Psicopatas e hierarquias

Artigo de Larry Gambone, acerca das suspeitas de que um comandante da Força Aérea canadiana será uma espécie de serial killer:

It is a well known fact that psychopaths, due to their desire to dominate and harm other people are attracted to hierarchical, authoritarian organizations like the military, police, prison guards, corporate bureaucracies and reform school staff. Indeed, depending upon their level of aggression and intelligence, they will try to worm their way into any organization that allows them to have some unchecked power over other people. Once again, I must point out that the majority of people in these organizations are not pathological. These latter are a minority, but they do much damage.

Their damage is made worse by two factors. One is that the intelligent sociopath is a master in imitating normal healthy people and charming them into thinking he is something special. Their associates always say "Why he was like one of us. He seemed so normal." The other factor is tribalism. All organizations protect their own, and this is even more so in an authoritarian organization. Members will go into denial mode when faced with suspicious activity and whistle-blowers will be persecuted.

The central aspect of sociopathic behaviour is lack of empathy. Thus, the pathological will be attracted to organizations in which empathy is regarded of little importance. Corporations exist to make a profit, and to hell with the employees, the environment and the community if they get in the way of that goal. If you are in the military you are forced to go out and kill people you don't know and who have never done anything to you. Part of being a police officer is brutalizing demonstrators if you are told to do so. This organizational pathology is compounded by propaganda that dehumanizes "the other" in the eyes of those who work for those organizations. Thus the enemies are "gooks" or "sand monkeys" , the workers are "little people who don't matter", the demonstrators are "commies" – not, note well, other human beings little different from me.

(...) But the sociopath revels in these displays of domination, degradation and cruelty, and is attracted to these organizations for that reason.

Williams is proof that all hierarchical organizations ought to have better screening processes. But the real way to help eliminate the problem of sociopaths in power would be to eliminate the sociopathic aspects of these organizations to begin with.