Dissent Into Madness – New James Corbett Documentary on the Weaponization of Psychology vs. Dissent

James Corbett knocks the ball out of the park again: “What if the delusions of the dissidents 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?”

James Corbett’s new documentary traces how psychology has been used as a weapon against political dissidents, from Soviet “sluggish schizophrenia” diagnoses to early American psychiatric abuse including one of the most prominent “Founding Fathers.”
Corbett examines Benjamin Rush, the “father of American psychiatry,” who invented a “disorder” called “anarchia” – defined as having too much love of liberty.

The deification of the “founding fathers” begins to fall apart when you learn the history of Dr. Benjamin Rush, the so-called “Father of American Psychiatry”, who suggested that people who didn’t want to be tax-farmed by the new “government” were suffering from a mental disorder called “Anarchia” and should be bleed, starved and put into a “tranquilizing chair”

Dr. Benjamin Rush’s Tranquilizing Chair

Interestingly, while Benjamin Rush was despotically ready to use abusive techniques on political dissidents who didn’t support the new federal “government,” he eerily saw the future of monopolized AMA medicine and tyranny of the bio-security police state we glimpsed in “The Covid”

Modern Pathologizing of Conspiracy Theorists The film documents the systematic campaign to label conspiracy theorists as mentally ill, showing how terms like “conspiracy theory” and “mental disorder” have been purposefully linked by the monoply media and CIA. Corbett points to DOZENS of nearly identical articles and broadcasts asking “Why Do People Believe in Conspiracies?” that all pathologize such thinking.

Dr. Ewan Cameron’s Notes from the CIA’s MKULTRA program document that the people in “government” are certifiably and unethically cruel and psychopathic themselves

Political Psychopathy A major section argues that those in power are themselves psychopaths who project their disorders onto dissidents. The documentary explores how psychopaths don’t just take advantage of their lack of conscience to obtain power, but use that power to shape organizations and society in their own psychopathic image.

Solutions and Resistance The documentary concludes with examples from the Milgram experiments showing that when people see others disobey authority, their own willingness to comply drops dramatically – from 65% to just 10%. This demonstrates the power of modeling disobedience as a circuit-breaker against tyranny.

Finally, Corbett introduces the concept of “pathocracy” – a system of government “wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people” Episode 483 – Dissent Into Madness | The Corbett Report and examines how such systems can make normal people adopt psychopathic behaviors.

The documentary essentially argues that we live under rule by psychopaths who have weaponized psychology to silence opposition, and that visible acts of disobedience are key to breaking this cycle of control.

TRANSCRIPT

JAMES CORBETT: “Insane.”

“Deranged.”

“Crazy.”

In the hands of a tyrant, these aren’t mere words, not impartial descriptions of thought or behaviour. They’re weapons.

After all, there’s nothing more damning, more completely dehumanizing, than to call someone “crazy.”

LIZ WINSTEAD: The conspiracy theory thing . . . it . . . I’m just utterly shocked that they could try to make this . . . It’s, it’s . . . You know how people wear tinfoil hats? I think they’re wearing tinfoil condoms. I’m not sure, because they seem so crazy.

SOURCE: The Ed Show MSNBC March 9, 2012 8:00pm-9:00pm EST

DAVID CHAVERN: There’s always been crazy conspiracy theories. I think we’ve all got uncles [who] over the Thanksgiving dinner [have] told us crazy stuff.

SOURCE: U.S. Senate 10242017 CSPAN October 25, 2017 12:02am-12:30am EDT

GLENN BECK: It started with the 9/11 “truthers”. Crazy. Then the “birthers.” Crazy.

SOURCE: Glenn Beck FOX News February 3, 2010 2:00am-3:00am EST

LAURA INGRAHAM: That the Bush administration could perhaps have had something to do with 9/11—facilitating 9/11, encouraging the actions that took place on 9/11—that is insane. That is literally insane.

SOURCE: The O Reilly Factor FOX News September 3, 2009 11:00pm-12:00am EDT

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? Once diagnosed as mentally unsound, political dissidents can be treated as we have always treated those we dismiss as “crazy.” They can be locked away, drugged, and subjected to all manner of torture in the name of “treatment.”

Now, the idea that would-be rulers would cynically use the “lunatic” cudgel against their political enemies is bad enough.

But what if the reality is the complete opposite of what is commonly understood?

What if the “delusions” of the dissidents are in fact real? What if their “paranoid fantasies” are not fantasies at all? What if their inability to fit in is not a sign that they are sick, but that the society they are protesting against is sick?

In other words, what if it’s not the political dissidents who are “crazy,” but the politicians?

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.

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. Ever since czarist days Russian political dissenters have feared their political views could land them in the infamous Arctic labor camps. But what increasingly haunts the Soviet political dissident today is the threat of being declared insane and sent to a mental hospital. While the Soviet authorities strenuously deny it, the dissident movement continues to claim that thousands of people who disagree with Kremlin policy are confined to mental hospitals when their only disease is dissent.

SOURCE: Special Report – Soviet Psychiatry (1977)

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:

The incarceration of free-thinking healthy people in madhouses is spiritual murder, it is a variation of the gas chamber, even more cruel; the torture of the people being killed is more malicious and more prolonged. Like the gas chambers, these crimes will never be forgotten and those involved in them will be condemned for all time during their life and after their death.

As Reich correctly observes in his report, “[T]he experience of Soviet psychiatry had a lot to teach about the vulnerabilities of psychiatry to misuse wherever it is practiced.”

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:

• the abuses of Nazi psychiatrists, who sat on planning committees for the Aktion T4 euthanasia and sterilization program and who directed the Nazi regime’s horrific (and failed) attempt to eradicate schizophrenia by systematically killing off Germany’s schizophrenic population;

• the abuses that Japanese psychiatrists inflicted on their patients during and immediately after WWII, resulting in an abnormally large number of patient deaths;

• the Cuban revolutionary government’s use of psychotropic drugs and electroconvulsive therapy in order to obtain information from, punish, demoralize, coerce, subdue, terrorize, and cause psychological damage to those deemed a threat to state security;

. . . 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, “We are following in America your advice and example.”

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 “an excess of the passion for liberty,” which “could not be removed by reason, nor restrained by government” and “threatened to render abortive the goodness of heaven to the United States.”

And what did this “father of American psychiatry” prescribe for those he deemed to be suffering from mental illness? Well, for starters, he “treated his patients with darkness, solitary confinement, and a special technique of forcing the patient to stand erect for two to three days at a time, poking them with sharp pointed nails to keep them from sleeping—a technique borrowed from a British procedure for taming horses.”

He also invented two mechanical devices for the treatment of the insane: a “tranquilizing chair,” in which the patient’s “body is immobilized by straps at the shoulders, arms, waist, and feet [and] a box-like apparatus is used to confine the head,” and a “gyrator,” “which was a horizontal board on which torpid patients were strapped and spun to stimulate blood circulation.”

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“:

The cause in the most of cases, that induces the negro to run away from service, is as much a disease of the mind as any other species of mental alienation, and much more curable, as a general rule. With the advantages of proper medical advice, strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many negroes have of running away, can be almost entirely prevented, although the slaves be located on the borders of a free state, within a stone’s throw of the abolitionists.

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, “is the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health professionals in the United States and contains a listing of diagnostic criteria for every psychiatric disorder recognized by the U.S. healthcare system.”

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: 83% of the members of the panel working on mood disorders had pharmaceutical industry ties, and 100%—every single member—of the sleep disorder panel had “ties to the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the medications used to treat these disorders or to companies that service the pharmaceutical industry.”

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. Recent surveys indicate one in six American adults report taking a psychiatric drug, such as an antidepressant or a sedative. Worryingly, the number of children being prescribed antipsychotic medications like Adderall and Ritalin has continued to increase decade after decade.

And, more worrying still is the way that this increase in antipsychotic prescriptions has been justified by the invention of new “mental disorders” like “Oppositional Defiance Disorder.”

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:

So, one of the things that happens in 1980 is you have the introduction of this new mental illness called “oppositional defiant disorder” (O.D.D.). Now, literally, this has nothing to do with juvenile delinquency—people need to know. So, these kids, specifically, are not doing anything illegal. That’s a whole other “mental illness” called conduct disorder. But oppositional defiant disorder, by definition, they are arguing with adults, they are often refusing to comply with adults. They’re doing the things that almost every of the 20 people I profile in resisting illegitimate authority—all these famous anti-authoritarian from George Carlin to Lenny Bruce to Ralph Nader to Thomas Bay—all these people are doing this kind of stuff. And so that’s what really concerned me at that time in the ’80s is, are you kidding, you are pathologizing rebellion.

Now, some of these kids, at the time, you know, if you talk about a nine-, ten-year-old, who’s just being oppositional, they’re not making judgments necessarily about who’s a legitimate authority and who’s an illegitimate authority. So, I wouldn’t call them genuine anti-authoritarians at eight or nine years old. But here’s the important thing: a lot of these oppositionally defined kids who are just being a handful and rebellious at the time, they are the kind of kids who at some point mature into genuine anti-authoritarians—unless you’re drugging the crap out of them! Which is what my profession then moved into: not just pathologizing them—giving a mental illness—but they are part of, if you take a look at the oppositional defiant disorder, that, along with conduct disorder, are what my profession calls the “disruptive disorders.” And there’s this huge increase in the early ’90s to the 2000s of the number of these kids with disruptive disorder who are being drugged on these antipsychotic drugs: Risperdal, Zyprexa, this kind of thing. Heavily tranquilizing drugs.

So, this was a huge concern for me. Not only for these poor kids, who are all of a sudden becoming pathological and drugged, but politically, this should concern everyone when you’ve got the next generation of potential anti-authoritarians being completely marginalized by this pathologizing and medicating.

SOURCE: Interview 1421 – Bruce Levine on Resisting Illegitimate Authority

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: who loaded the weapon?

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: “If the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility. This is a challenge which must be met.”

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 “can justifiably stress our particular point of view with regard to the proper development of the human psyche, even though our knowledge be incomplete”—asserts that they must aim to make that point of view “permeate every educational activity in our national life.”

He then launches into a startling confession:

[W]e have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church; the two most difficult are law and medicine. [. . .] If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity!”

Then Rees brazenly proclaims that “Parliament, the Press and other publications are the most obvious ways by which our propaganda can be got across” 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: “Many people don’t like to be ‘saved,’ ‘changed’ or made healthy,” he remarks.

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: “The theme of all of Rees’s known work is the development of the uses of psychiatry as a weapon of the ruling class.” That work, the article elaborates, included advising Rees’ superiors how they “can succeed in structuring a stressed individual’s or group’s situation appropriately, the victim(s) can be induced to develop for himself a special sort of ‘reaction formation’ through which he ‘democratically’ arrives precisely at the attitudes and decisions which the dictators would wish to force upon him.”

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: the Central Intelligence Agency.

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 “help the CIA mission where it intersects with psychiatric and broader behavioral issues.”

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 “an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), intended to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used in interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.”

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. This subproject involved Dr. Cameron using LSD, paralytic drugs, electroshock therapy and drug-induced comas to attempt to wipe patients’ memories and reprogram their psyche. 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—”resist torture and evade successful interrogation by their captors.”

Among the hundred or so people in attendance at that lecture was one particularly enthused fan of Seligman’s work: Dr. Jim Mitchell, a military retiree and psychologist who had contracted to provide training services to the CIA. 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, from mind control experiments to torture programs to brainwashing and lobotomization, there can be no doubt that the governments, militaries, and intelligence agencies of every major nation have devoted considerable resources to the weaponization of psychiatry over the course of the past century.

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 well-meaning but emotionally unstable people typically latch on to these fantastical conspiracy theories because they help these poor, deluded souls make sense of the news and offer them a feeling of control over an uncontrollable world.

Next, the report offers advice to those who are seeking to disabuse anyone who has fallen for this conspiracy claptrap of their delusional notions. That advice, it turns out, is the same admonition given to someone coming upon a wild animal in the jungle: don’t confront the target directly or make them angry; speak to them in soothing tones and pretend to listen to what they’re saying; and disengage if it seems they’re preparing to attack.

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 the BBC and FiveThirtyEight and Vox and the American Psychological Association and The New York Times and PsychCentral and Addiction Center and LSU and Technology Review and National Geographic and verywellmind and Business Insider and Psychology Today and Harvard and LiveScience and Scientific [sic] American and NBC News and The Conversation and Intelligencer and TIME and The Guardian and Popular Mechanics 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 the CBC and Channel 4 and CNBC and Channel 4 (again) and DNews and StarTalk and 60 Minutes and TIME and DNews (again) and Big Think and Al Jazeera and the Weekly and Tech Insider and Inverse and Dr. Todd Grande and euronews and CBS News and The University of Chicago.

Oh, and did I mention it’s also a podcast? Well, it is, and it’s been produced by Ava Lassiter and NPR and Radio Times and NPR (again) and LSE and Bill Gates and NPR (again again) and The Anthill and Speaking of Psychology and NPR (again again again) and Big Brains and NPR (again again again again).

So, are you starting to formulate a hypothesis that there may be some grand scheme afoot here? Do you find yourself speculating that perhaps (just perhaps) there might be a coordinated effort to pathologize conspiracy theorists in order to justify locking them away in padded cells?

Do you find it interesting that the terms “conspiracy theory” and “mental disorder” were forever linked in the public imagination when Richard Hofstadter penned his infamous 1964 essay in Harper’s Magazine, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics“? Or that the best-remembered passage from that essay is the one in which he describes the “style of mind” behind the conspiracy-prone, populist political movements of his era as “the paranoid style” because “no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind”? Or that his caveats to that “diagnosis”—namely, that “I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes” and that “I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics”—are largely forgotten?

Then the dinosaur media pundits and their psychiatric “experts” have a message for you: “Shut Up, Conspiracy Theorist!, or we’re gonna put you in a straitjacket!”

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.

WILLIAM KLEIN (played by Jeffrey Tambor): I just wanted to meet them face to face. I wanted them to admit what they were doing.

CAPT. BARNEY MILLER (played by Hal Linden): Who is they?

DET. SGT. ARTHUR DIETRICH (played by Steve Landesberg): He was in the office at the Trilateral Commission.

MILLER: Trilateral Commission?

DIETRICH: Yeah, the Trilateral Commission.

MILLER: All right! What is the Trilateral Commission?

DIETRICH: It’s an organization founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller to bring together business and political leaders from the United States, Europe, Japan, so they could work together for, uh, better economic and political cooperation between their nations.

KLEIN: Tha-that’s what they’d like us to believe. But you see what they’re really up to is a scheme to plant their own loyal members in positions of power in this country to work to erase national boundaries—create an international community, and, in time, bring about a one world government with David Rockefeller calling the shots!

MILLER: I take it they’re pressing charges?

RED-HEADED OFFICER: Yeah, well, uh, he broke a globe and, uh, some UNICEF artwork.

KLEIN: Well, the-they’re in on it, too!

MILLER: Okay Mr. Klein . . .

KLEIN: But, I-I-I’m telling you, our whole way of life as we know it is in jeopardy!

MILLER: I appreciate that information.

KLEIN: But, I-I-I have the documented evidence. It’s all in there. Show him.

RED-HEADED OFFICER: Well, he’s got, um, got these magazines here.

MILLER: Conspiracy Review. Suppress Truth Roundup.

KLEIN: Their whole master plan is exposed!

MILLER: Yeah, well, um . . .

KLEIN: You’re still not convinced, huh?

[Capt. Miller laughs]

KLEIN: Would you, would you like to hear the names of just a few of the people who have been on the Trilateral Commission?

MILLER: Uh, not particularly, no.

KLEIN: James Earl Carter. Heard of him?

MILLER: Look, Mr. Klein . . .

KLEIN: Henry Kissinger. You heard of him? Walter Mondale!

DIETRICH: Who?

MILLER: Mr. Klein, this is . . .

KLEIN: John Anderson! George Bush. Now you remember, at the, at the convention everybody thought it was gonna be Ford for “Veep”. You know what happened? David Rockefeller just picked up a phone. Put in a call: Hey, Ronnie, forget Jerry, it’s George. Bye. So, no matter who won in November, they had their man in the White House!

MILLER: Are you through?

KLEIN: Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.

MILLER: Okay, just have a seat—

KLEIN: Listen, I-I-I’m sorry. I’m sorry for yelling. It’s just I get so agitated when I think about what they’re doing!

SOURCE: Trilateral Commission – (Clips) from Barney Miller – Se7 Ep8 (1981)

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, “caps of metal foil” are used to mitigate the effects of a mad scientist’s telepathic hypnosis experiment. 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 “a priesthood of marginal paranoids” and declares such theories “an assault on the sanity of American society, and I believe in its fundamental sanity.”

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:

Initially, conspiracy theories were not an object of ridicule and hostility. Today, however, the conspiracy-theory label is employed routinely to dismiss a wide range of antigovernment suspicions as symptoms of impaired thinking akin to superstition or mental illness. For example, in a massive book published in 2007 on the assassination of President Kennedy, former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi says people who doubt the Warren Commission report are “as kooky as a three dollar bill in their beliefs and paranoia.” Similarly, in his recently published book Among the Truthers (Harper’s, 2011), Canadian journalist Jonathan Kay refers to 9/11 conspiracy theorists as “political paranoiacs” who have “lost their grip on the real world.” Making a similar point, if more colorfully, in his popular book Wingnuts, journalist John Avlon refers to conspiracy believers as “moonbats,” “Hatriots,” “wingnuts,” and the “Fright Wing.”

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 “never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th,” 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 “stop asking me to raise this ridiculous topic on the show and start asking your doctor if Paxil is right for you” 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 “necrotizing conspiracy theory radicalism” is a danger to society and that the crazy truthers perpetuating these delusions need to be treated as potential terrorists.

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. Firstly, there is her harrowing account of how quickly a series of seemingly disconnected problems and concerns—a series of threats that she had received for her fearless reporting on Big Pharma and her 9/11 truth advocacy in the New Zealand press, a bout of insomnia, an off-hand comment that was misinterpreted as a suicidal statement—escalated into full-on forced detention in a psychiatric ward.

Secondly, there is her revelation that those who were supposed to be acting in her interest—a police officer, various social workers, the chief psychiatrist in the psychiatric ward—would not even listen to her when she tried to present evidence for her belief that 9/11 was an inside job.

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 thoughtcrime 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.

TAYLOR HUDAK: A well-respected Swiss cardiologist brutally arrested in his practice the day before Easter Sunday 2020. And the reason? He told the truth. It is a story so extreme that one may believe it is just that, a story of fiction. But this was a reality for Dr. Thomas Binder. While finishing work at his office on Saturday, April 11, 2020, before a planned holiday vacation, Dr. Thomas Binder was aggressively confronted by a total of 60 armed police officers, including 20 officers with the anti-terrorism unit Argus.

SOURCE: Dr. Thomas Binder Interview – How Psychology Was Weaponized To Suppress Truth In The Age Of COVID

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.”

THOMAS BINDER: I felt it was my duty as a doctor to inform the populace about this medical condition. Of the whole society in a way that also lay people can understand and once informed can decide how to proceed.

HUDAK: Dr. Binder wrote blog posts to his website and posted to social media debunking unscientific claims like zero COVID, asymptomatic spread, the flawed PCR testing, lockdown policies and more. And on Thursday, April 9th, 2020, Dr. Binder posted a blog that went viral.

BINDER: And this blog was read about 20,000 times in a day. And then I thought, well, this information will spread exponentially and other fellow doctors will do the same. And in a week or so, this nonsense will have collapsed.

HUDAK: Unfortunately, two and a half years later, and we all know that’s not what happened. Instead, Dr. Binder’s viral blog post caught the attention of two colleagues, who together then called the chief of state police on Dr. Binder, claiming that he was a danger to himself and the government. This is what led to his brutal arrest two days later on April 11, 2020.

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 “knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act,” 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

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 “no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what [they] do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members.”

Am I talking about politicians? Technocrats? Billionaire “philanthrocapitalists”? Royalty? Captains of industry?

Of course I am. But I’m also talking about psychopaths.

We all know what a psychopath is, or at least we think we do. They’re chainsaw-wielding, crazed serial killers, like Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Or they’re knife-wielding, crazed serial killers, like Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs. Or they’re acid-spraying, lapel-flower-wearing, crazed serial killers, like The Joker from Batman.

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 programing, 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:

Imagine—if you can—not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken. And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools. Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless. You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they seldom even guess at your condition.

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—from Howard Cleckley’s seminal 1941 work, The Mask of Sanity, to Robert Hare’s popular book, Without Conscience, to Andrew Lobaczewski’s rescued-from-the-dustbin-of-history-by-an-independent-publisher opus, Political Ponerology—have repeatedly tried to warn the public over the years, psychopaths do exist. They represent something like 4% of the population, and they are responsible for much of the havoc in our society.

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 behaviours, from “egocentricity/grandiose sense of self-worth” to “pathological lying and deception” to “lack of remorse or guilt” to “early behaviour problems.”

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.

Egocentricity / grandiose sense of self-worth?

Check.

Pathological lying and deception?

Check.

Conning / lack of sincerity?

Check.

Lack of remorse or guilt?

Check.

Callous / lack of empathy?

Check.

Parasitic lifestyle?

Isn’t that the definition of a career politician?

Check.

Early behaviour problems?

Check. (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’ behaviour 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:

Yes, politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths. I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this. [. . .] That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow—but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one.

For whatever it’s worth, certain members of the UK government agree with Stout’s assessment. In 1982, one UK Home Office official suggested “recruiting psychopaths to help restore order in the event England is hit by a devastating nuclear attack.” And the reasoning behind this official’s surprising suggestion? The fact that psychopaths “have no feelings for others, nor moral code, and tend to be very intelligent and logical” means they would be “very good in crises.”

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:

• Clive Boddy, a professor at Anglia Ruskin University who argues that “[e]vidence for the existence of white-collar psychopaths comes from multiple studies which have found psychopathy among white collar populations”;

• Dr. Kevin Dutton, an Oxford University psychologist who used a standard psychometric tool—the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (Revised)—to score a number of current and historical political personages, finding that Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Ted Cruz scored relatively high on the test (along with Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, and Saddam Hussein);

• Scott O. Lilienfeld, a professor of psychology at Emory University who led a study of the 43 US presidents up through George W. Bush, demonstrating that certain psychopathic personality traits directly correlate with political success; and

• Ryan Murphy, research associate professor at Southern Methodist University whose 2018 study concluded that Washington, D.C., had the highest prevalence of personality traits corresponding to psychopathy in the continental U.S. (and also found that the concentration of lawyers is correlated to the prevalence of psychopathy in a geographic area).

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 he regrets spending most of his career studying psychopaths in prison rather than psychopaths in positions of political and economic power. When questioned about this regret, he noted that “serial killers ruin families” while “corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”

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.

. . . But actually it’s even worse than that. These political psychopaths don’t just ruin societies. They reshape society in their own image.

7. Projections of the Psychopaths

In psychology, “projection” refers to the act of displacing one’s own feelings onto another person. As Psychology Today explains:

The term is most commonly used to describe defensive projection—attributing one’s own unacceptable urges to another. For example, if someone continuously bullies and ridicules a peer about his insecurities, the bully might be projecting his own struggle with self-esteem onto the other person.

This concept of projection equips us to better understand why political psychopaths pathologize conspiracy theorists and political dissenters: they are projecting their own mental disorders onto their ideological opponents.

But there is another sense in which psychopaths are “projecting” their pathology onto the world stage. You see, psychopaths don’t merely take advantage of their lack of conscience to obtain political or economic power. They use that power to shape the organization they’re leading into a projection of their own psychopathic tendencies.

ROBERT HARE: The psychopath’s relations with others are superficial. Surface. Very, very little depth. Mostly style over substance. And the idea is to impress other individuals to somehow put them in a position where you can manipulate them, and so forth.

And a corporation I imagine would be not unlike that in many respects. They would have public relations firms. They would be spending half their time and a lot of their budget on trying to present a particular image to other people. And this image is very superficial and you never really get to know the real corporation. You’re going to see what they want you to see.

SOURCE: Corporation : Clinical Diagnosis (PCLR)

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. The psychopath’s capacity for guilt-free deception and manipulation of others is reflected in the company’s advertising and marketing material. The psychopath’s willingness to commit crimes without shame in pursuit of his objectives finds its analogue in the corporation’s willingness to flagrantly break the law. And the psychopath’s utter lack of remorse for his crimes is mirrored by the corporation’s cynical calculation that fines and punishments for its illegal acts are merely the “cost of doing business.”

But the psychopath does not stop at turning an organization into a projection of his own perverted personality. Be it a business, a bank, or, in the case of a political psychopath, an entire nation, the organization under his control eventually starts to change the character and behaviour of the employees or citizens under its thumb.

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 either “good people” or “bad people.” They are either psychopathic or sane. They are either the type of person who commits a terrible crime or they aren’t.

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—those born with a “lack of conscience” and its associated neurocognitive impairments discussed by Hare, Stout and others—from secondary psychopaths, who develop psychopathic traits as a result of the environment they are functioning in.

Many experiments have been conducted over the decades researching the phenomenon of secondary psychopathy and how “good people” can be placed in situations wherein they will do “bad things,” from the seemingly mundane Asch conformity experiment, which showed that people are often willing to state and even believe demonstrable lies in order to avoid breaking a group consensus, to the truly shocking Milgram experiment, which famously demonstrated that ordinary people could be induced to deliver what they believed to be potentially fatal shocks to strangers on the say-so of an authority figure.

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 “psychological study of prison life.” 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.

How did this happen? How did otherwise average, healthy young men descend into such barbarity in less than one week?

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: “unless we become sensitive to the real power of the System, which is invariably hidden behind a veil of secrecy, and fully understand its own set of rules and regulations, behavioral change will be transient and situational change illusory.”

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 “aggressive interrogation techniques” on detainees, including stress positions, exploitation of detainee fears (such as fear of dogs), and waterboarding. It recounts how Rumsfeld added a handwritten note to the request’s recommendation to limit the use of stress positions on prisoners: “I stand for 8-to-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?” And it condemns Rumsfeld for creating the conditions by which his approval could be interpreted as a carte blanche to initiate torture of detainees: “Secretary Rumsfeld authorized the techniques without apparently providing any written guidance as to how they should be administered.”

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 pathological lying and deception, callous behaviour, and failure to accept responsibility for his own actions.

DONALD RUMSFELD: It appears that there were not weapons of mass destruction there.

RAY McGOVERN: You said you knew where they were.

RUMSFELD: I did not. I said I knew where suspects sites were, and we were just—

McGOVERN: You said you knew where they were, “near Tikrit, near Baghdad and North, East, South and West of there.” Those are your words.

SOURCE: Ray McGovern Owns Donald Rumsfeld – Rummy denies his own words

RUMSFELD: We know they have weapons of mass destruction. We know they have active programs. There isn’t any debate about it.

SOURCE: The Unknown Known

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 “to study antisocial behaviour.” 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 “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

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 a system of government “wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people.” 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.

How can soldiers’ natural aversion to pulling the trigger on complete strangers be overcome? How can doctors who have sworn an oath to do no harm participate in the scamdemic madness of recent years? How can regular, salt-of-the-earth, working-class policemen be induced to brutally beat peaceful protesters? 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 isn’t just that psychology has been weaponized against those of us who would engage in political dissent.

And the problem isn’t simply that this system for suppressing and pathologizing dissent has been created by literal psychopaths and their sociopathic lackeys.

The problem is that the state itself is psychopathic and is actively warping the morals of otherwise mentally sound individuals, causing them to adopt psychopathic traits in return for material reward and positions of authority.

This is the problem of pathocracy.

Once we realize the gravity of this situation, the obvious question presents itself: how do we throw off the yoke of the political psychopaths and topple their pathocracy?

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, show no remorse or moral qualms about hurting others, will end up winning the vicious battle to fill the top spots in the political hierarchy.

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: what can we possibly do to overthrow the pathocracy?

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 behaviour. 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. When the test subject saw someone disobey the experimenter, they themselves refused to proceed with the experiment 90% of the time.

This is the surprising conclusion that has been scrubbed from most accounts of the Milgram experiments: Disobedience, once modeled, becomes an option in the mind of the public.

This point is crucial to understand because, exactly as Étienne de La Boétie pointed out nearly 500 years ago, a small cadre of tyrants, no matter how psychopathically menacing, are incapable of administering a tyranny all by themselves. They require the active participation of a much larger number of obedient order-followers.

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 doctors who participated in the vaccination drives against their own experience, judgment, and training; the employers who imposed vaccine requirements on their employees; the business owners who implemented vaccine certificate checks on their premises; the police officers who threw the unvaccinated in quarantine facilities; the workers who kept those quarantine centers functioning; the judges and lawyers who rubber-stamped all these actions, etc.

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, our enslavement to the pathocracy is, by and large, a voluntary servitude born of obedience.

Combining La Boétie’s insight with Milgram’s lesser-known experimental results, then, we find a template for toppling the pathocracy: highly visible acts of disobedience.

But is this true? Can a single act of disobedience really bring down a pathocracy?

Once again, we don’t have to speculate about this possibility in a vacuum. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, we can actually watch a recording of such an event happening in real time.

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. Someone booed. The boo was taken up by others and became a jeer. Chants of “Timișoara!” rippled through the crowd, a reference to a massacre of political dissidents by Ceaușescu’s security forces that had taken place just days earlier.

The dictator, unused to any sign of dissent from the population over whom he had ruled so brutally for decades, called for order. His wife demanded the crowd’s silence, prompting Ceaușescu to tell her to shut up, and then he attempted to continue with his speech. But the jeers began again.

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—the riots and unrest, the attempted escape of Ceaușescu and his wife, their capture by military defectors and their execution on Christmas Day—all stems from that precise moment when one person in the crowd simply voiced what the rest of the crowd was feeling.

This is the circuit-breaker effect. 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: pathocracies are inherently unstable and they are doomed at some point to topple under their own weight.

Next, the even better news: if it’s true that psychopaths can fashion a psychopathic society that twists people into sociopaths, then the opposite is true, too. Healthy, non-pathological humans with love, empathy, and compassion can fashion a society that brings out the better side of human nature.

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 a world in which compassion, cooperation, love and empathy are not just encouraged but actively rewarded. A world in which every person is allowed to become their best possible self.

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. And isn’t that what healthy, non-psychopathic individuals forming a healthy, non-psychopathic society would spend their time and resources doing?