Bathsheba Syndrome

What does the Bathsheba Syndrome refer to? It is the ethical failure of people in power.

What is an example of the Bathsheba syndrome?

Consider, for example, the biblical story of David and Bathsheba. King David is smitten by Bathsheba, the wife of one of his generals, and he seduces her. David compounds his moral failure with one misdeed after another, until he eventually orders Bathsheba's husband killed—David is corrupted by his power.

Power Abuses

In these tumultuous and challenging times of great transition for humanity, we are being forced to repeatedly observe how the values and organizing principles of current human culture have been shaped to distort natural laws and subvert human heart-based values. The main pillars of society have been built to enslave the masses and extract resources for those at the top and their corrupt minions, willing to turn on their fellow human beings. If we look at the main problems created in the world, they have been built upon inverted values, enforced by the controller archetype of the False King of Tyranny.

The mass media projection of the idealized successful masculine archetype is one that climbs the corporate or social ladder to be given absolute power in his domain, as long as he plays ball with the upper ruling class. To maintain his status and wealth, he is used to continually commit gross Abuses of Power that are intentionally directed against his fellow human beings, to propagate slavery to consumerism and to continually profit off of their misery. Without understanding the NAA oversight in the mind control game behind the creation of these crumbling structures, we misperceive the problems in the world as based on human incompetence and greed. These structures are by design.

Ethics in Telling the Truth

While feeling pressured to either tell the truth or to lie can make most people anxious, anxiety can be seen as a positive emotion—that, in the face of threats and feelings of powerlessness, anxiety gives humans freedom to act courageously according to Rollo May’s The Meaning of Anxiety. Facing threats, May believed, is the mark of an authentic adult, who is creative, responsible and ready to move beyond conformity and traditional values. In Power and Innocence, May argued further that failing to confront lies is symptomatic of powerlessness and the feeling of powerlessness contributes to corruption and violence.

One complication is those most likely to lie (and feel no anxiety about lying) tend to be those with power. According to Dana Harvey, a sense of power buffers individuals from the stress of lying and increases their ability to deceive others. This is referred as the “Bathsheba Syndrome.”

The need, then, is not only to tell the truth, but to confront power with power—telling truth to power. In this time of heightened political awareness, as well as in our daily lives as public administrators, we must discern truth from fiction, tell the truth when we see it or confront lies when they are evident.

See Also

Abuses of Power

Lying Techniques

Master-Slave Mentality