Disturbed character

Disturbed character is a personality type applied to people who are often unencumbered by qualms of conscience and passionately pursue their personal goals with indifference to—and often at expense of—the rights and needs of others and cause all sorts of problems for others and society at large. Character-disordered personalities lack self-restraint when it comes to acting upon their primal urges. They have too little of a conscience or in extreme cases no conscience at all. They typically resist making concessions to societal demands, may have some antisocial tendencies, and may have diminished capacities for experiencing genuine shame or guilt. Erroneous thinking patterns and attitudes underlie the dysfunctional behaviors they display. These problematic behavior patterns may be habitual and automatic, but they also are conscious and deliberate.

Those possessing these distorted characters resist changing their attitudes and core beliefs despite having plenty of insight and awareness. What they need and can benefit from are:

• limits
• confrontation
• and most especially correction.

Cognitive-behavioral therapeutic approaches are the most appropriate in this regard.

When dealing with disturbed characters, it is, however, also important to craft win-win scenarios so that they do not feel like they have to lose. According to Keith Ward, faith as the practical commitment to a relationship with God has capacity to progressively transform human life, liberating it from hatred, greed and ignorance, and enabling it to become a more effective mediator of transcendent beauty, joy, compassion and benevolence.

Brief summary of problematic patterns of thinking of disturbed characters

• Self-focused/self-centered thinking
• Possessive thinking
• Extreme "all-or-none" thinking
• Egomaniacal thinking
• Shameless thinking
• Quick-and-easy thinking
• Guiltless thinking

The aggressive personalities

Among the most character-disordered personalities are covert-aggressive personalities, the more extreme cases of which are:

• cult leaders,
• political extremists,
• Sunday night TV "success" peddlers
• false prophets and
• militant social activists.

They use the tactics of manipulation in their overall modus operandi and seek to rise to position of substantial power and influence. They gravitate toward and exploit the excellent opportunities for self-advancement and the wielding of considerable power that can be gained under the guise of service available in such endeavors.

Examples

Politics: Peace for our time vs. The first foretaste of a bitter cup

See Also: Gleichschaltung

The notorious example of complete failure of applying the proper confrontation and limits towards someone exhibiting the traits of disturbed character with regard to political extremism is the attitudes of so-called Western powers towards the gradually increasing aggressive demands of Adolf Hitler. Few hours before the Führer’s ultimatum related to territorial claims in Sudetenland at the expense of Czecho-Slovakia would expire, Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, asked Mussolini to "save the peace" by intervening. In his reply, "Herr Hitler" agreed to postpone his mobilization for twenty-four hours and invited Chamberlain to meet in conference at Munich. After Chamberlain brought the news to House of Commons, the whole house burst into a roar of cheering. Men all round, except few remaining in their benches, were shouting: "Get up! Get up! Thank God for the Prime Minister!" One man who remained silent and seated—with his head sunk on his shoulders, his whole demeanor depicting something between anger and despair, was Winston Churchill.

Chamberlain believed Hitler when the latter vowed that restoring their beloved homeland to the mistreated Sudetendeutsche was his last territorial demand. The Prime Minister treated Czechoslovakia, a “faraway country,” only as the “Czech problem” on his desk and not as a land inhabited by real people. Churchill adopted a different attitude; he had studied Adolf Hitler’s career with intensity and was aware of the history of broken promises and “last territorial claims” including the Versailles Treaty, the Locarno Pact, the Rhineland, and Austria.

After the Four-Power Meeting began in Bavaria, the Focus group was supposed to meet and draft and sign a telegram to the British Prime Minister adjuring him to make no further concessions at the expense of Czechoslovakia and warning him that if he did so he would have to fight the House of Commons on his return. Regrettably, one by one, the group drifted away. Some who had said they would come had not and finally declined to permit the use of their names, while others made excuses of lacking the approval from their parties. They refused to put their names to their principles. Churchill commented: "What are they made of? The day is not far off when it won’t be signatures we’ll have to give but lives—the lives of millions. Can we survive? Do we deserve to when there is no courage anywhere?", and Nicolson wrote in his diary: they "sat there gloomily realizing that nothing could be done. …So far as one can see, Hitler gets everything he wants."

Later on, after he signed, behind the back of Czecho-Slovakia, the Munich Agreement, ordering it to cede inter alia the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany, Chamberlain returned to Great Britain. While waving the paper of the 'peace' agreement, the Prime Minister famously declared:

‘My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.’

Prophecies which made Jeremiah appear an optimist

A few days later, during the British Parliamentary Debate on the Munich Agreement, Duff Cooper described Hitler in his address as a dictator that does not understand the language of sweet reasonableness and that discards the old diplomatic methods and introduces a new vocabulary into Europe. He criticized the approach in which “we were always told that on no account must we irritate Herr Hitler; it was particularly dangerous to irritate him before he made a public speech, because if he were so irritated he might say some terrible things from which afterwards there would be no retreat. It seems to me that Herr Hitler never makes a speech save under the influence of considerable irritation, and the addition of one more irritant would not, I should have thought, have made a great difference, whereas the communication of a solemn fact would have produced a sobering effect.” He suggested that urging the mobilization of the Fleet and the mailed fist would be the kind of language which would be easier for Herr Hitler to understand than the guarded language of diplomacy or the conditional clauses of the Civil Service. While Chamberlain considered this to be the one thing that would had ruined the peace mission, Cooper argued it would be the one thing leading it to success and was highly critical of Chamberlain that he still believes he can rely upon the good faith of Hitler. Finally Cooper concluded that if he was a party to persuading, or even to suggesting to, the Czechoslovak government that they should accept ultimatum, he should never be able to hold up his head again: “I have ruined, perhaps, my political career. But that is a little matter; I have retained something which is to me of great value—I can still walk about the world with my head erect.” During his contribution to debate, occasionally interrupted by screams "Rude! Rude!" and "nonsense," Churchill maintained that the utmost Chamberlain has been able to gain for Czechoslovakia and in the matters which were in dispute has been that the German dictator, instead of snatching his victuals from the table, has been content to have them served to him course by course. Lord Maugham labeled Churchill an "agitator" who should be "shot or hanged." The Times reported that Churchill had "treated a crowded House to prophecies which made Jeremiah appear an optimist" and referred patronizingly to his "dismal sincerity."

Less than a half-year later, Hitler broke his promises, took all of Czechoslovakia and then invaded Poland in September 1939, thus starting World War II in Europe. According to Winston Churchill, who opposed the agreement and called it "a total and unmitigated defeat" and "a disaster of the first magnitude" right from the time when it was signed, "There was never a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action." Today Czechs and Slovaks label the Munich Pact also as the Munich Dictate or the Munich Betrayal because the system of alliances in Central Europe guaranteed by France and Britain upon which Czechoslovakia had relied for her safety proved of no avail. The mass demonstration of brokenhearted people of Prague after the surrender of Munich showed that thousands still had the will to resist, but in vain. Leaderless and betrayed, they could not stand against the Munich powers. The western democracies have sacrificed their prestige. The immediate consequence of yielding to Fascist threats of force and violence was that the only hope to offer was the very existence of the other lands where "there may still be men who do not tremble when Adolf Hitler cracks the whip". Western democratic leaders did not manage to stand firm against the threats of Fascism, representatives of which consequently gained confidence in the following their intentions openly described in the Mein Kampf as aiming at fascist mastery of Europe and eventual destruction of the world democracy. The Munich case has become a byword for a failed act of appeasement toward a ruthless despot and/or totalitarian ideology. Peace and freedom and the right to live—they can only be possible in lands where men are determined that totalitarian symbols such as the swastika shall not be raised in triumph and where the pages of totalitarian demagoguery such as the Mein Kampf can never become the supreme law.

W. Churchill's reaction to the Munich Agreement on October 5, 1938 in the House of Commons

‘We have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat … you will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi régime. We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude. Do not let us blind ourselves to that. Many people, no doubt, honestly believe that they are only giving away the interests of Czechoslovakia, whereas I fear we shall find that we have deeply compromised, and perhaps fatally endangered, the safety and even the independence of Great Britain and France. … we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road … we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting”. And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.’

Science vs. Evolutionism

In his historical lecture at Sorbonne University in 1864, Louis Pasteur denounced the doctrine of spontaneous generation, supported by evolutionists of his day, as error. From that time on, Georges Clemenceau was among those who became Pasteur's fierce opponents, holding his scientific discoveries in disdain. For twenty years Clemenceau, the future "Tiger", waited for an opportunity to thwart Pasteur and his methods. In 1886 Clemenceau joined the fiercest of Pasteur's adversaries who tried to discredit his method of antirabies vaccination whenever a death of patient occurred. They were ready to unleash hostile, passionate and skillful campaigns in the French press that was always looking for scandal, and also in the scientific press, that had gained an important position in society since the first half of the nineteenth century. What was at stake here was the very future of the vaccines. Their fallacious arguments were of two kinds:

• if the bitten patient who received the treatment did not develop rabies, the critics claimed that since the disease does not always become symptomatic, this was a spontaneous cure;
• if patient died after vaccination, they attributed the death either to rabies, which thus had not been cured, or worse yet, to the inoculation itself.

The conclusion was always the same: Pasteur had not discovered anything, attributing the positive result to his method and harmful effect to external causes was not an option. Pasteur however had no doubts about the effectiveness of his vaccines. He made sure that every last hostile article based on manipulative, aggressive and false accusations, whether in the general press or in specialized journals, received response either from him or his close associates such as Vulpian, in which they defended his findings and conclusions he had drawn from them. In the face of these attacks he sometimes became tired, unwell and worn out by perpetual controversies and battles that he had to fight day after day, consuming his time he could otherwise devote to scientific research. Instead of using the same underhand means he faced, Pasteur showed science in action and personified the march of progress. At the same time, Pasteur's aggressive adversaries were consumed by envy and "cast into the shadowy realm of the wicked", along with other archaic opponents of his method.

Pasteur's declaration on the arguments of the partisans of spontaneous generation:
“One must not assume that an understanding of science is present in those who borrow its language.”

Among other partisans of Evolutionism, antisocial tendencies were recognized, for example, with:

• Auguste Comte who suffered from a personality disorder and often showed himself to be arrogant and domineering.
• Eugène Dubois who never gave up his dictatorial control over "his" fossils, withdrew them from public and did not allow others to scientifically examine them while at the same time he was becoming more and more paranoid.
• J. B. S. Haldane who was supremely self-confident, given to bullying both subordinates and superiors, and described by his biographer as exhibiting the traits of ham-handedness coupled with impatient temperament.

Wikipedia

Although Wikipedia (WP) can be regarded as usable on very technical matters, on subjects with popular appeal it often requires a moderation by so called ArbCom (Arbitration Commission) which is however usually, despite the claims on neutrality, very biased when trying to solve the disputes of editors. It has been claimed that there are some rather disturbed individuals that run WP via this ArbCom and the cadre of Administrators so that the members of the American Psychological Society (lately renamed to The Association for Psychological Science) should step in and have a rather unique function to mitigate this major defect of WP which is expected to "raise its head". The editors and administrators who are supported by ArbCom often exhibit antisocial tendencies such as breaking the civility rules ("No one gives a shit about bible verses, Convervapedia is that way") when dealing with people who differ in opinions compared to their own.

See Also

• ABC Theory of Emotion