psychopaths – Just the Tarot

Putin, Ukraine, Toxic Males, and The Emperor Card

Toxic-Male psychopathology in the invasion of Ukraine.

We’re at about the three week mark in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Anyone who’s a decent person has been shocked, appalled, and nauseated by what we’ve seen. A quiet, peaceful country primarily known for its wheat and decorated Easter eggs is being bombed into dust.

For no apparent reason.

The horror of what we’re seeing on the news everyday is hard to grasp, but equally hard to grasp in the, “why,” of it. Why would Russia suddenly launch a brutal military campaign – the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Nazis – against a neighbor who was absolutely no threat to its security?

I saw a talking head on one of the news shows tonight who asked, “Just how much of a psychopath is Vladimir Putin?” It’s a revealing question because it points to the fact that we already knew Putin was a psychopath, we just didn’t know (and still don’t) how truly crazy he may be.

That truth points to another truth, which is that we’ve developed a remarkably high tolerance for psychopathology. We put up with it. We accept it. It isn’t as if Putin hasn’t been doing dreadful things for decades. He almost single handedly destroyed whatever small hope the Russian people had for freedom and democracy. His political opponents end up poisoned, dead, or in prison. He employed chemical warfare in Syria.

He’s a bad guy. A crook. A thug. A criminal. And he has been all of those things all of the time that he’s been in power. Still, the world leaders kept inviting him to the dinner table. Kept trading with Russia, inviting their teams to the Olympics, welcoming their tourists and investors, just as if Putin was somehow a normal, civilized leader. It wasn’t until he decided to obliterate a modern society for no particular reason that we began to treat him like the psychopath that he is.

Just to define our terms before we go any further, what exactly do we mean when we say that someone is a psychopath? According to Wikipedia, psychopathology is:

“characterized by persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited and egotistical traits.”

Put another way, a psychopath is a cold blooded, egotistical prick who causes a lot of suffering and really doesn’t give a shit about how many people he hurts.

I have argued previously in this blog that psychopathology is an inherent part of the Toxic-Male paradigm which our society too often embraces. We see some of that exemplified in the Tarot card, The Emperor. We can tell from his throne, scepter and title that he’s a powerful leader, a king of kings. When we look a little more closely at the card, though, we see that he’s completely alone, armored, rigid, and surrounded by a blighted, sterile landscape. His power is so toxic that not a tree or a flower can grow in his poisonous energy field. Still, we focus on the power and not the devastation.

Power that destroys everything around it for the sake of power is psychopathic.

Many of us actually admire and reward psychopathic behavior. Consider this article from Forbes magazine in which they estimate that up to 12% of corporate CEOs may be psychopaths. They are in those positions precisely because they are ruthless, have a total lack of empathy and will place corporate profit above the human suffering of their employees every time.

Remember when the CEO of the mortgage company Better.com fired over 900 employees at a goddamned Zoom meeting just before Christmas? People across the country were shocked at the totally heartless, callous way that he’d behaved, but he wasn’t fired. He took a month-long hiatus (translate: he took Christmas vacation) and was back at work within a month. He issued a tepid apology which was much more of an, “I’m sorry I got caught,” than it was an, “I’m sorry.” He kept his job because the board of directors at Better.com wanted someone with psychopathic traits running their company.

We may shake our heads at the horrible behavior of Vladimir Putin but while we’re doing that we should take a very careful look at the behavior of Donald Trump. Persistent antisocial behavior? Check. Impaired empathy? Check. Total lack of remorse? Check. Bold, disinhibited and egotistical traits? Check. Can we really doubt that the primary difference between Putin and Trump is one of power? Can we really doubt that Trump would have happily shut down a free press and had his opponents imprisoned if he could have gotten away with it? Trump is a classic CEO psychopath.

And just about half of the population of the United States voted for him. If you need any evidence that we have an increasing tolerance for psychopathic behavior, there it is.

When we look at written history, legends, and myths, it’s a safe bet that psychopaths have always been scattered throughout the human race. Wherever we find suffering, cruelty, torture, war and rape, there we find psychopaths. Is it fair, though, to tag this trait as a part of Toxic-Males? After all, there are female psychopaths, too.

The answer to that question is a resounding, “yes.” Psychopathology is toxic and it is very much a male behavior. The ratio of male to female psychopaths may be as high as 20:1. Virtually all serial killers have been males. Mass shootings are overwhelmingly committed by males. The prison population of violent offenders is heavily weighted toward males.

We can see the same evidence in human history. Leonard Shlain, author of “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image,” hypothesizes that most of the earliest human cultures were matriarchal, goddess based and peaceful. It wasn’t until the emergence of patriarchal society that we began to see psychopath kings and leaders. There is no historical record of females leading hordes of barbarians to murder, rape, and pillage. Virtually all of the monsters in human form – Ghengis Khan, Hitler, Napolean, Pol Pot, to name just a few – have been males.

It might be tempting for us to simply shrug our shoulders and say, “Oh, well . . . they’ve always been a part of the human race. What can we do about that?” Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately – the human race is at a crossroads and, as Eckhart Tolle has pointed out, we are in imminent danger of extinction if we don’t begin to evolve out of our current ways of thinking. We now have weapons capable of destroying life on earth. Millions – not thousands – of people were killed in wars and other armed conflicts during the 20th century and it’s not looking a hell of a lot better in this century.

To put it mildly, “Houston, we have a problem.” A major component in that problem is Toxic-Male psychopathology. By far and away, the majority of human beings – male and female – are NOT out there killing people and spreading terror. It’s this tiny, tiny minority that’s threatening our very existence.

So we must be rid of them. One way or another, we MUST be rid of them. We start that process with our own minds. We start that process by recognizing that they are sick, depraved, deeply flawed human beings. We stop, “admiring,” their so-called toughness and ruthlessness and realize that it’s really nothing more than a thin veneer over a sadistic personality. We stop describing them as, “geniuses,” when they put their brutality on full display. We stop voting for them when they run for office. We stop promoting them to positions of leadership in businesses. We stop acting as if it’s somehow okay or inevitable that mass shootings continue in our society or that our leaders are braggadocious bullies.

Above all else, we need to start holding up and supporting the model of emotionally healthy, nurturing, caring males. Most men are not like these psychopaths – we know that. Most men love their partners and their families and just want to live their lives in peace and harmony. At the same time, though, as males we are constantly confronted with the stereotypes of what, “real,” men are like. And those stereotypes look an awful lot like the psychopaths: ruthless, emotionless, physically dominant, violent, and lacking in empathy. That ideation of the, “alpha male,” is buried WAY deep down inside the collective psyches of both males and females. We have to start digging it out, holding it up to the light of day, and rejecting it.

It really is a matter of our survival.

THE DEVIL CARD AND THE CONUNDRUM OF EVIL PEOPLE IN THE WORLD

An exploration of the notion of evil as it applies to anti-social personality disorders.

There are some people who seem to be just . . . evil.

It feels kind of icky, just making that statement. It seems like stepping into that whole judeo-christian tar-pit of demon possession and punishing, crazy gods and hell fire and damnation and sinners. We can see that idea illustrated pretty well in The Devil tarot card. Two nude people are chained to a black altar while a gigantic, scary demon bat/goat sort of a thing hovers over them. Yikes! They done been possessed by the devil!!!

Evil in that context seems like a very medieval, primitive sort of a concept. Something that you expect to hear coming out of the mouths of fundamentalist religious people who aren’t very spiritually evolved.

Still . . .there are some people who seem functionally evil.

Many of us have had the ill-fortune to encounter a few psychopaths or sociopaths or malignant narcissists. Usually – if we’re normal people – they take us completely by surprise. Many of them are extremely adept at concealing their inner natures, but they basically have NO EMPATHY. No sense of compassion. No kindness. No love living inside of them. Not even a little sprout.

It’s a shock, when we realize that. That these are people who appear to be perfectly normal on the outside (in fact, in the case of narcissists, they may be very attractive on the outside) but have nothing but a dead, arid desert in their hearts. What’s worse, many of them aren’t content with just being morally and ethically dead, they actually delight in causing harm to others. Sociopaths may be content to live and let live (as long as you don’t cross them) but malignant narcissists and psychopaths go out of their way to fuck people up. They don’t see other people as humans – they see them as prey.

It can still be difficult to get from that behavior to the concept of evil. We tend to view, “evil,” in terms of moral wrongness and choice. In other words, if we see a clear choice between loving kind behavior on the one hand and cruel, malicious behavior on the other and we choose to be cruel and malicious, then that’s evil. The evil lies in perceiving the distinction between the two behaviors and choosing the one that causes harm.

Psychopaths, sociopaths, and narcissists don’t seem to have that sense of choice. It’s not that they’re choosing to be evil rather than being kind, they simply have no concept of kindness. What’s more, they view that lack of a sense of compassion as a strength. They view normal people who have a conscience and try to be kind as weak and they go out of their ways to exploit that weakness.

So, in a classic sense of ethics, we can’t really see them as being evil, because they don’t have that capacity to choose between being a good human being and being a fucked up human being. They’re just fucked up. Period.

We may embrace the medical/psychiatric model and try to make excuses for them. We look at them from a normal person’s point of view and think, “How awful it must be to live in a world of no love and no kindness. Something horrifically traumatic must have happened to them to make them that terrible.”

Well, yes and no. Sociopaths, for instance, have brains that are measurably, physically different from those of normal people. They appear to have been born that way. Not all people who are born with that brain structure become sociopaths, however. It seems that something has to happen in their environment to trigger the brain into becoming sociopathic. It’s like they’re hardwired that way at birth, but someone or something has to throw the switch to activate the wiring.

Psychologists and researchers are still arguing about exactly what it is that throws the switch. It could be emotional trauma, physical trauma, horrible parents, malnutrition, all of the above or – in some cases – none of the above. A lot of sociopaths were born into wealthy, loving families. Somehow, though, they end up with NO feelings of compassion or empathy, with a total lack of the characteristics that make us fully human.

It’s important to note, though, that THEY DON’T FEEL THAT WAY. At all. They’re quite happy with the way they exist in the world and think the rest of us are fools. They don’t see themselves as lacking in basic human characteristics, they see us as weaklings.

It’s also important to note that there are apparently no, “cures,” for these disorders. There’s no way to magically change them into, “normal,” human beings. If you dig around on the internet you’ll find some theorizing that talk therapy may be effective in treating malignant narcissism, but when you ask actual therapists about that, they just shake their heads.

There is some evidence that the number of sociopaths and narcissists among us is actually increasing, but there are arguments against that. It could be that our methodology for detecting them has just gotten better. It could be that they’re just more visible because of our new world of social media.

In any case, there’s no question that they’ve always been among us. In fact, Austrian philosopher Karl Popper argued that what we call, “history,” is largely the record of the psychopaths of our species. We study people like Hitler, Napolean, and Genghis Khan, people who caused immense pain and suffering in the world and just didn’t care, but we ignore all of the millions of kind, loving souls who were trying to just get through life.

Although they are very much a minority, almost a tiny fraction of the population, they have an oversized effect on the people around them. Because of them, we tend to question the goodness of human nature. We see the world as a dangerous place and fail to see all of the love and compassion that exists in the majority of human beings.

Even worse, they frequently succeed in dragging us down to their level. Anyone who’s been worked over by a malignant narcissist will tell you that you emerge from that experience with a lot less trust of other people and with a constant question of whether the next person you become involved with will be a real human being or another monster in disguise.

So . . . we end up having to recognize that there ARE people living among us who have no empathy, no compassion, no sense of ethics, no internal moral compass, and who cause a great deal of suffering for other human beings.

We can’t really call them, “evil,” in the ethical sense of their choosing to be rotten human beings. And we can’t really use the medical model and say that they’re, “sick,” because many of them live normal, productive lives and appear to be quite happy, making everyone around them miserable. And, thankfully, we’re evolving out of that primitive model of thinking that they’re possessed by demons or they’re servants of the devil.

But there they are, walking among us like human question marks. How can you be a human being and exist in that space? If you DO exist in that space, are you still fully human? It’s truly a conundrum that currently has no solution. Until there IS a solution, they can at least serve as a contrast for the rest of us. We can look at them and realize, “That’s what I DON’T want to be.”

Dan Adair is the author of, “Just the Tarot,” available on Amazon.com at a very reasonable price.