Psychopathy and the Origins of Totalitarianism (A Very Important Paper to Understand where We are Today)

Many of the greatest horrors of the history of humanity owe their occurrence solely to the establishment and social enforcement of a false reality. With gratitude to the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper and his important 1970 essay “Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power” for the term and idea, we can refer to these alternative realities as ideological pseudo-realities.

Pseudo-realities, being false and unreal, will always generate tragedy and evil on a scale that is at least proportional to the reach of their grip on power—which is their chief interest—whether social, cultural, economic, political, or (particularly) a combination of several or all of these. So important to the development and tragedies of societies are these pseudo-realities when they arise and take root that it is worth outlining their basic properties and structure so that they can be identified and properly resisted before they result in sociopolitical calamities—up to and including war, genocide, and even civilizational collapse, all of which can take many millions of lives and can ruin many millions more in the vain pursuit of a fiction whose believers are, or are made, sufficiently intolerant.

Pseudo-realities are, simply put, false constructions of reality. It is hopefully obvious that among the features of pseudo-realities is that they must present a plausible but deliberately wrong understanding of reality. They are cult “realities” in the sense that they are the way that members of cults experience and interpret the world—both social and material—around them. We should immediately recognize that these deliberately incorrect interpretations of reality serve two related functions. First, they are meant to mold the world to accommodate small proportions of people who suffer pathological limitations on their abilities to cope with reality as it is. Second, they are designed to replace all other analyses and motivations with power, which these essentially or functionally psychopathic individuals will contort and deform to their permanent advantage so long as their pseudo-real regime can last.

Pseudo-realities are always social fictions, which, in light of the above, means political fictions. That is, they are maintained not because they are true, in the sense that they correspond to reality, either material or human, but because a sufficient quantity of people in the society they attack either believe them or refuse to challenge them. This implies that pseudo-realities are linguistic phenomena above all else, and where power-granting linguistic distortions are present, it is likely that they are there to create and prop up some pseudo-reality. This also means that they require power, coercion, manipulation, and eventually force to keep them in place. Thus, they are the natural playground of psychopaths, and they are enabled by cowards and rationalizers. Most importantly, pseudo-realities do not attempt to describe reality as it is but rather as it “should be,” as determined by the relatively small fraction of the population who cannot bear living in reality unless it is bent to enable their own psychopathologies, which will be projected upon their enemies, which means all normal people.

Normal people do not accept pseudo-reality and interpret reality more or less accurately, granting the usual biases and limitations of human perspective. Their common heuristic is called common sense, though much more refined forms exist in the uncorrupted sciences. In reality, both of these are handmaidens of power, but in pseudo-realities, this is inverted. In pseudo-reality, common sense is denigrated as bias or some kind of false consciousness, and science is replaced by a scientism that is a tool of power itself. For all his faults and the faults of his philosophy (which enable much ideological pseudo-reality), Michel Foucault warned us about this abuse quite cogently, especially under the labels “biopower” and “biopolitics.” These accusations of bias and false consciousness are, of course, projections of the ideological pseudo-realist, who, by sheer force of rhetoric, transforms limitations on power into applications of power and thus his own applications of power into liberation from it. Foucault, for any insight he provided, is also guilty of this charge.

It must be observed that people who accept pseudo-realities as though they are “real” are no longer normal people. They perceive pseudo-reality in place of reality, and the more thoroughly they take on this delusional position, the more functional psychopathy they necessarily exhibit and thus the less normal they become. Importantly, normal people consistently and consequentially fail to realize this about their reprogrammed neighbors. Perceiving them as normal people when they are not, normal people will reliably misunderstand the motivations of ideological pseudo-realists—power and the universal installation of their own ideology so that everyone lives in a pseudo-reality that enables their pathologies—usually until it is far too late.

As a result of this failure of perspective, many particularly epistemically and morally open normal people will reinterpret the claims of pseudo-reality into something that is plausible in reality under the usual logic and morals that guide our thinking, and this reinterpretation will work to the benefit of the pseudo-realists who have ensnared them. This sort of person, who stands between the real world and the pseudo-real are useful idiots to the ideology, and their role is to generate copious amounts of epistemic and ethical camouflage for the pseudo-realists. This phenomenon is key to the success, spread, and acceptance of pseudo-realities because without it very few people outside of small psychologically, emotionally, or spiritually unwell people would accept a pseudo-reality as if it is a superior characterization of the genuine article. Clearly, the more plausible the account of pseudo-reality on offer, the stronger this effect will be, and the more power the ideologues who believe in it will be able to accrue.

Pseudo-realities may have any degree of plausibility in their distorted descriptions of reality, and thus may recruit different numbers of adherents. They are often said to be accessible only by applying a “theoretical lens,” awakening a specialized “consciousness,” or by means of some pathological form of faith. Whether by “lens,” “consciousness,” or “faith,” these intellectual constructs exist to make the pseudo-reality seem more plausible, to drag people into participating in it against their will, and to distinguish those who “can see,” “are awake,” or “believe” from those who cannot or, as it always eventually goes, will not. That is, they are the pretext to tell people who inhabit reality instead of pseudo-reality that they’re not looking at “reality” correctly, which means as pseudo-reality. This will typically be characterized as a kind of willful ignorance of the pseudo-reality, which will subsequently be described paradoxically as unconsciously maintained. Notice that this puts the burden of epistemic and moral responsibility on the person inhabiting reality, not the person positing its replacement with an absurd pseudo-reality. This is a key functional manipulation of pseudo-realists that must be understood. The ability to recognize this phenomenon when it occurs and to resist it is, at scale, the life and death of civilizations.

Adoption of a pseudo-reality tends to hinge upon a lack of ability or will to question, doubt, and reject them and their fundamental presuppositions and premises of the pseudo-reality. Therefore, the “logical” and “moral” systems that operate within the pseudo-reality will always seek to manufacture this failure wherever they can, and successful pseudo-realist attacks will evolve these features like a social virus until their effectiveness is very high. This deficiency is often the direct result of mental illness, usually paranoia, schizoidia, anxiety, or psychopathy, however, so maintaining and manufacturing these states in themselves and normal people is strongly incentivized by the false “logic” and false “morality” of the ideological pseudo-reality. That is, the methods and means applied in service to a pseudo-reality will create and manipulate psychological weaknesses in people to get them to carry water for a destructive lie. The nicer, more tolerant, and more charitable a community is, supposing it lacks the capacity to spot these counterfeits early on, the more susceptible its members will tend to be to these manipulations.

The ultimate purpose of creating a pseudo-reality is power, which the constructed pseudo-reality grants in many ways. Though these means are many, we should name a few. First, the pseudo-reality is always constructed such that it structurally advantages those who accept it over those who do not, frequently by overt double standards and through moral-linguistic traps. Double standards in this regard will always favor those who accept pseudo-reality as reality and will always disfavor those who seek the truth. An ideological pseudo-reality must displace reality in a sufficient population to grant itself power to succeed in its goals. Linguistic traps will often employ strategic double meanings of words, often by strategic redefinition (creating a motte and bailey), will beg the question in ways that forces people to participate in the pseudo-reality to respond (often by Aufhebung-style, i.e., Hegelian, dialectical traps), or will begin with an assumption of guilt and demand proof of innocence such that denial or resistance is taken as proof of guilt of some moral crime against the moral system that serves the pseudo-reality (a kafkatrap). Demands will be made with sufficient vagueness such that they can never be said to have been met and such that responsibility for failure will always be the fault of the enemies of the ideology who “misunderstood” them and thus implemented them incorrectly.

Second, the very assertion of pseudo-reality demoralizes all who are pressed into engaging with it by the mere fact of being something false that must be treated as true. We should never underestimate how psychologically weakening and damaging it is to be forced to treat as true something that is not true, with the effect strengthening the more obviously false it is. Despite the fact that obviousness of the pseudo-real distortion concentrates its demoralizing power, pseudo-reality is only pseudo-real when the distortion is not immediately and wholly transparent and also when it is sufficiently widely socially accepted to become a socially constructed pseudo-truth. Whether or not the distortion is apparent, however, the situation it creates is most demoralizing for those who see through it because making the distortions of a pseudo-reality apparent to those who do not already see them is always exceptionally tedious and will be vigorously resisted not only by adherents but by useful idiots.

Thus, third, by trading off normal people’s assumptions that seemingly serious people care about what is true, they successfully force normal people to verify aspects of the pseudo-reality even in the act of denying it by getting the normal person to meet the ideologue part way. This is the relevance of pseudo-reality being pseudo-real, with greater plausibility strengthening the effect. That is, many normal people will fail to realize the pseudo-reality is false because they cannot see outside of the frame of normality that they charitably extend to all people, whether normal or not.

This dynamic bears a brief elaboration. Normal people do not tend to recognize that a broken logic and twisted morality is being used to prop up an ideological vision—a pseudo-reality—and that the mental states of the people within it (or held hostage by it) are not normal. Some among them, particularly the very but not exceptionally smart, thus skillfully reinterpret the absurd and dangerous claims of the pseudo-realist ideologues into something reasonable and sensible when, in fact, they are not reasonable or sensible. This, in turn, renders the pseudo-reality more palatable than it actually is and further disguises the distortions and underlying will to power presented by the ideological pseudo-realists. All of these features, and others, advantage the ideologue who, like some modern-day Zarathustra, speaks a pseudo-reality into existence, and all of these confer power upon that ideologue while stealing it from every participant in their social fiction, willing or not.

As we are now speaking in terms of ideologues, we need to be clear before continuing that by “ideology” is meant here something closer to “cult ideology” than a more general meaning of the term. It is crucial to distinguish between these so that we do not confuse those sweeping approaches to contextualizing and understanding reality that are generative of comprehension of the real with those that exist in relationship with the pseudo-real.

Liberalism may, for example, be construed as an ideology, but it would not qualify as a cult ideology because, for any shortcomings it may have, it makes itself subordinate to the truth. (Indeed, this together with its incorrect general assumption of the normality of all people is why liberal systems are so susceptible to ideological pseudo-reality and thus so desperately need a vaccine against them.) That liberalism subordinates itself to an external, or objective, truth is obvious from the first principles of liberalism, which arises in the context of favoring rationalism and deferral to the greatest degree of objectivity in any circumstance it seeks to understand or dispute it aims to solve. It also explicitly sides with due processes in service to these objectives and explicitly denies any “ends justify the means” rationales. Accordingly, it exhibits none of the psychopathic tendencies that arise quite regularly in the context of ideologies that depend upon the production and maintenance of some useful but bogus pseudo-reality.

Though we are primarily interested in ideological pseudo-realities, perhaps the most atomic example of a pseudo-reality is not ideological in nature. It is the tragic world of the clinically deluded person, which only he accepts as the “true” state of affairs. “His reality,” “his truth,” is no one else’s because he is not a normal person, and no one is confused by this. The psychopathology involved is readily apparent to all normal people, and, if all goes well, he receives treatment, not enablement. Extending this example up by one rung on the social ladder, we can imagine that our delusional person is sufficiently charismatic and linguistically savvy to establish a cult following of fellow believers in his pseudo-reality. While a cult may not itself be ideological, it requires no effort to climb the ladder from a cult (say of personality, even) all the way up to global pseudo-real sociopolitical movements that endure over decades or even centuries (Hegel, for example, wrote The Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807).

Only two propositions are needed to understand this ladder exists from a single deluded person with a small cult around him to a massive and devastating political movement. The first is simpler: it is that otherwise psychically, emotionally, and intellectually healthy people can be manipulated into pathologies in these domains. That is, such a ladder exists because pseudo-realists are sometimes able to persuade people that the presumptions underlying their pseudo-real construction provide a better read on reality than others, which obviously happens all the time. Cults arise and can grow quite large.

Many of the greatest horrors of the history of humanity owe their occurrence solely to the establishment and social enforcement of a false reality.

Hopefully, I posted that enough times for folks to be able to absorb it. I have posted the following several times on Free Republic and will post it yet again:

It's not so much what you don't know that will get you in trouble, it IS what you know THAT AIN'T SO.

~ Mark Twain

I missed this when you posted it three years ago. It’s a great paper. Thanks.

It is indeed long. For anyone tempted to skip it, I would suggest reading a bit of the earlier sections to understand the author’s terminology, then go to the section, “The Caprice of the Party.” That is such a great capsulization of false intellectual movements throughout the ages (Communism, DEI, Climate Change, etc), that you will want to read more.

(And I don’t say the just because I have lately been thinking of Climate Change fanatics as modern Pharisees.)

Bottom line is, it’s a great road map for understanding and rejecting ideas that “only an intellectual could believe.”

<>"The psychopathology involved is readily apparent to all normal people, and, if all goes well, he receives treatment, not enablement.<>

The recent CoVid debacle is a result of psychopathy at the highest levels of our defense industry.

If you refused the vaccine you were guilty of rejecting pseudo-reality, the unpardonable sin.

Our government has created and/or enabled an Inequity pseudo-reality that finds itself severely challenged by Trump, an even bigger sin.

Insurrection my reality-based ass.

This paper is pseudo-profound. The author has supported Democratic Party candidates, including volunteering for Barack Obama, and was part of the New Atheism movement.

So the bottom line remains, how does any well-meaning person distinguish between reality and propaganda? It’s not an easy problem to solve.

Pieper’s 1970 essay is worth study as well, though it is slow going in places. The whole phenomenon is the basis of Orwell’s 1984. We are living in it today.

Consider the spreading gender insanity, and the catastrophic manmade global warming scenario as prime examples.

I always thought the same, but classified some as educated, and some as educated beyond their ability to understand. Many degreed people seem to have a grasp of a great many facts by rote, but are unable to internalize it rationally.

I highly recommend reading Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, as a sort of primer on the discourse among the “educated” that led to truth becoming subject to the narrative rather than the other way around.

One such recent example of this IMHO is the “Happy Kwanzaa” BS that certain businesses spout after Christmas. The particular business who posted this is Wegmans, the Rochester, NY based grocery store chain. When I pushed back against this charade, the chorus of virtue signalers couldn’t hold back saying in one case that this is an example of the “melting pot” that is America. When confronted with the fact that a black, socialist separatist started this BS in the 1960s, I was told by one erudite virtue signaler that I was “fucking stupid”. These people have bought the lie and NOTHING will convince them otherwise.

I got a lot from this; he is quite erudite.

I know this piece was only an excerpt, so I may be commenting from ignorance of some other statements he might have made. But I found in his use of the term “epistemic” a category which he never really filled. There was no definition of what is true-reality, and how it can be known.

I have a couple of terse additions:
1. True reality is that which is universal, necessary and certain, and it always conforms to what we call “logic”.
2. True reality is grounded in the Root of all Being, which is the God of the Bible.

Violate those two and you have a decapitated sense of reality, or, as the writer asserts, “pseudo-reality”.

This sums up nicely, the Zelenskyy/Ukraine cheerleaders, who have bought into the pseudo-realities (aka propaganda) as to everything related to the Ukraine/Russia conflict:

Not a single devotee of waging war over thus is penetrable with any facts that they vehemently disagree with. They are even willing to ignore glaring facts, of which there is no dispute whatsoever.

The title is misleading.

Lindsay doesn’t go into the basic premise at length: psychopaths are the underlying cause and constructors of totalitarianism.

It’s a point I’ve made on this forum a number of times over the last two decades. It’s clear now that the history of the European monarchs shows that collectively, they are a clade of psychopaths of varying degree. So were the Asian “emperors” and their modern counterparts, the Communist dictators.

It’s actually a natural thing. Psychopaths live on manipulating others. And, they are relentless. So they never quit trying to dominate others using all means available to them.

Charlemagne forced all tribal leaders to kneel to him as if he were a deity. That was a hilarious concept since he claimed that the Christian deity had anointed him to rule. It’s really ordinary psychopathic behavior - using intimidation and extortion to force a non-psychopath to grovel. It’s what they live for. The idea that this means “God chose me to be king” is precisely what the American Revolution was fought over: denying that “Divine Right”.

But being who they are, they won’t quit. They’ll always be trying.

Comment: every federal worker, every police officer, every member of the “government” should be REQUIRED to take one of the psychopath profiling tests: PCL-R or later developments. The results should be public. And above a certain score should disqualify you from office.

Quite a few radical abolitionist diefied today by woke and uniparty also fit this bill

Funding murderers to go south and kill slave owning families and when exposed little to no accountability

Some parallels tween now and then

Blurring of objective realities of 1000s of years in an eye blink

Self righteous morality indignation mostly from puritan stock who had a history of it

And like the left projected what they themselves were guilty of on others ….rebellion …a history of it from Washington on

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