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''Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven!''

Benz ''Fallen Angels''
Devoted to a study of those who are damned by their own thoughts and deeds: the ''neo-liberals''.
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Love is the subtlest force in the world		 
Mohandas ''Bapu'' Gandhi
Psychopathic killers, however, are not mad, according to accepted legal and psychiatric standards. Their acts result not from a deranged mind but from a cold, calculating rationality combined with a chilling inability to treat others as thinking, feeling human beings. Such morally incomprehensible behavior, exhibited by a seemingly normal person, leaves us feeling bewildered and helpless.
Dr. Robert D. Hare
Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us
While not deeply vicious, he carries disaster lightly in each hand.
H. Cleckly
                                                       The Mask of Sanity
[G]ood people are rarely suspicious: they cannot imagine others doing the things they themselves are incapable of doing; usually they accept the undramatic solution as the correct one, and let matters rest there. Then too, the normal are inclided to visualize the [psychopath] as one who's as monstrous in appearance as he is in mind, which is about as from from the truth as one could well get .... These monsters of real life usually looked and behaved in a more normal manner than their actually normal brothers and sisters; they presented a more convincing picture of virtue than virtue presented of itself - just as the the wax rosebud or the plastic peach seemed more perfect to the eye, more what the mind thought a rosebud or a peach should be, than the imperfect original from which it had been modelled. [emphasis added - bdt]
William March,
                                                            The Bad Seed
                                                (quoted in Without Conscience)
"Because there is no cure for adult sociopathy, the only useful option is prevention. ... child psychiatrist Jack Westman estimates that each typical sociopath will cost society $3 million over the course of his lifetime."
David T. Lykken
                                               The Antisocial Personalities
                                 Social Science & Modern Society (Dec. 1996)
We carefully - rationally in fact - assign blame for our crimes to the irrational impulse. In this way we merely shut our eyes to the central and fundamental misunderstanding: reason is no more than structure. And structure is most easily controlled by those who feel themselves to be free of the cumbersome weight represented by common sense and humanism. Structure suits best those whose talents lie in manipulation and who have a taste for power in its purest form. 

Thus the Age of Reason has turned out to be the Age of Structure; a time when, in the absence of purpose, the drive for power as a value in itself has become the principal indicator of social approval. And the winning of power has become the measure of social merit.
John Ralston Saul
                                                       Voltaire's Bastards
                                     The Dictatorship of Reason in the West
What seems different about the psychopath is that he is peculiarly unaffected or detached emotionally from the knowledge that he gains by putting himself in your shoes. Thus, although he is able to very quickly glean during the briefest of interaction with another person a lot of very useful information about what makes him tick, this knowledge is simply knowledge to be used or not as the politics of the situation dictate.
[ ... ]
His eyes were moist as he accurately described how the woman must have felt during and after the attack. But later in the same interview, after a rather jocular rapport had been established, this boy blurted out, "I don't know what all the fuss is about. The old bag only had a dozen scratches". To my knowledge, in all his subsequent years at mental hospital, he stuck to all the right lines of remorse which he quickly learned were more appropriate and useful. The bright psychopath, the experienced psychopath, doesn't stumble like that very often. Although with luck and the right question at the right time in the right place about how the other person's feelings affected him, will produce a pause, or a puzzled look, or even rarely the question "how am I supposed to feel about it". ... [emphasis added - bdt]
Excerpted from The Partial Psychopath a paper presented at the 
68th Annual Meeting of the Ontario Psychiatric Association,1988
by E.T. Barker M.D. and B. Shipton Ph.D
Public concern about crime has never been greater. Perhaps most troubling  are seemingly senseless and dispassionate acts of violence, particularly those committed by young people. In a frantic search for understanding, we readily blame upbringing, poverty, flawed environment, or an 
ineffective criminal justice system. All these may be important, but we tend to ignore another part of the picture: the enormous social, economic, and personal suffering inflicted by a few people whose antisocial attitudes and behavior result less from social forces than from an inherent sense of entitlement and an incapacity for emotional connection to the rest of humanity. For these individuals - psychopaths - social rules have no constraining force, and the idea of a common good is merely a puzzling and inconvenient abstraction."
Robert D. Hare
                         The Harvard Mental Health Letter, September 1995
                                 Psychopaths: New Trends in Research
[ Is sadism (i.e. cruelty for its own sake, as distinct from the willingness to be cruel) necessarily an attribute of psychopathy? sociopathy? anti-social personality disorder? Would the pathological sense of 'entitlement' not be severely destructive even if categorized as 'a'-social rather than 'anti'-social? And, if cruelty is ever justified as tactic, would this not give one a taste for it? bdt 10SEP96 ]

"We may live without poetry, music, art;
We may live without conscience and live without heart;
We may live without friends; we may live without books;
But civilized man cannot live without cooks."
Lucile [1860], pt.1 canto 2, st.19
                                              Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton;
                                            Earl of Lytton [Owen Meredith]
Talking about American news sources such as the New York Post, the author of _Cocaine Politics_ recounts:
A friend of mine told me he knew about the Oliver North story for two years.
"You know why I didn't break the story," he said.
Wanting to hear him say it I replied, "No, why?"
"Olie North was my best source"
[ Fallen-angels recruit us; we act in collusion with them, as though in our own best interests. bdt ]
Mohandas Karamchad Gandhi - Seven Sins
     1. Wealth without work
     2. Pleasure without conscience
     3. Knowledge without character
     4. Commerce without morality
     5. Science without humanity
     6. Worship without sacrifice
     7. Politics without principle
 
 
Links to resources concerning Deep Politics
  • Robert D. Hare:
  • Internet Mental Health ( mentalhealth.com )
  • Empathic Parenting - Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children

    • Deep Politics

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