Understanding Obama

I was tempted to title or subtitle this, “Time to Call a Spade a Spade,” but I’m just not as slippery as Obama in getting out of immature crap like his “lipstick on a pig” remark (which was so rehearsed and deliberate he closed his eyes to help himself remember it before delivering the line) or his middle finger salute/cheek scratch to Hillary during the primaries.

Actually, it is time to call Obama a sociopath and to explain what that is and what to do about Obama being one.

(Fun fact: today Google key words lists the key phrase “is Obama the anti-Christ” as having an average monthly search volume of 14,800.)

Oh, I should explain that I have no professional training in psychology or psychotherapy whatsoever. I never even studied psychology in college (in the 1970s). I looked at the course descriptions and textbooks and decided against them because they offered no clarity about how to be healthy, or defend yourself from the unhealthy. (For the record, I think the field has made considerable progress in those areas since then.)

What I know about psychology comes from popular psychology books and street smarts from surviving an anorexic (and her even-more-psycho mother), borderline psychotics, narcissists, alcoholics, emotional blackmailers, sociopaths and combinations of the above. Oh, and Dr. John Gray, before his Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus fame (stories for another day), when he was doing his Making Love Work seminar (with bitch-troll-from-hell his then-wife, Dr. Barbara deAngelis) and, post-divorce, his Heart Seminar in Washington, D.C.

Credentialed professionals are not allowed to speculate on Obama’s mental health unless they have examined him and have his permission to do so.

And that ain’t a-gonna happen.

But, if I can make enough noise and what I say makes sense to enough people, I hope for two things to happen. First, that there will be a dramatic increase in the number of people immune to Obama and all his tricks. Second, that there will arise a demand for credentialed people to speculate on my speculations in public forums and that that also will lead to more people becoming immune to Obama and his fell legions of true believers.

OK, so here it is:

The explanation for all of Obama’s contradictory statements — you can find opposite and mutually exclusive positions from him on a variety of topics from gay marriage to clean coal — is that he will say whatever he knows people want to hear in exchange for giving up their power to him. That means he will tell any lie to get what he wants. When sweet lies don’t work, he resorts to threats, guilt-tripping (RAAAAAAAACIST!!!), deception and other manipulations of emotional blackmail.

I believe a large number of people who have given up their power to Obama are good people who, when THEY make a promise, move heaven and earth to deliver the goods. They do not even know how to believe that someone would promise them something with no intention of keeping the promise. That is the honest person’s conception of the social contract created by the proffer of a promise, especially when the requirement is to pay in advance of the delivery of services or goods, and more especially when their payment is in the form of their freedom, rights and most of their worldly goods.

However, I guess you could say no real contract has been formed in this exchange because there was not a true meeting of the minds. That is because Obama and sociopaths like him work from a social contract with completely different terms. They have no conception that if they make a promise, they must keep it. This is because the sociopath has no conscience (more on that below).

No, to Obama and sociopaths like him, the purpose of a promise is to get people to give you willingly whatever you want from them. After all, getting people to give you what you want willingly is more pleasant and takes less effort than obtaining it by force. So, for the sociopath with skills in charm, persuasion and seduction, promising people whatever they want is almost always the first line of attack. THERE IS NO INTENT TO KEEP THE PROMISE!!!

Let me say it again: a sociopath’s sole purpose when making a promise is to get something in the easiest and most pleasant way. There is NO INTENT TO KEEP THE PROMISE!!!

Indeed, once the promise has achieved its purpose, if you try to make the sociopath deliver his side of the bargain, you will generally get one or both of two responses. First, delay and fog — you’ll get what was promised, at some time in the future, but only if you do even more of what the sociopath wants, with tiny rewards applied whenever you start to lose faith, as the sociopath leads you on toward an ever-receding goal.

(Note that Obama already is positioning the financial crisis he has done so much to create and increase as a reason why his failed first term should be rewarded with a second. Personally, I’m expecting him to try to make the situation so bad that he can argue that we should suspend the Constitution and make him president-for-life, a la Hitler’s fire in the Reichstag and Enabling Act in 3, 2, 1 ….)

Second, outrage, threats, denunciations, recriminations, shame and guilt on whatever scale of wall-eyed fit is required to obtain capitulation.

This pattern already is starting to be obvious to people who are noting Obama’s rapid flip-flops from “Hope! Change! Yes, we can!” to “Gloom! Doom! You are powerless and only government can save you!”

What Obama takes advantage of when he flip-flops is that he is creating cognitive dissonance. Instead of being able to see the fell, unifying motive behind the flip-flops, people respond to Obama’s mutually exclusive position statements by picking the ones that support the narrative they want to hear, the picture they want to see, the feelings they want to feel. They ignore the paradoxes instead of seeking the paradigm that explains them. Which is that Obama is a sociopath, which means that he has no conscience at all and is always in the process of telling whatever lie is required to get what he wants, which is the power to have absolute control over as many people as he possibly can. Forever.

It’s actually easier to understand how a sociopath operates when you get to see the whole cycle of no-conscience-plus-sense-of-entitlement-leading-to-willingness-to-tell-any-lie-to-obtain-a-goal-by-pleasant-means-leading-to-outrage-and-bullying-to-obtain-the-goal-when- outed-or-thwarted, conveniently compressed into one story.

Luckily, there’s one handy, courtesy of Josh Mankiewicz, news correspondent for NBC, which aired on Dateline NBC on Sunday, Aug. 12, 2007, entitled, “The Ultimate Con Artist.” The story is a profile of Fred Brito, an impostor who has posed in a variety of professions, including Catholic priest. The link provides both a transcription of the story and the videos. However, it is the videos that really convey how a sociopath flip-flops between charm and persuasion to anger and bullying when he is thwarted.

(Warning: if you go to YouTube to check for the NBC videos, what you’ll find instead is that Fred Brito has re-invented himself again and is using his exposure as a con artist as his newest credential. In other words, he’s working his latest con.)

If you want one book that explains Obama, it is The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout, Ph.D. On pp. 92-93 of the paperback edition Dr. Stout writes:

Being natural actors, conscienceless people can make full use of social and professional roles, which constitute excellent ready-made masks that other people are loathe to look behind…. In addition, we are distracted from a person’s actual behavior when he represents himself as in some way benevolent, creative, or insightful….

Worse, our respect for people who appear to be inspired and benevolent leaders can be abused — has been abused many times — to cataclysmic ends. With a leader, especially one who claims to have a sublime mission, as with a doctor or a priest or a parent, we tend to bestow the qualities of the role on the individual, and to follow the individual accordingly. Benjamin Wolman, founder and editor of the International Journal of Group Tensions, writers, “Usually human cruelty increases when an aggressive sociopath gains an uncanny, almost hypnotic control over large numbers of people. History is full of chieftains, prophets, saviors, gurus, dictators, and other sociopathic megalomaniacs who managed to obtain support … and incited people to violence.” Insidiously, when such a “savior” abducts the normal population for his purposes, he usually begins with an appeal to them as good people who would like to improve the condition of humanity, and then insists that they can achieve this by following his own aggressive plan.

In a confusing irony, conscience can be rendered partially blind because people without conscience use, as weapons against us, many of the fundamentally positive tools we need to hold society together — empathic emotions, sexual bonds, social and professional roles, regard for the compassionate and the creative, our desire to make the world a better place, and the organizing rule of authority. And people who do hideous things do not look like people who do hideous things. There is no “face of evil.”

(I did NOT just go look for Creative Commons licensed photos of Michelle Obama because the point is that evil doesn’t just look like her but also like Obama with his sweet angel face on AND Obama when he isn’t getting his way and resembles Uncle Scar from The Lion King.)

Dr. Stout goes on to explain that another tool of the sociopath is “gaslighting,” after the famous movie Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer: to bully someone else into doubting their perceptions and judgments is now called “gaslighting.” Another way Obama takes advantage of his flip-flops is to use gaslighting to insist that he never contradicted himself, you heard him wrong, or you are stupid for insisting on consistency as a measure of his integrity and sound judgment.

There is no way to give Obama a conscience. The best thing to do is educate everyone possible about what he is and how to resist him — OMG, especially members of Congress and the press — thwart him at every turn and then get him out of office as soon as possible.  Sooner is better. Impeachment, for starters, and removal from office — dear God, even Joe Biden is starting to look like a better bet now than Obama — but arrest, conviction and prison would work, too. (On charges of bribery and/or campaign finance fraud, for starters.)