Blog # 196 CELEBRITY SOCIOPATHS

The public at large has for some time been experiencing significant shock and disappointment in response to ongoing  revelations that a great many beloved and revered show business personalities, have credibly been exposed as sexual predators. What may at first have been denied and resisted as incomprehensible, has proven, even to the most loyal and agnostic fan, to be the disorienting and uncomfortable reality.

Our casual, but necessary, dip into the relevant textbooks has instructed us that personalities who are solely ruled by their own needs and desires, with no concern for the effects of their behavior on others, are clinically diagnosed as sociopaths (psychopathic). It appears that medical experience has designated our subject category as high functioning sociopaths. This condition reportedly is accompanied by superior intelligence and great talent, but also, by an aberrant version of morality which has been integrated into the essential persona of the sociopath as his personal religion.

In the “futuristic” 1949 George Orwell novel, “1984,” the author describes a Statute which legally affords to all capitalistic employers the unfettered right to sleep with women employed at their business enterprise. Ancient history reports that in medieval times, the lord to whom any vassal belongs had the right to sleep, the first night, with the vassal’s intended bride (droit de seigneur). Our American oral history is replete, to be sure, with accounts of sexual abuse during its shameful period of slavery.

The present comment, however, is solely focused on the highly talented and hugely successful personalities who have shockingly been revealed to possess total disregard for the feelings of others, and who, because of their outrageously unchecked egocentrism, have behaved egregiously toward others whom they have objectivized in the fulfillment of their personal ends.

High functioning sociopaths appear to be remarkably adept at presenting themselves in the public’s expected persona and seem to have perfected the strategic art of manipulation. They are goal oriented, patient and calculating; It should be observed, additionally, that such sociopathic abusers exist and function successfully in the business and political arenas.

It is, candidly, beyond the capability of this writer to hazard any solution to this anti-social and harmful phenomenon, except to the limited and mitigating extent of his observation of its eternal existence, as aesthetically portrayed in the world’s inventory of  great literature.

-p.