Activist Post April 18 2013 (Thanks, A.L.)
Were people consciously aware something was about to change in a very bad way just before Lenin and Trotsky appeared on the scene in Petrograd in the spring of 1917? Did the German people realize accepting the ‘hope’ of Hitler would result in something so hideous and evil that tens of millions of people would die and a permanent bloodstain would appear on the history of Germany? What was life like months or years before the Armenians suffered genocide at the hands of the Turks, did they know that government imposed gun control was really disarmament before extermination? How about the Chinese before the tyrant Mao, or the North Koreans before the Kim Jung il family infestation? Did these people know what was coming, but didn’t know what they could do?
Most of written history is written on pages of blood. I think today, right now, is another one of those moments just before something very bad is about to happen. And, this time, we have the written historical records of bad news to learn potentially lifesaving, culture-rescuing information before we slip into another example of blood and carnage insanity.
Although Sigmund Freud introduced the world to the word psychopath in his book Psychopathology of Everyday Life, published in 1901, it wouldn’t be until forty years later that a true definition of psychopathology was developed to include the personality type of psychopath: a scientific understanding that sheds light on past and current events.
One of the first researchers to study and document the nature of personality types called psychopaths was Hervey Cleckley, MD, in his book The Mask of Sanity, published in 1941. In this classic work, Cleckley spent considerable time with prison inmates in Georgia; prisoners that “little agreement was found as to what was actually the matter with them.” And, according to Cleckley, “[the prisoners] continued, however, to constitute a most grave and a constant problem to the hospital and to the community.”