The Soviet system used psychiatry as a weapon by diagnosing political opponents as mentally ill in order to confine them as patients instead of trying them in court. Anyone who challenged the state such as dissidents, writers, would-be emigrants, religious believers, or human rights activists could be branded with fabricated disorders like sluggish schizophrenia. This turned normal political disagreement into supposed medical pathology and allowed the state to present dissent as insanity.
Once labeled in this way, people were placed in psychiatric hospitals where they could be held for long periods without legal protections. Harsh treatments were often used to break their resolve. The collaboration between state security organs and compliant psychiatrists created a system where political imprisonment was disguised as medical care, letting the Soviet regime suppress opposition while pretending it was addressing illness rather than silencing critics.
On the topic of the US declaring dissidents mentally ill, The Adrian Schoolcraft story is a pretty horrific account of what it looks like when a modern cop tries to whistleblow.
Also I don’t think you even need sociopaths to wreck a hierarchy. Hierarchy collects power at the top of it’s organizational structure, and power by it’s nature becomes an end to itself, so hierarchy ensures abuse of it’s power. Honestly calling every human a sociopath who gives in to that One Ring-style allure might actually be the same kind of medicalization that the state does to it’s dissidents, in the opposite direction, but equally obfuscating. Yes it’s a human failure, but the organizational structure very much sets up humans to fail.
But it’s mostly sociopaths that insist on that hierarchy. Something like 3% of any population are sociopaths, and they’re not ‘mentally ill’, they just have a diminished capacity to feel empathy. Because of that, they don’t understand altruism and think the only way society can function is if everyone is in their place – if there are strict rules governing everything, because in their worldview, they see others like themselves, and they would need those rules to keep themselves in check.
It’s very similar to people who think without laws against raping and pillaging, everyone would rape and pillage. They’re mostly telling on themselves, as most of us rape all we’d like, which is never.
Billionaires are often sociopaths. That’s how they became billionaires – because it’s all me, me, me.
Strong disagree on sociopathy being linked to a hierarchy.
The reality is that pretty much EVERY system of governance (that is meant to scale beyond five people in a field) needs a hierarchy of some form. Its the Whitest Kids U Know gag on anarchy where you quickly find out that there are people better suited to certain jobs and you need some degree of a social safety net to allow them to keep all of you alive (n that case, keeping a nuclear power plant from melting down… and then making t-shirts).
It is why there are basically no flat Democracies. You inherently end up in some form of a Democratic Republic where The People elect representatives who can then (theoretically) spend all day educating themselves on important issues and figuring out how to make an educated vote that represents the will of their constituents.
The core concept is just the reality of needing special skills and knowledge to make many decisions. There can be arguments that the people in charge of Directing The Military are still equal to the custodial staff keeping the streets clean but… moving on.
Where sociopathy comes into play is that those roles tend to inherently attract power mad people (there is a DIFFERENT WKUK gag on this…). But hierarchical systems are a natural knock on from just having to have a socioeconomic system that scales.
Sociopathy is just vernacular for ASD, which is medically considered a disorder, and in my opinion it’s just as prescriptively hierarchy-brained, scapegoated, and invented as ODD which is in some ways it’s inverse. They’re just medicalizations of what I feel is more or less normal human behavior when encountering either extreme of a hierarchy - The boot that does the stomping gets assigned ASD when things don’t go well. The one to be stomped gets assigned ODD when they resist.
I really think that hierarchy creates these personality types. They’re not necessarily pre-existing mental types in a hypothetical blank state society. And I think that our belief in them as “natural” just serves to further legitimize the power structure that actually generates them. To add: I don’t think you have to be at the top or bottom of a hierarchy to exhibit the behaviors associated with these labels, existing anywhere in the hierarchy can get you hierarchy-brained. Like America’s “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”, you can learn these traits before you arrive at the social stations they’re associated with.
I should emphasize, as far as I’m aware this is largely my own opinion.
I love your opinion, it makes much more sense to me.
It’s not, though. There are extremes in all human thought patterns, and some have extreme low empathy (sociopaths), whilst others have extreme high empathy (which can also be detrimental).
All humans are somewhere on that curve, but when we give people with very low empathy a lot of power, very bad things happen.
My point was that these extremes aren’t necessarily ‘mental illness’ – they’re natural extremes, but giving them a lot of power is absolutely detrimental to society, because they can’t understand how the rest of us work, and they need to inflict their unnecessary and unconventional rules on the rest of us.
Well I suppose the fact that I disagree is entirely besides the point, as either way we can trust that a critical mass of people will abuse a power hierarchy. It doesn’t really matter if, as I think, the hierarchy created them or if, as you think, they already exist and are merely drawn to it. A hierarchy will abuse it’s power.
Chicken and egg feedback loop.
Wait wait wait… ASD as in “Autism Spectrum Disorder”?
You’re equating sociopathy with autism? Like it’s just another word for the same?
o_O
Double empathy problem turned malignant much?
Am I misunderstanding what you’re saying? You say this is largely your own opinion, that these are the same, or that others say they’re the same?
These are very much not the same. Dangerous to conflate.
Unless also having narcissistic personality disorder or other cluster B stuff, autistics are typically more empathetic. It just doesn’t show the same way.
And yeah, as for hierarchy creating… Asperger history’s as nasty as the rest of the Nazi stuff manipulating people, in ways both intentional and unintentional. Lots of manipulations and “externalities”.
Maybe he meant ASPD (Antisocial Personality Disorder)?
Respect to Mike C Rupert too.
And yeah, beware the overly structuralist approaches.
Very well put.
I have a discussion with my wife every so often about what our own little utopian island would be like, like how the government would be, how roads would be managed, what homes would be like, etc. I brought up the other day this exact point about how if there’s a position of wealth and power at the top controlling too much, then sociopths would gravitate towards that for the same of having power and wealth, which ruins the government system. It would have to be a heavily distributed system of government, but too distributed where it would make it difficult to implement standardizations, get stuff done, etc.
Idk how that would work exactly, because then you’d also have to make sure no greedy, power hungry Trump-likes get into a position with too much power. There has to be a way, though.