HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, June 18, 2025 – I’ve had the unsought advantage over the years of getting to know psychopaths up close and personal, sometimes in deeply intimate relationships. By advantage, I mean I’ve learned how to stay outside their sphere of control; by intimate, I mean physical intimacy, because no-one can get emotionally close to a psychopath. That door is welded shut.

Living and moving in close proximity to psychopaths at various times (including now), I learned from them how not to be. Psychopaths are very useful for modeling bad behavior. It’s almost textbook paint-by-number bad in some cases, but it’s still informative from an observational point of view. I had to learn the hard way to step back and observe these people from an emotional if not a physical distance and to train myself not to let my feelings (other than my gut feeling) get involved. You learn the hard way not to get emotionally entangled with psychopaths, though I’m not sure it’s a lesson you ever fully learn.

Still, the hard way is the only way anyone ever learns how to deal with psychopaths. That’s because we keep trying to attribute to them the same “essential humanity” that we attribute to non-psychopaths. This failing is on us; we can’t blame them for being what they are. And frankly, I have yet to meet a psychopath who hasn’t more or less instantly self-identified as a psychopath to anyone with eyes to see. Now that I know what to look for, I can spot them as easily as a shiny nickel in the middle of the road. They’re like a fox in the henhouse or a wolf in the sheep pen. The trick is to be the henhouse (not the hen) and the fence (not the sheep). We’re to observe from a safe distance, not intervene or engage. Beyond the perfunctory, it’s never advisable to engage with psychopaths.

Which brings me to today’s topic – psychopathic nations. Whole nations can be psychopathic, not just individuals. That’s not to say that all the people in those nations are psychopaths; I’m not saying that at all. But a nation can still be psychopathic without all its people being so. To be considered psychopathic, a nation just needs to display certain key psychopathic traits, such as being perpetually self-absorbed, lacking in empathy, lacking in self-awareness, manipulative, a cunning and unapologetic liar, coldly calculating, an unabashed user and abuser of others, seeing others as less than human and therefore unworthy of humane treatment, adept at playing one party against another, perpetually protesting its innocence, perpetually proclaiming its victimhood, and perpetually justifying its exceptionalism by explaining why it should get away with doing things that other nations should not get away with doing. A psychopathic nation also appears to take pleasure in inflicting pain on its victims, all while either ignoring or downplaying the pain, or claiming it’s deserved.

How can a psychopathic nation be dealt with in a global community? Should it be isolated and contained by laws, such as those passed by the UN? That’s already been tried, but it hasn’t worked because our current psychopathic regimes have dismissed the laws as not applying to them. Should psychopathic nations be punished militarily? That’s also been tried but has so far failed because other nations get tricked, guilted, or bullied into bolstering the psychopaths’ defenses. Perhaps these nations should just simply be ignored? If you’ve ever dealt with psychopaths one-on-one, you’ll know that ignoring them rarely works. Psychopaths crave attention not as an ego-stroker but as a control mechanism. If they have your attention, they’re controlling you, so if you’re ignoring them, they’ll do whatever it takes to regain your attention, and no method is off the table. Even if they have to kill you to get you to look their way just one more time, they’ll kill you. Psychopathic nations are the same.

Which explains why these countries are always doing things to get attention. Attention-getting is their calling card on the world stage. So, for instance, they’ll unexpectedly attack another nation while it’s engaged in peace talks, catching it off-guard. This is not a new tactic but certainly a dirty one and again reveals the attacking nation’s underlying psychopathy. And since a psychopath doesn’t want to be admired or even liked, just in control, a psychopathic nation is not in the least fazed by the world’s nearly unanimous condemnation of its dirty tricks. It will instead frame the condemnation as persecution. Weeping crocodile tears, it will state that it has a right to defend itself from potential future aggressions. It will offer no apologies, because a psychopath never feels the need to apologize. Beyond self-pity, self-aggrandizement, and nearly boundless lust, a psychopath never really feels anything.

Yet for all their horror show of characteristics, psychopathic nations should not be despised. They represent both a collective reward for our bad behavior and a temptation that we dare not become. In this regard, psychopathic nations are a cautionary tale of what not to be, how not to act, and who not to serve. Because it’s as glaringly obvious as that shiny new nickel lying in the middle of the road that psychopathic nations don’t serve God. I don’t know who or what they serve, but it’s not my Father in Heaven; it’s not Jesus’ Father. Our Father is not being served by psychopaths. Something or someone is being served, but it’s not God.

How, then, are we to deal with not-God-serving psychopathic nations? Do we ignore them? At our peril; the more you ignore psychopaths, the more and worse they’ll do to get your attention. Do we cautiously and supportively interact with them, fingers crossed and hoping for the best? Again, we’d do so at our peril; psychopaths cannot be trusted and will only interact with us to find out our weaknesses, which they’ll later use against us. Or do we simply run and hide? You can’t hide from relentless control-seeking enemies, other than when your flight is directed by God and under God’s protection, keeping in mind that psychopathic nations, like psychopaths, can only inflict as much pain and destruction as has been earned, either as a negative reward or as a tightly controlled test sanctioned by God. It’s also worth noting that as time goes by, more and more nations will turn psychopathic.

So, what can we do? Or, better said, what should we do? As with individuals, nations with psychopathy should not be interacted with other than for the merest of perfunctory gestures. We should instead stand at a safe distance and observe them. We should be the henhouse, not the hens; the fence, not the sheep. We should not get involved; we should quiet our emotions. Like a sniper lying stock-still far above his target, we should keep psychopathic nations in our crosshairs but never pull the trigger. It’s not our job to pull the trigger. God has not given us that job.

It’s our job to do God’s will, and Jesus very clearly told us: “Watch”.

So we’re to serve God and watch, but otherwise let the abominations be.