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Psychopathy, Politics, and the Founding Fathers
By Gordon Francis Corbett
Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary tells us that a psychopathic personality
is "an emotionally and behaviorally disordered state characterized by clear
perception of reality except for the individual's social and moral obligations
and often by the pursuit of immediate personal gratification in criminal acts,
drug addiction, or sexual perversion."
For we who study politics, and who follow its currents and tides, that
definition should ring a few bells. Very often, in recent years, we have gazed
at our television screens, or at our newspaper pages, and realized that a given
politician's statement or action bespeaks a total lack of scruples.
One theory runs that psychopaths feel no emotion under normal circumstances,
and that to feel some kind of pleasure, they must create circumstances that you
and I would deem very unusual. For some of these people, the easiest way to
create them is to hurt someone.
When I attended college, one of my room-mates had tendencies that, I
thought, seemed psychopathic. Years later, because this fellow had participated
in politics, I asked a psychologist whether he thought that politics attracted
psychopaths. He replied that it does, but that the full truth was worse: it
tends to manufacture them.
We already know that some politicians who ask for our trust will betray it
without compunction. If that psychologist is right, we now know why a few do it
so eagerly.
We must take care.
On the one hand, politics offers many things to many people. Some are
honest and some are crooks. Few are psychopathic. When we watch a candidate
evade issues better than Joe Nemeth dodged tacklers, we should remember that he
is probably only a clever and voluble crook.
On the other hand, we dare not forget that some clever and voluble crooks
are psychopaths.
We lack the means and the time to determine whether any politician is honest
or crooked, let alone psychopathic. Therefore, we must do what our Founding
Fathers advised. We must bind him down from mischief with the chains of a
Constitution.
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