Organized Psychopathy -- Tom Sullivan

[erronis]

https://digbysblog.net/2026/07/15/organized-psychopathy/

Why does the world feel like it's coming apart?

People feel it. You feel it. I feel it. These are perilous times. They did not begin with Trumpism. But the country elected Donald Trump as president twice. Donald Trump. Twice. These times did not begin with the financial crisis and Great Recession, although they contributed. The Trump administration is filled with incompetent, unscrupulous, self-dealing officials. It feels like collective madness. Madness American voters chose.

Jim Stewartson of MindWar: The Psychological War on Democracy offers a diagnosis for it: Organized psychopathy.

The elite backlash to creation of the world's largest middle class dates back to the New Deal. President FDR's program was itself a reaction to the Great Depression. President Theodore Roosevelt took on the trusts of the Gilded Age. Elite Southern planters sparked the Civil War. The American Revolution itself was a rejection of rule by hereditary English royalty and landed gentry (admittedly led by American gentry). Our current turmoil continues the unending struggle not between left and right but top and bottom. Right now, the world's power-hungry elite feel ascendant.

Stewartson dates the beginning of the end to the Reagan administration and to the end of the Fairness Doctrine. And, I'd add, the subsequent rise of a billionaire-owned propaganda industry that is now consolidating control of major news and entertainment networks.

Stewartson writes:

The world is now in danger of devolving into total war because the systems for containing aggressive individuals who value power over human life have failed.

We are being reduced to Adams' "Ignorance and Vice" because tyrants banded together to destroy the ability for much of the population to receive, as Madison called it, "popular information."

"A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy."

--James Madison, 1822

The United States is currently both a "Farce" and a "Tragedy" because much of "popular information" has been taken over by amoral, psychopathic people. This failure allowed aggressive individuals with dangerous psychopathologies to recruit, reward, and multiply themselves.

. . .