Dear Editor
Let’s start with a definition. “1. A person having an egocentric and antisocial personality marked by a lack of remorse for one’s action, an absence of empathy for others, and often criminal tendencies. 2. A person with antisocial personality disorder.” Quite broad, probably, to various degrees including some of the people you know. Dare I say maybe even yourself to a degree if you can admit it.
“Absence of empathy, lack of remorse” can be encouraged by conditioning in this day and age of a steady smorgasbord of violence and division served up and flooding our receptive senses in invasive media persuasion. Our minds, feelings, sight, hearing, our reflection on our fellowship with life and social commitment to each other can become foggy as they are sidelined in the controversial justification for power, greed and winning. The degradation of human value being the only other presented option. So, we can drift into a semi-conscious state in a foggy denial of our natural tendencies for passive, co-operative, collective survival. Our very emotions of sympathy, empathy and remorse suffer in the media onslaught of psychopathic, controlling activities.
The hard-core part of the definition is an apt description for many of the world's elite leaders in politics, industry and wealth. Leaders' selfish activities have deprived the world of free enterprising opportunities and created a tsunami of nomadic migrants, creating waves of victims from predictable wars, poverty and environmental upheavals. Upheavals that cannot be considered human suffering. The obvious pitiful victims, if one cares to look, are the homeless, the refugees or wandering migrants in desperate search of safety, food, health and a secure roof over their heads.
Conquerors' propaganda for their followers over history paints deceptive, negative, pictures of anyone not adhering to the conqueror’s strict definition of acceptability. It preaches about subversive characteristics and flaws in the identified foe. That they are dangerous to the regime and therefore deserve little or no consideration compared to the followers of the, supposedly, superior doctrine that was the basis of conducting the conquest in the first place.
Unconditional, tunnelled-visioned, adherence to a self-interest without remorse or empathy to the obvious expense of other forms of life that are negatively affected, loudly trumpets the full definition of psychopathic.
Lucrative industries in analysis, meditation or self-love have sprung up to try to reconnect us to the conscience-rewarding practicalities of a simple, natural, non-aggressive, fulfilling lifestyle. Life that considers the collective pursuit of happiness, health and natural teachings as having the ultimate importance in the peaceful sustainability of this Earth for those conditions of life that would be appreciated now and by our future generations.
We are not born psychopathic. We are born with potential as the old grandmothers who once kept the home fires burning throughout antiquity, in their collective reflections would search for, would identify and encourage because they knew that gratifying compassionate potential made for a more harmonious community.
Those grandmothers still exist in their wisdom. You could easily have one. Ask them.
Greg Chatterson
Abernethy
