THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

WHY WE ARE RULED BY SOCIOPATHS | 1998-11-07

While a lot of people are for Clinton and a lot are against him, I doubt anyone now doubts that he is a sociopath. A sociopath is a person who is incapable of feeling honest guilt. He is also incapable of feeling any obligation to another person or to society in general.

This is a shockingly common phenomenon. Once we thought it was very rare. We now know that sociopaths probably constitute one to five percent of the population.

To be acceptable today, a politician must be a sociopath. Every move, every smile, every emotion is used to get what he is after. By definition, the more conscience you have, the less perfect a modern politician you will be.

Democracy is a system of government where people get what they deserve. We ASK for sociopaths to rule us. We want someone who will say the right thing. We label anyone who loses his temper or says anything that is purely an individual opinion, as over the edge. So we vote for people who say the right thing.

All the time.

Nobody who is not a sociopath can have acceptable opinions all the time.

In "The Bead Buyers"(below) I explain that we have become a society where sociopaths who learn the formulas for "handling" us, the right "spin", are allowed to rule us.

Dale Carnegie's book, How To Win Friends And Influence People, was a handbook for sociopaths. Not coincidentally, his methods worked like a charm. Nothing could be more inevitable in a country where Carnegie's advice works than that we get presidents like Nixon and Clinton.

The best book I ever read about success with women was written by a woman. It's title was The Inept Seducer. At the end, it had a piece called "How to be Ept," which gave men ten steps by which they could get what they wanted just about every time.

It worked like a charm.

The Inept Seducer worked beautifully, just as Carnegie's stuff worked beautifully. And the one tactic that was never discussed in The Inept Seducer at all was HONESTY. With American women, according to this lady, honesty is absurd. My experience says she was dead right.

We are ruled by sociopaths because we ASK to be ruled by sociopaths.