A Delicious Bowl of Bat Soup, Part Two

Conspiracies, Coronavirus, and the Psychopathic Style in World Leadership

As far as I understand it at this point, it seems that there have been a few major “behind the scenes” influences on the direction of American society and its political economy over the last decades. The political spectrum in the US ranges from the Far Right to neoconservatism to neoliberalism to a few Left Wing outliers like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Further to the Left are a small group of scraggly anarchists and a few left-over Marxists. The country has shifted farther Right since the Seventies. Bill Clinton was essentially a “Republican Lite”; Obama was as well. 

One of a number of elite organizations lurking behind the scenes is the Trilateral Commission, started by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1973 to build cooperation between America, Western Europe, and Japan. According to the Washington Post, its members have included George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Jeffrey Epstein, Paul Volcker, as well as “top executives of AT&T, ITT, Xerox, Mobil, Exxon, the Chase Manhattan Bank, First Chicago Corp., General Electric, TRW, Archer Daniels Midland, PepsiCo, RJR Nabisco and Goldman Sachs (not to mention Nissan, Toshiba and Fuji Bank).” The Trilateral Commission published The Crisis of Democracy in 1975. The report argued that Democratic society was becoming unmanageable: “Some of the problems in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy…” the authors noted. “Needed, instead, is a greater moderation in democracy.”  The Trilateral Commission saw it in the best interests of the US, European nations, and Japan to be directed by a technocratic managerial elite, wielding power outside of the turbulence of electoral politics. 

The Trilateral Commission is often made a central focus of conspiracy theories. That is not my perspective here. The point I want to make is that one important strain in American political thought has been shaped by a particular segment of the power elite. This influential group believe that our future direction is not toward more democracy, but less. They believe that we will inevitably become a technological society, a technocracy, managed for the masses by a small group of elite experts that includes corporate executives and the super-wealthy, with elections largely irrelevant. 

Whether or not the Trilateral Commission is still as powerful, this type of technocratic approach is pursued today by the neoliberal elite in the Democratic party, as well as sectors of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. People like Eric Schmidt of Google and Bill Gates are aligned with this technocratic, managerial agenda and worldview. We are seeing growing fury against this technocratic approach from the mass populace. Working people, for instance, are afraid of increasing automation, such as self-driving cars and trucks, which will take away their jobs. This fury is being manipulated and channeled into irrational conspiracy theories like Qanon, which has become a large-scale movement. 

Another extremely powerful group is made up of wealthy Far Right Libertarians. The enormous influence wielded by this group was the subject of Jane Mayer’s indispensable book, Dark Money. Essentially, in the 1960s, a group of super wealthy businessmen, led by the Koch brothers, realized they did not like the direction of American society. They didn’t like the Great Society with its increases in social services, increased taxation on the wealthy, better public health and public education. They met in secret and developed a strategic and tactical plan, orchestrated a bit like a corporate takeover, to strip away these programs. They wanted to radically limit the power of the government. 

To this end, they funded economics departments at universities and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, built lobbying arms and media outlets. They realized that they needed to create initiatives that resembled the grassroots activist movements found on the Left,  so they created “astro-turf’d” social movements like the Tea Party. They strategically backed certain intellectuals like Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, which correlates IQ to race. Murray’s work has been repeatedly debunked. But it provides ideological cover for reducing social services and educations to certain ethnic groups, such as blacks. 

While the Libertarian plutocrats did not entirely support Trump at first, they have aligned with him since his election. Many of Trump’s cabinet appointees have close ties to the Heritage Foundation. Trump’s cabinet are mainly tasked with reducing their departments to the bare minimum, if not eliminating their function altogether. The Koch brothers’ forty-plus year strategy has finally succeeded. Trump has unified the Republican Party around a neo-Fascistic agenda and personality cult, seeking to establish rule by a minority over the long term. 

Both the technocratic neoliberal approach represented by Obama, the Clintons, and Biden and the Right Wing libertarian approach represented by Trump have revealed themselves as catastrophic failures for the United States and the world. Obama, with a large-scale popular mandate and a Democratic majority in Congress, was unable to address the ecological emergency we are facing, which threatens humanity with civilizational collapse and extinction. Since leaving office, Obama has bragged that he counts fracking, which causes irreparable environmental harm, and increasing Wall Street’s dividends among his successes. 

Since Trump took office, we are living through an amazingly accelerated collapse of the American Empire. Among many policy failures, the Trump administration’s mismanagement of the Coronavirus epidemic is staggering, leading to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths and 50 million people unemployed. As a society, buffeted by the pandemic as well as civil unrest and environmental disasters, the US seems to have lost its collective sanity. 

Trump’s rise to power is symptomatic of very deep societal pathologies. Many of us sense something hidden in the shadows; we sense that we have not see the worst of it yet, that worse catastrophes are coming as our society decays and disintegrates further. It feels like we are under the effect of a hypnotizing spell; some kind of black magic. It as if we are facing a viscerally occult force that makes any coherent response impossible. 

As I write this, it seems that the US inevitably faces the political catastrophe of a contested election with the possibility of some form of civil war. From the way that the mainstream media repetitively drums this message into the public, one intuits that this imminent disaster is being stage-managed and orchestrated. As I proposed in the beginning of this essay, powerful factions seek to dissolve the rights and protections guaranteed in the Constitution. They plan to establish despotic rule, authoritarian tyranny, without limits. They believe that the Democratic, liberal experiment is over. 

So what is to be done? Obviously, what we need is a functional alternative to this out-of-control control system. The alternative has to be so compelling, inspiring, and true that it leads the great multitude of humanity toward a new vision and a new opportunity. This alternative has to be devised and released outside of the two party system, as a unifying grassroots movement bringing the traditionally conservative working class and the liberal and progressive upper middle class together. As its unifying theme, the movement would reveal the psychopathology of the current governing elites and define a viable alternative to technocratic rule. 

We can take a small degree of comfort from the fact that humanity has confronted past crises that seemed almost insurmountable — such as the revolutions of the 18th Century or the two World Wars of the 20th. However, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that the scale of our current crisis absolutely dwarfs anything we have seen in our historical past. Considering the rapidity of species extinction and ecosystem collapse, humanity will not survive on Earth for much longer if we do not change our direction. Another plausible option, which almost seems worse, is that we survive, but Chinese-style totalitarianism becomes pervasive, with dissidents injected with something like neural-lace, to control their behavior at the level of the brainstem, on an abysmally polluted world. 

It is increasingly obvious that the accelerating power of technology has far outpaced our ethical and moral development as a species. Clinton Callahan writes in Beware The Psychopath, My Son, that we must realize that civilization itself, with its vertical power structures, is largely the invention of sociopaths and psychopaths and is designed to serve them: “All civilizations, our own included, have been built on slavery and mass murder. Psychopaths have played a disproportionate role in the development of civilization because they are hard-wired to lie, kill, cheat, steal, torture, manipulate, and generally inflict great suffering on other humans without feeling any remorse, in order to establish their own sense of security through domination.” 

In The Psychopath Epidemic, Cameron Reilly writes, “The cultures of many of our largest organizations — business, political, military, law enforcement, and religious — attract and reward psychopaths. They prosper and rise into management positions, where they contribute to increasing the toxicity of the organizational culture. Combined, these toxic organizations pose an extraordinary danger to society.”

According to anthropologist Pierre Claustres in Society Against the State, many indigenous tribes in the Amazon and elsewhere developed social systems designed to keep the chiefs or Alpha Males from wielding excessive power. This can work in small-scale tribal communities. As modern civilization developed to its present level of size and complexity, we lost those safeguards. 

Of course, the vast majority of people are not psychopaths or sociopaths. Most people prefer to live peacefully. They want to lead decent, honest, and honorable lives. Unfortunately, that will not be possible for any of us until we address our collective psychopath problem. I consider it a severe error in the contemporary “spiritual” and “New Age” culture to not acknowledge that the rule by psychopaths is at the core of our deepening collective crisis. Nothing we can do internally, in terms of our inner spiritual work, is going to address this issue or change the outer situation. Those who believe that have been fooling themselves. But, then, what can be done? 

The first step in reckoning with a problem is admitting that you have one. The second step is learning about it, and then you can develop a strategy for overcoming it. “The psychopaths’ only limitation is the participation of susceptible individuals within that given society,” writes Callahan. It is estimated that true psychopaths are less than 1% of a given population, while those with lesser deviant traits make up another 5% of a population. True psychopathy appears to have a genetic basis rather than being a result of psychological conditioning. Psychopaths are a small minority.

Callahan writes, “Psychopaths learn to recognize each other in a crowd as early as childhood, and they develop an awareness of the existence of other individuals similar to themselves. They also become conscious of being of a different world from the majority of other people surrounding them.” Psychopaths possess "special psychological knowledge of normal people. … They are experts in knowing how to push our buttons, to use our emotions against us. But beyond that, they even seem to have some sort of hypnotic power over us. When we begin to get caught up in the web of the psychopath, our ability to think deteriorates, gets muddied. They seem to cast some sort of spell over us. It is only later when we are no longer in their presence, out of their spell, that the clarity of thought returns and we find ourselves wondering how it was that we were unable to respond or counter what they were doing.” This perfectly describes the collective cognitive condition of the United States at this point. 

Psychopaths can be identified by brain scans: “When Robert Hare, a Canadian psychologist who spent his career studying psychopathy, did brain scans on psychopaths while showing them two sets of words, one set of neutral words with no emotional associations and a second set with emotionally charged words, while different areas of the brain lit up in the non-psychopathic control group, in the psychopaths, both sets were processed in the same area of the brain, the area that deals with language.” Modern society now has the ability to identify psychopaths. In theory, we can establish rules and laws that keep them away from positions of power. 

If we are going to reckon with our psychopath problem, we also have to study these character disorders, to discern their weak spots. Callahan notes that psychopaths “have little real conception of past or future, living entirely for their immediate needs and desires. Because of the barren quality of their inner life, they are often seeking new thrills, anything from feeling the power of manipulating others to engaging in illegal activities simply for the rush of adrenaline.” This incapacity to care or to plan for the future is a flaw in the psychopath’s armor that can be exploited, potentially, to defeat them. 

This brief overview helps us understand what is happening on the world stage right now. As I discussed, the evidence strongly suggests that Coronavirus-19 was bio-engineered, probably accidentally released, but then knowingly distributed globally by the Chinese leadership. This is, obviously, a serious crime that should be investigated and prosecuted. But the mechanism for doing so doesn’t exist. Similarly, Trump’s incompetence and inattention allowed Covid-19 to wreak damage on the US population as well as the US economy. At the very least, he should have been removed from office for this, if not prosecuted. Xi Jinping and Trump are psychopaths addicted to the adrenaline rush they get from knowingly lying and causing harm. 

The mass media, over a number of decades, has prepared and in a sense “tenderized” the mass populace in the US for rule by psychopaths. The mass media is an instrument of mass hypnotism and indoctrination. As with the government and the major corporations, the mass media also seems run by psychopaths, who utilize it as a means to control the collective consciousness. Unfortunately, despite its initial promise as a tool for liberating knowledge and connectivity, social media has been weaponized as an incredibly invasive technology for social engineering and psychological manipulation. 

Part of what enhances the cognitive dissonance we are experiencing is the tension between overlapping and competing agendas on the part of our psychologically deviant elite. There is a peculiar, unstated tension between the technocratic control system (represented by Biden, Obama Gates, Eric Schmitt, the Trilateral Commission, Davos, etc) and the crude Right Wing libertarianism / authoritarianism of Trump, his minions, the Heritage Foundation, and so on. In a sense, one might see the technocratic approach as more cunning, while Trump is more obvious. He actually enjoys boasting about his illegal and immoral activities and can’t stop doing so, where the technocratic elite prefer keeping their agendas secret and obscure. Trump’s childlike approach is pathetic and repulsive, but his followers find it refreshing. At least with him, they know that nothing is hidden. This also helps to explain why Trump is excused from behavior that other Presidents would have been crucified for. 

This also explains the clashing responses to the pandemic within the US. Obviously, the US should have done what Europe did and organize an effective, immediate lockdown for six weeks. We missed our crucial window of opportunity to stop the virus from spreading. However, over time, we are learning much more about this virus. As it spreads, it is also becoming less deadly. According to the CDC, for people under the age of 49 years old, there is now a .05% fatality rate. For people above 65 years old, the fatality rate goes up to 1.3%. The reports of chronic organ damage have also been greatly over-inflated. It now seems evident that the vast majority of people who get Coronavirus have no long-term damage. 

Societally, at this point, we seem to be in a state of extreme over-reaction to the threat of the virus. While those with chronic conditions and the elderly should continue to quarantine, masks and social distancing make less and less sense for most people. Yet as with the security apparatus that developed after 9/11, we are seeing the tendency of these technocratic systems to become more invasive and controlling. In our current paradigm, it seems difficult, if not impossible, to disband them once they have been imposed. 

Let’s rewind a bit, to clarify what we have discussed so far. Some of the ruling elites in government, finance, and the corporate world are made up of psychological deviants on the psychopathic and sociopathic spectrum. These individuals rise to power in hierarchical systems based on control, dominance, and exploitation. They win the game because they have no conscience, ignoring destructive consequences and “externalities.” Psychopaths have a sense of each other and recognize their distance from ordinary human beings. As the winners of the power game, they see themselves as innately superior, “masters of the universe,” who have a natural right to control and manipulate the mass population. They also may enjoy causing suffering. Over time, some of them get addicted to the adrenaline rush that comes from illicit, immoral, and criminal activity. Like addicts, they have to keep increasing the dose. 

This framing helps us reach a coherent understanding of events like 9/11, why the Chinese leadership decided to spread the Coronavirus globally once it was released, and the partly orchestrated social breakdown that is happening in the US right now. Psychopaths don’t necessarily need to be meshed in tightly plotted conspiracies to be working toward the same goal and agenda. Their tendency will be to push societal forces in the direction that serves their perceived, short-term interests. They automatically project the barren quality of their inner lives into the outer world, reshaping the world in their own image. That we have been ruled and manipulated by psychopaths without conscience helps to explain the increasingly vacuous, soul-less quality of contemporary existence. 

“When you understand the true nature of psychopathic influence, that it is conscienceless, emotionless, selfish, cold and calculating, and devoid of any moral or ethical standards, you are horrified, but at the same time, everything suddenly begins to make sense,” Callahan writes. “Our society is ever more soulless because the people who lead it and who set the example are soulless – they literally have no conscience.”

We can, therefore, define one new organizing pole for a global counter-movement: It will be based on identifying psychopaths —  through brain scans, personality tests, and observation — and removing them from positions of power. This is something that people can agree with, from across the political spectrum. The various forms of psychopathy must be understood more widely, along with methods for identifying the manipulative mechanisms used by psychopaths to cover their tracks.

Along with this, we need to define a new direction for human society that is distinct from the technological control paradigm which is sociopathic in its essence. I believe that neoliberals are making a mistake in rejecting working class anger against automation and corporate globalization. They need to re-think their position and find common cause with them. Similarly, I consider the mass movement questioning vaccinations and other advances in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals to be a healthy one that is worthy of support. The subject requires much deeper analysis as well as oversight from civil society. 

We have seen a massive increase in vaccinations since the mid-1980s. During that time, children have become more prone to many chronic diseases and conditions, from asthma to autism to ADHD. Vaccines are an enormous profit center for pharmaceutical companies. Vaccines now produce $60 billion in annual revenue. The pharmaceutical corporations that produce vaccines are part of the same market system that led cigarette companies to hide the danger of cigarette smoking and energy companies to disseminate climate change denial. Someone who develops a chronic condition is a long-term profit center for a pharmaceutical company. There are many legitimate reasons to be concerned that a rushed vaccine for Covid could have negative long-term health effects for many people. Such long-term conditions are actually advantageous to pharmaceutical companies, increasing their bottom line. Also, in the US, vaccine-makers have been released from legal liability for damage they cause. 

What I am proposing here is that we graduate from the “conspiracy theories” that seek to identify a particular plot orchestrated by a small cabal. It doesn’t work that way. Our problem is that we have a technocratic system designed and controlled by psychological deviants — psychopaths and sociopaths — who are without conscience. They continually seek more wealth, power, and control. They recognize each other intuitively and work toward the same basic goals. They range across the political spectrum from Democrat and neoliberal, from Marxist to Far Right Wing libertarian. When we turn our collective focus to address these two issues — the psychopaths who have taken control of human civilization and the technocratic system that enhances their capacity to manipulate us — we can build a global movement across classes, races, religious and ethnic groups to defeat them.