It is a celebrated truism of the annoyingly named “New Age Spirituality Movement” that HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS MUST CHANGE for world peace and environmental sanity to prevail. But this idea isn’t discussed in the mainstream discourse because it is viewed as being vague & abstract. But there is NOTHING vague or abstract about the ignorance, denial, delusion and psychopathic behavior exhibited by those with their hands on the levers of power in the world.
Our magnificent leaders occupy a spectrum of human behavior. On one end of that spectrum is willful ignorance: they might not be very bright and they don’t especially care to know information that conflicts with their comfortable world view. Next on that spectrum are self-deception, denial and delusion. Politicians and corporate executives are particularly adept at our very human capacity for talking ourselves into believing completely ridiculous shit when doing so happens to be convenient. This is how they can wake up in the morning, look at themselves in the mirror, genuinely believe that their behavior is acceptable and then go about their day doing a grotesque, despicable disservice to future generations. At the other end of this spectrum is psychopathic behavior. About one or two percent of humans qualify as psychopaths or sociopaths. They are neurologically incapable of experiencing guilt or remorse. They don’t have a conscience. While many psychopaths are in prison, a number of the smarter ones end up in political office or in corporate boardrooms – places where a little treachery can serve you quite well. When I call Dick Cheney a psychopath, I’m not trying to be shrill or provocative. I’m trying to be accurate in my speech. The man is diagnosable as a psychopath. He told bald faced lies about weapons of mass destruction, turned Iraq into a sloppy goat fuck and then had the gigantic, narcissistic balls to do conservative talk shows ragging on about what a bad job Obama was doing in the Middle East.
If we had a friend who was an abusive alcoholic, we’d be saying all kinds of things about human psychology. We’d be saying, “Gosh, he’s in a lot of denial. How are we going to get him into counseling? How are we going to get him to do some soul-searching?” Meanwhile, the people running the world are in blind, screaming shit house denial or some of them are psychopaths and all we can say is, “That politician is sleazy. That corporate executive is greedy.” Is this really the best we can do? Sigmund Freud died in 1939. Modern psychology is not a new and unheard of science. It’s high time we brought the full weight of modern psychology to bear on the people running the world because they are running it off the edge of a cliff.