Everyone one has his place, right? His roll in society? Or so they say - these philanthropists who see the good in everyone. In seeing if I could flesh this out for every manner of man, every walk of psychological profile, I stumbled on the psychopath. And if it weren’t for the fact that, a minute earlier, I did the same for the politician, I may just have skipped over the connection - a potential connection - between the two. Is it possible - I questioned - that the only arena in which we see psychopaths as, well, psychopath is outside the game of politics? Could it be that when placed centrally into politics, the psychopath ends up appear as merely a sleezy, corrupt, power-hungry despot? In other words, your typical run-of-the-mill politician? In other words, is the reason why we have psychopaths in society only that some politicians-by-nature simply haven’t found their way to their proper calling and therefore end up taking out their frustrated, but natural, propensities and ‘gifts’ in unproductive and dangerous ways - that is, their need to exert power over others, their self-appointed right to rise above and dominate them?
My first thought was that this couldn’t be possible. Most psychopaths - or psychiatrically diagnoses psychopaths - are, for one thing, stupid. For another thing, they seem to lack social skills. Most psychopaths, whom we find in outstanding number in local correctional facilities like prison and psycho-wards, are really quite inept at getting along in society and doing anything skillfull (except, I guess, hurting people - but this, I assume, is a result of lack of self-control rather than an application of skill). How could they conceivably make it into politics?
But my second thought was that those whom we recognize as psychopaths are probably just those whom didn’t have what it takes to follow their calling - the exceptions to the rule, in other words. After all, isn’t the diagnosing of them as psychopaths just a matter of catching those weak-links who simply weren’t able to, or weren’t fortunate enough, to evade such labeling?
Perhaps this is true, but it does have certain implications: namely, that it must require more than a psychopathic personality to succeed as a politician. It must also require that one be intelligent obviously, and perhaps more obviously that one have exceptional social skills. But given these, I currently entertain the possibility that what more is needed, finally, is indeed a psychopathic personality.
Think about it: what is a psychopath? Consulting most psychiatric authorities, we get a definition that includes chiefly, but not exclusively: one who lacks a sense of guilt or social conscenience. I don’t know how anyone could ever get into politics with even a normal sense of social conscience holding them back. Most of of the time, our social conscience persuades us to second guess our tendencies and desires to exert power over and manipulate others. We like to be fair, kind, cooperative; not domineering, controlling, manipulative. Let’s face it: in order to survive in politics, one has to be ruthless, conspiring, cold and calculating. If not, then someone else will be, and he will eat you up and spit out your bones. The successful politician is he who is totally and utterly self-interested and without a scintilla of guilt. The one ideal he must be guided by, the one goal towards which all his efforts are put, is power.
Now, of course, one is expected to object: how can a psychopath possibly succeed at governing society? The goal is not for him to gain power, but to see society through hardship and strife and towards prosperity and happiness. How can one who doesn’t give a shit for society possibly be trusted with such a burden of responsibility? The answer is this: when it comes to psychiatric dispositions, the rule of thumb is never to think in black and white. The difference between a ‘normal’ human being and a psychopath is not the difference between a social conscience and the lack thereof, but a difference of degree. Psychopaths do have a social conscience - it’s just pittifully weak. This is good news. It means a psychopath can be made to feel guilty about doing harm to others - it just takes a lot - about as much as an entire society willing to rend your head from your body at the first sign of your ineptitude and potential for making their life miserable - and such a society, let’s admit, can be extremely demanding and intolerant.
So society and its bitchy attitude can be enough to keep a psychopath in check, but what about other societies - foreign ones? Well, this is where the psychopathic tendency to be cold and calculating, heartless and inhumane, comes in handy. What do you think it takes for Bush, or any president, to calculate the number of soldiers necessary to send into Iraq - soldiers who have families, goals and aspiration, who fear death and the pain of bullet wounds - in order to secure a reasonable chance of victory or progress? What does it take not to bat an eye over the thought of what he is actually doing in sending young, innocent, and noble men to their deaths? One might argue that Bush is simply weighing the benefits of global freedom from terrorisms and despotism against the costs of American lives, but I wonder whether one can even do this without being cold and calculating, without being overwelming by the passions of empathy and guilt. Would one not have to be numb, uncaring, only concerned with numbers and statistics? Such a responsibility as that which comes with being president, with being chief and commander, sending countless young men to their deaths, would surely and very quickly render anyone other than a psychopath crouched down in a corner, rocking back and forth, wining and lamenting over the stress of the their job. Sure, one may understand that the long term benefits may outweigh the costs of the present moment, but such understanding typically comes with more: it comes with very debilitating emotional anguish and stress, enough usually to break one down psychologically and render him disfunctional - unless, of course, one just doesn’t give a damn, which is just the psychopath.
So the psychopathic politician is kept in check by his own society and its emmensely menacing glare over him, but he is allowed free reign of his self-serving and insatiably power-hungry drive over other societies. These other societies are not of the utmost top priority to the politician’s society. We’re all selfish and uncaring in a way. And so if his spychopathic tendencies are directed towards something other than his own society, there is little, if anything, to stop him. His society is not so concerned in the latter case over what abuses he exercises, not so much because it is compose of equally audacious psychopaths, but because it has distanced itself from the responsibility of making the kinds of executive decisions that he is charged with - that it has charged him with, and precisely because it can’t bear the burden of responsibility, of guilt, that comes with making such decisions itself. Yet because it too has enough of the cold and calculating skills of rational thought as the psychopath himself, but with the additional burden of guilt that comes inevitably with it, it knows - it has to admit - that such harsh and brutal decisions have to be made. If, therefore, someone exists who can make these decisions without the guilt, without anything holding him back, then he is just the man for the job. Society can wash its hands of it while at the same time justify and defend the politician in his decision to do what it simple can’t on the grounds that the logic of the situation concludes only that such decisions must be made.
Only in such a situation is the psychopathic personality redeemed - only as a politician can the psychopath take up his redemption and find his rightful place in sociery.
) - but the key feature here is that he could not be successful (or