A hello to Scrutiny Hooligans readers: my name is Tom Buckner, and I’ve been offered the chance to post here, “above the fold” as it was put to me. For this I’m very grateful. Osiris only knows what shenanigans I’ll repay this kindness with. Like ending sentences with prepositions. Or sentence fragments. I may even relapse into the Pelagian Heresy.

But I have decided to get my feet wet by reprinting an essay from 2005, which was hosted at a wondrous blog called the nonist. There are a few things I could update and a few things I would now emphasize differently; I’m less inclined now to let the Democratic Party off the hook, for one thing. And let’s not dwell on the purple prose in the first paragraph, either.  But nothing important has changed. I still think the idea I expound here is an important and overlooked one.  It asks a simple question: if your boss can make you piss into a cup to prove you’re not seeking what wiser people than I have termed “illegal states of mind,” then why cannot society demand proof that its rulers have a conscience?

Our unwell nation is surrounded by a thousand doctors, all claiming to know what is ailing her; but so few understand; they look at what is on the surface, when the malady is in her very entrails; it is as if worms had eaten away at her vitals. And so they have. I am deeply troubled that very, very few people think about the deep systemic implications of whatever is happening on the surface on any given day. This is why the Far Right became so powerful; the warning signs have been there for well over a decade, but few saw them.

What is it that sets the Far Right of the Republican Party apart from normal Americans? What enables them to lie, and lie again, spill innocent blood, steal, steal, and steal, claim up is down and patriots are traitors, and wake up in the morning after a good night’s sleep and do it all again, with no pang of conscience?

To answer this question, look at the field of physics: if an Einstein or Hawking goes public with a crazy-sounding new theory which is later proven correct, it is because they believe the math. If the equations work out perfectly, a good physicist knows that they must be believed, no matter what ‘crazy’ things they might imply. If the equations tell you time slows down at light speed, then by golly you’d better believe it slows down.

This is where so many observers went wrong: no matter how many times the Far Right acted like they had no conscience, no matter how many times conservatives lied or colluded in murder in faraway places or stole from the public, few people could accept the truth: that the Right was infested with sociopaths.

Now, it is true that no formal diagnosis by a mental health professional exists (that I know about) stating that George W. Bush is a sociopath. However, the meme is out there: google the words Bush and sociopath together, and you get 50,900 hits! Moreover, there are some convincing circumstantial arguments that the label fits; see Mary Shaw’s article the sociopathic bush administration or Beth Conover’s bush isn’t a moron, he’s a cunning sociopath. If you think they, or I, am throwing the word ‘sociopath’ around loosely, please read the wikipedia entry for antisocial personality disorder, which is the most ‘modern’ if somewhat cumbersome term.

But I am not simply suggesting that the President is a mentally ill, heartless, incomplete human. I am suggesting that the ranks of his party and supporters are a mutually supporting horde of mentally ill, heartless, incomplete humans! Consider the behavior of high-ranked Republicans from Bush and Rove on down to many of their foot soldiers, their friends in the media such as Rush, corrupt ‘religious’ figures such as Pat Robertson, and such Wall Street robber barons as Ken Lay, and review this list of symptoms from the aforementioned wiki:

Arrogant/Deceitful Interpersonal Style

• Glibness/superficial charm
• Egocentricity/Grandiose sense of self-worth
• Pathological lying
• Conning/Manipulative

Deficient Affective Style

• Lack of remorse or guilt
• Callous/Lack of empathy
• Shallow affect
• Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

Impulsive/Irresponsible Behavioral Style

• Need for stimulation/Proneness to boredom
• Parasitic lifestyle
• Lack of realistic, long-term goals
• Impulsivity
• Irresponsibility

Good lord! About the only relevant symptom the Conservatives do not (obviously) display is ‘proneness to boredom’! (Some would argue that ‘flat affect’ is rare among the people I refer to, but any Method actor can manufacture emotion, and so can any real politician; act angry, and you start to feel it for real, for instance).

The Hare checklist has some other symptoms, less relevant to the current topic, having to do with juvenile delinquency, etc.:

• Promiscuous sexual behavior
• Many short-term marital relationships
• Criminal versatility

On the Hare PCL-R test, there are 20 traits:

Score 0 if the trait is absent, 1 if it is possibly or partially present and 2 if it is present. The item scores are summed to yield a total score ranging from 0 to 40 which is then considered to reflect the degree to which they resemble the prototypical psychopath. A score higher than 30 supports a diagnosis of psychopathy. Forensic studies of prison populations have reported average scores of around 22 on PCL-R; control “normal” populations show an average score of around 5.

A note of caution: the test must be administered by a trained mental health practitioner under controlled conditions for it to have any validity.

Another informative page is the malignant personality: These people are mentally ill and extremely dangerous! The following precautions will help to protect you from the destructive acts of which they are capable.

First, to recognize them, keep the following guidelines in mind.

(1) They are habitual liars. They seem incapable of either knowing or telling the truth about anything.

(2) They are egotistical to the point of narcissism. They really believe they are set apart from the rest of humanity by some special grace.

(3) They scapegoat; they are incapable of either having the insight or willingness to accept responsibility for anything they do. Whatever the problem, it is always someone else’s fault.

(4) They are remorselessly vindictive when thwarted or exposed.

(5) Genuine religious, moral, or other values play no part in their lives. They have no empathy for others and are capable of violence. Under older psychological terminology, they fall into the category of psychopath or sociopath, but unlike the typical psychopath, their behavior is masked by a superficial social facade.

So perhaps we are actually considering ‘malignant personality’, which is something slightly different? Especially note the proclivity for pretending to be moral and religious as a tactic, rather than a true sentiment. In any case:

Consider the matter more systematically from the standpoint of affinities. What do I mean by ‘affinities’? Put yourself in the shoes of an ambitious and sociopathic person desiring lots of power, money, etc. Looking around, you see two major American parties.

One, the Democrats, is the party of regulation, the party that prefers to tax the rich and give welfare money to the poor. The Democrats want to tell a businessman he can’t dump poison in the river, can’t bust unions and make employees work extra hours for free, can’t steal their pensions, can’t this, can’t that. The Democrats are a bunch of wet blankets!

The Republicans, on the other hand, are swell guys. They want to get the government out of your way. You can make a ton of money without red tape, you can corner the market and charge the suckers top dollar for gasoline, medicine, electricity, or whatever you’re selling. The GOP will get rid of those annoying labor regulations. You can treat your workers like the peons they are. You can keep most of the money you get, instead of giving it away to bums. Taxes are for little people. Greed is good. Why protect the suckers? The stupid, weak monkeys fall out of the tree. The strong survive.

Corporations can be seen as ‘artificial sociopaths’, potentially immortal paper persons which only care about winning and profit. Corporations, too, prefer the GOP.

The evidence all points the same way: one can look at the American political scene and reliably predict that clinical sociopaths, persons with truly abnormal prefrontal lobes and no feeling for their fellow humans, will mostly flock to the party that most aligns with their natural proclivities, and that party is the Republican Party now in power. Where the Democrats have also gone after big money and corporate funding, they have only gone against their own natural affinities, against their natural populist base. Big mistake; why (as Jim Hightower and others have said) should the voters choose fake Republicans when they can have the real thing? And there are a few Democratic sociopaths, if I’m reading Zell Miller right; but he’s a straggler, or a mole.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing to note about the sociopathic personality is that it is not that uncommon. The wiki tells us that “Approximately 3% of men and 1% of women have some form of antisocial personality disorder (source: DSM-IV).” If you know a hundred people, you probably know at least one sociopath. In a nation of 300 million people, that works out to a million women and four million men! Hare believes the number is lower, around one percent of the population; this still gives a couple million sociopathic adults. What this tells me is that in the United States, or any other nation, one can find enough sociopaths to staff the government, fill the top slots of the corporations, man the Army, Navy, Air Force, and police, and still have enough left over for the pulpits and news rooms. Suddenly the Far Right’s ability to march in lockstep makes perfect sense.

For an excellent article exploring the ways sociopaths exploit business organizations, see “psychopath in a suit” by Leon Gettler.

“(Dr. Hare) says there would be a higher proportion in such areas as business, politics, law enforcement agencies, law firms, religious organizations and yes, the media. “They have a predatory quality to them and the prey is always around certain areas,” Dr Hare said. “In the business world, if I was a good psychopath and I was well educated, bright, intelligent, grew up in the proper way, knew how to talk and dress and how to use a fork, I’m not going to go out and rob banks.”

Did I mention that 8.8 billion dollars went missing last year [i.e., 2004] after it landed in the hands of the Bush appointees running the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq? George Clooney and his Oceans Eleven pals only took 160 million bucks from Andy Garcia’s casino; they’d have to go back and rob the Bellagio 54 more times to catch up with Bremer et al.

Now consider the situation when this nation was founded. At the time of the Revolution, there were about 2.5 million people in the Colonies, a fourth of them slaves; Philadelphia had 25,000 people, and only three other cities had more than 5000 inhabitants. We could expect, then, that Philadelphia would have 250 true sociopaths in it at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and every other place less than that. And, in those days, even men like Washington and Franklin had to meet face-to-face with those they wished to influence, or spread their ideas through pamphlets as did Tom Paine. Personal reputation was everything; mass media did not exist. I suspect, though I could be mistaken, that smaller populations made it a bit harder for sociopaths to operate without being noticed; the bad seeds were easier to keep track of. The Constitution, as it was first written, reflected that more innocent world.

In view of all this, I propose an Amendment to the Constitution:

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Amendment XXVIII

1. Recognizing the danger of persons without conscience in positions of great responsibility, and recognizing the danger that such persons can cooperatively foil the checks and balances on which an open, democratic government and a free people depend, all government employees and certain non-governmental workers shall pass psychological tests as a prior condition of employment, as follows:

2. Testing shall be designed to detect and remove psychopathic/sociopathic (Antisocial Personality Disorder) persons from sensitive positions, using Hare Psychopathy Checklist- Revised (PCL-R), Babiak and Hare B-Scan, or such improved tests as may become available. No other disorders shall be subject to testing under this Amendment. No new test shall be adopted which weakens or alters the intent of this Amendment.

3. Persons to be tested shall include: all government career employees, federal, state, and local, including but not limited to Civil Service positions and appointed positions, and judgeships; all commissioned military ranks; all elected positions, federal, state, and local, including but not limited to the posts of President, Vice President, Senate, and House of Representatives; and any government posts not otherwise enumerated.

4. Persons not in government positions to be tested shall include: all those involved in administration or design of tests under this Amendment; all executive officers and board members of corporations employing at least 2,500 employees, and subordinate corporate officers in such corporations overseeing at least 1,000 employees; all executive officers and editorial staff of media outlets with actual circulation, listeners, or viewership of at least 50,000 persons per year. Failure to comply shall be a felony offense, and in addition result in the revocation of the corporate charter.

5. Persons denied employment as a result of tests indicating psychopathy may apply to be retested and reinstated, but shall have no legal recourse nor compensation otherwise if the second test has the same result.

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Although I have done my best to make this Amendment airtight, foolproof and immune to tampering, I read Gödel, Escher, Bach; I understand it’s impossible to create a truly infallible formal system, and this includes legal language. Likewise, I’m not trying to be cruel; if a sociopath can earn a living without making the rest of us miserable, I’m all for it. It’s simply that these people are lit matches, and don’t deserve jobs in the powder magazine. An Amendment which makes it all but impossible for sociopaths to ascend to great power may transform the nation from the plaything of the ruthless into something verging on Utopia. Or, well, better than the Orwellian mess we keep waking up in now. Think of it as a powerful vermifuge for Lady Liberty.