Dear Friends,
It seems to me, in a psychopathic society, like Animal Farm… any act of goodwill is taken as a sign of weakness and used against the virtuous. Psychopaths don’t reciprocate, they manipulate. Psychopathic societies are the same. Moreover, a psychopath will tell himself or herself they are the good guy, because they are just teaching the patsy how the world works. The pathological society justifies its actions similarly. Just as empathy is a weakness to a psychopath a psychopathic society not only has none but will use it against the empathic person. Such societies will exploit every good trait in people, against them. Just as psychopaths do. The difference is, psychopaths can move to a new place where no one knows them and start their inhuman games again… but a society doesn’t have that ability.
Everyone is the hero in their own story, even the villain. He or she often justifies their evil by blaming the victim. The person bleeding from wounds, or psychically, had it coming. They’ll know better next time, etc. The villain believes they are teaching others and if they enjoy it so much the better. Once enough people have been “taught” they have to move to a different city far enough away so they have new students, uncontaminated by the old. This is because the real lesson is that they are untrustworthy and so no one will do business with them. In the new place, however, the psychopath, narcissist, and Machiavellian can start anew. With fresh material they can teach about the world… and just what they really are. That’s why such people move every few years.
People can move societies can’t. Once a psychopath has alienated everyone in an area, they simply move on. There are so many people in the world to take advantage of they will never run out. A society, however, doesn’t have that ability. Once it alienates the people living in it, it has to deal with the results. The pathological person moves but a society has to do something else. Replace the people perhaps? This is because once people are alienated they are impossible to win back… especially if the goal is to screw them again. The pathological society shames their victims, once that fails, they exploit law. This further alienates citizens. Once law has failed that society begins a death spiral. The elite extract more and more as there is less and less to extract, until the people rise up. It can take centuries to recover.
How can we tell a psychopathic society from a functional one? It’s not by comparing one to another. Comparing a pathological society to a slightly more or less pathological society gets us nowhere. The real tests are productivity, justice, and liberty. A society that isn’t productive will need ever more welfare to paper over the hole. Cultures that have double standards are patently not just. One could argue that in places where the people are tyrannized while the elite do the tyrannizing are the definition of pathological. Moreover, in a sane society, humility, honesty, hard work, innovation, creativity, etc. in other words… human heartedness would be rewarded and their opposites discouraged. In a pathological society, the woman who demands the baby be cut in half… wins in court.
Does the society you live in reward honesty, hard work, humility, justice, and self-sacrifice… or does it take advantage of these things? That’s how you can judge if your society or any other is pathological. In Orwell’s book, Animal Farm, the true believer, the horse, died of overexertion. His hard work, loyalty, humility and self sacrifice were exploited until he died. Then no one was left who would work. That’s how pathological societies operate. They destroy the good and reward the bad until there are only bad left. Then it collapses. It can’t move to a new place. It could try to replace the people with new ones unfamiliar with the grift. The trouble is they won’t be horses, they’ll be pigs, sheep, and goats. Maybe we should work on our societies to make them sane instead of pathological.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
