Truth vs Falsehood (32 page)

In addition to the above, there is often a verbal faculty characterized as glibness as well as impulsiveness, the inability to learn from experience, emotional instability, and a proclivity and attraction to crime, drugs, and sensationalism. The lack of incorporation of social values and the respect for authority are expressed as defiance, impulsiveness, and narcissistic egocentricity. Psychiatrically, they are often diagnosed early in life as having Oppositional Defiant Disorder or Conduct Disorder, with psychopathic or sociopathic trends.

The early childhood symptoms of some forms of this chronic mental disorder are often characterized as the triad of fire setting, cruelty to animals, and enuresis (persistent bedwetting past the expected age of control). There is a proclivity to prevarication and being a ‘pathological liar’, with an impaired sense of reality and capacity for comprehension. Some become convincing fabricators and invent believable stories by which they often accuse innocent people whose lives are thereby destroyed. This is one situation in which the calibration of truth can be crucial, as the false accusers are quite often convincing to authorities. Because of the commonness of false accusations, male personnel in adolescent treatment centers are fearful of being alone with any female patient for even brief moments. The residents know only too well the disastrous impact of accusations that are often due to malicious spite resulting from perceived slights to the inflated narcissism.

Recidivism is associated with the inner grandiosity and attraction to thrills, danger, excitement, and a denial of reality, which are seen as obstructive to the inner infantile omnipotence. These characteristics lead to chaotic marital and family situations, and chronic school and behavioral problems. These individuals frequently become dropouts and join gangs and antisocial countercultures. Most true criminals have a long ‘rap sheet’ that goes back to childhood. Seventy-five percent of discharged felons are back in prison within three years.

Youth violence, as reported by a current, ongoing study by the National Institutes of Health (Kaplan, 2004), is characterized in early childhood by low I.Q., delayed speech development, lower resting heart rate, genetic factors, negative emotions, lack of sympathy for others, disrespect for rules, unreliability, carelessness, aggression, attraction to antisocial and violent behaviors, plus cerebral neurotransmitter (metabolites of Serotonin) abnormalities triggered by childhood abuse.

Early in their lives, psychopaths are often referred for psychiatric treatment, which is found to be useless and ineffective. Occasionally, there is improvement because the disorder is sometimes associated with bipolar disorder, ADHD, addictions, or borderline or explosive personality disorders. The lack of response to psychologically-based treatments has to do with the inner defects in ego formation as well as the absence of the capacity for love or compassion. In psychoanalytic terms, they lack the ability to form a positive transference to the therapist.

In society, the career of the criminal is reflective of their socio-economic status. On the lowest level, they become members of criminal gangs. The more erudite become con men, and some are members of subcultures, such as the Irish travelers, the Chicago gangs of the prohibition era, or the drug dealers of today’s culture. Psychopaths who have come from higher socio-economic levels often are more socially adept and become white-collar embezzlers or unethical CEOs of large corporations and get involved with stock fraud. Some learn how to set up shell corporations, Ponzi schemes, and pseudo charities, or they become manipulators of the stock or commodities markets. Some become adept at politics and enter government where they become corrupt officials. When psychopathy is limited primarily to sexuality, pedophiles infiltrate religious or youth organizations to which they are attracted by the availability of victims. They wear the sheep’s clothing of the cleric, scout leader, coach, camp counselor, etc. Diagnostically, all the above-cited examples calibrate below 200, a serious warning sign. Psychopaths characteristically do not admit guilt even when caught red-handed or photographed on videotape.

The dual-personality criminal is often unsuspected unless it is held in mind as a possible explanation for puzzling cases that include a subordinate psychopathic personality camouflaged by a seemingly normal, respectable persona. The two personalities may be completely split and even unknown to each other (see later). The normal personality protests its innocence because it is actually unaware of the split-off, depressed criminal personality.

From the above classifications, it can be seen that it is important to correctly diagnose the violator of the law instead of lumping all violators together, which is obviously doomed to failure, as it would be in medicine where effective treatment is completely dependent upon a correct initial diagnosis. The normal person who violates the law responds to consequences such as fines or probation, or, in more severe cases, imprisonment. The normal violator of the law also responds to education, such as a required driving re-education course or restriction of a driver’s license. The normal person is also inhibited from further violations by shame, guilt, remorse, public disgrace, fear of consequences, and fear of loss of social and self-esteem.

True crime implies a more serious violation, and here again, the diagnosis is critical. The question to be answered is whether or not the basic personality is psychopathic or relatively intact. The law historically differentiates crimes of passion, crimes committed under the duress of financial crises, and passing life situations. Both the violator of the law and the normal person who commit a crime are responsive to therapeutic techniques of group or individual psychotherapy, psychiatry, philosophical re-education, counseling, faith-based programs, or reacculturation. This is an area where anger management classes, referral to 12-step programs, probation, and supervision do eventually bring about amelioration. Again, it is critically important to make a correct diagnosis because the application of consequences or therapeutic attempts is usually ineffective if the underlying personality of the perpetrator is sociopathic.

Criminality is an established recidivist lifestyle for which no effective therapeutic endeavor has thus far been found. The basic personality is unchanged, and, with experience, the perpetrator does not change the behaviors but becomes more clever in learning how to escape detection.

To a person with normal psychological makeup, a prison sentence is frightening. The culture is foreign and brings up guilt, fear, and aversion to the prior behaviors. These responses are totally lacking in the psychopathic personality to whom prison life is a very familiar culture; the individual is merely removed from the streets to another location and continues uninterruptedly. The basic tenets and lifestyle of criminality are actually the internal rules of conduct within any prison’s population and are attenuated in their expression merely by the threat of the prison administration.

In the prison population, the gangs maintain control just as they did on the streets, and in order to survive, the prison inmate quickly learns how to play the game. To the psychopath, time in prison has no impact on subsequent behaviors other than a refinement of cleverness.

The calibrated level of the psychopathic personality of the typical criminal recidivist is generally between 35 and 80 on the Scale of Consciousness. So far, criminality has failed to respond to any therapeutics or course of techniques, and thus, society can only respond by maneuvers to protect itself as best it can, i.e., quarantine in prisons. Because the psychopath scorns rules and regulations, even those that would be called “common sense,” the police detain citizens for what seem to be minor infractions because they know that the psychopath is irresponsible as a lifestyle. Thus, stopping cars for having a taillight out brings a high capture rate of criminals who are wanted for more serious crimes. This is the wisdom of the “three strikes and you’re out” legislation that has been demonstrated to be highly effective in taking the criminals off the streets, resulting in the reduction of over 50 percent of street crime.

It is naïve to look at such laws with the sentimentalism that “it is unfair to put somebody in prison for stealing a pack of cigarettes.” The facts reveal that the chronic criminal has been caught for maybe only 1/100th of the number of crimes they have committed. The typical pedophile has usually abused scores and in some cases even hundreds of victims before arrest and detection. The car thief has stolen hundreds of cars before finally getting caught. The domestic abuser has been violent dozens of times, and the chronic thief has stolen thousands of items, etc.

Due to legalities, the courts, together with defense attorneys, preclude a presentation of the defendant’s past history to the jury whose capacity for balanced judgment is therefore impaired by the deliberate withholding of critically important information. The diagnosis is completely different between the recidivist and the opportunistic perpetrator of a crime under duress or temporary weakness of personality. The “one size fits all,” strictly punitive approach is only effective with persons who are basically psychologically intact and have fallen into deviant behavior but are able to learn from their mistakes. For some such fortunate individuals, incarceration is the experience that brings about the critical “hitting bottom.” Many such people do go through major turnarounds and become model citizens and spiritually oriented.

When it is realized that psychopathic persons are unable to help themselves and that no effective treatment is available, a compassionate view incorporates the realization that while the psychopaths are perpetrators, at the same time, they are victims of their own condition. The evolution of their consciousness is primitive and seems to be arrested at the predatory-animal level. Other than quarantine, society has no other solutions as yet.

Espionage and Political Criminality

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg		175
Walker Family (Navy spies)		120
Harold Philby		120
FBI and CIA Moles		110-175
Aldrich Ames		105
The Cambridge 5		75
Los Alamos Defectors-Manhattan Project		80
Double Agents		130
Alger Hiss		205 160
Robert Hanssen (spy)		80

This group is unique and includes the combinations of greed, pseudopolitical rationalization, character defect, defective conscience, and the capacity for psychological compartmentalization (which is also seen in some serial killers, especially those who kill sequential spouses and lead an ostensibly normal lifestyle in the interim).

Along with these defects, there is an accompanying intellectualism. The defectors who revealed the atomic bomb secrets considered themselves to be the intellectually superior elite and their actions thereby excusable as a consequence of their capacity for rationalization. Although ‘ethics’ was an essential element of discussion of the morality of the development of nuclear fission, individuals with intellectualized grandiosity rationalized their behaviors, which were actually examples of deception as demonstrated by the calibrated levels of their consciousnesses. If their erudition were truly superior to the rest of mankind, then their consciousness calibrations would have been in the high 400s or the 500s.

“IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE

EASTERN DISTRICT OF VIRGINIA

Alexandria Division

SENTENCING MEMORANDUM

“Robert Philip Hanssen is a traitor. For all the words that have been written about him, for all the psychological analyses, the speculations about his motivation, and the assessments of his character, this is, at the end of the day, all that really warrants being said about Hanssen. He is a traitor and that singular truth is his legacy.