You can add to your list billionaires Trump put into positions of power, Steve Mnuchin, as Treasury Secretary, who deservedly earned the title, The Foreclosure King, for the efficient and ruthless eviction of thousands of homeowners.
The billionaires referenced here prove that too much money makes most people into sociopaths.
But instead of being shamed for what they are, they are worshipped for their wealth.
Thank you for this. It now makes more sense to me as to what huge number of billionaires and Politicians are doing.
I read Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead) when I was about 19yrs I was so angry I ripped it up, threw it in the garbage and set fire to it. I realised then that this woman was a danger even though I knew nothing of sociopathic behaviour.
Interesting to learn that she needed welfare at the end of her life.
I always wondered why rich people needed SO much money and couldn't figure this out till today.
I'd like to use this opportunity to share an answer to a question that nagged my mind for at least twenty years...What is the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath? I finally heard a reasonable and concise answer listening to a podcast interview with a distinguished psychiatrist, The Hidden Brain (if I remember correctly). He explained that both socio- and psycho- pathologies exhibit selfish behaviors lacking empathy that breach socially acceptable norms (some are unethical, some are immoral and some can also be criminal). While both sociopathic and psychopathic conduct is harmful to others, the psychopath is the one that derives pleasure. Sociopaths are simply indifferent.
F. Reynolds, thank you very much for sharing that link. I have come to the conclusion that the word, belief, is the most reprehensible and dangerous word in our language.
It's been driving me nuts how Trump and MAGA have been discussed and portrayed as the problem in the Republican sphere. Conservatism itself is crazy. It's like a cult, but doesn't fit the conventional definition of a cult because the old standard has a preoccupation with charismatic leaders. I consulted the thesaurus to find a more suitable descriptor, but couldn't really find what I was looking for.
I've watched some interviews with Cassidy Hutchinson and it struck me how deeply her sense of identity is constructed from republicanism. She thinks that there are just a bunch of bad apples in the party, but doesn't understand that the entire creed is corrupt, misguided. The same applies to Liz Cheney. Hell, Joe Scarborough is probably in the same boat... along with tens of millions believers.
After reading your most excellent comment. I did some deep thinking, trying to think of a sociopath that isn't also a psychopath, and frankly can't think of any, except most psychopaths wind up institutionalized except those like Trump who are flith rich and powerful can buy the best lawyers.
Other wise I cannot think of any sociopath who is not also a psychopath
I totally agree with your assessment of Cassidy Hutchinson, most people who steadfastly out of self interest or blind belief, to a political party or a movement, are essentially brainwashed.
Just like "Once a Marine always a Marine" . I spent 26 years as a special ops team member, then leader, they too have a similar saying, and I chuckle, for that is not my identity. My identity is who I am now, an 84 year old cancer survivor that is pre diabtic,, with deficits. That's the real world not some fantasy world.
I humbly submit the difference might be, is the harm "hands-on?" Trump's dirty work is always done by his worshippers. Nothing is more "hands-on" than Ayn Rand's inspirer.
By a standard suggested above, the distinction is fogged, because Trump obviously got a kick out of the mayhem on Jan. 6. But at a distance.
The most important physician in modern history was a 19th century Frenchman named Jean Charcot. He was concerned about the way French society treated people who were suffering from serious mental problems. They were handed over to the police and treated as though they were criminals. Usually locked away in what we today would call prisons. This is punishment, said Charcot. Why punish them? there are people in society who act in a bizarre fashion and we fail to understand what is the wellspring of their behavior. We are repulsed by them and hand them over to the criminal justice system. This is cruel, inappropriate and unnecessary said the great doctor. Charcot said we should treat them as though they have a disease and hand them over to the medical community. He did not say they had a mental illness. He was clearly using an analogy, a metaphor. Unfortunately he was misinterpreted and some thought he meant literally: mental disease.
Many of his students became important influencers later in their professional lives. One of them was Sigmund Freud, a man of limited intelligence but a highly developed phantasy life involving sex. Freud misinterpreted Charcot completely and thought the great doctor was speaking of a literal mental illness. Freud developed phantastic explanations for people who behave in a bizarre fashion. As if this were not bad enough; he then began to say that ordinary people with behavioral problems can be explained by his outlandish, phantasies as well. Freud borrowed from Hebrew and Greek myths for his explanations of human behavior. He did not use them metaphorically; he was, like so many people of limited intelligence, literal.
The entire edifice of Freud's ideas was based upon the experiences of less than a dozen women who came to him for counseling. They told him they were the victims of incest. Freud simply could not, or refused to, believe them and assumed they were suffering from false memories. He then built a truly phantasmagorical series of explanations for their words which they addressed to him while he was counseling them.
I read the complete translation ( by George Simpson, I believe) of Freud's ideas when I was young, and even at a young age I could see that Freud was himself psychotic (meaning, out of contact with reality). He has done more harm to the discipline of Psychology in the U.S. than anyone in history. His ideas enjoyed great popular acceptance in the U.S. But not in Europe. That is another story altogether.
Many of those who use the term Psychopath mean that there are people with a mental disease even though there is no lesion to be found on their central nervous system. It is true that there are some people with a lesion on their central nervous system and it affects their behavior. But these people constitute less than 1% of all those labelled as suffering from mental illness, a Psychopath. Mental illness as it is commonly expressed is a myth. One might wish to look into the writing of Thomas Szasz THE MYTH OF MENTAL ILNESS, and David Mechanic's work also.
Near the end of his life Freud eventually came to realize that he was wrong. He said so in his personal journal. After he died this journal was hidden from the public by his daughter for a generation or more. Eventually it urned up in the archives of a Canadian university; I think McGill. It made a big, nasty splash in the academic Psychology community as you can imagine.
"Sociopath" is used by Sociologists to refer to someone who is so far removed from the shared experiences and sympathetic understandings of the general culture that they seem to have a social disease, metaphorically. Trump qualifies, clearly.
Gerald, I love to hear you mention Jean-Martin Charcot. It's my understanding that he was trying to understand and treat patients humanely, and educate doctors regarding the existence of unconsciousness. If, under hypnotic suggestion, he could relieve a patient's "hysterical paralysis," for example, he could explain that the malfunctioning part of the body wasn't physically incapacitated, but that something in the patient's unconscious mind was causing the paralysis. Charcot never proposed a specific theory regarding what was emotionally troubling the patient and how these feelings got repressed into unconsciousness, but the young Sigmund Freud did.
Freud was in Paris in the late 1880's doing research on the brain, specifically looking for physical signs of neurological damage which might correlate to emotional distress and the symptoms lumped together by neurologists at the time called, "hysteria." To do this research he had to go to the morgue in Paris and obtain brain samples to investigate under a microscope. While in the morgue he saw many deceased children with obvious signs of physical and sexual abuse. Freud began to wonder if children who weren't outright killed by their abusers, became the "hysterics" that Charcot was exhibiting in his medical teaching clinic. In Vienna,
Freud had already become good friends with Josef Breuer, a highly acclaimed doctor who'd experimented with emotionally distressed patients by listening to them talk about their troubles. Freud had been doing the same with some of his patients and they were telling both of these doctors about sexual abuse by fathers and others that had occurred in their childhoods. Combining these three phenomena, deceased children who'd obviously been massively abused, the stories of abuse he was hearing from his young adult patients, and the demonstrations in Charcot's clinic of the existence of unconscious processes in the mind, Freud arrived at his first theory, which he called, euphemistically, "seduction." The theory stated that children were being sexually abused, that the feelings associated with being abused were repressed into unconsciousness because they were too unbearable to tolerate, but they emerged indirectly and got expressed in previously inexplicable symptoms of physical or emotional distress. He further explained that treatment involved helping the patient remember events that were previously unrememberable, along with the original feelings that were too terrible to endure at the time.
Freud's original theory was absolutely correct and so was his prescription for treatment. However, in 1896, when he presented the case histories of several patients, along with his theoretical explanation of the etiology and treatment of "hysteria," his colleagues fell silent. One version of the story goes that they began to shun him, they stopped referring to him, and after 18 months of feeling ostracized, with six children and a wife to feed, Freud retracted "seduction" and replaced it with the theory of intrapsychic fantasy. Now the story was that children yearned for and fantasized about sexual union with the parent of the opposite sex, there was sibling rivalry and oedipal competition, and it all got suppressed into unconsciousness to emerge later in the symptoms called, "Hysteria."
Contemporary psychoanalysts have returned to Freud and Breuer's original observations and improved on treatment for early childhood trauma. But I completely agree with your observation that his theories of intrapsychic fantasy were somewhat tortured, and they did much harm to victims of childhood, sexual abuse for 6 decades until they were questioned and re-considered. Our culture can now talk more freely about abuse and offer a variety of treatment approaches. Collectively, we are definitely more empathetic with trauma victims and are coming to recognize how much physical and emotional violence there is in average, American child-rearing. :(
Ms. Taylor, thank you for your thoughtful response. You appear to know a great deal about the activities of Freud in his early years as a student of Charcot. I thank you for informing me.
I have always viewed the concept of "repression" with a certain amount of doubt. I believe it is more likely that a horrible experience does not create a problem because it is repressed and then subsequently it re-appears in some altered form. I think the problem with a horrible experience is more likely to create pain because the person who experiences it cannot stop thinking about it. It sticks in their mind consciously;. They cannot stop reliving it over and over and this is a terribly painful, disabling experience. My friends and relatives who have been in terrifying combat in Vietnam , Korea, and WWII told me they would like to forget it; but they cannot. That is the problem for them: they cannot forget it.
On a related topic I wonder about the whole concept of "hysteria." Hyster is greek for womb. Scholars commonly turn to ancient languages as they search for names to give to the new concepts they are developing. Ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew are often chosen as the reservoir of terms to borrow from. When a surgeon removes a woman's womb that is said to be a "hysterectomy." A sensible term for womb- removal.
Irrational, nonsensical behavior was and still is claimed to be a typical response of females. Thus, people suffering from irrational thoughts and frightening feelings and allowing these to take control of their behavior are said to be "hysterical" according to Freud. A claim which is clearly born of a bias against females. This bias is a common cultural trait. We are culturally predisposed to label such behavior as female. I love that sequence in THE AFRICAN QUEEN when Humphrey Bogart's character "Mr. Allnut" drunkenly shouts at Katherine Hepburn's character "Rosie," calling her "a bible thumping, psalm singing old maid." But then he changes his view of her entirely after he shares the warmth of her wonderful lips with their first kiss and is overwhelmed by her courageous determination to attack the german warship.
I suspect a better place to look for an explanation for human behavior is in society itself, as all human behavior is social. I prefer to not look into human biology for explanations of inherently social phenomena.
Hi gerald, I totally agree that "all human behavior is social." The human context in which experience takes place affects the experiencer's reaction. Experiences that are emotionally traumatizing in childhood, when the child victim is dependent upon the parental perpetrator and has no escape, are happening under different circumstances than adult soldiers in warfare. Nature makes it possible for children who are trapped in assaultive or massively neglectful environments and must stay there for years before they're capable of taking care of themselves, to deny that what's happening to them is that bad, to consciously suppress feelings that would further infuriate the abusive parent upon whom the child is dependent, repress these experiences into deeper regions of unconsciousness, or completely dissociate from them, removing themselves from the situation as if it were happening to someone else.
The way that Freud and others subsequently learned about this is through careful listening to patients over the last 100 years and devising treatment relationships that were safe enough for repressed memories or dissociated experience to gradually emerge into conscious awareness. Often, painful memories emerge first in dreams, another somewhat unconscious realm of the mind, before the person feels safe enough to manage these memories with full consciousness. None of this remembering process is willful or consciously intended, but it happens as the person begins to feel safer with a therapist who demonstrates qualities of acceptance and compassion, unlike the traumatizing parents of the patient's childhood.
You are correct that there's another result of trauma that occurs in adults exposed to mortal danger, physical and/or emotional, and also cannot escape. There are forms of PTSD where the sufferer can't forget painful memories by which they are haunted. Abused children and soldiers in war are living under similar circumstances. But children are living in a traumatizing environment 24/7 with people upon whom they must depend for years. Abusive parents usually can't tolerate the child reminding them in any way of the abuse they are inflicting so there's one more requirement that author Alice Miller points out..."Thou Shalt Not Be Aware." Children are forced, by their fear of the parent's retribution, to tolerate the abuse but suppress, repress, or dissociate from the emotional effects of living with abusive parents. They dare not allow themselves to become fully aware of just how unbearable the situation is because they are dependent on the very people they fear the most.
A good book about these two, similar but different circumstances is, Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Herman.
Ms. Taylor, your comment "because they are dependent on the very people they fear the most." is an eye opener. Yes, that does make the child's situation different from the soldier's. The soldier can fight back while the child cannot, dares not. The soldier also has colleagues to whom he or she can turn for help. The child likely does not. I had not thought it through even though I, like many other children had an alcoholic German-American father and a somewhat negligent, emotionally distant mother.
I also had not thought about the potential of dreams as an opening in investigating trauma. This is not to say I have not wondered about the nature and significance of dreams in human existence. I have. I regret to say I did not here. The subject of dreams in this context probably seems obvious to you; as it seems you have experience in this subject which I lack. Thanks again for your response.
Sociopath here in Europe is usually an amoral person? ie. NO feelings
Yes to the Psycopath. These people have feelings like anger/enjoyment of hurting someone/perhaps have been bullied in school or had an abusive background.
It's very scary to me because I know about 'bullying.'
I was bullied for years because I came from a different background and I had a different perspective from others. Guess what? I became a bully.
Not proud to say this at all. BUT this is how I learned that empathy was important.
Kids are kids and some of us really 'know' who we are from a young age. I had lived in Sri Lanka (born there) and I hated the way the English treated me.
I had a friend who was born and brought up in the Falkland Islands...we connected and she was bullied because she was no different from me. We had the same perspectives with regard to the British Empire.
LOL. On Quora I posted a comment about the Brits having a longing for the good ole days of serfdom, and their willingness to finance and die for the benefit of their "betters"
Read slowly the words of "God save the King", may he reign over us. Talk of brainwashed.
His response was, come over here and say that, and you will enjoy the benefits of National Healthcare.
Now I am all in favor of single payer, but not government run healthcare, if England is an example, you can die in the waiting room, it is shoddy and mismanaged, The result of anything with an elite group of managers, like corporations, are involved.In America it is non profits, especially community run, like Evergreen in Kirkland, WA that run a great medical center, because they are close to the community.
In NW Washington and in Oregon, there are Peace Health medical centers, founded by the nuns of St Joseph, they are also great, save that they are opposed to abortions and medically assisted euthanasia. Then again they have contracted out a lot of their services to Blackrock.. Blackrock is the Redock in the Resident, the company that tried to buy Chastain Memorial, before the doctors and the board decided to give it to the local government.
Medical centers are above par, if owned by the local government, but distance between the Center and its management, as in England is subpar, because of distance and lack of community involvement. And that is why England''s National Institute of Health is problematic.,layers of cost cutting bureaucrats whose sole motivation is their own careers.
Doctors, nurses, techs and staff do the best they can within parameters of financial restraints. It doesn't happen in America to non profits, run by communities, fewer bureaucrats and minus the profit motive.
And that is why I support Bernie's single payor idea, not socialize national health care run by political appointees.
I can totally agree with you about England and the Health System. For years it has floundered under continual Conservative Prime Ministers.
I don't think this would have been the case if there had been a Labour Govt. but I don't know for sure.
The medical system in France remains really good (except for a shortage of Doctors) which is causing many problems.
I have been in Hospitals in the USA and France.
France is so much better.
When in Hospital in the US I needed a major 'op and had to wait a day before my Insurance Company decided to put me in Hospital. The ward was understaffed partiicularly at night + I had to pay for a sick bowl and other things!
I have also read that the controversy involves nature/nurture. Some experts think that sociopaths are "created" and psychopaths are born. I am looking forward to any breakthroughs on either account. The recent brain-scan technology is telling them a great deal.
It's simply naive to take a position in an either/or debate. That whole nature v nurture is antiquated dualistic thinking. The reality is that there is a spectrum where nature and nurture both factor in. The Hidden Brain guest spoke about how people are born with tendencies which is properly referred to as temperament in psychiatric circles. Temperament may predispose people to certain behaviors, but is not determinative because nurture can both augment or diminish those behavioral tendencies.
The podcast I refer to is a Hidden Brain titled, How We Live with Contradictions. The guest is Elliot Aronson, a seminal figure in psychology who developed the theory of cognitive dissonance. I highly recommend listening to it, here's the link...
Understood. What I have read says exactly that; their explanation was of what the personal history and brain scan data is now indicating. So much more work to be done, but with super-computer capacity to map the brain and scans to study, we will make progress. These things sure have increased our understanding of injuries. Onward and upward! Thanks for the link.
Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand... ugh! And Mitt Romney's "47 percent" comment, a case supporting libertarian theology. I wonder why Greenspan didn't help out Ayn Rand's finances when she needed a little help from her friends?
Alan Greenspans wife is Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC. If you believe that a wife and husband can hold two opposing beliefs, then I have a bridge. That loud mouthed fraud James Carville, who plays a liberal on TV is married to a Bush conservative Mary Madelyn. And George Conway, a Trump critic is married to Trump humping Kelly Ann Conway, one does not crawl ino bed with ideological and social enemies, unless their is something else afoot, like money, access which equates to power.
With respect, it's Mary Matalin. As for Kellyanne and George: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/kellyanne-george-conway-announce-divorce-rcna73451 Nobody knows what Andrea thinks: she reports. I'm not sure Carville plays a liberal: more a pragmatist. Very different people can be comfortable with each other based on religious roots. While Greenspan is a Randian, his pedigree is pure Jewish, and Andrea is Jewish. It's love itself that has no ideology.
Wouldn't that be grand? One reflection I had was a couple I knew: Immigrant Irish married immigrant Sicilian. Common denominator: Catholicism. But Fred was asking for much broader tolerance. Thanks for the compliment.
Thom's focus on Ayn Rand's influence on Libertarianism only touches the surface of this movement, its origins, advocates, and organizations designed to further its philosophy. For an in depth analysis of this movement I would suggest Nancy MacLean's "Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America." It is recent (2017) and extraordinarily documented.
Rather than the the Russian Revolution's influence on the origins of Ayn Rand's thinking, Mac Lean traces the origins closer to home and solidly imbedded in our own history--John C. Calhoun's doctrine of"interposition" which led to the Civil War; Sen. Harry Byrd's "states rights" justification for maintaining segregation in opposition to "Brown v. Board of Education", and the person to whom she
attributes the intellectual foundation for the modern movement--James Buchanan, not the former president, but someone I had never heard of until I started reading the book.
Buchanan's origins, philosophy, and the cohort that developed from him are eye-opening.
The Libertarianism Thom describes is truly a "wolf in sheep's clothing" using terms like "freedom".
"liberty" and "rights" which may naively be heard by the majority as intended for all, but is actually, from the Libertarian perspective, the birthright only of those who approach the mindset of the Ayn Rand's character's Thom describes.
There were many which embraced ideas which we call libertarian, and they predate Warren Calhoun, but they are qualities of the rich who have everything to lose with progressivism.
It was indeed Ayn Rand, who popularized and made libertarianism into a cult. A cult which people like Tim Miller a Bulwark contributor and frequent guest on MSNBC still embraces.
Bulwark and Lincoln Project staff are neverr Trump Republicans, but still believe in the tenets of faith first voiced by Rand in her many books, not just the Fountain Head, but Atlas Shrugged and the Art of Selfishness, which I confess to reading before I WOKE up.
You left out Paul Ryan, my man! The good-lookin' guy who knew when to fold his hand but is young enough to come back, who said Rand was the great inspiration of his philosophy somewhere along the way. I keep an ear to the ground for the timely return of Paul Ryan.
Thanks for this: Books are important and when they are read produce a meaningful narrative. You cannot get away from a book when it concurs with your own thoughts.
This is what the internet cannot do.
We need to hear from people who have NOT had similar backgrounds. This is Literature.
Michael, I love MacLean's book, Democracy in Chains, and want to re-read it for the information regarding other, earlier sources of what came to be euphamized as "Libertarianism." You're completely right that the term attempts to gaslight citizens into believing that it's THEIR liberty that's being protected when all it is is a power-grab by the wealthy elites who really DON'T want freedom for the masses, they just want LICENSE to behave as selfishly as they desire without governmental (read: "parental") limitations.
What happened to Ayn Rand was poetic justice. I remember a friend in high school getting high and embracing her. I'll bet that is what a lot of people did. Stoners who were enjoying double speak. I did not read Ayn Rand, but also did not subscribe to what people were telling me who read her that humans were primed to selfishness. I remember many conversations where we would be arguing for examples where that was not true, and everyone who subscribed to Ayn Rand would be bending over backwards to tear these examples apart and point out how simple acts of kindness were actually selfish because you were doing it to feel good about yourself. They ignored that fact that being kind made you feel good, something that Trump does not seem to connect to, or any other of the evil Republican cum libertarians.
The ego development of a young child is to view their things as an extension of themselves, so it is not even selfish in the same way as it would be for an adult. It is developmentally appropriate. We do teach them not to be cruel. I remember my daughter telling me how a classmate had stuck her tongue out at her and another friend when I picked her up from nursery school when she was three. I asked her why she thought that was, and she told me that it was because she and a friend would not let this girl play with them. I told her, "I guess she showed you how she felt about that." My daughter understood that the sticking the tongue out was not the problem it was her exclusion of the child that was. My daughter is now one of the kindest, most inclusive people. When she was young and would tell me about a problem with a child, I would tell her a story that would include her and the child in it, with an explanation of the child's behavior in it. So, when I would pick her up from her pre-school, she would tell me some problem that had happened, and then say, "tell me a story." This I would do, where I would then talk about her and the other child in a story way, even with "once upon a time... " since young children understand this as a beginning to the story. Unfortunately Trump seems stuck in this little child who did not get their needs met warp, that has him as an "enfant terrible." Perhaps, if he has dimensia, he will grow only worse.
Linda, I LOVE how you helped your daughter understand the complex, intersubjective world of human behavior without moralizing about "right and wrong." I'm guessing that she felt understood and accepted by her mom...the most important aspect if we want children to develop capacities for empathy with self and others. I love the "tell me a story" framework. I'd love it if you'd write some "tell me a story" picture books for parents to read with their toddlers and young kids. It would be a great model for parents and a great source of compassion for the slings and arrows of painful interactions that children go through almost daily. "Once upon a time..." :)
It's a phycological mindset without social conscience that fuels MAGA. Narrow thinking without a thought to humanity in the pursuit of individual goals is destructive to society. I know a simple concept involving compassion is considered weakness nowadays. Consider the advice of Bobby Azarian, a neuroscientist,
If the news media here in the US are to save face (from decades of omitting the imperative, as well as coddling the public with their incessant everybody happy nothing going on here nursery rhyme "features") then they'd be wise to pick up on A LOT of Thom's writings and research. For all of our networks, yesterday would be a great time to start.
I gather it's Thom's own crew that put up segments on YouTube. Since I spend a lot of time out of reach of radio or FSTV access, I'm grateful for that.
The root of all evil is a lack of having a conscience. When babies are raised to love Faith and hate facts, they get detached from the common reality and invent their own realities, where narcissism is welcomed. Since most of the world is raised in violent religious societies, they get strength from one another's insanity. Not caring about right or wrong, morals or immorality. But they are nuttier than fruit cakes. They become easy picking for rational thinking Nations, like "China". United we stand, divided we fall. The sane can not stand with the insane, or vice versa. The billionaire globalists see America as a juicy steak. The plutocrats have eaten the middle class alive the last 60 or so years and will turn her citizens over to the rational and intelligent thinking Chinese. Including making China the world reserve currency. This must have been planned back in the 1960s or '70s. Pre Carter and Reagan. Loot America and then torch her. Blame it on the hippies. Russia is killing off all of its undesirables with this Ukrainian war, being shot up with American arms. In the war with China, American undesirables will be sent to the front lines. That includes the intellectuals first. Anyone who spouts truth and reason and logic will be the first to go, after them, all of the takers, the criminals locked in prisons, the welfare recipients the churches will be glad to indoctrinate the children, and of course the homeless. Old people will just be left to starve or die of diseases, slowly and painfully. This is how greedy libertarians who are psychopaths think. So much for white supremacy. The libertarians are not racist. They like to torture all equally.
I love the line: "Blame it on the hippies." Code for "looters." But also shorthand for "undesirables," who are basically any creatives who question orthodoxy that supports supine conventionality. My Mom really hated "dirty, LAZY" hippies: bragged about she'd never give them a ride because she had EARNED her car. What you end up with is those who have the most to lose always being able to be manipulated into punching down.
Thanks so much, Thom, for this illuminating, if utterly chilling, story that connects "libertarianism" to sociopathy. We need to continue to understand the psychological roots of what gets converted into a highfalutin' ideology. Usually the roots are in very early, lived experience with one's earliest caregivers.
Before the trauma of the Bolsheviks smashing her father's store and appropriating it for "the state," I wonder what else happened to Ayn Rand in earliest childhood. My experience as a psychoanalytically trained psychotherapist with a background in early childhood development, leads me to wonder if there were traumatic lapses of empathy in her upbringing. People who end up idealizing the cold, I-IT use of other people above the I-Thou of mutual empathy, do so because they didn't feel the consistent love of an adoring parent when they were infants and toddlers. The relational configurations of our first three years create the templates for our later beliefs. Those beliefs emerge from our lived experience and if one hasn't experienced reliable, mutual affection and emotional security with at least one, attuned caregiver, one has no template for that kind of relationship.
As far as I understand, David and Charles Koch were raised by a Hitler-idealizing, German nanny because their parents wanted them to have a "strict" upbringing. No love or affection for them...just adherence to the rules of cold, imperious adults. I believe that made them the voracious-for-power adolescents and adults that they became. The craving for power over others is often the result of feeling utterly powerless to get what you need in earliest childhood, and what infants and toddlers need most is attention, attunement, and love. TFG didn't get these either at the developmentally-neccessary time of infancy to 3 years.
I'm guessing that there's something in Ayn Rand's earliest years that accounts for her idealization of extreme, conscience-less attitudes and behavior. I'm also guessing that the trauma of the Bolshevik cruelty only further cemented an attitude that had already formed deep within her psyche from infantile experience; that one is utterly on one's own, that if you don't prioritize your own needs exclusively, you won't survive, and that doing so is a virtue worthy of idealizing and asserting to the rest of the world. (But in your old age, when you once again experience your need for help from others, and this normal need can no longer be denied, then it's OK to revert to depending on the state to help you.)
I've been connecting this trauma to the Florida Cubans, but I'm not sure it's too "creative" to connect it to Palestinians. Castro jackboots down the door of your plantation mansion. Jews chop down your family's 100-year-old olive grove. I have not followed the news about an Armenian diaspora in progress right now. the "Heimat" is lost, and all there is left is to hate. There is no end to it in human history, but such events put to shame petty outrage over masks or vaccines or a closed Forest Service road or grazing fees or the route out of town a raped woman takes to where. It is crazy-time.
Love hearing your take on this since you actually know what you are talking about. Ayn was 12 when the everything blew-up in her world. Puberty. I could talk about what that does, but I would bore even myself.
From what I have read, the nature/nurture aspect of root cause for the anti-socials is going to take a long time time to unravel. Brain scans are helping, but I am waiting and watching for any breakthroughs.
Great food for thought in this Report. You can speak two languages, write successful books, and be considered an intellectual and still die broke using every system you railed against.
Intelligence has nothing to do with emotional maturity and mental health. My take-away from that Rand interview with Mike Wallace was that she thought of herself as "the world". I guess that left the rest of us in the real world the "objects" in her objectivism. Talk about having limited vision. Talk about arrested development. She looked crazy and she was, so does Trump and so did Hitler. Cultists like crazy.
This battle against insanity and Libertarian-ism might not be like Normandy, but it is just as important that the allies win it!
I too read Ayn Rand many years ago as an undergrad. Even as a young, inexperienced boy It did not take me very long to conclude that her characters were not believable. ATLAS SHRUGGED and THE FOUNTAINHEAD were so repulsive, it was difficult to finish them. I had no idea all these years that her characters were based upon actual, real human beings.
Many years after reading her I began to study serial killers as part of my research into Criminology. Now, It appears that her characters are based on an actual criminal in Los Angeles who exhibits the behavioral characteristics of a serial killer. It was not necessary for Hickman to kill the girl in order for him to carry out his scheme of extortion. The brutal strangulation and dismemberment are the kinds of things serial killers do. He committed those apparently gratuitous, brutal acts because he derived pleasure from them. The terror, horror, and brutality were ends in themselves; as is the case with serial killers throughout history.; going all the way back to Gille de Rais in France and Vlad Tepes in Transylvania during the fifteenth century.
Thank you Mr. Hartman for enlightening us. This is all new to me. Furthermore it does make sense in a macabre sort of way. The foundations of Libertarianism are truly: cruelty, hatred, and a fetish about power expressed through bloodletting; minor themes found in the history of western and Asian cultures. As I think about the Contract theorists Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau I am reminded of Hobbes's claim that the life of Man is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." I am not a follower of Hobbes. But I do not ignore him either.
Good for your youthfull instincts of revulsion! A little expansion of the Hobbes quote: "Life in the state of Nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." One infers he was calling humanity to rise above those conditions. Oh, well....
Vlad Tempe. I read the Sultan of Turkey, had been sending forces into Transylvania, Vlad the impaler, captured them, then shoved a stake up the anus, as a warning to the Sultan,it worked, but I later learned he did the same to his enemies, other than the Turks, I can't believe that he impaled his subjects, because doing so, would disenchant the populace, and a tyrant still needs the support of his people, even with the support of the GESTAPO, and the NKVD,KGB, FSB, tyrants need support of the people. Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Putin maintain control by use of mass media, which was not available until the Guttenberg press, and more effectively via over the air broadcasting.
Off the cuff, I wander what the folks of Tempe, AR would think of their towns name, fi they knew.
For centuries the Moslems had been trying to invade Europe and they failed. The reason for that failure was the unfortunate geographic fact that the Valley Vienna is in must be successfully traversed. The Moslem commanders had to funnel their troops through that valley. It became a valley of death them as the European armies were always at an advantage there and defeated the Moslems.
By the fifteenth century the decadent Christian Aristocrats who lived in the valleys which the Invaders must pass through had developed such a great fear of the brutal Moslem armies that they would leave their villages in the low country and hide out in their mountain fortresses when a Moslem army approached. Thus leaving the poor peasants alone to face the Moslems.
Then along came Vlad Tepes who was just as courageous and brutal as the invaders, plus he was a superior military man. He stayed put and took on the Moslems, defeating them thereby preventing a catastrophic invasion of Europe. Thus he was, in the hearts of the peasants a savior, hero. He remained their hero even though he subsequently, in his maniacal bloodlust, impaled thousands of his fellow citizens for his own entertainment. It is recored that he impaled 15,000 in one of his paroxysms of fury. As his victims screamed in terror and pain he strolled among them eating his lunch and cavorting with whores.
This altogether repulsive and horrifying person was, when just a boy, given by his own father to the Sultan of Turkey as a hostage to guarantee his father's adherence to a pact he had formed with the Sultan. Vlad was reared in the court of the Sultan among his eunuchs at Topkapi. It is not historically certain as to whether or not Vlad was castrated there. Probably not because the Sultan did not want to insult Vlad's powerful father with whom he had an agreement. But it is certain that Vlad learned a great deal about Moslem culture and military affairs while he was a boy-hostage. Possibly this had much to do with his subsequent brutality and military prowess later as a man.
Incidentally, there were several different kinds of religious male castration among both Christians and Moslems in Medieval times. Women often had their clitoris removed, a practice still found in some countries. A practice the UN has spoken against. Ain't religion wonderful?
Finally, the name of Vlad's father was Dracul. In his native tongue his son is called Dracula.
The story of Gille de Rais is equally bloodcurdling.
Gerald, I don't know anything about Vlad the Impaler but my guess is that he was repeatedly homosexually abused, ridiculed and humiliated, rather than castrated. The way he tortured and killed thousands in narcissistic fits of rage and revenge seems like an enactment of homosexual rape, only this time, HE had the power to do the hurting and it was the other person who screamed in pain and was utterly powerless. It was extremely common for children to be used and abused this way for thousands of years, especially in the courts of monarchs. Children so abused often grow up to unconsciously re-enact some form of their abuse.
I would also wonder what had happened to Hickman in HIS childhood to make him such a grotesque murderer...what kind of abuse did he suffer in infancy and toddlerhood that lay dormant in his unconscious mind until something terrible re-awakened his blind fury to annihilate.
The price we pay for abusing and shaming little boys is that they often become psychopathic killers when they grow physically capable of avenging the abused child they once were. Here, I'm also thinking of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and Putin... :(
Ayn was the metastatic brain tumor which spread first to Reagan; then to the pea-brain of fraud Trump and then onto the GOP at large.
Well done Mr. Hartmann. Well done indeed, sir.
You can add to your list billionaires Trump put into positions of power, Steve Mnuchin, as Treasury Secretary, who deservedly earned the title, The Foreclosure King, for the efficient and ruthless eviction of thousands of homeowners.
The billionaires referenced here prove that too much money makes most people into sociopaths.
But instead of being shamed for what they are, they are worshipped for their wealth.
I think Thom has covered Calvinism as an influence in American culture: wealth as evidence of god's favor.
Thank you for this. It now makes more sense to me as to what huge number of billionaires and Politicians are doing.
I read Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead) when I was about 19yrs I was so angry I ripped it up, threw it in the garbage and set fire to it. I realised then that this woman was a danger even though I knew nothing of sociopathic behaviour.
Interesting to learn that she needed welfare at the end of her life.
I always wondered why rich people needed SO much money and couldn't figure this out till today.
Yuk.
I'd like to use this opportunity to share an answer to a question that nagged my mind for at least twenty years...What is the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath? I finally heard a reasonable and concise answer listening to a podcast interview with a distinguished psychiatrist, The Hidden Brain (if I remember correctly). He explained that both socio- and psycho- pathologies exhibit selfish behaviors lacking empathy that breach socially acceptable norms (some are unethical, some are immoral and some can also be criminal). While both sociopathic and psychopathic conduct is harmful to others, the psychopath is the one that derives pleasure. Sociopaths are simply indifferent.
F. Reynolds, thank you very much for sharing that link. I have come to the conclusion that the word, belief, is the most reprehensible and dangerous word in our language.
It's been driving me nuts how Trump and MAGA have been discussed and portrayed as the problem in the Republican sphere. Conservatism itself is crazy. It's like a cult, but doesn't fit the conventional definition of a cult because the old standard has a preoccupation with charismatic leaders. I consulted the thesaurus to find a more suitable descriptor, but couldn't really find what I was looking for.
I've watched some interviews with Cassidy Hutchinson and it struck me how deeply her sense of identity is constructed from republicanism. She thinks that there are just a bunch of bad apples in the party, but doesn't understand that the entire creed is corrupt, misguided. The same applies to Liz Cheney. Hell, Joe Scarborough is probably in the same boat... along with tens of millions believers.
After reading your most excellent comment. I did some deep thinking, trying to think of a sociopath that isn't also a psychopath, and frankly can't think of any, except most psychopaths wind up institutionalized except those like Trump who are flith rich and powerful can buy the best lawyers.
Other wise I cannot think of any sociopath who is not also a psychopath
I totally agree with your assessment of Cassidy Hutchinson, most people who steadfastly out of self interest or blind belief, to a political party or a movement, are essentially brainwashed.
Just like "Once a Marine always a Marine" . I spent 26 years as a special ops team member, then leader, they too have a similar saying, and I chuckle, for that is not my identity. My identity is who I am now, an 84 year old cancer survivor that is pre diabtic,, with deficits. That's the real world not some fantasy world.
I humbly submit the difference might be, is the harm "hands-on?" Trump's dirty work is always done by his worshippers. Nothing is more "hands-on" than Ayn Rand's inspirer.
By a standard suggested above, the distinction is fogged, because Trump obviously got a kick out of the mayhem on Jan. 6. But at a distance.
The most important physician in modern history was a 19th century Frenchman named Jean Charcot. He was concerned about the way French society treated people who were suffering from serious mental problems. They were handed over to the police and treated as though they were criminals. Usually locked away in what we today would call prisons. This is punishment, said Charcot. Why punish them? there are people in society who act in a bizarre fashion and we fail to understand what is the wellspring of their behavior. We are repulsed by them and hand them over to the criminal justice system. This is cruel, inappropriate and unnecessary said the great doctor. Charcot said we should treat them as though they have a disease and hand them over to the medical community. He did not say they had a mental illness. He was clearly using an analogy, a metaphor. Unfortunately he was misinterpreted and some thought he meant literally: mental disease.
Many of his students became important influencers later in their professional lives. One of them was Sigmund Freud, a man of limited intelligence but a highly developed phantasy life involving sex. Freud misinterpreted Charcot completely and thought the great doctor was speaking of a literal mental illness. Freud developed phantastic explanations for people who behave in a bizarre fashion. As if this were not bad enough; he then began to say that ordinary people with behavioral problems can be explained by his outlandish, phantasies as well. Freud borrowed from Hebrew and Greek myths for his explanations of human behavior. He did not use them metaphorically; he was, like so many people of limited intelligence, literal.
The entire edifice of Freud's ideas was based upon the experiences of less than a dozen women who came to him for counseling. They told him they were the victims of incest. Freud simply could not, or refused to, believe them and assumed they were suffering from false memories. He then built a truly phantasmagorical series of explanations for their words which they addressed to him while he was counseling them.
I read the complete translation ( by George Simpson, I believe) of Freud's ideas when I was young, and even at a young age I could see that Freud was himself psychotic (meaning, out of contact with reality). He has done more harm to the discipline of Psychology in the U.S. than anyone in history. His ideas enjoyed great popular acceptance in the U.S. But not in Europe. That is another story altogether.
Many of those who use the term Psychopath mean that there are people with a mental disease even though there is no lesion to be found on their central nervous system. It is true that there are some people with a lesion on their central nervous system and it affects their behavior. But these people constitute less than 1% of all those labelled as suffering from mental illness, a Psychopath. Mental illness as it is commonly expressed is a myth. One might wish to look into the writing of Thomas Szasz THE MYTH OF MENTAL ILNESS, and David Mechanic's work also.
Near the end of his life Freud eventually came to realize that he was wrong. He said so in his personal journal. After he died this journal was hidden from the public by his daughter for a generation or more. Eventually it urned up in the archives of a Canadian university; I think McGill. It made a big, nasty splash in the academic Psychology community as you can imagine.
"Sociopath" is used by Sociologists to refer to someone who is so far removed from the shared experiences and sympathetic understandings of the general culture that they seem to have a social disease, metaphorically. Trump qualifies, clearly.
Gerald, I love to hear you mention Jean-Martin Charcot. It's my understanding that he was trying to understand and treat patients humanely, and educate doctors regarding the existence of unconsciousness. If, under hypnotic suggestion, he could relieve a patient's "hysterical paralysis," for example, he could explain that the malfunctioning part of the body wasn't physically incapacitated, but that something in the patient's unconscious mind was causing the paralysis. Charcot never proposed a specific theory regarding what was emotionally troubling the patient and how these feelings got repressed into unconsciousness, but the young Sigmund Freud did.
Freud was in Paris in the late 1880's doing research on the brain, specifically looking for physical signs of neurological damage which might correlate to emotional distress and the symptoms lumped together by neurologists at the time called, "hysteria." To do this research he had to go to the morgue in Paris and obtain brain samples to investigate under a microscope. While in the morgue he saw many deceased children with obvious signs of physical and sexual abuse. Freud began to wonder if children who weren't outright killed by their abusers, became the "hysterics" that Charcot was exhibiting in his medical teaching clinic. In Vienna,
Freud had already become good friends with Josef Breuer, a highly acclaimed doctor who'd experimented with emotionally distressed patients by listening to them talk about their troubles. Freud had been doing the same with some of his patients and they were telling both of these doctors about sexual abuse by fathers and others that had occurred in their childhoods. Combining these three phenomena, deceased children who'd obviously been massively abused, the stories of abuse he was hearing from his young adult patients, and the demonstrations in Charcot's clinic of the existence of unconscious processes in the mind, Freud arrived at his first theory, which he called, euphemistically, "seduction." The theory stated that children were being sexually abused, that the feelings associated with being abused were repressed into unconsciousness because they were too unbearable to tolerate, but they emerged indirectly and got expressed in previously inexplicable symptoms of physical or emotional distress. He further explained that treatment involved helping the patient remember events that were previously unrememberable, along with the original feelings that were too terrible to endure at the time.
Freud's original theory was absolutely correct and so was his prescription for treatment. However, in 1896, when he presented the case histories of several patients, along with his theoretical explanation of the etiology and treatment of "hysteria," his colleagues fell silent. One version of the story goes that they began to shun him, they stopped referring to him, and after 18 months of feeling ostracized, with six children and a wife to feed, Freud retracted "seduction" and replaced it with the theory of intrapsychic fantasy. Now the story was that children yearned for and fantasized about sexual union with the parent of the opposite sex, there was sibling rivalry and oedipal competition, and it all got suppressed into unconsciousness to emerge later in the symptoms called, "Hysteria."
Contemporary psychoanalysts have returned to Freud and Breuer's original observations and improved on treatment for early childhood trauma. But I completely agree with your observation that his theories of intrapsychic fantasy were somewhat tortured, and they did much harm to victims of childhood, sexual abuse for 6 decades until they were questioned and re-considered. Our culture can now talk more freely about abuse and offer a variety of treatment approaches. Collectively, we are definitely more empathetic with trauma victims and are coming to recognize how much physical and emotional violence there is in average, American child-rearing. :(
Ms. Taylor, thank you for your thoughtful response. You appear to know a great deal about the activities of Freud in his early years as a student of Charcot. I thank you for informing me.
I have always viewed the concept of "repression" with a certain amount of doubt. I believe it is more likely that a horrible experience does not create a problem because it is repressed and then subsequently it re-appears in some altered form. I think the problem with a horrible experience is more likely to create pain because the person who experiences it cannot stop thinking about it. It sticks in their mind consciously;. They cannot stop reliving it over and over and this is a terribly painful, disabling experience. My friends and relatives who have been in terrifying combat in Vietnam , Korea, and WWII told me they would like to forget it; but they cannot. That is the problem for them: they cannot forget it.
On a related topic I wonder about the whole concept of "hysteria." Hyster is greek for womb. Scholars commonly turn to ancient languages as they search for names to give to the new concepts they are developing. Ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew are often chosen as the reservoir of terms to borrow from. When a surgeon removes a woman's womb that is said to be a "hysterectomy." A sensible term for womb- removal.
Irrational, nonsensical behavior was and still is claimed to be a typical response of females. Thus, people suffering from irrational thoughts and frightening feelings and allowing these to take control of their behavior are said to be "hysterical" according to Freud. A claim which is clearly born of a bias against females. This bias is a common cultural trait. We are culturally predisposed to label such behavior as female. I love that sequence in THE AFRICAN QUEEN when Humphrey Bogart's character "Mr. Allnut" drunkenly shouts at Katherine Hepburn's character "Rosie," calling her "a bible thumping, psalm singing old maid." But then he changes his view of her entirely after he shares the warmth of her wonderful lips with their first kiss and is overwhelmed by her courageous determination to attack the german warship.
I suspect a better place to look for an explanation for human behavior is in society itself, as all human behavior is social. I prefer to not look into human biology for explanations of inherently social phenomena.
Hi gerald, I totally agree that "all human behavior is social." The human context in which experience takes place affects the experiencer's reaction. Experiences that are emotionally traumatizing in childhood, when the child victim is dependent upon the parental perpetrator and has no escape, are happening under different circumstances than adult soldiers in warfare. Nature makes it possible for children who are trapped in assaultive or massively neglectful environments and must stay there for years before they're capable of taking care of themselves, to deny that what's happening to them is that bad, to consciously suppress feelings that would further infuriate the abusive parent upon whom the child is dependent, repress these experiences into deeper regions of unconsciousness, or completely dissociate from them, removing themselves from the situation as if it were happening to someone else.
The way that Freud and others subsequently learned about this is through careful listening to patients over the last 100 years and devising treatment relationships that were safe enough for repressed memories or dissociated experience to gradually emerge into conscious awareness. Often, painful memories emerge first in dreams, another somewhat unconscious realm of the mind, before the person feels safe enough to manage these memories with full consciousness. None of this remembering process is willful or consciously intended, but it happens as the person begins to feel safer with a therapist who demonstrates qualities of acceptance and compassion, unlike the traumatizing parents of the patient's childhood.
You are correct that there's another result of trauma that occurs in adults exposed to mortal danger, physical and/or emotional, and also cannot escape. There are forms of PTSD where the sufferer can't forget painful memories by which they are haunted. Abused children and soldiers in war are living under similar circumstances. But children are living in a traumatizing environment 24/7 with people upon whom they must depend for years. Abusive parents usually can't tolerate the child reminding them in any way of the abuse they are inflicting so there's one more requirement that author Alice Miller points out..."Thou Shalt Not Be Aware." Children are forced, by their fear of the parent's retribution, to tolerate the abuse but suppress, repress, or dissociate from the emotional effects of living with abusive parents. They dare not allow themselves to become fully aware of just how unbearable the situation is because they are dependent on the very people they fear the most.
A good book about these two, similar but different circumstances is, Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Herman.
Nice talking to you!
Ms. Taylor, your comment "because they are dependent on the very people they fear the most." is an eye opener. Yes, that does make the child's situation different from the soldier's. The soldier can fight back while the child cannot, dares not. The soldier also has colleagues to whom he or she can turn for help. The child likely does not. I had not thought it through even though I, like many other children had an alcoholic German-American father and a somewhat negligent, emotionally distant mother.
I also had not thought about the potential of dreams as an opening in investigating trauma. This is not to say I have not wondered about the nature and significance of dreams in human existence. I have. I regret to say I did not here. The subject of dreams in this context probably seems obvious to you; as it seems you have experience in this subject which I lack. Thanks again for your response.
You're awesome, gerald...keep thinking. :)
Sociopath here in Europe is usually an amoral person? ie. NO feelings
Yes to the Psycopath. These people have feelings like anger/enjoyment of hurting someone/perhaps have been bullied in school or had an abusive background.
It's very scary to me because I know about 'bullying.'
I was bullied for years because I came from a different background and I had a different perspective from others. Guess what? I became a bully.
Not proud to say this at all. BUT this is how I learned that empathy was important.
Kids are kids and some of us really 'know' who we are from a young age. I had lived in Sri Lanka (born there) and I hated the way the English treated me.
I had a friend who was born and brought up in the Falkland Islands...we connected and she was bullied because she was no different from me. We had the same perspectives with regard to the British Empire.
LOL. On Quora I posted a comment about the Brits having a longing for the good ole days of serfdom, and their willingness to finance and die for the benefit of their "betters"
Read slowly the words of "God save the King", may he reign over us. Talk of brainwashed.
His response was, come over here and say that, and you will enjoy the benefits of National Healthcare.
Now I am all in favor of single payer, but not government run healthcare, if England is an example, you can die in the waiting room, it is shoddy and mismanaged, The result of anything with an elite group of managers, like corporations, are involved.In America it is non profits, especially community run, like Evergreen in Kirkland, WA that run a great medical center, because they are close to the community.
In NW Washington and in Oregon, there are Peace Health medical centers, founded by the nuns of St Joseph, they are also great, save that they are opposed to abortions and medically assisted euthanasia. Then again they have contracted out a lot of their services to Blackrock.. Blackrock is the Redock in the Resident, the company that tried to buy Chastain Memorial, before the doctors and the board decided to give it to the local government.
Medical centers are above par, if owned by the local government, but distance between the Center and its management, as in England is subpar, because of distance and lack of community involvement. And that is why England''s National Institute of Health is problematic.,layers of cost cutting bureaucrats whose sole motivation is their own careers.
Doctors, nurses, techs and staff do the best they can within parameters of financial restraints. It doesn't happen in America to non profits, run by communities, fewer bureaucrats and minus the profit motive.
And that is why I support Bernie's single payor idea, not socialize national health care run by political appointees.
I can totally agree with you about England and the Health System. For years it has floundered under continual Conservative Prime Ministers.
I don't think this would have been the case if there had been a Labour Govt. but I don't know for sure.
The medical system in France remains really good (except for a shortage of Doctors) which is causing many problems.
I have been in Hospitals in the USA and France.
France is so much better.
When in Hospital in the US I needed a major 'op and had to wait a day before my Insurance Company decided to put me in Hospital. The ward was understaffed partiicularly at night + I had to pay for a sick bowl and other things!
Me too, Elementstew! Love that little rhyme.
I have also read that the controversy involves nature/nurture. Some experts think that sociopaths are "created" and psychopaths are born. I am looking forward to any breakthroughs on either account. The recent brain-scan technology is telling them a great deal.
It's simply naive to take a position in an either/or debate. That whole nature v nurture is antiquated dualistic thinking. The reality is that there is a spectrum where nature and nurture both factor in. The Hidden Brain guest spoke about how people are born with tendencies which is properly referred to as temperament in psychiatric circles. Temperament may predispose people to certain behaviors, but is not determinative because nurture can both augment or diminish those behavioral tendencies.
The podcast I refer to is a Hidden Brain titled, How We Live with Contradictions. The guest is Elliot Aronson, a seminal figure in psychology who developed the theory of cognitive dissonance. I highly recommend listening to it, here's the link...
https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/how-we-live-with-contradictions/
Understood. What I have read says exactly that; their explanation was of what the personal history and brain scan data is now indicating. So much more work to be done, but with super-computer capacity to map the brain and scans to study, we will make progress. These things sure have increased our understanding of injuries. Onward and upward! Thanks for the link.
Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand... ugh! And Mitt Romney's "47 percent" comment, a case supporting libertarian theology. I wonder why Greenspan didn't help out Ayn Rand's finances when she needed a little help from her friends?
Alan Greenspans wife is Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC. If you believe that a wife and husband can hold two opposing beliefs, then I have a bridge. That loud mouthed fraud James Carville, who plays a liberal on TV is married to a Bush conservative Mary Madelyn. And George Conway, a Trump critic is married to Trump humping Kelly Ann Conway, one does not crawl ino bed with ideological and social enemies, unless their is something else afoot, like money, access which equates to power.
With respect, it's Mary Matalin. As for Kellyanne and George: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/kellyanne-george-conway-announce-divorce-rcna73451 Nobody knows what Andrea thinks: she reports. I'm not sure Carville plays a liberal: more a pragmatist. Very different people can be comfortable with each other based on religious roots. While Greenspan is a Randian, his pedigree is pure Jewish, and Andrea is Jewish. It's love itself that has no ideology.
"It's love itself that has no ideology." Poetry.
Are you familiar with the late Fred Rogers? "It's a wonderful day in the neighborhood. Will you be my friend?"
Wouldn't that be grand? One reflection I had was a couple I knew: Immigrant Irish married immigrant Sicilian. Common denominator: Catholicism. But Fred was asking for much broader tolerance. Thanks for the compliment.
I see your point, a common ethnicity beats ideology. That explains a lot.
Ha!
Thom's focus on Ayn Rand's influence on Libertarianism only touches the surface of this movement, its origins, advocates, and organizations designed to further its philosophy. For an in depth analysis of this movement I would suggest Nancy MacLean's "Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America." It is recent (2017) and extraordinarily documented.
Rather than the the Russian Revolution's influence on the origins of Ayn Rand's thinking, Mac Lean traces the origins closer to home and solidly imbedded in our own history--John C. Calhoun's doctrine of"interposition" which led to the Civil War; Sen. Harry Byrd's "states rights" justification for maintaining segregation in opposition to "Brown v. Board of Education", and the person to whom she
attributes the intellectual foundation for the modern movement--James Buchanan, not the former president, but someone I had never heard of until I started reading the book.
Buchanan's origins, philosophy, and the cohort that developed from him are eye-opening.
The Libertarianism Thom describes is truly a "wolf in sheep's clothing" using terms like "freedom".
"liberty" and "rights" which may naively be heard by the majority as intended for all, but is actually, from the Libertarian perspective, the birthright only of those who approach the mindset of the Ayn Rand's character's Thom describes.
There were many which embraced ideas which we call libertarian, and they predate Warren Calhoun, but they are qualities of the rich who have everything to lose with progressivism.
It was indeed Ayn Rand, who popularized and made libertarianism into a cult. A cult which people like Tim Miller a Bulwark contributor and frequent guest on MSNBC still embraces.
Bulwark and Lincoln Project staff are neverr Trump Republicans, but still believe in the tenets of faith first voiced by Rand in her many books, not just the Fountain Head, but Atlas Shrugged and the Art of Selfishness, which I confess to reading before I WOKE up.
You left out Paul Ryan, my man! The good-lookin' guy who knew when to fold his hand but is young enough to come back, who said Rand was the great inspiration of his philosophy somewhere along the way. I keep an ear to the ground for the timely return of Paul Ryan.
Oh, god...that's ominous! A sociopath-in-waiting...
Thanks for this: Books are important and when they are read produce a meaningful narrative. You cannot get away from a book when it concurs with your own thoughts.
This is what the internet cannot do.
We need to hear from people who have NOT had similar backgrounds. This is Literature.
Michael, I love MacLean's book, Democracy in Chains, and want to re-read it for the information regarding other, earlier sources of what came to be euphamized as "Libertarianism." You're completely right that the term attempts to gaslight citizens into believing that it's THEIR liberty that's being protected when all it is is a power-grab by the wealthy elites who really DON'T want freedom for the masses, they just want LICENSE to behave as selfishly as they desire without governmental (read: "parental") limitations.
What happened to Ayn Rand was poetic justice. I remember a friend in high school getting high and embracing her. I'll bet that is what a lot of people did. Stoners who were enjoying double speak. I did not read Ayn Rand, but also did not subscribe to what people were telling me who read her that humans were primed to selfishness. I remember many conversations where we would be arguing for examples where that was not true, and everyone who subscribed to Ayn Rand would be bending over backwards to tear these examples apart and point out how simple acts of kindness were actually selfish because you were doing it to feel good about yourself. They ignored that fact that being kind made you feel good, something that Trump does not seem to connect to, or any other of the evil Republican cum libertarians.
Greed an d selfishness are expected characteristics of toddlers, not adults. We teach children to share and not be cruel in kindergarten.
The ego development of a young child is to view their things as an extension of themselves, so it is not even selfish in the same way as it would be for an adult. It is developmentally appropriate. We do teach them not to be cruel. I remember my daughter telling me how a classmate had stuck her tongue out at her and another friend when I picked her up from nursery school when she was three. I asked her why she thought that was, and she told me that it was because she and a friend would not let this girl play with them. I told her, "I guess she showed you how she felt about that." My daughter understood that the sticking the tongue out was not the problem it was her exclusion of the child that was. My daughter is now one of the kindest, most inclusive people. When she was young and would tell me about a problem with a child, I would tell her a story that would include her and the child in it, with an explanation of the child's behavior in it. So, when I would pick her up from her pre-school, she would tell me some problem that had happened, and then say, "tell me a story." This I would do, where I would then talk about her and the other child in a story way, even with "once upon a time... " since young children understand this as a beginning to the story. Unfortunately Trump seems stuck in this little child who did not get their needs met warp, that has him as an "enfant terrible." Perhaps, if he has dimensia, he will grow only worse.
Linda, I LOVE how you helped your daughter understand the complex, intersubjective world of human behavior without moralizing about "right and wrong." I'm guessing that she felt understood and accepted by her mom...the most important aspect if we want children to develop capacities for empathy with self and others. I love the "tell me a story" framework. I'd love it if you'd write some "tell me a story" picture books for parents to read with their toddlers and young kids. It would be a great model for parents and a great source of compassion for the slings and arrows of painful interactions that children go through almost daily. "Once upon a time..." :)
Thank you Madeline. I had not thought of picture books. It is a great idea.
It's a phycological mindset without social conscience that fuels MAGA. Narrow thinking without a thought to humanity in the pursuit of individual goals is destructive to society. I know a simple concept involving compassion is considered weakness nowadays. Consider the advice of Bobby Azarian, a neuroscientist,
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/a-neuroscientist-explains-why-maga-supporters-refuse-to-accept-trump-s-91-felony-charges/ar-AA1gB4jH
Capitalism as now practiced being practically unchecked by our government also robs working families of the opportunity to succeed.
I am taking this on because: someone comes up with a fantastic idea, they make a lot of money.
What is the first thing they do?
Sell the idea!
I am thinking of writing on substack.
Have a problem because my 'life' experience is alien to most people.
I do not want to charge anything for people to hear this BUT the longer I am on substack I realise 'money' is what people want.
I am not rich or powerful BUT I have a voice and often I am called names: Troll. etc.
NO-one listens anymore!
Almost no one. Aristotle still demands accuracy. His Spirit lives on!
Holy smokes. That is one hell of truth telling.
If the news media here in the US are to save face (from decades of omitting the imperative, as well as coddling the public with their incessant everybody happy nothing going on here nursery rhyme "features") then they'd be wise to pick up on A LOT of Thom's writings and research. For all of our networks, yesterday would be a great time to start.
I gather it's Thom's own crew that put up segments on YouTube. Since I spend a lot of time out of reach of radio or FSTV access, I'm grateful for that.
The root of all evil is a lack of having a conscience. When babies are raised to love Faith and hate facts, they get detached from the common reality and invent their own realities, where narcissism is welcomed. Since most of the world is raised in violent religious societies, they get strength from one another's insanity. Not caring about right or wrong, morals or immorality. But they are nuttier than fruit cakes. They become easy picking for rational thinking Nations, like "China". United we stand, divided we fall. The sane can not stand with the insane, or vice versa. The billionaire globalists see America as a juicy steak. The plutocrats have eaten the middle class alive the last 60 or so years and will turn her citizens over to the rational and intelligent thinking Chinese. Including making China the world reserve currency. This must have been planned back in the 1960s or '70s. Pre Carter and Reagan. Loot America and then torch her. Blame it on the hippies. Russia is killing off all of its undesirables with this Ukrainian war, being shot up with American arms. In the war with China, American undesirables will be sent to the front lines. That includes the intellectuals first. Anyone who spouts truth and reason and logic will be the first to go, after them, all of the takers, the criminals locked in prisons, the welfare recipients the churches will be glad to indoctrinate the children, and of course the homeless. Old people will just be left to starve or die of diseases, slowly and painfully. This is how greedy libertarians who are psychopaths think. So much for white supremacy. The libertarians are not racist. They like to torture all equally.
I love the line: "Blame it on the hippies." Code for "looters." But also shorthand for "undesirables," who are basically any creatives who question orthodoxy that supports supine conventionality. My Mom really hated "dirty, LAZY" hippies: bragged about she'd never give them a ride because she had EARNED her car. What you end up with is those who have the most to lose always being able to be manipulated into punching down.
Thanks so much, Thom, for this illuminating, if utterly chilling, story that connects "libertarianism" to sociopathy. We need to continue to understand the psychological roots of what gets converted into a highfalutin' ideology. Usually the roots are in very early, lived experience with one's earliest caregivers.
Before the trauma of the Bolsheviks smashing her father's store and appropriating it for "the state," I wonder what else happened to Ayn Rand in earliest childhood. My experience as a psychoanalytically trained psychotherapist with a background in early childhood development, leads me to wonder if there were traumatic lapses of empathy in her upbringing. People who end up idealizing the cold, I-IT use of other people above the I-Thou of mutual empathy, do so because they didn't feel the consistent love of an adoring parent when they were infants and toddlers. The relational configurations of our first three years create the templates for our later beliefs. Those beliefs emerge from our lived experience and if one hasn't experienced reliable, mutual affection and emotional security with at least one, attuned caregiver, one has no template for that kind of relationship.
As far as I understand, David and Charles Koch were raised by a Hitler-idealizing, German nanny because their parents wanted them to have a "strict" upbringing. No love or affection for them...just adherence to the rules of cold, imperious adults. I believe that made them the voracious-for-power adolescents and adults that they became. The craving for power over others is often the result of feeling utterly powerless to get what you need in earliest childhood, and what infants and toddlers need most is attention, attunement, and love. TFG didn't get these either at the developmentally-neccessary time of infancy to 3 years.
I'm guessing that there's something in Ayn Rand's earliest years that accounts for her idealization of extreme, conscience-less attitudes and behavior. I'm also guessing that the trauma of the Bolshevik cruelty only further cemented an attitude that had already formed deep within her psyche from infantile experience; that one is utterly on one's own, that if you don't prioritize your own needs exclusively, you won't survive, and that doing so is a virtue worthy of idealizing and asserting to the rest of the world. (But in your old age, when you once again experience your need for help from others, and this normal need can no longer be denied, then it's OK to revert to depending on the state to help you.)
I've been connecting this trauma to the Florida Cubans, but I'm not sure it's too "creative" to connect it to Palestinians. Castro jackboots down the door of your plantation mansion. Jews chop down your family's 100-year-old olive grove. I have not followed the news about an Armenian diaspora in progress right now. the "Heimat" is lost, and all there is left is to hate. There is no end to it in human history, but such events put to shame petty outrage over masks or vaccines or a closed Forest Service road or grazing fees or the route out of town a raped woman takes to where. It is crazy-time.
Love hearing your take on this since you actually know what you are talking about. Ayn was 12 when the everything blew-up in her world. Puberty. I could talk about what that does, but I would bore even myself.
From what I have read, the nature/nurture aspect of root cause for the anti-socials is going to take a long time time to unravel. Brain scans are helping, but I am waiting and watching for any breakthroughs.
Ayn Rand was a sociopath. She was amoral.
Great food for thought in this Report. You can speak two languages, write successful books, and be considered an intellectual and still die broke using every system you railed against.
Intelligence has nothing to do with emotional maturity and mental health. My take-away from that Rand interview with Mike Wallace was that she thought of herself as "the world". I guess that left the rest of us in the real world the "objects" in her objectivism. Talk about having limited vision. Talk about arrested development. She looked crazy and she was, so does Trump and so did Hitler. Cultists like crazy.
This battle against insanity and Libertarian-ism might not be like Normandy, but it is just as important that the allies win it!
Thanks Thom for the artful and thorough description of the mind of a psychopathic sociopath from Hickman to Rand and today's Republican party..
This is a keeper, like all of your reports and books
I too read Ayn Rand many years ago as an undergrad. Even as a young, inexperienced boy It did not take me very long to conclude that her characters were not believable. ATLAS SHRUGGED and THE FOUNTAINHEAD were so repulsive, it was difficult to finish them. I had no idea all these years that her characters were based upon actual, real human beings.
Many years after reading her I began to study serial killers as part of my research into Criminology. Now, It appears that her characters are based on an actual criminal in Los Angeles who exhibits the behavioral characteristics of a serial killer. It was not necessary for Hickman to kill the girl in order for him to carry out his scheme of extortion. The brutal strangulation and dismemberment are the kinds of things serial killers do. He committed those apparently gratuitous, brutal acts because he derived pleasure from them. The terror, horror, and brutality were ends in themselves; as is the case with serial killers throughout history.; going all the way back to Gille de Rais in France and Vlad Tepes in Transylvania during the fifteenth century.
Thank you Mr. Hartman for enlightening us. This is all new to me. Furthermore it does make sense in a macabre sort of way. The foundations of Libertarianism are truly: cruelty, hatred, and a fetish about power expressed through bloodletting; minor themes found in the history of western and Asian cultures. As I think about the Contract theorists Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau I am reminded of Hobbes's claim that the life of Man is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." I am not a follower of Hobbes. But I do not ignore him either.
Good for your youthfull instincts of revulsion! A little expansion of the Hobbes quote: "Life in the state of Nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." One infers he was calling humanity to rise above those conditions. Oh, well....
Vlad Tempe. I read the Sultan of Turkey, had been sending forces into Transylvania, Vlad the impaler, captured them, then shoved a stake up the anus, as a warning to the Sultan,it worked, but I later learned he did the same to his enemies, other than the Turks, I can't believe that he impaled his subjects, because doing so, would disenchant the populace, and a tyrant still needs the support of his people, even with the support of the GESTAPO, and the NKVD,KGB, FSB, tyrants need support of the people. Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Putin maintain control by use of mass media, which was not available until the Guttenberg press, and more effectively via over the air broadcasting.
Off the cuff, I wander what the folks of Tempe, AR would think of their towns name, fi they knew.
For centuries the Moslems had been trying to invade Europe and they failed. The reason for that failure was the unfortunate geographic fact that the Valley Vienna is in must be successfully traversed. The Moslem commanders had to funnel their troops through that valley. It became a valley of death them as the European armies were always at an advantage there and defeated the Moslems.
By the fifteenth century the decadent Christian Aristocrats who lived in the valleys which the Invaders must pass through had developed such a great fear of the brutal Moslem armies that they would leave their villages in the low country and hide out in their mountain fortresses when a Moslem army approached. Thus leaving the poor peasants alone to face the Moslems.
Then along came Vlad Tepes who was just as courageous and brutal as the invaders, plus he was a superior military man. He stayed put and took on the Moslems, defeating them thereby preventing a catastrophic invasion of Europe. Thus he was, in the hearts of the peasants a savior, hero. He remained their hero even though he subsequently, in his maniacal bloodlust, impaled thousands of his fellow citizens for his own entertainment. It is recored that he impaled 15,000 in one of his paroxysms of fury. As his victims screamed in terror and pain he strolled among them eating his lunch and cavorting with whores.
This altogether repulsive and horrifying person was, when just a boy, given by his own father to the Sultan of Turkey as a hostage to guarantee his father's adherence to a pact he had formed with the Sultan. Vlad was reared in the court of the Sultan among his eunuchs at Topkapi. It is not historically certain as to whether or not Vlad was castrated there. Probably not because the Sultan did not want to insult Vlad's powerful father with whom he had an agreement. But it is certain that Vlad learned a great deal about Moslem culture and military affairs while he was a boy-hostage. Possibly this had much to do with his subsequent brutality and military prowess later as a man.
Incidentally, there were several different kinds of religious male castration among both Christians and Moslems in Medieval times. Women often had their clitoris removed, a practice still found in some countries. A practice the UN has spoken against. Ain't religion wonderful?
Finally, the name of Vlad's father was Dracul. In his native tongue his son is called Dracula.
The story of Gille de Rais is equally bloodcurdling.
Gerald, I don't know anything about Vlad the Impaler but my guess is that he was repeatedly homosexually abused, ridiculed and humiliated, rather than castrated. The way he tortured and killed thousands in narcissistic fits of rage and revenge seems like an enactment of homosexual rape, only this time, HE had the power to do the hurting and it was the other person who screamed in pain and was utterly powerless. It was extremely common for children to be used and abused this way for thousands of years, especially in the courts of monarchs. Children so abused often grow up to unconsciously re-enact some form of their abuse.
I would also wonder what had happened to Hickman in HIS childhood to make him such a grotesque murderer...what kind of abuse did he suffer in infancy and toddlerhood that lay dormant in his unconscious mind until something terrible re-awakened his blind fury to annihilate.
The price we pay for abusing and shaming little boys is that they often become psychopathic killers when they grow physically capable of avenging the abused child they once were. Here, I'm also thinking of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and Putin... :(
Egads!