Psychopathic authoritarians, or just mundane bureaucrats?

I have a practical outlook regarding the behavior of certain public figures. But first I want to quote from Joseph Sansone, M.S., PhD, a psychiatrist, who offered a statement submitted to a Dutch Court in the case highlighted in this link. It is a case filed in the Netherlands, and Bill Gates and many others are named defendants. They are accused of using the covid vaccines as a means of pushing hidden bioweapons. I’ve no doubt they are guilty. The problem is that we don’t have justice, so no court will find  them so.

I have my own outlook on lies and lying liars in the public sphere. Joseph Sansone, M.H., PhD, has filed what I think in our country would be called an amicus brief to the Netherland proceedings. He is not part of the lawsuit. He says that the defendants in this case are “psychopathic authoritarians”. That’s a name dreamed up by the psychiatric professions, probably listed in the DSM-5. I imagine members of his profession voted on it, with a majority of psychiatrists deciding by a show of hands what is a disease, what is not. By this means we also have ADHD, bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, intermediate explosive disorder (which I would have guessed relates to diarrhea), and a host of others. All made up. But I want to quote Sansone on this:

Psychopathic Authoritarianism is the systemic elevation of power, control, and domination above truth, empathy, liberty, moral integrity, bodily autonomy, and human dignity. It is the collective manifestation of traits identified as the Dark Tetrad,  sadism, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. On a systemic level, these trees operate together with fear and coercive control to produce obedience, conformity, and subjugation of persons to institutional authority and may include a callous disregard for human life.

I don’t have a problem with any of that, as it is in essence a nice rant. However, I recall an German woman living in New York City, Hannah Arendt, who was sent as a journalist to witness the Adolf Eichmann trials in Israel in 1961. Eichmann was allegedly an architect of the Holocaust. Arendt, apparently taken aback, , noted that the defendant was hardly a monster, but more like a mundane bureaucrat. She coined the phrase “the banality of evil”.**

There are a host of accused persons in the Netherland trial, and I doubt any of them will come off as being any less mundane. They are probably involved in monstrous activities, if my suspicions about the Covid vaccines are true, but I suspect on the stand they will all assert innocence and involvement in a humanitarian cause, done to save lives. That will carry the day. No judge who wishes to remain a judge would allow a trial like this to come to any other conclusion than innocent. The world does not work that way. It does not allow justice. All of the statues of heroic characters and scales of justice outside courtrooms are no more than virtue signals.

Michael Mann, the famous Hockey Stick inventor, appears to me to be psychopathic in his outlook, considering the way he treats those who disagree with him. I see him as classic “suck up piss down.” But I doubt very much that he was born with any particular psychiatric disorder. In his younger years he was intelligent and ambitious in search of his PhD. He was apparently diverted by money, fame and power, and this brought out his less admirable character traits. But he is not evil personified, just a man seemingly lacking character. He had a major role in perversion of science in pursuit of goals having nothing scientific about them. He helped destroy not just careers, but lives of people who got in his way. He cherry picked his way to satisfying his hidden masters, his “closeted friends”, as he called them.

I guess then that we could say that Michael Mann suffers from Psychopathic Authoritarianism. He’s nasty, and not harmless. If he is evil, it could only have been due to a bad batch of chianti, or a bite by a rabid Marxist. But I don’t regard the man as evil, just weak, lacking principles, and opportunistic. If not him others would gladly perform his part. He masterminded nothing, merely followed orders.

Have there really been psychopathic monsters in real life? There are indeed sociopaths/psychopaths. They are drawn to public life. They do harm to innocent bystanders. They leave a scar. But in general, they are good at imitation of regular people and so could probably easily fool Sansone or most others in his profession. I regard the whole of the psychiatric outlook as misguided and removed from the practicalities of life and of people who are forced by their ambition and circumstances to tell lies. Fellow travelers and masked sociopaths are all about in politics, journalism, history, academia, and, of course, professional sports.

Picture yourself in the position of a doctor who is prescribing COVID vaccines to her patients. She is unaware of the true nature of the vaccine (as am I). She has no knowledge of virology and isolation of viruses. She is trained strictly in symptomology. She has no desire to harm anyone. She wants to help people. She is just doing her job, the one she trained for her entire life. She might have supervised the administration of the vaccine to thousands of people, and they may suffer unnecessarily or die premature deaths as a result, but she is blissfully unaware of any crime.

So too will Gates and his cohorts be found innocent. They know nothing evil, and are banality on parade.

I know that behind climate change and Covid are monsters, people whose objective is to rid the planet of what Henry Kissinger called “useless eaters.” They are, to me, nameless and faceless characters of indescribable power. In a better world we could sue them force them to appear in court somewhere and answer for their crimes, and then hang them high. But that will never happen. Have you not noticed that history is made by the powerful, and recorded and rewritten by scribes (journalists and historians) who walk backward cleaning up the mess and lying about everything that happened.

Hardly anything we know is true. Find me a court somewhere who can fix that.

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**There are interpretations of Arendt’s behavior that are best left unsaid.