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Politics Resource Center |
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October 21, 2002 Something to Think About
by Gordon Francis Corbett
Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary tells us that a psychopathic personality is "an emotionally and behaviorally disordered state characterized by clear perception of reality except for the individual's social and moral obligations and often by the pursuit of immediate personal gratification in criminal acts, drug addiction, or sexual perversion." For we who study politics, and who follow its currents and tides, that definition should ring a few bells. Very often, in recent years, we have gazed at our television screens, or at our newspaper pages, and realized that a given politician's statement or action bespeaks a total lack of scruples. One theory runs that psychopaths feel no emotion under normal circumstances, and that to feel some kind of pleasure, they must create circumstances that you and I would deem very unusual. For some of these people, the easiest way to create them is to hurt someone. When I attended college, one of my roommates had tendencies that, I thought, seemed psychopathic. Years later, because this fellow had participated in politics, I asked a psychologist whether he thought that politics attracted psychopaths. He replied that it does, but that the full truth was worse: it tends to manufacture them. We already know that some politicians who ask for our trust will betray it without compunction. If that psychologist is right, we now know why a few do it so eagerly. We must take care. On the one hand, politics offers many things to many people. Some are honest and some are crooks. Few are psychopathic. When we watch a candidate evade issues better than Joe Nemeth dodged tacklers, we should remember that he is probably only a clever and voluble crook. On the other hand, we dare not forget that some clever and voluble crooks are psychopaths. We lack the means and the time to determine whether any politician is honest or crooked, let alone psychopathic. Therefore, we must do what our Founding Fathers advised. We must bind him down from mischief with the chains of a Constitution.
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