America’s Pathology

I have had the opportunity to study only one person in extreme detail that had a sociopathic disorder. The person was actually a highly functioning and dear friend of mine who absolutely had zero empathy for others. After eight years of spending time thoroughly researching this person, I was personally convinced that this type of person exists in reality and must be dealt with from the societal viewpoint.

It is not that sociopaths are necessarily evil, although some are. It is just that they do not see any of their actions as evil, no matter the consequences to others. Their needs transcend all others’. In fact a desire that the normal person might consider trivial, to them can be earth shattering, engulfing the needs of all that come in contact with them.

For a hot cup of coffee, they would not flinch if the person providing it to them had to give their life to prepare the coffee and bring it to them. This sounds extreme, but in the world of the sociopath, it is not. The sound of it is so abhorrent and ridiculous to the normal person that one cannot typically even process its reality. In fact, it took me eight years to believe it to be true, even with all the evidence before me.

Yet these people are real and walk among us. If you have compassion for your fellow man, do not mistakenly believe that all do to your extent, or to any extent at all. If you have a sense of remorse when you do someone else wrong, do not believe for a moment that all possess this character, for they do not. The terror of sociopathy is that these people are highly functioning and tend to concentrate in places of power over the individual for that wields them the authority to act our their pathology without restraint.

Unfortunately, society can be taken in by sociopaths in positions of power. Their rationale, which is so very different from that of normality, becomes the projection of society in early stages of changing environment. We drift in their direction as if it is one that would be chosen by us until it goes beyond our level of comfort. But then it continues past that point for they wield the power. And then we know, something is amiss.

We are then part of a country that tortures, when our country has always held to a higher standard. We are a country that assassinates when we have always been one not to follow that path. We are a country that prepares for civil unrest through domestic drones and laws to kill US citizens on domestic soil without trial.

As our sociopathic leaders take us beyond what we know is ethical, we at first just watch their sociopathy in disbelief. For no rational human being with a sense of right and wrong would go down this path. It took me eight years to understand both intellectually and emotionally, holistically, that very rational, but completely sociopathic human beings will go down this path without flinching and without concern for the welfare of those they are sworn to protect.

When SCI FI Becomes a Reality, the 2nd Amendment Will Feel Cosy

America has now decided to employ the same drones used to kill terrorists in Yemen above our own skies. Combine this decision with the fact that the Administration is now hiring people who meet psyche profiles that will allow them to more easily kill our own citizens and it makes a good scifi movie.

Every city is now being outfitted with cameras at road intersections for traffic control. Every state security center is being outfitted with facial recognition software and computing power to recognize any individual that passes through these videos. Every cell phone is now by law a listening device for law enforcement to be used without warrant. Every security center can listen to every phone conversation in America and with enough artificial intelligence can create dossiers on every individual in America summarizing their speech. Every cell phone GPS can be matched by location to every suspected crime scene, mob, demonstration or assembly to monitor and assess probabilities of being connected to action against the state. Every security center can add every credit card transaction to dossiers to scan for probabilities of terror or crime. EVery public form of transportation, every banking transaction, even your use of electricity can be monitored and compared to the norm for suspected illegal activity.

Add to this immense detection power, growing exponentially and connecting interagency, interstate, and internationally, a computing and analytical capacity that is breaking through previous paradigms of what is possible faster than our policing laws can be changed to keep up with them and you have an immense, almost inconceivable capability to determine the DNA of our citizenry in real time.

Now take this microscopic surveillance and add it 30,000 drones operated by sociopathic twenty somethings that have sworn to remotely joy stick their contraptions in grid formation and to trigger their kill switches to employ deadly lazers with precise accuracy anywhere in their assigned grid and you have a Orwellian destruction machine awaiting he who would be king.

Now as a law abiding citizen, I am ambivalent of such policing power. The love part of my thinking is that this artificial intelligence strength can be used against that not so mythical future terrorist organization that plots to take down our country through weapons of mass destruction. Such immense policing force could not have been accepted by our government at all levels were it not for the very real possibility and high probability that our government and/or financial structures could be incapacitated by ideological organizations possessing nuclear or other means of destruction within our borders.

As this power that is now flying up the curve of capability begins to pin point and prioritize those individuals amongst the 310 million of us moving within the boundaries of America that might perpetrate these most heinous of crimes, we will all watch in amazement at how much more easily our law enforcement continues to apprehend individuals set on perpetrating terrorist crimes of all levels of sophistication. For that terrorist that might one day attempt to destroy an entire city in a lunch pail, it will give America a fighting chance to find this needle in a haystack and to stop such an atrocity of unspeakable scale before it is triggered.

The mistrusting part of my ambivalence feels this power could be used to enslave our nation through a rising tyrannical government of ideological extremes almost as easily as it could be used to protect us from destruction by a rogue terrorist bent on destroying what they feel is an evil hegemony that enslaves the world. America now debates the use of automatic pea shooter ak-47s that might one day have to fight a 30,000 headed, lazer breathing dragon in the sky bent on destroying every human within the border whose dossier meets predictive probabilities of becoming an enemy of the state.

 

This scifi thriller above would be out on the lunatic fringe if it weren’t so real.  Advocates of gun control say that the whole concept of the 2nd amendment is out on the lunatic fringe. But mankind is capable of some pretty way out lunacy.

The trillions of dollars the United States and others have spent on nuclear weapons that can destroy the entire planet many times over is even farther out on the lunatic fringe, yet our societies marched in lockstep out to the fringes as we taught our children to make sense of our lunacy through the exercise of climbing under their school desks. 

The North and Central American holocaust, EuroAmerican slavery, the rise of the Nazis, the killing fields, ethnic cleansing, Chinese re-education and so many other atrocities, these are all so lunatic as to be deniable to the human condition, if it were not so that they actually occurred. 

Are we on this planet going to be so deluded as to think that in the next 5,000 years of human history, if mankind is lucky enough to figure out how to deny its own extinction, that we will not time and time again repeat of our horrific nature on civilizations yet to rise? 

Yes, the 2nd Amendment is out on the lunatic fringe. But when the world is confronted by its next lunatic existence, this one simple protection of the right to bear arms might just seem normal. It might just be that as we meander through the burned out cities in our roving gang of hunters and gatherers, that we look back at that band of elite eighteenth century farmers that gave us the 2nd amendment with a solemn reflection to thank them from the pit of our hearts for the bit of sanity they gave to our now post apocalyptic chaotic world.