Psychopathy in politics: callous indifference versus deliberate harm (1)

It could be argued that there are two kinds of psychopathy, and two different manifestations of the behaviour.

First, there is what may be termed the psychopathy of "callous indifference". This is psychopath that has an aim, and will achieve that aim regardless of the cost to others. The aim is the only thing that matters, and those that get in the way only have themselves to blame if they get hurt. At the extreme level, there are historical figures like Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union with complete callous indifference to the fate of its population. He had a plan for the country, and no-one would be allowed to get in his way; if that meant millions of Ukrainians dying of starvation, or millions of others being killed and imprisoned by the government during the "terror", so be it. This even extended to his own family.
At the more mundane level, there are criminal gangs and the mafia, who get rid of people who are a "nuisance". Similarly, there are "white collar criminals" who will break the law and ignore regulations in order to make a profit. These are all manifestations of "callous indifference".
When it comes to government, there are governments ruled by those who have an aim, and are prepared to carry out that aim regardless of the cost to any innocent individuals caught up the government's scheme. It takes a large amount of callous indifference from government when they are shown real-life innocent individuals whose lives have been wrecked by government decisions, to still continue with the same aim regardless.

Second, there is the psychopath that perpetuates deliberate harm. This is the psychopath who (to use the British legal phrase), with malice aforethought, deliberately decides to do harm to others. His aim of deliberate harm is to "punish". An obvious historical example of this is Adolf Hitler, whose hatred of the Jews led to his conscious decision to try and wipe them out.

The focus of this article is on the first type: callous indifference, and how this is manifested in everyday politics.
Below, we'll look at some examples of government policy in contemporary Britain that could be construed as actions of "psychopathic" callous indifference.


Britain's "austerity" government" - a modern "case study" in callous indifference

The British government's policy of "austerity", enacted since 2010, has been its guiding principle. The idea, on the face of it, was to bring Britain's finances back into an even keel after suffering during the financial crisis. Explained in straightforward terms of "balancing the books", this garnered a lot of public support, at least initially. But this simplistic explanation masked the hidden truth.

The austerity agenda has pervaded all aspects of government, from local government services to the police and armed forces, the welfare system and public services. With local government budgets cut by up to fifty percent in some cases, this has had a predictable and devastating effect on social care provision, with this having a cascade effect on mental health services, the elderly and so on. The surge in the number of homeless people is inevitably tied up with the fact that those in need of help from the state are simply being left to fend for themselves due to the lack of resources now provided by the state, with the predictable result that some have become the homeless "refugees" of the government's austerity agenda.
The "reforms" to the welfare system, enacted mainly under the watch of Iain Duncan Smith, have had a similar effect. From the introduction of Universal Credit, to the earlier changes to how disability was assessed, has meant that every reason humanly possible is being provided to withdraw funds from those in need. With a regime introduced that assumes that those asking for welfare are "fakers", coupled with one that creates an internal working environment where those working under the system not meeting targets under risk of losing their jobs, there is a culture of fear, both on those in need and those assessing that need. Those working for the state apply the rules rigidly for fear of official retribution; those who suffer the consequences of these rules can fear for their very future.
This culture of fear is deliberate. The fear created is systemically no different from that which has existed in authoritarian regimes; the only difference is the extremity of application. It is a fear borne of insecurity, that nothing and no-one is to be relied upon, and one small change can bring personal disaster. It has the double effect of dissuading some from even attempting to gain welfare that they are entitled to, while those who are on welfare live in constant fear of some small accidental event (like missing an appointment because of an unreliable transport network) resulting in a "sanction". The ultimate result of this can be being cut off from state support completely, regardless of the consequences.
While the government's aim of the austerity agenda may not be to punish sections of society deliberately, the "hidden truth" referred to earlier is that the idea is to deliberately reduce the size of the state. It takes a large amount of callous indifference to ignore the fact that this would have a seriously detrimental, even dangerous, effect on some segments of society. But the government doesn't care, because its aim is reducing the size of the state, regardless of its effect on society.


Theresa May's "hostile environment"

It takes a certain kind of willful ignorance of the lives of others to think that creating an immigration system designed with an inbuilt assumption of "guilty before innocent" is going to only punish the guilty. Whereas in the past, Home Office officials were allowed a fair degree of leniency about how stringently they enforced the rules, under Theresa May's watch as Home Secretary, this turned into the "hostile environment". This meant officials were to follow the rules to a tee, for fear of bring reprimanded or sacked. Those applicants who, for whatever reason, failed to provide the correct documentation, were to be denied. There should be no exceptions.
One early example of this was when the rules were changed around five or six years ago, so that only those British subjects who earn a high enough salary in Britain are allowed the right to live with their non-EU spouses and children in the UK. These rules are among the most punitive in the world, certainly in the developed world. This is a rule of such basic inhumanity that it has created "skype families", or has simply meant that there are a segment of British subjects with families that are forced into exile from Britain; due to government policy, some British families are unable to live in Britain.

Now the recently-highlighted status of the "Windrush generation" has shown the cross-over of the "hostile environment" and the "austerity" agenda. In the case of those who arrived to the UK from the Caribbean fifty years ago (around half a million, by some estimates), the only documentary evidence of their arrival was on their landing cards from decades earlier. But thanks to the Home Office's necessary "downsizing" in the first months of May's tenure, these documents were all thrown away for want of space in their new location.
Now these people can no longer prove when they entered the UK legally, as the documents were discarded by the very department that later on would need them to prove these people's rights. In this sense, the government has made them "non-persons", whose rights have been literally thrown in the trash.
You could call this sheer incompetence on a mammoth scale, but that would ignore the deliberate necessity for those in charge to assume that the people affected by this would all have other means to prove how long they had lived in the UK. But, in the absence of any national ID card system, the government itself only recognizes a small number of historical documents in such cases, as those in charge ought to know. This was why those landing cards, as anachronistic as they are, were so important (as well an indictment of the government's lack of proper systems). Because the government's own method of recording historical data is so haphazard and chaotic, without a British passport or UK birth certificate to properly declare your nationality, it's often difficult to prove your own identity over a period of decades. In this way, the onus is put on the individual to somehow have to hand a huge sheaf of documentary records proving his rights over decades, as the government itself simply has no organised historical system of records worthy of the name. This is nuts, but this is "the system". As said before, government officials would know this.
The fact that officials discarded those people's documents without question can only be seen as an act of callous indifference, that leaves the rights of those people affected up in the air. In effect, they have no rights, at least compared other British citizens, as they do not have the documents to prove it; the government threw them away. And being up against a Home Office that is no longer allowed to show leniency in special cases, how can they prove what rights they are entitled to?
Government assurances that these people will be treated fairly are facile and worthless, as the only way to ensure these people's rights would be to change the law on the government's "hostile environment", which is politically unthinkable. And this still does not magically bring back documents the government have destroyed.
The government has shown time and again it can never be trusted to "do the right thing", as the default setting of the system now in place under Theresa May is one of callous indifference that has aims and targets to be reached, regardless of the cost to those innocents caught in its trap, whose rights are removed arbitrarily. Just be thankful if you're not one of them, I suppose?

The callous indifference of the "hostile environment" also turns landlords, employers, hospitals and schools into virtual immigration enforcement officers in their own right, as they are now legally obliged  - under fear of government sanction - to check the status of who come under their orbit. The "hostile environment" has created a society of spies. What this means in practice is that those people even suspected of being illegal immigrants can be caught in this web of paranoia and prejudice. This is one way how those of the "Windrush generation" discovered their rights had been removed; by, for instance an employer or hospital checking their records and discovering (thanks to government actions) they're "not on the system".
The "hostile environment" has thus allowed basic racism and prejudice to re-emerge, where Britain is heading back to the hateful culture of "No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs". While the government might blithely state that only the guilty have something to fear, the realities of this involve wary landlords denying tenancy to people that "seem foreign", while more unscrupulous landlords house foreigners in unsafe (and illegal) tenancies, with the tenants too afraid to report them. The same is true for the public sector, where staff are now meant to check the status of anyone they suspect i.e. who "seems foreign". While Theresa May's idea was to create a "hostile environment" that made it almost impossible for illegal immigrants to live in the UK, the reality is that this now applies in much the same way to many foreigners in general, and even some Brits as well.

The British government's "austerity" agenda, coupled with its "hostile environment", are thus two examples of callous indifference that can be seen in politics. This is what happens when the mentality of the psychopath enters government: an unflinching bureaucracy of fear.