How to spot a psychopath

Source: VeryWellMind

 

[To be honest, you won't have to look far to find many prominent examples.]

From The Guardian 

The classic checklist for psychopathy was developed in 1980 by Prof Robert Hare, who is still the recognised giant of the territory. The 20 traits, which ranged from pathological lying to a lack of empathy, were based entirely on prison populations. This worked because not only did Hare have the benefit of a large sample, with pronounced psychopathic behaviours, but he was able to compare interviews and self-reporting with data collected about the individuals – so inconsistencies could be identified.

However, Hare knew this approach was limited. In 1976, he said that he simply didn’t know to what extent his results could be generalised to non-incarcerated psychopaths, including female ones. “Research into the socially successful psychopath is badly needed,” he concluded. Even decades later in the early 2000s, when Hare wanted to look into psychopaths in politics, he still needed to go to prison to find them (Pinochet’s henchmen in Chilean jails). Research into the higher-functioning psychopath – who doesn’t get caught, or maybe doesn’t even resort to crime – has proved elusive, not least because self-reporting questionnaires don’t work. Psychopaths lie; arguably, that’s their main thing.

It wasn’t from a forensic psychology but a business studies background that Dr Karen Mitchell arrived in the territory of high-functioning psychopathy. By the late 2010s, she’d spent 30 years working as a consultant on large-scale change in corporate culture. Her work tended to be with organisations in crisis: “So it might be market alignment, or deaths or suicides in companies,” she tells me from her home in Australia. Observing the sheer number of problems at work that stemmed from specific individuals with predatory traits, she started to research those same “dark personality” behaviours in other precincts. “Child sex abuse in religion, coercive control in human trafficking and domestic violence and terrorism,” she says. “When you look at all our global knowledge on human predators, there are so many fields and none of them interact.”

This matters because predatory personalities cause an astronomical amount of harm. We’re bad at recognising them interpersonally, for reasons to be discussed, but we’re also bad at pattern finding in aggregate – mainly because different disciplines have so many different names for these kinds of people. Mitchell lists some of the terms: “Malignant narcissist, dark triad, psychopath, coercive controller, primary psychopath, grandiose narcissist, corporate psychopath, Machiavellian, dark tetrad, covert narcissist, toxic leader.” These are all traits that she argues are part of the same phenomenon, the Dark Personality, or the Persistent Predatory Personality.

Mitchell embarked on a PhD, published in 2024, in which she interviewed people who had met persistent predatory personalities professionally – some clinical, but others not, from fields as wide as HR, social work, family courts, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, church leaders, and academics from different fields.

Her method, she says, was unorthodox, being qualitative, not quantitative. And some of her conclusions directly contradict clinical definitions of psychopathy, which rely heavily on impulsivity. Mitchell says this is because other definitions such as Hare’s are derived from the prison population, which is the low-functioning end of the scale. “People try and put Hare’s stuff into workplaces and domestic violence spheres, but there’s no way you can overlay something so blunt, built from criminal offenders, on to sophisticated CEO-type behaviours.”

Mitchell’s interviews are remarkable. People from very different fields say alarmingly similar things: there’s one question about whether the interviewee had themselves ever been frightened of a persistent predatory personality (bear in mind that these weren’t victims, they were seasoned professionals) and the answers came back: “I constantly worry that he will ruin my career” (from an HR person); “I worry that they will … want to seek revenge” (from a social worker); “I am pretty sure there are no lengths to which this man would not go to, to see that I am destroyed” (expert practitioner from the charity sector). These and arguably every statement from the interviews are so extreme that you can’t imagine saying them socially because you would sound mad – which some testimonies explicitly address. “People can’t get it. People who don’t work in our fields … often don’t hear about or see the kind of evilness perpetrated on others, and just can’t believe it. Whereas, unfortunately, it’s commonplace in my work.” (That’s from one forensic expert practitioner).

From this research, which took her five years, Mitchell built a template of 20 attributes, divided into four clusters, and 25 tactics that would identify a high-functioning persistent predatory personality type. Cluster one includes a need for control; a grandiose sense of self; pathological inner response to challenge; vengefulness; refusal to compromise. Cluster two includes being predatory or exploitative; sadistic and cruel; having a low regard for laws, agreements, social and moral codes; no boundaries in sexual relationships; unreasonable expectations of others. Cluster three relates to the truth: Dark Personalities cultivate a façade of normality; they are chameleon-like; dishonest; devious and manipulative; and unwilling to accept responsibility for the negative impacts they cause. Finally, cluster four is around the Dark Personality’s own interior life: their emotions are acted and they do not experience affinity or the joy that comes with it; they are callous and devoid of empathy; unremorseful; self-interested; and brazen.

Essi Viding, a professor of developmental psychopathology at UCL, is a leading figure from the classic research sphere, co-director of the Developmental Risk and Resilience Unit and Hare’s natural successor in many ways. “I often think of these individuals as having an in-group of one,” she says. “In social psychology, we talk about people that we care about, and most of us, because we’re group-living animals, collaborate, do altruistic acts, we’ll behave in ways that across the ages have increased our survival. But across the ages, we’ve had people who exploit other people’s altruism, and when the chips come down, only care about themselves.”

Viding fixes on the traits that leave society extremely bad at protecting itself against predatory behaviour. We all know that people lie, but think instinctively that we know when we’re being lied to. “These individuals almost short-circuit us in our ability to detect the danger signals until it’s too late,” Viding says. “The majority of us, if we get caught lying, look deeply uncomfortable. It’s not nice to get caught lying, we worry about our reputation, it’s embarrassing. But these individuals are not embarrassed when they’re caught lying. This has not been formally tested, but one might hypothesise that they take people in much more readily, precisely because they display these characteristics of extreme confidence and do not seem nervous.” She cites a 2019 paper in the Journal of Personality Disorders which developed the idea that behaviours which don’t normally go together in the human population – for example, absolute confidence and total untruth – tend to go together in Dark Personalities. This, Viding says, is why these people “can often do a lot of damage before anyone catches them”.

This causes much more havoc outside prisons than it does in them. While Mitchell says she stays out of politics, her tactics, once you see them assembled, are strikingly visible on the world stage. Indeed, the first time I read the phrase “dark triad” was when Donald Trump got elected the first time around.

The idea of a “pathocracy”, a democracy of normal people taken over by psychopaths, was conceived by an obscure Polish psychologist, Andrew Lobaczewski, who had lived under both the Nazis and then Soviet-era communists. His ideas never landed, because “the psychology publishers thought it was too political, and the political publishers thought it was too psychological,” according to editor and blogger Harrison Koehli. It’s unfashionable to the point of being taboo in psychiatry and psychology now to ascribe personality disorders to public figures. “One of the perils of bringing psychology into politics is that it’s very easy for anyone with any given political perspective to look at their political enemies or rivals and say: ‘OK, well, they’re all psychopaths,’” says Koehli. There’s also the Goldwater Rule, which established as a psychiatric principle that professionals are not allowed to diagnose public figures they haven’t had clinical contact with or met (this was after 1,189 psychiatrists declared Barry Goldwater unfit to be president in the 1964 election). Viding, however, finds the fixation with diagnosis perhaps irrelevant in this context. “I always find the obsession with diagnosing these people interesting. You don’t need to diagnose them, there are a set of personality traits, and you can recognise individuals with those traits. If someone’s in political power, you can see those exemplified in behaviour, and most people are perfectly capable of making an assessment of what that signifies.”

Brazen lying in public life is a tactic Lobaczewski recognised – he called it the “reversive blockade”. Koehli describes it as: “When you tell a lie convincingly and it’s such an absurd lie, most people’s automatic reaction is that they can’t comprehend a lie told on that scale, so they try to find the ‘golden mean’ between the statement and the reality. But that, Lobaczewski says, is the intention of the big lie. They know it will sow confusion.” The impact on the population over which a dark personality presides is huge: some will try and find that golden mean; others will remain steadfast in calling it a lie and fall out with the first lot; others will try to adjust their own reality to make the lie true; while others will become inured to the new normal – that we just all lie now.

On an interpersonal level, this brazenness is even more head-spinning. Often both predator and victim know it’s a lie, or the predator is accusing the victim of exactly the thing he or she just did, or the lie has been expressed using the victim’s own language. Reverse attribution is so familiar in the domestic-abuse sphere that it has its own acronym – Darvo, for deny, attack, reverse victim and offender – yet it still absolutely fogs the victims, who feel their credibility is permanently in doubt. In the workplace, the effects are also devastating, because there tend to be spectators who themselves have a decisive impact on the outcome. As Mitchell says about one of her interviewees who worked in HR: “People were genuinely convinced the dark personality was the victim and the victim was the dark personality. It destroyed the life of the victim, even though they had an excellent professional track record.”

The reality is that the higher the levels of these traits, the wider the harm caused. Mitchell describes one of her research participants, “The head of a large Catholic diocese, in charge of child sex abuse. She had a horrible job, right? Incredible, impeccable credentials, CEO of several children’s organisations. She’d go to the Holy See and say, ‘Look, this person has been abusing children’ and they’d go: ‘Really? But he’s such a nice guy.’”

In the non-criminal, non-violent space of endless persecution – as might happen in a workplace – there are layers of disbelief. People can’t fathom that the Dark Personality is dark, they can’t believe that anyone would want to be deliberately harmful, they can’t process that harm was caused at all. It was bracing to hear Mitchell describe workplace suicides as an issue that partly spurred her research, since it is completely forbidden, in the mental health world, to ascribe a person’s suicide to anyone else’s behaviour. Yet a landmark ruling in France did exactly that in 2019, and found “torment” in the workplace, linked to a number of executives, had created the culture at France Télécom in which 19 employees took their own lives, 12 attempted suicide, and eight suffered from serious depression, between 2006 and 2009. Jane Monckton-Smith, professor of public protection at the University of Gloucestershire, has said in the past that, if we included provoked suicides, domestic homicide statistics could be multiplied “five, six or seven times”.

In Hare’s study of Pinochet’s lieutenants, which spanned 20 years and was written up in 2022, “when they looked at individuals who were commanding officers, this top brass had really high levels of psychopathic features, particularly the lack of empathy for others,” says Viding.

Mitchell delivers her conclusion with businesslike bluntness: “These are completely boundary-less, dangerous people with very different brains – it’s like the difference between a domestic cat and a wild cat. Millions and millions of people have been hurt because we haven’t known the red flags, so we have to put them out there and then teach people to be discerning.” Viding, in different terms, and by a different route, has the same conclusion. “As I’ve done this research for 20-plus years now, I have increasingly started to think we really need to understand more about how we can inoculate people against being victimised. Because based on the literature, and what little I know about evolutionary and cross-cultural psychology, we are very unlikely to weed these traits out.”

We are not a hoax

 By Nick Anderson

Governments looked at the climate crisis – and decided to persecute the activists

Source: Our World In Data
This year the global temperature anomaly will be 1 degree above
the 1961-1990 average, and 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial average.

 From Owen Jones, at The Guardian

Injustice is easy to oppose after it has receded into the past, and there is no cost to imagining yourself as a hero long after the event. Everyone celebrates the suffragettes now, but at the time they were vilified as hateful spinsters and terrorists. McCarthyism is a pejorative political label on right and left alike now, but at his peak, more Americans approved of Senator Joseph McCarthy than frowned on his witch-hunt. Most people would like to believe they’d have stood up against the homophobia of 1980s Britain – yet, by 1987, only 11% of the British public believed same-sex relations to be “not wrong at all”.

Which takes us to climate activism. This year has seen a global onslaught against people agitating for more action to mitigate the worst effects of the climate crisis. Courts can issue stern judgments, but so can history, and you have to wonder its future verdict on how the persecution and silencing of those raising the alarm only escalated when the scientific evidence had become so cast-iron, and when extreme weather events hammered home the imminent danger facing the human species. Here in Britain, a government which is reneging on its climate commitments – not least by expanding oil and gas licences – is simultaneously introducing repressive legislation to silence those holding them to account.

After punitive sentences were handed down to climate activists, the UN’s rapporteur for climate change and human rights suggested in November that the sentences potentially breached international law. Indeed, earlier this month, the 57-year old climate activist Stephen Gingell was sentenced to six months in prison. His crime? Participating in a peaceful slow march in protest against new oil and gas licences – something that is now prohibited by the Public Order Act 2023. In the space of a month, at least 470 peaceful protesters were arrested with the aid of the raft of authoritarian measures driven through by Tory rule.

Like the climate emergency itself, the persecution of those fighting it is a global phenomenon. At the recent Cop28 summit in Dubai, protesters suffered restrictions on what they and their signs could say and where they could walk. The French government outlawed the climate activist group Earth Uprising under the dubious pretext that it fomented violence; this was rightly labelled by human rights activists as appearing “wholly disproportionate in violation of France’s obligations under international law”.

In Australia, new laws imposed steeper prison sentences and fines against climate protesters: all this, as Human Rights Watch notes, as the country faces “an onslaught of record-breaking temperatures, floods, and bushfires in recent years”. In New South Wales, meanwhile, punitive laws to crack down on climate protesters were last week ruled to be unconstitutional because they undermined “freedom of political communication”.

Meanwhile, climate activists suffer coordinated attempts to portray them as dangerous extremists. Take the Atlas Network, an influential global grouping of rightwing thinktanks: it has helped lead campaigns across the world to demonise climate activists as dangerous extremists. A report by the climate platform DeSmog argues that this has had real consequences: from the portrayal of the German climate movement Last Generation as de facto terrorists, which helped lay the foundation for police raids against its activists, to the British thinktank Policy Exchange, which is reportedly part of Atlas, publishing a report denouncing Extinction Rebellion as an “extremist organisation seeking the breakdown of liberal democracy and the rule of law”. Rishi Sunak later said that Policy Exchange’s work had helped the government in drafting its legislation to crack down on such protesters.

Again, what will our descendants think, not least as they inhabit a world battered by the consequences of today’s failures to address an existential emergency, knowing we were in full possession of the facts? Two months ago, an international team of scientists warned the Earth’s vital signs were in a worse state than in any time in human history, imperilling the future of life itself. From extreme weather events to drought, famine to forced population movements, a bleak future beckons unless the warnings of embattled climate activists are heeded.

What is happening is hardly subtle. There is a calculated attempt to claim that the real extremists are not those who imperil our world’s future by fighting policies that would limit carbon emissions, but those seeking to prevent impending calamity. The truth is these climate activists are being targeted not because they are protesting in the wrong way or because their methods are counterproductive, but because they have secured such a considerable platform to make the climate emergency a more salient and discussed issue. Understandably, vested interests profiteering at the expense of the planet have every motive to shut them up.

There are politicians with loud voices who acknowledge that the climate emergency is indeed real, but either say nothing when these climate activists face coordinated campaigns to silence them, or even render themselves complicit. In hindsight, it seems so obvious to accept the righteousness of those who fought for the rights of women to vote, or who stood against McCarthyite intimidation, or who fought for gay rights. But these were often lonely battles, and those vindicated by history paid heavy costs at the time. If the climate activists warning of the gravest threat humanity has yet faced are silenced into 2024, we all may find ourselves paying an intolerable price.

Source: Our World in Data

 

Legal, but deeply immoral

 

GQP Governors are Killing Their Citizens to Protect Billionaires

Image by Lothar Dieterich from Pixabay

From the Hartmann Report

The easiest and laziest way for a state government to deny its citizens a benefit to which they’re entitled is to wrap it in so much paperwork, make people jump through so many hoops to qualify, that they give up in confusion or exhaustion.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, one of the nation’s cruelest — he’s shipped refugees out of state based on lies, put a $10,000 bounty on the heads of pregnant women, and is alleged to have ordered his own police to throw children and nursing babies into the Rio Grande River where razor wire awaits them — is all-in on this with regard to Medicaid.

As the Texas Tribune reported this week:

“Half a million Texans have lost their Medicaid coverage since April, mostly for procedural reasons like not responding to messages from the state.”

This is a big deal: 45,000 Americans die every year because they lack health insurance, including those who can’t access Medicaid.

The state could have easily confirmed their eligibility with public records; most states do. But Texas’ Governor Abbott wanted people to have to jump through long, complex, confusing hoops. It would mean fewer Texans would have health insurance, which is explicitly his goal and that of 10 of his Republican gubernatorial colleagues, including Ron DeSantis.

And Medicaid is consequential: it covers roughly half of all American children, pays for 40 percent of childbirths, covers 1 in 5 parents, and is the largest funder of long-term care for the elderly. It’s also a key funder of substance abuse and addiction treatment, and covers more people than Medicare.

The federal government covers 90 percent of the cost of Medicaid, and 39 states have expanded their programs under Obamacare to cover all low-income people within their borders. But 11 Republican-controlled states continue to refuse to insure their low-income working people except under strict rules that limit the insurance to small groups like those who are disabled.

When the pandemic hit, the federal government forbade states from dropping people from their Medicaid rolls, but that protection expired in April and, in the months since then, Republican governors in those 11 states have been systematically stripping people of their insurance protection. None have been as enthusiastic to put their citizens at risk as Abbott’s Texas.

Roughly 45,000 Americans die every year from a lack of health insurance. Many uninsured people postpone medical tests and concerns until they’re fatal; others simply can’t afford the cost of treatment or ongoing medications to keep them healthy or alive.

Every one of these people has a story, a family who cares about them, friends and neighbors. Every one of these deaths — which don’t happen like this in any other developed nation on Earth — is a tragedy that is completely unnecessary.

Every one of them dies because of choices made by Republican governors who hate the idea of billionaires having to pay income taxes to cover the healthcare costs of working class or poor people.

In this, these governors subscribe to the all-American rich man’s slogan of, “I’ve got mine and screw you.” It was laid out in detail in 1980 when billionaire David Koch ran for vice president with the Libertarian Party, an organization created by the real estate lobby to give an air of legitimacy to their efforts to outlaw rent control and end government regulation of their industry.

His platform included a whole series of positions that were specifically designed to roll back and gut FDR’s “big government” programs (along with those added by both Nixon and LBJ’s Great Society) that had created and then sustained America’s 20th century middle class.

The amazing thing is that his list reads like today’s MAGA Republican agenda. Ending low-cost healthcare and gutting our public schools is just the beginning:

— “We urge the repeal of federal campaign finance laws, and the immediate abolition of the despotic Federal Election Commission.
— “We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.
— “We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services...
— “We also favor the deregulation of the medical insurance industry.
— “We favor the repeal of the fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, and increasingly oppressive Social Security system. Pending that repeal, participation in Social Security should be made voluntary.
— “We propose the abolition of the governmental Postal Service.
— “We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes.
— “We support the eventual repeal of all taxation.
— “As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately.
— “We support repeal of all law which impede the ability of any person to find employment, such as minimum wage laws.
— “We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.
— “We condemn compulsory education laws … and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws.
— “We support the repeal of all taxes on the income or property of private schools, whether profit or non-profit.
— “We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency.”
— “We support abolition of the Department of Energy.
— “We call for the dissolution of all government agencies concerned with transportation, including the Department of Transportation.
— “We demand the return of America’s railroad system to private ownership. We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system.
— “We specifically oppose laws requiring an individual to buy or use so-called ‘self-protection’ equipment such as safety belts, air bags, or crash helmets.
— “We advocate the abolition of the Federal Aviation Administration.
— “We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration.
— “We support an end to all subsidies for child-bearing built into our present laws, including all welfare plans and the provision of tax-supported services for children.
— “We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and ‘aid to the poor’ programs. All these government programs are privacy-invading, paternalistic, demeaning, and inefficient. The proper source of help for such persons is the voluntary efforts of private groups and individuals.
— “We call for the privatization of the inland waterways, and of the distribution system that brings water to industry, agriculture and households.
— “We call for the repeal of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.
— “We call for the abolition of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
— “We support the repeal of all state usury laws.”

The world is made up of “makers” and “takers,” these rightwing billionaires (who pay an average income tax of 3.4 percent) will tell you. The morbidly rich “job creators” shouldn’t be taxed to support those damn “moochers” who want everything from union rights to a living wage to Medicaid. How dare those moochers? They only provide the labor and consumption!

Why, these eleven Republican governors ask, should their brilliant billionaire patrons be forced — at the barrel of an IRS agent’s gun! — to pay taxes to support these ungrateful masses through “big government” programs like Medicaid, even if it’s federal money and costs the states virtually nothing?

Isn’t it up to each of us to make our own fortunes? Wasn’t Herbert Spencer’s interpretation of Darwin right? Aren’t Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg examples of the finest human beings our species offers? Don’t they deserve millions of times more wealth and power than average Americans because of their innate social, moral, spiritual, and intellectual superiority?

So what if 45,000 Americans die every year because of this callous attitude? What does it matter to the rightwing billionaires and their pet politicians and Supreme Court justices? They’re very careful to never have to interact with the riff-raff, after all, insulated by their private jets and yachts and gated, guarded mansions.

These Republicans will tell you, on behalf of their billionaire owners, that they believe our government should only have a few simple mandates: maintain a strong military, tough cops, and a court system to protect their economic empires. That’s why they’ll support massive prison expansions and nosebleed levels of Pentagon spending but (metaphorically) fight to the death to prevent an expansion of Social Security or Medicaid.

If almost a thousand Americans die every week for lack of Medicaid-type insurance, Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis will tell you, that’s the price of “freedom.” The kids, spouses, siblings, and parents of these dead Americans just need to get over it: there’s a principle at stake here!

Earlier this week, The New York Times laid out the Trump/GOP plan for the next Republican presidency, organized by the Heritage Foundation and other billionaire-funded think tanks. It would gut most federal agencies that protect average working people and the environment, and turn those with punitive police powers — like the IRS, DOJ, and FCC — into political arms of the presidency to reward friends and punish enemies, particularly, Trump says, in the media.

Six Republicans on the Supreme Court are also working at this agenda as hard as they can, most recently ignoring the black-letter wording of the Clean Water Act to strip federal protection from half the nation’s waters, and ending the EPA’s power to regulate CO2. Both of those decisions will also result in more dead and diseased Americans. Thousands a year now, perhaps hundreds of thousands a year in the future if climate change isn’t reigned in.

But do the rightwing billionaires and their Republican groupies care? Not a bit. Psychopathy is their thing; cruelty is their delight; “the greater good,” they say, is “idealistic pablum” that is simply “not feasible” (even though it’s been achieved by every other developed country in the world: even Costa Rica has a national healthcare plan that covers everybody in the country).

Fiscal brutality, ignoring the consequences of your actions, making routine decisions that destroy peoples’ lives, is how many people become billionaires, after all.

They see us voters as an impediment to their oligarchic plans, so every Red state in the country is working today to make it harder to vote and, since five Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized it in 2018, they’re also working to throw people in largely Democratic precincts off the voter rolls in massive purges.

The campaign to reshape America that Lewis Powell envisioned in 1971 and David Koch declared in 1980 is near fulfillment, and it’s being built on the dead bodies of hundreds of thousands of American citizens.

If the GOP can take control of the entire federal government in 2024, even living in a Blue state won’t protect your Medicaid, abortion and healthcare rights, or even the right to publicly disagree with Republican politicians without losing your job or being sued into bankruptcy (yes, the GOP wants the slander and libel laws “reformed” so, like Putin, they can fine or imprison anybody who criticizes them).

Eleven states denying healthcare to their citizens to keep taxes on billionaires low will become 50 states with no healthcare for working class people if Republicans win in 2024; millions more Americans will die unnecessarily, and the morbidly rich who set it all up will be laughing and diving into their money bins like Scrooge McDuck.

If that is not the America you want, double-check your voter registration every month (particularly if you live in a Red state) and help wake up friends, family, and neighbors. The stakes have never been higher.

Putin's bloodstained hands

 A cartoon by Pierre Balouhey

Putin's war crimes