Time magazine writes about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, accused of assaulting a hotel maid in New York City, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s child with an employee, and how society views powerful men taking advantage of women.
Read Sex, lies, arrogance: What makes powerful men behave so badly? on Time.com.
Link supplied by a Lovefraud reader.
This is the “real world”—people who are Smart, AND risk takers, and have many psychopathic traits do well in politics….Slick Willie did not get the name lightly…Bill Clinton was SLICK at PR and making people think he was sincere. The few (and brief) times I met him when he was governor of Arkansas, he impressed me with his “slickness” when asked a direct question….as I watched the lies unfold with his political career (and many that were hardly mentioned in the press) I realized that I think the man is a card carrying psychopath….and that, along with his high IQ and ability to smooze put him in the white house.
I think many people in politics are psychopaths….though I do disagree with the mention of Thomas Jefferson being lumped among them because he had children with a slave woman…at the time he did it, he was a widower, and the practice was quite common in his culture and there is no indication that Sally was an unwilling participant in the relationship. As far as history knows, Jefferson was never unfaithful to his wife, whom he apparently loved very deeply.
The old saying “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is very true for many reasons. One, people who seek power usually have high traits of psychopathy in the first place and though they may try to cloak them before the gain power, once they gain the power, they seem to release those traits for the worse. Even people who aren’t so high in psychopathic traits when given power so that they (at least think) they arent going to get consequences for bad behavior tend to engage in the bad behavior more.
That is why I tend to not trust ANY political incumbent or wanna be.
My local newspaper posted a version of this article today (Wednesday). It ended with “don’t judge the men – they are only human.” Not one comment was made about destruction and suffering and humiliation of families like Schwartzenegger’s (can’t spell that name). Again – ignoring the family / targets of the sociopaths and their experiences / feelings is missing the lion’s share of the information. So much work to do out there to educate / prevent / fight / work through all the destruction. Glad I’m seeing more clearly than 2 years ago when I would have been upset about this article without knowing why.
Well, it was probably a mistake (I’ve had a sixteen hour day at work and needed something to mitigate the boredom!) but I just read that transcript of the Weiner/ Lisa Weiss “sexting” thing. Oh boy. I really have to wonder what we’ve come to as a society. I mean, are there NO standards at all these days? No integrity or dignity in anything? I have never been a big fan of this culture, but I have to say that things have never looked so bleak or hopeless to me as they do at the present moment. Really, I can’t believe that this is now how people are interacting with one another. I would call it “bestial” – but that would be an insult to beasts!
At any rate, I’m no prude – I’m all in favor of healthy sexuality. But to call this sort of thing “erotic” is enough to make one’s skin crawl! I think it’s more accurate to call it the death of Eros. What really got my blood up, however, was reading a local columnist who defended this as “Boys will be boys and we have to separate the man from his policies”, etc. etc. – and other such nonsense, as predictable as it was obtuse. For what it’s worth, I’m personally very tired of this sort of thing. Haven’t we learned anything since the 90’s? I’m a passionate patriot, but I can honestly say that I hate what my country has become. I have little faith in our future, and I can’t see this latest batch of scandals (just wait – we’re getting twenty “meltdowns” a month, but there will be many more!) as anything but the harbinger of a general moral decadence and cultural decline.
Just as a sidenote – it occured to me while reading the Weiner/Weiss thing that though I don’t believe in suicide, I think I would actually be forced to poison myself if I had written that and it were exposed to the public! Not that I ever would or could talk like that – I’m just saying that I would be so ashamed of myself that death would be the only viable alternative to such a stain on my honor. Nevertheless, it seems like these people actually REVEL in this sort of thing: But then again, in a country that lionizes people like Paris Hilton, Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan, etc., I suppose that the only thing worse than bad publicity is no publicity at all!
Needless to say, comparing someone like Jefferson (or Hamilton) to these modern-day pygmies is fatuous in the extreme. Is it really even necessary to point out the flaws in such thinking?
Constantine – I was with you until the very end, when you insulted ‘pygmies’ (a derogatory term in and of itself) by comparing them to spaths/ narcs and the like.
I particularly liked your phrase, ‘the death or eros.’
I don’t know why, but these men do get away with this stuff and they will continue to get away with it. For whatever reason, it is glossed over and people look the other way. And they know it!!! They know they are going to get away with it or why else continue to do it??? That is my X spath for sure!!! It makes me really angry!!!!! I think they ALL need to pay for their actions. They need to feel the pain of the consequences!!
Constantine, I totally agree with you, and I also believe that a people get the kind of leaders they DESERVE….It still rankles me that Teddy Kennedy kept getting elected over and over after he drowned a woman who might have been saved because he ran away from the scene of the accident and hid out trying to come up with an alibi instead of even trying to save her….yet he got elected over and over and over and over….it is the old “boys will be boys” thinking, and I’m like Constantine, if I did what some of these men have done, I would “throw myself in the river” from shame and guilt, or at least go “live in a cave” some where.
In a country where the leaders seem to have no SHAME for anything and the majority of the population doesn’t seem to mind, where can our country go but DOWN?
Oxy:
The Ted Kennedy ordeal still upsets me also. I will never for the life of me get that…why he continued to be elected over and over again. People really are so easily duped, aren’t they?? But not us!! Never again.
Down is where we are going and it’s a bit scary I must say.
The same thing with JFK—-he smuggled women in the back door of the white house as Jackie was going out the front, including Marilyn Monroe, and yet even though the press knew it at the time they said nothing, but even after it was KNOWN after his death, he is still the great president after it was known.
Nixon resigned in disgrace for the Watergate thing, yet if he had been bringing women into the white house it would not have been a big deal, just “boys will be boys”—-just like Bill Clinton’s behavior.
I’m still with Ross Perot, “if a man’s wife can’t trust him, how can we trust him?”
Oxy:
Yep, JFK, another great example of womanizing and getting away with it. It drives me crazy. I don’t know what is wrong with our society.
I like the Ross Perot quote!!
One/joy – haha – yes, that’s very good, I didn’t realize that I was insulting the pygmies!
Oxy – That reminds me: I think that twenty years ago people would have called us the “Cassandras” and told us to “lighten up.” But the curious thing is that I think a significant minority is actually starting to “catch on” and realize that, yes, things really are looking about that bad.