This checklist is amazing. (If at first the checklist fails to load, press F5 or try navigating to it through here.)
It probably very much depends on the assessor, but according to my judgement, George W. Bush displays almost all of the listed psychopathic characteristics. I gave him 38 points out of 40. A score of 25-30 or more supports a diagnosis of psychopathy. Average scores in prisoner population are about 22, and average scores in normal population are about 5.
This might explain why different people see this president so differently. (There is still a substantial proportion of US population that appears to support Bush, for some reason.) I'm thinking the difference might be that some people lack the fundamental capability to 'read' people. According to recent articles in New Scientist, about 2% of the population cannot recognize a face - not even faces of people they've known a lifetime. It stands to reason that a larger percentage of the population would recognize faces but would have trouble interpreting the person - establishing an accurate mental model of what the person is like, rather than just hearing what he says and taking it at face value. (My mother, for example, has trouble understanding sarcasm. She's known me and my dad for the better part of her life, and she can't tell when either of us is being sarcastic; she takes it seriously. I reckon there are many more people like that out there.)
I hated Bush since before he was elected president. I knew he was a detestable person from the first few times I saw him. I felt despair as if a great tragedy had befallen the United States when he was elected. Yet, when I was confronted with some who supported him, I couldn't really argue against him persuasively, because essentially, my argument was that he is a detestable person. It was subjective.
Yet, now I learn that his behavior supports a diagnosis of psychopathy.
So now, knowing everything that happened since 2000, one might argue that this subjective impression from 6 years ago wasn't so subjective after all, now - was it?
Showing 3 out of 3 comments, oldest first:
Comment on Jan 5, 2007 at 09:19 by boris kolar
Comment on Apr 28, 2007 at 23:05 by Anonymous
I would suggest you study up on malignant narcissism,to see how it applies to the radical left ( of which I strongly suspect you are a member)
I would explain to you why "some people" seem to support him(while his current approval rating his down, his likeability numbers are, and have always been, quite high) but it would require a knowledge of international relations, economics and political science which I suspect are beyond your grasp, given your current misunderstanding of some fundamentals of psychology.
Comment on Apr 29, 2007 at 10:52 by Anonymous
Then again, is there a definitive expert that will give you a definitive opinion?
It's highly likely that, if you put 10 respected psychiatrists in a group and ask them their opinion about anything, there will be significant discrepancies in their judgements. This is because experts, too, are human, and their judgements are as subjective as everybody else's.
It saddens me that you cannot make a statement about your political beliefs without feeling the need to belittle the person with whom you disagree. Insinuations about my intellectual grasp and theorizing about how I must be a member of the "radical left" clearly shows that you have no clue about me, nor any respect for your correspondent. Unfortunately, I don't feel that any progress can be made on these terms.