| by Dr Brian Moench
( December 9, 2012 , New York, Sri Lanka Guardian) My father, a psychiatrist whose practice focused on the severely mentally ill, used to say, "Well, schizophrenia is better than no phrenia," and, "In poker, a paranoid always beats one of a noid." He also pioneered the subspecialty of forensic psychiatry, before it had a name, in that he was often asked as an expert witness to evaluate psychopaths and the competency of criminals to stand trial. Not all criminals are psychopaths, and certainly not all psychopaths have violated the law. Serious mental illnesses are family tragedies not to be trivialized. But in ruminating about a post-election America, I've been struck by how large portions of the country are mired in schizophrenic distortions of reality and how prominent business leaders and politicians overtly display personality traits common to psychopaths. Vestiges of widespread mental illness abound.
( December 9, 2012 , New York, Sri Lanka Guardian) My father, a psychiatrist whose practice focused on the severely mentally ill, used to say, "Well, schizophrenia is better than no phrenia," and, "In poker, a paranoid always beats one of a noid." He also pioneered the subspecialty of forensic psychiatry, before it had a name, in that he was often asked as an expert witness to evaluate psychopaths and the competency of criminals to stand trial. Not all criminals are psychopaths, and certainly not all psychopaths have violated the law. Serious mental illnesses are family tragedies not to be trivialized. But in ruminating about a post-election America, I've been struck by how large portions of the country are mired in schizophrenic distortions of reality and how prominent business leaders and politicians overtly display personality traits common to psychopaths. Vestiges of widespread mental illness abound.
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Psychopaths are notoriously refractory to treatment or behavioral modification, another trait they share with business and political elites. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby, "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me...They think, deep down, that they are better than we are.”
Although hurricane Sandy has
likely been the trigger for a sharp rise in the percentage of the population
who believes the climate crisis is serious and must be addressed in public policy, still,
about 30 percent of American adults don't believe it, and there is no
indication that the leaders of the Republican Party have joined the
"Reality" Party. Let's briefly outline how disconnected this position
is.
Eighty international scientific
societies have endorsed the concept of a primarily human-caused climate crisis
that is already starting to threaten the health and well-being of millions, and
soon to be billions, of people in the next few decades. The total number of
scientific organizations that dispute this is zero. If you were watching a
basketball game where the score was 80 to 0, with one minute left in the fourth
quarter, and you decided to bet your entire nest egg on that losing team, no
one would argue that you were not severely delusional.
Almost weekly, more studies are
published strongly suggesting that the chaos and destruction built into the greenhouse
gas phenomenon has been underestimated and that climate-related extreme
outcomes are happening even faster than worse case predictions of even
a few years ago. Our own Pentagon, the insurance industry,
the World Bank, the United Nations, the
American Meteorological Society and virtually every other country
in the world accepts the science. The American Republican Party and the Fox
News/right wing entertainment complex are the only organizations in the world
that deny the validity and reality of the science. And because the Republicans
control the US House of Representatives, there is no hope any legislation will
be passed to address the climate crisis. Inability to discern reality is the
hallmark of schizophrenia.
One of my professional friends -
smart, well-educated, and seemingly otherwise sane - has been relentlessly
trying to sell everyone I work with on the conspiracy theory that Barack
Obama's real father was an African-American communist activist, Frank Marshall
Davis, and that Obama's secret agenda is mind control and the collapse of the
American way of life through diabolical UN-mandated sustainable land use
planning - a pillar of Glenn Beck's circus tent of amazing conspiracy theories.
People who believe others are reading their minds, controlling their thoughts,
or plotting to harm them are usually medicated to make them safe to live among
us. But institutions that promote the same paranoid delusions are rewarded with
handsome profitability.
For the first time since the
Civil War, hundreds of thousands of American citizens have petitioned the
federal government to allow their states to secede from the union. This is more
than just a new expression of undying racism. It is also a sharp detachment
from reality. The efficacy of tax cuts for the rich as an economic stimulus,
has no empirical substantiation - in other words no basis in reality, just like
global warming denial.
Much has been written about the
Karl Rove/Republican/right wing/Fox News bubble and their group delusion in
truly believing that their polling heralding a Romney victory was superior to
everyone else's reality. Rove is also widely thought to be the source of the
famous quote from a George W. Bush insider, offered to Ron Suskind for an
article in the New York Times Magazine in 2004, "We're an empire now, and
when we act, we create our own reality." That's how schizophrenics talk
and think.
Psychopaths often appear normal,
even charming. Underneath, they lack conscience and empathy, making them
manipulative, volatile and often (but by no means always) criminal. The
psychologist Kevin Dutton in his book, The Wisdom of Psychopaths,
notes society, and especially Wall Street, admires and rewards many of the
qualities of psychopaths - fearlessness, emotional sterility, supreme
confidence, ruthlessness, lack of remorse, refusal to take responsibility,
narcissism and delusions of grandeur. Who could argue that those
characteristics virtually defined the Wall Street crowd responsible for blowing
up the world's economy in 2008? In fact, a recent study showed
psychopaths were four times more common among business leaders than among the
general population. [1]
A 2005 British study compared the
psychological profiles of 39 senior business executives at leading British
companies with those of mental patients in the UK's Broadmoor Special Hospital.
The business leaders scored a clear "victory" in the three traits normally
used to identify the emotional dysfunction of psychopaths: histrionic
personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and compulsive
personality disorder.
Other studies suggest that
financial elites, like psychopaths, are more likely to feel like rules and
societal constraints don't apply to them. Mitt Romney's entire business and
political career, especially his approach to paying taxes, is the freshest,
most conspicuous example of this personality trait.
Dr. Dale Archer, a psychiatrist
and frequent guest on "FoxNews.com Live"
of all places writes,
"Physically, studies have shown that the brain chemistry is different in
powerful politicians, leading to sensation seeking and risky behavior. They
have lower levels of the brain chemical monoamine oxidase-A, which means they
have higher highs when they engage in risky behavior and that they get bored
much more easily than the norm."
Enter the 71 corporate CEOs
behind the current Campaign To Fix The Debt. These are CEOs making the media
rounds and spending $30 million dollars pounding
the table on achieving federal deficit reduction exclusively by dismantling the
social safety nets - Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security - while they sit on
their own massive retirement funds averaging $9.1 million. These are the same
CEOs who have contributed mightily to and benefited personally from the deficit
they now want closed. Their companies have received trillions
in federal war contracts, subsidies and bailouts, as well as specialized tax
breaks and loopholes that virtually eliminate the companies' tax bills -
companies like Goldman Sachs, Honeywell, AT &T and Boeing. And no, they are
not offering to reduce their feeding at the public trough, instead they want us
to turn away the poor, disabled and the vulnerable, calling government support
for them "low priority spending." Meanwhile, CEOs of the major fossil
fuel companies have enough scientific expertise to know that their business
model of extracting all the carbon they can get their hands on threatens the
very survival of all of mankind, yet they are undaunted in doing exactly that.
Who cares about the collapse of civilization when there are quarterly profits
to be made? How are these captains of the fossil fuel industry not psychopaths?
Psychopaths are notoriously
refractory to treatment or behavioral modification, another trait they share
with business and political elites. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The
Great Gatsby, "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are
different from you and me...They think, deep down, that they are better than we
are.” Our nation's responses to the climate crisis, the federal deficit, our
economic stagnation and many of our other serious challenges are still being
held hostage by people who manifest a detachment from reality as profound as
that of schizophrenics. We are still allowing a powerful elite, who behave like
psychopaths, to steer our government towards protecting their interests at the
expense of everyone else. The greatest threat to the United States will never
be Al Qaeda, Russia, China or Iran. It will be our failure to wrest control of
public policy from the inmates of our own insane asylum.
Dr. Brian Moench is president
of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment and a member of the Union of
Concerned Scientists
1. Babiak P, Neumann CS, Hare RD.
Corporate psychopathy: Talking the walk. Behav Sci Law. 2010
Mar-Apr;28(2):174-93.
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