That’s not true. Psychopathy is a matter of the individual will attacking people in general within a society – positions of power put structural and institutional constraints on behavior such that shape that behavior toward domination. Take George W. Bush’s power away and he no longer acts in psychopathic fashion. A psychopath acts as a psychopath under any conditions (so long as he still hates the society he is attacking).

Here’s a general example taken from all capitalist societies, the prototypical one from which all hierarchies are derived – fatherhood. There are different levels of socially accepted ways to “feed the family”. One way that is socially accepted is to take a position in a corporation that exploits the third world. Due to the constraints of “fatherhood” (as the father views the constraints) he must take part in exploiting the third world because the alternative (not exploiting the third world and therefore making less money) makes him a bad father.

But even that might not be enough, and he may need to undertake actions that offend his own country’s ruling elite to make even more money. Again, all due to the institutional constraints (as he views them) of fatherhood.

In capitalist societies men want to become fathers precisely so that they can become dominative. That is to say, men recognize their own desire for power and the positive impact that fatherhood has on their quest for power (social status, sexual value, etc.) insofar as it places conditional constraints on them that individually, they desire. So men (and women, to the extent that they too “feed the family” and that they desire to couple with men who do) want to become dominative, they want to extort, coerce, and exploit. These might even be called “family values” within a capitalist society.

I’ll pass over the example of Brad Will for the sake of brevity, but look into it for some insight. Or Eugene Debs.

I want to cover one more issue in my time in this post – wife beating. The left is a joke on this issue, precisely because the left is imperialist as well (most of the left including Naomi Klein is capitalist) and not committed to socialism.

The American people, like all other people, strain for socialism. There is constant tension against capitalism, even in the corrupt American society (corruption itself implies a tension, a two-fold identity). Capitalism requires a husband to be dominative and a wife at the very least to be complicit. To the extent that that husband desires to not be dominative, often for socialist reasons, animosity is generated by the situation he finds himself in. That is to say, dislike for capitalism directly leads to bad marriages, and abuse of wives. Yet I’ve never heard the left even mention this primary aspect of wife beating, preferring to treat it as a personal problem (a kind of moral failing of men). The left apparently fails to note that in non-capitalist societies, such as that of indigenous Americans for example, there is very little if any wife beating. Women in America know very well that capitalism and imperialism produce wife beating as an inevitable side effect, which is one reason why the issue receives so little serious examination. American women have decided that imperialism is more important than their own bruises.

All civilizations including our own were built on slavery and mass murder – largely by psychopaths who are hard-wired to lie, cheat, steal, manipulate, torture and kill without feeling any remorse. Since they have no limitations on what they can or will do to achieve power, all hierarchies – political, religious, economic and social – inevitably become top-heavy with psychopaths.

The whole point of gaining power in the first place is to *not* have to justify decisions – to become unaccountable. Power means never having to say you’re sorry. Power means never having to explain (truthfully).

It’s often said that the powerful are irresponsible, or irrational, but this isn’t true. It’s the command structure itself with it’s utter lack of accountability that inevitably leads to self-serving behavior.

Humans have thus far failed at achieving a world without hierarchy. Almost ever major human problem can be traced to hierarchies – war chief among them.

Even the left typically complains about the *people* in power – so they say that George W. Bush is a terrible person. What needs to be attacked is not so much the power-mongering monster that happens to be in power at the moment but the hierarchical structures which are created and maintained that inevitably are filled. All hierarchies need to be challenged and most need to be destroyed. Without a home to live in the power-mongers will either adapt to the new social reality or fade away.

as Tariq Ali frequently says, “this is not going to end well”, and we have to ask ourselves, is the US on an irreversible course of global conflict beyond anything experienced since World War II?

Also, the big question is what possessed Saakashvili? What he did was like deliberately stepping in dog dirt and then wondering why your shoes are dirty! Clearly, the US Government was not in the loop and was taken completely by surprise (thank God Bush was in Beijing!). My theory is the Israelis. The whole thing is eerily similar to the Israeli screw-up in Lebanon. But not the Israeli government. The relevant ministers, Livni (ex-Mossad) and Barak (ex-para) are intelligent enough to realise that the whole thing was a harebrained scheme that was bound to blow up in everybody’s face. My scenario: the whole thing was cooked up in Tblisi between Saakashvili and some witless Israeli military jock sent up there as an “advisor”, the latter convincing the former that if he could create “Georgian facts” on the ground, the US would be forced to support him.

The why of it all is probably that Saakashvili thought that he could “putsch” his way into NATO before the US election. Of course, letting a country engaged in a military conflict into an alliance is like selling life insurance to someone who has just been shot! And in this case, the victim started the fight himself! So I would guess that both NATO and the EU will do nothing more than adopt statements calling for a return to the status quo ante and a negotiated settlement, and will re-affirm the principal of territorial sovereignty in very strong language (thereby torpedoing US policy in Kosovo!).

If people weren’t being killed, the whole thing would be high farce!