Psychopath-Driven Ine******y Is Making Our Society Sick
Wealth Ine******y
by Thom Hartmann | June 5, 2021 - 6:47am
Ine******y is literally k*****g us, both individually and as a society, and its two main drivers are monopolistic business behavior, and greedy CEOs and politicians. Both are a result of psychopaths taking over politics and business.
Decades ago, when I was doing international relief work, I visited a school for Aboriginal children way up northeast near Cairns, Australia in a little town called Lockhart River.
One of the teachers there, a white guy who'd grown up in Sydney and was my guide around the place, told me the story of an "amazing, life-changing" revelation he had the first week he was teaching at the school.
He was supervising after-school activities, and a large group of the kids formed into two teams and were playing soccer. The game's score went back-and-forth, back-and-forth with the two teams, fairly evenly matched, taking turns with who was ahead.
"They played for about an hour," he told me, as I recall. "And then they stopped. They said the game was over, and I couldn't figure out why."
The revelation for him came when they told him that, by their rules, the game was over when both teams had achieved the same number of points. When things were even.
This is how things were across much of humanity before the psychopaths took over.
Humans are wired for cooperation and empathy; these are among the highest values in societies the predate the Agricultural Revolution and in cultures today who still remember their roots in such ancient societies.
The advent of agriculture 7,000 years ago, however, produced seasonal bursts of food from harvests, often followed by long, hungry winters. This gave some people—the psychopaths—the ability to (as Daniel Quinn wrote so eloquently in his book Ishmael) "lock up the food." It was the original sin of greed, the forbidden fruit of the garden, something that's considered a crime or a mental illness in Older Cultures.
Those greedy few who controlled the food had the power of life and death over everybody else, eventually coming to be known as kings, robber barons and CEOs as humanity moved into the modern era.
Although humans are wired for empathy, collaboration and cooperation, there is a small percentage—most estimates run between .5% to 2%—of people among us who are psychopaths; these people rarely feel empathy and view cooperation as a sign of weakness rather than strength.
And, tragically, these psychopaths have mostly come to dominate the worlds of politics and business.
Most stunning, multiple studies show that as many as 20% of American CEOs are psychopaths, accounting for a brutal business culture and a winner-takes-all economy.
Depending on party affiliation, those numbers probably hold true in politics, as well; if psychopaths are over-represented in the Republican Party (Trump is the latest and most visible example), that would account for their brutal style of politics.
If psychopaths are under-represented in the Democratic Party, that would account for why Dems constantly want to compromise and work things out. Such behavior is, after all, the baseline norm for humans who are not psychopaths.
While psychopathic CEOs and politicians battling it out in their own realms may seem remote for the average person, the reality is their psychopathic, greedy behavior accounts for much of the massive ine******y we see in the world today.
And that psychopath/greed-driven ine******y is making us, as a society, sick.
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett of the E******y Trust in the UK have spent years documenting how the more unequal a society is the greater will be their rates of crime, mental illness, violence, homicide, suicide, drug addiction, obesity, unwanted pregnancy and a whole host of other medical, psychological and social ills.
On the other hand, the more egalitarian or equal a society is the less frequently these societal ills present themselves. They've shown this is true from country to country, and even did an extraordinary break-down state-by-state in the US showing the exact same effect.
And now we're finding that just playing games that are based on psychopathic behavior like trying to wipe out your competitors and take all their assets triggers similar reactions in people to societal ine******y itself. And some games are worse than others at this.
And the game that's the worst is Monopoly.
Back in 1903 Lizzy Magie, a British feminist and socialist, patented the board game that we know today as Monopoly. She invented the game as a warning about the dangers of unrestrained, unregulated capitalism, although over the past hundred years that has been almost completely forgotten.
As Chris Melore reports, "Monopoly stands out as the most debated—and most forbidden—board game of all time. In a recent survey of 2,000 U.S. residents, 20 percent say that their game nights with friends or family members are often or always disrupted by competitive or unfriendly behavior."
Perhaps the "good" news is that "only 11% of respondents said they witnessed a physical fight break out," but Monopoly—a game that is based on the prime psychopathic value of taking everything for yourself and thus increasing ine******y—seems to trigger the worst in us.
Nobody's calling for a ban on the game of Monopoly, but as the Aboriginal kids taught their "westernized" teacher—and the extraordinary scientific research of the E******y Trust clearly shows—we will all be better off if we can reform our political and business cultures to be less greed-driven (psychopath-friendly) and more collaborative and fair (humanity-friendly).
Those psychopath-proofing reforms range from tackling actual business monopolies, to getting corporate and billionaire money out of politics, to strengthening our democracy by establishing an absolute right for all Americans to easily and comfortably v**e like in other democracies (see: HR1).
It's a big lift, but if we all work together we can still make it happen.
This article was first published on The Hartmann Report.
Milosia2 wrote:
Psychopath-Driven Ine******y Is Making Our Society Sick
Wealth Ine******y
by Thom Hartmann | June 5, 2021 - 6:47am
Ine******y is literally k*****g us, both individually and as a society, and its two main drivers are monopolistic business behavior, and greedy CEOs and politicians. Both are a result of psychopaths taking over politics and business.
Decades ago, when I was doing international relief work, I visited a school for Aboriginal children way up northeast near Cairns, Australia in a little town called Lockhart River.
One of the teachers there, a white guy who'd grown up in Sydney and was my guide around the place, told me the story of an "amazing, life-changing" revelation he had the first week he was teaching at the school.
He was supervising after-school activities, and a large group of the kids formed into two teams and were playing soccer. The game's score went back-and-forth, back-and-forth with the two teams, fairly evenly matched, taking turns with who was ahead.
"They played for about an hour," he told me, as I recall. "And then they stopped. They said the game was over, and I couldn't figure out why."
The revelation for him came when they told him that, by their rules, the game was over when both teams had achieved the same number of points. When things were even.
This is how things were across much of humanity before the psychopaths took over.
Humans are wired for cooperation and empathy; these are among the highest values in societies the predate the Agricultural Revolution and in cultures today who still remember their roots in such ancient societies.
The advent of agriculture 7,000 years ago, however, produced seasonal bursts of food from harvests, often followed by long, hungry winters. This gave some people—the psychopaths—the ability to (as Daniel Quinn wrote so eloquently in his book Ishmael) "lock up the food." It was the original sin of greed, the forbidden fruit of the garden, something that's considered a crime or a mental illness in Older Cultures.
Those greedy few who controlled the food had the power of life and death over everybody else, eventually coming to be known as kings, robber barons and CEOs as humanity moved into the modern era.
Although humans are wired for empathy, collaboration and cooperation, there is a small percentage—most estimates run between .5% to 2%—of people among us who are psychopaths; these people rarely feel empathy and view cooperation as a sign of weakness rather than strength.
And, tragically, these psychopaths have mostly come to dominate the worlds of politics and business.
Most stunning, multiple studies show that as many as 20% of American CEOs are psychopaths, accounting for a brutal business culture and a winner-takes-all economy.
Depending on party affiliation, those numbers probably hold true in politics, as well; if psychopaths are over-represented in the Republican Party (Trump is the latest and most visible example), that would account for their brutal style of politics.
If psychopaths are under-represented in the Democratic Party, that would account for why Dems constantly want to compromise and work things out. Such behavior is, after all, the baseline norm for humans who are not psychopaths.
While psychopathic CEOs and politicians battling it out in their own realms may seem remote for the average person, the reality is their psychopathic, greedy behavior accounts for much of the massive ine******y we see in the world today.
And that psychopath/greed-driven ine******y is making us, as a society, sick.
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett of the E******y Trust in the UK have spent years documenting how the more unequal a society is the greater will be their rates of crime, mental illness, violence, homicide, suicide, drug addiction, obesity, unwanted pregnancy and a whole host of other medical, psychological and social ills.
On the other hand, the more egalitarian or equal a society is the less frequently these societal ills present themselves. They've shown this is true from country to country, and even did an extraordinary break-down state-by-state in the US showing the exact same effect.
And now we're finding that just playing games that are based on psychopathic behavior like trying to wipe out your competitors and take all their assets triggers similar reactions in people to societal ine******y itself. And some games are worse than others at this.
And the game that's the worst is Monopoly.
Back in 1903 Lizzy Magie, a British feminist and socialist, patented the board game that we know today as Monopoly. She invented the game as a warning about the dangers of unrestrained, unregulated capitalism, although over the past hundred years that has been almost completely forgotten.
As Chris Melore reports, "Monopoly stands out as the most debated—and most forbidden—board game of all time. In a recent survey of 2,000 U.S. residents, 20 percent say that their game nights with friends or family members are often or always disrupted by competitive or unfriendly behavior."
Perhaps the "good" news is that "only 11% of respondents said they witnessed a physical fight break out," but Monopoly—a game that is based on the prime psychopathic value of taking everything for yourself and thus increasing ine******y—seems to trigger the worst in us.
Nobody's calling for a ban on the game of Monopoly, but as the Aboriginal kids taught their "westernized" teacher—and the extraordinary scientific research of the E******y Trust clearly shows—we will all be better off if we can reform our political and business cultures to be less greed-driven (psychopath-friendly) and more collaborative and fair (humanity-friendly).
Those psychopath-proofing reforms range from tackling actual business monopolies, to getting corporate and billionaire money out of politics, to strengthening our democracy by establishing an absolute right for all Americans to easily and comfortably v**e like in other democracies (see: HR1).
It's a big lift, but if we all work together we can still make it happen.
This article was first published on The Hartmann Report.
Psychopath-Driven Ine******y Is Making Our Society... (
show quote)
🎯
The only thing I would add to is the political comment about democrats being more likely to want to compromise and work things out. This may or may not be true of the general public, I think our nature more than politics determines how well we get along with others.
Politicians however, on both sides of the aisle, tend to be the psychotic, greedy ones when it comes to cooperation and getting things done. By and large a useless lot, and I don't just mean America's politicians. It's human nature and it's everywhere.
In the time before colonization The Sinixt who I am descended from appointed a Salmon Chief. It was his job to ensure the survival of all tribal members. In the spring and summer he sent people out to check on the root and berry crops they gathered and he would assign gatherers to the areas that were ripe and ready for harvest. The wild game would be harvested and prepared for storage and the whole tribe was involved. In the winter after the solstice the Salmon chief visited every household and examined the provisions that they had stored . Those with more than they needed were compelled to share with those who did not have enough. This way all of the tribal members would survive the winter.
Milosia2 wrote:
Psychopath-Driven Ine******y Is Making Our Society Sick
Wealth Ine******y
by Thom Hartmann | June 5, 2021 - 6:47am
Ine******y is literally k*****g us, both individually and as a society, and its two main drivers are monopolistic business behavior, and greedy CEOs and politicians. Both are a result of psychopaths taking over politics and business.
Decades ago, when I was doing international relief work, I visited a school for Aboriginal children way up northeast near Cairns, Australia in a little town called Lockhart River.
One of the teachers there, a white guy who'd grown up in Sydney and was my guide around the place, told me the story of an "amazing, life-changing" revelation he had the first week he was teaching at the school.
He was supervising after-school activities, and a large group of the kids formed into two teams and were playing soccer. The game's score went back-and-forth, back-and-forth with the two teams, fairly evenly matched, taking turns with who was ahead.
"They played for about an hour," he told me, as I recall. "And then they stopped. They said the game was over, and I couldn't figure out why."
The revelation for him came when they told him that, by their rules, the game was over when both teams had achieved the same number of points. When things were even.
This is how things were across much of humanity before the psychopaths took over.
Humans are wired for cooperation and empathy; these are among the highest values in societies the predate the Agricultural Revolution and in cultures today who still remember their roots in such ancient societies.
The advent of agriculture 7,000 years ago, however, produced seasonal bursts of food from harvests, often followed by long, hungry winters. This gave some people—the psychopaths—the ability to (as Daniel Quinn wrote so eloquently in his book Ishmael) "lock up the food." It was the original sin of greed, the forbidden fruit of the garden, something that's considered a crime or a mental illness in Older Cultures.
Those greedy few who controlled the food had the power of life and death over everybody else, eventually coming to be known as kings, robber barons and CEOs as humanity moved into the modern era.
Although humans are wired for empathy, collaboration and cooperation, there is a small percentage—most estimates run between .5% to 2%—of people among us who are psychopaths; these people rarely feel empathy and view cooperation as a sign of weakness rather than strength.
And, tragically, these psychopaths have mostly come to dominate the worlds of politics and business.
Most stunning, multiple studies show that as many as 20% of American CEOs are psychopaths, accounting for a brutal business culture and a winner-takes-all economy.
Depending on party affiliation, those numbers probably hold true in politics, as well; if psychopaths are over-represented in the Republican Party (Trump is the latest and most visible example), that would account for their brutal style of politics.
If psychopaths are under-represented in the Democratic Party, that would account for why Dems constantly want to compromise and work things out. Such behavior is, after all, the baseline norm for humans who are not psychopaths.
While psychopathic CEOs and politicians battling it out in their own realms may seem remote for the average person, the reality is their psychopathic, greedy behavior accounts for much of the massive ine******y we see in the world today.
And that psychopath/greed-driven ine******y is making us, as a society, sick.
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett of the E******y Trust in the UK have spent years documenting how the more unequal a society is the greater will be their rates of crime, mental illness, violence, homicide, suicide, drug addiction, obesity, unwanted pregnancy and a whole host of other medical, psychological and social ills.
On the other hand, the more egalitarian or equal a society is the less frequently these societal ills present themselves. They've shown this is true from country to country, and even did an extraordinary break-down state-by-state in the US showing the exact same effect.
And now we're finding that just playing games that are based on psychopathic behavior like trying to wipe out your competitors and take all their assets triggers similar reactions in people to societal ine******y itself. And some games are worse than others at this.
And the game that's the worst is Monopoly.
Back in 1903 Lizzy Magie, a British feminist and socialist, patented the board game that we know today as Monopoly. She invented the game as a warning about the dangers of unrestrained, unregulated capitalism, although over the past hundred years that has been almost completely forgotten.
As Chris Melore reports, "Monopoly stands out as the most debated—and most forbidden—board game of all time. In a recent survey of 2,000 U.S. residents, 20 percent say that their game nights with friends or family members are often or always disrupted by competitive or unfriendly behavior."
Perhaps the "good" news is that "only 11% of respondents said they witnessed a physical fight break out," but Monopoly—a game that is based on the prime psychopathic value of taking everything for yourself and thus increasing ine******y—seems to trigger the worst in us.
Nobody's calling for a ban on the game of Monopoly, but as the Aboriginal kids taught their "westernized" teacher—and the extraordinary scientific research of the E******y Trust clearly shows—we will all be better off if we can reform our political and business cultures to be less greed-driven (psychopath-friendly) and more collaborative and fair (humanity-friendly).
Those psychopath-proofing reforms range from tackling actual business monopolies, to getting corporate and billionaire money out of politics, to strengthening our democracy by establishing an absolute right for all Americans to easily and comfortably v**e like in other democracies (see: HR1).
It's a big lift, but if we all work together we can still make it happen.
This article was first published on The Hartmann Report.
Psychopath-Driven Ine******y Is Making Our Society... (
show quote)
This is a fascinating look at the subject, psychcopathy, which applies to people in general. Where the author loses all credibility is naming ONE PERSON in a party as a psychopath, and blaming ONE PERSON for a "brutal style of politics" of an entire political party.Then, in a sickeningly partisan, sugar-coated ,syrupy fluff-job says "If psychopaths are under-represented in the democratic party, that would account for why dems constantly want to compromise and work things out". Did you even read this before you posted it ?
Executive orders. Attacks on America's First and Second Amendment rights.Censorship and propaganda. "Constantly want to compromise and work things out" ? And now "Dr" f***i appears to be responsible for a whole heap of lies and deceit. Deaths. Economies wiped out. Families broken. ALL under the democrat's f**g. THIS is PSYCHOPATHY. The offenses go on and on...
Psychopath ? Let's take a look at Joseph Goebbels, hitler's "Minister of Propaganda". [ hitler and his henchmen perfectly illustrate the term "psychopath, but I'm sure you'd argue THAT]. Goebbels famously stated "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it". This article is a SHINING example of such lies, and REAL Americans see right through it.
Milosia2 wrote:
Psychopath-Driven Ine******y Is Making Our Society Sick
Wealth Ine******y
by Thom Hartmann | June 5, 2021 - 6:47am
Ine******y is literally k*****g us, both individually and as a society, and its two main drivers are monopolistic business behavior, and greedy CEOs and politicians. Both are a result of psychopaths taking over politics and business.
Decades ago, when I was doing international relief work, I visited a school for Aboriginal children way up northeast near Cairns, Australia in a little town called Lockhart River.
One of the teachers there, a white guy who'd grown up in Sydney and was my guide around the place, told me the story of an "amazing, life-changing" revelation he had the first week he was teaching at the school.
He was supervising after-school activities, and a large group of the kids formed into two teams and were playing soccer. The game's score went back-and-forth, back-and-forth with the two teams, fairly evenly matched, taking turns with who was ahead.
"They played for about an hour," he told me, as I recall. "And then they stopped. They said the game was over, and I couldn't figure out why."
The revelation for him came when they told him that, by their rules, the game was over when both teams had achieved the same number of points. When things were even.
This is how things were across much of humanity before the psychopaths took over.
Humans are wired for cooperation and empathy; these are among the highest values in societies the predate the Agricultural Revolution and in cultures today who still remember their roots in such ancient societies.
The advent of agriculture 7,000 years ago, however, produced seasonal bursts of food from harvests, often followed by long, hungry winters. This gave some people—the psychopaths—the ability to (as Daniel Quinn wrote so eloquently in his book Ishmael) "lock up the food." It was the original sin of greed, the forbidden fruit of the garden, something that's considered a crime or a mental illness in Older Cultures.
Those greedy few who controlled the food had the power of life and death over everybody else, eventually coming to be known as kings, robber barons and CEOs as humanity moved into the modern era.
Although humans are wired for empathy, collaboration and cooperation, there is a small percentage—most estimates run between .5% to 2%—of people among us who are psychopaths; these people rarely feel empathy and view cooperation as a sign of weakness rather than strength.
And, tragically, these psychopaths have mostly come to dominate the worlds of politics and business.
Most stunning, multiple studies show that as many as 20% of American CEOs are psychopaths, accounting for a brutal business culture and a winner-takes-all economy.
Depending on party affiliation, those numbers probably hold true in politics, as well; if psychopaths are over-represented in the Republican Party (Trump is the latest and most visible example), that would account for their brutal style of politics.
If psychopaths are under-represented in the Democratic Party, that would account for why Dems constantly want to compromise and work things out. Such behavior is, after all, the baseline norm for humans who are not psychopaths.
While psychopathic CEOs and politicians battling it out in their own realms may seem remote for the average person, the reality is their psychopathic, greedy behavior accounts for much of the massive ine******y we see in the world today.
And that psychopath/greed-driven ine******y is making us, as a society, sick.
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett of the E******y Trust in the UK have spent years documenting how the more unequal a society is the greater will be their rates of crime, mental illness, violence, homicide, suicide, drug addiction, obesity, unwanted pregnancy and a whole host of other medical, psychological and social ills.
On the other hand, the more egalitarian or equal a society is the less frequently these societal ills present themselves. They've shown this is true from country to country, and even did an extraordinary break-down state-by-state in the US showing the exact same effect.
And now we're finding that just playing games that are based on psychopathic behavior like trying to wipe out your competitors and take all their assets triggers similar reactions in people to societal ine******y itself. And some games are worse than others at this.
And the game that's the worst is Monopoly.
Back in 1903 Lizzy Magie, a British feminist and socialist, patented the board game that we know today as Monopoly. She invented the game as a warning about the dangers of unrestrained, unregulated capitalism, although over the past hundred years that has been almost completely forgotten.
As Chris Melore reports, "Monopoly stands out as the most debated—and most forbidden—board game of all time. In a recent survey of 2,000 U.S. residents, 20 percent say that their game nights with friends or family members are often or always disrupted by competitive or unfriendly behavior."
Perhaps the "good" news is that "only 11% of respondents said they witnessed a physical fight break out," but Monopoly—a game that is based on the prime psychopathic value of taking everything for yourself and thus increasing ine******y—seems to trigger the worst in us.
Nobody's calling for a ban on the game of Monopoly, but as the Aboriginal kids taught their "westernized" teacher—and the extraordinary scientific research of the E******y Trust clearly shows—we will all be better off if we can reform our political and business cultures to be less greed-driven (psychopath-friendly) and more collaborative and fair (humanity-friendly).
Those psychopath-proofing reforms range from tackling actual business monopolies, to getting corporate and billionaire money out of politics, to strengthening our democracy by establishing an absolute right for all Americans to easily and comfortably v**e like in other democracies (see: HR1).
It's a big lift, but if we all work together we can still make it happen.
This article was first published on The Hartmann Report.
Psychopath-Driven Ine******y Is Making Our Society... (
show quote)
Why are people so enamored with sports? There are winners and losers. Why are people so caught up with what party is at the top in our political entities? There are winners and losers. How has the stock exchanges become a symbol of/dream of wealth? There are winners and losers.
Everyone wants to be a winner, be on the winning team......................but for there to be winners......................there must be losers. In an effort NOT to be a loser, or appear to be a loser, humans will go to extreme lengths, up to and including deadly violence. Those kids had it right, or rather, hadn't yet been contaminated with modern bull s**t - when there are no losers, everyone is a winner and walks away happy.
Milosia2 wrote:
Psychopath-Driven Ine******y Is Making Our Society Sick
Wealth Ine******y
by Thom Hartmann | June 5, 2021 - 6:47am
Ine******y is literally k*****g us, both individually and as a society, and its two main drivers are monopolistic business behavior, and greedy CEOs and politicians. Both are a result of psychopaths taking over politics and business.
Decades ago, when I was doing international relief work, I visited a school for Aboriginal children way up northeast near Cairns, Australia in a little town called Lockhart River.
One of the teachers there, a white guy who'd grown up in Sydney and was my guide around the place, told me the story of an "amazing, life-changing" revelation he had the first week he was teaching at the school.
He was supervising after-school activities, and a large group of the kids formed into two teams and were playing soccer. The game's score went back-and-forth, back-and-forth with the two teams, fairly evenly matched, taking turns with who was ahead.
"They played for about an hour," he told me, as I recall. "And then they stopped. They said the game was over, and I couldn't figure out why."
The revelation for him came when they told him that, by their rules, the game was over when both teams had achieved the same number of points. When things were even.
This is how things were across much of humanity before the psychopaths took over.
Humans are wired for cooperation and empathy; these are among the highest values in societies the predate the Agricultural Revolution and in cultures today who still remember their roots in such ancient societies.
The advent of agriculture 7,000 years ago, however, produced seasonal bursts of food from harvests, often followed by long, hungry winters. This gave some people—the psychopaths—the ability to (as Daniel Quinn wrote so eloquently in his book Ishmael) "lock up the food." It was the original sin of greed, the forbidden fruit of the garden, something that's considered a crime or a mental illness in Older Cultures.
Those greedy few who controlled the food had the power of life and death over everybody else, eventually coming to be known as kings, robber barons and CEOs as humanity moved into the modern era.
Although humans are wired for empathy, collaboration and cooperation, there is a small percentage—most estimates run between .5% to 2%—of people among us who are psychopaths; these people rarely feel empathy and view cooperation as a sign of weakness rather than strength.
And, tragically, these psychopaths have mostly come to dominate the worlds of politics and business.
Most stunning, multiple studies show that as many as 20% of American CEOs are psychopaths, accounting for a brutal business culture and a winner-takes-all economy.
Depending on party affiliation, those numbers probably hold true in politics, as well; if psychopaths are over-represented in the Republican Party (Trump is the latest and most visible example), that would account for their brutal style of politics.
If psychopaths are under-represented in the Democratic Party, that would account for why Dems constantly want to compromise and work things out. Such behavior is, after all, the baseline norm for humans who are not psychopaths.
While psychopathic CEOs and politicians battling it out in their own realms may seem remote for the average person, the reality is their psychopathic, greedy behavior accounts for much of the massive ine******y we see in the world today.
And that psychopath/greed-driven ine******y is making us, as a society, sick.
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett of the E******y Trust in the UK have spent years documenting how the more unequal a society is the greater will be their rates of crime, mental illness, violence, homicide, suicide, drug addiction, obesity, unwanted pregnancy and a whole host of other medical, psychological and social ills.
On the other hand, the more egalitarian or equal a society is the less frequently these societal ills present themselves. They've shown this is true from country to country, and even did an extraordinary break-down state-by-state in the US showing the exact same effect.
And now we're finding that just playing games that are based on psychopathic behavior like trying to wipe out your competitors and take all their assets triggers similar reactions in people to societal ine******y itself. And some games are worse than others at this.
And the game that's the worst is Monopoly.
Back in 1903 Lizzy Magie, a British feminist and socialist, patented the board game that we know today as Monopoly. She invented the game as a warning about the dangers of unrestrained, unregulated capitalism, although over the past hundred years that has been almost completely forgotten.
As Chris Melore reports, "Monopoly stands out as the most debated—and most forbidden—board game of all time. In a recent survey of 2,000 U.S. residents, 20 percent say that their game nights with friends or family members are often or always disrupted by competitive or unfriendly behavior."
Perhaps the "good" news is that "only 11% of respondents said they witnessed a physical fight break out," but Monopoly—a game that is based on the prime psychopathic value of taking everything for yourself and thus increasing ine******y—seems to trigger the worst in us.
Nobody's calling for a ban on the game of Monopoly, but as the Aboriginal kids taught their "westernized" teacher—and the extraordinary scientific research of the E******y Trust clearly shows—we will all be better off if we can reform our political and business cultures to be less greed-driven (psychopath-friendly) and more collaborative and fair (humanity-friendly).
Those psychopath-proofing reforms range from tackling actual business monopolies, to getting corporate and billionaire money out of politics, to strengthening our democracy by establishing an absolute right for all Americans to easily and comfortably v**e like in other democracies (see: HR1).
It's a big lift, but if we all work together we can still make it happen.
This article was first published on The Hartmann Report.
Psychopath-Driven Ine******y Is Making Our Society... (
show quote)
This concept works well in a small group of related people who share their lives , housing and food with their siblings, cousins and close friends. If the group is 50 or fewer related people their relationships work to their advantage. However in a larger group the concept of never competing with others because you might hurt someones feelings or that someone would be better at doing certain things than his associate is is counterproduct to the welfare of the entire group..
lpnmajor wrote:
Why are people so enamored with sports? There are winners and losers. Why are people so caught up with what party is at the top in our political entities? There are winners and losers. How has the stock exchanges become a symbol of/dream of wealth? There are winners and losers.
Everyone wants to be a winner, be on the winning team......................but for there to be winners......................there must be losers. In an effort NOT to be a loser, or appear to be a loser, humans will go to extreme lengths, up to and including deadly violence. Those kids had it right, or rather, hadn't yet been contaminated with modern bull s**t - when there are no losers, everyone is a winner and walks away happy.
Why are people so enamored with sports? There are ... (
show quote)
🎯
I don't allow the loser feeling to take hold of me when my team isn't winning. I just tune it out and do something else. That makes me a fair weather fan. But life is too short and precious to suffer needlessly.
lpnmajor wrote:
Why are people so enamored with sports? There are winners and losers. Why are people so caught up with what party is at the top in our political entities? There are winners and losers. How has the stock exchanges become a symbol of/dream of wealth? There are winners and losers.
Everyone wants to be a winner, be on the winning team......................but for there to be winners......................there must be losers. In an effort NOT to be a loser, or appear to be a loser, humans will go to extreme lengths, up to and including deadly violence. Those kids had it right, or rather, hadn't yet been contaminated with modern bull s**t - when there are no losers, everyone is a winner and walks away happy.
Why are people so enamored with sports? There are ... (
show quote)
Mostly correct, but the ones on the top don’t want to lose...ever.
Even when they know they should.
Nope !
Petulant children.
Driven by greed .
It’s the new capitalism. New , never lose , free market capitalism.
billy a wrote:
This is a fascinating look at the subject, psychcopathy, which applies to people in general. Where the author loses all credibility is naming ONE PERSON in a party as a psychopath, and blaming ONE PERSON for a "brutal style of politics" of an entire political party.Then, in a sickeningly partisan, sugar-coated ,syrupy fluff-job says "If psychopaths are under-represented in the democratic party, that would account for why dems constantly want to compromise and work things out". Did you even read this before you posted it ?
Executive orders. Attacks on America's First and Second Amendment rights.Censorship and propaganda. "Constantly want to compromise and work things out" ? And now "Dr" f***i appears to be responsible for a whole heap of lies and deceit. Deaths. Economies wiped out. Families broken. ALL under the democrat's f**g. THIS is PSYCHOPATHY. The offenses go on and on...
Psychopath ? Let's take a look at Joseph Goebbels, hitler's "Minister of Propaganda". [ hitler and his henchmen perfectly illustrate the term "psychopath, but I'm sure you'd argue THAT]. Goebbels famously stated "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it". This article is a SHINING example of such lies, and REAL Americans see right through it.
This is a fascinating look at the subject, psychco... (
show quote)
We blame trump because he was a psychopath. His psychopathy rendered his minions useless and unable to say no to him.
Milosia2 wrote:
We blame trump because he was a psychopath. His psychopathy rendered his minions useless and unable to say no to him.
You have the Soviet plan of fraud down to a T. If you do not know what I am talking about , as your handlers have not explained it to you, take the time to read "Disinformation by Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa and Prof Ronald J Rychlak and learn something about the fraud you, probably unwittingly, have been a party to.
SWMBO and NPP
Milosia2 wrote:
Psychopath-Driven Ine******y Is Making Our Society Sick
Wealth Ine******y
by Thom Hartmann | June 5, 2021 - 6:47am
Ine******y is literally k*****g us, both individually and as a society, and its two main drivers are monopolistic business behavior, and greedy CEOs and politicians. Both are a result of psychopaths taking over politics and business.
Decades ago, when I was doing international relief work, I visited a school for Aboriginal children way up northeast near Cairns, Australia in a little town called Lockhart River.
One of the teachers there, a white guy who'd grown up in Sydney and was my guide around the place, told me the story of an "amazing, life-changing" revelation he had the first week he was teaching at the school.
He was supervising after-school activities, and a large group of the kids formed into two teams and were playing soccer. The game's score went back-and-forth, back-and-forth with the two teams, fairly evenly matched, taking turns with who was ahead.
"They played for about an hour," he told me, as I recall. "And then they stopped. They said the game was over, and I couldn't figure out why."
The revelation for him came when they told him that, by their rules, the game was over when both teams had achieved the same number of points. When things were even.
This is how things were across much of humanity before the psychopaths took over.
Humans are wired for cooperation and empathy; these are among the highest values in societies the predate the Agricultural Revolution and in cultures today who still remember their roots in such ancient societies.
The advent of agriculture 7,000 years ago, however, produced seasonal bursts of food from harvests, often followed by long, hungry winters. This gave some people—the psychopaths—the ability to (as Daniel Quinn wrote so eloquently in his book Ishmael) "lock up the food." It was the original sin of greed, the forbidden fruit of the garden, something that's considered a crime or a mental illness in Older Cultures.
Those greedy few who controlled the food had the power of life and death over everybody else, eventually coming to be known as kings, robber barons and CEOs as humanity moved into the modern era.
Although humans are wired for empathy, collaboration and cooperation, there is a small percentage—most estimates run between .5% to 2%—of people among us who are psychopaths; these people rarely feel empathy and view cooperation as a sign of weakness rather than strength.
And, tragically, these psychopaths have mostly come to dominate the worlds of politics and business.
Most stunning, multiple studies show that as many as 20% of American CEOs are psychopaths, accounting for a brutal business culture and a winner-takes-all economy.
Depending on party affiliation, those numbers probably hold true in politics, as well; if psychopaths are over-represented in the Republican Party (Trump is the latest and most visible example), that would account for their brutal style of politics.
If psychopaths are under-represented in the Democratic Party, that would account for why Dems constantly want to compromise and work things out. Such behavior is, after all, the baseline norm for humans who are not psychopaths.
While psychopathic CEOs and politicians battling it out in their own realms may seem remote for the average person, the reality is their psychopathic, greedy behavior accounts for much of the massive ine******y we see in the world today.
And that psychopath/greed-driven ine******y is making us, as a society, sick.
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett of the E******y Trust in the UK have spent years documenting how the more unequal a society is the greater will be their rates of crime, mental illness, violence, homicide, suicide, drug addiction, obesity, unwanted pregnancy and a whole host of other medical, psychological and social ills.
On the other hand, the more egalitarian or equal a society is the less frequently these societal ills present themselves. They've shown this is true from country to country, and even did an extraordinary break-down state-by-state in the US showing the exact same effect.
And now we're finding that just playing games that are based on psychopathic behavior like trying to wipe out your competitors and take all their assets triggers similar reactions in people to societal ine******y itself. And some games are worse than others at this.
And the game that's the worst is Monopoly.
Back in 1903 Lizzy Magie, a British feminist and socialist, patented the board game that we know today as Monopoly. She invented the game as a warning about the dangers of unrestrained, unregulated capitalism, although over the past hundred years that has been almost completely forgotten.
As Chris Melore reports, "Monopoly stands out as the most debated—and most forbidden—board game of all time. In a recent survey of 2,000 U.S. residents, 20 percent say that their game nights with friends or family members are often or always disrupted by competitive or unfriendly behavior."
Perhaps the "good" news is that "only 11% of respondents said they witnessed a physical fight break out," but Monopoly—a game that is based on the prime psychopathic value of taking everything for yourself and thus increasing ine******y—seems to trigger the worst in us.
Nobody's calling for a ban on the game of Monopoly, but as the Aboriginal kids taught their "westernized" teacher—and the extraordinary scientific research of the E******y Trust clearly shows—we will all be better off if we can reform our political and business cultures to be less greed-driven (psychopath-friendly) and more collaborative and fair (humanity-friendly).
Those psychopath-proofing reforms range from tackling actual business monopolies, to getting corporate and billionaire money out of politics, to strengthening our democracy by establishing an absolute right for all Americans to easily and comfortably v**e like in other democracies (see: HR1).
It's a big lift, but if we all work together we can still make it happen.
This article was first published on The Hartmann Report.
Psychopath-Driven Ine******y Is Making Our Society... (
show quote)
Old Thom is losing it and largely misses another one. Perhaps he's paid to write this tripe. He has some of it right, but being greedy and selfish doesn't make one a psychopath. Plus, the democrats have just as many as the republicans - another thing he gets wrong. His problem is he's hyper partisan like so many others.
In life there are always winners and losers. That's how it is in nature.
Its always entertaining to see democrats talk about taking corporate money out of politics when their party is controlled by corporate money (Big Pharma and Monsanto are but two examples). Pointing that out is what got Tulsi Gabbard shunned.
Its not ine******y that's k*****g us or rotting us from within.
If you want to reply, then
register here. Registration is free and your account is created instantly, so you can post right away.
