When confronted with adversity, most of us try to come up with a way to overcome it. Only the most twisted among us look for a way to profit financially from the adversity others experience. Often, but not always, they are politicians. Other times they are little more than small time crooks looking to turn a quick buck. In most every case, they are sociopaths devoid of a conscience, the most severely mentally ill among us. They don’t get the same attention as the pour souls whose illness leads then to more dramatic outward evidence of their illness, and so they operate under the radar.

I once knew someone whose ex-husband was caught on hidden camera by a local news station trying to sell worthless products to the elderly. Most of us would have been humiliated by that experience but, ever the true sociopath, this guy claimed that he was victimized by the television station that caught him, unfairly persecuting him when many others were doing similar things that made his offense seem inconsequential. I am quite sure his victims, living on a fixed income and defrauded by him, didn’t find his acts inconsequential at all.

Sociopaths can be quite charming, which makes them ideal politicians. They are more than capable of lying to our faces, saying they have our best interests at heart. They know what our best interests are, they just don’t give a damn. They are incapable of moving beyond their own interest, and for them the rules are something to be bypassed. If you believe you can change them, you are deceiving yourself. The only treatment for the cancer they are is removing them from positions of trust.