In 2000, we can look forward to something
really exciting. Two of the most thrilling figures
of our age may stage a presidential debate. George
Bush, Jr. may be the Republican candidate. Gore
will be the Democrat. Can anybody imagine anything
more exciting than a debate between Bush and Gore?
I can. One thing that would be more
exciting than a Gore-Bush debate would be a two-hour
special on the night life of pond sludge. One of
the losing aspects of moderates is that they are
so BORING. If you have a moderate Republican running
against a Democrat, you have two people saying the
same thing. People switch channels. At election
time, they vote for the real Democrat.
I have spent decades in politics,
and I am perfectly aware of the dangers of being
labeled an extremist. But what those who haven't
been in hard core politics are not aware of is how
hard it is, in our age of massive competition in
communications, to keep the people interested. If
you keep your politics moderate and safe, you lose
your audience.
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It will not surprise the reader to
be told that psychopaths dominate America's political
system. What he may not realize is why the present
setup makes this situation inevitable.
When I first heard about psychopaths, it was a frightening
idea. I was already in my early twenties, I had
taught at the university level, and I was working
with my neurologist brother on research we were
invited to Walter Reed to discuss. But the concept
of a psychopath was new to me.
Suddenly I discovered there were people who had
no real feelings of guilt or obligation WHATSOEVER.
This was an extreme concept to me. Naturally, I
assumed it was a very, very unusual. In the 1960s,
it was generally assumed that it was very, very
rare indeed.
Recently, we discovered that psychopaths are not,
in fact, rare at all. At least one percent of our
entire population is psychopathic. Why didn't we
know that earlier?
We didn't realize it because we expect psychopaths
to be easily identifiable. Surely, we thought, if
a person is so different that he has no conscience
at all, it would show.
It turns out that quite the opposite is the case.
Intelligent psychopaths are so good at appearing
normal that they often make the rest of us seem
abnormal.
The case of Ted Bundy is instructive. Absolutely
nobody who knew Theodore Robert Bundy believed he
was capable of torturing and killing all those young
women. In the opinion of those who knew him, he
was not just an unlikely suspect, he was the LEAST
likely suspect.
Said one close friend: "Ted Bundy is the most
caring and compassionate person I have ever known."
Sounds like a lot of TV evangelists, not surprisingly.
Sounds like a lot of dedicated liberal activists,
not surprisingly.
While you and I are spending our efforts dealing
with our regret and our many different forms of
guilt, the psychopath carries NONE of that baggage.
All he has to do is study how to get along in our
society.
Well, what USED to be OUR society. It is his society
now.
You must remember that the psychopath is raised
in our society. All he is interested in is pushing
the right buttons. And never before in history has
there been a society that reduced itself so entirely
to pushing buttons, and nothing else, than America
today.
Parents no longer have any influence in determining
their children's partners. Now what we call "love"
is entirely a product of how a guy pushes the right
buttons in a bar or on a date. A normal young man
stumbles. The psychopath knows exactly what he wants
and he studies absolutely nothing but how to get
it. He is loving, considerate, and, above all, he
is "cool."
The psychopath has no prejudices. In Nazi Germany,
the psychopath could act like he hated Jews as much
as any regular Nazi. But in our society he has the
absolute advantage of being able to look you in
the eye and say he doesn't care about race, family,
or anything else except what you want him to worry
about. He is the ideal white gentile.
The psychopath is a great preacher. You and I have
genuine feelings of guilt, and they are not trustworthy.
You may feel guilty, but you won't show it every
minute.
The psychopath will show it every minute. He has
been faking emotions all his life, and he's GOOD
at it. You may have difficulty persuading yourself
that you were called by the Lord to preach the Gospel.
For a psychopath, that is no problem. You will feel
guilty when you have to interrupt your sermon to
raise money. Not the psychopath.
Need some guilt? The psychopath can give it to you
right on the spot.
The next time you see a picture of the serial killer
Ted Bundy on television, look at his eyes. They
are the picture of childlike innocence.
Psychopaths very often have those innocent, honest-looking
eyes of a Ted Bundy. The reason for this is that
psychopaths ARE innocent. No psychopath can ever
do anything against his conscience. He does not
have a conscience. This is not guilt. This is the
only true innocence.
As Bundy put it shortly before his execution: "I
have never felt guilty about anything in my life.
I feel sorry for people who feel guilt."
I wonder if a respectable conservative can be anything
BUT a psychopath. It seems that those who dominate
the media would be able to smell the potential for
heresy in a rightist, and would never trust anyone
with a conscience that might cause him to feel something
and betray his respectability.
Every liberal who deals with Southerners is haunted
by the feeling that one of them could have a conscience.
In 1964, the Civil Rights Act required that every
Southern school district make a "good faith
effort" to integrate the schools. What does
this mean? It means that every Southern school official
must genuinely WISH to have integration. It is a
psychological statement which requires that every
Southern official not just OBEY the integration
law, but that he BELIEVE in integration.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 required that every
Southerner have a total internal change in his FEELINGS
about integration. No one with deep convictions
need apply. Feelings can cost a district all of
its Federal funding. To a liberal or a respectable
conservative, the highest form of morality is catching
a Southerner at having personal beliefs which are
not Politically Correct.
Alan Alda played a senator in a TV movie, and one
of that senator's moral triumphs was to reveal that
an old segregationist Southerner had made a statement
to a friend of his that he still didn't believe
in integration. If he had revealed that a person
with top secret security clearance had told a friend
he was a Communist, it would have been McCarthyism.
Personal conversations are protected by true morality,
if those conversations have to do with Communism.
But not segregation. To reveal private conversations
that show a white gentile is not a true psychopath
on race is heroism of the highest sort.
People who have normal private opinions and guilt
and other feelings often react in odd ways. The
reaction of some people to hearing awful news is
often to say something totally irrelevant and silly.
Some laugh wildly. But these people are reacting
to their internal feelings. The psychopath has learned
to do without such feelings. Psychopaths have no
such distractions, and their reactions are right,
perfectly right.
The psychopath has spent his entire life learning
how to react correctly. He is the perfect citizen
of the sound bite age. He is the
absolutely perfect lawyer in a society ruled by
lawyers. He is the perfect big time preacher. He
is the perfect talk show guest. He is the perfect
modern political candidate.
For a person to remain Politically Correct is almost
impossible unless he is a psychopath. Today, every
person who is a public spokesman must be ready,
willing and able to change his language and attitudes
immediately.
One week, he must be the best friend the repeat
criminal ever had. He must recognize that the so-called
"criminal" is just a victim of Society.
But the next week, he must be "sensitive"
to "women's" concerns." He must be
outraged at all the repeat rapists this evil society
has released on the streets to prey on women. And
he must make these switches without looking back.
To be a respectable conservative, you must agree
that what the liberals are now doing is bad, but
everything they did in the past was good.
If you go to any political meeting, you will hear
people talking, not about what is right, but how
to "package" their views. There has always
been "packaging," but today the package
is everything.
When it comes to packaging, no one can compete with
psychopaths. That is all the psychopath has done
all his life. A normal person spends his life trying
to deal with his emotions, and how to express what
he feels. The psychopath has spent his life on what
all politics is now about: putting his responses
in the right package.
It would seem that the psychopath has all the advantages.
In our society, he does. In earlier times, there
was a healthy suspicion of anyone who was "too
smooth." People had their own loyalties and
prejudices, and they tended to expect their leaders
to react the way they did. They tended to like it
if their leaders were a bit prejudiced and inconsistent.
They were expected to have healthy prejudices.
But today, we want the right package, and ONLY the
right package. We comb through a person's entire
life history to find out if he ever made a single
unforgivable statement. A person who can spend his
entire life without making a single unforgivable
statement has GOT to be a psychopath.
In the early 1970s when Nixon tried to appoint a
Southerner to the Supreme Court, he nominated one
Southerner, and liberals looked up comments his
nominee had made a quarter of a century earlier
on race and used them to defeat him.
Nixon named another Southerner, and the liberals
did the same thing to him.
Hugo Black was a Southerner who got on the Supreme
Court, and he had been a KLANSMAN! But Black did
what the two Southerners nominated by Nixon had
not done. He made a total, complete, and absolute
switch to extreme leftism.
If a Southerner is to get approval by our rulers
today, he must make a switch only a psychopath finds
it easy to make.
And if a Southerner doesn't make the psychopathic
switch, respectable conservatives will be the first
to tear him apart.
I remember that in the 1960s there was another Southerner
who was a favorite of liberals. He wrote a book
called Congressman From Mississippi. In that book
he explained that he had risen in Mississippi as
a segregationist right winger, and had served in
Congress in that guise. But when President Kennedy
appointed him to the Board of TVA, he came out of
the closet as a lifelong liberal. He was a liberal
hero, the perfect Southern white gentile.
It never occurred to liberals that, if the wind
changed, this guy would probably announce he had
always been a closet Nazi, and would put them in
a gas oven without a qualm.
There is no animal on earth more dangerous than
a man who is truly without prejudice.
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