Diagnosing Paul Ryan’s psychopathy: Arrogant, manipulative, deceitful, remorseless
A flim-flam artist is a specific kind of con-man, and a con-man, in turn, is often enough a specific kind of psychopath. Although it’s impossible to clinically diagnose someone from a distance, I believe a good case can be made that Ryan has exhibited classic signs of psychopathic traits, especially in two closely related dimensions, the interpersonal dimension: glibness/superficial charm (just look at how the Beltway press falls for him), grandiose sense of self-worth (it never bothers Ryan however wrong he may be about anything), cunning/manipulative (see how effortlessly he got a positive-looking photo-op with the Congressional Black Caucus, without giving up a single thing), and pathological lying (calling his decades-long devotion to Ayn Rand “an urban legend”), as well as the affective dimension: lack of remorse or guilt, and failure to accept responsibility for own actions (failure to apologize for his racist remarks about “inner-city culture,” brushing it off as merely being “inarticulate”), emotionally shallow and callous/lack of empathy (his draconian budget cuts, which would take us back to Dickensian England).
Simply listing those examples is not a proper argument, of course. Doing that would take a much longer and more ambitious effort. But it is an indication that such an argument could be made — and that people really should stop simply assuming that Ryan will act like a normal non-psychopathic person does. At the very least, we should keep an open mind — maybe he’ll act like a psychopath, maybe he won’t. Let’s watch closely, and see how things turn out.
However, there are two more reasons to suspect Ryan of being psychopathic. The first is his long-term devotion to Ayn Rand, the second his totally unconvincing split from her — and other similarly unconvincing acts of reinvention he’s performed from time to time.
Ryan’s devotion to Rand is problematic because, as conservative crime novelist Michael Prescott explained, Rand herself modeled the protagonist of her first novel, Danny Renahan, on a notorious serial killer, William Edward Hickman, the most despicable sort of psychopath there is. It was her first-draft portrayal of her ideal man, and in a journal entry she wrote:
“[Renahan] is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness — [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people … Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should.”
http://www.salon.com/2014/05/03/diagnosing_paul_ryans_psychopathy_arrogant_manipulative_deceitful_remorseless/
