It Meets Sanjuro: The first and last scene of a very short movie

Most laws are passed in response to particular situations. Root cause analysis exposes the underlying dynamics that lead to particular situations. Based on these underlying dynamics, we can design fixes that prevent particular situations from arising. The Constitution of the United States is based in large part on British parliamentarian and historian Edward Gibbon’s root cause analysis of, as he entitled it, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is in this spirit of finding and fixing root causes that the following draft proposals are presented for new or revised Constitutional Amendments. The intent of this list is to express the intent of the amendments, not necessarily their wording.

• Sanity in Public Administration, AKA the Zookeeper Amendment: Screen and bar social predators from any and all positions of resonsibility over human beings, regardless of citizenship or residency status.
  • This Amendment sets a statutory threshold on a standardized psychopathy spectrum beyond which applicants for candidacy, or for appointment or employment to positions granting them any responsibility or authority over others, beyond which they are ineligible for said candidacy, appointment or employment to the subject office, post or position.
  • The tests used to decide such eligibility shall be standardized in accordance with the specifications to be set forth in this Amendment, shall be administered ONLY by federally authorized examiners and executives directly employed by, and reporting directly to, the federal agency established for this purpose, and shall include psychiatric, neuroanatomical and neurodynamical diagnostics that collectively resolve to a single numerical score.
  • Future adjustments to the requirements and specifications of these tests can make them more restrictive but shall never make them less restrictive.
  • Those who fail these tests shall thereby be automatically registered as psychopaths. Prospective applicants who don’t want to risk discovery as such should not run for public or private office or apply to positions of responsibility or authority over others. Private preliminary tests can serve them as predictors of their score on the standardized test, thus providing them with the opportunity to avoid detection and automatic registration as psychopaths.
  • This amendment shall apply retroactively to all existing office holders. Those who choose to opt out of the specified testing, or who opt in but fail the test, must quit and vacate their posts without delay, specifically without more than eight hours to complete the transition, during which their activites shall be actively monitored by armed and specially-trained federal police officers, and shall be restricted to relinquishing institutional equipment and conveying any passwords and access procedures needed by their successor.
  • The effects of this Amendment are expected to militate over time with a proscription against dictatorial business structures, which are exploitable by psychopaths, by denying psychopaths access to governmental power and authority, thus diminishing in turn the severity and incidence over time of psychopathy spectrum disorders in the gene pool.


• Upper Age Limit for Executive Officeholders, dedicated to French President Emanuel Macron, who expressed reservations about a certain 79 year old narcopath holding the nuclear codes.
  • This amendment bars candidates for executive or command offices, including and in particular the Office of the President of the United States, from assuming the duties of said office at a chronological age exceeding 75.
  • It is understood that a physiological rather than a chronological age would make for a better limit, but also that a physiological age limit would be far more vulnerable to cheating. Hence the chronological age limit proposed for the amendment, which is of course subject to revision before enactment.
  • The intent of this amendment is twofold: (1) It confronts the question of mental acuity, competence and age-related cognitive decline. (2) It confronts the question of antisocial behaviors in self-serving individuals near end of life — “If I can’t have it, no one can”. This problem emerged in Hitler in 1945 and is emerging in Trump in 2026. Only the forbearance of more scrupulous enablers prevented action on the scorched-earth sentiments of Hitler.

• Goldwater Overrule, AKA the Zoo Patron Amendment: Overrule the Goldwater Rule, a principle in the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) ethical code that prohibits psychiatrists from offering professional opinions on the mental state of public figures unless they have personally examined them.
  • The Goldwater Rule silences psychiatry professionals at moments when society most needs them, and at moments when their education and training stands to confer the maxiumum benefit on society.
  • This Amendment allows psychiatry professionals complete freedom in alerting the public to the presence of social predators in their midst, especially public figures seeking or assuming public office.
  • By way of analogy, a zookeeper with a degree in zoology who notices a leopard on the loose within the zoo grounds should not be prohibited from calling it a leopard in alerting the zoo patrons of its presence among them without having formally examined the animal.
  • In both cases, the alert is of immediate concern to public safety and the predator is unlikely to consent to such an examination, neither at the time of such an incident nor at any time in the future.
  • By the same token, a psychiatrist should not be limited in classifying specific people, regardless of their position or current activities, as to their propensity to align with social predators. It is recognized that each of us falls into one of three categories in this respect, and that stating an opinion as to which category a person occupies can only be construed as a public service to people who may not see this, or who may disagree with such assessment.

• Early Education in Psychopathy: Incorporate psychopathy awareness and practical detection and diagnostic methods into mandatory early secondary education.
  • The life of a psychopath is measured in victims. Anecdotally, they never go more than two weeks after destroying one victim before choosing the next. By the time someone is accosted by a psychopath and becomes their new victim, permanent harm has already been inflicted and worsens over time.
  • This Amendment brings psychopathy awareness to bear in time for it to confer a benefit to the general public.
  • This Amendment equips young students with the awareness, understanding and skills they need to protect themselves from the social predators in their midst, in time for these assets to prevent confusion, cognitive dissonance and permanent harm. By the time they receive this education, many young students will already be subject to bullying methods characteristic of budding psychopaths. They must understand what is being done to them before they begin to internalize these attacks and attribute them to their own shortcomings.

• Voting Districts: US states and territories shall count votes within a single statewide district.
  • WHEREAS voting districts are arbitrary, negotiable, fluid and contentious;
  • SO THEREFORE each US state or territory shall reduce and maintain its vote counting to the tabulation of individual votes within a single statewide district.
  • This Amendment is expected to eliminate the wasted time and effort otherwise taken up in districting, redistricting, suits and countersuits over how vote counting is to be distributed geographically within each state or territory.

• Democracy in Public Administration: Outlaw or impose prohibitive taxes on businesses with dictatorial organization.
  • The proximal goal of this Amendment is to migrate businesses from dictatorial (corporate) to democratic (cooperative) structures.
  • The ultimate goal of this Amendment is to deny to psychopaths an exploitable social structure.
  • This Amendment is expected to militate over time with a statutory threshold on the psychopathy spectrum for access to governmental power and authority, to remove from the social environment the selective advantages of psychopathic behavioral syndromes, thus diminishing the severity and incidence over time of psychopathy spectrum disorders in the gene pool.

• Immunity in Public Office: No public office shall confer immunity of any kind from due application and prosecution of established law, nor shall it act to defer any said application or prosecution.
  • This Amendment ensures that no one is above the law, more specifically that no public officer, employee, contractor or appointee associated with public office of any kind shall be immune from full and immediate application and prosecution of established law, whether or not the basis for said application or prosecution falls under the official charter or official duties of said office, position, contract or appointment.

• Enforcement by US Marshals: US Marshals are exempted from obstruction by the Secret Service.
  • The US Marshals are responsible for the arrest of government officials who act in violation of Constitutional law.
  • The Secret Service are responsible for the physical protection of government officials.
  • Government officials may, upon occasion, violate Constitutional Law.
  • Therefore when the duty of US Marshals to arrest those who violate Constitutional law comes into conflict with the duty of the Secret Service to protect government officials, the duty of US Marshals shall prevail.

• Presidential Self Pardon: Without suggesting that the Founders of this Republic committed any error or omission of reason while framing this Constitution, those subject to the Presidential Power of Pardon shall not extend to the present nor to any former holder of the Office of the President, nor shall it extend to anyone whose pardon under said Power would present the fact or appearance of a conflict of interest.
  • The necessity of this Amendment should stand as a lasting testament to the pathological opportunism of psychopathy spectrum disorders, and to the importance of maintaining the Office of the President as a legitimate office of government, as fully separate and distinct from a psychiatric ward.

• Only Voters can Finance Elections: Overturn the Citizens United decision by resolving that:
  • Money is not speech;
  • Business and government entities are not people;
  • Businesses, institutions and any other substitutes for individuals cannot make political contributions of any kind. This includes Federal, State and Local elections as well as the internal electoral processes of business entities, all of which shall be democratically organized and duly secured against infestation by psychopaths.
  • Those who wish to contribute personally held wealth or assets to political causes must first pass the Constitutionally standardized psychopathy spectrum tests set forth in other Amendments as a condition of said contributions.

• Private Equity Limitations: Private equity firms and other institutional investors shall be prohibited from investing in assets and commodities of general interest to consumers such as housing and real estate.
  • The governing principle is that institutional investment in assets of general interest to consumers inflates the prices and limits the general availability of those assets without contributing value to the general economy.

• Universal Healthcare: Venture forth from these lands and follow the example of any meritorious and fully civilized nation you encounter. Fill in this amendment when you return with a clue from far, far away.
  • The governing principle is that fully-subsidized and comprehensive healthcare is among the most basic of human rights and one of the most basic justifications for civil society.
  • It inures to the benefit of individuals and the society alike and pays dividends in hidden costs that are never incurred.

• Universal Education: Venture forth from these lands and follow the example of any meritorious and fully civilized nation you encounter. Fill in this amendment when you return with a clue from far, far away.
  • The governing principle is that fully-subsidized and comprehensive education is among the most basic of human rights and one of the most basic justifications for civil society.
  • It inures to the benefit of individuals and the society alike and pays dividends in hidden costs that are never incurred.

• Mother’s Choice: Codify the Roe v. Wade decision in a Constitutional amendment.

• Clarify the 2nd Amendment as permitting the establishment and organization of well regulated militias and not individual gun ownership.
  • This will not necessarily limit well regulated militias to State Guard units but it will set standards according to which qualifying militias are permitted to keep armories and control the use and storage of armaments and munitions. Other uses of armaments and munitions shall be similarly restricted to hunting and sporting clubs, which shall be similarly required to meet satutory standards of armaments and munitions regulation, deployment, storage and safekeeping. No individual use or possession of armaments as defined in the 2nd Amendment thus clarified shall be permitted, on the theory that only well regulated militias are inherently capable of fulfilling the intended purposes of the 2nd Amenent, and that individual gun owners as such are capable of firearms training, firearms experimentation, sport shooting and criminal activites to the exclusion of all else.
  • Said militias found liable, in whole or in part, through failure to meet the regulatory standards set forth in their articles of organization and procedural mandates, for individual firearms offenses exceeding a statutory threshold, shall be subject to permanent dissolution. Actions taken under the Constitutional authority, command and control of said militias shall not be subject to the liabilities prescribed under the proscription against individual gun ownership, as such restrictions would be fundamentally at odds with the charter and intended purpose of said militias. Put more simply, Why run a militia that can’t shoot?
  • Prohibit the Federal or National expropriation of State Guard military units. Rename National Guard to State Guard in aid of this prohibition. State Guard units answer to the State Governor and to no one else. This amendment is intented to restore and further clarify the original purpose and intent of well regulated state Militias under the 2nd Amenement as originally ratified.

• Incentivization Reform: Prohibit the operation of any post, agency, business entity or institution whenever and wherever such operation is subject to one or more conflicts of interest. This will do away with the honor system as it is applied to conditions under which office holders are expected to recuse themselves. The conditions of recusal shall be unambigously defined, and when said conditions resolve to indicate recusal, through either a motivational or incentive analysis, by the appearance alone of impropriety or by both, said recusal shall be mandatory and immediate. Failures to self-recuse under this Amendment shall be punishable in proportion to the damage and potential damage inflicted by said failures up to the date and time of actual recusal. No such failures to recuse shall be held attributable under the law to other than the officeholder whose actions, omissions and duty to recuse are subject to this Amendment.

• Responsibility to Act or Resist: Any Member of Congress who fails to fulfill their Oath of Office, either to act when said oath demands action or to resist when said oath demands resistance, shall be deemed irrevocably complicit in the violation(s) demanding said action or resistance.

• Rescission of Judicial Appointments and Decisions:
  • All of the judicial appointments of any President found guilty of impeachable offenses shall upon such conviction be rendered null and void. The judges thus removed shall be thenceforth irrevocably ineligible for any and all judicial appointments and shall, moreover, be barred from further law practice of any kind.
  • All of the Supreme Court decisions voted into law by Justices rescinded under this Amendment shall be irrevocably rescinded except when such rescission is overturned by a two-thirds majority of Congress.

• Government Shutdowns: Penalties
  • Congressional Salary Forfeiture: No member of Congress shall earn salary during government shutdowns and shall irretrievably forfeit any present and future right to such amounts as might have been earned during said shutdowns.
  • Congressional Fines: Members of Congress whose net worth is in the top tenth percentile among their peers shall be fined in the amount of twenty percent of their net worth per week, effective in advance and irrevocably, at the commencement of government shutdowns, until such time as they resign their Congressional membership, which resignation shall be considered irrevocable for the remainder of their unserved term.

• Environmentally-Conscious Information Transfer: Prohibit the use of other than electronic, optoelectronic or similar lightlike transmission technology for the conveyance of information for any purpose or in any context, even such information as might accompany the conveyance of physical goods, except in the form of product labels permanently affixed to said products for the purpose of branding or of instructing their use or of providing internet addresses at which such instructions may be found, or on protective packaging of said products for the express purpose of directing their delivery or return.
  • No government or business entity shall use, nor require to be used, nor permit to be used, transportation services of any kind in the conveyance of information, nor in support of such conveyance in any capacity or for any purpose, nor the use, consumption or expenditure of such natural resources as fuel or rubber that are or have been used in the transportation industry for the conveyance of organisms or physical objects.
  • No government or business entity shall condition the provision of goods, services or employment on the use of transportation services of any kind on the part of customers or applicants in their written application for goods, services or employment of any kind.

• Planetary Defense: The military forces of the United States shall acquire within 5 years from the enactment of this Amendment, and in perpetuity maintain and improve, a comprehensive and massively redundant planetary defense capability enabling the timely, effective and reliable deflection of Earth-crossing threat objects of every kind, prioritizing at first the known threat objects and adding thereafter the most likely among unpredictable threat objects, and shall maintain in perpetuity a state of readiness to activate the ideal chain of redundant defense sequences against any such threat.

• Deluge Readiness: As a backup to planetary defense, disaster management programs addressing cosmogenic deluges shall focus on the readiness of specialized shipbuilding industries to construct wooden arks for general use on short notice. Even in the modern age, wooden arks seem the ideal refuge for the simple purposes of human survival of these events. It is very likely, based on a correlation of the climatological record with regional flood myths from antiquity, in which the specifications for such arks varied as one might expect, that this will not be the first time that humans have developed this capability at scale. The experience of the Older and Younger Dryas deluges circa 12,900 to 9,400 years BCE, grouped in sequence and separated from one another by just a few thousand years, seems to have left in its wake a human society well prepared to react in a timely manner to the Burckle deluge circa 2,900 BCE.

• Electronic Security: Electronic infrastructure improvements shall be planned, developed, improved and maintained in perpetuity against disruptive cosmogenic plasma streams of every kind, prioritizing known threats including catastrophic solar flares, and expanding in due course to more distant threat sources such as explosive stellar transition events in the galactic environment. Said improvements shall be focused initially on the robustness to such events of power generation, power and electronic transmission and computing technology, expanding in due course to the mitigation of, and compensation for, breakdowns in the Earth’s natural solar and cosmic radiation shielding that may be brought about, whether directly or indirectly, by the action of such events.

• Planetary Sabotage: “Planet” means wanderer. The Earth is like a ship, aboard which maritime law prevails; so should corresponding laws prevail over the safety and security of the wandering Earth. Accordingly, planetary sabotage laws shall be enacted prescribing criminal penalties for acts or influence marketing aimed at compromising the safety and security of the planet, or with other intent in spiteful disregard of same.
  • Denial of Anthropogenic Climate Change. After the fashion of Holocaust denial laws in Europe, Congress shall enact, enforce and maintain strict penalties that criminalize the spiteful denial of anthropogenic climate change, especially when such denial is found to be motivated by political or financial interests.
  • Acts of Planetary Sabotage. Knowingly and spitefully shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater when there is no fire is traditionally cited as illustrating the limits of First Amendment protections of free speech. After a similar fashion, Congress shall enact, enforce and maintain strict penalties that criminalize declarations, acts or influence marketing that pose a real or apparent threat to the present or future safety and security of the planet, or with other intent in spiteful disregard of same, especially when such acts or influence marketing are found to be motivated by political or financial interests.

• Native American Lands: Return ownership of all Native American lands originally granted to indigenous peoples to the Native American tribes to which they were originally granted.

• Department of the Interior: Place an all-encompassing League of Indigenous North American Peoples in charge of the Interior Department. To avert inter-tribal animosity, stipulate only that governance of this Department is to rotate through a randomized sequence of tribes, similar to NATO rules, in which each tribe receives the governance, once and only once, each time through one complete such rotation. After the first rull rotation, the sequence is again randomized for the second rotation, and so forth in perpetuity.
  • This Amendment inverts the prior arrangement in which the Native American tribes fell within the Department of the Interior, placing them instead in collective charge of the Department of the Interior as a League of Indigenous North American Peoples created for, and commensurate with, said reorganization.
  • This Amendment is intended to mitigate the conflicts of interest inherint in the prior arrangement.
  • This Amendment returns the management of lands in North America to their original caratakers, bringing to bear their twenty to forty thousand years of applicable cultural experience.

• Mineral Rights: Relinquish all mineral rights on Native American lands to the League of Indigenous North American Peoples created for, and commensurate with, the reorganization of the Interior Department under said League.
  • This Amendment is intended to serve the purposes of the Interior Department reorganization under the League of Indigenous North American Peoples created for, and commensurate with, said reorganization.

• Hire them or House them: Require all municipalities to house and feed anyone for whom they cannot find or create employment within thirty days of the need arising.
  • This Amendment is intended to eliminate homelessness by shifting the burden of its eradication onto every community in the nation.
  • Those to whom employment is offered but refuse to accept it must be committed to a mental health institution of the sort that were common before the release of the Jack Nicholson movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest but in which the corrupting influences that movie exposes are intelligently and effectively disincentivized.
  • By statutory design, the pathway to discharge leads to employment.

One could respond to the first of these proposed amendments by pointing out that it is unfair to psychopaths but then we’d have to talk about whether cages and zoo enclosures are unfair to predatory cats, which no one questions. Unlike with most animal predators, we need not worry about hurting the feelings of psychopaths because psychopaths have no feelings to hurt. Unlike domesticated animal predators who assimilate as family members, psychopaths are cold-blooded, self-serving social predators for the sake of sport and self-promotion. They destroy innocent lives and bring down civilizations as a matter of deviant instinct and need to be contained. There are people in our midst who know how to handle them. We call them…

Kevin James: Exemplary Role Model for How to Handle Predators

The life of a psychopath is measured in victims. Anecdotally, they never go more than two weeks after destroying one victim before choosing the next. Yet the cages in this communal zoo we call modern society remain open, and we’ve long since normalized the carnage.

The post Proposed Constitutional Amendments appeared first on The Way of Ages.

Published Statistics

• P_gp (1.2% in 2008) is the percentage of the general population who are psychopathic
• P_gi (0.94% in 2011) is the percentage of the general population who are incarcerated
• P_ip (20% in 2001) is the percentage of the incarcerated population who are psychopathic

By failing to disambiguate these statistics from one another, we leave them open to tacit dismissal.  “At 20%, it looks like most or all of the psychopaths are in prison,” one might take away from these statistics.  “Good job.”  These statistics by themselves leave the whole problem of psychopathy in society too easy to dismiss out of hand because they do not describe the demographics fully enough.  Most people desperately want to dismiss the problem out of hand because accepting it as a basic social problem saddles each and every one of us with a basic social responsibility that most of us don’t want anything to do with.

Let’s take this excuse away.  Let’s do the math it takes to finish the picture.  Let’s calculate P_pf, the percentage of the psychopathic population who are free to wander among us and prey upon innocent victims, deprive them of their basic human rights and turn their lives into living hells, for lack of public awareness with all but total impunity.

Formula Components

• P_gp = Percentage of the GENERAL population who are psychopathic
  • 1.2% of the general population are psychopaths – http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy
  • This article does not say whether the 1.2% figure from “a US sample” covers ALL Americans or only those not incarcerated.
  • The present calculation assumes the former; a separate calculation shown below assumes the latter and results in an even higher value for P_pf.*
• P_gi = Percentage of the GENERAL population who are incarcerated
  • 0.94% of the US population are in prison – http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
• P_ip = Percentage of the INCARCERATED population who are psychopathic
  • 20% of a typical US prison population are psychopaths – http://www.hare.org/links/saturday.html

Additional Results

• P_gpi = Percentage of the GENERAL population who are both psychopathic and incarcerated
  • P_gpi = P_ip x P_gi = 20% x 0.94% = 0.188%
• P_gpf = Percentage of the GENERAL population who are psychopathic but FREE
  • P_gpf = P_gp – P_gpi = 1.2% – 0.188% = 1.012%
• P_pi = Percentage of the PSYCHOPATHIC population who are incarcerated
  • P_pi = P_gpi/P_gp = 0.188%/1.2% = 15.667%

The Result We’re After

• P_pf = Percentage of the PSYCHOPATHIC population who are FREE
  • P_pf = 100%-P_pi = 100% – 15.667% = 84.333%

Formula for Calculating P_pf

• P_pf = 100-P_pi
  • = 100-[(P_gpi/P_gp)*100]
  • = 100-[((P_ip*P_gi)/P_gp)*100]
  • = 100-[((0.2*0.94)/1.2)*100]
  • = 100-[(0.188/1.2)*100]
  • = 100-(0.15667*100)
  • = 100-15.667
  • = 84.333%

* Changing our assumption about the 1.2% figure for psychopaths within the general population to exclude those incarcerated, the calculation is slightly revised, though the formula remains the same.

• P_gp becomes 1.2% + (P_gi x P_ip) = 1.2% + P_gpi = 1.2% + 0.188% = 1.388%.
• The final calculation of P_pf then increases from 84.333% to 100-[(0.188/1.388)*100] = 100 – 13.545 = 86.455%.
• P_gpf is then 1.2% (the figure quoted in the article) rather than 1.012% resulting in a proportionally higher average expected encounter rate within the general population.

Discussion

84% to 86% of all US psychopaths are NOT in prison, representing 0.972% to 1.2% of the unincarcerated population. Depending on a typical working American’s profession or line of work, that could expose them to anywhere from 2 or 3 encounters per week to 2 or 3 encounters per day.  For those more apt to be profiled during such encounters as both accessible and vulnerable targets, each encounter with the same psychopath leads to more and more encounters going forward.

My own experience has been that psychopaths who know about each other tend to take turns with a given target rather than interfere with one another. Everything they do is based on the fabrication and implication of misleading impressions about themselves and about their victims. They would not be able to do this effectively if they presented conflicting false impressions of the same victim or if they had to coordinate with one another to maintain their consistency. In clinical terms, a psychopath must build and maintain his or her psychopathic fiction in isolation from those of other psychopaths. They cannot therefore share victims lest these fictions collide around a shared victim. Psychopaths are very good at reconciling such collisions to satisfy those who notice them but steering and avoiding the aegis of other psychopaths reduces their workload as it reduces their risk of exposure. There is also the question of the psychopathic bond, whose strength might be broken or even canceled when compounded in the same person at the same time by different psychopaths.

The post Let’s Do the Math appeared first on The Way of Ages.

• The Dark Ages did not end in 1500 AD but merely began to end around that time.

While science and technology have the power to enlighten, progress in these areas does not in and of itself constitute enlightenment in the broader population and does nothing in and of itself to promote rational thought as the only valid basis for useful belief systems.  Even those who pursue science and technology may retain old ideas that contradict scientific knowledge, in particular ideas that:

• contradict scientific knowledge that lies outside of their specialty area
• conform to irrational belief systems to which they are bound by peer pressure

Mental attitudes or mindsets, moreover, can linger from past ages in the background, in spite of the logical transitive closure of what science and technology imply.  Consider these common examples:

• Do people who believe in a personified overseeing deity believe so:
  • on the basis of objective evidence, or
  • because their social peers expect them to?
  • If on the basis of objective evidence, then:
    • why do these people differ so widely on the names, agendas and other attributes of said deity?
• Do people who believe in scriptural creationism believe so:
  • on the basis of objective evidence, or
  • because their social peers expect them to?
  • If on the basis of objective evidence, then:
    • why do these people differ so widely on the time frame, timeline and other details of the creation story?
• Do people who dismiss the process of natural selection do so:
  • on the basis of objective evidence, or
  • because their social peers expect them to?
  • If on the basis of objective evidence, then:
    • why do these people differ so widely on the origin of species?

Ideologies like these linger on today in spite of the Englightenment and the acceleration in scientific and technological progress it brought on.  For these reasons it could therefore indeed be said that:

• The Dark Ages did not end in 1500 AD but merely began to end around that time.

From this perspective, we might suppose moreover that a full ideological recovery from the Dark Ages can be expected to take at least as long as the period itself lasted.  If ideology has a momentum analogous to that of a moving object such as an ocean liner then we cannot expect it to change course all at once on a certain date, no matter what sort of ideological icebergs may have been sighted up ahead.  Taking the commonly accepted start and end dates for the Dark Ages of 476 AD to 1500 AD (plus or minus a decade on the end date), that’s 1014 years.  But wait!  1500 + 1014 is not yet behind us.  That is the year 2514, which, as of this writing, lies half a millenium beyond our grasp.  What if that is how far we still have to go before we can expect of Western culture as a whole that it has fully emerged from the Dark Ages?

There’s a slight twist in this story.  Just as the Dark Ages were ending, Western culture broke into several parts as explorers like Columbus and Magellan set out to expand the horizons and fortunes of their sponsoring states.  Whatever small amount of momentum that Western Europe might already have gained toward full englightenment would have been left behind by such explorers, thereby stunting the recovery of the new colonies almost before it began.  Colonial recovery was further stunted by one of the two main motivations for such missions: the promulgation of Dark Ages ideology – arguably just a variation on the commercial motive.

I would ask of those who still consider the Dark Ages to have ended around 1500 AD whether they can declare with a straight face that a culture characterized by the following is not still mired in Dark Ages ideology:

• Westerners yet abound and even expand their numbers who cite Biblical scripture as objective evidence.
• Legal battles in a certain outlying Western colony over the teaching of Biblical creationism in public schools rage on even more frequently than they did in 1925.
• A small cadre of Congressional leaders in that same outlying colony continue to hold out in denial of scientifically accepted conclusions about climate change.
• A modern-day detective thriller about hidden Bible codes gains a huge following.  The point over which its characters are willing to cross oceans and continents to risk death in exposing it or kill to keep it secret from public knowledge is whether Biblical scriptures or hidden clues in Renaissance art yet remain undiscovered suggesting that a certain rabbi during the reign of Augustus in the Roman province of Judea may have had a girlfriend.
• Without a controlling interest, it is all but impossible to change what you do within a modern business entity.
  • I assert this unequivocally based on 30 years of experience in the technology sector.
    • It is also painfully common in the entertainment industry, where it is known as type casting.
    • The same actor is cast and recast in unrelated films playing similar characters, often wearing much the same costume and will sometimes even be obliged to speak much the same lines.
    • Only the big stars (those with a controlling interest in the production) can break out of this professional Groundhog Day and play the roles they choose to further or round out their careers.
  • Thus without a controlling interest, you will always be associated within a business entity with the specialty area through which you were introduced to that business entity.
  • With protracted pressure and strong recommendations, you can venture into new territory, but:
    • regardless of your performance in the new role, you will soon find yourself back in your original department.
  • It is very easy to do something completely different.  The only catch is that you have to do it in another company.
    • In the new company, you will always be associated with the new specialty area through which you were introduced to the company.
    • Any attempt to move into a different one (even the same one you couldn’t get out of in a previous company) will ultimately fail.
  • This is the most striking vestige of Dark Ages social organization that I’ve yet noticed.
    • During the Medieval era, the families in a community would specialize in various crafts so that the community could function efficiently in the absence of higher education.
    • A typical family would invest in the tools of the trade and pass these tools and the knowledge surrounding their use down through the generations using the apprenticeship system.
    • This is how names like Cooper, Smith and Carpenter proliferated during the Dark Ages.  People knew you by what you did.
  • After 500 years there’s been a mixing and diversification of surnames but the same outmoded social organization lingers on.  Despite many a brave claim to the contrary, all modern civil organizations ultimately devolve into Coopers, Smiths and Carpenters with little or no lateral mobility.  Submarine crews know better from experience than to leave themselves vulnerable to single points of failure and use cross-training to reduce the risk of incapacitation.  Incapacitated business entities don’t sink as quickly as incapacitated submarines but sink they must and sink they do, just as fully and finally.  On the postmortem committee for a project that had succumbed to management’s beguilement over the course of two painful years by a single self-serving narcissist who had long since flown the coop, everyone got to say what they thought went wrong but management’s only goal was to simply address the matter as a formal gesture, close the book and look the other way.  To do otherwise would have called for true understanding, confessions all around and a great deal of embarrassment.  I believe it will be many centuries before Western culture as a whole can outgrow this obsolete yet deeply entrenched social dynamic.  Until that happens, what you do is how they know you.  If you’re a sufficiently deft and persuasive narcissist or psychopath, on the other hand, you get to choose – how they know you is whatever you say you do.
• Premeditated nepotism, for lack of a better term, is another Dark Ages practice that lingers on in the modern workplace.  If you can’t do something you want to do (typically gain promotion), never mind the qualifications.  Just marry into the desired position, or at least into the career track that will get you there.
  • This practice is most prevalent in large and lucrative government contract projects in which people are paid more for the time they charge than for the results they produce.  This type of incentive structure is more inherently tolerant of corruption than are those organized around the pure, open-market profit motive of businesses operating in the consumer or secondary markets.  While the latter environments favor discipline, fairness and productivity over time, the former lay themselves wide open to exploitation by nepotists, opportunists, narcissists and psychopaths.
  • In all the time I spent on government contracts, I could never bring myself to stoop so low as to avail myself of the numerous opportunities for premeditated nepotism that came my way.  Most of these opportunities were clearly sanctioned by management though never spoken as such – not to me, at least.  I saw a few who had availed themselves, however.  My impression was one of kept men or women, socially muted and politically sheltered, as though stranded in time and space.  This was never a lifestyle I could have sustained as it conflicted with my personal goals and so I always turned away from such situations – a decision which always led by and by to the door.  If we can’t expand the cozy little dynasty we envision, I could almost hear them thinking on my way out the door, we’ll at least have a cozy little silence on the matter.
• It’s been all but impossible since the Roman empire fell to find a decent Roman bath.  Only in the late 20th Century has this crowning achievement of Roman technology and lifestyle begun to make a comeback, but you still can’t find one without traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to just the right 5-star resort.  We still use Roman arches, so why not Roman baths?  Here are a few of the answers:
  • because during the Dark Ages, Roman arches were needed for the construction of churches and monasteries but Roman baths were not.
  • because the vast network of Roman aqueducts that once brought clean water to many towns and cities throughout Western Europe were systematically dismantled during the Dark Ages and their materials repurposed for the construction of churches and monasteries.
  • because Roman baths aren’t much use without a renewable supply of clean water.
  • Do we see a pattern emerging here?  Did lavish bath houses fall out of vogue for other reasons during the Dark Ages?  Certainly the knowledge and infrastructure needed to build them disappeared along with Roman civilization but did such facilities also become a symbol of Roman decadence and excess as the Church took the reins of public administration from secular Romans? Would the preservation of the aqueducts and the facilities they served have limited the spread of the Black Death?
  • The benefits of the 3-part Roman bath experience go beyond mere cleanliness and disease prevention.
    • Cycling between the tepidarium, the calderium and the frigidarium exercises the circulatory system in ways that other therapeutic regimens cannot.
    • The tepidarium serves both to gently introduce the body to what follows and, for those who need it, as a transitional pool between the other two.  The calderium forces the body to shunt blood to the extremities in an attempt to convect heat away, while the frigidarium does the opposite, forcing the body to pool blood into its core in an attempt to conserve heat.
    • It is easy to see the appeal of this system to, for example, a Roman legionary, as its regular use would render the body extremely robust to conditions that might otherwise induce heat stroke.
    • It is also easy for those who use such facilities to see how the regular application of this regimen can rejuvenate a person both physically and mentally, much to the benefit of his or her quantity and quality of life and profession, whatever that may be.
    • The Roman bath served also as a place to exercise, unwind and socialize after a day’s work.  Modern churches serve but a fraction of these functions and usually just once a week, whereas the local baths in the Roman world hosted a daily ritual that everyone looked forward to.  Some modern church services allow for no more than a few minutes of socializing during the sermon, after which everyone promptly goes home.  And oh, yes – weekly sermons as we know them today originated in the Dark Ages for the benefit of the illiterate masses.  Today they can only serve to bestow upon most modern congregations a unified selection, edition and interpretation of scriptures available in many forms to anyone with an ebook reader and a basic education – tools that also provide access to the vast and rapidly expanding body of accumulated human knowledge.
  • Despite these many benefits, Roman style baths remain rare in Western civilization and appear to remain a symbol of Roman decadence and excess.  To me this is just another of many signs that the Dark Ages are not yet over.

• Many among those who don’t go so far as to deny the findings of modern paleoanthropology still believe that primitive humans lived in caves – that only the advent of religion and modern society permitted them to live long and healthy lives.
  • Aside from the paleoanthropological findings that refute this view, I believe that the cultural inclination to it is rooted in Dark Ages attitudes.
  • The paleoanthropological reason for this belief results from a lag between the discovery of cave paintings and a complete scientific assimilation of the meaning of such findings.  It is often the case, as with the myth of progressive brain cell death with age, that the initial faulty conclusions are taken up and assimilated by society before the results of subsequent analysis have come in.  By the time they do, the social understanding of the subject has already been saturated by the faulty initial findings.
    • In the case of progressive brain cell death, this result was later found to be an artifact of the brain cell counting procedure that made use of sonication to tease apart the brain cells before making a sample count under a microscope.  The sonication process was preferentially destroying older brain cells because they are more brittle than younger brain cells.  Glial cells, which constitute the vast majority of brain cells but were later found to serve a mainly structural support function, cloud the related myth that humans use only a small percentage of their total brain power.  Biological features, be they known, unknown, understood or yet enigmatic, don’t evolve except through mutation followed by advantageous usage, from which one can infer based on pure logic alone that all neuroanatomical features, just like all of the other parts of an organism, have remained in use until the present or at least until the relatively recent past (as in the case of the appendix or tonsils).
  • As it turns out, prehistoric peoples left paintings in caves because that was the only place from which weather and vandalism would not wash them away.  For all we know, they left paintings everywhere but for obvious reasons only the cave paintings survived to be discovered by modern explorers.  Either way, we must give the artists credit for realizing early on that paintings created outside of caves would not last through the ages for the benefit of subsequent generations.  We can infer that this legacy was important to these ancient artists from the thousands of years over which the users of the Chauvet cave in France maintained, preserved and added to the paintings only recently discovered there.  Aside from its obvious use as a shelter for paintings, the Chauvet cave most likely served as a venue for spiritual ceremonies.  One of the clearest findings about the Chauvet cave is that its human users never lived there.
  • Caves are not sanitary places to live.  Most have poor drainage, few have adequate ventilation and moreover there simply aren’t – and weren’t – enough of them to go around such that every prehistoric family could find a cave of their own in which to live.  Finding an otherwise suitable location that was also close to the neighbors would have quickly mushroomed into a problem of truly epic proportions.
  • A much clearer picture of prehistoric lifestyles was revealed to the relatively modern Norse and European explorers of North America.  The proud and fearless warriors and hunters, the “noble savages” with physiques to die for and a total and sustainable command of their environment by whose grace the sickly and wheezing Pilgrims survived their first New England winter hardly fit the image of cowering cave dwellers.
  • Most documented cases of sustained cave dwelling by humans were for a single and consistent purpose – to hide from other humans.
    • Close examination of the pre-Columbian cliff dwellings in Southwestern North America suggest their historicity as refuges from unfamiliar invaders – by one theory, native explorers form Central America.  A more commonly accepted theory concerning the massive stone pueblos at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico cites oppressive class structures such as the one through which the Spartans enslaved in perpetuity the entire ethnicity of the Helots.
    • Some of the caves surrounding the Qumran settlement on the West Bank of the Jordan River were used as hiding places for sacred scrolls during the Biblical era.  Some were used as dwelling places for settlers hiding from the Roman legions who had pitched an outpost camp on the site of the original Essene settlement nearby, most probably during the Siege of Jerusalem under the command of Vespasian and Titus.  The first-century Judeo-Roman historian Flavius Josephus, who was present at the Siege of Jerusalem as a liaison for the Roman high command in their negotiations with the fortress defenders, underscored their reasons for hiding (and for hiding their sacred scrolls) in a passage on the Essenes: The war with the Romans tried their souls through and through by every variety of test.  Racked and twisted, burnt and broken, and made to pass through every instrument of torture in order to induce them to blaspheme their lawgiver or to eat some forbidden thing, never once did they cringe to their persecutors or shed a tear.
    • Dating from 5,000 BC, the ancient kingdom of Cappadocia in central Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) has lain at the crossroads of conquering armies on the march from all directions.  Though called by different names down through the ages, the Cappadocian people have used the karst topography and readily-excavatable igneous geology to maintain the stability and permanence of their unique enclave through the construction and maintenance of 30 miles of cleverly concealed tunnels and caves whose entrances, terraces and overlooks roll, curve, arch and blend with the landscape – virtually invisible from the outside, in many cases even at close range – that have hidden and protected their people, their wealth and their livelihoods for 7,000 years.  This strategy continues even today in the Turkish tourism and hospitality industry to which the caves of Cappadocia add a unique twist for travelers and celebrities seeking the next level up in privacy and natural beauty.  It is important to note that even the ancient Cappadocians were not primitive people but the creators of a sophisticated, durable and resilient civilization who used the unique topography of the region not as such for shelter and protection from wild animals but to conceal both themselves and the prosperity that their central location along many a trade route afforded from ambitious and avaricious powers on the march through their highly connected and strategic territory – what the Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu called key ground.
  • Although it is a myth that the catacombs of Rome, for example, originated as hiding places (since their construction, so it is argued, would have been too easily noticed), their use as refuges for religious burials, religious practice and for the display of religious works of art is well established.  The extensive use of catacombs for these purposes before the acceptance and proliferation of Christianity leading up to the Dark Ages could have built up within the early Christian community a cultural memory of “living in caves” before civilization (Christianity in the parochial view) began in earnest and could be openly promulgated.
  • Be that as it may, to the degree that English Puritans were obliged to take any sort of physical or societal refuge form persecution in the 16th and early 17th Centuries, the Wampanoag who greeted the first Pilgrims in 1620 were the first in their tribal history to encounter bonafide cave dwellers.  An how it must have shown!

So where does that leave the various modern fragments of Western Civilization?  Still cowering in the cold, dank, unhealthy Dark Ages with 500 years to go before emerging fully into the light?  Moving faster than that?  Slower?  In the wrong direction?  Aware enough to care?  Whichever course this ideological ocean liner chooses, science will be there to guide it and technology will be there to speed it along to its ultimate destiny.  How far ahead it can see and what sort of obstacles it can detect will depend more on its way of looking than on the sophistication of its sensing equipment.

The post When Did the The Dark Ages Really End? appeared first on The Way of Ages.

The post Surviving Psychopathy appeared first on The Way of Ages.

The post Robert Hare appeared first on The Way of Ages.

The post Paul Babiak appeared first on The Way of Ages.