Now that's probably just bragging to your employees but I'm sure he actually believes it and it is a problem. I mean, these private intel companies are actually, I mean first of all there's a revolving door between the private intel companies and our intelligence community so most of them are headed for, or have people high in the organizations who were in the FBI or working for Homeland Security or in the CIA or NSA or something like that. And for the most part I believe they retain their security clearances.
So you get this intelligence community that is completely unregulated. There's no oversight. I mean, at least with the NSA there's at least a facade of oversight, right? You have the Congressional oversight, even if it's theater at least you have that, but when you get in to an organization like Booz-Allen or an organization like Stratfor, where is the oversight coming from? The answer is there is none whatsoever.
R.K.: No oversight at all. That is terrifying. So really, to come back to the article that made me aware of you and your work, you've described whistleblowers, Chelsea Manning and Snowden and Thomas Drake and others who have basically seen an evil system as Hannah Arendt did and the book Moral Mazes is going to describe it and they've called it out and the system has hit them back.
P.L.: Yes, that is what systems do, yes.
R.K.: You know, I've done another series of interviews and articles about psychopaths and sociopaths, and I've been thinking about it lately having watched the final, next to last show of Breaking Bad and Walter White, psychopath monster,
P.L.: Yeah
R.K.: and the guy who plays a cop who kills people -
P.L.: You mean Dexter?
R.K.: Dexter, yeah that one just ended. So you've got some of the hottest T.V. Shows are about psychopaths yet it kind of blends with that banality of evil thing. I've been trying to sort out why people would be so fascinated by Walter White and I think it's because he comes from such a normal background. He's a father and a family man and a teacher, and the whole story is about his evolution to manifesting, because I don't think it's becoming, I think it's manifesting the monster within him.
P.L.: Right.
R.K.: So I've been kind of obsessed almost with the problem we have with sociopaths and psychopaths and I've interviewed people like the guy who wrote the book on corporate psychopaths and someone who teaches therapists how to help victims of psychopaths and sociopaths and narcissists and they all kind of get lumped together, that group of people who are so selfish that they hurt others to take care of themselves.
P.L.: Right.
R.K.: Which kind of fits your definition of evil, I'm kind of throwing that together, so have you thought about that group of people and where they fit in to this picture?
P.L.: Yes I think that to some extent these institutions often need these psychopaths as it were and they tend to be promoted very rapidly in an organization. They are self-interested but if you read Moral Mazes it's very clear that your self interest means that you do what your boss says, right? That's how you get promoted through the organization and then you stomp on everyone beneath you!
So you think of a psychopath as being someone who is just a bull in a china shop just wrecking everything, but in point of fact they are very strategic and as they're concerned about their interest they're very very good at maintaining the well-being of the organization, right? Because that's how they get promoted within the organization. So what happens is that the people who percolate up in to leadership of an organization tend to be psychopaths, but in doing so they become psychopaths for the organization as well.
That is they are capable of walling off, or compartmentalizing the evil -- not just what they do in their ordinary lives but they can compartmentalize the evil they do as an organization and I think that's the kind of key thing there. It's not just in their personal life that they can compartmentalize it, but they can compartmentalize it systemically.
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