Whitaker's 11/07/98 Articles

Bob Whitaker's Weekly Articles – November 07, 1998

November 07, 1998 – Introduction

November 07, 1998 – WHY WE ARE RULED BY SOCIOPATHS

November 07, 1998 – THE BEAD BUYERS

Introduction

Winston Churchill said that "Democracy is a system of government where one gets what one deserves."

It is time to stop blaming politicians and political experts for the weakness and ignorance of the American people. In a representative democracy, the job of a politician is to get elected.

He does this by taking good advice on how gullible we are.

WHY WE ARE RULED BY SOCIOPATHS

While a lot of people are for Clinton and a lot are against him, I doubt anyone now doubts that he is a sociopath. A sociopath is a person who is incapable of feeling honest guilt. He is also incapable of feeling any obligation to another person or to society in general.

This is a shockingly common phenomenon. Once we thought it was very rare. We now know that sociopaths probably constitute one to five percent of the population.

To be acceptable today, a politician must be a sociopath. Every move, every smile, every emotion is used to get what he is after. By definition, the more conscience you have, the less perfect a modern politician you will be.

Democracy is a system of government where people get what they deserve. We ASK for sociopaths to rule us. We want someone who will say the right thing. We label anyone who loses his temper or says anything that is purely an individual opinion, as over the edge. So we vote for people who say the right thing.

All the time.

Nobody who is not a sociopath can have acceptable opinions all the time.

In "The Bead Buyers"(below) I explain that we have become a society where sociopaths who learn the formulas for "handling" us, the right "spin", are allowed to rule us.

Dale Carnegie's book, How To Win Friends And Influence People, was a handbook for sociopaths. Not coincidentally, his methods worked like a charm. Nothing could be more inevitable in a country where Carnegie's advice works than that we get presidents like Nixon and Clinton.

The best book I ever read about success with women was written by a woman. It's title was The Inept Seducer. At the end, it had a piece called "How to be Ept," which gave men ten steps by which they could get what they wanted just about every time.

It worked like a charm.

The Inept Seducer worked beautifully, just as Carnegie's stuff worked beautifully. And the one tactic that was never discussed in The Inept Seducer at all was HONESTY. With American women, according to this lady, honesty is absurd. My experience says she was dead right.

We are ruled by sociopaths because we ASK to be ruled by sociopaths.

THE BEAD BUYERS

Hoogeetoobee the Elder spoke unto his son, "Young one, a man is only a real man when he has a BLUE glass in his nose."

Hoogeetoobee pointed at the blue glass shining in his nose and said, "My son, among our people, blue glass beads are deeply valued. If you wish a wife, take all your pigs to white men and get blue beads for your nose, not red beads."

And Hoogeetoobee was right. His son took all his pigs and bought blue beads and put them in his nose, and he had many wives of his tribe, which loved blue beads.

The tribe soon died out.

Wise Hoogeetoobee was right. He gave his son excellent advice for getting along in the grown-up life of his tribe.

But it is also true that that was one dumbass crowd of savages.

This year, a very thick but popular book called *The Wealth and Poverty of Nations* was published. It is by a Harvard professor, but it is popular because this Harvard professor is talking sense.

No, I have not been drinking, this Harvard professor actually makes some sense. He says that countries that are poverty-stricken are that way because they are run by what might technically be referred to as a crowd of dumbasses.

His language is more diplomatic, but that is what he is saying.

Historically in Latin countries, for example, real men in every class tended to mean men who did not work. The goal of a really macho man was to be nonproductive.

Real macho men in America tell us that "It's not what you know, it's who you know." That is true.

It is almost fatally true. When we ran head-on into a Japanese economy which was deadly serious about WHAT people knew, we damn near went under. What saved us was that the Japs had some "real man" advice THEY lived by.

The real men who were on top in Japan lived by clique. At the top, they went by WHO you knew. As a result, they made big loans on the basis of other real men asking for them. Their heroes defaulted, and the whole thing seems to have collapsed on them, saving the US for the time being.

But somewhere there is always a bunch of people, some Bill Gates', who take output seriously. Who you go to lunch with is such places is no substitute for creativeness or knowing your business. Whenever that happens, a lot of modern coat-and-tie bead-buyers get ruined.

Whenever someone tells me how to get along in a society, I listen for this bead-buyer crap. I am not so impressed by the wisdom I am hearing as I am by the sheer cowlike dumbness of people who can be "handled" this way.

Dale Carnegie says remember their names, that bowls them over. Other good advice tells us that "this is the way you talk to women," and "that is the way you flatter men's vanity." This is usually good advice. It also tells me that we live a society where grown men and women give out their money and their votes on that kind of basis.

This is a LOT more sophisticated than a blue bead in your nose.