- Subtitle:
- Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us
- Version:
- Language:
- Length:
- 236 pages
- Review Format:
- Book
- Year:
- 1999
- Country:
- Predominant Genre:
- Non-Fiction
- Author:
- Outstanding Performances:
- None
- Premiss:
- Psychopaths are fully aware of the consequences of their actions and know the difference between right and wrong, yet they are terrifyingly self-centered, remorseless, and unable to care about the feelings of others.
- Themes:
- Alienation | Curative | Destiny | Emotional repression | Empathy | Ethnicity | Evolution | Family | Grieving | Identity | Individualism | Justice | Loneliness | Loyalty | Materialism | Narcissism | Nature | Nostalgia | Personal | Political | Political Correctness | Preventive | Republicanism | Role modeling | Social class | Society | Snobbery | Solipsism | The State | Stereotyping | White culture | White guilt | White supremacy
- Similar to:
WHITE MAN’s CURSE: Self-Absorbed Gratification and a Sense of Omnipotence & Entitlement
F
ascinating look at the psychopathy inherent in Whites (most psychopaths are White) but which refuses to admit this simple fact. This book tries to scare readers to make a buck for its author by evading the issue that the problem with psychopaths is predominantly a White problem - that only Whites, therefore, can fix. Extensive use of the words our
& us
, does not effectively-conceal that these adjectives and pronouns do not include People of Color (POC).
Science is here used to label people that Whites simply do not like because they remind them of the personality traits they keep locked-up inside, themselves. As well as to force people to like each other or be placed in prison for not being warm or empathic enough toward Whites; thereby, legislating for love. The claim is even made that psychopaths are baffling
and complex
(since they are not clinically-insane) when it is obvious that people who believe they can do as they please in their desire for attention, often become perverse adults. Do we really need PhDs to tell us this?
Black people, for example, have experienced the deleterious effects of White psychopathy for centuries - so find it easy to spot the variable mixture of sweet-talk and intimidation of the typical psychopath. It is only when Whites turn on each other that Whites claim to be baffled
, since the murders committed by, say, the KKK are still not considered psychopathic by Whites, but as racial self-preservation and, therefore, rational.
This is, indeed, the most curious aspect of books like this: The Caucasian claim that psychopaths can be hard to recognize. But this can only be true if one is as lacking in empathy as the psychopath. The cognitive and emotional lack such books try to plug-up in Whites means Whites need to be told how to feel and how to think. All other ethnic groups know perfectly well who the psychopaths are; partly-explaining why psychopaths flourish best in White culture - where they are, therefore, less likely to be detected since they look like every other White - and why most psychopaths are Caucasian.
Trying hard to distance themselves from psychopaths, Whites mis-describe the condition and pretend psychopaths are somehow different from other people in some fundamental way; that is, a lack of empathy that is really nothing more than the desire for a lack of empathy - to facilitate the exploitation of others. Here, Whites confuse the goal, itself, with the achievement of the goal, through subjective inference cloaked in the respectability of scientific discourse - all this allied with the refusal to face-up to alternative explanations for observed behavior.
Perhaps psychopaths are a different species of human or, par for the course with White supremacy, a sub-species? This is supported by no empirical data and is nothing more than a political game to make Whites feel superior to those they so label; making it obvious psychiatry is little more than a soft-science: The militant wing of psychology, as it were.
After all this hypothesizing, this book provides only meager help for protecting oneself against psychopaths, since Whites are in denial about the fact that it is White culture that produces such apparently-physiological defects. This leads to absurd advice like being less gullible (does that mean more cynical?), rather than being more aware of the nature of objective reality. As with White supremacy, Whites claim to know what racism is, but never to help Blacks distinguish between the good and the bad Whites (if such a distinction is even valid) - since all Whites benefit from no-one knowing the good from the bad, as then racism is harder to detect and defeat. This is because Whites do not see a difference themselves - as this book clearly proves - and they would not want anyone to know just how sick their culture truly is.
Normal people are perfectly able to protect themselves from psychopaths only insofar as they are normal. Psychopaths prey on the very weaknesses that Whites so commonly manifest: Financial greed, attention-seeking, sexual lust, etc; making Whites the most likely psychopaths and the most likely victims.
Psychopaths are common in White media precisely because they are common in White culture. Like Whites, they know the difference between right and wrong and are fully aware of the consequences of their actions yet, like Whites, they are self-centered, remorseless and choose not to care about the feelings of others; while appearing completely normal (ie, usual) to other Whites because they share the same world-view the blind always leading the blind.
This appearance of normality does not fool everyone else, who clearly see that this White description of the psychopath closely-matches and is an eidetic description of typical White people, as such (compare with, Bobby Wright). And, while establishing a range of idiosyncrasies in linguistic and affective processing under certain conditions, Dr HARE has not confirmed a common pathology of psychopathy. His contention that the pathology is likely due in large part to an inherited deficit in cerebral brain function is speculative.
Despite the title of this book, there is no evidence that psychopaths lack a conscience - only the subjective question that because they do not do what so-called normal people do, then how could they possess a conscience? But this is anthropomorphism, not science. The expressed White fear of such people, that such a view reveals, is really a the fear of ones own reflection. Of con-artists, hustlers and rapists who charm, lie and manipulate their way through life to get others to do the responsible work of individuation that they, themselves, should be doing.
The anger directed at psychopaths by this author attempts to hide the usual White resentment at anyone’s apparent ability to be free of guilt while doing as they please. Whites also envy the emotional emptiness of the psychopath who seems so easily to avoid being weighed-down with regret for anything they do.
Hardly surprising then that since Whites have looted, raped and mass-murdered their way around the world for the past 500 years, that the vast majority of psychopaths should be White - they are taught to believe such behavior is OK. This makes psychopaths hard to detect among Whites because one is not looking for a needle in a haystack, but something common and numerous: The White definition of psychopathy describes rather well the White culture that spawned it is lost on Dr HARE. And given that this book possesses a self-congratulatory political tone, throughout, amid absurd and angry claims (angry since psychopaths reveal what POC suspect of all Whites) that White society views psychopathic personality traits as pejorative, despite Whites commonly manifesting them - it is to be wondered if Dr HARE is not, himself, something of a psychopath.
Perhaps this White author will one day write an honest book about White culture and its endemic problems - serial-killing, various addictions, child-molestation, etc - and end the whitewashing that such a culture regularly receives from dishonest authors eager to pretend the problems of the world - and their solutions - have nothing to do with them. Or, perhaps, collaborate with a Black psychiatrist who can see Whites more clearly than Whites see themselves.
The most disturbing
aspect of this book is, in fact, the extent to which Whites evade the truth about themselves in hiding behind scientific-sounding babble. As the psychopath must evade reality for his schemes to have any chance of success in the reality so evaded, so must this author in claiming to have created a reliable means of spotting and predicting psychopathic behavior; while then implying he finds it easy to function in a White society which creates and tolerates them.
It could just be that Whites are genetically-vulnerable to being psychopaths (since most psychopaths are White) and that psychopaths are hard to spot in White culture because they are so common there, this being what Whites mean when they exclaim: He was such a nice boy! Who’d’ve thought he’d rape and mutilate those kids.
A curious characteristic of Whites is their desire to be seen as cool; that is, to drain away what little humanity they have in favor of aping psychopaths - which they do rather well compared to other ethnic groups who favor emotionally-expressivity. This explains why Whites are like their tv: Psychopathic in destroying value in all it touches and treating everything as both equally-banal and equally-interesting.
This book sees human nature simplistically as the source of problems to be checked rather than as the source of human happiness; it is obsessed with regulating behavior that Whites fear rather than freeing it. It is dedicated to turning Whites into robots - as opposed to psychopaths - because the author sees humans as animals to be trained, as in A Clockwork Orange. The ultimate goal is the creation of a dictatorship of psychiatrists.
Angry, insincere and repetitive, as if author does not believe his own thesis and thinks whining-on about how terrible criminal psychopaths are will make his not-very-scientific mantra more believable - we already know how bad they are, so why keep going on about it? Opinion takes the place of hard facts too frequently to not be a deliberate attempt to make money out of people’s fear of psychopaths. Worse, there is no definition of normal or sane against which to judge people you might think are psychopaths.
The lack of any profound understanding of psychopathy is replaced with sneering and unscientific contempt - as if the author knows the right buttons to press in his readers, but lacks sufficient insight to help with the fears he attempts to exploit. This is little more than an unscientific puff for PCL-R that contains no references to other, similar metrics that just may be better in their predictive intent and result. Dr HARE describes psychopaths as social predators
, while pointing out that most do not commit murder. His work possesses a high moral-tone (sensationalist & self-righteous attempt to substitute for an insightful-enough intellect) yet tends toward sensationalism and graphic anecdotes; providing a useful summary of the assessment of psychopathy while, ultimately, avoiding the difficult questions regarding the internal contradictions in his concept or how it should be classified.
Although a shallow book, it does contain some useful information that will be of use to POC in dealing with the psychopathic nature of White culture and of how to avoid being hurt by Whites by explaining their most likely behavior and the fact that psychopaths can pass for fully-human only within White culture since they are so similar to all Whites - and, so, harder to pick out. And yet, if Whites spent as much time looking for sexists, White supremacists and social snobs as they do looking for other psychopaths, there would be a lot less of all of these social problems. But the lives of women, Black people and the poor do not matter to Whites: Fortunately for POC, most victims of psychopaths are also White.
The peculiarity of this book is that a White scientist does not ask the victims of sexism, classism & White supremacy for their survival strategies - which would be far superior to those enumerated here. With Whites, potential victims face a simple choice: Adapt to a hopeless situation by a) giving in; b) accepting others treatment of you as an inferior; c) losing their self-identity; or d) fight back.
