Psychopathic Relations and the Super-Patriarch

Abstract

This essay analyzes the psychopathic (i.e., anti-social) currents within hegemonic social relations—deregulation, environmental devastation, militarization, and the like. The essay locates these currents within patriarchal norms. It also promotes feminist theory as a resource for assessing the psychopathic relations that these norms have produced.

The Black feminist writer and filmmaker Toni Cade Bambara wrote in 1993 an essay entitled “Language and the Writer.” She begins, “I want to talk about language, form, and changing the world. The question that faces billions of people at this moment, one decade shy of the twenty-first century, is: Can the planet be rescued from the psychopaths?” (Bambara 1996, 139). When Bambara wrote the essay, several alarming events had already occurred, and many more were on the horizon. There was the Iran-Contra scandal from 1985 to 1987. There was the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and Ronald Reagan’s refusal to acknowledge it until 1987, 6 years after the first reported cases. There was the Willie Horton ad in which George H.W. Bush mobilized white voters by dog-whistling about Black lawlessness. In 1989, the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred. There was also the Gulf War that started in 1990, and Rodney King was beaten in 1991.

Let’s assume that Bambara had these events and leaders in mind when she referred to the psychopaths who were endangering the planet. Let’s also assume that her question is one that we can extend into our moment. In doing so, we might use the question to pose another set of questions: “What are the psychopathic relations that jeopardize the planet in this moment, twenty-plus years into the new century?” Moreover, we might see these jeopardies as the culmination of patriarchal pathologies that spew their toxicities across global terrains—toxicities that attempt to make the anti-social the norm of social relations, toxicities promoted by billionaires and political leaders—that command the world’s attention.Thus, we might understand our task as clarifying the social formations unleashed by what we might call the super-patriarch.

Just a quick perusal of the urgencies of our moment yields catastrophes that cross social and national boundaries. There’s the climate disaster brought on largely by fossil fuel production. There’s the rise of authoritarian movements and regimes in the Global North and the Global South. There’s the astonishing and growing gap between the wealthy and everyone else. There’s the violent suppression of social justice movements here and abroad. There’s the proliferation of nuclear weapons. There’s the violence that is the Israeli genocide. There’s also the election of right-wing political leaders to major offices. There’s the organized campaign to target trans people, particularly youth. There’s the attack on reproductive freedoms. All these things amplify Bambara’s question.

I don’t know whether Bambara read Hervey Cleckley’s 1941 book The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues about the So-Called Psychopathic Personality, or whether she was simply drawing on the everyday use of the category “psychopath.” In any case, Cleckley ([1941] 1982) said, in that text, that the psychopathic personality was expressed by someone who seemed normal and rational on the outside but who internally lacked coherence and fostered anti-social and destructive behavior. Bambara’s argument, though, recasts the psychopath from private terrains and repositions that figure onto the world’s stage. This interpretation might go even further than Bambara and engage psychopathy through various social formations. As a result, Bambara’s statement compels us to look for psychopathic relations in social formations. Put simply, her charge requires us to determine the social formations in our moment that are given to psychopathy—the practices that are made to seem rational even as they destroy lives and freedoms.

Certain super-patriarchal figures are brought into stark relief in our moment—the world leader and the billionaire, in particular. But even they are simply metonyms for anti-social formations—deregulation, environmental devastation, nuclear proliferation, and so on. Each of these psychopathic formations takes as its archetype the super-patriarch, the figure—real and discursive—that commands world-changing resources and seemingly arrogates all social agency unto himself.

In his 2022 book Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World, the economic journalist Peter Goodman profiled the Davos man, as that “species of human” made up of the “wealthiest, most powerful people on earth” (Goodman 2022, 1), who used their resources during the pandemic to shield themselves from its ravages, buying up real estate and stock at the cheapest prices, using their lobbyists to convince governments to mobilize taxpayers’ monies for corporate bailouts, maneuvering healthcare and pharmaceutical systems to maximize profits from people’s miseries (Goodman 2022, 1).

According to Goodman, Davos Man constructs himself as the world’s superhero. As Marc Benioff, the billionaire CEO and philanthropist of the software company Salesforce, put it at the 2021 World Economic Forum,

In the pandemic, it was CEOs in many, many cases all over the world who were the heroes . . . . They’re the ones who stepped forward with their financial resources and their corporate resources, their employees, their factories, and pivoted rapidly—not for profit but to save the world. (Goodman 2022, 2)

For Benioff, the billionaire is the presumed social and moral agent par excellence, mobilizing his goodwill and riches to produce a presumably altruistic version of capitalism.

While focusing on particular billionaires, Goodman suggests that the billionaire is also an ideological force. “He has insinuated into our politics and culture what we may call the Cosmic Lie,” he says,

the alluring yet demonstrably bogus idea that cutting taxes and deregulating markets will not only produce extra riches for the most affluent, but trickle the benefits down to the lucky masses—something that has, in real life, happened zero times. (Goodman 2022, 8)

As a figure that shows up in political and social culture, the billionaire is more than any actual individual, but a social archetype that shapes social discourses, policies, identities, and practices.

While the theory of trickle-down economics claimed to be a way of achieving social responsibility by looking out not only for the wealthy but also for the middle and lower classes as well, its origins were explicitly anti-social and anti-public. For instance, in his New York Times article “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits,” the economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman (1970) argued, “In either case, the key point is that, in his capacity as a corporate executive, the manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation or establish the eleemosynary institution, and his primary responsibility is to them.” Here, Friedman tried to shift corporate conversations away from the social world and its publics and toward the welfare of the shareholders.

For Friedman (1970), the discourse of social responsibility confused necessary distinctions between the executive as private person and the executive as a corporate being. As he said,

Of course, the corporate executive is also a person in his own right. As a person, he may have many other responsibilities that he recognizes or assumes voluntarily—to his family, his conscience, his feelings of charity, his church, his clubs, his city, his country. He may feel impelled by these responsibilities to devote part of his income to causes he regards as worthy, to refuse to work for particular corporations, even to leave his job, for example, to join his country’s armed forces. If we wish, we may refer to some of these responsibilities as “social responsibilities.”

For Friedman, these actions involved the preferences of the private individual, but they were not to be confused with the duties of the corporate being who manages the preferences of shareholders:

But in these respects he is acting as a principal, not an agent; he is spending his own money or time or energy, not the money of his employers or the time or energy he has contracted to devote to their purposes. If these are “social responsibilities,” they are the social responsibilities of individuals, not business. (Friedman 1970)

In this instance, the shareholder is understood necessarily to have no social responsibilities, and it is the job of the executive to fulfill the anti-social world presumably demanded by the shareholder.

Friedman implied that this anti-social world was the world as it should be—the normative preference of a market society. He said, for instance, “Whether blameworthy or not, the use of the cloak of social responsibility, and the nonsense spoken in its name by influential and prestigious businessmen, does clearly harm the foundations of a free society” (Friedman 1970). A free society, he implied, is therefore an anti-social society. This is why he could sum up the business world as having only one narrow commitment—the accumulation of wealth. As he put it,

I have called it a “fundamentally subversive doctrine” in a free society, and have said that in such a society, “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” (Friedman 1970)

Friedman’s argument about social responsibility trickled down to political culture in the United States and Britain. In a 1986 press conference, then-President Ronald Reagan said, “I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the Government, And I’m here to help” (Reagan 1986). And In 1987, his British counterpart Margaret Thatcher said,

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first (Thatcher 1987).

It is significant here that Thatcher redefines personhood away from its assumed social roots. A real person, according to her, is someone who turns away from notions of the public and its social institutions. It is not simply that she said there is no such thing as society; she also implied that there is no such thing as a social being. This construction of the person as someone who rejects the social and rejects relationality is absolutely crucial for a corporate and social ethos that can legitimately be called psychopathic.

Who knows all that Bambara meant when she invoked the crisis to our planet? But certainly in our day, the threat of environmental disaster and nuclear devastation qualifies. In fact, by evacuating social concerns from policy and subjecthood, opportunities were created for Earth’s corporate devastation. Take for instance, the issue of nuclear weapons. In her chapter “Peace is a Sister’s Issue: Afro-American Women and the Campaign Against Nuclear Arms,” from Women, Culture, and Politics, Angela Davis (1990, 70) wrote,

If it is true, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once said, that a “nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death,” then our country has died spiritually many times over since the advent of the Reagan administration.

Davis (1990) points out the role that tax inequalities play in this nuclear reality, writing,

[Some] of the country’s largest military contractors pay absolutely no federal income tax—Lockheed, General Electric, Boeing, and General Dynamics between 1981 and 1983, even though they had combined profits totaling $10 billion. Some of these companies even managed to get money back from the government.

Davis suggested here that by relieving the weapons manufacturers of any tax burden, the government underwrote our nuclear nightmare.

But perhaps more importantly, the American public underwrote it as well. As she stated,

Over sixty cents of each income-tax dollar go to the Pentagon. A person who earns twenty-two thousand dollars a year will have given an entire year’s salary to the Pentagon between 1985 and 1989, all for the production of more MX missiles, more Trident and Cruise missiles, and for further research and development of the Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars. (Davis 1990, 70–71)

In this assessment, we have what we may consider a retake of Marx’s (2004, 47–59) argument in “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret.” There Marx argued that the commodity form had overtaken social relations and suppressed knowledge of how it amplifies and normalizes labor exploitation. Here, the secret of tax displacements onto the public is that they foster the conditions for looming disasters that would destroy the public. Put simply, because of decades of tax policies, the public is enlisted in the psychopathic project.

In his discussion of defense spending, the late political theorist Eqbal Ahmad (2006, 207) also argued,

During this period [of 1947–1970], the United States spent fifty times more money on its military operations in underdeveloped countries than on its so-called economic aid to them. At the same time, its investments abroad grew from 7.2 billion dollars in 1947 to more than 60 billion in 1970; the Pentagon and the armaments industry collaborated to make the United States the biggest merchant of death in the Third World (11 billion dollars in United States arms sales to the Third World in 1975).

The status of the United States as a weapons distributor, in other words, is underwritten by the private sphere of the home.

The distressing climate disaster is also another area in which we can see psychopathic relations. Consider, for instance, the revelations that Exxon Mobil knowingly suppressed the effects of fossil fuel production. Discovering internal memos in 2015, investigative reporters uncovered that Exxon Mobil understood in the 1970s that fossil fuel production would lead to global warming and change the world’s landscape before 2050. Additional documents also revealed that the largest trade association for the U.S. oil and gas industry knew what the effects of fossil fuels would be since the 1950s at least, and that “electric utilities, Total oil company, and GM and Ford motor companies [were aware of this since] at least the 1970s” (Supran, Rahmstorf, and Oreskes 2023).

But as scientists Geoffrey Supran, Naomi Oreskes, and Stefan Rahmstorf (2023) have recently argued, the truth is even more damning than what the journalists uncovered:

Our findings demonstrate that ExxonMobil didn’t just know “something” about global warming decades ago—they knew as much as academic and government scientists knew. But whereas those scientists worked to communicate what they knew, ExxonMobil worked to deny it—including overemphasizing uncertainties, denigrating climate models, mythologizing global cooling, feigning ignorance about the discernibility of human-caused warming, and staying silent about the possibility of stranded fossil fuel assets in a carbon constrained world.

In its active suppression of research, Exxon Mobil was fulfilling Friedman’s argument to the letter. As far as its managers were concerned, the only social responsibility that the corporation had was to its own profits. It had no moral responsibility to preserve social well-being. Exxon was so committed to profit making that it obfuscated climate research and knowingly helped to bring about our present-day climate disaster. And inasmuch as it flouted the welfare of life on this planet, it proved itself to be the corporate expression of psychopathy.

For our purposes, it is important to acknowledge that the super-patriarch is not simply the object of critique. It is also a powerful object of identification and subjectification. The theorist Norma Alarcón 30 years ago, in her article “The Theoretical Subjects of This Bridge Called My Back,” tried to bring our attention to the fact that the patriarch was not only an object of identification for cisgender men but also for certain strands within feminism as well:

Though feminism has problematized gender relations . . ., it has not problematized the subject of knowledge and her complicity with the notion of consciousness as “synthetic unificatory power, the centre and active point of organization of representations determining their concatenation.” The subject (and object) of knowledge is now a woman, but the inherited view of consciousness has not been questioned at all. (Alarcón 1990, 357)

Her text, like that of Bambara’s, represents unfinished business. Carceral feminism, bourgeois feminism, Anglo-American feminism, anti-trans feminism—all inherit this view of consciousness and illustrate that feminism may not have performed the deep reckoning that she called for. Combined with Bambara’s prophetic warning, Alarcon’s theorization of the patriarch as the basis of unlikely identifications and subjectifications is needed now more than ever.