His methods were overt, but is he really any different to any other leader in history or at present? Nations still exist by taking a chunk out of someone else.. a classic example being all our consumer goods that come from China. How many people have died directly, indirectly or are suffering through the manufacturing process that allows us to have what we have? Sure we're not directly sanctioning the death and suffering using a flimsy pretext but you have to be ignorant to not understand how things work these days. We're still killing each other. What's the difference? As far as I can see none, just differing degrees of covertness about the psychopathy.. but I know as soon as that position is taken it becomes easy to say "Well, Hitler was a nasty man who believed in nonsense.. our leaders are just making tough decisions.".
Well it's all relative. Historical evidence shows that Europe didn't care too much about the reports of what was happening to the Jews at any stage of the War, until it became a pretext to bomb Berlin and launch the full invasion of Germany. Then people cared as part of manufacturing consent, and also because the very real possibility existed that Hitler would deem them a lesser species and they'd end up being exterminated. If you ask me, Hitler was just the extreme version of the Social Darwinism that was already happening in most of Europe for the better part of the previous century, he was just the natural conclusion of that philosophy which we now deem unPC to talk about but is still a social force to this day. If anything it shows that people will care about the human element if it ends up being discussed in a wider context, otherwise it will be a footnote or something overlooked,
vis a vis China. I find the whole Nazi/Jew thing overdone now. The European Court recently found a 100 year old SS person guilty of giving support at the camps, and everyone gave themselves a good self-righteous pat on the back... I find the whole thing laughable because governments are doing stuff now way worse than that on a global scale, but it makes for a nice bait and switch I guess. The line between civilization and barbarity is a fine one... perhaps one that doesn't exist at all.
About China... having lived there and studied its politics for years, I can tell you that most of its society welcomes it. Despite what the western media would have us believe, the Chinese people are perfectly capable of overthrowing their government at any time. The Communist Party are just the new emperors, and like any emperor they will be destroyed if they don't provide. Part of Mao's rise to power was a national distaste for why China had fallen behind, become so backward (in their words), and so poor. People there are enjoying the status quo that capitalism has brought them. There's little reform coming from the inside, in terms of better conditions for the rural people, or those working in factories. Their society is just as selfish as ours, if not more so because beyond people's families no one gives a shit about one another -- no really, the concept of social agency is bunk there. Everything defers to the family. If your family isn't helping you then you're SOL because no one else will. It's all about family duty. They don't give two shits about anyone else, when it comes down to it.
As for us benefiting from it... that's just colonialism, which is indeed psycho. Always has been. What I feel you are trying to describe but are vaguely pinpointing is that nature itself has a psycho element. I see that you are pointing out a hypocrisy, but what I can't tell is if you're arguing for more humanism, or arguing for us to just admit our true nature already. On a systems level, I think humans are totally psycho. The system is violent. Wars are always fought over resources, markets, etc... but now we package them in false pretenses to act like we're not trying to provide for the tribe. But what should we do with this information? If we're all indeed a bit psycho, then what? I doubt it changes much.
IMO our primary relationship, which is to that of nature, has to change. If humanity, as a whole, is psycho, then psychos only respond to their well-being being threatened. That means our collective behavior won't change until the destruction of nature threatens us in a very real way, which it's beginning to do. Beyond that, I don't think anything will change the cycle. Science and technology have provided some hopes but in other ways they have only further enabled the behavior. Maybe we're just fucked.
We like to moan about our leaders and how we live, but how many actually change their way of being to circumvent the psychopathy? Not many.
Not many can. The government generally forces people to participate. There are some people living off the grid but they do so are the leisure of the government, who could make a law anytime saying that it's illegal for them to live a detached lifestyle.
It just shows what a flimsy concept psychopathy is and how it shifts to suit the mood of the era. Such a transitory concept with no hard reference point is a subjective concept in my opinion.
Well psychopathy isn't even a DSM term, so you'll have to refer to something more specific in your critique.
I would say its a sideways step, not a step up. Again its more about shifting concepts, definitions and practices.. the understanding of the mind yesterday was both as equally valid and absurd as the understanding modern psychology puts forward today. We still have not actually defined our reference point. An attempt has been made to posit that the mind is the brain, confined to the inside of our skulls, and that a lot of hocus pocus of the past does not exist.. but nothing has actually been proven in either of those arenas.. it has just been assumed for the sake of attempting to make a reference point.
It's my understanding that the reference point is functionality and how well we can get on with others, or understand society as is. As most people with mental health issues or developmental disabilities will tell you, normalcy is a narrow margin. And as most clinical psychologists will tell you, the system is far from perfect, but it's all we've got. Do you have a proposed alternative?
Going back to China for a sec... their culture does not believe in psychology or psychiatry. It's a very new thing there. When someone has a mental health issue the general disposition of the public is that the person should just get a grip and deal with their problems, or it becomes a private family matter. China's interesting like that. That same mechanism made Christianity an abysmal failure there during the colonial period. But on the flipside, traditional practitioners dealt with mental illness, called by other names.
I used to live in an apartment there and in the building across the street from me there would be a woman screaming to her self all day and night at someone who wasn't there. Eventually the cops got called and they took her away, but they didn't take her to a mental hospital, they took her to her parent's place and then gave her apartment to someone else (they can do this in China). Who knows what happened to her after that, she was obviously schizophrenic. People would gather in adjacent apartments to just watch her (kan re nao, a phenomenon in China where people enjoy staring but won't help, ever), some with amusement. Can't lie, I was one of them. In China they call people like her shenzhenbing, someone who is troubled but it's synonymous with someone who makes trouble / a troublemaker. They see people there who are crazy as simply acting out, like they should just get a grip already. In North America such a person would be carted away a.s.a.p, and she eventually was but it took months. The most horrifying factor for me was eventually learning that there had been a 5 year old living with her the entire time and he would just go sit in the stairwell when his mother had one of her fits. She would toss things out the window at invisible specters. One time she tossed a pot of boiling water out the window narrowly missing people on the street.
Diagnosis aside, should she just be left there to scream into the night, in terror and in suffering? Who should be responsible for it, if anyone? I'm sure there are millions of people like her around in that country. I'm just saying, it becomes a social burden eventually, even in a country like that where there is less social empathy beyond the family. Even in a place like that, eventually they came and took her. Eventually.
Coming back to the original question, I don't think our society would function without psychopathy, because to me the concept itself is half defined in the first place.. what one person defines as psychopathy I may define simply as someone who had the drive and motivation to make something happen. The actions may have been questionable, but shit got done. Keeping all the engines of nations, economies and all the rest chugging along requires the ability of drive and determination without having a moral conniption fit over how many people may get hurt or killed as you engage your objective. On a more personal level.. remove psychopathy and the system would collapse from that angle too.. our entire mode of life is based around lying, lying to ourselves and to other people, on a daily basis.
Well there's the Machiavellian side to the system and to government. But that's not psychopathy. Neither is lying to ourselves and others.
I really object to the term psychopathy.. people do some dark stuff I'll grant you that, but it just appears to me to be a label of convenience. To try and institute laws against people who we deem to be disagreeable in terms of thought process, before we even have a reference point defined on what sanity actually is.. well that to me is no different that Hitler and his methods. You might not be killing anyone, but you're still casting judgement over people before actually knowing the truth. That is a dangerous road to go down.
Psychopathy isn't a DSM term though, it's a social one, and fraught with problems in what it implies -- as you have already elaborated.
Sounds like every 5 year old to me..
Try living with a borderline person or one who has anti-social personality disorder and you'll quickly realize you're not dealing with a 5 year old.
The labels aren't perfect, they are a subjective spectrum, but they have their uses. You're also overlooking that for some people, the diagnoses really helps them. They have suffered for years under the mistaken conclusion that they are completely alone and so abnormal that nobody can help them. The diagnosis can be instructive, even if the body of knowledge relating to it is subjective or incomplete.
I think we should ask the deeper question that you've been dancing around: if we lived in a more benevolent, compassionate, well-adjusted and empathetic society, would we have fever psychopaths?
