Articles:
The Mask of Sanity: Psychopath-in-Chief?
americanthinker.com
By Jay Michaels [/] http://j.mp/0PsychoO
or
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/10/the_mask_of_sanity_psychopathinchief.html
Does
this sound like someone we all know?
“Poverty
of emotional feelings, lack of remorse or shame, superficial charm,
pathological lying, egocentricity, a lack of insight, absence of
nervousness, an inability to love, impulsive antisocial acts, failure
to learn from experience.”
It’s
a summary (by Richard Lynn) of the first ten of sixteen behavioral
traits of the psychopathic personality from the classic work on the
subject, Hervey Cleckley’s The Mask of Sanity. The book will be
seventy-five years old next year.
It’s
given to few individuals to describe a new human type. Cleckley did
it twice. With Corbett Thigpen, he published Three Faces of Eve in
1957. The movie version released later that year launched Joanne
Woodward’s career and familiarized Americans with what came later
to be called dissociative identity disorder.
Psychopathology,
like multiple personalities, had been described before. It was
called “moral insanity,” by the 19th century British physician J.
C. Pritchard: “a morbid perversion of the natural feelings.” But
Cleckley was the first to study it systematically and describe it in
detail.
Among
his patients at a VA hospital, Cleckley, a professor at University of
Georgia Medical School, was intrigued by the sometimes charming,
glib, superficially intelligent, but utterly unscrupulous individuals
he called psychopaths. None had sought treatment voluntarily.
They’d all been impeached, so to speak, by those they’d lied to.
Of
course like all personality disorders, psychopathology is distributed
widely, in less virulent forms, across a large population. Nearly
everyone feels depressed occasionally, but only about 7% of Americans
are clinically depressed. However, the distribution of psychopaths
or sociopaths (Cleckley in later editions uses the words
interchangeably) is not geographically random. There is undoubtedly
a high concentration in Washington, D.C. But even among Democrats,
few display so blatantly so many of the classic features described by
the Georgia psychiatrist as the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania
Ave.
But
there are a couple of ways the President deviates from the classic
profile. Cleckley’s characteristic #15 reads: “sex life
impersonal, trivial, and poorly integrated.” Obama’s future
biographers will reveal whether this is accurate or not.
Number
16 is “failure to follow any life plan.” Here the President
departs dramatically from the checklist. He has pursued higher
office relentlessly and ruthlessly since he was a teenager. And his
goals have not deviated. He has sought to “fundamentally
transform” America. This means socialism -- extending government
control of the economy in the name of “social justice.” It means
further exploitation and disenfranchisement of European-Americans
(aka whites), support of Muslims and persecution of Christians and
the subversion of Judeo-Christian values, and, overseas, reducing
American power and influence, and promoting the interests of Islam.
Cleckley
also observed in psychopaths the “absence of delusions and other
signs of irrational thinking.” Here, too, the President doesn’t
conform to the profile. The basis of his political beliefs is
delusional: the West is evil, exploiting the Third World through
colonialism, just as its own workers are exploited by capitalism, and
is now irreparably and catastrophically destroying the climate.
But
Cleckley, who read widely and gave some thought to social problems,
would probably not have been surprised that delusions are now the
conventional wisdom of Americans. He was disturbed by what he called
“a rapt predilection of small but influential cults of
intellectuals or esthetes for what is generally regarded as perverse,
dispirited, or distastefully unintelligible.” He was thinking
specifically of Nobel Prizes awarded to Ezra Pound and André Gide,
“who insists that pederasty is the superior and preferable way of
life for adolescent boys,” and the accolades given Finnegan’s
Wake, “a 628-page collection of erudite gibberish indistinguishable
to most people from the familiar word salad produced by hebephrenic
patients.” He was troubled by what he perceived as the growing
acceptance of homosexuality on the part of elites, even in the 1950s,
and wrote a book on the subject, The Caricature of Love.
With
a few notable exceptions, Jack Cashill’s Deconstruction Obama,
Stanley Kurtz’s Radical-in-Chief, Dinesh d’Souza’s The Roots of
Obama’s Rage, Steve Sailer’s America’s Half-Blood Prince,
biographies of the President have flown to the remainder table at
warp speed -- deservedly. One day, when candid, thorough,
dispassionate studies of our first post-racial President are written,
we’ll have a better idea of the psychopathology this cold-blooded
seducer of a nation. Before they sit down with their notes, Obama’s
future biographers might want to take a look at The Mask of Sanity.
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