Thanks for the kind comments, I’ve been following your writing.

My feeling is that it was narcissism that was the initial problem, and having that unopposed for decades led to full-blow psychopathy.

If you are interested in psycho- or sociopaths, “The Sociopath Next Door” by Martha Stout is a fine book written in a non-academic style by an academic, but with plenty of footnotes — which makes it a good read for me without giving up on the chance to check the writer’s results. Her claim in the first page that 4% of Americans are sociopaths or psychopaths has over a page of references in the back… which was good, because I was deeply skeptical when I hit that number.

As a student of history, this is a fascinating time, reminiscent of Rome under Caligula or Tiberius. As a human living through it, it’s rather grimmer, but still fascinating.