The second component of the Dark Triad —
psychopathy — refers to a person’s lack of empathy toward others and a tendency to behave in a
callous and uncaring manner toward them. Here too, research by psychologists
supports the view that, compared to their “lower-class” counterparts,
“upper-class” individuals act with less compassion — and also fall short
on certain basic skills necessary for building positive connections with other
people.
In one experiment, for example, lower-income participants were
substantially more willing to take on extra work to help out a distressed
research partner than were the upper-income participants. In another study, lower-class participants demonstrated a
stronger compassion-related physiological response than did their upper-class
counterparts after watching a video of children suffering from cancer. In a
related study, the lower-class participants in a stressful interview process showed greater sensitivity
and compassion toward their competitors than did the upper-class interviewees.
And in an experiment with four-year-old children, those from less wealthy homes
behaved more altruistically than those from wealthier homes, donating more of
their prize tokens to children they were told were hospitalized.
In other
studies, individuals from a
lower social class were significantly better than upper-class participants at
judging the emotions being portrayed when they were presented with photos of
human faces. The researchers concluded that this enhanced ability may reflect
the reality that those who are less well-off must rely more on accurately
reading their social environment, because they depend more on interpersonal
relationships and collaborative efforts in their daily lives. On the other
hand, individuals with extensive material resources like today’s super-rich are
more likely to find close relationships, especially with people of lesser
means, quite unnecessary in their goal-oriented pursuits — and their
perspective-taking abilities may suffer as a result.
In the business world, a compassion deficit among members of the billionaire class isn’t very hard to see. For example, rarely do we hear the CEOs of today’s corporate behemoths acknowledge the critical role that they themselves play in blocking upward mobility and financial security for millions of working-class Americans. Most obviously, union-busting and related “right-to-work” efforts suppress the wages and benefits that could dramatically improve the lives of working families. More broadly, despite substantial increases in worker productivity over the past few decades, the super-rich have directed the rewards of economic growth into their own pockets rather than into their employees’ paychecks. Likewise, international trade agreements, written in secret with strong corporate representation, have prioritized protecting profits for huge companies over safeguarding wages, human rights, and the environment. Perhaps this callousness is captured especially well by Amazon’s billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos, who reportedly once described his negotiating approach as similar to “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.”
Narcissism
The third trait of the Dark Triad — narcissism
— refers to an individual’s sense of superiority over other people and
convictions about personal entitlement to special treatment. Once again, in a
diverse set of psychological studies, individuals of higher social class displayed greater
levels of narcissism and entitlement than did their less wealthy counterparts.
In one study, for example, participants who
rated themselves higher on a measure of socioeconomic status also scored higher
on a scale designed to measure psychological entitlement; a sample item from
that scale is “I honestly feel I’m just more deserving than others.” Another
study instead used a nonverbal measure of entitlement. Participants looked at
sets of circles of varying sizes and were asked to identify which size circle
best described how they saw themselves compared to others. Those of higher
social status picked larger circles as their self-descriptors than did those of
lower social status. In a third study that used a behavioral measure of
narcissism, upper-class participants were more likely than their lower-class
counterparts to make use of a wall mirror before having their photos taken. In
a survey study,
researchers in Germany directly assessed a sample of very high net-worth
individuals. They too found that this group scored higher on a measure of
narcissism compared to a separate sample of people of lesser economic means.
In the board room and beyond, the narcissistic super-rich are accustomed to being in charge and to having things their way — unlike those they sometimes refer to as “the little people.” Of course, they don’t necessarily feel fortunate in this regard because, by their own account, they fully deserve all the benefits and privileges bestowed upon them. The special favors they receive are particularly apparent when we consider the corrupting influence of wealth on “equal justice under law,” the hallowed words engraved atop the Supreme Court Building in our nation’s capital. Indeed, unequal treatment runs the gamut from the likelihood of arrest and prosecution to the leniency offered in sentencing. As one example of these unwritten norms, wealthy tax cheats have developed a broad repertoire of arguments — based on notions of personal superiority — for why they should receive a light sentence or no sentence at all after being caught, prosecuted, and found guilty (all rarities in their own right). Their farfetched justifications — which some judges nevertheless find persuasive — include all of the following: they’ve already suffered sufficient public humiliation for their misdeeds; although they cheated, they’ve also been generous in their charitable donations; the fines they’ve paid were sufficiently punitive; and their status as “job creators” makes it unwise to remove them from the community and put them behind bars.
Note from KMM: Pegean says, Narcissism? Narcissist? Where have i heard those words before? Somewhere in this blog….
Note from Kathie MM: Pegean says, “Much of the political campaigning is very dismaying. What i want to know is what the devil is under those hats? And what the heck is a tweet? Isn’t tweeting for the birds?
It was the most beautiful day in the history of the world, or some reasonable facsimile thereof. The sky was the tenderest blue. The sun warmed the skin and created gorgeous deep shadows. Trees kept their green leaves, with only a few branches turned a brilliant red. It was a wondrous day to be alive and to be on planet Earth.
There was a poignancy to all this beauty as the plaza at Boston’s Government Center filled with thousands of young people and their elders, everyone come to bear witness to the terrible threats facing our beloved planet and the urgent need to act now before we lose it all.
There were adorable children with their homemade signs. A contingent of folks protesting the fracked gas Compressor Station proposed for the South Shore to transport fracked gas to Canada. Folks from the Sunrise Movement helping to register new voters. Others stressing the need to protect our water, our birds, our biodiversity.
And this was only the beginning of only one of the 4,638 climate strike actions taking place today around the country and around the world. Will we act in time? The beauty of the day demanded it.
Note from KMM: Pegean says “Tho I am just a cat forsooth, I see the lies. I see the truth. I want this world of ours to thrive. Pease help me keep our earth alive.”
Talk to the totalitarian hand:While Julian Assange rots in prison for publishing journalism, clinical psychologist Dr Lissa Johnson explains some of the science behind how we got here, and also how we push back.
(IMAGE: Steve Rhodes, Flickr)
6 Aug 2019 – On Sunday June 28th 2019, Western democracy arrived at an historic crossroads. Moving forward from this day, citizens of Western nations will head down one of two paths.
The first path leads towards genuine democracies, wherein governments are accountable to the publics they govern, and publics have a right to know what leaders do in their name. It is a path along which a free press fosters an informed electorate, capable of making informed decisions at election time. Such principles are not only fundamental prerequisites for democracy, but essential protections against government abuses of all kinds.
The second path heads down totalitarian terrain, currently being blazed by the Trump administration, wherein governments decide who is free to speak and who is not, including who is a ‘journalist’ and who is not, by granting themselves the power to silence those who make them look bad. This pathway not only spells death to democracy and the public’s right to know, it is a recipe for state-sanctioned abuse.
As the Science of Human Rights Coalition warns in a document titled Human Rights 101, “Unless citizens want their governments to support human rights, government leaders rarely will do so… [Human rights principles] carry no weight unless the people know them, unless the people understand them, unless the people demand that they be lived.”
People kept in the dark about their government’s activities, however, are in no position to demand anything of their governments at all, as political philosopher Hannah Arendt reminds us. Down the pathway of governmental secrecy, citizens can kiss goodbye not only to respect for human rights, but to holding their leaders accountable over any issue in which the interests of the elites and the majority clash, whether fossil fuels, climate emergency, racial and economic inequality and injustice, endless wars, mass surveillance or any other public interest matter one might care to name.
Judicial Harassment, Public Mobbing and Holding Governments to Account
But getting back to Sunday, June 28th 2019; what happened that placed Western societies at such a crossroads, faced with a choice between democracy and autocracy, freedom and tyranny, knowing and not knowing, light and dark?
On that day, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, published letters to four ostensibly democratic states, detailing the ways in which those states have joined forces to mob, persecute, silence, harass, defame and psychologically torture a publisher of journalism.
Importantly, the states concerned have targeted the publisher in question not for causing any harm nor publishing misleading content. Quite the reverse. The publisher under attack stands out amongst his peers for his unblemished record of 100 per cent accuracy. Which makes that publisher Julian Assange.
WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange is being mobbed not for perpetrating harm or deception, but for making powerful leaders look bad. By publishing the truth about them.
Professor Nils Melzer, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture. (IMAGE: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe)
In democracies founded on informed electorates, such journalistic activity is a welcome development. In totalitarian states, however, where powerbrokers’ interests reign supreme, it is not.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines totalitarianism as “a politicalsystem in which those in power have complete control and do not allow people freedom to oppose them”. A political system in which a publisher languishes in Belmarsh Supermax for journalism would be an example.
In fact, Pulitzer Prize winning author Chris Hedges has long argued that Western societies are undergoing a gradual transformation from democracies to corporate totalitarian states, through a slow motion corporate coup d’etat, in which power is seized not by a demagogue but by “the faceless anonymity of the corporate state.” A Princeton study in 2014 lent empirical weight to that view.
The violently oppressive reaction of powerful state-corporate interests to the publishing activities of Julian Assange appears to illustrate Hedges’ point even more powerfully still.
As punishment for keeping the world’s population so accurately informed about the inner workings of power, Nils Melzer reports that Julian Assange is not only incarcerated in Belmarsh prison, but has suffered nearly a decade of “prolonged, involuntary and arbitrary detention… [along with]sustained and unrestrained public mobbing, intimidation and defamation… [ranging from]judicial harassment… [to]open threats and instigation of violence, [including]repeated calls for his assassination or murder.”
Professor of international law Nils Melzer has succinctly pointed out that none of this has anything to do with facing ‘Swedish Justice’. Melzer explains that the Swedish investigation surrounding Julian Assange has been, from the start, “a relentless campaign of judicial persecution… [involving]abuse of the judicial system in order to try to extradite [Julian Assange] to the US”.
Most recently, that judicial persecution has entailed locking Julian Assange in Belmarsh Prison for 50 weeks over the pseudo-legal concoction of defunct bail infringement. Even the Secretary General of the Swedish Bar Association has called the Swedish investigation “deplorable”, fearing that it has “damaged the reputation of the Swedish judicial system”.
Altogether, Professor Melzer’s letters, which constitute his final report, lay the responsibility for the near decade-long campaign of persecution and psychological torture of Julian Assange squarely at the feet of the UK, the US, Sweden and Ecuador. In his letters to those four states, Melzer notified each government of their culpability via “direct perpetration or, as the case may be, through instigation, consent, or acquiescence, as well as through failure to prevent” the various forms of persecution described.
In addition to detailing the states’ culpability, Professor Melzer requested a response from each state outlining their plans to investigate the allegations in his final report, and to protect Julian Assange from further harm, as well as ensuring redress for harms caused to date. In the event that no such measures were forthcoming, Professor Melzer asked the states to “explain how this is compatible with [their]human rights obligations”.
Posted on the website of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, alongside Nils Melzer’s letters, are the states’ replies. Before examining those replies and their implications for Western democracies, it is worth briefly revisiting how and why the persecution of Julian Assange began.
A Tender Eye That Brought Humanity to a Vicious War
In 2007, two Reuters employees set out on assignment in Baghdad. They were Namir Noor-Eldeen, a 22-year-old photo-journalist and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40, a father of four.
He was “one of the most beloved members of the Reuters staff, a cheerful, funny, smart young man who loved motorcycles” a colleague recalled. A former Reuters Chief Photographer in Iraq described Namir as an “editor’s dream… [whose]quick smile and energy never faded…it’s very, very sad to know I’ll never get one of his bear-hug greetings again.”
A screencap from the infamous ‘Collateral Murder’ video, which sparked the global hunt for WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.
While on assignment in Baghdad, after walking calmly across an open square, the two unarmed men found themselves showered with gunfire, raining down from a US Apache helicopter above. Namir’s body was “riddled with bullet holes”, killing him instantly. His wounded colleague, Saeed, attempted to drag himself on his stomach to safety, out of the helicopter’s sights.
As Saeed crawled away, two young children, aged five and ten, arrived on the scene in a van. Their father and his friends, all unarmed, stopped to rescue Saeed from the carnage, dragging him into their vehicle. The man’s children sat and watched as their father was ripped apart by gunfire, unleashed from the helicopter above, while being strafed by bullets themselves. As they cried and bled, surrounded by death, the children had no-one to cradle them through their pain, their father lying lifeless on the ground.
“Look at those dead bastards,” one of the soldiers gloated. “Nice.”
Three years later, in 2010, for posting a leaked video of the massacre, offering the world a human glimpse of the war on Iraq, as well as exposing tens of thousands of other civilian killings in Iraq and Afghanistan, Julian Assange was placed on an FBI manhunting target list.
A whole-of-government operation was launched against him, replete with a ‘war room’ under the direction of a Brigadier General, involving a “suite of government offices not far from the Pentagon”, where “120 intelligence analysts, FBI agents, and others” worked “24 hours a day, seven days a week”, targeting WikiLeaks.
In 2010 Barack Obama even urged foreign allies to file criminal charges against Julian Assange, just weeks before the legally “deplorable” Swedish investigation was instigated. As if that weren’t enough effort to silence a journalist, a grand jury was also convened, where Julian Assange now faces 17 counts under the Espionage Act and 175 years in US prison, for reporting on Namir and Saeed’s deaths, the deaths of their rescuers, and the trauma of the children who watched from a van.
For turning these carefully dehumanised foreigners into living breathing human beings, bringing humanity to a vicious war just as Namir had done, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning have been made to pay. As punishment, both have suffered years of detention and both have suffered torture, while those responsible for the killings have walked free.
Nils Melzer warns, “When you prosecute a whistleblower and a journalist for exposing war crimes and corruption, you have to be very careful, because if you don’t prosecute the war crimes, then clearly you don’t have equality before the law… then prosecution becomes persecution.”
A Line in the Sand
The murderous acts that WikiLeaks exposed in 2010 are the very kind of acts that the US-led persecution of Julian Assange has served to bolster and protect, along with a raft of other state-corporate crime and abuse such as torture, exploitation of vulnerable populations, for instance in Haiti and the Chagos Islands, CIA domestic spying tools, predatory pro-corporate deals such as the TPP, environmental abuses by oil and mining companies, and on and on and on.
Not only has the near-decade long campaign of mobbing, judicial harassment and vilification of Julian Assange served to distract from these state-corporate abuses and crimes, creating a climate of impunity for the perpetrators, it is now poised to create a precedent of legal impunity, via the Espionage Act charges.
As numerous leading legal minds and even establishment media have warned, the Espionage Act prosecution awaiting Julian Assange in the United States stands to criminalise journalism worldwide, green-lighting cross-border pursuit of publishers around the globe. The legal upshot will be that states can get away with murder simply by slapping Espionage charges on those who expose their crimes. Or, alternatively, by torturing them to death, whichever comes first in the Assange precedent.
Either way, Nils Melzer has expressed his grave concern that “US authorities intend to make an ‘example’ of [Julian Assange], in order to punish him personally, but also to deter others who may be tempted to engage in similar activities.” Similar activities being holding power to account by publishing truthful material in the public interest, a cherished bedrock of democracy and human rights.
WikiLeaks publisher, Julian Assange, being dragged from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in April 2019.
Chris Hedges writes that the persecution of Julian Assange represents not only a sharp downhill turn on the corporate totalitarian slide, but “the destruction of all protection of the rule of law”.
Speaking at a rally for Julian Assange in Sydney, Mike Head, of the World Socialist Website, adds that it is “not just about the past crimes [that Julian Assange]has exposed. It’s also a warning of the future crimes being prepared”.
In short, the implications of Nils Melzer’s letters to the US, the UK, Sweden and Ecuador could not be more serious nor more dire.
WikiLeaks’ editor Kristinn Hrafnsson says, “A line has been drawn in the sand and either you are going to support Julian and fight this retribution and those indictments, or you basically step back and the lights will go out. That’s how serious it is.”
The UN Rapporteur on Torture’s letters stand on that line in the sand, by demanding that the states involved publicly confirm where they intend to head from here: down the path of lights-out for rule of law and democratic freedoms, or down the path of democracy and human rights?
Note from KMM: In the next post, Dr. Johnson demonstrates the role of moral disengagement in the torture of Julian Assange, and the role of the corporate media in the process. Article originally published by Transcend Media Services, September 16, 2019.
