LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY transmission31g)

As I'm sure you've all observed, the sort of people drawn to Fundamentalist and Dominionist circles are not exactly the wholesome, morally upright types that they like to present themselves as. In fact, it often seems to be the case, to paraphrase the great comedian Bill Hicks, that the farther you are to the right, the deeper and darker the secrets you're hiding. Anyhow, I came across the following passage in a book about clinical psychopathy called The Emptied Soul: On the Nature of the Psychopath, by Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig, which I think can be neatly applied to the Fundamentalist mindset:

“Individuals approaching the psychopathic extreme are not totally wanting in morality, but they do sense a weakness, an awareness that something is missing, which frightens them. They also suspect that their love is not all that it could or should be. In order to adopt they begin to compensate for these deficiencies [by] becoming morally rigid. Rather than, or perhaps in order to prevent falling into a state of total moral and ethical apathy, they turn compulsively moralistic, championing moral causes for themselves and for others more fanatically than anyone else. These are the people who are always talking about principles, always concerned about “the principle of the master.” They get so lost in principles that they never notice the need for a little milk of human kindness by way of balance. Compensated psychopaths tend to seek out occupations where those with whom they work will help to maintain a moral rigidity, occupations where a strict morality is the order of the day. Therefore we would not be surprised to find large numbers of compensated psychopaths in the so-called helping professions: teaching, psychiatry, the ministry, social work, and the like. It is, for example, difficult for a clergyman to lead a completely immoral life. His profession makes him the moral authority, a representative of Eros in the highest sense of the word, whose task it is to convince others that these values are the ultimate ones. His professional role enables him to shore up his own weak morality and his almost absent sense of eros.
Since compensated psychopaths cannot depend upon eros, their egos work out a moral system which is foolproof in any and every situation. The result, as paradoxical as it may seem, is usually a well-developed morality with an emphasis on the ego’s role but woefully lacking in love. Compensated psychopaths continually and at all costs uphold moral conventions, fanatically defending their moral systems. Were they to relax the hold on their moral code, the entire structure might well collapse like a house of cards, revealing their psychopathic nature. It is rather like cooking, a poor cook sticks assiduously to the recipe, while a gifted one can change this and that according to a momentary whim.”