You don't have to be mentally ill to be these things. Considering the type of people that rule our world
(
) it seems that the most well adjusted people in our society are not only more than capable of being this, it seems like a requirement.
So I am no longer comfortable using the word psychopath (or any other "dark triad" nonsense) to describe these types of people. These people aren't struggling to function with a mental illness, they're of the exact mindset that thrives in our backwards society.
However I'm struggling to think of a suitable replacement word that carries with it the same "This is serial killer coded shit" vibe that calling someone a psychopath carries (and associating such a thing with psychopaths is ableist so I don't want to use the word in that way anymore)
Calling them ghouls, fascists or nazis doesn't carry the same weight. What kind of word bests describes the casual, dangerous heartlessness of people without throwing the mentally ill under the bus?
inhuman
Early in the genocide i called "israelis" inhuman and my partner got in an hours long argument with me that their actions are actually very human and how dehumanizing people is bad even if they're the worst people alive. I wonder what she thinks now though.
I don't believe dehumanizing people is bad from some moral standpoint, or is somehow inherently 'fascistic', but I believe it clouds our analysis. These monsters are human. That's material reality. Humanity isn't some pure superior condition that only some human beings obtain. Systematic forces make fellow humans act like this. And make no mistake, this is not a call for mercy, nor misanthropic. It's a rejection of the mainstream moral that all human life is unconditionally valuable, and the lazy coping mechanism of dehumanization that arises when we want to justify the removal of "human rights" from a human. IDF soldiers are people, and because of their social role, it's important to kill them.
This clip from a documentary on the '43 Group (starting 17:19) makes an important, related remark about how delusion shapes action: