The Breakdown of Human Morals and Ethics and the Rise of the Psychopaths

[Selkie]

Posted by Joe Akulis (here)
Kinda curious about De Toqueville. He wrote all this awesome stuff about how awesome America's morals were, and his famous work was published in 1835.

In chapter 1 of that famous work, he said this of the Native Americans:
"The Indian knew how to live without wants, to suffer without complaint, and to die singing."

I find that kind of hypocrisy upsetting to my stomach. In 1831 we began the internment and wintertime march of the remaining civilized Native American tribes to lands west of the Mississippi. The march was nicknamed the Trail of Tears. Must be De Toqueville didn't tour that part of the country when he was pondering and philosophizing about America.

Here's the words of someone who was there though:

John Burnett was an American soldier who participated in the Trail of Tears, and later wrote,

“School children today do not know that we are living on lands that were taken from a helpless race at the bayonet point to satisfy the white man’s greed…
I fought through the Civil War and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew."

The Trail of Tears... Didn't the Nazi's do something similar in the 1940's?

Look, I'm not trying to make people upset with these posts. All I hope to do is cause people to stop and consider that some things may be getting whitewashed and shouldn't be. I apologize to anyone who is upset with my inability to stay quiet and just agree all the time...

No one wants you to stay quiet about something that is important to you, but please stop trying to hijack this thread into a discussion of the plight of the Native Americans. If you want to discuss that issue, please start a new thread, where the subject can be given the attention it deserves.

[Joe Akulis]

My focus is on the way people living in America have been able to gloss over all manner of atrocity in order to maintain our claim to moral and ethical superiority.

The effect it causes is when someone wakes up a little and starts to feel like things are turning sour, they believe it's a new phenomenon and not just the same old business as usual for hundreds of years. And I don't think that is accurate.

But you're right, I've made too much of a nuisance of myself, and it's not the first time. I'll move along, and hope that I can still call everyone a friend, despite my loud mouth.

See you on the next engaging thread!

[Hervé]

Posted by Hanson (here)
[...]
Good threads, but my points still stand. If there was a quick and accurate way to identify psychopaths, it would be very useful to apply it to every member of Avalon and post the results publicly. That would be putting our "money" (our actions) where our mouths are, so to speak.

Not that that will ever happen. But it should. We should be the change we wish to see in the world.

I thought I posted this (<--- click) on one of those threads but it doesn't look like it.

Now, let's think a bit... and put oneself in some psychopath's shoes... would one widely and pervasively promote a surefire test that directly points at one being a psychopath? Or would one hide it and disappear it from public view and use?

On the other hand, I am quite certain modern equivalents of such tests are at work in many organizations which hierarchies are constituted of such "like-minded" individuals...

Here are a few end results:

Posted by Hervé (here)
[<---click on the "here" to read the full post]

[...]
Twilight Of The Psychopaths

by Dr. Kevin Barrett
Spanish version

from TheCanadian Website

“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.”
– John Lennon, before his murder by CIA mind-control subject Mark David Chapman

When Gandhi was asked his opinion of Western civilization he said it would be a good idea. But that oft-cited quote, is misleading, assuming as it does that civilization is an unmitigated blessing.

Civilized people, we are told, live peacefully and cooperatively with their fellows, sharing the necessary labour in order to obtain the leisure to develop arts and sciences. And while that would be a good idea, it is not a good description of what has been going on in the so-called advanced cultures during the past 8,000 years.

Civilization, as we know it, is largely the creation of psychopaths. All civilizations, our own included, have been based on slavery and “warfare.” Incidentally, the latter term is a euphemism for mass murder.

The prevailing recipe for civilization is simple:
1. Use lies and brainwashing to create an army of controlled, systematic mass murderers
2. Use that army to enslave large numbers of people (i.e. seize control of their labour power and its fruits)
3. Use that slave labour power to improve the brainwashing process (by using the economic surplus to employ scribes, priests, and PR men). Then go back to step one and repeat the process.


Psychopaths have played a disproportionate role in the development of civilization, because they are hard-wired to lie, kill, injure, and generally inflict great suffering on other humans without feeling any remorse. The inventor of civilization — the first tribal chieftain who successfully brainwashed an army of controlled mass murderers—was almost certainly a genetic psychopath.

Since that momentous discovery, psychopaths have enjoyed a significant advantage over non-psychopaths in the struggle for power in civilizational hierarchies — especially military hierarchies.

Military institutions are tailor-made for psychopathic killers. The 5% or so of human males who feel no remorse about killing their fellow human beings make the best soldiers. And the 95% who are extremely reluctant to kill make terrible soldiers — unless they are brainwashed with highly sophisticated modern techniques that turn them (temporarily it is hoped) into functional psychopaths.

In On Killing, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman has re-written military history, to highlight what other histories hide: The fact that military science is less about strategy and technology, than about overcoming the instinctive human reluctance to kill members of our own species.

The true “Revolution in Military Affairs” was not Donald Rumsfeld’s move to high-tech in 2001, but Brigadier Gen. S.L.A. Marshall’s discovery in the 1940s that only 15-20% of World War II soldiers along the line of fire would use their weapons:

“Those (80-85%) who did not fire did not run or hide (in many cases they were willing to risk great danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages), but they simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy, even when faced with repeated waves of banzai charges”
(Grossman, p. 4).

Marshall’s discovery and subsequent research, proved that in all previous wars, a tiny minority of soldiers — the 5% who are natural-born psychopaths, and perhaps a few temporarily-insane imitators—did almost all the killing.

Normal men just went through the motions and, if at all possible, refused to take the life of an enemy soldier, even if that meant giving up their own. The implication: Wars are ritualized mass murders by psychopaths of non-psychopaths. (This cannot be good for humanity’s genetic endowment!)

Marshall’s work, brought a Copernican revolution to military science. In the past, everyone believed that the soldier willing to kill for his country was the (heroic) norm, while one who refused to fight was a (cowardly) aberration. The truth, as it turned out, was that the normative soldier hailed from the psychopathic five percent.

The sane majority, would rather die than fight.

The implication, too frightening for even the likes of Marshall and Grossman to fully digest, was that the norms for soldiers’ behavior in battle had been set by psychopaths. That meant that psychopaths were in control of the military as an institution.

Worse, it meant that psychopaths were in control of society’s perception of military affairs. Evidently, psychopaths exercised an enormous amount of power in seemingly sane, normal society.

How could that be?

In Political Ponerology, Andrzej Lobaczewski explains that clinical psychopaths enjoy advantages even in non-violent competitions to climb the ranks of social hierarchies. Because they can lie without remorse (and without the telltale physiological stress that is measured by lie detector tests) psychopaths can always say whatever is necessary to get what they want.

In court, for example, psychopaths can tell extreme bald-faced lies in a plausible manner, while their sane opponents are handicapped by an emotional predisposition to remain within hailing distance of the truth. Too often, the judge or jury imagines that the truth must be somewhere in the middle, and then issues decisions that benefit the psychopath. As with judges and juries, so too with those charged with decisions concerning who to promote and who not to promote in corporate, military and governmental hierarchies.

The result is that all hierarchies inevitably become top-heavy with psychopaths

[...]

Continue here: http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_ponerology08.htm

... now, is there an even better way to recruit the remaining potential psychopaths than to dismantle any moral vestiges in individuals and promote the "survival of the fittest" as a "law"?

[Selkie]

Posted by Joe Akulis (here)
My focus is on the way people living in America have been able to gloss over all manner of atrocity in order to maintain our claim to moral and ethical superiority.

The effect it causes is when someone wakes up a little and starts to feel like things are turning sour, they believe it's a new phenomenon and not just the same old business as usual for hundreds of years. And I don't think that is accurate.

But you're right, I've made too much of a nuisance of myself, and it's not the first time. I'll move along, and hope that I can still call everyone a friend, despite my loud mouth.

See you on the next engaging thread!

No one is glossing over anything. No one said American was wonderful, now or in its past. No one even implied it. All the OP was about was noting a phenomenon. How anyone feels about Christian values, or Christians is quite beside the point. It is quite possible to loath Christianity and/or America while being intellectually honest about them. Has "the Church" been horrible? Yes, of course! Have Christians murdered and slaughtered their way across the land...many lands? Yes! Did American slaughter the Native Americans? Yes! But all of that is still beside the point of the OP, because the OP was not about Christianity or America, it was about the phenomenon of psychopathy, and the thread has become bogged down in a discussion of religion when it was not necessary.

[Selkie]

Posted by Hervé (here)
[...]

... now, is there an even better way to recruit the remaining potential psychopaths than to dismantle any moral vestiges in individuals and promote the "survival of the fittest" as a "law"?

Didn't John Nash say that Adam Smith was wrong?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash,_Jr.

[Hervé]

Posted by Silkie (here)

Posted by Hervé (here)
[...]

... now, is there an even better way to recruit the remaining potential psychopaths than to dismantle any moral vestiges in individuals and promote the "survival of the fittest" as a "law"?

Didn't John Nash say that Adam Smith was wrong?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash,_Jr.

Well, I am not sure which of A. Smith or H. Spencer Nash proved wrong, all I know is that, in the end, empires never last.

However, the "survival of the fittest" is the meme that's enforced on educating kids along with "Darwinism" as a recruiting means for the psychopaths' club and, as you know, psychopaths are only interested in short term with exclusive focus on their wishful thinking, regardless of the encompassing bigger picture... that, ultimately, is going to bring about their downfall.

[Hanson]

Posted by Hervé (here)
Now, let's think a bit... and put oneself in some psychopath's shoes... would one widely and pervasively promote a surefire test that directly points at one being a psychopath? Or would one hide it and disappear it from public view and use?

Precisely why I said "Not that that will ever happen."

There will be no twilight of the psychopaths unless there is a dawning of the moral majority who will insist on cooperation instead of competition, equality instead of hierarchy, freedom instead of slavery, and caring instead of coldness. And that dawning will have to be born of grass-roots effort and constructive action. As you indicate, it won't come from our leaders, who will instead clandestinely oppose that dawning at every opportunity.

It will take a group of committed people to start the ball rolling by testing their own group membership for psychopaths. That's why I suggested it might be a group like Avalon, if only there were an easy and accurate way to test for psychopaths. But there isn't, as far as I know. If there is, I'd like to hear about it.

[Jhonie]

An awakening Christian.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=pukHQh1mEHI

[Selkie]

Posted by Hanson (here)
...There will be no twilight of the psychopaths unless there is a dawning of the moral majority who will insist on cooperation instead of competition, equality instead of hierarchy, freedom instead of slavery, and caring instead of coldness...

(my emphasis)

Like I said in the OP, before the mid-60's THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT WE HAD! And then it suddenly...but not accidentally...became fashionable for everyone to "do their own thing" (remember that phrase, anyone?). Collectively, we threw restraint to the winds because it felt so good. Suddenly, by the 70's, a wave of narcissism had engulfed the U.S., and everyone had set themselves up as demi-gods and demi-goddesses, worshipping the shrine of "ME".

But not everything that feels good is good for us, either individually or collectively, and now we beginning to pay the price.

To the degree that we have become narcissistic and unrestrained, we have lost our civil liberties. The psychopaths don't care about freedom and liberty, even though they promote narcissistic behavior in the population. What psychopaths do is put people into double binds, in order to punish them. They do this to us collectively (because they have captured our institutions) as well as individually, as when someone is in an individual relationship with a psychopath.

The collective double bind is that the psychopaths have encouraged us to collectively "let out hair down" and become narcissistic and impulsive, and now that we have, they have begun to punish us for it with an ever-more repressive regime of surveillance and police brutality. The thing about psychopaths is that THEY DONT FOLLOW THEIR OWN RULES. We, the populace, will end up in a brutal, repressive regime while the psychos who rule will continue to be, well, psychos.

Think Romania

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Ceau%C8%99escu

Ceausescu lived in unimaginable luxury,



while the people starved.

[Cristi Copac]

christianity has always been that way since 2000 years ago. majority of people who commit acts of violence and crime identify themselves as christians. even the most common psychopaths in history of crime identify themselves as christian. there is a catch to it though. they think themselves as devils. and by large angels and demons have the same god. that is why psychopaths who are christian never kill or attack a saint man of church and that is why the saint man of church forgives the psychopath. don't believe me? read the statistics and investigate this theory. it's brand new...

[Selkie]

Posted by simbad24 (here)
...christianity has always been that way since 2000 years ago. majority of people who commit acts of violence and crime identify themselves as christians. even the most common psychopaths in history of crime identify themselves as christian. there is a catch to it though. they think themselves as devils. and by large angels and demons have the same god. that is why psychopaths who are christian never kill or attack a saint man of church and that is why the saint man of church forgives the psychopath. don't believe me? read the statistics and investigate this theory. it's brand new...

Clearly, you have not understood a word I said, and clearly, it is much easier to state the obvious and beat a dead horse than it is to look at things from a different angle

[Selkie]

Posted by Silkie (here)

Posted by simbad24 (here)
...christianity has always been that way since 2000 years ago. majority of people who commit acts of violence and crime identify themselves as christians. even the most common psychopaths in history of crime identify themselves as christian. there is a catch to it though. they think themselves as devils. and by large angels and demons have the same god. that is why psychopaths who are christian never kill or attack a saint man of church and that is why the saint man of church forgives the psychopath. don't believe me? read the statistics and investigate this theory. it's brand new...

Clearly, you have not understood a word I said, and clearly, it is much easier to state the obvious and beat a dead horse than it is to look at things from a different angle

So let me ask you this: is the little old lady down the block, who goes to church every day and looks after her grand-kids and puts money in the poor box...is she evil? Are those who live their Christian values of loving their neighbor and treating them well evil? Or could evil people wear a mask of Christianity while perhaps actually being something else? Might psychopathy be a distinct phenomenon from the mask it wears, whatever mask it wears? I think it is.

Its like this: some soldiers are psychopaths, but that does not mean that all soldiers are psychopaths. Its like Ted said: painting all members of a group with one brush is called prejudice.

[heyokah]

Posted by Silkie (here)
..........
Don't forget that the pagans were slave-keepers. They were not gentle tree-huggers. They were savage, with savage rituals. They were erudite and cultured and believed in an earth goddess, but they were savage, and killed slaves and other people for pleasure, as everyone knows.

Even under the best circumstances, when you are a slave, your life, your body and your children are actually owned by someone else. The pagans were also sexually licentious, and yet they infibulated their slaves.

https://www.bme.com/media/story/833351/?cat=ritual

Pagan society was also rife with all kinds of other abuses, like whipping and pederasty, as well as human sacrifice.

So when the slaves took up Christianity and revolted, is it any wonder that they killed unbelievers? If you were a slave, and you had been infibulated and/or had been whipped, wouldn't you want to kill the person who did it to you?

So I think that the excesses of the early Christians can be laid directly at the door of the pagans and their abuses. The excesses of the later Christians, I think, can be laid to the dictum "Never Again". In other words, the Christians hunted down anyone who smacked of paganism simply because they did not want them to "re-boot". And maybe that is why Christianity is on the rise again. Maybe the Christians sense the re-boot of a dangerous system...a system based on slavery. A system (paganism) that is, in its basic behavior, at least semi-psychopathic.[COLOR="red"]

What or who do you mean exactly by pagans? Gnostics? Native Americans? Aboriginals?

Posted by Silkie (here)
....... Its like Ted said: painting all members of a group with one brush is called prejudice.

I think a better title for this thread would perhaps have been: "The Breakdown of Human Morals and Ethics and the Rise of the Psychopaths." ...... without the word Christian.....

[Selkie]

Posted by heyokah (here)
...What or who do you mean exactly by pagans? Gnostics? Native Americans? Aboriginals?

At the time, I was thinking mainly of the Imperial Romans, but if the shoe fits, it doesn't matter who is wearing it. In the effort to make the world a better place, there can be no sacred cows.

Posted by heyokah (here)
...I think a better title for this thread would perhaps have been: "The Breakdown of Human Morals and Ethics and the Rise of the Psychopaths."...... without the word Christian.....

(my emphasis)

Yes, and I could not agree more, and thanks I will ask the mods to change it.

You know, painting all members of a group with positive brush (whitewashing) is no better than painting them with a negative brush. Positive or negative, failure to distinguish is prejudice. We usually think of it in the negative, but whitewashing is just as prejudicial as "blackwashing". Human institutions will always be flawed and will always be vulnerable to being used for evil. It is up to us as individuals to make them better.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=5ma5tF6TJpA

¤=[Post Update]=¤

Would it be possible for the mods to change the title of this thread to "The Breakdown of Human Morals and Ethics and the Rise of the Psychopaths"?

[Cristi Copac]

yes she is. the community as a whole you might do a milion good deeds yourself but if you don't give people the right to defend themselves and you forgive criminals especially hard core ones yes it's a very big evil . if you don't belive in stuff like pride, honor. inteligence and you actually pursue it's destruction that it is evil . it's a perverted evil by not confronting the evil in itsellf and forgiving without actually measuring the results of hundreds of years of forgiving. but of course i would not say this publicly because i'm not a cretin. but this is the truth. and i would not try and fight with guns and axes the type of people you described.

[Selkie]

Posted by simbad24 (here)
...the community as a whole you might do a milion good deeds yourself but if you don't give people the right to defend themselves and you forgive criminals especially hard core ones yes it's a very big evil . if you don't belive in stuff like pride, honor. inteligence and you actually pursue it's destruction that it is evil . it's a perverted evil by not confronting the evil in itsellf and forgiving without actually measuring the results of hundreds of years of forgiving. but of course i would not say this publicly because i'm not a cretin. but this is the truth. and i would not try and fight with guns and axes the type of people you described.

(my emphasis)

I addressed that here

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post971858

This is the salient part of the post from that link,

Quote Posted by Akasha (here)

Quote Posted by Silkie (here)
.....Btw, loving thy neighbor doesn't mean you can't defend yourself and trounce him if he acts like a complete jerk.....

Posted by Akasha (here)
Errrrrr, actually it does:

Quote Luke 6.29: And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also. (KJV)
Not a doctrine I personally subscribe to...

Posted by Silkie (here)
Well, then, that has to be adjusted, because its unrealistic, and its not a doctrine (or ethic, however you want to look at it) that I subscribe to, either. Like I said, not all Christian ethics are ethics that make for a better world.

(emphasis added)

[Cristi Copac]

i don't see any evil in a pagan society. it's better to have open violence and justified than to say you don't want it and to have actually the 2000 years of violence that humanity and earth has never seen. and stupidty and hypocrisiy and the darkness of the human mind and the perverted sadomasochistic soul of christians. sorry man but the romans were right. christians are very very big hypocrites and evil people and i explained why. some people deserve to be slaves in this world.others actually crave that. but i can say this honestly because i know people and i'm not a hypocrite.

[Hanson]

Posted by Silkie (here)
Its like this: some soldiers are psychopaths, but that does not mean that all soldiers are psychopaths. Its like Ted said: painting all members of a group with one brush is called prejudice.

That sounds like a prejudiced statement to me. It's like prejudging those that you believe have prejudged others.

Say you have 100 soldiers. Most could not be labeled psychopaths, but their commanding officer might have psychopathic leanings, and his commanding officer might have even more psychopathic leanings, and so on up the chain of command. The soldiers enter a civilian village and proceed to kill everything in sight. There may not be a flaming psychopath among those soldiers, but as a group, they behaved as if they were one. The hundreds of helpless villagers killed, had they survived, would probably have unanimously classified those soldiers, all of them, as psychopaths. Prejudice?

You probably recognize this event. It was called the My Lai massacre. It is not unique in the annals of war, meaning such behavior is not uncommon among soldiers, the majority of whom are probably not psychopaths. But any group which is led by psychopaths can exhibit the behavior of a psychopath. Prejudice?

[Sean]

Posted by Silkie (here)

Posted by Joe Akulis (here)

Posted by Silkie (here)
[...]
What I mean is not that there cannot be psychopaths among Christians, or whether or not they are real Christians, but whether Christian ethics suppressed psychopathy in general, like in the realm of government, how businesses, corporations and banks were run, etc.

A general, rosy statement like this makes me think someone might want to take time to read about the real America. Come back after reading Wade's essay on the American Empire, and see if you still agree that governments and businesses have been conducting themselves ethically for the past 500 years.

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm


P.S. Here's another: "you can have a iron-clad written contract, and it may mean nothing because some people feel like they do not have to keep their word, or honor their contracts."

Someone needs to read about how America has honored every contract/treaty ever entered into with Native Americans.

Governments are always violent, and duplicitous. That is not in dispute. What I am saying is that there was more RESTRAINT. The key word is RESTRAINT. The nature of psychopaths is that they have no restraint. They have no conscience and therefor they have no brakes or checks on their behavior...they have no restraint. The government simply did not used to be so unrestrained. Neither did the corporations and the banks. What loosened the restraints? To me, it seems to be a concerted effort, beginning in the 60's, to overturn Christian values. As imperfectly as they were lived, Christian values were lived well enough by enough people to make life for most people relatively safe and secure.

addition In the case of the Native Americans, they were not Christian, and so maybe the government felt like it did not need to even pretend to practice Christian values in its dealing with them.

I think it's possible that people and governments have ALWAYS behaved this way(unrestrained,cruel, murderous), but with tech advances, we just know about a lot more than we would have 500 years ago. Hell..people were probably WORSE then. To answer your main question..no, I don't think christian morals ever checked anything. Most of the "christians" I've ever met were some of the nastiest, narrow-minded, cruel, racist, homophobic, ignorant people in any circle I was a part of.

morality is an internal thing, a personal thing, a character thing. If you have to find your morality in a book..lol

[heyokah]

Posted by workingactor (here)
....................
morality is an internal thing, a personal thing, a character thing. If you have to find your morality in a book..lol

I fully agree !