The Birth of the Sociopath: Why Smart People Choose to Stop Seeing Goodness

Understanding How People Choose to Become Worse Than They Could Be

Photo by Mike Erskine on Unsplash

Inspired by a question from subscriber Whit Blauvelt

---

After publishing “The Sociopaths Are Shocked That Most People Aren’t Sociopaths,” subscriber Whit Blauvelt asked the question that matters most:

What makes a sociopath? How are intelligent people “so entirely blind to the virtues and beauties of compassion?”

Understanding the answer matters not just philosophically but strategically—because if we don’t understand how people become this way, we can’t prevent it, recognize it early, or build effective resistance against it.

What Etiology Means—And Why It Matters

Etiology is the study of causation—specifically, how something comes to be. In medicine, etiology investigates the causes of disease. In philosophy and psychology, it asks: what sequence of events, what conditions, what choices lead to a particular outcome?

When we ask about the etiology of sociopathy, we’re asking: How does someone go from having normal human capacity for moral perception to becoming someone who mocks grace at a memorial, who responds to moral criticism with “You only embolden me,” who builds elaborate intellectual justifications for cruelty?

This matters because the answer determines our response. If sociopathy is genetic—something people are born with—then it’s a fixed feature we can only contain. If it’s caused by brain damage, we’d approach it medically. But if it’s cultivated—if it emerges through choices that compound over time—then it’s something we can resist, interrupt, and potentially reverse.

The evidence suggests it’s the last one. And that changes everything.

What They Started With

Infants have moral sense. Babies show preference for helpful over harmful behavior before they can reason abstractly. The capacity to recognize and respond to virtue isn’t something we acquire through education—it’s something we develop from capacities we’re born with.

NOTE: Recent large-scale replication studies (2025) have cast doubt on some of the classic findings about infant moral preferences, with a ManyBabies consortium finding that infants did not consistently show preference for helpful over hindering puppets. The science on innate moral capacities is more contested than once thought, though most researchers agree some moral precursors emerge early in development.

More importantly: people who become sociopaths weren’t always this way. Consider Shaun Maguire, the Sequoia Capital partner. In 2016, he was a Clinton donor “scared out of my mind about Trump.” This means he could perceive the threat—could recognize what was at stake morally and politically.

By 2024, he was donating $300,000 to Trump after his felony conviction, calling DEI “literally cancer,” and posting racist screeds about political opponents. When 900+ tech founders signed an open letter demanding accountability, his response was: “You can try everything you want to silence me, but it will just embolden me.”

Something happened between 2016 and 2024. Not brain damage. Not genetic activation. A series of choices that compounded into a framework that justifies cruelty as clarity.

The First Compromise

The etiology of sociopathy begins with a moment when self-interest conflicts with what virtue demands. This isn’t usually dramatic. It’s often small: a rationalization, a shortcut, a decision to prioritize advantage over principle because “everyone does it” or “the stakes are too high” or “the other side is worse.”

But here’s where it becomes pathological: you can’t maintain self-respect while simultaneously believing “I chose power over principle.” Cognitive dissonance won’t allow it. So you construct a rationalization that resolves the tension: there is no principle, only power.

This is the crucial move. Not just “I made an exception this time” but “virtue itself is the illusion.” Not “I compromised” but “compromise reveals truth—that everyone is ultimately self-interested and morality is just performance by people not smart enough to see through it.”

Once you make this move, everything that follows becomes easier. Because you’re not abandoning principles—you’re seeing through false ones. You’re not becoming worse—you’re becoming realistic.

This tracks with what moral psychologists like Jonathan Haidt and Joshua Greene have documented about moral rationalization. We don’t reason our way to moral conclusions and then act on them—we make intuitive moral judgments and then construct justifications after the fact. The sociopath’s innovation is taking this universal human tendency and turning it into a complete system: all moral judgment is just rationalization, therefore moral judgment itself is illegitimate.

Why Intelligence Makes This Worse

Here’s the terrible irony: smart people are better at this than others. Not because intelligence protects against moral corruption, but because intelligence provides better tools for rationalization.

If you’re smart, you don’t just abandon virtue—you build intellectual frameworks that justify the abandonment. You read Nietzsche and misunderstand him as licensing domination. You study evolutionary psychology and conclude that altruism is just disguised self-interest. You absorb Ayn Rand and convince yourself that selfishness is the highest virtue.

This is what I mean when I write about “Ideas Without Love”—intellectual sophistication applied without basic regard for human dignity. Brilliance in service of detachment rather than connection. The wedding of considerable intelligence to moral pathology.

The frameworks aren’t random. They all accomplish the same thing: they transform moral failure into moral clarity. “I’m not cruel—I’m realistic.” “I’m not abandoning virtue—I’m seeing through the performance.” “I’m not becoming worse—I’m becoming honest about what humans actually are.”

The Reinforcement Loop

But here’s where etiology becomes tragic: once you’ve constructed this framework and acted on it, you become invested in its truth.

Every time someone challenges you with moral criticism, you can’t hear it as legitimate feedback—because hearing it that way would require acknowledging that you’ve been wrong, that you’ve chosen to be worse than you could have been. That acknowledgment would be psychologically unbearable.

So criticism becomes attack. Moral accountability becomes oppression. Any attempt to call you back to virtue becomes evidence that virtue is just a tool wielded by the weak to constrain the strong.

This is why Maguire responds to 900+ tech founders with “You only embolden me.” It’s not confidence—it’s defensive rigidity. The more people tell him he’s wrong, the more invested he becomes in proving he’s right, because the alternative would require reconstructing his entire self-understanding.

The framework becomes self-reinforcing. Evidence that contradicts it gets interpreted as confirmation. People who challenge it become enemies. The world gets divided into those smart enough to see through virtue’s performance and those naive enough to still believe in it.

The Cultivated Blindness

Whit asks how they become “so entirely blind to the virtues and beauties of compassion.” I think it’s cultivated blindness—not congenital absence, but systematic training not to see what would require change.

Think about what this means philosophically. In my framework, meaning emerges from the space between what is (facts about reality) and what ought to be (values we construct). That tension is where we get to be human—where we construct meaning through relationship rather than having it handed down.

The sociopaths collapse that tension. They reduce “ought” to “is”—claiming that because power exists, power is all that matters. Because self-interest is real, morality must be performance. Because consciousness emerges from physical processes, it must be reducible to computation.

This is why they fantasize about uploading consciousness into computational devices. They’ve already reduced themselves to pure calculation, so why not complete the process? They can’t perceive the irreducibility of subjective experience—the beauty, the grace, the dignity—because acknowledging it would reveal their framework is fundamentally incomplete.

What Virtue Actually Is

Whit suggests that “virtue is as fundamental to existence as consciousness.” I think he’s pointing at something true, though I’d frame it slightly differently.

Virtue isn’t a Platonic form existing independently of consciousness. But the capacity to recognize and respond to virtue is inseparable from consciousness itself. To be conscious is to be capable of caring about something beyond calculation. To experience beauty. To recognize dignity in others. To feel the weight of moral obligation.

These aren’t add-ons to consciousness—they’re constitutive of what consciousness is. This is what I mean when I write that “our soul is meaning, constructed such as it is.” Meaning isn’t discovered in nature or handed down from gods—it’s constructed through the exercise of consciousness in relationship with reality and with other conscious beings.

And virtue emerges from what actually works to sustain conscious flourishing. It’s not arbitrary. Grace, dignity, compassion—these correspond to something real about how conscious beings can relate to each other and to reality in ways that make life worth living.

The sociopaths have trained themselves not to see this. Not because the capacity is absent, but because seeing it would require acknowledging that their sophisticated framework is incomplete—that humans are capable of more than calculation, that there are dimensions of experience that resist reduction, that virtue is real and powerful and worth defending.

Why Erika Kirk Matters

This is why I keep returning to the moment when Erika Kirk offered forgiveness at her husband’s memorial. When confronted with genuine grace—not performance, not weakness, but actual human capacity for transcendence—the sociopaths revealed themselves.

Trump mocked it: “I hate my opponent. I cannot stand my opponent.”
The crowd laughed. Delighted laughter.

But here’s what matters: not everyone laughed. Some people were moved. They saw beauty where the sociopaths saw only weakness. They recognized something real that cultivated blindness had trained them to dismiss.

This proves the blindness isn’t universal or inevitable. Most people retain the capacity to perceive virtue. The sociopaths are the exception, not the rule—people who’ve trained themselves through accumulated choices not to see what they could still see.

The Strategic Implications

Understanding this etiology matters for resistance because it tells us what we’re fighting and how.

If sociopathy were genetic or caused by brain damage, we could only contain it. But if it’s cultivated through choices that compound—if it emerges from small rationalizations that build into sophisticated frameworks that get reinforced through defensive rigidity—then we can resist at each stage.

We can refuse the first compromise that prioritizes self-interest over virtue. We can reject intellectual frameworks that rationalize cruelty as clarity. We can respond to moral criticism with reflection rather than defensive rigidity. We can maintain our capacity to perceive virtue by continuing to practice recognizing and responding to it.

More than that: our resistance isn’t just individual. When we maintain grace even when it’s mocked, when we defend dignity even when it’s dismissed as weakness, when we organize around solidarity even when it’s called naive—we’re demonstrating to others that another way is possible.

We’re proving the sociopathic framework is incomplete. We’re showing that humans are capable of more than calculation. We’re keeping alive the capacity to perceive virtue in a world that increasingly treats it as performance.

The Choice We Face

So here’s the answer to Whit’s question: What makes a sociopath?

Sustained choice to prioritize self-interest over virtue, rationalized through increasingly sophisticated intellectual frameworks, reinforced by defensive rigidity against moral criticism, until the capacity to perceive virtue atrophies from disuse.

They weren’t born this way. They chose it—perhaps not in one dramatic moment, but through accumulated small choices to turn away from moral discomfort, to prioritize power over principle, to convince themselves that their intelligence justifies their cruelty.

And that means the rest of us have to choose too. Not once, but daily. Not in grand gestures, but in sustained practices of refusing to participate in the cultivation of blindness.

When we mock grace, we teach others to dismiss virtue. When we treat relationships as transactions, we normalize the sociopathic framework. When we let cynicism pass as sophistication, we make it easier for people to convince themselves that virtue is performance.

But when we maintain grace even when mocked, when we defend dignity even when dismissed, when we organize around solidarity even when called naive—we prove that consciousness is capable of more than calculation, that virtue is real and powerful, that humans can choose to remain human even when systems conspire to optimize them into something else.

How Sociopathy Becomes Systemic

Understanding individual etiology reveals how sociopathic rationalization spreads through institutions and media ecosystems. It’s not that everyone becomes a sociopath—it’s that sociopathic frameworks become normalized as “sophisticated” or “realistic.”

When Marc Andreessen describes liberation as freedom from “having to pretend to care about other people at dinner parties,” when venture capitalists celebrate “disruption” that destroys communities while enriching investors, when tech platforms optimize for engagement regardless of democratic consequences—they’re not just acting selfishly. They’re evangelizing a worldview where selfishness is wisdom and concern for others is performance.

This spreads through elite networks, through media that treats cynicism as insight, through algorithmic systems that reward sociopathic behavior with attention and profit. Each person who adopts the framework makes it easier for the next person to rationalize the same choice. Each institution that operates on sociopathic principles makes those principles seem more legitimate, more inevitable, more like “just how the world works.”

This is why resistance must be both individual and collective. We maintain our own capacity to perceive virtue while refusing to let sociopathic frameworks become normalized as sophistication. We call out “ideas without love” for what they are—not deeper insight but cultivated blindness dressed as intelligence.

The battle isn’t just political. It’s existential. Will we become sociopaths or remain human? Will we construct meaning that serves flourishing or domination? Will we hold the center or surrender to those who’ve trained themselves not to see what makes the center worth holding?

Understanding the etiology of sociopathy reveals that this isn’t predetermined. The pathways aren’t one-way. People can choose differently. And our job—through how we live, what we defend, what we refuse to accommodate—is to make that choice visible, viable, and worth making.

The center holds because we choose to hold it. And that choice, made daily in the space between what is and what ought to be, is what keeps us human when forces conspire to convince us that humanity is weakness.