Does the Exercise of Power Reinforce Psychopathologies?
Source: lewrockwell.com
The tendency of power to obscure reality has been noted in the past. Neal Gabler in 2004 wrote “All politicians operate within an Orwellian nimbus where words don’t mean what they normally mean, but Rovism posits that there is no objective, verifiable reality at all. Reality is what you say it is, …” What does this imply?
Given that exercising political leadership from a position of centralized power fashions realities, does this tend to reinforce the psychopathologies of leaders? In other words, don’t leaders become drunk with power? Don’t they become corrupted by the power? Don’t arrogance and hubris take over their behavior? Don’t they receive positive reinforcement from seeing their power to move masses and events? Doesn’t this reinforcement amplify their ambitions? These are all implications, and these are also ideas that have been aired before. They are becoming better and better known as descriptively accurate because we are seeing more and more examples daily. We see this effect of centralized power not only at the national level but also in the behavior of police locally. We see it in the strange ambitions of the NSA to mop up every conversation ever made in any medium.The persons wielding power become separated from objective reality, and that itself is virtually a definition of a psychopathology or a disorder of the mind. Subjectivity conquers objectivity. To guard against this tendency, a political leader should be exposed to many viewpoints backed up by cogent analysis. He (or she) should not be surrounded by yes-men (or yes-women) who merely mirror his own views and reflect them back to him. Stalin was known for purging anyone around him who disagreed with him. Hitler refused to hear opinions that differed from his own. They structured their office so as to enhance their own psychopathologies.
As U.S. presidents become more and more surrounded by a closed circle of advisers, or a compliant press with bland editorials, or news reports in the media that reflect their own press briefings, or controlled town meetings where views contrary to their own are vetted, or motorcades and conferences where protests are carefully vetted or hidden from view, they too amplify the tendency to separate themselves from reality and live in a world of their own making. In the Bush administration, the White House began to manufacture its own intelligence reports so as to justify attacking Iraq. The White House lawyers create their own judicial and legal interpretations so as to give the presidents what they want as justifications for their wars, their torture, their assassinations, their anti-constitutional activities, and their executive orders. The heads of state tend to restrict their conversations to closed groups and each other.
A follow-on dangerous effect is that the leaders not only separate themselves from exposure to contrary views or to objective reality, but also they reinforce their beliefs in what they view as reality. They believe their own propaganda. They then feel even more embattled when contrary opinions are expressed to them. They rationalize by assessing their opponents and the public as ill-informed or irrational.
To counteract this tendency to be divorced from reality, a group of ex-intelligence officers has taken to writing open letters to politicians. They recently sent a letter to Angela Merkel that’s well worth reading. It is immediately clear that they are complaining about matters held to be factual that are not supported by reality or actual facts:
“You need to know, for example, that accusations of a major Russian ‘invasion’ of Ukraine appear not to be supported by reliable intelligence. Rather, the ‘intelligence’ seems to be of the same dubious, politically ‘fixed’ kind used 12 years ago to ‘justify’ the U.S.-led attack on Iraq. We saw no credible evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq then; we see no credible evidence of a Russian invasion now.”
Why would they feel the need to write such a letter if they had not observed the phenomena I am describing?
An observant independent person who reads and thinks about such matters will not be taken in by the realities (or spins) being proffered by politicians, but most people don’t have the time or the interest to do this.
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Read the full article at: lewrockwell.com
Tune into Red Ice Radio:
Mikkel Clair Nissen - Hour 1 - Psychopathic Narcissism & Pathological Collectivism in Denmark
Mike Cross - Philosophy of a Psychopathic Society & Template of Conformity
Thomas Sheridan - The Labyrinth of the Psychopath, The Intraspecies Predators & Transhumanism
Mike Cross - Psychology of the Cultivated Society
Thomas Sheridan - Hour 1 - Cultural Marxism & The Psyop in Europe
G. Edward Griffin - The Collectivist Conspiracy
Ingrid Carlqvist - State Controlled Press in Sweden & Mass Immigration
Dale Hurd - Sweden: No Diversity in Politics and Media
