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by James Corbett
are in fact real?
What if their paranoid fantasies are not fantasies at all?
In other words, what if it's not the political dissidents who are crazy,
but the
politicians? about the dark history and the even more disturbing present of political psychopathy.
JAMES CORBETT:
In the hands of a tyrant, these aren't mere words, not impartial descriptions of thought or behavior. They're weapons.
After all, there's nothing more damning, more completely dehumanizing, than to call someone "crazy."
But sometimes "crazy" isn't just a figure of speech. Sometimes it's a diagnosis.
And as long as there have been those willing to diagnose others as "insane," there have been those who have sought to use this as a label for their political enemies.
And why not?
Now, the idea that would-be rulers would cynically use the "lunatic" cudgel against their political enemies is bad enough.
But,
In other words,
You're about to learn about the dark history and the even more disturbing present of political psychopathy...
Prepare yourself for DISSENT INTO MADNESS.
This is The Corbett Report...
1. The Bad Old Days
The history of psychology is, to a large extent, the history of cruel and unusual punishments meted out by rulers on political dissidents in the name of "curing the mentally disturbed."
That psychology has always been a convenient tool for the ruling class to wield against dissenters may seem like a controversial observation at first glance.
But, this is precisely what the most mainstream of establishment sources tell us... when they're talking about the establishment's enemies, that is.
To be sure, MacNeil and Lehrer and the other American critics of Soviet psychiatry - like Dr. Walter Reich, who wrote a 6,000-word expose on "The World of Soviet Psychiatry" for The New York Times in 1983 - weren't wrong.
They just weren't telling the whole truth...
The horrors of the Soviet psychiatric system - in which political dissidents were routinely diagnosed with "sluggish schizophrenia," psychiatric hospitals were used as temporary prisons during periods of protest, and troublesome rebels were kept in medically induced comas or drug-induced catatonic states for extended periods of time - has been well-documented in numerous mainstream sources, both popular and academic.
But these horrors were given their most poignant expression in the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
As Reich correctly observes in his report,
But, by a funny coincidence, these concerns only ever seem to come up when psychiatry is being "misused" in countries that are on the US State Department's enemies list.
There are no shortage of sources that will tell you about:
...and any number of similar examples of psychiatric abuse by governments at war with or in the crosshairs of the US government.
Often excluded from this analysis, however, are the horrific abuses that psychiatrists in the West have inflicted on their patients in the name of state security.
While the history books will rightly condemn the horrors of the Nazi eugenic sterilization program, they seldom explore the roots of that program.
As it turns out, those roots were in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
What's more, Ernst Rüdin - the director of the also-Rockefeller-funded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry and one of the key architects of Germany's eugenics program - modeled the Nazi eugenics legislation on America's own "Model Eugenical Sterilization Law."
In fact, America's first professor of psychology, James McKeen Cattell, helped bring the eugenics pseudoscience to the shores of America in the first place.
Having befriended Francis Galton, the progenitor of eugenics, during a trip to England in 1887, Cattell returned to the US with an enthusiasm for the idea.
He later wrote a letter to Galton bragging,
Still further back in history, Benjamin Rush - one of the founding fathers of the United States and the man officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as the "father of American psychiatry" - made early contributions to the weaponization of psychiatry by inventing a number of mental disorders to pathologize dissent...
The most notable of these made-up disorders was "anarchia," a type of madness Rush defined as,
And what did this "father of American psychiatry" prescribe for those he deemed to be suffering from mental illness?
Well, for starters, he,
He also invented two mechanical devices for the treatment of the insane: a "tranquilizing chair," in which,
Rush's apprentice, physician and outspoken germ theory critic Samuel Cartwright, made his own contribution to the field by inventing a disorder he named "drapetomania", or the disease causing negroes [slaves] to run away:
Yes, the history of psychiatry is replete with examples of political dissidents, unruly populations, or other "social undesirables" being labeled as insane and sent to the madhouse... or worse.
But that was then, many would be inclined to argue. This is now.
Surely psychiatry isn't used to suppress dissent anymore, is it?...
2. The Bad New Days
Yes, of course psychiatry is still used as a weapon to be wielded against political dissidents.
And I'm not just talking about psychiatric repression in some backward, evil dictatorship like Russia. (Although, to be sure, there's that, too.)
No, once again, it is the "liberal," "enlightened," "free and democratic" West that is leading the way in weaponizing psychiatry against the masses.
And, incredibly, the wielders of this psychiatric weapon don't try to hide the fact but have instead actively sought to codify it in their "bible."
Since 1952, the American Psychiatric Association has published the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the DSM, as a guideline for the classification and diagnoses of mental health issues.
Commonly referred to as the psychiatric diagnostic bible, the DSM, according to the APA itself,
Critics have long questioned the influence that Big Pharma has had in pressuring the APA to diagnose more and more behaviour as "abnormal" in order to prescribe pharmaceutical interventions to a greater and greater percentage of the public.
Concerns over Big Pharma's influence on the creation of the DSM are not trivial. In 2012, a study led by University of Massachusetts-Boston researcher Lisa Cosgrove noted that 69% of the DSM-5 task force members had ties to the pharmaceutical industry, including paid work as consultants and spokespersons for drug manufacturers.
On certain panels, the conflict of interest was even more profound:
If the DSM task force members' goal is to make sure that more and more pharmaceuticals are sold, then by every measure they've been remarkably successful.
Clinical psychologist Bruce Levine, who has spent decades ringing the alarm bell about the ways in which his profession is being used to repress legitimate political dissent, explains:
As we shall see, the weaponization of psychology against those independent freethinkers who tend to question authority is not some vague, amorphous concern about a Big Pharma boondoggle that's hurting people in the pocketbook.
Rather, this weapon is now being used against critics of the biosecurity agenda and others who dare point out that the globalist, transhuman emperor 'is wearing no clothes'...
But if it is true that the study of the mind has been weaponized and that that weapon is being deployed against conspiracy realists, the obvious question then becomes:
3. Who Loaded the Weapon?
In October of 1945, George Brock Chisholm - the man who would go on to serve as the first Director-General of the World Health Organization and the man who helped spearhead the World Federation for Mental Health - delivered an incredibly candid lecture in which he laid out his plans for steering the profession of psychiatry in a bold new direction.
Published in 1946 as "The Reestablishment of Peacetime Society," the lecture includes a proclamation that psychiatrists should take it upon themselves to rid the population of the concept of good and evil entirely:
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Chisholm's call to action was taken up by the British military.
The "challenge" of "freeing the race" from the "crippling burden of good and evil" was taken up by British military psychiatrist Colonel John Rawlings Rees, the first president of Chisholm's World Federation of Mental Health and chair of the infamous Tavistock Institute from 1933 to 1947.
In 1940, Rees gave an address to the annual meeting of the UK's National Council for Mental Hygiene in which he laid out in predictably militaristic terms how this ambitious plan for reforming the public psyche was to be achieved.
In "Strategic Planning for Mental Health," Rees, after claiming that the psychiatrists of the council,
...asserts that they must aim to make that point of view,
He then launches into a startling confession:
Then Rees brazenly proclaims that,
...before reminding his audience once again of the need for secrecy if this plan to influence the development of the public psyche is to succeed:
So what were Rees and his fellow travelers really aiming at in their "fifth column" campaign to "attack" the professions and propagandize the public?
His true intentions are revealed through his work for the British military - including his alleged drugging, poisoning and mesmerizing of Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer of the Nazi party, who was captured and held by the British for decades after making a still-unexplained solo flight to Scotland in 1941, and through his work at the Tavistock Institute, where he attempted to mould public opinion in the UK to his liking.
As The Campaigner magazine explained in a Tavistock exposé published in 1978:
That work, the article elaborates, included advising Rees' superiors how they,
In other words, Rees' work centered on the Problem-Reaction-Solution method of mass social control that Corbett Reporteers will be very familiar with by now.
It should be no surprise, then, to learn that Rees' research heavily influenced the operations of a budding young intelligence service that was then forming in the United States:
Indeed, the CIA has always been interested in weaponizing psychiatry as a way of achieving success in their covert operations.
In fact, the CIA even openly advertises job opportunities for psychiatrists to,
But, when most people think of the CIA and weaponized psychiatry, they think of MKUltra and mind control.
As even the Wikipedia article on the subject admits, the CIA's "Project MKUltra" was,
There is much that the public still does not know about this project, its forerunner programs, Project Bluebird and Project ARTICHOKE, and the depths to which agents of the US government sank to discover ways of manipulating, melding, erasing or reprogramming individuals' psyches.
But what we do know about the program is chilling enough.
One series of experiments, presided over by Sidney Gottlieb, involved administering LSD to unwitting Americans, including mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts and prostitutes.
This included "Operation Midnight Climax," in which unsuspecting men were drugged and lured to CIA safe houses by prostitutes on the CIA payroll.
Their sexual activity was monitored behind one-way mirrors and was used to study the effect of sexual blackmail and the use of mind-altering substances in field operations.
Another experiment, dubbed MKULTRA Subproject 68, was overseen by the esteemed psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron.
When brought to light, the program was identified as an attempt to refine methods of medical torture for the purpose of extracting information from unwilling sources and was condemned.
Lawsuits regarding the blatantly illegal experimentation conducted by Cameron continue into the current era.
Although MKUltra officially "ended" after its exposure in the 1970s, the CIA has not stopped employing psychiatrists to find new and innovative ways to psychologically torment their opponents.
In May 2002, Martin Seligman, an influential American professor of psychology and a former president of the American Psychological Association, delivered a lecture at the San Diego Naval Base explaining how his research could help American personnel to - in his own words,
Among the hundred or so people in attendance at that lecture was one particularly enthused fan of Seligman's work:
Although Seligman had no idea of it at the time, Mitchell was - as we now know - one of the key architects of the CIA's illegal torture program.
Naturally, Mitchell's interest in Seligman's talk was not in how it could be applied to help American personnel overcome learned helplessness and resist torture but rather how it could be used to induce learned helplessness in a CIA target and enhance torture.
As it turns out, Mitchell's theory (that "producing learned helplessness in a Qaeda interrogation subject might ensure that he would comply with his captor's demands") was bogus.
More experienced interrogators objected at the time, noting that torture would only induce a prisoner to say what his captor wants, not what he knows.
What those interrogators didn't understand was that extracting false confessions from prisoners was actually the point of the CIA torture program.
It was "confessions" extracted under torture, after all, that went on to form the backbone of the 9/11 Commission Report, with a full quarter of all of the report's footnotes deriving from torture testimony.
Yes,
But, as it turns out, one of the simplest and easiest techniques for controlling dissent is simply to pathologize it.
As we are beginning to see, simply declaring resistance to the status quo to be a form of mental disorder can be an exceptionally powerful tool for silencing opposition.
4. Pathologizing Conspiracy
One of the most popular articles to be written in recent decades is titled "Why Do People Believe in Conspiracies?"
It starts by noting the worrying rise in the number of people who believe in wild, outlandish theories about how people in positions of power conspire to maintain their influence and expand their wealth.
The article's author then cites a psychologist, who explains that,
Next, the report offers advice to those who are seeking to disabuse anyone who has fallen for this conspiracy claptrap of their delusional notions.
But this article usually ends on a positive note: if this wild conspiracy theorist you're talking to hasn't completely lost touch with reality, then it may be possible to talk them down from the ledge.
You can gently create some cognitive dissonance in their mind by pointing out that every conspiracy that has ever occurred in history has been exposed by whistleblowers and reported on by journalists, and therefore there is no such thing as a secret conspiracy.
If they're of sound mind, this will be enough. Your confused friend will see the light and learn to trust government and authority once again.
Do you want to read this article? Would you like a link? Well, I don't have one link for you; I have dozens.
You see, the curious thing about this "Why Do People Believe in Conspiracies?" article is that it hasn't been written just once or twice. It's been written hundreds of times by hundreds of different journalists, and it's been published by ...and even that most prestigious of journalistic institutions, goop. (Yes, goop!)
And it's not only in written form.
It's also a video report that's been filed by, Oh, and did I mention it's also a podcast?
Well, it is, and it's been produced by,
Then the dinosaur media pundits and their psychiatric "experts" have a message for you:
Don't believe me? Well...
5. First They Came for the Truthers...
The idea that those who believe in conspiracy theories are mentally unsound is, of course, not a new one.
Witness how the subject was treated on Barney Miller, a popular American television sitcom from the late 1970s that centered on the exploits of a cast of detectives in a New York City Police Department station house.
Or take the "tin foil hat" conceit.
As the crack journalists over at Vice helpfully explain, the concept of wearing a tin foil hat to protect one's brain from government mind control was introduced into popular culture via Julian Huxley's 1927 story, "The Tissue-Culture King."
In Huxley's tale,
Since then, the "tin foil hat-wearing madman" has gone on to become a ubiquitous pop culture trope, employed by lazy TV writers as an easy way to signal to the audience that someone is suffering from paranoid delusions about vast government conspiracies.
Or take President Lyndon Johnson's advisor, John P. Roche, who wrote a letter to the Times Literary Supplement that was picked up and reported on by Time in January of 1968.
In the letter, Roche dismisses conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination as the gospel of,
Or take the various examples of the pathologization of conspiracy theorizing pointed out by Lance deHaven-Smith in his modern-day classic, Conspiracy Theory in America:
Certainly, there is no shortage of commentators perpetuating the idea that conspiracy theorizing is a form of mental illness.
But it wasn't until the post-9/11 era of terrornoia panic accompanying the rise of the Homeland Security state that the trigger was pulled on the loaded gun that is the psychiatric weapon.
Of course, the post-9/11 decade was filled with academics, journalists, and talking heads of various stripes conflating conspiracy theorizing with mental illness, exactly as the pre-9/11 era had been.
Heeding George W. Bush's injunction to,
...political commentators of all stripes began a campaign of vitriol directed against 9/11 truthers that began to ratchet the conspiracy/insanity rhetoric to new heights.
Bill Maher's "joke" that truthers should,
...helped to fertilize the soil for the likes of Winnipeg Sun columnist Stephen Ripley, who then "diagnosed" 9/11 truthers as suffering from "paranoid delusions."
These pronouncements prepared the public for the fulminations of TV talking heads on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum that,
But the campaign to demonize 9/11 truthers as psychologically disturbed and potentially violent criminals who need to be taken off the streets hasn't stopped at harsh words and strong rhetoric.
Many examples of conspiracy theorists in general and 9/11 truthers in particular being held for psychiatric evaluation against their will could be cited here, but one case from The Corbett Report archives will serve to make the point.
It's the case of Claire Swinney, a New Zealand journalist who in 2006 was - in her own words - "Held In A Psychiatric Ward & Called 'Delusional' For Saying 9/11 Was An Inside Job."
Swinney's story - which she recounted in an interview on The Corbett Report in 2009 - is remarkable for a number of reasons.
But for those who believe in the legal safeguards that exist to prevent the abuse of the psychiatric weapon, the most concerning fact of all is that Swinney's remarkable eleven-day ordeal in forcible psychiatric confinement - a confinement that included forced medication - was that it occurred in direct contravention of the New Zealand government's own laws.
In fact, not only does the country's Mental Health Act clearly state that forcible psychiatric detention is not permitted if it is based solely on a person's political beliefs, but, as Swinney notes, the medical personnel who authorized her confinement weren't even familiar with this provision.
The compulsory psychiatric confinement of someone with no history of mental illness solely for expressing a belief in 9/11 truth is shocking enough.
That this detention took place not in the United States and not in the immediate aftermath of the events, but in New Zealand some five years later, defies justification.
Sadly, this isn't an isolated incident.
As we enter the biosecurity era, authorities around the world are working to set the precedent that people who resist the medical authorities' diktats can be diagnosed as mentally ill, stripped of their professional credentials and even arrested.
An example of this phenomenon that should be familiar to those in The Corbett Report audience is that of Dr. Meryl Nass.
Dr. Nass is an internal medicine specialist with 42 years of medical experience who had her medical license suspended by the Board of Licensure in Medicine, Maine's state medical regulator, for refusing to toe the government-approved line on COVID-19 treatments.
Incredibly, in addition to suspending her medical license, state regulators also ordered her to undergo a psychiatric evaluation for the thought-crime of disbelieving the government's COVID narrative.
One of the most startling stories of psychiatric intimidation of a COVID skeptic, however, is that of Dr. Thomas Binder.
Dr. Binder is a cardiologist who has had a private medical practice in Switzerland for 24 years.
As Taylor Hudak reported for The Last American Vagabond late last year, Dr. Binder's life was turned upside down in 2020 when he found he could not sit idly by while the entire medical profession lost its collective mind.
Dr. Binder's alleged crime?
A series of blog posts attempting to alert the public to the unscientific nature of the lockdowns, the masking and social distancing requirements, and other restrictions being imposed on the public in the name of the "pandemic."
To those who remain ignorant of the history of psychiatry's use as a weapon of political oppression, this is incomprehensible enough. But what happened next almost defies belief, even among those of us already in the know.
After studying Binder's blog posts and emails, the police determined that there were no grounds for issuing an arrest warrant.
Nonetheless, they did send Dr. Binder for a mental health evaluation. Incredibly, the doctor in charge of Binder's psychiatric evaluation invented a diagnosis of "corona insanity" - which is not a recognized clinical condition - and ordered him to be placed in a psychiatric unit.
After a period of evaluation, Binder was offered an ultimatum: remain in the psychiatric hospital for six weeks or return home on condition that he take a neuroleptic medication.
The incredible and flagrantly illegal actions taken in the forcible psychiatric detention of "conspiracy theorists" and political dissenters like Swinney and Binder serve more than one purpose.
Beyond temporarily sidelining the person in question (both Swinney and Binder returned to their work critiquing government narratives after their release) and beyond throwing their public reputation into doubt by forever associating their names with a false psychiatric diagnosis, the wielders of the psychiatric weapon achieve something of even greater value when they engage in such tactics.
That is, the stories of these psychiatric detentions serve as warnings to the general public: when you dissent on sensitive political issues, you risk being institutionalized for your beliefs.
Rationally speaking, it's utterly implausible to lock everyone who subscribes to a conspiracy theory in a padded cell.
Even establishment sources readily admit that 50% of the public believe in some conspiracy or other, including the 49% of New Yorkers who, in 2004, claimed that the US government,
...and including the whopping 81% of Americans who declared in 2001 that they believed there was a conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.
But, unfortunately for us, those who are brandishing this psychiatric weapon are not rational at all. In fact, as we shall see, those in political power who seek to diagnose their critics with mental illness are themselves suffering from one of the greatest psychopathologies of them all....
6. Our (Mis-)Leaders are Psychopaths
Tony Blair - Dick Cheney - Hillary Clinton
They are "remorseless predators who use charm, intimidation, and, if necessary, impulsive and cold-blooded violence to attain their ends."
They "ruthlessly plow their way through life, leaving a broad trail of broken hearts, shattered expectations, and empty wallets."
They have,
We all know what a psychopath is, or at least we think we do.
But if that is what we think of when we think of a psychopath, we find that once again we are the victims of Hollywood predictive programming, constructing our understanding of reality not from actual, lived experience but from fictional characters dreamt up by writers and projected on a screen.
In the real world, psychopaths are a subset of the population who lack a conscience.
The full implications of this strange mental condition are not apparent to the vast majority of us who do possess a conscience and who assume that the inner life of most people is largely similar to our own.
In The Sociopath Next Door, Dr. Martha Stout, a clinical psychologist who has devoted much of her career to the subject, demonstrates what the absence of a conscience really means by inviting her readers to participate in this exercise:
The possibilities for manipulation, deceit, violence and destruction that this condition presents should be obvious by this point.
And indeed, as a number of books by psychologists and researchers studying psychopathy:
...have repeatedly tried to warn the public over the years, psychopaths do exist...
So, how do we know who is a psychopath?
That, as you might imagine, is a highly contested question. While various biomedical explanations for the condition have been proffered - dysfunction of the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, for example - and dozens of studies to determine the relationship between brain physiology and psychopathy have been conducted in the past half-century, psychopathy is most commonly diagnosed by way of the Psychopathy Checklist, Revised, known as the PCL-R.
Devised by Robert Hare - the most influential psychopathy researcher of the past half-century - the PCL-R involves, among other things, a semi-structured interview in which a subject is tested for 20 personality traits and recorded behaviors, from,
Although none of these personality traits are indicative of psychopathy by themselves, the presence of a certain number of them (corresponding to a score of 30 or higher on the PCL-R test) is used to diagnose the condition.
So, how would your average politician score on this test?
Let's find out.
(Actually, this one is straight from Stout's book... but her story of the young boy who uses his "Star-Spangled Banner" firecrackers in their skull-and-crossbones-emblazoned box to blow up frogs is just a "composite" case that isn't meant to represent anyone in particular, of course.)
I could go on, but you get the idea.
To be fair, a cherry-picked list of isolated examples of politicians' behavior like this is not enough to diagnose anyone as a psychopath and, by itself, should not convince you of anything.
Nor should you be convinced by the psychologists who have offered their professional opinion on politicians they have not themselves examined - like neuropsychologist Paul Broks, who, in 2003, speculated as to whether Tony Blair was "A Plausible Psychopath?," or professor of psychology David T. Lykken, who, in the Handbook of Psychopathy, argues not just that Stalin and Hitler were high-functioning psychopaths but that Lyndon B. Johnson "exemplified this syndrome."
So, is it fair to suspect that psychopaths are overrepresented in the political class?
According to Martha Stout, it is:
For whatever it's worth, certain members of the UK government agree with Stout's assessment.
In 1982, one UK Home Office official suggested,
And the reasoning behind this official's surprising suggestion?
The fact that psychopaths,
To be sure, the a priori case for the utility of psychopathic traits in political office is fairly obvious, but empirical data to back up this intuition is hard to come by.
After all, politicians, corporate chieftains, royals, and bankers are not administered a PCL-R test before assuming their office or position.
Nonetheless, a number of researchers have offered some data that supports the political and corporate psychopathy thesis. They include:
Even Robert Hare - who has coauthored one of the few empirical studies confirming a higher prevalence of psychopathic traits among corporate professionals in management training programs than in the general population - has said that,
When questioned about this regret, he noted that,
The fact that the key positions of political, financial, and corporate power in our society are dominated by psychopaths certainly helps to explain why our society is as profoundly sick as we non-psychopaths know it to be.
For those who still believe that our sick society can be cured by recourse to the political process, this seems like the worst news imaginable.
These political psychopaths don't just ruin societies.
7. Projections of the Psychopaths
Plato - The Allegory of The Cave
In psychology, "projection" refers to the act of displacing one's own feelings onto another person.
As Psychology Today explains:
This concept of projection equips us to better understand why political psychopaths pathologize conspiracy theorists and political dissenters...:
But there is another sense in which psychopaths are "projecting" their pathology onto the world stage.
You see,
They use that power to shape the organization they're leading into a projection of their own psychopathic tendencies.
In one memorable scene from the 2003 documentary, The Corporation, Robert Hare points out that a corporation under the management of a psychopath could itself be diagnosed as psychopathic.
Thus, the egocentric and narcissistic tendencies of the psychopath boss are reflected in the development of the corporation's public relations.
But the psychopath does not stop at turning an organization into a projection of his own perverted personality.
The idea that psychopathic systems can make non-psychopaths act like psychopaths might, at first glance, go against our moral intuitions.
Surely, we reason people are,
As it turns out, however, our reasoning has been proven wrong by research into "secondary psychopathy."
This category of psychopathy, sometimes referred to as sociopathy, is meant to differentiate primary psychopaths:
Many experiments have been conducted over the decades researching the phenomenon of secondary psychopathy and how "good people" can be placed in situations wherein,
But perhaps the most revealing experiment for the purposes of understanding secondary psychopathy is the Stanford Prison Experiment.
Led by Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, this 1971 experiment involved recruiting participants from the local community with an offer of $15 per day to participate in a,
The recruits were then screened to eliminate anyone with psychological abnormalities, and the remaining candidates were randomly assigned as either guards or prisoners and told to prepare for two weeks of life in the basement of Stanford's psychology building, which had been converted into a makeshift prison.
The results of that experiment are, by now, infamous...!
Immersing the participants in the role play with realistic surprise "arrests" of the prisoners by real Palo Alto police officers, the exercise quickly descended into a study in cruelty.
The prison "guards" quickly devised more and more sadistic ways to assert their authority over the "prisoners," and two of the students had to be "released" from the prison in the first days of the ordeal due to the mental distress it had placed on them.
The experiment was called off after just six days, with the researchers finding that both the prisoners and guards had exhibited "pathological reactions" to the mock prison situation.
In his book The Lucifer Effect - How Good People Turn Evil, which documents that study as well as subsequent decades of research he did into the psychology of evil, Zimbardo reflects on how a system can reflect the pathologies of those who created it and how it can, in turn, influence individuals to commit evil acts:
The true import of this lesson was felt three decades later, when the US began its detention of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The physical, psychological, and sexual abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was brought to the attention of the world in April 2004, when graphic images of the abuse were first published in American media.
Once again, the public began to question how the otherwise average young American men and women who had been assigned to the prison as military police guards could have committed such incredibly sadistic acts.
That question was answered in part by the Senate Armed Services Committee report on the Abu Ghraib abuses.
The report details then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's approval of a request to use,
It recounts how Rumsfeld added a handwritten note to the request's recommendation to limit the use of stress positions on prisoners:
And it condemns Rumsfeld for creating the conditions by which his approval could be interpreted as a carte blanche to initiate torture of detainees:
It should come as no surprise, then, that, as even a cursory review of Donald Rumsfeld's career will demonstrate, he exhibited several of the personality traits on the PCL-R checklist, including,
The connection between the Stanford Prison Experiment and what happened at Abu Ghraib didn't escape the attention of investigators.
The so-called "Schlesinger Report" on detainee abuses included an entire appendix recounting the Stanford experiment and what it taught about how secondary psychopathy can be induced in those working in a system or institution.
Nor did the connection between Stanford and Abu Ghraib escape the attention of the public.
After revelation of the Abu Ghraib abuses in 2004, the Stanford Prison Experiment website's traffic exploded to 250,000 page views per day.
What most of the public do not know, however, is that the funding for the Stanford Prison Experiment came from the Office of Naval Research, which provided a grant,
It seems that the military psychopaths certainly did learn the lessons of that experiment - and then promptly weaponized them.
Whatever the case, although nothing in any of these experiments or research exonerates any individual from the evil deeds that they have committed, these findings do shine a light on the problem of secondary psychopathy.
How much of the madness of our society is a projection of the psychopaths who are running it?
8. Pathocracy
Statist propaganda in the West tries to convince us that we live in a democracy, exemplifying Abraham Lincoln's famous ideal of,
But this is gaslighting...
In truth, we live in a pathocracy, which, borrowing from Lincoln, might be described as "government of the psychopaths, by the psychopaths, for the psychopaths."
Although "pathocracy" is still a foreign concept to many, it is by now a well-established and thoroughly documented phenomenon.
The term was coined by Andrew Lobaczewski - a Polish psychologist whose life's work was shaped by his experience growing up first under the thumb of the brutal Nazi occupation and then under the equally brutal Soviet regime - in his book, Political Ponerology.
Lobaczewski defines pathocracy as,
Then, in a chapter of Political Ponerology devoted to the subject, he describes how pathocracies develop, how they consolidate power, and how they trick, cajole, intimidate, and otherwise induce non-psychopaths into participating in their madness.
These are the questions that keep both the pathocrats in power and those looking to escape the pathocracy up at night, albeit for very different reasons.
Thankfully, we do not need to ponder these questions in a vacuum.
In fact, the conditions for creating an environment in which the average person can be induced to participate in evil acts has been studied, catalogued, and discussed by psychologists for the better part of a century.
Unsurprisingly, though, this research, ostensibly intended to better understand how people can guard against such manipulation, has instead been weaponized by the pathocrats and used to fine-tune the creation of systems for generating more obedient order-followers.
In fact, this was part of the point of the well-known but almost completely misunderstood Milgram experiments.
At this point in our exploration, we are finally beginning to grasp the full extent of the problem posed by psychopaths in positions of political, corporate, and financial power.
The problem is that,
This is the problem of pathocracy.
Once we realize the gravity of this situation, the obvious question presents itself:
As usual, the quality of our answer to this question is directly dependent on the depth of our understanding of the underlying problem.
For example, we might be tempted to ask if we can find a way to eliminate psychopaths from all positions of power.
But this is a misunderstanding of the problem itself. If there are in fact many psychopaths who are all vying with each other for political control, then we have to understand that eliminating the current political psychopaths would merely open the door for others to step into those vacant positions.
Worse, given the psychopathic nature of the power structure as it exists, the system itself actually ensures that psychopaths and sociopaths who, by definition,
Only when we step back and interrogate the political system as a whole can we appreciate that the very existence of those seats of power from which a handful of individuals can rule over the masses is itself a construct of the pathocracy.
Unless and until those seats of power are eliminated altogether, we will never rid ourselves of the struggle for dominance that rewards the psychopaths with control over others.
The elimination of these seats of power, however, will not happen until we overturn the underlying assumption that centralization of power is necessary in the first place.
So, for those of us morally sound individuals currently living under the rule of the psychopaths, the question remains:
As it turns out, the answer to that question may in fact be much simpler than we think.
9. Circuit Breaker
In the 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram set out to study the extent to which people's blind obedience to perceived authority influences their behavior.
It was with this goal in mind that Milgram began his infamous study of obedience on August 7, 1961.
The results of those experiments, well-known to the public by now, ostensibly demonstrate that average, everyday people can be induced to deliver what they believe to be potentially lethal electric shocks to complete strangers based solely on the say-so of an authority figure.
This finding is most commonly summarized with the factoid that a whopping 65% of participants in the original 40-person study were willing to deliver a 450-volt shock - what they were led to believe could be a potentially lethal shock - to an audibly distressed person based on nothing more than a prompt from a person in a lab coat wielding a clipboard.
As one of the most famous psychological studies of the 20th century, the Milgram experiments have generated no end of debate, controversy and scrutiny.
The NPR-promoted critics of the experiments, who contend that most of the study's participants knew that the entire situation was phoney and that they disobeyed even more often than was reported, are often pitted against the establishment psychologist defenders of the experiment, who correctly note that the experiments' shocking (pun intended) conclusions have been independently reproduced time and time and time again in country after country around the world.
(In one particularly twisted reproduction, the researchers even sought to ensure that no subject would suspect the experiment was fake by delivering real electric shocks to cute puppies.)
What almost everyone misses about the Milgram experiments, however, is that the study was not one experiment that was conducted on one set of 40 participants one time to yield one final result.
In fact, Milgram conducted the experiment a total of 17 times with 17 separate cohorts of 40 to 60 test subjects, with each iteration of the study employing a number of experimental variations.
In one variation, he changed the site of the study from the Yale University campus to a rundown office building. In another variation, the test subjects were allowed to instruct an assistant to deliver the shocks instead of pressing the switch themselves.
In still another variant, the lab coat-wearing actor playing the "experimenter" was called away on business and replaced by an ordinary man wearing a suit.
And in yet another variation, the test subject was obliged to wait and watch another actors become the "teacher" and go through the experiment before assuming the role himself.
Each variation produced markedly different results.
When the test subject could instruct someone else to deliver the shocks instead of doing it himself, for instance, the percentage of participants willing to deliver the maximum (supposedly potentially lethal) shock rose to an incredible 92.5%.
When the experiment took place in an office building instead of on the Yale campus, the number willing to administer the maximum shock dropped to 48%.
And when the test subject watched other people take the "teacher" role before them and observed them refusing to obey the experimenter's command to deliver the shocks, that subject's willingness to deliver the maximum shock plummeted to 10%.
Let me rephrase that for the hard of thinking.
This is the surprising conclusion that has been scrubbed from most accounts of the Milgram experiments:
This point is crucial to understand because, exactly as Étienne de La Boétie pointed out nearly 500 years ago,
Indeed, it's important to become conscious of the fact that none of the worst excesses of the pathocracy in recent times would have been possible without the active participation of vast swaths of the population.
So-called vaccine "mandates" were not achieved by one psychopath in a position of political authority, or even by a gaggle of such pathocrats.
They were enabled by,
The same goes for any number of pathocratic abuses that we've been subjected to in recent years.
These programs can only be implemented when most of the people comply with their orders and thus fulfill their role in the operation.
Just as in the time of La Boétie,
Combining La Boétie's insight with Milgram's lesser-known experimental results, then, we find a template for toppling the pathocracy:
But is this true? Can a single act of disobedience really bring down a pathocracy?
Once again,
On December 21, 1989, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu took to Palace Square to address the Romanian people.
At first, it proceeded like any number of such speeches he had delivered over the years. He talked about the successes of Romania's socialist revolution and sang the praises of the "multi-laterally developed Socialist society" that had arisen under his brutal reign.
But then, something extraordinary happened.
The footage of the incident, including Ceaușescu's look of utter confusion as he realizes that the crowd has turned against him and that the threat of violence is not enough to subdue them, is priceless.
There, captured on tape for posterity, is the moment when the realization dawns on the tyrant that the people have rejected his tyranny.
The rest of the story:
...all stems from that precise moment when one person in the crowd simply voiced what the rest of the crowd was feeling.
By saying no to illegitimate authority, resisting bullies and tyrants, disobeying immoral orders, refusing to comply with unjust mandates and demands, we make it that much easier for those around us to stand up for what they, too, know to be right.
But wait, it gets even better...
First, the good news:
Next, the even better news:
This is the real goal of the erstwhile victims of the pathocrats.
Not to eliminate the political psychopaths and assume their positions of power in the psychopathic political system that they created, or even to abolish that system altogether, but to envision,
It's up to each one of us to model what we want to see in the world.
Just like the brave dissenter who can break the circuit of tyranny by voicing opposition to the tyrant, we can also become the models of love, understanding and compassion that will motivate others to become the same.
The psychopaths have spent centuries weaponizing psychology to more effectively control us.
But we can wield our understanding of human nature for something good.
Video also
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