Truth vs Falsehood (31 page)

Although seen as an injustice in today’s world, over the course of cultural and social evolution, it was merely a transitory phase. Thus, slavery is not intrinsically an ethnic issue although it always has had ethnic expressions. An unseen benefit of slavery in America’s history was that the lifespan of American slaves was twice that of the native Africans who remained in their original communities and were subject to tribal warfare.

Homeless street people are a conglomerate of the impaired from various strata and are well-studied sociologically. Their numbers greatly increased as a result of the closing of the state hospital system, which had provided a safe haven for many of the mentally disabled in a protective environment where they were accepted, understood, and provided with a home, sustenance, medical and dental care, as well as appropriate psychiatric services, psychologists, group therapists, social workers, and case workers. The old state hospital was an established subculture that calibrates as integrous at level 215. Its demise was considerably the consequence of the movies,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
(cal. 180) and
The Snake Pit
(cal. 150), which represent distortions that have had a major downside that was accelerated by the spurious notion that mental illness is a “myth” (cal. at 110 [Szasz, 1974]).

Behavioral

These disorders result from a variety of psychiatric, genetic, neurological, and psychological pathologies. These people tend to be obsessive and are characterized by chronic resistance to insight or the need for treatment. They are therefore psychopathic in quality. In treatment, people with these disorders are seen as recalcitrant, unmotivated, and adept at deception and “dissembling” (pretending normalcy). Although addressed by the criminal court system and incarceration, these disorders usually recur upon discharge from prison, e.g., the famous, grotesque Singleton case. There appears to be little motivation for recovery, except in those who choose faith-based 12-step programs and stay involved with them after discharge. Note that faith-based treatment programs are under political attack by the same group that supports the ‘rights’ of pedophiliacs. Interestingly, if the boys who are seduced and raped were girls, the predators would be guilty of statutory rape. (Who pays for the boys’ surgical repairs and AIDS treatment?)

Pedophilia is a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, accompanied by psychopathic trends. Those who are arrested for a supposedly single incident typically have previously molested hundreds of children and continue to do so after their release from prison. The adequate treatment of this condition is an area of civil rights discussion, which can be summarized as the difficulty of balancing the civil rights of the innocent victims against the perceived civil rights of the perpetrator. Similar discussions arose in past decades about persons who had active-infection tuberculosis and refused to respect the rights of others. The arguments involve the basic concepts of triage, which also come up in the military when the survival of one soldier is weighed against the life of an entire regiment, or whether a ship and its crew should be sacrificed to save one seaman who has fallen overboard.

Overt Violence

The killer instinct is in the most repressed, hidden recesses of the ego (Freud’s “Id”), which is the level of killing for the love of violence for its own sake, i.e., without psychological premises, as the act itself is its own source and fulfillment. Historically, it is seen in the ‘berserk’ activity of the Viking conquerors who slaughtered people needlessly; in the Japanese in the 1930s; and in the concentration camps of World War II. It is simultaneously the extreme of megalomania/egocentricity (malignant narcissism) unleashed by brainwashing, inflammatory political rhetoric, or religious zealotry (cal. at 80).

Arson has been included with behavioral disorders because it is also compulsive and repetitive. Whereas teenage classmate killers can be triggered by having been abused or bullied, the basic psychopathology is actually intrapsychic (Brooks, 2004) and not ‘caused’ by external factors. The intrinsic factor is narcissistic grandiosity and contempt for ‘inferiors’. The same psychopathology is seen in gangster rappers to whom normal people are “scumbags” or “whores.” In addition, there is another personal element contributed by violent video games that, by Pavlovian conditioning (i.e., kill—reward), results in desensitization and a trance-like automaticity in which the behavioral conditioning translates into acting out behaviors to “see what it’s like.”

It is significant that 65 percent of the population suffers from various degrees of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) as a consequence of television and movie violence. A memorable example was the post-
Psycho
-movie (cal. 80) syndrome. Multitudes of people were afraid to take showers alone in the home for years afterward, and everybody locked their bathroom doors. (PTSD is characterized by fearful flashbacks.)

Drugs and Alcohol

In the past, these were completely hopeless and untreatable conditions because they are not only psychological and behavioral, but physiological as well. From a medical viewpoint, true addiction is denoted by withdrawal symptoms. Psychological addiction, such as dependence on marijuana, lacks physical withdrawal symptoms. Opiates are addictive even to brain cell neurons that are raised in a laboratory culture medium. When the addictive substance is removed from the culture medium, the neuron shrivels and dies.

Psychologically, the addictions fall into two somewhat different classes—those of the sedatives, such as alcohol, heroin, barbiturates, and tranquilizers—and those that are excitatory, such as amphetamines and cocaine. The sedative disorders have only been recoverable since the advent of Alcoholic Anonymous, which is the offshoot of the transformative spiritual experience of its founder, Bill Wilson. The movement is now spread out across the world. (AA calibrates at 540.) The addictions are so severe that reason, which calibrates in the 400s, has insufficient power and is only offset by the energy field that calibrates at 540. Upon analysis, the addiction is to the artificial consciousness level that characterizes the ‘high’ that is experienced due to the drug’s effect of blocking out the lower levels of conscious experience. By following the 12-step program, people progressively relinquish the ego, which is replaced by spiritual energy that is maintained by following a spiritual program of proven value.

Severe Behavioral/Psychiatric Disorders

These involve psychotic levels of mental impairment, with transitory periods of quasi-normal behavior. In the borderline personality disorder, the hold on reality is tenuous, and psychological conflict triggers regression to more extreme and severe states of emotionality under even very slight provocation.

‘Possessed’ murderers are a class unto themselves. Many of them hear voices or God telling them to kill themselves or others and involve paranoid psychosis. The psychopathic disorder is relatively well-known as a lack of conscience that typifies the classic ‘con’ man and the sociopath of criminal subcultures. In psychiatry, these are technically classified as character disorders, or “dysocial,” if they are primarily a response to cultural conditions (e.g., street gangs).

Personality Disorders

According to the most recent National Institutes of Health survey, approximately 15 percent of U. S. adults (31 million) have diagnosable personality disorders as follows:

All of these psychological diagnoses are associated with considerable emotional, social, and occupational impairment and interpersonal conflicts, as well as deviant attitudes and belief systems (2002 National Epidemiological Study, NESARC Report, 2004).

Criminality

Present Inmate Population — Average Group Calibrations

The extremely low calibration levels indicate primitiveness and the predominance of animal instincts, thus representing a maturational arrest of the evolution of consciousness. Some become perceived in a pseudo folk-hero kind of distortion. In reality, they are, as the calibrated levels indicate, deadly killers, whether they are stylized as Machine Gun Kelley, Scarface, the Godfather, Babyface Nelson, Liberators, etc. In more ethical conservative cultures, the media would not glamorize such criminals nor would entertainers gain social status by associating with them. Media hype contributes to the attraction of the criminal lifestyle for impressionable ‘wannabe’ adolescents and gives a stamp of approval to serious deviancy.

Research on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy reveals three shots fired, two shots hit, one by Lee Harvey Oswald, and the other by an accomplice from the ‘grassy knoll’.

The psychopath lacks a conscience and thus is capable of fooling even a so-called lie detector that triggers the anxiety that would arise from deception in a normal person. With no conscience, there is no sense of guilt as moral, ethical, and spiritual values are absent. A century ago, the formal psychiatric diagnosis was “Moral Imbecility” (cal. 90).

The Nature of Criminality

It is unlikely that a cure can be found for any human ailment without accurate diagnosis and elucidation of the underlying pathology. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the world’s failure to comprehend the essential nature of criminality and its expression on the international level as war. The application of consciousness research elucidates basic elements that are not otherwise observable, including essential characteristics to which society habitually turns a blind eye.

Clarification first requires a differentiation of violations of the law from crime and criminality. A violation of the law is a legal and moral issue and includes a high proportion of relatively ‘normal’ citizens of any country. These violations are transitory and often due to immaturity, opportunity, carelessness, neglect, ignorance, lack of attention, lack of acculturation, transitory illness, physical and mental impairments, age, and distraction by other affairs or temporary conditions, such as marital strife, loss of a job, or simply the lack of education.

On a more serious level is the subject of true crime, which may be temporary or isolated and due to emotional pressure, intoxication, provocation, personality defect, lack of inhibition, instability, financial pressures, lapses of conscience, or something as simple as thrill seeking or “falling in with bad company.” In the case of “violations of the law” and “isolated crimes,” it is presumed that the perpetrator is of normal mental and emotional capacity and that fines and jail time will bring these violations or crimes to a halt.

Criminality, however, is of a different nature altogether and akin to a disease. Essentially, it is a chronic, serious mental disorder that has emotional, behavioral, and psychological characteristics. In addition, there is often a genetic impairment of adequate development of the frontal cortex of the brain (Arahart-Treichel, 2002). Criminality has a childhood onset characterized by the inability to delay gratification, the lack of capacity to foresee or fear consequences, the lack of concern for others, and a narcissistic core of egocentricity. Psychological research reveals that it is often diagnosable by age three.

Rather than the erroneously hypothesized low self-esteem, on the contrary, criminals have an exaggerated, inflated, grandiose, and egoistic sense of self-importance. There is a denial of personal responsibility, along with impulsivity and lack of conscience, guilt, or remorse. It is a pervasive lifestyle characterized by a narcissistic lack of concern for the rights of others or the incorporation of society’s values, such as morality or ethics. In Freudian terminology, there is a lack of superego development and a failure to introject and identify with an adequate authority figure.