Sociopathic Society

A People's Sociology of the United States

Charles Derber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317251729
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Charles Derber introduces and vividly explains the idea of a sociopathic society and why the idea has become necessary to understand today s world.Sociopathic society is rooted in governments and economies, not psychiatry. The book offers a new sociology of societies organized around antisocial values, which ultimately lead to societal and planetary self-destruction. Most of the sociopathic behaviors are perfectly legal and are perpetrated by governments, financial institutions, and corporate capitalism.Focusing on the United States, Derber connects the dots of Wall Street meltdown, guns and murder, uninhibited greed, the 1% and the 99%, a new crisis of unemployable surplus people, Hurricane Sandy and global warming, cheating scandals, and more including the war on democracy itself.Although the book brings together a breathtaking set of stories of a system run wild, it also offers hope, showing pathways for confronting and avoiding the many ways a society can commit sociocide. FEATURES OF THE BOOK"

PART I

Sociopathic Society

1

An Anatomy of Sociopathic Society

After a New England Nor’easter, a friend, a celebrated intellectual, told me about the aftermath of the storm in his community. He lives in an affluent suburb north of Boston and the power had gone out in the whole town, a frequent event. He told me that there had been a proposal to lay the electric lines underground to prevent these inconveniences. But the community majority rejected the small tax hike involved, indicating that they preferred to get their own generators or go without power rather than pay for their neighbor’s power. What a “sociopathic society,” he exclaimed.

A bolt of electricity shot through me. “Sociopathic society.” The words seem a contradiction in terms, but they go to the heart of my thinking and writing over recent decades.

Only a few weeks after my conversation with my friend, the December 12, 2012, massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, shocked the nation. A young killer murdered six adults and twenty children between the ages of five and ten, with a semi-automatic Bushmaster rifle, using high-capacity magazines designed for war. It was just the latest of a series of horrific mass killings in schools (the nightmares of Virginia Tech and Columbine High School), movie theaters (the shooter who killed twelve and injured fifty-eight in a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado), shopping malls (two gunned down in a mall in Clackamas, Oregon, in the same week as Newtown), and places of worship (the bigoted gun assault on the Sikh temple in suburban Milwaukee, Wisconsin). In the three weeks following Newtown, two thousand more gun deaths were reported and the US gun manufacturers sold thousands of new semi-automatic weapons and high-capacity clips, as guns flew off Walmart shelves and frenzied buyers emptied out gun stores. The US Congress did nothing.

Americans might not recognize the term “sociopathic society,” but they were staring it in the face. They were afraid, rightly, for their children and themselves.

Our current crisis involves far more than military-style gun massacres and an armed, angry population. It reflects an economy, politics, and culture that are a fertile foundation for a sociopathic society.

My argument in this book is that the United States, with a long history of sociopathic institutions and practices, is now evolving toward a full-blown sociopathic society. We still have a chance to change course. But our society is increasingly structured to turn people and institutions toward sociopathic behavior that harms other individuals and entire societies, including our own. The United States is beginning to socially unravel, haunted now by the specter of war with weapons of mass destruction, economic meltdowns, and uncontrolled climate change.

Is the United States—the world’s most powerful nation—already a sociopathic society?

Many think so. A 2009 report from the public interest group the Public Record argued bluntly, “The economic elite have launched an attack on the US public and society is unraveling at an increased rate.”¹ The first section of the report, buttressed by statistics on inequality, poverty, joblessness, hunger, homelessness, crime, uninsured health care, low quality schools, high student debt, crumbling infrastructure, and the like, is called “Societal Breakdown.” The theme crops up everywhere. Conservatives such as David Brooks and liberals such as Robert Reich write about the unraveling of the US social fabric. Brooks writes that

In the half-century between 1962 and the present … the social fabric has deteriorated. Social trust has plummeted. Society has segmented…. The American social fabric is now so depleted that even if manufacturing jobs miraculously came back we still would not be producing enough stable, skilled workers to fill them. It’s not enough just to have economic growth policies. The country also needs to rebuild orderly communities.²

Reich’s book Beyond Outrage argues that offshoring and outsourcing are the real big business in America, leaving Americans without jobs or wages that keep society alive.³ Arianna Huffington in Third World America⁴ writes that the United States is degrading into the misery and chaos of the world’s impoverished failed states. Nobel economist Paul Krugman simply proclaims, “Banana Republic, here we come.”

All of this suggests that the United States is crossing a threshold toward a sociopathic society.

***

A sociopathic society breeds routinized, institutionalized pervasive and fierce sociopathy that chips away at its own foundations.

Sociopathy is antisocial behavior by an individual or institution that typically advances self-interest, such as making money, while harming others and attacking the fabric of society. In a sociopathic society, sociopathic behavior, both by individuals and institutions, is the outcome of dominant social values and power arrangements. A sociopathic society, paradoxically, creates dominant social norms that are antisocial—that is, norms that assault the well-being and survival of much of the population and undermine the social bonds and sustainable environmental conditions essential to any form of social order. This reign of antisocial social norms is crucial to my definition of sociopathic society. Like an autoimmune disease, such antisocial societal programming leads to behavior that weakens and can, in the most extreme scenario, kill the society itself.

You might ask whether “antisocial social norms” are possible, and whether a sociopathic society can actually exist. A good and crucial question.

One might want to argue on relativistic grounds that whatever a society prescribes is “social” and thus social norms cannot be antisocial within a particular society. By that argument genocide in Nazi Germany is “social” because it is defined as good by that society. My argument against that is twofold. First, while what is “social” has inherent subjective qualities defined by a society, there is an objective limit having to do with harm, death, and sustainability, as well as with universal human rights. Social norms or practices that undermine the society or environment of the society endorsing them—or wiping out their population—are, in my argument, antisocial, because they harm and kill not only many people but, in many cases, even the society endorsing the practice. I would add that genocide violates one of a core set of universal human rights that are embraced in UN covenants signed by almost all societies today, and that social relativism of the “social” reaches its limits when it violates these universal rights.

Second, prevailing social norms are largely constructed by elites and do not necessarily represent either the values or interests of the larger population. The Jews and gypsies and Slavs killed by the Nazis in Germany did not see this socially prescribed practice as “social” or in the social interest—and they rejected the genocidal norms. Elites are in the business of constructing definitions of what is “social” that reflect their own interests, not those of the general population. When I talk about antisocial social norms, I am taking the view that elites’ definition of the “social” may be enforced by the law and the elite itself but should be called antisocial if it hurts the general populace. What is “social” for the elites is often “antisocial” for the general population. If one accepts that elites tend to shape and enforce social norms and that the general public—especially when hurt by those norms—has a different idea or interest in what is defined as “social,” then the idea of antisocial social norms becomes easier to understand.

Sociopathic behavior is not always self-interested in the strict sense of the term. A suicide bomber who kills innocents is engaging in sociopathy even though he is killing himself for what he regards as a higher purpose. Soldiers in unjust wars who kill thousands on the battlefield also practice such “altruistic” sociopathy, even though the soldier may perceive himself as making the ultimate sacrifice.

Sociopathic behavior, whether practiced by individuals or institutions, can be physically violent, but more often it is not. An example from the corporate world is when the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, AIG, and other bailed-out Wall Street giants in the Great Recession increased their own compensation after driving their banks and much of America into a ditch. One defining mark of a sociopathic society is that most sociopathic behavior is perfectly legal and conforms to social norms and expectations. As a codification of antisocial norms, the law itself becomes sociopathic in the most full-blown sociopathic societies.

Sociopathic people often have narcissistic, competitive, and antisocial personalities, but, in contrast to what psychological theories tell us, this can be the outcome of the hardwiring of sociopathic society. Sociopathic personalities may be embracing the reigning societal values rather than rejecting them. In a sociopathic society, narcissists and antisocial individuals—one might think of O. J. Simpson, Donald Trump, Lance Armstrong, or Bernie Madoff—can appear entirely normal, since they often are pillars of the community and know how to succeed under existing rules of the game. Many of them are political leaders, CEOs of major corporations, high military officers, or high-ranking church clergy.

Sociopathic institutions rule the landscape of sociopathic society. These can be economic (corporations such as Enron), political (a self-serving Congress of millionaires), or military (a detention center such as Guantanamo), but they all advance institutional self-interest by harming others and undermining society. Sociopathic institutions do this because the design of the institutions is destructive and unsustainable; they essentially dig their own graves and can kill off the larger host society.

The witty documentary film and best-selling book The Corporation, written by law professor Joel Bakan, makes the point tellingly by imagining the corporation as a patient on the couch being diagnosed by a psychiatrist.⁵ The psychiatrist goes through a checklist of symptoms evidenced by his patient—insatiable greed, self-preoccupation, power lust, willingness to harm others without remorse, pursuit of profit at the expense of communities and the whole society. The behavior is sociopathic, but it is embedded in the corporate law and power arrangements that make up the “corporate patient” on the couch. The patient is programmed such that it cannot act differently. Bakan writes that the corporation is “pathological”; it is

singularly self-interested and unable to feel genuine concern for others in any context … deliberately programmed, indeed legally compelled, to externalize costs without regard for the harm it may cause to people, communities, and the natural environment. Every cost it can unload onto someone else is a benefit to itself, a direct route to profit.⁶

The problem here is not a rotten apple—such as Enron or its corporate accountant, Arthur Anderson—but a rotten barrel. The media portrayed Enron as a rotten apple spoiled by bad leaders. Bakan’s point, though, is that Enron was acting as the corporate system requires, much like the other leading financial firms, as became evident in the Wall Street meltdown of 2008. Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, J. P. Morgan Chase, Countrywide, Washington Mutual, and AIG—all programmed to maximize short-term profit—carried out unethical, destructive behavior, whether predatory loans or issuing toxic financial instruments that they secretly bet would fail. The problem is not a few bad leaders but a corporate DNA placing profits over people and chartered by a larger sociopathic economic system (the barrel).

***

The idea of sociopathic society requires some distinctions and nuances. First, we need to distinguish the types of sociopathic behavior. Physical violence, such as murder or rape, is one terrible form that individuals commit (and institutions such as sweatshops or the military often sanction), particularly prevalent in the United States, with violent crime rates, especially with guns, far higher here than in other advanced societies. But there are more prevalent nonviolent sociopathic personal acts, part of the fabric of daily life in the United States, almost all perfectly legal, such as cheating on tests or on your spouse or lying to friends or, as we shall see, simply monopolizing the conversation and never listening.

In a sociopathic society, sociopathic individual behavior is so pervasive and socially accepted that perpetrators don’t think of themselves as doing anything wrong. When cyclist champion Lance Armstrong first acknowledged in a 2013 interview with Oprah Winfrey that he had been doping—using performance-enhancing drugs—and lying about it for years, she asked him if he believed he was cheating.

Oprah: Did you feel you were cheating?

Armstrong: No. At the time, no. I viewed it as a level playing field. I looked up the definition of “cheat.” The definition of cheat is to gain an advantage over a rival or foe. I didn’t do that. I viewed it as a level playing field.⁷

Armstrong is rationalizing but not entirely wrong, arguing that it was the rules of the game and the larger culture that drove his behavior:

Armstrong: I did not invent the culture [of cheating] but I did not try to stop it.⁸

What was that sociopathic culture all about in his view?

Armstrong: It was this ruthless desire to win. Win at all costs, truly.⁹

Armstrong is describing accurately the sociopathic world of sports that has taken over in all the major athletic fields, as sports became big business. “Win at all costs” is a mantra beyond sports, of the entire corporate world. But Armstrong’s self-justifying goes too far. In fact, he implied he was doing an honorable thing by sustaining his charitable foundations and sponsors despite his competitive disadvantage caused by his cancer. He called himself “humanitarian.”

In a sociopathic society such as the United States, the most important sociopaths are powerful institutions such as giant corporations and the military. Economic sociopathic acts by large corporations are a crucially important form, illustrated not just by the Wall Street banks that crashed the economy but by Walmart, Disney, and other huge retail enterprises that source caps, T-shirts, skirts, and pants from super-exploitative and dangerous sweatshops around the world, including Bangladeshi factories that spectacularly collapsed in May 2013 and killed instantly over 1,300 workers. Or consider that virtually all Fortune 500 firms use accounting tricks that transfer most of their taxable income or cash holdings to foreign subsidiaries, the current favored corporate tax strategy, or offshore havens such as the Cayman Islands, to avoid taxes. There is political sociopathic behavior by governments and political parties, such as suppressing the vote or buying elections, and passing tax laws or subsidies that unfairly benefit politically connected corporations. And there is military sociopathy by the Pentagon and CIA, such as fighting Mid-East wars for oil in the name of democracy, or detaining suspects without habeas corpus or other legal rights, and torturing captured prisoners. In all these cases, the sociopathic behavior is typically legal and normatively valued, reflecting the objectives of profit maximization or military control that elites have programmed and much of the population has come to accept as legitimate.¹⁰

We now see sociopathy on a grand scale, both legal and il...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword by Noam Chomsky
• Preface
• PART I Sociopathic Society
• PART II Sociopathy and the New American Dream
• PART III Sociopathic Capitalism
• PART IV War and Sociopathic Foreign Policy
• PART V Climate Change as Sociopathy
• PART VI Fascism: The Ultimate Sociopathic Society?
• PART VII Alternatives and Activism
• Notes
• Credits