America in the Age of Narcissism

Although this is not scholarly, it is very interesting and well-informed.

Unlike psychopaths, narcissists are made, not born.

Families and even societies can be predisposed towards forming a greater percentage of narcissists because of the priorities they reinforce and the behaviours that they uphold and reward.

Among these are superficiality, personal entitlement, competitive pride that defines the person, a perverse sense of individualism, and above all a lack of empathy.

They can be professionally very successful, socially attractive and charismatic, bigger than life. But personally they are often inept and unfortunate, unable to sustain intimate relationships, morally ambivalent. They tend to react with coldness and rage when their desires and plans are thwarted.

They rarely accept responsibility or admit to errors. They project their failure onto others. They are empty inside, and seek to build externalities to make up for it. They try to fill their emptiness with things and money and credentials and other people. Their behaviour is a reflex in response to their emptiness.

Everyone has a need for recognition and validation. The difference is that in a narcissist the personal needs are so dominant that one becomes addicted to validation and a grandiose amount of recognition.

The malignant narcissist can easily become a white collar style of criminal, stealing from victims with little or no remorse, almost approaching the empathetic vacuity of a psychopath.

Losing all hope and empathy is their freedom. And in this way they fashion their own emptiness, and can become the lord and master of their own personal hell.

Stocks and Precious.Metal Charts - Predator Nation - FOMC Minutes Tomorrow

"Psychopaths are social predators who charm, manipulate, and ruthlessly plow their way through life, leaving a broad trail of broken hearts, shattered expectations, and empty wallets. Completely lacking in conscience and in feelings for others, they selfishly take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without the slightest sense of guilt or regret.

Psychopaths often come across as arrogant, shameless braggarts—self-assured, opinionated, domineering, and cocky. They love to have power and control over others and seem unable to believe that other people have valid opinions different from theirs. What makes psychopaths different from all others is the remarkable ease with which they lie, the pervasiveness of their deception, and the callousness with which they carry it out.

The most debilitating characteristic of even the most well-behaved psychopath is the inability to form a workable team.

The majority of people and therefore workplaces are easy prey, because we still want to believe that people are inherently good. We don't really want to believe that such people exist. Wherever you find money, prestige and power you will find them. We are far more likely to lose our life savings to an oily-tongued swindler than our lives to a steely-eyed killer."

Robert D. Hare, Without Conscience


“Over the past quarter century, the leaders of both the Democratic and the Republican political parties have perfected a remarkable system for remaining in power while serving the new economic oligarchy. Both parties take in huge amounts of money, in many forms — campaign contributions, lobbying, revolving-door hiring, favours, and special access of various kinds.

Politicians in both parties enrich themselves and betray the interests of the nation, including most of the people who vote for them. Yet both parties are still able to mobilize support because they skilfully exploit America’s cultural polarization. Republicans warn social conservatives about the dangers of secularism, taxes, abortion, welfare, gay marriage, gun control, and liberals.

Democrats warn social liberals about the dangers of guns, pollution, global warming, making abortion illegal, and conservatives. Both parties make a public show of how bitter their conflicts are, and how dangerous it would be for the other party to achieve power, while both prostitute themselves to the financial sector, powerful industries, and the wealthy. Thus, the very intensity of the two parties’ differences on “values” issues enables them to collaborate when it comes to money.”

Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation

Stocks are still struggling to recover from their recent decline and set a new high.

Gold and silver were hit sharply today early on, but recovered somewhat into the close, as the Dollar strengthened again.

The amount of gold available for delivery at these prices has become shockingly low.

FOMC minutes tomorrow.

Have a pleasant evening.

American Psycho Redux

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."

Charles Mackay

The US is remarkable, not for any unusual distribution of psychopaths amongst its people, but rather for the high regard and admiration in which the more articulate and successful psychopaths and sociopaths among their ranks are held by the public, their natural prey.

The problem is not that there are disturbed and destructive people in a society. The problem is when they are able to subvert a culture to satisfy their goals, when their animalistic cunning and heartlessness becomes fashionable, imitated, and even respected.

It is surely the greatest triumph of madness over common sense since the self-destruction of nations in the 20th century. Whole peoples surrendered themselves to ruthless leaders, thrilled to be ravaged by power without weakness. They drank deeply from the cup of madness and danced with the culture of death. And that is what it is to be without boundaries or constraints, free as gods on earth.

"He may have destroyed men, women, and children, and condemned thousands of families to homelessness and despair, but he never wavered in his resolve and conviction while doing it. He amassed great power and fortune, and he never got caught. He believed in himself, and he's a winner."

"The manipulative con-man. The guy who lies to your face, even when he doesn’t have to. The child who tortures animals. The cold-blooded killer. Psychopaths are characterised by an absence of empathy and poor impulse control, with a total lack of conscience.

About 1% of the total population can be defined as psychopaths, according to a detailed psychological profile checklist. They tend to be egocentric, callous, manipulative, deceptive, superficial, irresponsible and parasitic, even predatory.

The majority of psychopaths are not violent and many do very well in jobs where their personality traits are advantageous and their social tendencies tolerated. However, some have a predisposition to calculated, “instrumental” violence; violence that is cold-blooded, planned and goal-directed.

Psychopaths are vastly over-represented among criminals; it is estimated they make up about 20% of the inmates of most prisons. They commit over half of all violent crimes and are 3-4 times more likely to re-offend. They are almost entirely refractory to rehabilitation. These are not nice people.

So how did they get that way? Is it an innate biological condition, a result of social experience, or an interaction between these factors?

Longitudinal studies have shown that the personality traits associated with psychopathy are highly stable over time. Early warning signs including “callous-unemotional traits” and antisocial behaviour can be identified in childhood and are highly predictive of future psychopathy.

Large-scale twin studies have shown that these traits are highly heritable – identical twins, who share 100% of their genes, are much more similar to each other in this trait than fraternal twins, who share only 50% of their genes. In one study, over 80% of the variation in the callous-unemotional trait across the population was due to genetic differences. In contrast, the effect of a shared family environment was almost nil.

Psychopathy seems to be a lifelong trait, or combination of traits, which are heavily influenced by genes and hardly at all by social upbringing.

The two defining characteristics of psychopaths, blunted emotional response to negative stimuli, coupled with poor impulse control, can both be measured in psychological and neuroimaging experiments...They do not seem to process heavily loaded emotional words, like “rape”, for example, any differently from how they process neutral words, like “table”.

This lack of response to negative stimuli can be measured in other ways, such as the failure to induce a galvanic skin response (heightened skin conduction due to sweating) when faced with an impending electrical shock...

The psychopath really just doesn’t care. In this, psychopaths differ from many people who are prone to sudden, impulsive violence, in that those people tend to have a hypersensitive negative emotional response to what would otherwise be relatively innocuous stimuli."

Craig, M., Catani, M., Deeley, Q., Latham, R., Daly, E., Kanaan, R., Picchioni, M., McGuire, P., Fahy, T., & Murphy, D. (2009). Altered connections on the road to psychopathy Molecular Psychiatry, 14 (10), 946-953 DOI: 10.1038/mp.2009.40