A Fellow Feeling.

An interesting week. Just on the 35^th anniversary of the last one, the incoming “leader of the free world” made a thinly-veiled threat to invade Panama again if it didn’t offer the US “mate’s rates” on using its canal. In case they didn’t get the message, he posted a picture of a US flag waving in the middle of the canal. At the same time, he said that for reasons of national security and global freedom, American “ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity." This comes shortly after his suggestion that Canada would make a very good 51^st state of the US and that “maybe” the US should invade Mexico to crush the drug cartels. In each case, the targets of his grasshopper-sized attention span told him to get stuffed, which probably won’t give him pause as he has a huge squad of billionaires advising him just what is needed to Make America Great Again. By this, of course, they mean just what they need to get even richer themselves, and those countries have it. For example, China has recently retaliated against US trade sanctions by blocking exports of critical metals needed for the high-tech trade. Mr Musk, who is very much in the high-tech trade, knows that underneath Greenland’s pesky icecap lie vast quantities of critical metals just begging to be dug up by clever people who know how to take advantage of global warming.

For devotees of the Godfather or Sopranos or whatever, this is all standard stuff: Make them an offer. If they refuse, make them an offer they can’t refuse. Gangsterism, in other words, is colonising international affairs. In fact, it’s nothing new, it’s just that now it’s being done with the ostentatious vulgarity you’d expect from a cheap New York crook (scroll down that link for a laugh). But hang on, what’s this, referring to the most powerful politician in the world as a petty crook? Aren’t our pollies made of nobler stuff? Aren’t they above skullduggery and blackmail and bodies floating in the river? In short, aren’t our politicians well-balanced, high-minded personalities who see further and make wiser decisions than the rest of us? As it stands, that’s a scientific question, not just a matter of opinion, but I don’t think we can answer it as very few politicians would agree to testing. Even if they did, the tests aren’t foolproof, it doesn’t take too much brain power to work out how to fudge the answers to give a good image, and politicians are ever-alert to presenting a good image. We would never know whether they were telling the truth or just “faking good,” as psychologists say. But again, don’t normal people always tell the truth? That brings us full circle: who says politicians have normal personalities?

To answer that, we’d have to be able to say what amounts to a normal personality and, before that, what’s personality in the first place? Don’t ask psychiatrists, they don’t know. Yes, they have sections on personality disorder in their diagnostic manuals but in DSM5, it’s right down the back, 39 pages out of nearly 900, starting at p645, between brain damage and paraphilic disorders (weird sex), so that gives some idea of how it rates in their world view. Personality disorder is defined as:

An enduring pattern of inner experience and behaviour that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture, is pervasive and inflexible, has an onset in adolescence or early adulthood, is stable over time, and leads to distress or impairment.

That, of course, is a description, not a definition, and it goes nowhere as they don’t define personality itself. Even though they use the term (and cognates such as character, temperament and so on) all the time, they don’t know what personality is, they have no theory of personality. In turn, this little oversight comes from the fact that they don’t know what the mind is, they have no theory of mind as such. The reason they don’t have a theory of mind is because their concept of science says you can’t talk about things you can’t see or measure, so the mind is definitely out of bounds. Yes, it makes no sense but that’s the corner psychiatry and psychology painted themselves into a hundred years ago, when they decided to put all their eggs in the positivist basket.

Psychologists have since found a way to wriggle around the problem by saying: “We measure what people say and make no further judgements on it.” By asking lots of people lots of questions, they can give a statistical measure of where each person fits in the spread of answers. In order to make sense of all the answers, the questions are grouped in clusters whose members relate to each other, but not to other clusters. For example, one group of questions covers how tidy and organised each person is, how closely they follow rules and stick to convention, etc. That was always called “obsessionality,” meaning how obsessively the person follows rules, but the term was muddied by the concept of “obsessive-compulsive” so now it’s called “conscientiousness.” Everybody gets a score ranging from highly efficient and organised down to extravagant and careless at the other extreme. Each group of questions was called a character or personality trait and was always regarded as strongly influenced by genetics but that was driven by a need to be “more scientific than thou” and has gradually lost influence (although not as much as it should, see [1]).

This way, everybody ends up with scores on a number of scales, and the whole tangle is called a “personality profile.” However, it still doesn’t say what personality is. We know what it does, i.e. produce observable behaviour, but not the nature of the mental mechanism that produces that behaviour. If you ask a psychiatrist for the nature of that mechanism, you will either be told “It’s the brain, stupid,” or get a blank stare. My view is that the mechanism of personality just is a set of rules [2] acquired over a lifetime, some of them known or conscious, but many of them not known or unconscious. These generate a response to each situation we come across in life. If a person has a set of rules that is both internally consistent and meshes smoothly with the rules of the larger society, we say that person has a normal personality. People whose rules are internally inconsistent and/or contradict society’s rules, thereby producing internal distress and/or external conflict, are given the label of “personality disorder.” Sometimes the disorder is restricted to one or a few domains of life, while others can’t seem to get it right anywhere or anywhen, the end result being that their lives lurch from one crisis to the next. In the main, these unfortunates get the ridiculous label “borderline personality disorder” and are treated badly (as in: “Just because he’s a psychopath doesn’t mean you can treat him psychopathically”).

If personality is nothing more than a very large set of rules in the informational state called the mind, there are two consequences for psychiatry. First, rules are not inherited. In the biocognitive model for psychiatry [2], DNA gives us the physical machinery of the brain but it says nothing about the rules, beliefs, ideas, etc. that are coded into the brain. Personality and the genetic code are entirely different realms of discourse with no points of contact. Second: as an informational state, rules can be revised. This can be beneficial, when inconsistent or unhelpful rules are revised as a result of good life experiences, but it can also go the other way. As the direct result of bad experiences, a comfortable set of rules can become jarring and inconsistent, producing internal distress and/or friction with the larger world. These days, this goes by the clumsy name of PTSD. The post-traumatic states are wholly psychological with no basis in biology.

Because psychiatrists want to see personality disorder as a genetic disorder of the brain, they have invented a list of “diagnoses” of particular personality types. These, however, are largely nonsense and serve only to give the impression that psychiatrists know what they’re talking about when in fact they don’t [3]. It still leaves us struggling with the concept of the “normal personality”: who’s normal, after all? To a large extent, normal is what the society says it is at the time but if we strip away local and temporal variations, we are left with a core of what most people in most places in most ages would recognise as “the normal personality.” In a detailed paper, an international group decided that the healthy adult personality is

…psychologically well-adjusted (i.e. emotionally stable), had high self-esteem, good self-regulatory skills, an optimistic outlook on the world, and a clear and stable self-view. These individuals were low in aggression and meanness, unlikely to exploit others, and were relatively immune to stress and self-sufficient [4].

OK, so far, so predictable (and, of course, so expensive just to find out that much): the healthy personality is more or less a nice, responsible and cheerful person who takes care of others and doesn’t get too upset over silly things. Next question: Do politicians fit this profile? If you ask them, of course they do. They’re very strong on family values, patriotism, responsibility and all that. Then ask Boris Johnston about having wild parties during the Covid lockdown and lying about it (not to overlook his ten or so children by eight or so women), or what about Australia’s Mr Family Values himself, the Hon. Barnaby Joyce MP? Turns out he was having an affair with his secretary, who became pregnant so he left his wife and daughters for her. However, in an interview on TV with the lady beside him, he laughed and said “Of course, we’re not sure if the baby’s mine.” A while later, he was photographed lying dead drunk in the street in Canberra. Or Prince (now King) Charles who swore in front of a billion people to be faithful to his new wife, then rushed off to his paramour and wondered if he could come back as her tampon? And we won’t waste time on that “very stable genius.”

On the face of it, politicians are not normal personalities. The more flamboyant and outrageous are simply ratbags, in it for themselves, with no regard or respect for other people. If, to get more votes, they have to say black is white, then that’s what they’ll do, but that’s superficial. Yes, leaders set the tone and pace of their movements or governments, they may make the big decisions but they don’t implement them. They have ministers or secretaries of state to do that, usually somewhat more restrained and stolid types who dress sedately and smile for the camera while going about their business of keeping the government on target. In general, they aren’t much interested in, or even very good at, addressing thousands of cheering supporters but their value is their ability to convey a sense of normality. They seem to care and take things seriously and generally seem like the sorts of people you can trust to do the right thing. In fact, they’re not. They will calmly sit in cabinet and make decisions wrecking people’s lives, starting wars or giving benefits to their friends, then go on TV and, with a warm smile, tell how they’re working hard to make life better for the little people in the street. There are untold examples, but a couple from this apparently well-behaved country will illustrate the point.

About ten years ago, the then Liberal-National (conservative) government set up a scheme to track and penalise people who were improperly getting social security benefits. This was called Robodebt, which means what you think it means, mindlessly lumbering people with debts due to overpayments. However, it was known almost from the beginning that it was illegal, that it was wrongly accusing people of massive debts which they didn’t owe and, being on benefits, they couldn’t possibly repay. This was immensely distressing to many thousands of people and resulted in perhaps fifteen suicides. There were at least a hundred people at the highest levels of government who knew all about this scandal and kept it going for years, much as with the equally brutal Post Office affair in the UK. When it came to the enquiry, none of them showed the slightest contrition. Indeed, the former prime minister, one Scott Morrison, allegedly a devout Christian, had to be repeatedly ordered to tell the truth. The only account of this sordid business worth following comes from a YouTube series by (an incredibly obsessional) young chap called “Knights in Shining Lama” (no, I don’t either). The Murdoch media made sure it didn’t get much publicity.

In another example, and for reasons which had nothing to do with national security, Australia committed troops to the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. Eventually, as always happens in that country, the invaders trod the Via Dolorosa of defeat and fled the ruined country. When the small Australian contingent finally got home, stories started to circulate about war crimes committed by the nominally upright Aussie troops. I first heard these stories in about 2014 from returned veterans who were adamant that many highly visible soldiers had murdered Afghan civilians and prisoners but it had all been covered up. Eventually, an Army lawyer named David McBride leaked the material to the press. A subsequent enquiry showed that the complaints were true but, bizarrely, not one of the suspects has been charged although Mr McBride now sits in a federal prison, having been convicted of the leak under some national security law or other. Not one of the politicians in the various governments involved in this matter gives a damn. Yet, if we tested them, they would almost all come up as “normal personalities” (in particular, Scott Morrison would but nobody believes a word he says).

There is a major problem with the personality profiles: they don’t measure a behaviour or attitude called empathy, the capacity to put oneself in another’s shoes and experience that person’s emotional state. It’s the ability to feel for other people, to know how they would feel if what you plan for them came to pass. Dressed in their neat suits and ties, or with permed hair and handbags ready (or both), politicians don’t have this capacity. When planning a war, they do not think of the injured men who will be in pain for the rest of their lives, or families shattered by that inevitable telegram, or the terror of a peasant family whose farm has been blown up. When trying to balance the budget, they don’t reduce the military budget or take a pay cut themselves even though all politicians quickly become very wealthy. Instead, they cut social services which affect the most vulnerable and exposed people in the community, those least able to fight back. They don’t care, and the reason they don’t care is simple.

Politicians go through an apprenticeship, a training program lasting many years. It matters not the quality of the person who enters that program and what colour shirt he wears, what emerges at the other end is homogenised and standardised as a generic politician, all sharp edges smoothed, all corners rounded, all troublesome ideas plastered over. Your standard pollie is a yes-man who knows which side his bread is buttered, how to get himself up the ladder and, above all, how to knife his colleagues so he can stand on their bodies to reach a higher rung. At ten thousand points in his career, he faces a decision point: support the action (e.g. an illegal Robodebt scheme that wrecks lives, or an illegal invasion that wrecks an entire country) and move up the ladder, or oppose it on empathic grounds and get pushed to the side, maybe even out of the party. Inevitably, the politician’s native lust for power means it’s a no-brainer.

At the Robodebt enquiry, former government minister Stuart Robert admitted lying to the public about the scheme. Instead of publicly revealing his misgivings about its legality (without even touching on its morality), he “defended cabinet solidarity” and broadcast that it was correct and he supported it (read this report for a very brief summary of his shameless perfidy). He knew it was wrong yet he chose to support the power structure against the defenceless. Similarly, while the current Australian government has applied “sanctions” on Afghan officials over their repression of women (as though our leaders give a shit), not one has said a single word against the obvious and continuing genocide in Gaza. The reason is they genuinely don’t care enough to speak up and risk their jobs. If getting ahead in the pecking order requires them to support the American-Israeli-Zionist slaughter, then that’s what they’ll do.

If politicians had normal levels of empathy on entering politics (in their twenties or often in their teens), it was trained out of them during their long years slogging away in the branch committees or the trade unions or whatever. Time and again they had to choose: “Empathy or power, that is the question. Hmm, so long empathy, it was nice knowing you.” The first time may cause a bit of anguish but the thrill of power soon extinguishes that. The process is self-selecting: those who feel sorry for the victims, who put empathy before power, are soon out on the street. For those who remain, quietly strangling their natural empathy is rarely a struggle as the heady aroma of power and dominance is the Holy Grail that leads them on, cheerfully stepping over the bodies as they go. There is nothing they love more than to see the person ahead of them in the queue defenestrated and forced out, especially if they can have a hand in it and prove their mettle to the dehumanised people at the top. And, of course, the higher they go up the political ladder, the greater their sense of privilege and entitlement. I’ve often thought that the sense of privilege is not a thing in its own right. It’s like confidence: there’s no such thing as confidence, it’s simply the absence of anxiety. A sense of privilege is no more than the absence of empathy.

So are the rich different from us? Yes, they’ve got money. Are politicians different from us? Yes, they are unburdened by empathy, which is why those of us who suffer from the handicap of fellow-feeling will never get anywhere near the controls. Were they born that way? No, they probably had pets as children but, in early teens, as soon as they got a whiff of power in their nostrils, the pet went quietly to the vet for the long sleep.

Captain Gustave Gilbert served as prison psychologist to the major Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg trials. In his Nuremburg Diary from 1947, he said:

In my work with the defendants, I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.

Similarly, after reporting on the Eichmann trial in Israel in 1962, historian and political theorist Hannah Arendt agreed: “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture on the verge of descending into barbarism.”

Empathy dies from the top down.

*****

References:

1. Joseph J (2023). Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics at the Crossroads. https://www.madinamerica.com/2023/06/mary-boyle-interviews-jay-joseph/

2. McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge.

3. McLaren N (2012). Chapters 14-16 in The Mind-Body Problem Explained: The Biocognitive Model for Psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press.

4. Bleidorn W et al (2020) The Healthy Personality from a Basic Trait Perspective. J Pers Soc Psychol. 118(6):1207-1225. doi: 10.1037/pspp0000231.