The question is often asked how a society that in its day-to-day workings exhibits culture and lawfulness can also support behavior at high levels that’s criminal. The question was asked of German society in the 1930s and could well be asked of the US today.
A good answer is given by Carolyn Baker
“One of the main factors to consider in terms of how a society can be taken over by a group of pathological deviants is that the psychopaths’ only limitation is the participation of susceptible individuals within that given society. Lobaczewski gives an average figure for the most active deviants of approximately 6% of a given population. (1% essential psychopaths and up to 5% other psychopathies and characteropathies.) The essential psychopath is at the center of the web. The others form the first tier of the psychopath’s control system.
The next tier of such a system is composed of individuals who were born normal, but are either already warped by long-term exposure to psychopathic material via familial or social influences, or who, through psychic weakness have chosen to meet the demands of psychopathy for their own selfish ends. Numerically, according to Lobaczewski, this group is about 12% of a given population under normal conditions.
So approximately 18% of any given population is active in the creation and imposition of a Pathocracy. The 6% group constitutes the Pathocratic nobility and the 12% group forms the new bourgeoisie, whose economic situation is the most advantageous.
When you understand the true nature of psychopathic influence, that it is conscienceless, emotionless, selfish, cold and calculating, and devoid of any moral or ethical standards, you are horrified, but at the same time everything suddenly begins to makes sense. Our society is ever more soulless because the people who lead it and who set the example are soulless – they literally have no conscience.
My Comment:
To this I will add that the pathocracy also exhibits and encourages the exhibition of sentiments that mimic and substitute for emotion. Various kinds of false sentimentalities and emotionalism mimic authentic emotion to create a facade that deceives the onlooker. One could go further and say that this distortion extends from the affective life to the cognitive, where a false and superficial “logic” takes the place of genuine reasoning….
Welcome to the integrated spectacle.
I tend to think of psychopathy as a spectrum disorder where a psychopath is an individual that manipulates, controls, or uses others as objects. This can be depicted by a bell-curve distribution with one tail represented by murderers, rapists, politicians (by far the most destructive), and often businessmen. The other tail, with little or no psychopathic behavior, is occupied by those with Autistic Spectrum Disorders, who tend to be asocial with little desire to run someone else’s life.
I attribute the rise of modern technological civilization (and individualism) to the development of Asperger’s Syndrome (the Engineer’s Disorder), a part of the Autistic Spectrum, and mankind’s proclivity to destroy civilization to the extreme forms of psychopathy of the Psychopathic Spectrum Brain.
The majority of the bell curve is represented by those with mild to moderate psychopathy. The list of ways people manipulate or control others is seemingly endless and most people have plenty of experience with both sides of that equation. In my opinion, this is where civilization is made or lost.
If some force drives the bell curve towards increased psychopathy, civilization tends to decrease or be destroyed. Like now. Conversely, decreases in psychopathy translates into increases in asociality, its cousin individuality, and asperger’s engineer-driven progress. The likely condition of the american colonies.
There is a likely biological mechanism to increase the level of psychopathy in a given population and it’s at work now.