The Thought Leader

"The Leftist intellectual" could be an alternative title to this

By DAVID BROOKS

Little boys and girls in ancient Athens grew up wanting to be philosophers. In Renaissance Florence they dreamed of becoming Humanists. But now a new phrase and a new intellectual paragon has emerged to command our admiration: The Thought Leader.

The Thought Leader is sort of a highflying, good-doing yacht-to-yacht concept peddler. Each year, he gets to speak at the Clinton Global Initiative, where successful people gather to express compassion for those not invited. Month after month, he gets to be a discussion facilitator at think tank dinners where guests talk about what it’s like to live in poverty while the wait staff glides through the room thinking bitter thoughts.

He doesn’t have students, but he does have clients. He doesn’t have dark nights of the soul, but his eyes blaze at the echo of the words “breakout session.”

Many people wonder how they too can become Thought Leaders and what the life cycle of one looks like.

In fact, the calling usually starts young. As a college student, the future Thought Leader is bathed in attention. His college application essay, “I Went to Panama to Teach the Natives About Math but They Ended Up Teaching Me About Life,” is widely praised by guidance counselors. On campus he finds himself enmeshed in a new social contract: Young people provide their middle-aged professors with optimism and flattery, and the professors provide them with grade inflation. He is widely recognized for his concern for humanity. (He spends spring break unicycling across Thailand while reading to lepers.)

Not armed with fascinating ideas but with the desire to have some, he launches off into the great struggle for attention. At first his prose is upbeat and smarmy, with a peppy faux sincerity associated with professional cheerleading.

Within a few years, though, his mood has shifted from smarm to snark. There is no writer so obscure as a 26-year-old writer. So he is suddenly consumed by ambition anxiety — the desperate need to prove that he is superior in sensibility to people who are superior to him in status. Soon he will be writing blog posts marked by coruscating contempt for extremely anodyne people: “Kelly Clarkson: Satan or Merely His Spawn?”

Of course the writer in this unjustly obscure phase will develop the rabid art of being condescending from below. Of course he will confuse his verbal dexterity for moral superiority. Of course he will seek to establish his edgy in-group identity by trying to prove that he was never really that into Macklemore.

Fortunately, this snarky phase doesn’t last. By his late 20s, he has taken a job he detests in a consulting firm, offering his colleagues strategy memos and sexual tension. By his early 30s, his soul has been so thoroughly crushed he’s incapable of thinking outside of consultantese. It’s not clear our Thought Leader started out believing he would write a book on the productivity gains made possible by improved electronic medical records, but having written such a book he can now travel from medical conference to medical conference making presentations and enjoying the rewards of being T.S.A. Pre.

By now the Thought Leader uses the word “space” a lot — as in, “Earlier in my career I spent a lot of time in the abject sycophancy space, but now I’m devoting more of my energies to the corporate responsibility space.”

The middle-aged Thought Leader’s life has hit equilibrium, composed of work, children and Bikram yoga. The desire to be snarky mysteriously vanishes with the birth of the first child. His prose has never been so lacking in irony and affect, just the clean translucence of selling out.

He’s succeeding. Unfortunately, the happy moment when you are getting just the right amount of attention passes, and you don’t realize you were in this moment until after it is gone.

The tragedy of middle-aged fame is that the fullest glare of attention comes just when a person is most acutely aware of his own mediocrity. By his late 50s, the Thought Leader is a lion of his industry, but he is bruised by snarky comments from new versions of his formerly jerkish self. Of course, this is when he utters his cries for civility and good manners, which are really just pleas for mercy to spare his tender spots.

In the end, though, a lifetime of bullet points are replaced by foreboding. Toward the end of his life the Thought Leader is regularly engaging in a phenomenon known as the powerless lunch. He and another formerly prominent person gather to have a portentous conversation of no importance whatsoever. In the fading of the light, he is gravely concerned about the way everything is going to hell.

Still, one rarely finds an octogenarian with status anxiety. He is beyond the battle for attention. Death approaches. Cruelly, it smells like reverence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/opinion/brooks-the-thought-leader.html?ref=opinion&_r=1&

Why are Parsi elites welcomed, while Jewish and Chinese elites are reviled?

Foreign ethnic elites who have a disproportionate influence in their host society's economy are called market-dominant minorities. The two best examples are the Chinese who settled southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, and the Ashkenazi Jews who lived mostly in the Pale of Settlement in eastern Europe, and more recently in western Europe and its offshoots.

In her book World on Fire, Amy Chua looks at how the presence of market-dominant minorities can easily spark ethnic tensions, as the lower-status natives feel envy and anger toward what they come to perceive as an intrusive race of bloodsuckers. Again the Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese provide the strongest examples -- no matter where they go, the locals usually come to view them with antipathy. Occasionally that escalates into full-blown ethnic riots, like the pogroms against Jews in eastern Europe and the series of anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia.

Explanations for the psychology underlying the native masses' hatred of ethnic elites tend to portray the envy and resentment as an inevitable consequence of the presence of market-dominant minorities. Yet there is a clear counter-example of a market-dominant minority group that has been welcomed wholeheartedly by most of the host society -- the Parsis of India, who have a disproportionate influence at the higher levels of the Indian economy.

Even though they are only one case, it is such a strong counter-example that it must make us reconsider what truly underlies the psychology of anger toward ethnic elites. The Parsis, like the Jews and the Chinese, are not a native ethnic group of the society where they have strong influence, having come from Persia into India. (While they do share some genetic and cultural heritage, it would still be like a group of Armenians settling and wielding much control over the economy in Ireland.) They also came to their high status gradually through greater intelligence and industriousness, not through force. And they have been living in their host society for hundreds of years -- plenty of time for the seeds of envy and rioting to have been sown.

And yet, there has been no history of pogroms against the Parsis. If anything, they're seen as more of a national treasure, not that Indians worship them or anything. All the ingredients for an explosion of ethnic hatred and rioting would seem to have been present for centuries, so what gives?

The general consensus by native Indians and by European observers, for at least the last several hundred years, is that the Parsis are incredibly charitable, preferring to spread around their wealth. (See some representative quotes in their Wikipedia entry.) They themselves emphasize this aspect of their community in the phrase "Parsi, thy name is charity." Most importantly, they aren't only generous toward one another, but toward the masses of their host society. A 20th-century Parsi captain of industry, J.R.D. Tata, was right out of the progressive mold of Andrew Carnegie and Milton S. Hershey.

So, it looks like the primary way that they've avoided the fate of so many other market-dominant minorities is to not behave like a bunch of greedy gold-hoarders. They don't give away all of their wealth, but they do donate enough to prove their generosity. Moreover, no one sees them as doing so without any real care for others -- i.e., just being charitable to gain approval or to keep the would-be rioters content. All observers seem to agree that it's out of a sense of duty and empathy.

And it's empathy where the Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese are lacking. I touched on this in a longer post about why they tend not to be very good social scientists. Popular stereotypes everywhere that they've settled depict Jewish and Chinese people as brusque and rude, whereas the opposite stereotype prevails about the Parsis. They would also not fail basic tests of the recognition of facial emotions like the East Asians do. And unlike Jews, the equally high-IQ Parsis haven't produced scores of fruitcake intellectuals and political "thinkers," from Karl Marx to Ayn Rand, whose failures stem from nothing more than their inability to get other people.

In general, looking over this list of famous Parsis, they don't seem to produce many autistic or nerdy people. It looks more like professionals, entrepreneurs, and entertainers. (The Han Chinese have over 10,000 times as many people as the Parsis, and yet they can't produce a single Freddie Mercury.)

What was it about their niche in India that preserved their empathy, unlike other market-dominant minorities like the Chinese and Jews? Beats me, I don't know their history well enough. Something about the types of white-collar jobs they held must not have selected for having a dim and suspicious view of other people, unlike the case of Jewish tax farmers in Europe.

Their story should give us hope that it is possible for an ecological niche to select for higher average IQ, as well as for business skills, while not corroding our social nature. Sadly they do have very low birth rates, but then what brainy group these days does not?

Move over Mrs Queen - Philip is our king

Review of: "MAN BELONG MRS QUEEN: ADVENTURES WITH THE PHILIP WORSHIPPERS" BY MATTHEW BAYLIS (Old Street Publishing £10.99)



Like a surreal sitcom or a movie Ealing never made is the island in the South Pacific where Prince Philip is worshipped as the ‘son of the local mountain god’.

In the jungle there are bamboo tabernacles ‘filled with royal mugs and Jubilee cake tins.’ A mouldering pile of newspaper clippings about Prince Charles’s organic farms is a Holy Relic.

The locals who pray to His Royal Highness on ‘telephones made of creeper vines’ expect him any day to appear from the clouds, bringing forth a ‘huge shipment of fridges, guns, trucks and washing machines,’ says Matthew Baylis, like ‘some messianic version of Sale Of The Century.’ Is it truly Prince Philip they want or the TV show’s host Nicholas Parsons?

It is easy to mock. Baylis, who because he’d joked: ‘I’ve brought English weather with me!’ was taken by the natives for a witch-doctor, thus the one personally responsible for the endless unseasonal rain, tries to portray himself throughout this book as: ‘a clumsy clown blundering into that frail, delicate mountain society.’

He certainly has a hard time keeping a straight face when he outlines the pidgin dialect, where ‘bugarup’ means broken and ‘rubba belong fak-fak’ is a condom.

Prince Philip’s private secretary, Brigadier Sir Miles Hunt-Davis, is Big Ass Dear Summer Lance Daisies. If HRH didn’t know that before, and is reading this over his breakfast egg, I don’t want to be responsible for his choking to death laughing. But it could happen.

The cult began, it seems, when the Royal Yacht sailed around Polynesia about 40 years ago. The good natives on Tanna, ‘a kidney-shaped isle of 18,000 souls,’ 18 km in extent, which cost the Empire £23,362 annually to run and which yielded £10,719 in sandalwood sales, liked the sound of this man of French, German, Russian and Danish descent, who’d operated a searchlight during the Battle of Mattapan and had diverted enemy shells away from HMS Wallace in the war.

Prince Philip was ‘an all-action chap, the very kind they admired on Tanna,’ and, furthermore, he ‘didn’t belong to France or England or America, or any of the other nations the Tannese knew.’

They saw him as a foundling or changeling out of mythology, a baby who’d been taken from Corfu in 1922 in ‘his orange-crate bed,’ distinguished himself as a fighting hero, married a princess and lived in a castle. Covered with his medals, he looked made of metal.

This is no nuttier, in fact, than Germanic myths about Siegfried or the Vikings and Beowulf.

A theme in Baylis’s book, indeed, is how religions evolve, the combination of imagination, fancifulness and wishful thinking.

The Tannese believe Buckingham Palace, ‘a big house with soldiers around it,’ means ‘back-e-g-home-paradise,’ because the prince ‘is sick with longing for Tanna.’ Like Siegfried yearning for Valhalla.

Good sport that he is, HRH has sent ceremonial clay pipes and signed photographs to the islanders, two in 1978 and another in 2000, ‘veritable icons’ kept in a hut on stilts.

In gratitude and reciprocation, Prince Philip has been promised ‘three virgin wives’, if only he’d return to his village.

Kwin Lisbet, his current wife, could come, too, they added.

Were he to get Big Ass Daisies to dispatch, on his behalf, an autographed copy of his gripping book, Competition Carriage Driving, I have no doubt that Siko Nathuan, the current chieftain, would extend the islanders’ warm invitation even to Fergie, who could be allowed a job in the kitchens.

As Baylis acknowledges, it all sounds ‘barking mad’, the product of ‘mud-bespattered tribesmen, deluded by their home-grown drugs’. Baylis has had experience of the latter.

‘Kava’ is a lethal brew, made from a fibrous root, milled in a mincing machine and mixed with rainwater and spit. It is drunk straight from a coconut shell and makes you collapse and have visions. Baylis also knows what it is like to spend months eating nothing but yams: ‘My stomach began to boil with angry gasses.’ So he has done his best to be as the Tannese are, and he fell in love with them.

The touching brilliance of Man Belong Mrs Queen is that the ‘machete-wielding cultists’ are taken seriously. Like a professional anthropologist, Baylis comes to appreciate how a society that seems at first so alien is nevertheless ‘inherently sensible and logical.’

For example, if Prince Philip is ‘unpopular, misunderstood and mocked’ at home, the Tannese can see that his belief that ‘rising populations lead to epidemics and food shortages’ is not an ‘attack upon the poor and hungry’ but makes utter common sense.

How weird, in fact, Europeans must seem to the South Seas islanders - pale ghosts appearing on floating houses, killing people with ‘exploding sticks.’ When Westerners took their shoes off, it seemed that they had no toes - the Tannese hadn’t seen socks before. The maddest thing the natives ever heard was the story of wives in England and the U.S. who go out to work in order to earn money to pay for the women who look after their children. Indeed, what kind of topsy-turvy world is it that has nannies?

And what about taps installed by well-meaning missionaries? The tribal elders destroyed them, because otherwise what would women do all day, if they couldn’t spend three hours walking to the well and three hours walking back? With time on their hands they’d gossip and squabble, that’s what. There’s wisdom there.

If the Tannese exchange vegetables and daughters with neighbours at festivals, don’t we do that at the Royal Welsh Show in Builth Wells?

Furthermore, if young tribesmen, at initiation ceremonies, are ‘starved and fed rotten food, beaten and deliberately bewildered,’ how does that differ in essence from a traditional English public school education?

The only thing that worried me was the National Dress - ‘a cover for the penis made of a dried palm-like pandanus leaf and secured in place by a belt around the waist’ - because you’d not get away with wearing that in Windsor Castle, though you probably could in Balmoral.

 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2490934/Move-Mrs-Queen--Philip-king-MAN-BELONG-MRS-QUEEN-ADVENTURES-WITH-THE-PHILIP-WORSHIPPERS-BY-MATTHEW-BAYLIS.html

Famous 'Nazi in all of us' experiment manipulated: Australian psychologist

ARGUABLY, there is no more famous experiment in psychology. In 1962, Dr Stanley Milgram took a group of normal people, put them in a laboratory, and ordered them to electrocute someone.

Two thirds obeyed - applying, they thought, 450V shocks to an actor who writhed in apparent agony. For a world looking to explain how the Holocaust had happened, how ordinary people could commit unspeakable acts simply because they were ordered to, the Milgram experiment offered an insight. It is an experiment that has found new resonance with each generation - with those looking to understand the My Lai massacre, the Rwanda genocide and Abu Ghraib.

There is just one problem. According to an Australian psychologist who has reviewed the original recordings of the test and spoken to some of those involved, it could be that Milgram's experiment explains nothing at all - except his willingness to manipulate results. "It became clear to me that Milgram had an idea of the kind of results he wanted," Gina Perry said. "He enacted the experiment to ensure that result".

Ms Perry's investigations began as an attempt to interview the original subjects of the experiment for a book. However, the more she researched, the more she became concerned that they had been treated unfairly by Milgram - and by history. "It's a bit heart breaking to listen to the recordings. These people have been so unjustly depicted. They have been portrayed as evil incarnate."

The volunteers were told that they were testing the extent to which punishment aided learning. Split into two groups, one half would be learners - who would have to remember word pairs - the other half teachers, who would electrocute the learner if he or she made a mistake. In fact, the learners were all actors.

If the teachers refused to electrocute the learners, an experimenter would prompt them to do so four times before giving up. What is not widely known though is that there were 24 iterations of this experiment, with slightly different setups. In only one - the famous one - did 65 per cent obey. "Overall, over half disobeyed," said Ms Perry.

Even among those who obeyed, the experiment was not as described. On one occasion far from having only four promptings, a subject was ordered 26 times before obeying, Perry recounts in her book Behind the Shock Machine.

"The common perception is that they were all slavishly obedient - that they entered a zombie-like state of compliance," Ms Perry said.

"When you listen to the recordings you can hear people bargaining. They're concerned, they're worried, they're distressed.

"You can hear them emphasising the right answer, wanting to get the learner to pick up the right answer." On several occasions, people even offered to swap places with the learner.

Then there was the issue of how many actually believed it was real. Candid Camera was the most popular TV show in the US at the time. A lot of people told Ms Perry they expected to see a TV crew afterwards. A lot said they had spotted tell-tale flaws in the experiment. "The whole focus of this experiment is that there's a Nazi camp guard inside all of us," Ms Perry said.

"We've come to accept it as a statement about humankind." She added, however, that it simply cannot show that.

Other psychologists cautioned that Milgram, who died in 1984, could not be so easily dismissed. "Yes, this undermines certain findings, but this effect has been found in many other experiments," Gisli Gudjonsson, from King's College London, said.

"In those days ethical rules were different. We mustn't lose sight of the fundamental truth though, that ordinary people - most people - are capable of very cruel things when put in certain circumstances," she said.

 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/famous-nazi-in-all-of-us-experiment-manipulated-australian-psychologist/story-fnb64oi6-1226734772611

Downton's etiquette errors give Countess the vapours: Stately home hostess reveals blunders in period drama dining scenes

Fiona, 8th Countess of Carnarvon

It is enough to make a butler lose his composure. For Downton Abbey has been accused of basic etiquette errors – by the lady of the house.

The Countess of Carnarvon, the mistress of Highclere Castle where the series is filmed, has criticised the ITV1 drama’s repeated faux pas.

Among them, says Lady Carnarvon – who writes a blog in which she reveals how a stately home should really be run – are the incorrect setting of the table for dinner and the lack of servants.

‘It’s the little details,’ she says. ‘Glasses are back to front and things are set wrong.  ‘Setting up the table is an art. Knives, forks and spoons are set from the outside in, beginning with the bread knife and working through each course to cheese.

‘A pat of butter is impressed with the intertwined Cs and coronet and placed in front of each guest.

‘The wine glasses and water tumbler are arranged to the top right of each setting. Downton prefer a different arrangement.

‘I don’t want to step on people’s toes so I’ve tried a few times to  say, “Do you know you’re setting the table wrong?” I do feel, after  all, that it’s my dining table and obviously we wouldn’t set it like that. 



‘They look at me blankly and I sort of try once more and then I give up… and now I try not to look because it’s easier.’

Other tips from Lady Carnarvon, whose husband the 8th Earl of Carnarvon owns Highclere, near Newbury in Berkshire, include butlers wearing white gloves to keep fingerprints off the glasses.

She has previously said a stately home of Downton Abbey’s size would, in the early 20th century when the programme is set, have had up to 60 domestic staff.  At the end of the third series, the fictional Crawley family had only about a dozen servants.

Her observations will delight  the small group of Downton  fans that takes to the internet  after each episode to point out anachronisms.

 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415711/Downtowns-etiquette-errors-Countess-vapours-Stately-home-hostess-reveals-blunders-period-drama-dining-scenes.html

Kevin Rudd - hero or psychopath?

I have argued elsewhere that many leading Leftists are psychopaths so I find the analysis below reasonable. The point that psychopaths have some advantages is made below and I also have an academic article to that effect

A GIANT ego. A narcissist. A micro-manager. An impulsive control freak. A haphazard and secretive decision maker.  This is not what Kevin Rudd's political enemies think of him. It's what many of his colleagues do.

Whether openly or whispered in hushed tones to journalists, this is the picture once painted by his fellow ministers, MPs, public servants and diplomatic associates.

It's a decent rap sheet - one that easily tops the usual bile directed at colleagues or opponents in the den of iniquity that is politics. But nothing that borders outlandish.

Then, one day, the dam broke. The outspoken and literally outgoing member for Bendigo Steve Gibbons took to Twitter and publicly declared his former leader a "psychopath". Among other less than genteel terms.

Gibbons is a man who is routinely and rightly pilloried for making crude, stupid and nasty remarks in the name of cheap publicity.  But this time the term took off, which perhaps says more about Rudd than it does about Gibbons.

So is it true? Is the man running this country really a psychopath, given the aforementioned ferocious descriptions appear to tick plenty of the boxes that define such a diagnosis?

Firstly, one has to demystify the term.  Such a designate is no longer deemed by experts to be the exclusive domain of murderers, serial killers and rapists.  No, you could indeed be sitting next to one. Your boss could be one, or, perhaps more likely, your high-flying CEO in his spacious corner office suite.

In fact prominent Australian psychotherapist John Clarke claims that between one and three per cent of the Australian population could be certifiably deemed psychopathic, and he warns not just police to keep a look out but companies and political powerbrokers.

Anthropologist Stephen Juan suggests that one in 10 companies are headed by a corporate psychopath.

It seems psychopaths are everywhere, and they are more likely to wear a suit and tie, than carry a bloodied weapon or be pointing a sawn-off shotgun.

"One of the misconceptions about psychopathy itself is that people think a psychopath goes out and kills people. By definition, they are somebody that is recklessly indifferent to any physical, emotional harm they may cause," criminal mind expert Steve van Aperen said.  "There are certainly many undiagnosed psychopaths in business and politics."

Juan says often people get confused between the terms psychopath and psychotic, which makes people less inclined to label someone as the former and thus grouping them with such fiends as Ivan Milat, Charles Manson or Martin Bryant. The distinction is reality, he says. Those suffering from psychosis have lost grip on reality. Those deemed psychopathic are very much aware of it, and are attempting to control it.

They are often easy to spot, Juan says, and follow a defined set of traits that set them apart from normality.  "The corporate psychopath is the type of psychopath that gets into politics because they are usually exceedingly ego-oriented - it is all about them. So even when they get criticism, it is still all about them," he says.  "They love the centre of attention. Good or bad they see themselves being the centre of the universe.

"They are the great users, the great manipulators, they often have aides and underlings do work for them, and expect blind loyalty but they don't give loyalty in return. They use everyone for gain.

"Everything is about them. If you talk to them in a conversation about your issues, they will immediately turn it around to their issues. It's as if no one exists other than them."

They are always exploiting issues for their own gain, says Dr Juan.

They climb the corporate ladder very effectively, they are often very charming and articulate, often very good looking which they use to their advantage.

It is the only thing they exist for. Themselves. They can't be trusted, they will lie to your face and deny they have when they are caught. They never own up to their own actions, they are always blaming others. They are polar opposites in public and private, with the former a place for their charm offensive to be exercised, and the latter a dark place of indifference and loathing.

It's the psychopath's modus operandi; a persona that they can't escape from, a disguise that soon becomes arduous to hide.

In a bid to unmask those with psychopathic tendencies and prevent crime, Canadian criminal psychologist and FBI adviser Robert D Hare created the Psychopathy Checklist in the early 1990s that remains the gold standed for reference.

Its defined set of traits include impulsiveness, superficial charm, grandiosity, callousness, manipulative, lack of remorse or guilt, propensity to blame others, poor behavioural control, egocentric.

Whether unfairly or resoundingly just, Kevin Rudd's name has oft been etched beside those traits, by members of his own camp or from across enemy lines.

His impulsiveness is well documented, from rushed decision making done without proper consultation with colleagues or stakeholders, to his "policies on the run" such as the changes to the Fringe Benefit Tax system that  crack down on salary-sacrificed cars, to the detriment of the struggling car industry.

On these rash methods, he is internationally renowned.  "He makes snap announcements without consulting other countries or within the Australian government," said a US Embassy official of Kevin Rudd in a leaked memo to the Whitehouse.

Superficial charm? The opposition have climbed aboard this freight train, frequently referring to the PM as fake. Even Fairfax editors denounce the man who is smiling, caring Kevin the Queenslander, but is vastly different behind closed doors, where no cameras lurk.

"Much has been written and said about Kevin Rudd when the camera is rolling and Kevin Rudd in private," editor of the Launceston Examiner, Martin Gilmour said.  "Based on my experience on Thursday morning when the doors closed, he was about as engaged and charismatic as a silt rake."

Grandiosity? Egocentric? Enter stage left, former opposition leader and intimidating hand-shaker Mark Latham.   "I mean this guy is a once-in-a-century egomaniac," said Mr Latham in his jilted-lover tome.

Poor behavioural control? The RAAF air hostess who copped a Rudd spray because his special meal wasn't available; the foul-mouth tirade delivered while filming a video message in Chinese; the exodus of 16 staff from his office in his first year as PM due to his "short fuse and unreasonable demands" and the current rumours that 80 per cent of his staff hate his guts.

In a News Corp Australia survey of 30,000 voters last month voters were given a list of words to describe Rudd.  The results were stark: smug, manipulative and egotistical.

Claude Minisini spent 15 years within the FBI's behavioural science division. In his opinion, Kevin Rudd is your classic organisational psychopath. Ticks every box, allegedly.

"One of the traits of a psychopath is a lack of remorse. Has Kevin Rudd shown that? In relation to the pink batts saga, has he ever come out and said sorry to individuals for him making that bad decision? The answer is no," Ms Minisini said.

"Is he indifferent, or does he rationalise having hurt or mistreated someone else? I suppose he ticks that box too. I would certainly say that he is impulsive. Has he failed to adequately plan ahead? I suppose he ticks that box too. Is he irritable and aggressive? Yes, he probably ticks that one.

Research conducted by Western Sydney University professor Peter Jonason claims that while Machiavellianism is apolitical in its nature, there is a "left-leaning bias for those individuals high on psychopathy".

"Psychopathy may thrive in more liberal areas because of the lessened focus on law and order. And thus, it is within liberal areas that psychopathy may have a freer reign, therefore, freeing up men to benefit from such an approach to life," he said.

But there are other known traits of the psychopath that Rudd bypasses. Psychopaths are usually submerged in sexual promiscuity (not sure a visit to Scores counts) and have poor marital relations.

Despite the obvious shortcomings, several clinical psychologists and researchers believe possessing the traits of a psychopath could be advantageous for someone seeking political power.

A research paper lead by Emory University's Scott Lilienfeld explored such issues, pinpointing which US presidents were more likely to exhibit psychopathic traits.

"Some psychopathic traits, such as interpersonal dominance, persuasiveness and venturesomeness, may be conducive to acquiring positions of political power and to successful leadership," the paper claimed. It cited Winston Churchill and Lyndon Johnson as perfect case studies, claiming both possessed very real characteristics of a psychopath, but who "managed to parlay these traits into political success".

<a href="http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/kevin-rudd-hero-or-psychopath/story-fni0cx12-1226694584192">SOURCE</a>

Charles Chenevix Trench

(Obit. of 29 Nov 2003)

Charles Chenevix Trench, who died on Wednesday aged 89, became the author of a wide variety of popular historical works after serving as an Indian Army officer in the 1930s, winning an MC during the Second World War and then becoming a district commissioner in Kenya.

Employing a crisp, anecdotal style, he wrote 19 books, including three classic accounts of British India: The Indian Army and the King's Enemies, 1900-1947; The Frontier Scouts; and The Viceroy's Agent.

His interest in the 18th century led to Portrait of a Patriot, a biography of the demagogue John Wilkes who nevertheless established important constitutional freedoms, and The Royal Malady, a witty study of George III's madness which drew on the unpublished papers of the King's physician, Sir George Baker, and the diary of Dr John Willis. He also produced The Western Risings, a judicious account of the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion, and Grace's Card, Irish Catholic Landlords 1690-1800.

Charley Gordon was a reassessment which revealed a humorous element in the Victorian general who had been attacked by Lytton Strachey; and The Great Dan showed the strong imperial streak in the Irish nationalist leader Daniel O'Connell. There was also The Poacher and the Squire, a survey in which Chenevix Trench drew on personal experience, since he admitted that he had done "a bit of big game poaching" in India, although he had also been concerned with game preservation in Kenya. Two other amusing potboilers were A History of Horsemanship and A History of Marksmanship, which reflected his love of the outdoors.

The Desert's Dusty Face, describing his career in Kenya, was a collection of true stories which abounded with Wodehousian wit and jibes at American hunters. It was written to make readers feel as though they, too, were making a safari around a remote district.

A descendant of an Archbishop of Dublin and the son Sir Richard Chenevix Trench, a member of the Indian Political Service, Charles Pocklington Chenevix Trench was born on June 29 1914 at Simla, India. He was educated at Winchester, concluding after a year that he must be rather "wet" because he had not been beaten; he proceeded to take steps to remedy this deficiency.

"With some difficulty, and after several warnings about untidiness and so forth, I succeeded," he recalled in a letter to The Telegraph. "It was, of course, disagreeable, but left no permanent scars on my personality or my person . . . For my last three years I spent most of my spare time fishing, and tying trout flies for sale at the local tackle-shop. Although these pursuits contributed nothing to the honour of the house, I was neither persecuted nor mocked for them."

After reading PPE at Magdalen College, Oxford, Chenevix Trench was commissioned into Hodson's Horse, the Indian cavalry regiment, which was serving in Persia, Iraq and Syria on the outbreak of war. He then attached himself to the 12th Lancers for the closing weeks of the British First Army's advance into Tunisia in 1943.

The following year he was sent on a course at Benevenuto in Italy, from which he took "French leave" to visit a brother Hodson's Horseman, who was GSO 1 of 8th Indian Division. This led to his attachment to 1st/12th (Northwest) Frontier Force Regiment with which, as a fluent Pushtu speaker, he was put into the Pathan company. When the company commander was killed, Chenevix Trench took over, and a few weeks later led a successful night attack on the German position on the last ridge overlooking Assisi.

By then, however, his regiment had tracked him down, and demanded his instant return to Syria. Here he learned that he had been awarded an immediate MC for his conduct during the attack near Assisi; the citation recorded that Major Chenevix Trench had "set a magnificent example of coolness and disregard for his personal safety", and that "the success achieved by C Company was largely due to his inspiration and leadership".

In 1946 Chenevix Trench retired from the Army to follow his father into the Indian Political for the 18 months until Partition; he then became district commissioner in the Kenyan colonial government. He served in the Northern Frontier district, before moving to Nanyuki. In addition to learning Swahili, he was the only officer in the district who spoke Somali, essential to understanding the problems posed by infiltrators from over the border.

When he made his two-week safaris, Chenevix Trench insisted on being accompanied by the troop of tribal police, which was mounted either on Abyssinian ponies, or on horses which they had been allowed to catch on European ranches for £5 each; this enabled him to get a far closer feel for the people and their way of life than if he had travelled by vehicle. The only interruption came during the Mau Mau emergency, when his combination of Kenyan and military experience led him to be brought back to Nairobi as GSO 2 (Civil) to the Director of Operations.

During the run-up to independence, the colonial administration decided to hold a census of the population for the benefit of the incoming native government. But one British officer of the King's African Rifles, who was responsible for the count, was unsure about how to record five soldiers who had registered as "Jesus Christ", and four who claimed to be "Agatha Christie". Chenevix Trench, the returning officer, was writing an article about Jacobean table manners when he was asked for advice. Without looking up, he replied "Doesn't matter a bugger provided you don't call any of them Son of God!"

After independence in 1963, Chenevix Trench retired once again to embark on a new career. His cousin, Anthony Chenevix-Trench, who had just been appointed Headmaster of Eton, invited him to join the staff. However, he decided instead to go to Millfield, in Somerset, where he taught English, Swahili, Urdu, history, symbolic logic and polo for six years. He now retired for the last time, to Nenagh, Co Tipperary, to concentrate on his books, and on hunting, fishing and farming; one year he named two turkeys Hitler and Goebbels, so that he would not mind killing them for Christmas.

For 20 years he composed a lucid monthly article on current affairs for that pillar of Empire, Blackwood's Magazine, under the pseudonym "The Looker On"; he also reviewed books regularly for the Irish Times and the Irish Independent.

Charles Chenevix Trench married, first, Jane Gretton, with whom he had a son, who predeceased him, and two daughters. After their divorce he married Mary Kirkbride, with whom he had two daughters.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1448007/Charles-Chenevix-Trench.html


Explanation of the name:

Melesina Chenevix was a society beauty of Huguenot extraction.  In 1803 she married Richard Trench, who was also well-connected.  She was so highly regarded by her two sons Francis and Richard that, after her death, they changed their surnames to Chenevix-Trench.  Richard went on to become Archbishop of Dublin in the Church of Ireland (Anglican).  He was also a well-regarded poet and an intellectual of his day. He had 14 children and  Charles Pocklington Chenevix Trench  (above) was one of his grandsons (via Richard Chenevix Trench).