and commentary for a week - these narcissistic fools are impossible to avoid. They are, by far, the most dangerous of people; to themselves, and everyone in contact with them. Combine this maladaptation with great wealth, and outright psychopathy, and the consequences can be devastating. As George Soros himself admitted when interviewed – if he hadn’t helped the Nazis steal from his fellow Jews, someone else would have, so why should he feel any guilt? The answer to that question is perfectly obvious to all non-psychopaths, and the narcissistic psychopathy of Soros is plain for all prepared to see. This depth of evil stupidity may well have been one of Soros' few moments of public lucidity, which is no doubt why he tried so desperately to later bury that particular interview; an effort wonderfully stymied by alert denizens of YouTube.
In becoming inter-generational power wielders, these psychopaths have done another thing that all humans do (they are indeed human, contrary to some views) – they have evolved subjective justificatory myths regarding their own nature, behaviours and morality, and they have recreated their own kind through their own and others’ children.
Our relative downfall has been that psychopaths can be manufactured – and perhaps worse, psychopathic tendencies are actually ‘infectious’. (Again, see Lobaczewski)
When children (or adults for that matter) are brutalised and tortured sufficiently, their psyches are splintered and shattered and become amenable to malevolent manipulation. When the capacity for empathy, love and natural sympathy is compromised, what remains is perfectly ‘sane’ and ‘rational’ from the point of view of the individual experiencing life through such a shattered self. Empathy and pity and compassion, in a world whose raw facts are brutality and subjugation, winners and losers – is obviously at best sheep-like stupidity, and at worst, suicidal. As psychopaths have never begun to examine the roots of their own initial adaptation*, they cannot heal and evolve into their own potential wholeness.
(*They cannot examine themselves like this, their wounding is stuck on emergency repeat through their impulsive and irresistible recreation of their trauma through surrogates – namely; the rest of us suffering the consequences of their misdeeds, and their insatiable hunger for control, wealth and power. The irony here is that their only hope of rescue is their defeat by us, so we are no longer their surrogate ‘victims’, and their wounds can finally be fully healed and transcended, freeing them from the terrible spiritual loop they have trapped us all in. I guess that on some level this must actually be cosmically ironically funny, but it is a level far beyond the ‘me’ sharing this I must admit.)
Some argue that no treatment of psychopathy is even possible in principle. I disagree – their problems, however, in our psycho-pathologically infected societies, are rarely seen clearly for what they are, because their ‘common sense’ splintering diffuses unexamined throughout the meme pool we all absorb - we are awash in each other. In effect, their problem has consequently become a global crisis, one that we all contribute to, both around us in environmental devastation and social fracturing, and also insidiously within us, buried in the conditioned inner narratives of existence we have inherited, adapted, and adopted, by default.
So what we can witness has been a grotesque natural selection in play, and it is currently devastating our planet. Generations of psychopaths have reproduced themselves in positions of power in our societies, with our implicit consent. Make no mistake; they rely on this implicit consent. They ensure in turn that those who reach high office are compromised in turn, or eminently blackmail-able and manipulable. The rumours (and demonstrable facts) of predatory child rape gangs at the ‘highest’ political and social levels is no accident – it is inevitable given this situation. This is in fact a dead giveaway regarding the reality and nature of this problem, a real smoking gun.
Do not call this ‘paedophilia’ - it has little to do with love as we value it – do not be tempted by euphemisms which serve the perpetrator’s savage and desperate agenda. It is child rape and child torture – name it for what it is. This helps to counter recent attempts to ‘normalise’ this evil aberration. Organised child rape and torture serves multiple functions for the psychopathic power-brokers: it traps the weak-minded and damaged into compromising situations that are then recorded and used for blackmail and control in high office. It further reinforces the psychopathy of the controllers and perpetrators, strengthening their generation-spanning myths of ‘deserving victims’ and ‘innately powerful and superior predators’. And it is blatant evidence of the deep unconscious need of the psychopath to seek self-healing and wholeness by reproducing the trauma and horror at the root of their own damage through surrogate others. There are likely other reasons too, but not immediately relevant for the purposes of this summary.
So the wars, the starvation and poverty, the environmental devastation and human misery that have been evident on a global scale throughout my life, have never been the inevitable result of uncontrollable forces beyond us. They are the result of deliberate policy, conceived at the ‘highest’ political and social levels (which should not be conflated with 'high consciousness' - it is anything but), to perpetuate a system where the victors remain victors, and stay in charge. Any efforts to modify conditions for the better, on whatever level, are stymied, channelled and dampened by these forces, both local and global.
And they are losing.
It seems indeed a dark and miserable picture. But this article is about the end of this system, the death of the age of the psychopath. By their nature the psychopathic view is a partial view – it cannot be other: it is splintered, it is not, and never can be – whole. The psychopath cannot, and will not, grasp this. The psychopath maintains power through a variety of mechanisms, but by far the most important are these: the control of the narrative (information), and the fomentation of conflict, which is of course related. On a global level the traditional narratives can no longer be controlled, and slowly but surely the majority non-psychopaths are waking up to who the real enemy is, and isn’t, and what needs to be done about them. When a critical proportion of us fully target them, and not each other, their time is done. Their main weapons are, right now, neutralised, and there is literally nothing that they can do about this, they are completely outflanked. In truth, since Gutenberg, this has just been a matter of time.
For those who are impatient for this to be realised I would urge the following: please examine carefully who you consider the enemy is in the light of this analysis? Are you targeting the juvenile unconscious minions and victims of these psychopaths (and hence unconsciously serving their divide and control agenda), or are you right above the appropriate target? We can end this horror show in our lifetimes – or we can end it this next year...
Every human being has a deep drive to be free in relationship to a truly greater whole, to avoid arbitrary constraint. This includes psychopaths; it is their particular solution to this generic human challenge that is fundamentally maladaptive/insane. The base issue in each society that has ever arisen is how best to organise to maximise human freedom in keeping with the freedom of everyone else as self-creating self-willing life. This is the underlying dynamic, the energy that springs from our fundamental identity, long before we dress ourselves up as ‘people’, and the solutions are practically infinite. Many will take issue with this characterisation, and I don’t intend to defend it here. I simply point out that only the damaged and frightened do not prioritise their own empowerment and autonomy in this sense, they are forced to seek self-healing first – and any and all experiences which assault our sense of freedom and self-creative autonomy within our greater cosmic identity are experienced as damaging and/or frightening. This motivates human behaviour accordingly.
We have supported and kept our leaders and rulers because we have believed the lie that we need them to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe, to maximise our freedom and our happiness. We do not. The facts clearly belie this. This information is now out there for everyone to see who actually wants to look (most still don’t, but that does not matter), and the psychopaths have lost control for good. They are fighting a desperate rear-guard action now, mostly through their compromised or naive and unthinking proxies. Their censorship drive will fail (which truly is the only battle of real lasting import going on here) – but there are too many outlets of information flow to dam, and too many of us see them clearly now for what they really are. In a sense they are like the postulated supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies – they cannot be seen directly, but their effect on the millions around them is unmistakable. But the invisibility of our human black hole psychopaths is a sleight of hand, and they cannot consume the light, it is the death of them. We see them through their actions, and the consequences of their being. By their deeds we know them… and by their deeds they are being undone.
As they unravel there is something critical that I believe we must keep to the forethought of our attention on them: we absolutely have to offer them something that they have never, and could never, offer us – potential forgiveness, and genuine compassion. This is not optional, or a sign of weakness – it is mandatory, because it is a sign of the fundamental difference between us, and without this, we become them and they win. This is at the very root of their infectiousness. The psychopaths who have ruled and lorded and controlled our societies these past ten thousand years are the biggest victims of all. Their actions have been, and still are, utterly evil, monstrous and terrible. Would you want to be one of them? More, know this for a fact – these monsters are in deep truth frightened and broken children, stuck in the horror of their worst moments. Their lives are unenviable travesties of a real life, their ‘achievements’ are illusion. They thrive only in shadows. Underneath these fleeting shadows there is only light, the one light of us all. The level of our ‘civilisation’ is always a measure of our treatment of the least among us, and they are unquestionably the least of us, contrary to their ridiculous egos. For all their current riches, I for one would not exchange places with a single one of them - for all the treasure in any conceivable universe. If that recognition alone does not engender compassion, nothing will. But these permanently frightened and broken children will indeed answer for their crimes, for all of our sake’s, and that reckoning is right on our doorsteps. Love to all, monsters and angels alike. Db
Great article, thanks for sharing.