Robert J. Lifton, ninety-eight year-old psychiatrist and author of “The Nazi Doctors,” among other works, coined the phrase malignant normality to describe the normalizing of otherwise intolerable behavior.

It became a requirement for believers in Nazi “ideology” to accept that certain populations needed to be exterminated. Any Nazi voicing an objection to this new “normal” would be expelled from the party (and probably much worse). If it is what society normally does, like ripping infants from the hands of desperate parents and sending them a thousand miles away with no hope of a future reunion, then it is, by definition, normal. Normality may also be, as Lifton observed, malignant.

Gabor Mate elaborates on this observation at length in The Myth of Normal. He notes how easily we mistake “normal” for natural, healthy or desirable. If our society is ruled by the destructive myths of powerful psychopaths, there is nothing natural, healthy or desirable about the normality they impose.

The pathology that drives a Hitler, a Donald “Not A Loser!” Trump, a Sloppy Steve Bannon, is well known and easy to see. They cannot trust another human and therefore require unchecked power and loyalty oaths they make others swear to on pain of death. Treason and betrayal must always be punished by painful public execution or others will feel licensed to defy orders and, ultimately, uncover the infallible dictator’s murder-inducing terror of humiliation.

The powerful psychopath’s need for absolute power, their claimed right to define “normality” for everybody else, and a reflex to loyalty on the part of millions of admiring enablers, is the single biggest reason why human history is written in the blood of the meek. Any dissenting voice is the enemy of a maniac who cannot tolerate being questioned, criticized, made to feel vulnerable in any way. Loyalty or the sword, plunged slowly and deliberately through each hand, foot, arm, leg, etc., until you are begging for death. Which will it be, bitch?