One might ask, "How can these fossil fuel industry CEOs sleep at night? They surely wouldn't want a legacy of drought, famine, mass-extinction of wildlife, and millions, if not billions of cases of human misery. Would they?"
Guess what, folks? They have no trouble sleeping at night. Nor do they have trouble buying off all three levels of our government. That's much easier to accomplish when you make billions of dollars and externalize every penny of cost possible.
And, they have no qualms about selling their own children and grandchildren and ours down the river, in a world of poisoned air and water, a world increasingly marred by industrial sites that spew forth the polluting remains of critters that bought the farm millions of years ago.
They make their horrific crimes pay by taking advantage of a basic component of human goodness. Most good people want to believe that others are basically decent people. We have also been programmed to believe that the really dangerous folks out there are desperate looking, slovenly-dressed characters who want what we have, and are bombers, mass-murderers and serial killers.
Maybe the biggest lesson to learn in dealing with our most pressing issues is that not all humans are the same. Some are either born with, or become capable of, self-serving behavior so evil that no fiction writer could create it.
Not long ago, my wife and I mentioned this startling behavior of fossil fuel CEOs to a very bright, worldly friend of ours, whose career keeps her in the Middle East much of the time. She has met with oil company tycoons, and practically shuddered when she very deliberately said, "They're not human."
Of course, biologically, they are, but, that's about it. They're psychopaths, and they are not simply among us; they have hijacked our system of democracy. That enough members of Congress, as well as other elected officials, have the same problem, that's not so difficult.
Hervey Cleckley's classic work, The Mask of Sanity, edited and exerpted here in a special research project of the Quantum Future School, explains this chillingly well. (I added bold character to some of the text, but changed nothing.)
"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.
In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world.
You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences will most likely remain undiscovered...
Revealing, and a glimpse into the mess that we're in.
Most of us feel mildly guilty if we eat the last piece of cake in the kitchen, let alone what we would feel if we intentionally and methodically set about to hurt another person.
Those who have no conscience at all are a group unto themselves, whether they be homicidal tyrants or merely ruthless social snipers.
The presence or absence of conscience is a deep human division, arguably more significant than intelligence, race, or even gender.
What differentiates a sociopath who lives off the labors of others from one who occasionally robs convenience stores, or from one who is a contemporary robber baron - or what makes the difference betwen an ordinary bully and a sociopathic murderer - is nothing more than social status, drive, intellect, blood lust, or simple opportunity.
What distinguishes all of these people from the rest of us is an utterly empty hole in the psyche, where there should be the most evolved of all humanizing functions. [Martha Stout, Ph.D., The Sociopath Next Door] (highly recommended)
Those who have no conscience at all are a group unto themselves, whether they be homicidal tyrants or merely ruthless social snipers.
The presence or absence of conscience is a deep human division, arguably more significant than intelligence, race, or even gender.
What differentiates a sociopath who lives off the labors of others from one who occasionally robs convenience stores, or from one who is a contemporary robber baron - or what makes the difference betwen an ordinary bully and a sociopathic murderer - is nothing more than social status, drive, intellect, blood lust, or simple opportunity.
What distinguishes all of these people from the rest of us is an utterly empty hole in the psyche, where there should be the most evolved of all humanizing functions. [Martha Stout, Ph.D., The Sociopath Next Door] (highly recommended)
For those of you who are seeking understanding of psychopathy, Hervey Cleckley's book The Mask of Sanity, the absolutely essential study of the psychopath who is not necessarily of the criminal type. This book is no longer available. We have it scanned and our team of researchers spent two weeks going over the text carefully to eliminate text conversion errors. You may download the entire book FREE as a PDF from the link at left, top. (Read A Sample Chapter of The Mask of Sanity)
"Likeable," "Charming," "Intelligent," "Alert," "Impressive," "Confidence-inspiring," and "A great success with the ladies": These are the sorts of descriptions repeatedly used by Cleckley in his famous case-studies of psychopaths. They are also, of course, "irresponsible," "self-destructive," and the like. These descriptions highlight the great frustrations and puzzles that surround the study of psychopathy.
Psychopaths seem to have in abundance the very traits most desired by normal persons. The untroubled self-confidence of the psychopath seems almost like an impossible dream and is generally what "normal" people seek to acquire when they attend assertiveness training classes. In many instances, the magnetic attraction of the psychopath for members of the opposite sex seems almost supernatural.
Cleckley's seminal hypothesis concerning the psychopath is that he suffers from a very real mental illness indeed: a profound and incurable affective deficit. If he really feels anything at all, they are emotions of only the shallowest kind. He does bizarre and self-destructive things because consequences that would fill the ordinary man with shame, self-loathing, and embarrassment simply do not affect the psychopath at all. What to others would be a disaster is to him merely a fleeting inconvenience."
Revealing, and a glimpse into the mess that we're in.
"in abundance the very traits most desired by normal persons." That's what makes it easy for these individuals to buy influence even with lawmakers who should know better. That's possibly what made it easy for Penn State University to accept $88 million from East Resources (a gas-drilling company that was sold for some 4.7 billion later that year (2010), and then for Penn State researchers to convince many folks that this gas-drilling, this hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") isn't bad at all, and that we need this "clean burning" fuel. It's what make it apparently easy for National Public Radio to accept contributions from Shell, the polluting oil company that is becoming horribly polluting gas-drilling company. (One reason I no longer contribute to NPR, which has become the middle of a right-leaning road). It's also what helped the Sierra Club, at the national level, accept $26 million from the natural gas industry from 2007 through 2010 (Certain leaders endorsed natural gas as a means of getting our country away from using coal-- a possibly noble, but extremely short-sighted decision.), until new Executive Director Michael Brune turned away more of this tainted money, and set a better course. That certain leaders could buy this lie can only be explained by the persuasive power of the psychopath.
Our system is so skewed, that crimes for which ordinary citizens would spend long years in prison for committing, produce only token fines against our worst industries-- merely the cost of doing business. If someone dumps poison down his neighbor's drinking water well, the offender will go to prison. If the corporate efforts of some gas-drilling company CEO poison many private drinking water wells, sicken people who live near gas compressor stations, ruin property values in drilling country, (as have happened in Pennsylvania, and elsewhere), they'll simply deny that their actions are connected to anyone's misfortune. And, they'll ramble on about how drilling gas is patriotic (even though it's killing American workers and American citizens, and much of the product is slated to be shipped overseas).
Did anyone go to prison after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, in which 11 workers died? Nope. Did anyone go to prison after a Massey Energy coal sludge impoundment sent 300 million gallons of toxic coal sludge into Martin County, Kentucky, and beyond, polluting water up to 70 miles away, even though company officials knew that the same impoundment had leaked a few years before? Nope. When you're a psychopath, and you fool enough people, you can get away with anything.
Our system is so skewed, that crimes for which ordinary citizens would spend long years in prison for committing, produce only token fines against our worst industries-- merely the cost of doing business. If someone dumps poison down his neighbor's drinking water well, the offender will go to prison. If the corporate efforts of some gas-drilling company CEO poison many private drinking water wells, sicken people who live near gas compressor stations, ruin property values in drilling country, (as have happened in Pennsylvania, and elsewhere), they'll simply deny that their actions are connected to anyone's misfortune. And, they'll ramble on about how drilling gas is patriotic (even though it's killing American workers and American citizens, and much of the product is slated to be shipped overseas).
Did anyone go to prison after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, in which 11 workers died? Nope. Did anyone go to prison after a Massey Energy coal sludge impoundment sent 300 million gallons of toxic coal sludge into Martin County, Kentucky, and beyond, polluting water up to 70 miles away, even though company officials knew that the same impoundment had leaked a few years before? Nope. When you're a psychopath, and you fool enough people, you can get away with anything.
