Is psychopathy needed to reach the top in America?

Eric Zuesse

Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court is just another tip being displayed of America’s top-level-psychopathy iceberg.

On September 16th, the Washington Post headlined “California professor, writer of confidential Brett Kavanaugh letter, speaks out about her allegation of sexual assault”, and the news-story opened:

Earlier this summer, Christine Blasey Ford wrote a confidential letter to a senior Democratic lawmaker alleging that Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her more than three decades ago, when they were high school students in suburban Maryland. Since Wednesday, she has watched as that bare-bones version of her story became public without her name or her consent, drawing a blanket denial from Kavanaugh and roiling a nomination that just days ago seemed all but certain to succeed.

Now, Ford has decided that if her story is going to be told, she wants to be the one to tell it.

Speaking publicly for the first time, Ford said that one summer in the early 1980s, Kavanaugh and a friend — both “stumbling drunk,” Ford alleges — corralled her into a bedroom during a gathering of teenagers at a house in Montgomery County.

While his friend watched, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth.

“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” said Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist in northern California. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”

Despite the headline’s usage of the lesser phrase “sexual assault” to refer to the alleged incident, the article itself makes clear that Mrs. Ford says that she had viewed it at the time as an attempted “rape,” and the article reports that there is extensive record in the files on the case, indicating that it traumatized her, and that for many years afterwards, it harmed her ability to trust any man, and adversely affected her career.

For example:

Ford said she told no one of the incident in any detail until 2012, when she was in couples therapy with her husband. The therapist’s notes, portions of which were provided by Ford and reviewed by The Washington Post, do not mention Kavanaugh’s name but say she reported that she was attacked by students “from an elitist boys’ school” who went on to become “highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington.” …

Notes from an individual therapy session the following year, when she was being treated for what she says have been long-term effects of the incident, show Ford described a “rape attempt” in her late teens.

In an interview, her husband, Russell Ford, said that in the 2012 sessions, she recounted being trapped in a room with two drunken boys, one of whom pinned her to a bed, molested her and prevented her from screaming. He said he recalled that his wife used Kavanaugh’s last name and voiced concern that Kavanaugh — then a federal judge — might one day be nominated to the Supreme Court.

So: two boys at “an elitist boys’ school” (Georgetown Prep) had traumatized this girl; and, when she escaped, she told no one:

She said she recalled thinking: “I’m not ever telling anyone this. This is nothing, it didn’t happen, and he didn’t rape me.”

Years later, after going through psychotherapy, Ford said, she came to understand the incident as a trauma with lasting impact on her life.

“I think it derailed me substantially for four or five years,” she said. She said she struggled academically and socially and was unable to have healthy relationships with men. …

She married her husband in 2002. Early in their relationship, she told him she had been a victim of physical abuse, he said. A decade later, he learned the details of that alleged abuse when the therapist asked her to tell the story, he said.

The superbly written article in the Washington Post, by Emma Brown, portrays a prep-school culture that has been widely reported elsewhere, in which a lifetime of high society produces privileged people who treat the poor or the weak as objects to be used and thrown away, as waste, not regarded as being centers of importance equal to themselves, but instead their mere property, to use in any way they please. It encourages the growing wealth-disparity in this country, because it devalues the poor as the property of the rich. It devalues women as property of men. As the dominant culture, it encourages oppression and victimization. Victims are viewed as if they were victimizers’ property. This news-story exemplifies that culture — the culture that reigns in America. Supremacist culture.

According to the records from 2012 and from 2002, the other boy, the one who had helped Kavanaugh in the attempted rape, Mark Judge, has also had a nationally prominent career:

Judge is a filmmaker and author who has written for the Daily Caller, The Weekly Standard and The Washington Post. He chronicled his recovery from alcoholism in “Wasted: Tales of a Gen-X Drunk,” which described his own blackout drinking and a culture of partying among students at his high school, renamed in the book “Loyola Prep.” Kavanaugh is not mentioned in the book, but a passage about partying at the beach one summer makes glancing reference to a “Bart O’Kavanaugh,” who “puked in someone’s car the other night” and “passed out on his way back from a party.”

There have been so many men who have been nationally prominent in America who have later been outed as attempted rapists, if not as rapists, if not as serial rapists, but who were, like Kavanaugh and like Judge, publicly endorsed by others of their class, and only extremely few of them become incarcerated in our prisons, which are instead overflowing with the lower classes, who get imprisoned for lesser crimes. Anyone who would say of the United States, that it’s a country of “Equal Justice Under Law” — a real democracy — is either a liar, an ignoramus, or a fool, because it’s so clearly false.

This is not to say that other countries are better. This problem, of top-class psychopathy, seems to be the norm everywhere. However, not every nation calls itself a ‘democracy’, but America does; and so America’s example of pervasive rot at the top, is especially important. As regards the social-sciences evidence concerning whether the U.S. actually is a democracy, that evidence is now extensive, and it is consistent: America is a dictatorship. The Washington Post would never report that fact, however, because it’s at the top and it is owned by and serves the purposes of America’s richest person, Jeff Bezos; it’s one of America’s leading news-media; but the scientific evidence is clear and consistent on this: America is a dictatorship, by the richest.

Regarding the other social-sciences evidence on psychopathy, that also is rather clear and consistent, and it shows that in American society, the more psychopathic one is, the more successful one is likely to be, and psychopathy is more normal at the top of American society than it is at the bottom. Furthermore, the luckier a person is, the worse he or she becomes. So: contrary to the social-science theoreticians who have hypothesized that the causal relationship between psychopathy and success is uni-directional, it’s actually bi-directional and therefore actually a vicious circle, self-reinforcing, which leaves at the top of society a class of extremely rich extremely evil individuals. I call them “the aristocracy.”

Competency is almost a pre-requisite to extreme success, but so too is psychopathy. One without the other won’t get a person to anywhere near the top, except as freak occurrences, which might exist.

Though this WP news-report contains more than mere hints of that broader social-science reality, that broader reality itself is prohibited from being published in America’s major news-media (including the aristocracy’s think-tanks and foundations), because it implicates themselves. So you read about it here instead (in the last three links above). It’s the news behind the news. Unfortunately, not many people are interested in that. The public’s unconcern, with what causes the phenomena they learn of in the news, assists that vicious circle to continue. Perhaps nothing can change it. Anyway, it’s the reality. And this news-report in WP well reports a typical example of it.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.