Justice is Psychologically Blind

Our legal systems are failing psychologically.

As always, thank you for your interest and support.  

We need to fiercely restore psychological balance in justice.

If you have read enough CNI analysis, you know there is a lot of commentary about how the psychological establishment has been failing democracy by their de facto silencing of experts. This is a main reason why there is currently so little public education about the narcissistic disorders harming us, despite having preyed upon every group, in every society, throughout human history.

In other analysis, you will have also seen comments about how the American Justice System is also usually blind and ignorant to even the most obvious narcissist disorders. It appears that the legal system’s blindness is yet another repercussion of the American Psychiatric Association’s ever increasing and highly suspicious loyalty to an outdated rule they are financially incentivized to uphold and enforce.

This power play happens by them hiding behind the “Goldwater Rule.” They claim it forbids experts from giving any public psychological assessments of anyone.

This sword of Damocles is held over every expert who dares discuss narcissists publicly. It is indeed a poison pill and very real threat, because being accused of “ethical” violations in any profession that requires the highest ethical standards can certainly be a career death knell for many.

In hindsight, it must be clear by now to the APA that it is suicidal to democracy to have what is essentially a gag order on the vast majority of practitioners, academics, scholastic experts, journalists and the vast majority of law enforcement up and down the legal system. You know the people best trained to educate our society on how to advise, counter and defend against psychologically dangerous people who we often interact with unknowingly, on a daily basis.

It is a longtime CNI conclusion that with the establishment not protecting or educating the public, there needs to be many more people filling the knowledge void for democracy to survive. Indeed, there would be no need for the think tank’s existence if all of the above were not true. Have no doubt the manipulation tools available to wealthy malignant narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths are now more powerful than ever, and must be countered.

On the positive side, the public is slowly learning more about these dangerous disorders but it still “begs the question,” will the public learn and will governments act fast enough to save us?”

It is a primary goal to have CNI become a sustainable bulwark against narcissistic disorders that threaten every sharing and giving person’s civil rights, and democracy itself. Therefore, if you agree with the urgent need to build more counter-narcissist defenses, barriers and public knowledge, please know that what you can give financially will be fully aimed at building a resource to protect good people’s freedoms and psychological peace of mind individually, in groups and in all societies, for time immemorial.

Certainly criminal profilers working in the justice system are highly skilled at using narcissist psychology to find criminal patterns and our security services specializing in behavioral analysis have extensive training and education, but the knowledge gleaned from their expertise seems exclusively kept behind institutional closed doors.

With the predator protection legal system we have today, any public release of an individual’s psychologically driven dangers to our society would likely be highly condemned by the APA as unethical, no matter how true or urgent. It is as if they have chosen to protect the malignant narcissist’s rights over public safety and their duty to warn. This will come back to bite us if not fixed soon.

Sadly, all the institutional obscuring of narcissistic personality disorders also means the majority of police, lawyers, prosecutors, judges and other legal experts are vastly undertrained, incentivized to be disinterested and/or just blind to how narcissism spectrum psychology intersects with almost everything they do in their professions.

One fairly regular yet understandably debatable statistic thrown around to prove this point is that it is often stated by experts that 50% of those in prison are psychopaths.

To be fair, due to psychology often being abstract and subtle, it can be easy to miss obvious signs, tells and triggers that both subconsciously and obviously fly by us every day. To give a small conception of how slippery and elusive even obvious signs, signals and evidence can be when not paying close attention, I almost missed a big and fairly obvious one myself!

A very teachable judicial moment

Thankfully, there was a very striking teachable judicial moment in trump’s nearly half a billion dollar loss to the State of New York in his “civil” (financial not criminal) trial brought on by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

The claims brought by AG James and agreed upon by the judge’s verdict are extremely destructive to trump personally, financially and practically to his entire organization, because it is very much run as trump being the mafia Don of his New York “family business,” that commits the same illegal financial shell game over and over.

There are still criminal questions yet to come but it is likely AG James started this way because there is a lower threshold of proof needed to win a civil vs. a criminal trial, and especially when battling a narcissist, one needs all the legal advantages one can get.

Certainly having the state Attorney General lead such a trial is a powerful advantage. The fact that she got a nearly $.5 billion settlement and that trump and sons are not permitted to lead any business in New York for a few years shows why corrupt rich people always want to defund those in government who can hold them accountable.

At a minimum, AG James put a serious hole in trump’s personal wealth, business armor, reputation as a “stable genius” businessman, and will hamper his ability to remain untouchable with the rich man’s justice, he has counted on his entire life, so definitely a big win for the people’s justice.

However, as noted it didn’t hit me right away and I almost missed it, but something the judge read in the verdict about trump and his accomplices lingered until it was recognized as the excellent piece of CNI philosophical evidence that it is.

In his words, the judge practically revealed a point I have tried to get across for some time, and that point is nearly the entire legal system is mostly unaware of how often the psychology of malignant narcissists stays invisible to them even when it intersects with their area of the law, in terms of fair justice, truth telling and deterrence.

Judge Engoron on the behaviors of trump and sons in the trump organization:

“Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological. They are accused only of inflating asset values to make more money. The documents prove this over and over again. This is a venial sin, not a mortal sin. Defendants did not commit murder or arson. They did not rob a bank at gunpoint. Donald Trump is not Bernard Madoff. Yet, defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways.” - Judge Engoron - Feb 2024

Definition: Pathological

pathological - Cambridge dictionary

adjective

(of a person) unable to control part of their behaviour; unreasonable:

I've got a pathological fear of heights.

Anthony's a pathological liar.

As a lyricist, I have always been fascinated by how some words really resonate in the heart and mind. “Pathological” seems to be the opposite of the kind of word that brings the clarity of meaning and resonance in memory that I am usually striving for in lyrical terms. The word does have a certain poetic flow to it but the truth is for most, it is too abstract to be a useful memorable definition.

The definition that finally stuck in my head was, “a compulsive and maladaptive behavior that is their way of being and part of who they are.” In other words, when you see the term “pathological narcissist” in CNI analysis, it specifically means a compulsive and maladaptive narcissist who shows all the signs of being a clinical narcissist, which in itself is more jargon that obscures needed psychological knowledge from the general public.

Cheat Code: Semantically, to be a clinical narcissist is to be a pathological narcissist, is to have a form of a Cluster B personality disorder. They are pretty much all saying the same thing, and are umbrellas that malignant narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths all fit under.

A clinical narcissist is someone who has been professionally tested and found to have met the criteria to be diagnosed as a pathological narcissist with one or more Cluster B personality disorders. Remember it is their way of being, it is who they are, it is pathological.

“Borders on pathological.” Really? “Borders?”

What makes the judge’s words so telling and teachable is that if someone behaves in the exact same compulsively greedy and selfish maladaptive ways to only serve themselves every single time, that is virtually the definition of “pathological.” As applied to the terms “pathological narcissists” “and pathological liars,” you can see how the word is utilized to signify someone’s personality flaw is “compulsive and maladaptive.”

In his own words, the judge has said the defendants were liable for fraud because their asset valuations reflected a "fantasy world," the “documents prove” they did the same greedy thing “over and over again,” there “is conclusive evidence" that trump’s net worth was inflated by as much as $2.2 billion, and yet trump and his minions “are incapable of admitting the error of their ways.” Essentially the entire trump defense strategy was to deny everything that goes against them no matter what reality said they did.

How is this all only “bordering on pathological” and not pathological behavior itself, your honor? Isn’t compulsively doing the same bad things over and over and refusing to admit it, pathological? How is trump not like Bernie Madoff? Madoff’s asset valuations also reflected a "fantasy world," and there was "conclusive evidence" that he inflated his net worth. Madoff too only committed a “venial sin, not a mortal sin…did not commit murder or arson…did not rob a bank at gunpoint.”

If trump and his children were and are psychopathically running financially dishonest companies to trick investors and banks into giving them money and interest rates they did not deserve for the sole purpose of self-enrichment and maintaining their wealth illusion shell-game, lifestyle and successful self-image at any cost, how is that any different from what Madoff did?

Certainly there is also a long history of trump’s investors and vendors getting screwed over by his many bankruptcies and made-up financial promises, thus he hurt a lot of people.

I know it is kind of mind-blowing that someone like Judge Engoron who has been a Federal judge in Manhattan since 2013 can absolutely excoriate trump in his fraud verdict but then says trump only “borders on pathological.” Seriously? What more does trump need to do to prove he is pathological?

As was established in the trump playbook is an illusion, trump’s behaviors are not as planned or random as they often appear. They seem specific compulsive behaviors that are virtually identical to all the empirical symptoms of both NPD and ASPD.

To be clear, this is not a personal critique of Judge Engoron. He seems to have done a mostly admirable job as our legal system dictates. He is just an example of almost every judge, prosecutor, lawyer and law enforcement employee in our system. They just do not see most predators and their behaviors for what they really are.

They somehow do not understand the mentally disordered people who will never abide by any rules unless they are not forced to abide by, because they are pathological (compulsive) narcissists. Ergo, they cannot stop. They must be stopped.

Ask yourself what kind of person besides a compulsive narcissist expects to get away with submitting, “blatantly false financial data to the accountants, resulting in fraudulent financial statements” and when “confronted at trial with the statements, defendants’ fact and expert witnesses simply” deny “reality” fail to “accept responsibility” or are unwilling to “impose internal controls to prevent future recurrences?”

Just to show how ridiculous trump’s legal argument of “everybody does it” is, this spin does not even match most of his own behavior of being willing to do dark and self-serving things everybody does not do.

Everyone does not brag about not paying any taxes, uses nazi language, refuses to acknowledge their election loss, incites an insurrection, attempts a coup, talks about being a dictator, chooses personal loyalty over honorable competence, or trusts Putin’s denials over American Intelligence. Until trump, America agreed these were all horrible things only sick people and/or traitors would do.

Don’t even get me started on American Justice’s blindness to the implications of how the vast majority of pathological narcissists have no respect for the law beyond real and serious consequences. Aka “what is stopping them from doing whatever they compulsively want and crave?” Empirical psychology calls it “a firm barrier.”

A firm barrier trump kept running into as President.

Sadly, there are far more of these disordered narcissists than most realize. These are people who are almost completely driven by psychological compulsions, and they will never stop unless the law stops them from bypassing society’s norms of decency, morality and legality in a compulsively doomed drive to fill their emptiness with money, shiny objects, power and a trail of hurt souls they cruelly injured to make themselves feel big.

Ask yourself, how is it that such a wise and experienced judge in the economic center of the world, New York, does not clearly see the pathological and malignant narcissist many of us with a narcissist life experience and/or education can so clearly see in trump, and so many of his flying monkeys.

Huge legal red flag

Judge Engoron’s clear example should be a huge legal red flag telling everyone that even the wisest and most experienced judges in the economic center of the world, only partially recognize pathological and malignant narcissist behavior when they see it, and we need American law to do better.

Yes, Engoron shows us he sees most of trump’s bad behavior and results from a legal sense, but he also clearly shows us he really does not understand the psychological patterns and symptoms of the DSM’s Cluster B personality disorders, if he truly thinks trump only “borders on pathological.”

Again, this is not a condemnation of the judge. This is just to show he is another consistent example of how almost everyone up and down our legal and justice system thinks, and he proves how American justice is truly blind to pathological narcissism.

If judges cannot see trump’s most obvious grandiose form of malignant and moronic pathological narcissism, one must question their ability to recognize and properly account for any clinical-level narcissistic disorders at all.

Unfortunately, this knowledge is only a cheat code in understanding one of the most existentially dangerous aspects of the judicial system we have today, in the sense that most involved in the “legal” system are usually completely and/or willfully blind to how the law and justice are massively connected to, affected by and altered for the benefit of narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths compulsively trying to rule.

Indeed this is something that urgently needs countering in every society seeking true justice before the pathological ensure the only justice left is what serves them.