do you think barack obama is a sociopath

DSM-IV Definition

Antisocial personality disorder is characterized by a lack of regard for the moral or legal standards in the local culture. There is a marked inability to get along with others or abide by societal rules. Individuals with this disorder are sometimes called psychopaths or sociopaths.

Diagnostic Criteria (DSM-IV)

1. Since the age of fifteen there has been a disregard for and violation of the right's of others, those right's considered normal by the local culture, as indicated by at least three of the following:
A. Repeated acts that could lead to arrest.
B. Conning for pleasure or profit, repeated lying, or the use of aliases.
C. Failure to plan ahead or being impulsive.
D. Repeated assaults on others.
E. Reckless when it comes to their or others safety.
F. Poor work behavior or failure to honor financial obligations.
G. Rationalizing the pain they inflict on others.

2. At least eighteen years in age.

3. Evidence of a Conduct Disorder, with its onset before the age of fifteen.

4. Symptoms not due to another mental disorder.

A, B, E, G

holy shit my brother is a sociopath, good to know

Difficult to say. Jon Ronson's book touches on whether politics is dominated by psycho/sociopaths and ends up unable to fully throw its weight behind whether the standard definition of the term is even a valid one. Went with 'maybe'.

everything is p much dominated by psycho/sociopaths tbf

i tend to think the most genuinely decent and humane people don't have the cold-eyed ambition to achieve the level of power required to influence the world via politics, but maybe that's a harsh generalization.

It's something Robert Hare, who designed the test for psychopathy, seems to believe, iirc. High-functioning psychopaths have the right combination of superficial charm, emotional distance, ability to lie convincingly and snap-decision making to get ahead. It's often applied more to corporate titans than politicians but is valid for both, in theory. The trouble is that the test is so subjective it's easy to apply parts of it to anyone you think's kind of a dick.

one of my least favorite things about the present age is ready access to the text of the DSM resulting in a lot of armchair diagnosing. true sociopathy is actually very rare. a happily married sociopath with a couple of well-adjusted children: this is a concept I'd be very surprised to find any doctor taking seriously. to say that people have "sociopathic tendencies" is meaningless; everybody's capable of putting the blinkers on to shut out the pain of others, for example. "rationalizing the pain they inflict on others"? you could make the case that all non-vegetarians are to some degree sociopathic on this criteria.

sorry this is hobby-horse thing w/me, you get a lot of teens now saying "I think I'm a sociopath" when they're just normal egocentric teens & I think it's really unhealthy, sociopathy's a real thing and the likelihood is that few of us will ever even run across a true one in our lives.

that said it's otm that to really wanna be president there's gotta be something wrong w/you but that something probably isn't total inability to understand that there are other people in the world besides yourself

emotional distance = snap decision making, or close to it at least, imo

xp animals != 'others' imo

Calculating != sociopathic

putting all of aerosmith's reasonable objections to the question aside i think the answer is:

yes

however, i think human brains aren't really designed to handle the amount of power, influence + responsibility that level of office entails and some disassociation from morality is going to happen like 90% of the time.

like i don't think you have to be a sociopath to become president, but i think you'll develop some manifestation of sociopathy when you become president for sure

arguably, it's not even disassociation from morality so much as an ability to focus on a different kind of morality that deals less with the individual and more on large groups of ppl

one of my least favorite things about the present age is ready access to the text of the DSM resulting in a lot of armchair diagnosing

So true. I have arguments with students over their readiness to call people romantically and sexually interested in them as "stalkers," or when they attach "issues" to any dilemma (e.g. "He has jealousy issues" instead of "he's a jealous guy").

oh that is so true, alfred – and aero (to an extent...). my kids are constantly calling each other "creeps" in the same way.

What I mean is that I agree with you in spirit, aero, but tbh I think there actually a lot of sociopaths under the too-broad definitions of the DSM IV, and only a few of them are dangerous or actually "actively" sociopathic. I don't blame people for self-pathologizing, but rather for understandably subordinating themselves (or their peers) to an elastic, inarticulate, definition that is overly inclusive, essentially ridic, and offers a convient expl. for abberant behavior. A lot of the ODD students I worked with a few years back are nascent/will likely be sociopaths by even the most stringent interpretation of the DSM-IV definition, but I suspect many of them will lead normal lives, get married, etc. In part, this is b/c the pattern of antisocial actions/bad choices made in the past do not nec. correlate w. a likelihood to commit those same offenses in the future, at least in a way that is outwardly harmful (although 'distasteful' and 'dickish' are an entirely different beast).

I am sorry that is all jumbled together. What it means is that yes, people who are not trained should not run to the DSM for explanation, but when they do they are at least... a little right... much of the time. The pathologies are fungible, and accepting of half-truths: they're not strictly descriptive. Nonetheless, I don't think a lot of sociopaths are diagnosed b/c the level of success/manifestation of "quirks" the exhibit are just acceptable enough to pass muster.

arguably, it's not even disassociation from morality so much as an ability to focus on a different kind of morality that deals less with the individual and more on large groups of ppl

― carpy deems (darraghmac), Friday, 6 January 2012 00:40 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is true & exemplified by his reluctance to unnecessarily disturb the peaceful prejudices of millions, by limiting needle exchange programmes, killing the programmes themselves affecting many fewer

this maybe plays into the whole deep-down-he's-a-nice-guy fanfiction thing, but what seems really frustrating, whenever you read some reaction he's made to liberal complaints, is that it's more the ability to compartmentalise things that have happened into events or tallies, rather than issues; so it becomes about how people on either side couldn't expect everything to line up with their preference, rather than whether a thing is demonstrably okay or not. like i feel like some of the presidential bubble thing must just be taking a weird detached angle that sees everything as successfully or unsuccessfully manoeuvred dealmaking, rather than positive or negative results

Truman was a nice guy from Missouri who had little qualms about dropping two A-bombs.

I look at Obama and see a remarkable poise and equanimity: it's clear he doesn't need the presidency to aggrandize himself; he would succeed at almost anything he tried. But those same qualities lead to the kind of equanimity that allowed the far less erudite Truman to put head to pillow without a care in the world about incinerated children.

more like socioPATHETIC

how weird to think that adding the word pathetic to the charge of sociopathy somehow makes that charge more severe

once you're accusing someone of sociopathy, imo, you're basically accusing them of being the worst possible human there is

but imagine doing a shitty job at being the worst possible human there is

if only :(

answer: no

capitalism forces us all to be sociopaths

sounds like a Gang of Four title.

Don't you have to be apathetic to be socio/psychopath? And yeah, apathetic characters tend to get far in life cuz they don't have emotional burden

how did you vote lorax?

I didn't vote but I think Obama has feelings because he's a democrat :/

true

lol @ anyone who really thinks obama is a sociopath

moments like these really give me warm feelings about our little fucked up ilx community here xp

not interesting enough to be one

is a murderer, of course

choom gang

Aero otmx10000000. He is a basically well-intentioned dude (nb: I think most people are in general well-intentioned dudes) who has made a bunch of disappointing choices with the power he's been given, with a bunch of shitty consequences.

If he were a legit sociopath then Dreams From My Father would be a seriously fucked-up read.

aero otm about obama being an excellent president, well said

a happily married sociopath with a couple of well-adjusted children: this is a concept I'd be very surprised to find any doctor taking seriously.

Dennis Rader, the BTK killer? For certain values of "happily" and "well adjusted" anyway. But certainly he's an outlier.

He is a basically well-intentioned dude

that is balls.

CTRL-F 'Excellent'

not interesting enough to be one

some ppl in this threads need to have obama be both evil + banal is really weird. is your loathing so extreme that it can support two contradictory impulses?

(or, maybe the more obvious answer, are you just students of arendt?)

That'll never catch on like "friends of Dorothy."

He is banal for a US president. They all belong in prison.

i think you're drifting into absolute incoherency

sipping on champagne, opining, "oh my, i find his criminal murderous sociopathy so banal. mmm."

head of modern US = head of mob family x 10,0000

"i do declare, how many ppl did that fascist kill today? oh, only thirty-two? yawn. he should surely be in prison if i could only muster up the stamina to care."

ha

this is weird slash fic:

Obama is a naturally empathic individual, whose diverse, mobile, international background made him unusually able when it came to assessing new social situations and reading more than people say.

Pareene otm in today's column:

It’s just that Lehrer asked incredibly stupid questions. I know it thrilled Chuck Todd that this was a “serious,” “policy-heavy” debate, but the candidates just had one argument about Romney’s vague tax plan — making the same points repeatedly — for more than the first half-hour. Lehrer’s insistence on asking the candidates to confirm that they have different ideas about things was bizarre — Ralph Nader was not onstage arguing that they were Tweedledum and Tweedledee

man didn't think i'd say this but nader being onstage would have been better for everyone.

pareene's take on the debate was the best one i saw.

if Obama hates himself it wd make him marginally more humane in my eyes

lol

bump

You put forward in the book this idea of Putin’s pleonexia, his insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others. Looking at the way he reacted with the Kursk submarine disaster and the sieges in Beslan and Moscow Theater do you think Putin is almost sort of like a sociopath or psychopathic kind of character?

My researcher suggested that very early on. His working theory is that Putin is a psychopath, but I’m not in the business of passing psychiatric diagnoses, especially on people I have actually never met personally. I think it’s as good an explanation as there is out there, but in a way it doesn’t matter. Not all psychopaths become tyrants, and certainly not all psychopaths kill people that they perceive as traitors or have the opposition to them running under constant threat of death and bodily harm. So I think in a sense once a person comes into government office, or at least until he has left government office, his personal psychiatry is beside the point. His behavior is what’s important.

http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/102758/Facing-Putin-Extended-Interview.aspx

Brutality is just another face of power.

what about 'power is just another face of brutality'?

You can't fit the bigger box inside the smaller one.

power enable one type of brutality -- the multiplier effect of antisocial tendencies given operative force (the wider set of brutalities being committed by the disenfranchised among their own kind); power is intrinsically brutal

'Brutality is just another face of power' is true but it's also rather vague, it's difficult to create a 'x abstract noun is just another face of y abstract noun' statement that can never be true

wrt the putin dude -- the last sentence seems completely awry, his behaviour is what is important but his behaviour seems to derive heavily from his personal psychopathology

putin seems like the most obviously psychopathic statesman of the current era, i wonder how many ordinary russians see him in that way, and how many of those still support him

The idea wouldn't have much traction, I think. Particularly given the relatively recent history of actual psychopaths involved in high-level Russian politics.

It's more obvious he's incompetent.

there's a good chance putin is an actual actual psychopath

My thinking runs like this. Power in the social or political sense is defined by one's ability to bring the actions of others into alignment with one's will or to frustrate the ability of others to enforce their will. Brutality is but one instrument of power. The ability to disburse money and rewards is another. Mastery of persuasion and ideas is a third. I hope this makes my thought less vague to you.

maybe the term has less weight in russia given the communist (and not entirely extinct) tradition of psychiatry-as-oppression, 'sluggishly progressive schizoprhenia' and other pseudo-disorders

not all psychopaths behave like beria

Explanation attempts for the Russian apartment bombings

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Many different explanations have been given for the Russian apartment bombings.

You might want to consider whether russia's political culture is pathological. If so, then it would encourage and reward pathological behavior from its leaders, requiring that those whose pathology is not innate to mimic pathology as a means to advancement.

A Google search on "pathology of power" (quotes included) cites over 3 million hits.

If you believe that Putin ordered false flag bombings, murders journalists, was completely indifferent to collateral damage in the Moscow Theatre siege, etc, you would think he is a psychopath. These are treated in Russia roughly as seriously as the allegations that Tony Blair ordered the murder of David Kelly are in the UK, though.

the third of those seems more or less true though indifference to loss life in hostage situations would is not psychopathy, whether the apartment bombings had some level of fsb involvement seems unclear (as does the death of david kelly, unless you are a true believer in whatever the coroner said) though the wiki page is blackly humourous (not arguing putin had any involvement in this ftr)

evidence for putin's psychopathy is based more on affect, demeanour and anecdotes from inner circle like those surrounding the georgian war)

so many copy errors there jesus

sv do you not think putin seems psychopathic in a liberal but not completely elastic use of the term?

http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/102758/Facing-Putin-Extended-Interview.aspx

― Nilmar Honorato da Silva, Sunday, November 17, 2013 2:22 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

lol.

The outcome of the theatre seige almost certainly owed a huge amount to operational incompetence, tbh.

It is difficult to say. My inexpert opinion would be that he probably does have elements of a psychopathic personality. He does seem to be able to distance himself emotionally from the consequences of his darker actions.

That said, how do we judge Yeltsin's affect when he was jovially creaming off millions as people starved to death / died for lack of basic medicines? Or the western politicians who actively colluded in enriching gangsters at vast human cost to the Russian people in the belief that an imperfect market economy was worth however many hundreds of thousands of premature deaths, etc?

It is hard not to fall back on the banality that anyone who can make those kinds of moral compromises without throwing themselves off a bridge probably has something wrong with them.

idk it seems putin is over a borderline beyond yr usual instrumentalist pragmatic child killing IMF bruh into something more coldly hostile and vicious but who knows shit about putin, nobody has conclusively proven or dispelled all those rumours that he has amassed a huge private fortune

wary of 1) the tendency to overdiagnose "hot" pathologies and 2) attempts by non-experts to diagnose anyone, let alone people with heavily managed images whom youve never met

but, sure, putins a sociopath. capitalism makes sociopaths of us all.

Are psychopath and sociopath not interchangeable terms?

i think so yeah

sociopath is used with the same intent as psychopath but in contexts when you don't want to play pretend psychologist, i think

and yet

yeah i know. these terms are contested within their sphere of specialist use tho, right? never mind amongst non-specialists. personally i figure it's better to talk about behaviours than inherent personality types or illnesses unless the latter has some therapeutic worth, and even then i'm not sure how much therapeutic worth there is in labelling.

Thomas Frank talks to Adolph Reed Jr.:

Obama’s a highly intelligent man. You’ve met him.

Yes.

Maybe he’s a cipher in the sense that he’s a symbol. But he’s not a cipher of a human.

I don’t know. Look, I’ve taught a bunch of versions of him.

You mean you’ve had people like him as students?

Yeah. So his cohort in the Ivy League. His style. There’s superficial polish or there’s a polish that may go down to the core. I don’t know. A performance of a judicious intellectuality. A capacity to show an ability to understand and empathize with multiple sides of an argument. Obama has described himself in that way himself in one or maybe both of his books and elsewhere. He’s said that he has this knack for encouraging people to see a better world for themselves through him.

Yeah, he’s like a blank slate.

Right. Which in a less charitable moment you might say is like a sociopath.

Come on now!

I’m not saying that. But I’m just saying. I’m not saying he’s a sociopath but…

That (blank slate personality) seems like the classic … the kind of people who lead the Democratic Party. Only he’s got considerably more charisma than most of them.

He’s better at it than most. And this is another point that I make. That any public figure, especially a politician or a figure in a movement, is going to be like a hologram that’s created by the array of forces that he or she feels the need to respond to. That’s how it was that we got more out of Richard Nixon from the left than we’ve gotten from either Clinton or Obama.

http://www.salon.com/2014/03/09/we_are_all_right_wingers_now_how_fox_news_ineffective_liberals_corporate_dems_and_gop_money_captured_everything/

a real sociopath would not be pardoning all these ppl

what if he's like the joker in that nolan batman movie and is letting the worst criminals out to play

almost all non-violent drug offenders i thought?

i agree that obama is the joker from the movies

otm

can everyone plz stop using the word 'sociopath'

you just did it

use/mention distinction buddy

(i was kidding)

gbx, noted sociopath

the newly free cons will be hunted by drones