1) Would you be surprised to learn that many of the traits you consider heroic/admirable are psychopathic traits?

Grace under pressure, radiant charm, bold risk taking, fearlessness, not driven by emotion.

Like all things with the mind, psychopathology exists on a spectrum.

2) You only know the psychopaths who make the news as serial killers but they're the smallest percent of the spectrum. I call them "failed psychopaths" because they have zero impulse control. Psychopaths make up about 2% of the pop. The vast majority exist in positions of power.

3) Psychopaths excel at certain kinds of jobs, like surgery and law and corporate leadership, where their cold blooded calm keeps them intensely focused when everyone else is cracking under the pressure.

4) But there is a very dangerous kind of psychopath that is rarely discussed + they're the ones in positions of supreme power, with control over a vast array of people and resources, whether at the government or corporate level. Their traits are easy to spot if you pay attention.

5) The Office of Strategic Service compiled this list of psychotic characteristics during the war about Hitler:

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy;

6) never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

7) This is the "red zone" of psychopathic characteristics and when you see them in any person, public or private, you should take great care because you're dealing with someone who not only doesn't think or feel like you, they are almost alien in the way they perceive the world.

8) If I gave you 10 million dollars and said do whatever you want for the rest of your life, what would you do? 90% of the population would do what they love for rest of their life, see friends, eat, read, drink, travel, play games, have fun. But not psychopaths in the red zone.

9) No matter how much they get they want to control and dominate more, to play a game with people as pawns. And once they get into power they are nearly impossible to remove until they die and the destruction they bring is massive and widespread.

10) Their psychosis ripples out into society and has a distortion effect. They induce altered states in everyone around them, as if the air is laced with drugs. People become crazier and more violent and insane around them. The worst traits in people come boiling to the surface.

11) A master psychopath gives people the room to express their worst characteristics with ease. He gives them an outlet. The Nazi policy that allowed parents and the state to kill mentally or physically challenged children started with a single letter.

12) The letter came from a *father* who wrote to Hitler asking if he could kill his mentally challenged child. An ambitious Nazi who controlled the mail saw it as an opportunity and brought the letter to the great psychotic. He got the policy approved.

13) The policy allowed hospitals that cared for the disabled to fill in a form. If 3 doctors put an X on the form they could kill the child. In a classic example of how policies spiral out of control under psychotic leadership, hospitals soon skipped the form all together.

14) Hospital staff simply selected the children they wanted to kill and then put down the cause of death in the register as measles or some other small disease.

15) Other people in society often think they can control a brilliant psychotic once he gets in power but they are soon show how delusional they are because red zone psychotics are masters at long term strategy and finding exploits and weaknesses in human behavior.

16) The problem is other humans think they're playing by the same rules. They imagine everyone has some level of empathy or consciousness + they don't realize red zone psychotics are playing a game that is much different from theirs, one with no rules except to win at all costs.

17) In the end the red zone psychotic cannot be controlled and the inevitable outcome is mass suffering and death on a scale that few can imagine.

18) This scenario plays out again and again in history with 100% consistency. I call it the Dark Hero's Journey. It's most brilliantly dramatized in the first Avengers movie, by Thanos, a red zone psychopath who wants to wipe out half the galaxy to "save it."

19) He is helped by die hard fanatics who hang on his every word and who would give their life for him, never knowing that his loyalty goes only one way and they're nothing but pawns to him because everyone is a pawn to him.

20) Perhaps nobody is more surprised then the former follower of a psychotic ideology who is now getting garroted, hung, shot or stabbed by his former comrades in arms for not being pure or true enough to their imaginary cause.

21) This happens when the red zone psychotic runs out of imaginary enemies to demonize. The psychotic philosophy is like a cancer that eats everything around it and then feeds on itself until it finally collapses and balance has a chance to return to a traumatized society.

22) But the return to balance is not an easy path and there's no short cut. It's only achieved by weathering the societal storm of insanity the leads regular people to bloody rage and to unspeakable atrocity and cruelty to their fellow man, who they can no longer see clearly.

23) Only when the psychosis has passed away can average people make sense of what has happened to them and begin to rebuild in the wake of destruction. When the hold of the altered state is broken it's like waking up from a nightmare, except that it was real.