With the latest two recent shootings of unarmed black men I’m seeing a call for swift discipline of the officers involved, and improved training for new recruits (aka, A Good Start). I’m also seeing these trigger happy cops labeled as sociopaths. While they may or may not be psychopaths, I’m certain they have superiors who are in fact narcissists and sociopaths, and this is where the real problem lies not just in law enforcement, but in politics and organizing writ large and small.

As a business owner for more 30 years, it was a matter of professional survival that I learned to identify the workplace psychopath/narcissist, and I devoted a significant amount of time in the 90’s studying this phenomenon of human psychology.

I first wrote publicly about this back in 2003, when I published a guest blog piece for Digby at Hullabaloo that had gone viral at the time, “Are psychopaths running our government?”

Greater luminaries than I have declared this group to be Psychotic Personalities (Kurt Vonnegut recently caught flack for suggesting as much) but I wanted to know if there was any means by which to make a more serious medical diagnosis than "because they make me crazy." There is. Giles Whittell, writing for the Times On Line, interviewed Dr. Robert Hare, who, along with his colleague Dr Paul Babiak, will publish a book called Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work later this year. Hare defined psychopathy for modern scientists with an exhaustive questionnaire called the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R). Introduced in 1980 it has become an internationally recognized tool for identifying psychopaths.

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“[Dr.] Hare puts the average North American incidence of psychopathy at 1 per cent of the population, but the damage they inflict on society is out of all proportion to their numbers, not least because they gravitate to high-profile professions that offer the promise of control over others, such as law, politics, business management ... and journalism.”

So how does this tie to current events? The Thin Blue Line is a phenomenon that affects many organizations large and small. It’s one example of the Authority Trap, where respect is demanded and heretics are burned at the stake. Responsible authority understands its role in respecting and protecting those under its authority, while psychopaths flip this dynamic; those under their authority shall give all respect and deference to their authority, they cultivate and surround themselves with loyalists through the creation of a false Us and Enemies Out To Harm Us narrative, and those loyalists are expected to protect them through swift enforcement of (their imposed) group norms.

Psychopaths are expert at rising in organizations that offer the ability to have power over others. Without strong safeguards and gifted leaders, psychopathic rulers will cultivate a cult like following that will aggressively weed out anyone who might call them out, even challenge or criticize them in the slightest way, and with a ferocity that, by design, heavily discourages others who wish to remain on the privileged 'inside' from thinking of speaking up (The Snowden/Manning effect, aka the Thin Blue Line, aka The Authority Trap).

In any environment run by a psychopath, any criticism, no matter how targeted, legitimate, or relevant, is labeled a personal attack on them in particular and on their organization in the general (think Hillary or DWS), the critic labeled an “outsider,” unstable, crazy, and their loyal underlings, as a sign of loyalty and status among the ‘in’ group, will be expected to carry out the “cleansing” to “protect” the group from having even obvious and blatant transgressions or hypocrisy being pointed out. You can’t be for the police and call out police brutality. You can’t be for Democrats and call out Hillary for corruption and having sold out to corporate interests. You can’t be for Sanders and disagree on tactics.

This is a handy checklist that covers how the narcissist and psychopath work to silence dissent:

Gaslighting is a manipulative tactic that can be described in different variations of three words: “That didn’t happen,” “You imagined it,” and “Are you crazy?” Gaslighting is perhaps one of the most insidious manipulative tactics out there because it works to distort and erode your sense of reality; it eats away at your ability to trust yourself and inevitably disables you from feeling justified in calling out abuse and mistreatment.

And this is where Bernie is playing a different game. The difference between an organization run by a psychopath and one that isn’t is the difference between fear of the leader or hope for the future. Between falling in line or being empowered. Between wondering if you’re the crazy one not fitting into a world gone mad, or finding yourself among like-minded people who can disagree on tactics and still agree on goals without challenging your sanity.

So how do we fix ongoing police abuse by forces that view us as more the enemy than as the people they’ve sworn to protect and serve? How do we fix a government that’s only responsive to those who would view us as sheep to be sheered, leaders who view us as a nuisance rather than the people they to have sworn an oath to protect and serve? How do we deal with the Thin Blue lines in our everyday lives? What do we do when we see our leaders on all levels failing to follow their mandates of an inclusiveness and greater good, and instead find them working toward creating a protective bubble, perpetuating themselves as the aggrieved victims and creating mountains of drama, always the fault of their enemies, while ostracizing any and all criticism as an attack rather than an honest attempt to improve toward a common good?

We do what Bernie is doing. We speak up though we might not be heard. We speak up though it might cost us standing in our daily groups. We speak up though it might cost us friends and co-workers and facebook likes and re-tweets and the respect of peers. We speak up because we’re speaking for those who have even less voice than we do. We speak up because we have more courage than those who fear the psychopaths and bullies and those hangers-on who pretend to be working for a Potemkin greater good but just want to preserve standing in their small “insiders” coterie. We speak up because we’re willing to risk being mocked and belittled and have our words distorted, because we understand this is what psychopaths, and their enablers, do when their façade is challenged.

We speak up because if we have learned nothing from Bernie’s campaign, hell, his entire five decades long career, we have learned that if we do not speak up the psychopaths who seek to run our institutions, and their followers who alternately fear and deify them, will continue to abuse their misguided notion of what it means to have authority without the responsibility of empathy for those they wield power over.

So before anyone asks, “Why don’t the police police themselves?” ask yourself how you respond to the psychopaths and bullies in your workplace or daily organizations. Speaking up isn’t so easy when your comfortable standing among peers is at stake. Now look at what Bernie did and risked to speak up against the psychopaths and bullies. He was publicly boo'ed by his peers, and still he speaks up.

Bernie has never allowed himself to fall into the Authority Trap that seduces so many who find themselves with authority over others, and we shouldn’t either. We all have but one power and one power alone - all we can do is speak out until enough of us can ourselves come into positions of authority, and then once there guard against confusing your authority to protect and serve those less fortunate with the seductive call of control over those dirty doubting heretics who just don’t show enough respect. Resist the urge to show them whose boss, because we know that’s The Way of the Bern!

And that’s the Authority Trap. Be like Bernie - fight it from the outside first, and then don’t abuse it from the inside once there. He doesn't seek to control, he seeks to empower. You have it. Use it.