Archive for June 2nd, 2004

Can You Spot a Psychopath?

You will find the silliest use of words among people who think they the masters of our language. The word “sociopath,” for instance, is now used instead of the more accurate term “psychopath.” That is because “psychopath” is used in movies and among the general public so those who don’t want to sound like common people use the term “sociopath.”

A psychopath is a person who can feel no real sense of guilt. He could blind a baby and never feel the slightest real qualms about it. There are at least five million psychopaths in the United States, and they make up the overwhelming majority of our clergy.

Many years ago, Dale Carnegie wrote one of the first blockbuster self-help books. It was called “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” It should have been subtitled, “How to be a Successful Psychopath.”

Above all, said Carnegie, you have to remember people’s names. A politician can let violent criminals back on the streets and bus a man’s children into the ghettoes, but he can still get reelected if he remembers the voters’ names. A voter might get a little upset if criminals are let back on the street, but he will never forgive a politician who doesn’t remember his name.

In a sound-bite society, the psychopath is king. You get elected or promoted by following certain rules, rules that can be written down and memorized. You cannot get sidetracked by serious concerns about other people or considerations that throw you off the strict path of rules laid down. Genuine concern and feelings of guilt and other emotions can be faked more convincingly than real feelings can be shown by non-psychopaths.

In fact, in a society where every successful spokesman is a psychopath, genuine emotions seem fake.

No one is better is better at faking emotions than a psychopath with a lifetime of practice. I was fooled by Jerry Swaggart’s tearful confession of his transgressions. But what he was feeling was the pain of getting caught, and the tears were real because he was feeling sorry for himself.

The judge who sentence Ted Bundy to death started out by saying what a nice young man he was and how he wished Bundy well. Ted Bundy would have cheerfully walked up and put that judge’s eyes out, right there and then, but the judge was convinced by Bundy’s lifetime of acting that he was reallly an intelligent, thoughtful young man.

If a judge who has just gone through gruesome evidence of how Bundy has horribly murdered twenty or so people, how can the average person resist psychopathic skills? Every single Catholic bishop knew all about the thousands of rapes of little boys that were going on, but every one of them made it to bishop and is considered a model of humanity.

Like religion, politics is the property of psychopaths. I cannot imagine anybody but a genuine psychopath becoming a major conservative spokesman. To be a respectable conservative spokesman, you have to know exactly how far to go, exactly what to believe, and exactly which opinions you have to change on command. You have to fake guilt and outrage on command.

So Hannity looks straight into the camera and tells America that Jesus Christ died on the cross for interracial dating. O’Reilly tells the same camera that the Founding Fathers wanted the government to sponsor interracial dances because they called this country the UNITED States of America.

Do Hannity and O’Reilly mean what they say? Yes, they do. They mean it to the extent that any psychopath means anything. They would not understand what the term “meaning it” actually signifies. They are psychopaths. There is something missing in them. They do not “mean” anything in the same way you do.

Not all leftist spokesmen are psychopaths. They mean what they say.

Leftism requires a good, solid, consistent hatred of white people, Americans and so forth. Plenty of people genuinely hate their own kind, so a lot of leftists are genuine. But conservative spokesmen are, without exception, psychopaths.

Most conservative spokesmen are regarded by everyone as really nice guys and sincere and friendly people, the way Ted Bundy was.

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Right Out of the Movies

I said before that too many of the things that happened to me seem like I made them up. I also pointed out that I wish I had made them up. I am an excellent writer but I can’t “plot,” which means I can’t make up stories and become a writer of novels.

But I finally figured out why so many of the things real people in real situations say to me sound like they come out of movie scripts. The reason they sound like they came out of movie scripts is because they DID come out of movie scripts.

In the 1920s and thirties, they made a lot of gangster movies. John Dillinger was killed while he was walking out of the theater after watching one of them.

I was watching a documentary that pointed out that gangsters who saw those movies actually tried to model themselves after the gangsters in the movies. Today’s gangster show, “The Sopranos,” shows Tony Soprano’s gang constantly quoting and acting like characters in the movie, “The Godfather.”

One example of real people using movie language has haunted me through the years, until I realized the fact that reality often follows movie scripts.

I was in a big city election, and the Republicans decided that black militants, since they were in competition with the respectable black “leaders” who are slavish liberal Democrats, might be willing to ally with conservative Republicans.

That is an excellent theory, but Yuppie Republicans can’t carry it out, as you will see.

So the Republicans got in contact with some black militants. The blacks militants insisted that the Republicans go into the ghetto at night for a talk. The blacks wanted to impress them, so they wanted the thing on their turf.

I, of course, insisted on going along. I told the Yuppies that I would sit quietly and listen. I fully intended to do just that.

Well, the Republican delegation got to the black headquarters, and they were sure as hell impressed.

It looked like a scene from a Clint Eastwood movie. There were fully automatic weapons in plain sight. The Republicans were in coats and ties, the blacks were in “tough” clothes.

No Republican said a word. A black guy was talking fast.

Finally the only redneck the Republicans had with them started talking back.

A buddy of mine in Washington, who shared a coat-and-tie job with me, once said, “What scares me about Whitaker is that any time we get on an elevator or we’re walking down the street, he picks the biggest, meanest looking black around us and starts talking with him.”

So since the rest of the crowd I came with seemed to have developed laryngitis, I talked.

As we were riding back, the Yuppies who were supposed to do the talking at the meeting finally started talking again. I asked them why they didn’t say anything. One of them said, “You started ARGUING with that guy. I was just hoping to get out of there alive!”

Actually, I wasn’t arguing. We were talking loud and our conversation didn’t sound suburban, but it was friendly enough.

Now comes the movie line. The black spokesman call the next day and said he wanted to get together again. He wanted to talk to Whitaker. The Republican on the phone, who had heard about that encounter, asked why Whitaker? Whitaker had been the disagreeable one.

The black guy said “He’s a white MAN. We can talk to him.”

Unfortunately no one in our camp was interesting in a second encounter, so the thing died there.

When I tell this story, that last line always bothers me: “He’s a white man. We can talk to him”
It sounds like a line from a movie. Nobody would believe it.

I now realize it WAS a movie line. The black guy used a line he had seen or heard somewhere. I don’t feel so stupid telling the story now.

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