“Liberalism was never about freedom, but nurtured a profound desire to change humanity above all other aspects. This rendered it a willing ally of tyrants promising to do the dirty work of such a project.” - John Waters on Substack

By James Howard Kunstler - May 29, 2023

An anxious silence falls over the land this Memorial Day as we discern increasingly that those we put in charge of this shape-shifting thing called the public interest are running out of trips to lay on the people. Something grotesque is revealing itself: a bankruptcy not just of money but of national purpose, meaning, and legitimacy. You realize this day, with a breaking heart, that your country has been stolen by psychopaths.

Brace for impact. We’re already off the road and now it’s only a matter of how this vehicle comes to a stop in the ditch. Then, it’s a question of how each of us emerges from the smoldering wreckage. The main thing, though, is clear to everyone: What we were riding in is no more. We’re out there stumbling around in the dark, in shock, trying desperately to assess our whereabouts and what has happened to us.

Now, the trouble with being ruled by psychopaths is that they don’t care about other people. They are actually incapable of imagining the lives of others, especially the fact that these others care about each other, and what happens to them. You may have noticed, for instance, that the psychopath Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) went to Ukraine last week and declared, “Russians are dying. We have never spent money so well.” Only a couple of months ago, he called for the assassination of Vladimir Putin. He stopped short of dissing Mr. Putin’s mother.

Ukraine, of course, is a lost cause, and it was never a good cause in the first place. Contrary to Lindsay Graham’s untoward utterance, American money has killed far more Ukrainians than Russians. He overlooked this unappetizing tidbit because he doesn’t care about the Ukrainians, for whose sake our “folks” in charge supposedly undertook this clusterfuck. Lindsay Graham also may not have noticed that our country is collapsing and Russia is not. That must be because Lindsay Graham does not care about Americans, either.

As for our money, it looks like most of the rest of the world — the nations that still produce things of value — are so turned-off by American pathocracy that they are seeking every way possible to stop using our money in international trade settlements. That money, our dollar, became the world’s reserve currency because our country ended up on top in the previous world war and for the better part of a century afterward dominated the planet militarily. Naturally, as our leadership turned more pathological and pathocratic, so did our military endeavors — until lately they amount to little more than just smashing up other countries to show we can do it.

These other countries must wonder which is the next place that America will try to smash up? Two of these other countries, Russia and China, are coming around to the realization that they are possibly better equipped to do the smashing than America is. There is no indication that our pathocracy recognizes that the next smash-up may be World War Three, and that we may not emerge from it victorious.

Hence, our anxiety this Memorial Day as we reflect on America’s military exploits generally, and must perforce contemplate our less-than-glorious prospects ahead. How will our pathocrat neo-con strategists greet the debacle of our failure in Ukraine? Denial and spin, for sure. But will they scramble to dream up yet another misadventure as reckless and absurd? You have good reason to be concerned.

Pathocracy always marches toward totalitarianism because pathocrats can’t imagine a management of public affairs by a people who care about each other (and their country). Therefore, everyone must be subject to incessant coercion and punishment, especially for their thoughts (and especially for thoughts of opposition to pathocracy). However, there are certainly more people who care about each other than there are psychopaths in America. I’m not a big fan of quantification but, for the record, psychiatric meta-analysis estimates that 1.2 to 4.5 percent of the population displays psychopathic personality disorders.

How that tiny fraction of the citizenry came to take charge of our affairs is surely the big mystery of the moment. My guess is that under conditions of economic-social-and-political collapse, the people who care about each other become preoccupied with their mutual caretaking duties while the psychopaths, unburdened by such cares, can go about other business — such as plunder, murder, and the sowing of chaos.

Sometimes in history, the pathocrats are simply overthrown by the majority of humans with functioning emotional equipment. It’s not easy, though, because . . .

[SNIP]