• In March 2024 the Supreme Court ruled against the state of Colorado seeking to keep insurrectionist Trump’s name off the state ballot, citing the 14th Amendment Insurrectionist clause.
• The 9 Justices were one block from Congress on January 6th 2021. Trump, Giuliani, et.al. spent 2 months researching ways to overturn his loss in November 2020. The Justices witnessed the culmination of that effort with angry rioters chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”. A woman was even shot dead in the hallway of the House! Trump incited that violence in an attempt to stop the vote certification.
• In their interpretation of the Insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment, the Trump attorneys masquerading as Supreme Court Justices, in effect, added language to that clause requiring those seeking to enforce it to make and win a court case that would eventually make its way back to the Supreme Court. That ruling caused an insurrectionist to be able to run, win and for 8 months [as of 2025-10-15] occupy the Oval Office, bringing all the chaos the Framers knew to avoid by creating the Insurrectionist Clause.
• The best lawyers must represent We, the People, and Redress the Court immediately. The 9 Justices and 8 billion souls on the planet saw what happened within Trump’s first week: he pardoned 1500 Jan 6th rioters, and had agents hunt down and fire all those in the DOJ who participated in the cases! The People’s lawyers must demand the Court reverse its improper Decision. By allowing insurrectionist Trump to run for President, the 9 Judges violated the Constitution. The November 2024 election was tainted. So, in a “hanging chads” type situtation, the Justices must then (1) vacate the tainted election results; (2) install the legal candidates Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz as the 47th President and VP; (3) declare null and void Trump’s last 8 months of folly and reset the Nation’s dockets back to January 19th 2025; (4) by rights, for failing to issue the highest Decision, resulting in hundreds and thousands of Human and Civil Rights abuses, trillions of dollars in losses to citizens; plus ruining America’s Good Name on the Free World stage, all 9 should resign. Then We the People should hold a special election, interview a pool of eligible candidates and vote for the 9 new members.
• If all this can be done, then those 8 billion witnesses will see how a representative democracy is supposed to work: for the 99%ers who believe in Truth, Justice and the American Way.

A loose end is why not a single Democrat moved to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment on 6 January 2025. They must have agreed not to in advance, or we should have expected some or all of them to perform their sworn duty to do so. Any one of those who could have done this must know the answer to this question but as far as I’m aware, no one has asked it of them.

The post Chronology of a Coup appeared first on The Way of Ages.

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.

• Those in Category 1 (call them acolytes) are instinctively enamored of such anomalies and are inclined to enthusiastically support them;
• Those in Category 2 (call them skeptics) are instinctively repulsed by psychopaths and other “fraudsters” and are inclined to resist them;
• Those in Category 3 (call them agnostics) either cannot or will not differentiate fraudsters from normal people and always reserve judgment.

Let us therefore pose a solution to the Fermi Paradox in which, over time:

• Skeptics, when left to their own devices, incrementally build social structures aimed at improving the human condition.  The personal and common survival value of these behaviors should be obvious.  Although the mix of socialist and capitalist motives can vary, in a putatively ideal free society the socialist motives build the infrastructure upon which to build capital markets and the capitalist motives generate wealth from which to draw fairly for social services and to further improve the supporting social infrastructure.
• Acolytes episodically commandeer the social structures built up by the skeptics for personal gain.  They do so by building socially vacuous confucio-machiavellian hierarchies on top of the pragmatic social structures built and maintained by the Skeptics.  They do this under the auspices of machiavellian political figures whenever such opportunities emerge, as they are often apt to emerge with or without democratic processes.  These upsets (all them cognotype inversions) always end up straining or collapsing the underlying pragmatic social infrastructure for lack of any common benefit. Whenever their efforts gain them the opportunity, they plunder the social infrastructure in their Machiavellian drive to dominate.
• Meanwhile the agnostics become useful tools by which to bend favor between normal and anomalous candidates within democratic societies or between would-be despots in the absence of democracy, as they have no instinctive attraction or aversion to either type of candidate and are easily swayed.  They are universally courted as what some have referred to themselves after the fact as “useful idiots”.  As a group, they are for this reason perennially immune to political disfavor.

The darwinian selective advantages of each of these three cognotypes and their social niches is clear enough, and the resulting dynamics sort well with the historical record.  It is important to understand the short-term selective value of each cognotype because these are what maintain the demographic balance and whose motivational differences in turn drive the episodic disruption cycle.  Unfortunately with the march of technology, the episodic upsets thus engendered become increasingly dangerous, as the short-sighted acolytes, as perennial champions of vacuous hierarchies, find more and more powerful tools at each turn of the cycle – tools which could be used to set back the underlying tangible infrastructure by leaps and bounds of steadily increasing magnitude.  While a society dominated by skeptics can and often has been envisioned to progress rapidly and progressively, the historical record and the Fermi Paradox sort better with the findings of Babiak & Hare, which find convincing support amid the recent emergence of reliable political statistics.

It is not difficult in hindsight to understand this mix, nor how it came to be given the short-term darwinian selective advantages of each category and the dynamics of their interaction, both of which are plainly visible to anyone who wishes to understand them scientifically.  Less obvious are the lengthy result cycles of the complex social dynamics thus set in motion, which lie beyond the tractability of natural selection.  The process of natural selection is a random one and can’t associate malefactors with end results the way a detective or jury can when, for example, the malefactors succeed over time by making the benefactors fail over time.  Nature can’t select against malefactors it can’t track and has a long history of selecting in favor of highly-evolved predators.  As a result, the host society as a whole either succeeds, fails or drags along in misery with no end in sight.  The episodic self-destruction of social orders is thus beyond the power of nature to select against in a surgical manner that might improve the dynamics going forward, and so it blindly selects instead against the host society en masse, leaving as a challenge for the host society to correct itself if it can.

The pragmatic difficulty in social self-correction arises in reconciling these social dynamics and the players that drive them with the traditional precepts of egalitarian society.  In treating all individuals as equal under the law, we afford in perpetuity to all, regardless of mind category, a license to disrupt forward social progress at the expense of the common good.  The mix is tolerated because the alternative is to confront a problem far more vast and inexorable than most are willing to confront.

Limitations on candidates for office are already in place, such as the requirement for native birth in candidates for the US presidency.  While limitations based on mental health are vulnerable to political interpretation and manipulation, one cannot deny their importance in comparison to the limitations already in place.  What we need, therefore, are criteria of mental health as easily and universally defensible as the criterion of native birth.  Since the Electoral College is obsolete in the internet age for purposes of counting votes, why not repurpose it for the psychological evaluation and underwriting of political candidates using widely accepted quantitative criteria?  The alternative is to place limits on who can vote.  While such limits are not without precedent in US politics, the general approach is fraught with its own disadvantages and is just as vulnerable to political interpretation and manipulation as would be mental health criteria for political candidates.

If people really are created equal then our politics should reflect that.  If nature is found to differ from this perspective, on the other hand, then our political apparatus is duty bound to guard itself against nature’s certifiable anomalies.  While the free press contributes to such safeguards, its inevitable entanglement with politics and commerce marries it to controversy, volatility and sensation over progressive change and pits state-controlled news media against the more purely market-driven news media.  (I challenge the reader to discriminate a third category of news media.)  More socially responsible and legislatable safeguards are needed to avert catastrophic social cycles the likes of which dominate the historical record.  The historical record is, after all, a solidified concrete object lesson, not just a warning.

The post Anomalies and their Followers as Drivers of Episodic Social Upsets appeared first on The Way of Ages.

• Category 1: About a third of those interviewed felt enamored of the huckster and felt that he or she had “charisma”.
• Category 2: About a third of those interviewed “felt their skin crawl” during the presentation of the antics and had an instinctive aversion to the huckster even before being interviewed.
• Category 3: “What happened?” The authors used this phrase to describe the reactions of this audience member category to their questions about the huckster. These intervewees apparently didn’t understand what they were being asked, as though indifferent to or unable to parse the words, actions, character or perceived intent of the huckster. It’s possible they were simply averse to controversy and were withholding their true impressions but this was their response when interviewed.

The researchers then revealed to each audience member the underlying trickery of the huckster. The Category 1 members felt the huckster had been misunderstood and unfairly treated by the experimenters and stood firmly by their original impressions; the Category 2 audience members felt their instincts had been vindicated and stood firmly by them; the Category 3 members again reacted as before: “What happened?”. In no case did any of the audience members change their initial assessment of the huckster. Apparently it wasn’t a matter of rational analysis, according to which the subsequent revelations should have changed the minds of the Category 1 people and awoken the Category 3 people to the existence of bad people. While it’s possible that no one wanted to admit they had been fooled, each subject seemed hard-wired to have the reaction they had and to maintain the original assessment they had made of the huckster and the huckster’s antics.

Then there’s the “huckster” category itself. While Babiak & Hare didn’t classify the huckster as a psychopath or NPD sufferer, that’s what their book is about because those are the people they’ve made careers of studying and feel they are qualified to write about. This category represents about 1-5% of a given population. Babiak and Hare are two of the world’s leading experts on psychopathy in its various forms, and on Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which they differentiate from psychopathy. Personally, I believe NPD to be just another “style” of psychopathy based on 6 years of experience with an NPD sufferer at an aerospace company during which I was also exposed to what Babiak & Hare would most probably have identified as a puppetmaster psychopath who employed the macho style, which they associate in historical context with Hitler and Stalin. While the manner of the NPD differed, I’m not so sure the methods did and the results and apparent intent were the same: identify, attract, subjugate, use and discard one victim after another on an uncontrollable quest for total domination of their social and professional circles. The macho psychopath did it with swagger, character assassination and outright lies of such contortion and audacity as to defy refutation in any context short of a formal courtroom setting while the NPD did it with smiles, charm and endless self-promotion, creating a sort of swirling vortex within which it was impossible to have a normal conversation or make a point without it being converted in real time into a reinforcement of the NPD’s centrality and preeminence in the order of things. To me after long and careful observation as the hand-picked target of both denizens, the NPD sufferrer’s antics seemed just another style of mainstream psychopathy because he and the macho style psychopath sought and achieved the same results.  Both also, it should be noted, weaved the kind of endless and endlessly revised social fiction which the experts associate with psychopathy, calling it the psychopathic fiction.  It quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, so why not call it a duck?

It is instructive to compare the results of statistically controlled surveys to these numbers. While we cannot positively correlate them without repeating the Babiak & Hare experiment itself using the same subjects, we can see the survey results in a new light. Those of us with enough life experience not to need more experimental results can also refine and strengthen our world view. When someone matching the extreme psychological profile of a psychopath or someone with NPD enters politics – and many would argue that we’ve seen both varieties in droves – it becomes useful to compare the associated poll numbers to the putative equilibrium distribution discussed above. We are free to compare numbers, moreover, without drawing conclusions that might inspire criticism of our methods because our only method here is to compare numbers and speculate freely on their meaning. We may compare numbers to gain insights and perhaps inspire future controlled experiements without committing a priori to formal methods and without drawing final conclusions. It would cost more than most research institutions will ever be able to afford, for example, to conduct an experiment on the grand scale of a presidential election that someone with NPD just happens to win – setting aside the question of whether “just happens” captures the most accurate assessment of the outcome – yet here we find ourselves having wandered into just such a situation without spending a dime, which is not meant to suggest, of course, that it won’t end up costing us a pretty penny in the long run to have done so. Notwithstanding the Goldwater Rule, any psychopathologist hoping to contribute to society where it counts the most is just not doing their job if they ignore an opportunity like this. I’m not even a psychopathologist, but I sometimes think that psychopaths and NPDs are pulling numbers from a grocery counter in Hell for a turn at targeting me. Somehow I don’t think I’m alone in this perception and the exposure gained amounts to years of clinical experience provided it is appreciated in the context of modern research results.

Before delving into the quantitative data, I’d like to establish their basis in what has become a fairly broad professional consensus on the qualitative state of President Trump’s mind. Let’s keep two things in mind as we do this:

• Narcissistic Personality Disorder, like Psychopathy, has been preferentially characterized as congenital and untreatable, although the present consensus according to Wikipedia includes such statements as “Treatments have not been well studied” and “Therapy is often difficult as people with the disorder frequently do not consider themselves to have a problem”.
• The Goldwater Rule continues to discourage many professionals from speaking out about public figures who exhibit the symptoms of NPD or other mental disorders.

Firstly, therefore, about the state of President Trump’s mind (the qualitative analysis):

• 2017-02-20: Jeffrey Flier, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and Higginson Professor of Physiology and Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Formerly Dean of Harvard Medical School, tweets:
  • “Narcissistic personality disorder. Trump doesn’t just have it, he defines it. ‪#trumpdiagnosis”

• 2017-08-25: According to the Independent in UK, A group of psychiatrists has written to Congress to warn Donald Trump poses a “clear and present danger” to the world.
  • “It no longer takes a psychiatrist to recognise the alarming patterns of impulsive, reckless, and narcissistic behaviour,” the group claims.

Secondly, in the qualitiative context thus established, here are the numbers (the quantitative analysis):

• 2017-03-28 (37%): Anchor Poppy Harlow mentioned a daily tracking poll of Trump’s approval, which on Saturday hit a new low of 37 percent. She pointed out, accurately, that Trump still has strong support from his base, and the conversation quickly moved on.
  • While the journalist initially misquoted the source, the poll number was accurate.
• 2017-05-09: Trump Fires FBI Director James Comey
  • thus setting the stage for a response in Trump’s poll numbers.
• 2017-05-11 (36%): Just 36% of voters approve of the job President Trump is doing as commander-in-chief, a new poll out Thursday shows.
  • By this measure, firing the FBI director had no statistically significant effect on his approval rating.
  • While Republicans have traditionally taken a hawkish, “conservative” stance against communism in general and against Russia in particular, for example, these “special” Republicans don’t seem to care how Trump got elected, nor how blatantly he attempts to obstruct justice when people try to find out if the Russians helped him.
  • On the contrary, his base held strong, suggesting either a stalwart rational approval of this firing or a profound disconnect within his base between their approval of this candidate and his actions as President.
• 2017-06-12 (35-36%): President Trump’s Disapproval Rating Just Hit Another High.
  • “As of June 11, 59% of voters disapprove of the job Trump is doing as President, according to the Gallup daily tracking poll, while just 36% approve.”
  • “That same day, his Gallup approval rating reached an all-time low of 35%.”
  • As you can see, I’m referencing “new low” approval and “new high” disapproval ratings to avoid having to compile my own statistics on a daily basis.
  • While saving me work, this also means that you can’t argue with me about these numbers because I’m just the messenger.
  • To challenge these numbers, you’d have to argue with the national pollsters I’m referring you to.
• 2017-06-15 (35%): DONALD TRUMP’S LATEST APPROVAL RATING PLUNGES AS SUPPORT AMONG REPUBLICANS, WHITES DROPS.
  • As you may have noticed, the hyperbole used by advertising agencies masquerading as news organizations (AAMANO) to describe numbers that aren’t actually changing is beginning to wear thin.
  • For the purposes of this survey, however, I for one am only interested in the numbers and can therefore disregard the hyperbole without throwing out the numbers.
  • The number we should be keeping in mind is that 33.33% or Babiak & Hare’s “about a third” of those surveyed about a “huckster” as we watch the “new low” approval ratings fluctuate over time.
  • So far, the huckster’s “base”, as the AAMANO call it, has refused to drop below 33% in ANY poll at ANY time over the months covered in these poll results regardless of the political circumstances, suggesting that they’re driven by something other than politics.
• 2017-06-27 (36%): GOOD NEWS FOR TRUMP: THE FORMER LEAST POPULAR PRESIDENT’S APPROVAL RATING JUST SURPASSED FORD’S.
  • “According to the latest poll Monday from Gallup, Trump’s approval rating was just 36 percent, compared with 58 percent who disapproved.”
• 2017-06-28 (“a third”): Storm clouds: Independents turn away from Trump while his base turns inward
  • “Only a third of American adults think that Trump is proving to be a more effective leader than Obama was, the poll found.”
  • The bar chart at the bottom of the cited article breaks the Trump support statistics down into those for:
    • All adults (the number of interest for the present analysis)
    • Democrats
    • Independents
    • Republicans
    • Trump supporters
• 2017-07-16 (36%): DONALD TRUMP ISN’T HAPPY ABOUT NEW POLL SHOWING HE IS THE PRESIDENT WITH LOWEST APPROVAL RATING IN 70 YEARS.
  • “The ABC News/Washington Post poll shows the president currently has just a 36% approval rating, showing a drop of 6 points since a similar poll taken after his first 100 days in office.”
  • In the context of the other polls taking place over this period, we are once again reading a new headline about a new poll showing the same approximate approval rating framed as a new low by market makers masquerading as news executives.
• 2017-07-17 (36%): Poll: Trump’s approval rating drops to 36%.
  • “Only 36% of Americans approve of President Donald Trump’s performance in the Oval Office, a new Washington Post/ABC News poll has found.”
  • Again, we see more and more of the same hyperbole announcing a new low while the numbers themselves continue to hover between 33 and 37 percent.
  • As most of us can well appreciate, phrases like “A new poll”, “A new low”, “approval rating drops” and “approval rating plunges” draw more eyeballs to the SUV ads than “holding steady at the well-studied resistance level”, even though the latter phrase more aptly describes the dynamic we are seeing based on the numbers themselves, given that these numbers are not inconsistent with the statistics reported by Babiak & Hare (2006).
  • The latter phrase would also require more background explanation, which would of course draw different and much fewer eyeballs to the SUV ads – eyeballs whose knowledge-hungry owners would be less apt than most to consider buying an SUV on impulse.
  • We can thus well appreciate in this context that enlightenment tends to run rather opposite the direction of the SUV market, which underscores the fundamental conflict of interest between news reporting and advertising.
• 2017-07-18 (38.7%): TRUMP VOTERS, REPUBLICANS OVERALL ACTUALLY DON’T CARE IF THE PRESIDENT SHOOTS SOMEONE ON FIFTH AVENUE: POLL.
  • “The weighted average from data-focused website FiveThirtyEight pegged his approval rating at just 38.7 percent Tuesday. As Trump approaches the six-month mark, that’s the lowest-ever approval figure for a president at this point in his tenure.”
  • There’s an excellent graphic at the FiveThirtyEight link above showing Trump’s approval rating slowly sinking toward but never dipping below what’s beginning to firm up as a theoretical hard lowest possible support level for a President with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, though I should mention that I did see in a subsequent report a figure of 32%. As any statistician will tell you, 32% in a context like this is not significantly distinct from 33.33%.
  • Needless to say, it would cost billions of dollars to conduct an experiment on this scale but now we don’t have to. We just have to collect and interpret the numbers.
• 2017-07-22 (37%): POLLS SHOW TRUMP, THE LEAST POPULAR PRESIDENT EVER, IS PLUNGING EVEN LOWER.
  • “Gallup pegged his approval at just 37 percent Friday, while 58 percent of Americans disapproved.”
  • “That’s not quite the all-time low for Trump in the Gallup tracking poll—he sunk to just 35 percent in late March when the GOP’s first health care plan flopped before the House could even vote—but it’s getting close and earlier this month the president had briefly risen back to 40 percent.”
  • So far the approvers in all of these results can be interpreted as Trump’s “base” (those born into Category 1 as defined above) along with a smattering of “swing” approvers in Category 3 ranging from 0 to 6%.
• 2017-08-02 (33%): Trump’s approval rating hits new low.
  • “The poll showed that just 33 percent of US voters approve of his job performance while 61 percent disapprove.”
  • This number is important because it represents a statistical low resistance limit according to a broad interpretation of the results of Babiak & Hare (2006).
  • By this interpretation, the approval rating of a psychopath or NPD sufferer clever or wellborn enough to stay out of jail (a “huckster” in the language used by Babiak & Hare in describing their experiment) won’t ever go below “about a third”, which is 33.33% should we wish to use a precise number in place of their approximate language.
• 2017-08-02 (38%): TRUMP’S FAVORITE RIGHT-LEANING POLL SHOWS THE LEAST POPULAR PRESIDENT EVER IS PLUNGING EVEN LOWER.
  • “Trump’s approval rating stood at just 38 percent Wednesday, down one percentage point from his previous all-time low Monday.”
  • “Sixty-two percent of voters, a record high, said they disapproved of Trump, according to Rasmussen Wednesday.”
  • As we can see for ourselves in the history of this number since 28 March across several polls, 38% is more like an all-time high approval rating for Trump than an all-time low.
  • The commercial news media are in the business of moving products, however, and so we must suffer their endless hyperbole and try to keep our focus on the approval rating figures, which are giving credence more and more to a rock-solid resistance level at about 33%.
  • As amply noted above, this is not inconsistent with the experimental results of Babiak & Hare (2006).
• 2017-08-07 (33%): Trump claims base is bigger ‘than ever before.’ Polls suggest otherwise.
  • “According to a Quinnipiac University poll released last week, just 33 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as president.”
  • Meanwhile Trump himself according to this article was declaring his base “far bigger and stronger than ever before” – knowing from experience that the bigger the lie and the more often you repeat it, the more people will believe it – at least, the more strongly that stalwhart 33% will believe it who constitute his base.
  • Within a broader audience, one could also read this rule to mean that the more nuts people believe you to be, the more afraid certain of them will be to contradict you.
  • The main point upon which Trump can rely is that this technique is proven and effective in the short term, though the end result of the dynamic it sets in motion is a different matter.
  • The short term is usually enough to seal deals and make profits, however. In that sense the technique carries benefits that can outlast its effectiveness.
• 2017-08-08 (36%): Trump’s approval rating stagnant despite surging confidence in the economy – which is at a 15-year high.
  • “Confidence is the economy is at its highest point since June of 2001”
  • “Yet Trump’s approval rating remains stagnant at 36 percent in a CBS poll”
• 2017-08-08 (38%): TRUMP SHOULD BE ON ‘24-HOUR SUICIDE WATCH’ BECAUSE OF LOW APPROVAL RATINGS, SAYS FORMER TED CRUZ AIDE.
  • A CNN poll released Tuesday showed Trump’s approval rating had dropped to 38 percent, the lowest number for any president after 200 days in office.
  • Again, we’re looking at an approval rating near the high end of Trump’s range since 28 March, yet the headline casts it as “the lowest number for any president after 200 days in office”.
  • While the commercial news media run on hyperbole, science runs on numbers and we’re seeing very consistent numbers indeed.
• 2017-08-14 (34%): Trump drops to new low in Gallup poll, matching George W. Bush’s popularity on the day he left office.
  • “Gallup’s daily tracking poll showed Trump with just a 34% approval rating, his lowest since taking office in January, and a 61% disapproval rating.”
  • Comparing this to the foregoing Gallup numbers, we do find it to be a new low for that poll, but not by much.
  • Taking all of these numbers at a glance, we are seeing what can fairly be called strong resistance at a statistical low limit of 33%.

2017-08-26: PopSugar summarizes Trump’s poll numbers during his first 7 months in office according to “nine of the biggest, most respected polls on the matter” in surveys spanning 23 January 2017 to 13 August 2017:

Given that Trump qualifies as a “huckster” by the standards of Babiak & Hare (2016) and that the one third of survey subjects in the third “What happened?” category described by those authors are easily swayed to approval or disapproval, the key figures to note throughout the foregoing results are the lowest approval rating (33% according to the summary) and the highest disapproval rating (62% according to the summary). As described in more detail above, Babiak & Hare reported that amongst their test subjects, about a third stood in unwavering admiration and support of the huckster (Category 1), about a third stood firm in their instinctive revulsion to and distrust of the huckster (Category 2) and about a third seemed indifferent to the huckster or lacked an understanding of what they were being asked by the experimenters (Category 3). The numbers above are not inconsistent with these test results if we understand what the B&H results predict in such a political mix: about a third would stand in unwavering support of Trump (Category 1), corresponding to a “hard deck” unyielding low approval rating of about 33.33%; another third would prevent his approval rating from rising above 66.66% (Category 2); and about a third in such surveys would lack instincts (Category 3) and rely instead on the preponderance of minutiae in popular discourse and media coverage on the day of their participation. What we see in the summary above is a 33% hard deck (guarded by those in Category 1), a 62% ceiling (guarded by those in Category 2 and kept short of 66.66% by a few stragglers in Category 3) and an otherwise free swing of variation between these two hard limits thanks to the easily-swayed survey participants in Category 3. We might also attribute the low bias in the approval rating summary to the predominantly negative media coverage of Trump during its period of coverage, which would explain why the highest disapproval rating (62%) fell short of the theoretical value of about 66.66% and why the average approval rating fell short of the statisticall mean of 50%. This low bias serves to illustrate, however, just how firm the low-side resistance stands at “about a third” against a predominantly negative socio-political consensus: 33% actual according to the summary results vs. “about a third” or 33.33% predicted by the results of Babiak & Hare.

It is interesting to examine the following Obama poll results from 3 years ago in light of these findings.

• 2014-07-02 (33%): Poll: Obama worst prez since WWII.
  • “According to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday, 33 percent of voters think the current president is the worst since 1945.”
  • Were it not for that strikingly familiar figure of 33%, we might be inclined to dismiss these results as unrelated. I beg to differ.
  • It would be interesting to see the results of this Obama negativity survey conducted concurrently with a Trump approval rating survey using the same subjects.
  • I would expect a strong, perhaps even complete overlap between those who consider Obama to have been the worst president since 1945 and those who approve of Trump’s performance in March-August 2017. Yes, it’s that naggingly consistent 33% we keep seeing.

Once in a while a clever media denizen of means conducts an original experiment to shed more light on the disconnect between politics and policy amongst those enamored of hucksters, such as this one in which:

• Jimmy Kimmel Just Completely Trolled Trump Supporters Into Loving Obamacare
  • All he had to do was change the name to Trumpcare.

When we encounter numbers like this in the general population, it would be foolish to assume that they stabilized only recently at their present values. It is much more likely that we’re seeing a long-established equilibrium distribution into which the general population falls into 3 approximately equal thirds except for a smattering of extreme cases represented by the “hucksters” themselves. Perhaps this distribution became established in these ratios during the Industrial Revolution, or perhaps much earlier when people began concentrating in cities. Lao Tzu in Chapters 41 and 50 of the classical arrangement of his Tao Te Ching divided people into three main categories in the 6th Century BCE based on some combination of his life experience and the Imperial Archives at Loyang under his keeping and could have been perceiving the same equilibrium distribution in his own way. Perhaps it became established instead with the species itself before or during the development of tribal behaviors in prehistory. Perhaps it even predates the species itself and was common to now-extinct hominid species, and perhaps it is common even today to the few surviving primate species; the findings of Jane Goodall are not without hints of psychopathic tendencies in some of the wild chimpamzees she studied, for example, and their hierarchical social organization is undisputed. It would be much harder, however, to break chimps out into Categories 1, 2 and 3, without a common language and culture within which to assess experimental results.

All of these scenarios are possible but those that posit ancient origins for this distribution are the more plausible until a mechanism can be identified by which such a distribution could be suppressed by environmental selection pressures – conditions of adversity, for example, with which people in, say, Category 1 would not be able to cope because their individual and collective search for a “charismatic” (self-deluding) leader would pose too much of a distraction from rational perception and proactive adaptation. One could cite the silverback-dominated gorilla social structure on the one hand and their close proximity to extinction on the other. Inasmuch as silverbacks represent a much higher proportion of gorilla populations (one in each troupe) than 1-5%, it is easy to characterize them as otherwise normal gorillas more apt to beneficially govern and protect the troupe than to abuse them for individual benefit as might an aberration. To mathematically counterbalance the obvious short-term benefits to the individual of psychopathic behaviors, the fact alone of the mere 1-5% representation of extreme personality profiles within a given human population today stands on plain statistical grounds as evidence of the great magnitude of the destructive effects they have on their host societies.

We therefore end up with the following Equilibrium Distribution of NeuroAnanomical ArcheTypes:

• Psychopaths and NPDs (1-5%)
• Category 2 (33%) – Rational but occasionally discordant over small points.
  • Why isn’t this the ONLY archetype?
  • Did Neanderthal interbreeding sully the human genotype?
  • This is not meant to suggest that Neanderthals had a different equilibrium distribution than we observe in modern humans, only that the mixing of DNA could have produced a statistically significant proportion of anomalous neuroanatomical phenotypes.
  • Argument for: New Clues to How Neanderthal Genes Affect Your Health by Michelle Z. Donahue of National Geographic, 5 October 2017.
  • Argument against: Human-Neanderthal interbreeding would normally be expected to infuse beneficial heterozygous alleles producing an overall gene pool quality known as heterosis or hybrid vigor. This weakens the case for modern aberrations as a remnant of Neanderthal-Cromagnon interbreeding.

• Category 1 (33%) – Enamored of psychopaths & NPDs
  • addicted to the psychopathic bond;
  • thinking hierarchically rather than rationally;
  • always pining for the next psychopathic leader.
  • A strong case could be made that monotheism arises when the pining of Category 1 people goes unrequited for too long.     They get together and agree to worship a certain deity – an imaginary leader – who fills the void in their psyche that demands a leader who can convince them that he or she is all-powerful. They agree to “make” the deity all-powerful in the stead of this leader to satisfy this longing.*
    • 2017-10-03: Pat Robertson Blames Las Vegas Massacre On ‘Disrespect’ For Donald Trump, which he conflates with a disrespect for God and for authority in general. It is this attitude and the authoritarian dynamic it sets in motion to which documents such as the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights are most particularly addressed. The leading words of the First Amendment, inspired by Edward Gibbon’s legendary autopsy of Roman civilization, sets the tone of this anti-authoritarian theme by specifically separating church from state – a principle of which Thomas Jefferson said he preferred to be remembered as a champion more than for his better-known accomplishments such as authoring the Declaration of Independence and serving as America’s third President.
    • 2017-10-14: Michele Bachmann Offers Her Thoughts On Donald Trump Being A ‘Man Of Faith’, in which the former congresswoman asserts that “There’s nothing better than a man under authority” after being told by the evangelist Vice President Mike Pence that Donald Trump is now a “committed believer” of Jesus Christ and a “man of faith” who has “asked God for help and wisdom.” Meanwhile the narcissistic President for his own part, recapturing attention diverted to God by Mike Pence, was known to mock his VP’s faith by asking people who had just spoken with him “Did Mike make you pray?”

• Category 3 (33%) – Unable to perceive, unwilling to discriminate or possibly just indifferent to neuroanatomical archetypes.
  • Easily swayed to one side or the other, the members of this category decide by their very indecision the outcome of many elections.

How can we explain the establishment of such an equilibrium distribution? What, if any, evolutionary advantage might it confer upon the species as a whole?     Is it an evolutionary adaptation that imparts an advantage to the species, or is it the result of a self-organizing dynamic that benefits only individual psychopaths and NPD sufferers in the obvious ways that we can observe and understand, yet flies in the face of collective advantages and will eventually doom the species?

Working Hypothesis 1: This equilibrium distribution confers an evolutionary advantage to the species.

• The interplay between psychopaths – intentionally conflated herein with NPD sufferers as described above – and the 3 main categories of people whose responses to them fit into approximately equal thirds is an equilibrium distribution in which:
  • Category 2 people (those having characteristics normally associated with human qualities in art and literature) have stabilized at about 1/3 of a given population because:
    • Any less would result in social, cultural and technological stagnation;
    • Any more would result in stagnation by reason of too many conflicting opinions.
  • Category 1 people (those who instinctively align with psychopaths and other “hucksters”) have stabilized at about 1/3 of a given population because:
    • Any less would leave too much of a power vacuum to be filled by Category 2 people (see above).
    • Any more would so impede the social, cultural and technological progress of Category 2 people as to threaten the stability of the polity.
  • Category 3 people (those unable to recognize or unwilling to acknowledge these distinctions) have stabilized at about 1/3 of a given population because:
    • Any less would afford too small a pool of “swing votes” for Category 1 and Category 2 people to exploit during formal or informal democratic decision-making events.
    • Any more would afford so may “swing votes” as to destabilize the polity.
  • Psychopaths have stabilized at 1-5% because:
    • on the one hand, their behavior patterns always accrue a following among Category 1 people and because of the tremendous short to medium-term individual advantages they confer upon the psychopath personally, while
    • on the other hand, the periodic social upheavals this leads to (such as that created by Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s, whom Babiak and Hare have posthumously diagnosted with macho-style psychopathy) pose an ongoing threat to the survival of the species.
    • Thus, any more psychopaths than 1-5% have historically led to the destruction of the host society, and
    • Any fewer psychopaths, while a tremendous relief to the host society, is not stable because as noted above, any less would leave too much of a power vacuum to be filled by Category 2 people, who can’t agree on much of anything without periodic distraction by the social upheavals caused by psychopaths and those who align with them.

• In this scenario, the equilibrium distribution of mind categories confers upon the species:
  • stability in human social dynamics:
    • Psychopaths and their followers provide an ongoing menace and distraction, which selects against complacency, hubris and corruption among Category 2 people.
    • Psychopaths and their followers keep Category 2 people on their toes, preventing them from becoming mired down in minor differences of opinion.
  • periodic disruptions that foster social progress:
    • The episodic social upheavals created by psychopaths and the organizing dynamics of Category 1 people periodically clean the slate of human progress, allowing Category 2 people to start over in their progressive improvement of the human condition based on more current knowledge and environmental conditions.

Working Hypothesis 2: This equilibrium distribution results from a self-organizing dynamic that confers no evolutionary advantage to the species and as such is a solution to the Fermi Paradox.

• The haphazard courses of DNA recombination and natural selection in humans (and perhaps in all sentient beings) foster over time by means of a self-organizing dynamic the differentiation of human minds into the categories observed by Babiak and Hare.
  • Category 2 people (those having characteristics normally associated with human qualities in art and literature) have stabilized at about 1/3 of a given population because:
    • As a group they are responsible for the substance of society and its progressive standard of living and would foster much faster progress without distraction, yet
    • They have been displaced by Category 1 people to the extent of the ongoing influence and organizing power of psychopaths over Category 1 people.
    • They have been displaced by Category 3 people to the extent that the innate or calculated neutrality of Category 3 people on the subject of mind categories has shielded them from harm by psychopaths and Category 1 people while also making Category 3 people the perennial pawns of informal or institutionalized democratic processes – a position one might imagine would work decidedly to their advantage as a group inasmuch as both Category 2 and Category 1 people would be constantly vying for the alliegance of Category 3 people in their eternal political struggles against one another.
    • In other words, nature is still experimenting with hierarchical social structures in Homo Sapiens as a fallback to more rational and fault-tolerant ones because of the young age of the prefrontal cortex in relation to the full history of human evolution.
  • Category 1 people (those who instinctively align with psychopaths and other “hucksters”) have stabilized at about 1/3 of a given population because:
    • They have displaced Category 2 and Category 3 people by virtue of their innate compulsion to align themselves with psychopaths and thus self-organize into political groups that seek power for its own sake on behalf of the psychopaths.
    • By forcing conflict over questions whose answers most rational people would consider obvious, Category 1 people prevent Category 2 people from having the conversations they need to have in order to make meaningful progress.
    • In other words, as above, nature is still experimenting with hierarchical social structures in Homo Sapiens as a fallback to more rational and fault-tolerant ones because of the young age of the prefrontal cortex in relation to the full history of human evolution.
  • Category 3 people (those unable to recognize or unwilling to acknowledge these distinctions) have stabilized at about 1/3 of a given population because:
    • Be it accidentally or by intent, they have carved out a protective niche for themselves by keeping a low profile and by staying out of the inevitable frays between Category 1 and Category 2 people.
  • Psychopaths have stabilized at 1-5% because:
    • Their behavior patterns always accrue a following among Category 1 people and confer tremendous individual advantages upon the psychopath personally, while
    • on the other hand, the periodic social upheavals this leads to (such as that created by Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s, whom Babiak and Hare have posthumously diagnosted with macho-style psychopathy) often result in the destruction of their host societies and pose an ongoing threat to the survival of the species.
    • Thus, any more psychopaths than 1-5% have historically led to the destruction of the host society, and
    • Any fewer psychopaths, while a tremendous relief to the host society, is not stable because of the tremendous personal advantages that psychopathic behavior patterns confer upon the individual psychopath. DNA recombination is a random process that does not make moral judgments and cannot stop itself from endlessly repeating this ancient experiment because of the tremendous success it confers on the individual psychopath, and at least temporarily on those who fall in behind them.

In case you missed the link above under Category 1, the idea that minds in this category think hierarchically rather than rationally has gained scientific grounding since the 2016 US presidential election.

• Trump Voters Driven by Fear of Losing Status, Not Economic Anxiety, Study Finds

A person who thinks rationally must take a big, difficult and initially disorienting step back from the canvas in order to truly grasp what it means for a person to think hierarchically rather than rationally.  This difficulty arises for two reasons:

1. A person who thinks rationally doesn’t see the rational point in thinking hierarchically.
2. Even a person who thinks rationally can easily miss the fallacy of the preceding point.

The fallacy is called ignoratio elenchi (missing the point, also known as a red herring or irrelevant conclusion).  The point missed should be obvious: the notion of a person who thinks hierarchically rather than rationally.  The point made by the first statement above is not relevant to the point it misses because a person who has been stipulated to think hierarchically to the exclusion of rationality, it should be clear, does not think rationally.  A person constantly arguing rationally may develop over time the habit of always striving to persuade others of the validity of his or her point of view.  The real possibility that not everyone thinks rationally can easily throw such a person for a loop.

Speaking of aerial maneuvers (at the risk of appearing initially to veer off course), let me draw an analogy from the world of aviation.  In aviation we make a habit of studying the sequence of events leading up to known incidents and accidents so that we can avoid making the same mistakes ourselves.  We do this for a very simple reason: only those who survive an accident can learn from it.  One situation that once in a while strikes inexperienced pilots (John F. Kennedy Jr., for example, or so it has been plausibly hypothesized) is called the graveyard spiral.  A graveyard spiral begins when a pilot not adequately trained to rely solely on the instruments loses visual contact with ground references such as a horizon, city lights, the ocean surface, mountains, rivers or other landmarks.  To place this in present context, think of these visual references as facts to be organized and used in rational discourse.  When these references are lost, the overwhelming instinct is to grip the yoke and over-control the airplane in a desperate attempt to hold the present course and speed.  To make a somewhat longer story shorter, the lack of reliable visual references creates a feedback loop that puts the plane into a graveyard spiral, which ultimately drives it into the ground or ocean at top speed.  All the pilot needed to do to survive was look at the instruments and use what they indicated about the airplane’s speed, heading and attitude to climb out of the soup and into the sunlight or starlight.  Failing this, they could have just let go of the controls, set the throttle to full and let the plane fly itself out of the soup as most planes are designed to do.  It would be very simple for them to do this but the instincts as pointed out are universally overwhelming without the proper training and most of those who find themselves in this situation without adequate training never do.  They die not because they made the wrong choice but because they failed to change their view of the situation, step back from the canvas and perceive the proper course of action logically before pressing forward with routine thought and action.  In general terms, this is what most people do when confronted with the idea of hierarchical thought processes in others.  Irrational thinking doesn’t make sense but that does not make it implausible nor even necessarily improbable.  There is already an established body of scientific knowledge according to which – shall we call them vulnerable? thinkers exist in substantial proportion within any random sample of people and are not looking for rational arguments in the people they admire nor in the candidates they support.  They are looking instead for that euphoric, heady or perhaps giddy feeling they get when someone with just the wrong type of mental disorder reels them in using an emotional snare that clinical psychologists and professional criminal investigators call the psychopathic bond.

So let’s repeat here something that’s worth repeating:

• Not everyone thinks rationally.

Stop for a moment, step back from the canvas and try to appreciate the enormity of what that means for a democratic society and for the thought processes of the voters who drive its politics – not to mention the importance of voting whenever the opportunity presents itself.  If you vote only for perfect candidates then technically you can never vote.  Though the pickings may sometimes be slim, the act itself of voting should always be a no-brainer, not a judgment call.

Let us know what you think. As you can see, the dynamics are much the same under either working hypothesis about the equilibrium distribution of mind categories because we can readily observe these dynamics in action in world affairs and in the historical records. What differs between the two hypotheses is our interpretation of those dynamics and of how they have resulted in the equilibrium distribution we can observe and measure today. While the differences may seem subtle or unimportant from a scientific standpoint, our understanding of the dynamics is important from a social standpoint because under Hypothesis 1 we have no immediate motive to intervene while under Hypothesis 2 we should intervene so as to safeguard the survival and cultural growth of the species. The sooner this problem space can be made tractable by modern methods, the sooner we can formulate and polish workable and testable social models to find out which hypothesis converges more quickly and certainly to the observable equilibrium distribution while creating historical outcomes that most closely parallel the historical records.

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* I use “monotheism” in place of “religion” in this context because there is a much better suited hypothesis for the emergence of polytheism in developing cultures. As language develops, adjectives are invented to conveniently identify certain qualities of human conduct, experience and governance. Examples include activities described as just, concordant, discordant, fortunate, fateful, amusing, furious, graceful, etc.     In usage, people unavoidably begin to use such adjectives as nouns – justice, concord, discord, “dis” this, “dis” that, fortune, fate, muse, fury, grace, etc. To people always looking for explanations of why things happen the way they do but without access to sufficient accumulated explanatory knowledge, the next step is equally unavoidable – to personify these nouns. Justice, Concord, Dis, the Fortunes, the Fates, the Muses, the Furies, the Graces – all of these became gods and goddesses in the Greek and/or Roman pantheons – simply because of the human tendency to personify influences for which no abstract, mechanical or other reductionist explanation has yet been devised. Even today we still have Murphy’s Law, an urban myth among technology organizations which personifies the quandary about why things inevitably do go wrong simply because they can go wrong. This quandary is more aptly addressed as a manifestation of statistical inevitability but invoking this mythical lurker named Murphy – roughly analogous in usage to the Roman god Dīs Pater – is usually more fun, wry and tongue-in-cheek. In the ancient world, people without suitable explanatory culture and thus inclined may choose in similar fashion to invent imaginary Olympian bureaucrats and elect by consensus to place them in charge of these otherwise unexplainable phenomena. As the Greek and Roman examples illustrate, this works well enough when they do and provides a picturesque canvas upon which to paint these concepts when instructing the next generation.

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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.

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