Standing with psychopaths
We are seeing Israel committing genocide but not held to account by many who profess concern for human rights. This is the dystopian world that supporting psychopaths creates.
The use of psychopath here is as a shorthand for the extremely selfish, heartless and manipulative people known as Dark Triad types, comprising the combinational psychological makeup of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism, which are the personality qualities that facilitate rapidly reaching and remaining in the echelons of power in our societies. There is no excuse that they can give for why they are that way, except that they have deliberately chosen to be that for a very long time. They know what they are doing creates harm, but they do it anyway as they do not care.
Israel's treatment of Palestinians is not unlike most settler-colonial projects, and it requires a high level of psychopathy to be able to attempt genocide, even supporting Hamas to justify the genocide to the Israeli population. All this is well-known history, but many are too willing to allow them to get away with it, but this is what happens when too many are dependent upon the spoils that psychopaths reap, as they have done when they decimated past lands. Such endemic selfishness allows psychopathy to flourish, so people suffer but most turn away so they can shield their conscience.
Even Bernie Sanders refused to demand cessation of the genocidal attacks by Israel, even though Netanyahu invoked a Biblical passage – Samual 15:3 – detailing a supposedly God-sanctioned genocide as a justification for attempting to bomb Gazan Palestinians out of existence. When people reveal who they truly are, by their tacitly standing with psychopaths, we need to believe that despite all their nice supportive words at other times, their fallback position is that they will stand by and watch us die if we don't matter to them. They have shown that they lack moral courage.
All of us have allowed ourselves to overlook what others have done that we would not want happening to us, even if we would not have suffered any violence from doing so. However, even if we are not the perfection we would like to be, we still need to stand up and protect those who, by our reticence, are subjected to suffering by those whom we are effectively supporting. We have to stand up and be counted, just because it is the right thing to do. We may lose the support of some, but if they are alright with the suffering, we could not trust them anyway, even if they were supposed friends.
When we see those we thought were looking after us blatantly refuse to condemn those who cause suffering, by whatever rationalisation they use, we cannot trust them. We have to rethink whether they are really the ones who we should be supporting in positions of power, no matter what they have done that seemed beneficial in the past. We now know what we know, and that cannot be ignored. Our sentimentality does not prevent suffering, and what we are seeing in Israel is suffering, and it has been openly going on for over 75 years. Try to change their minds, but if that fails, withdraw support.
Practically every Western politician, including Zelensky, supports it continuing, many with arms, so we really have to make hard choices about who we vote for. Sort of supporting what we want done is not good enough. We must demand that who we vote for will stand against suffering and won't kowtow to selfish vested interests that continue to create and maintain suffering for us and others. We cannot hide behind our selfishness and hope that we can avoid the suffering, as those who create suffering always seek ways of creating more, and their supporters are just as expendable as everyone else.
Unfortunately, too many other psychopathic dictators in other countries are using the conflict for their own political ends. These are not friends here. Psychopaths do scapegoat other psychopaths, mainly to take the heat off themselves. The world political stage is filled with many pretending to work for peace, but are busy working to sabotage any chance of it so they can extract the most benefit for themselves. Creating suffering and then using that to hijack those who have empathy for the sufferers into supporting themselves instead is the perverted modis operandi of a psychopath.
Covid-19 showed us who was willing to let us die to maintain their wealth and opportunities to exploit us. We have collectively ignored the many coups that have been fostered in our name to support those same exploitative people and their systems. We ignored the bombing of Gaza in 2021, but we have now seen what our world will become if we let these psychopaths continue on their rampage of destruction. We must stand up for all of humanity to rightfully be respected, otherwise we allow ourselves to be divided and the majority to be oppressed while a few receive temporary privilege.
Disconnect from the thinking that most must lose for us to thrive, because we are not thriving. For many of us, the stress treadmills of modern life are not providing a balanced life, but we are only here because we continue to believe that dark triads are somehow important to us. They spin a con to keep us divided so that we do not combine to prevent them ruling over our lives, but we can withdraw from the mental contract we have signed up to as it is up to our own free will. We don't have to buy into the false hope peddled to us. We don't have to stand with psychopaths to survive and thrive.
Israel is just one example of what happens when the interests of one group are moulded into a state apparatus that visibly enforces their privilege to the genocide of the disadvantaged. There are many, and our own societies are similar, but the repression is not as visible. Fortunately, we are seeing and recognising how many of our nations are guided by the desires of heartless elites who only see us as a means to their ends. The Israeli government does not care about its people, and neither do most. They are forced to pretend they do because we expect them to, but we can expect much more.
Psychopaths have power because we allow them to, and most of that comes about because they persuaded us through pervasive advertising and threats of state violence. They laid out supposed paths for us to move up the social ladder, knowing full well that most of us don't have the ruthlessness required to succeed on their terms. Their processes are an illusion because they don't scale, as we cannot all have so much privilege, if only because we would have forced the planet to cook us long ago. People who hold onto huge wealth while humanity starves are not worthy of keeping their wealth.
We don't have to stand with psychopaths, but instead stand for the humanity of all. We don't have to eradicate psychopaths, but we cannot let them ever have so much power over others. That does mean we have to find ways of having our large societies but not have them controlled by so few. The issue is to balance governance with freedom to exercise our free will, and that involves finding how we can use our collective free will to govern our societies. There is work to do to build robust systems, and it must be done without the undue influence of those who want to do us harm as they will want to sabotage whatever we build. There is more to our lives than being exploited, and that means for all of us.
We are at the crossroads where we can either continue to pretend that others don't count, and suffer the consequences, or stand together in support of humanity, to the exclusion of no one. The time of hiding is coming to an end, as despite efforts to hide their nefariousness under layers of advertising and propaganda, those who are the enemies of humanity are revealing themselves for who they are. Their layers of influence are unravelling before our eyes, and we can now take the opportunity to disconnect from the dystopian illusion they want us to believe in.
We can choose safety, dignity and prosperity for all, and in that we will get all that for ourselves. We don't need to think that another's gain is our loss, but that it is our gain as well. Every person who gets to be creative and express their joy for living adds to our joy. We share this world and we can share the joy it can give. We need to see this from a world-wide perspective, as those who create suffering work on the world stage. Nationalism is part of their divide-and-conquer selfishness-promotion strategy, and we need to take a pass on that.