Yes, this is a brilliant summation of sociopathy. I would also add another dimension which is how we treat our children.
The Attachment Theory in psychology observes how children's general view of the world is shaped by how they were treated by their primary caretakers during infancy and toddlerhood (0-4 yrs. or so).
Those with 'secure' attachment to their family and treated with respect and care tend to view the world as secure and welcoming. Those with moderately chaotic childhood experiences, but adequate care, hold more of an ambivalent attachment style, trust, but verify.
Those who were mistreated or abused (Donald Trump), see the world as threatening and hostile and naturally develop an avoidant-hostile relationship with the world (people and nature). Once the thermostat is set in childhood, it prevails throughout one's life and highly resistant to change.
While, sociopathy is likely a choice, it is made on a very solid existential philosophical base. It is far easier to provide a secure childhood experience for our children than attempting to reason with or change those indoctrinated with a lifetime of neglect and rage.
The cultivation of the soul...and our free will in choosing which path we take. I couldn't agree more that this is the choice of our times. Thank you for another beautifully thought out and written post.
"In 1962 I was a Conservative. I believed privilege could only be justified by service, high taxes on very high incomes were necessary to prevent an entrepreneurial economy becoming a rentier economy, and Keynesian growth would finance public service improvements and a welfare state that steadily reduced inequality. I was suspicious of ideologically driven, large-scale change. These were the mainstream policies of the Macmillan government at the time. In 60 years I have moved from centre right to hard left without changing my opinions."
"There were people in the Conservative party who were thoroughly decent in their approach towards society at large, those who were in need, and the requirement for a balanced economy where dogma did not rule every decision, but finding the right solution did.
And then we got neoliberalism. And neoliberalism is a dogmatic political philosophy. It's not based upon any facts. It's based upon a set of conditions that have been created by economists so that their mathematical models work. They have absolutely no relationship with reality at all.
Let me give you a simple example of the conditions that are required to apply so that neoliberalism works.
You are meant to have perfect knowledge of what is going to happen from now until the end of time, or at least the end of time as far as you are concerned.
And you will never change your mind about anything between now and then because your preferences are immovable. If you now choose something from a menu when you go in, you will never change your preference ever again. If you like a particular television programme, you will never go off it. And this is, of course, completely absurd."
As I said in another comment, a lot of socialists and leftists should be careful not to realize they are throwing stones from glass houses when they act triumphant in their view that they were right about neoliberalism all along. Many socialist thinkers like Naomi Klein have been serially dishonest in their characterization of neoliberal thinkers, like Milton Friedman. Going so far as to suggest Friedman was playing a kind of shell game (claiming he was facially dishonest about his intentions), claiming he sought to fully dismantle the welfare state (he didn’t—in fact he was an early proponent of of a basic income scheme in the form of a Negative Income Tax).
His theory of power was clearly off. And I suspect, having been a scholar of his work, that if he was alive today, there’s a good chance he would have updated his priors much in the same way Fukuyama, DeLong and others have.
Socialists and leftists have made similar catastrophic errors in their theory of power. Again, as I wrote in another comment, in their enthusiasm for Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolutions.
Liberals (or specific strands of liberalism, which neoliberalism is) being wrong, doesn’t prove socialists right. Both liberalism and socialism have made accurate critiques of each other. And even modern Marxist theorists have conceded the point that liberals made about the problem of economic calculation and the pricing mechanism. See: Bhaskar Sunkara.
This is, among other things, why when it comes to economic regulation and economic matters, I have come to be pragmatist in a very Deweyist (as in John Dewey)way. I think there are certain epistemic horizons that nobody can see beyond, and things happen and evolve in ways nobody can anticipate.
My liberalism is a very small-L liberalism and is based around very foundational moral commitments. I think policy and regulation are things that should be rightly decided by democratic deliberation.
Strong majorities right now want higher taxes on the rich, for instance. And I’m okay with that.
I personally also think we need to expand the tax base and raise middle-class taxes too. But some leftists in their class warfare frame see that as an ethically-repugnant stance.
But haven’t prominent neoliberal intellectuals like Francis Fukuyama and others acknowledged their errors—on China and here in the U.S.—over the past ten years. That’s hardly a sign of dogma.
A lot of the neoliberal critiques of central planning and the regulatory state were proven correct. Market fundamentalism or what Vlad Vexler calls hyper-neoliberalism was clearly flawed like all totalizing frameworks tend to me.
The intellectuals, sure. But what's being observed is the lingering influence of their past work, even if it's since been anywhere from quietly abandoned to openly repudiated by said intellectuals.
The intellectuals looked at the results and reconsidered their views. But a lot of the people who benefited from putting those views into action, in politics and economics, cling to them anyway because they perceive themselves as continuing to benefit from doing so.
The criticisms were largely correct, that's true, but the flaw was leaping from there to assuming that the proposed solutions must also be correct. (This is the same problem that Marxists have. Or, to put it in blunter terms, I can prove that 2+2 != 5, but that doesn't mean I'm right if I then assert that 2+2 = 6.) The solutions weren't correct (maybe they were less wrong than the Marxist solutions) but implementing them benefited a class of people who were then able to take and hold power on that basis and enabled them to stay in power with the same ideology even as the flaws in the solutions became ever more apparent.
I think Empathy or the lack of it is important factor in Sociopathy/Psychopathy.
Psychologist Gustave Gilbert, who interviewed Nazi leaders during the Nuremberg trials, said after all his work examining the psyches of those who committed the most horrendous acts of World War II that he had come close to finding a definition of the nature of evil:
“It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants,” he said. “A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
Those without empathy can do Evil things but usually don’t do evil things unless they are crazy because we have laws and the consequences of getting caught act as a restraint. Plus, not everyone who is without empathy is Evil.
However, an intelligent Psychopath can and will do Evil to satisfy his urges and material gains if he can get away with it. A psychopath is just another name for a person who has no empathy that does Evil that harms others. They make up about 3% of the population. Fortunately the dumb ones who cant control themselves are in jail. The smarter ones basically restrain themselves and pretend to be normal.
Łobaczewski (Political Ponerology-Politics and Science of Evil) focuses heavily on psychopathy, particularly individuals with:
• No empathy or remorse.
• Charisma and manipulative social skills.
• A desire for dominance and control.
In “soft” societies, these individuals camouflage themselves by mimicking the moral or ideological language of the time. Over time, they:
• Gain influence in institutions.
• Form networks with other pathological individuals.
• Reshape norms to erode empathy, integrity, and truth.
He calls this process “ponerogenesis”—the genesis of evil within a society.
When these dynamics progress far enough, Łobaczewski argues that society can shift into a “pathocracy”—a system in which psychologically disordered individuals dominate the government, media, education, and culture.
Key features of a pathocracy:
• The marginalization of normal, empathetic people from power.
• Suppression of truth through redefined language and corrupted ideology.
• Normalization of cruelty, lies, and moral inversion.
Under a pathocracy, even people who are not pathological begin to mimic the behavior and thinking of the ruling elite out of fear, careerism, or psychological adaptation.
Łobaczewski emphasizes that evil often hides behind ideology. He saw totalitarian regimes—especially communist ones—as examples where:
• Pathological elites used ideological slogans to manipulate well-meaning people.
• The ideology served as a mask to justify dehumanization, repression, and lies.
Importantly, this isn’t limited to one political side. Any ideology—left, right, religious, or secular—can be co-opted.
There appears to be a decline in human empathy over the years. For example, one psychology study surveyed American university students and reported a 48% decrease in levels of empathy between 1979 and 2009. Imagine that: this sample portrayed half the level of empathy they once had 30 years ago. Overall, scientists are reporting a generational decrease in empathy and a rise in narcissism around the world, particularly in the West.
If belief that empathy is a weakness were widely embraced, the world would become an even harsher, more unforgiving place:
* The social safety net would continue to crumble, leaving the vulnerable completely abandoned.
* Corporations would face fewer ethical obligations, accelerating worker exploitation.
* Extreme wealth inequality would become permanent, leading to unrest and societal collapse. Simply put, a world without empathy is not a world that most people would want to live in.
Here is what Darwin had to say in The Descent of Man about Empathy (before the words invention sympathy was used in its place):
In however complex a manner this feeling may have originated, as it is one of high importance to all those animals which aid and defend one another, it will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.”
In Modern Society we have Law and Police to protect individuals and few non-human predators to worry about, and plenty of material comforts. Successful (Intelligent) Psychopaths who manage to stay out of jail can rise to important positions in business and politics. Indeed, having no empathy or moral restraints gives an intelligent Psychopath a competitive advantage over those who do. Remember the old saying? Nice Guys Finish Last. There is truth to that.
These Successful Psychopaths are capable of doing Evil and getting away with it, but in the past have always had to Exercise restraint in a world full of empathic and non-psychopathic people, otherwise they get caught and maybe suicided like Jeffrey Epstein.
More importantly they recognize their own and are members of the same groups that discuss how to change society that serve their interests. Club of Rome, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberger, Atlantic Council, WEF, Heritage Foundation, etc, etc. There are also Secret Societies. In this way they may act in a Collective and Coordinated way toward common goals. Mind you not everyone in these groups are psychopaths.
My hypothesis is that in modern times that the proportion of psychopaths in leadership positions has increased because successful psychopaths breed more than normal people due to their financial success and proclivity to having multiple wives/ mistresses over a lifetime . Another reason is that the dumbing down and secularization of the population has allowed successful psychopaths to get away with more Evil and compete more successfully. Also , a secular Population is less equipped to recognize Evil and indeed are willing to tolerate Evil if it is done for a purpose they agree with, like winning an election for their Party.
So we are at the point where Psychopaths can come out of the closet and actually act like Psychopaths without much consequence. Someone once bragged he could shoot up NY Times Square without losing any votes and then got elected President twice
In a Pathocracy ,when the psychopathic leaders dominate society people who are not pathological begin to mimic the behavior and thinking of the elite out of fear, careerism, or psychological adaptation. And thats where we are now with 30% or more willing to go along with evil to support their sides ideology.
What happened between 2016 and 2024? The Pandemic!
And what one's take on the pandemic while it was occurring and after is what this is about today, vis-a-vis shade throwing, projecting one's own bad guy on the other guy.
Sociopathy in this case is a syndrome, pointing to a cultural milieu steeped in technocratc distance that itself is sociopathic! Our internet way of life has run amok and is what this essay is trying to pin on a few, so called, bad actors. But it's in the circuitry of our hard drives and the emf's from cell towers and satellites bombarding our native soul/mitochrondria that the etiology of the problem confronting societal health lies.
The push for more science and technology without balancing the humanities and arts on the scales of our whole psychical and social self-community story in the round, is the culprit, the elephant in the room. With just half the picture in play in society at large, we get only one side of ourselves in the bargain.
The result of STEM, STEM, STEM is a robotic value system that rewards machine-like behavior. We become a Borg, a hive, without individuality, creativity and most importantly, sustainability.
And even more invidious to our well being is the lack of storied relationships to family, kin, village and country found in our homes, neigborhoods and watersheds, regions and continents where we live and emotionally affiliate, that are being dislocated from our daily sense of identity in favor of screen time. We've become infatuated by our own wizardry (of Oz) and have lost connection to our steps on Earth that ensole us within community and family, with meaning and purpse.
Sociopathy? Where does one start to unpack its insidious traits in our contemporary internet, industrial complex life today? And don't do the blame game! It is built into the system we are living amidst. Extracting ourselves piecemeal one at a time may be the only way we have at our disposal: to take the reins in hand of one's own destiny with one's kith and kin around us, and venture the depths of a shared dreamtime with lucidity from both sides of the border between night and day, opening a portal to a fifth Hopi mythical world, whence this nightmare of history is left behind.
Giving commensurate value to our sleeping (on it) time, we can awaken in our dreams and thereby survive the present worlds alienating grasp on us, and from an archimedian point of view, retrieve our way Home to a place on Earth.
I think some people are born sociopaths but the vast majority talk themselves into the behavior as you have outlined. Wish there was a better way to tell them apart.
Thank you, Mike. Our current capitalist economy is built from a sociopathic framework - neoliberal economic theory. The systems and policies that stem from this framework inevitably contain sociopathic traits... education & healthcare probably being the top two. If we want human and societal flourishing, it requires integrated frameworks free from sociopathic traits.
I think the criticisms of neoliberalism today are valid. In fact, most prominent neoliberal thinkers, including Francis Fukuyama, have abandoned neoliberalism. I think many of the neoliberal architects of the 1980s and 1990s genuinely believed global markets would be democratizing—they weren’t playing a shell game. They simply got it wrong.
But socialists got it wrong too, often catastrophically. Many of the academics and activists I knew in that era were deeply sympathetic to the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, and rationalized the regime’s repression as “anti-imperialist necessity.” That willingness to excuse tyranny in the name of justice mirrors neoliberalism’s blindness to the injustices that flowed from its own utopianism.
Both projects—the socialist and the neoliberal—failed the same moral test: they subordinated human dignity to system-level abstractions. The work now is not to trade one failed totalism for another, but to rebuild a political economy rooted in human flourishing rather than ideological purity.
"That willingness to excuse tyranny in the name of justice mirrors neoliberalism’s blindness to the injustices that flowed from its own utopianism." ... and that is perhaps a fatal flaw of human reasoning... that there is a utopia that we can create and maintain. What it seems that we all fail to acknowledge, understand and accept is that we live in systems within systems that are complex and ever changing, i.e. complex adaptive systems and Permaculture.
Through a series of ChatGPT prompts exploring CAS & Permaculture in relation to socioeconomic frameworks, I gave this prompt: "Now combine CAS in sociology, economics along with Permaculture to develop a framework for society that creates the conditions for human and environmental flourishing that includes adaptation of CAS and Permaculture principles to education, healthcare, food systems, finance & banking systems, electoral systems, and governance that minimizes the conditions that bring about sociopathic traits in people." ... and then I asked "Compare the framework I asked you to develop, centered around CAS and Permaculture, in relation to his statement to "rebuild a political economy rooted in human flourishing rather than ideological purity.""
With all of this, I have to acknowledge that it is not novel. There are pockets of communities all over this world practicing and implementing a CAS/Permaculture-based frameworks. I believe that this can and must be done on a larger scale.
And yet the average IQ partisan parrot just votes for whoever tells the best lies, and in the last election the sadistic liar won. So it appears average people prefer sociopaths (by a narrow margin). It also seems that half of us just want to hurt others, and any excuse for vengeance is good enough, even if it hurts the hater.
This seems to feed into things like Peter Thiel's anti-Christ dementia as well. If venture capitalists can cheer destruction as beneficial to investors, not only do Thiel's action support that POV but they also tend to nudge the rest of us into that black hole from sheer inertia when you take into account the recent actions of several billionaires.
Yes, this is a brilliant summation of sociopathy. I would also add another dimension which is how we treat our children.
The Attachment Theory in psychology observes how children's general view of the world is shaped by how they were treated by their primary caretakers during infancy and toddlerhood (0-4 yrs. or so).
Those with 'secure' attachment to their family and treated with respect and care tend to view the world as secure and welcoming. Those with moderately chaotic childhood experiences, but adequate care, hold more of an ambivalent attachment style, trust, but verify.
Those who were mistreated or abused (Donald Trump), see the world as threatening and hostile and naturally develop an avoidant-hostile relationship with the world (people and nature). Once the thermostat is set in childhood, it prevails throughout one's life and highly resistant to change.
While, sociopathy is likely a choice, it is made on a very solid existential philosophical base. It is far easier to provide a secure childhood experience for our children than attempting to reason with or change those indoctrinated with a lifetime of neglect and rage.
https://www.simplypsychology.org/attachment.html
The cultivation of the soul...and our free will in choosing which path we take. I couldn't agree more that this is the choice of our times. Thank you for another beautifully thought out and written post.
A timely update to Bonhoeffer who captured the sociopaths of another era - before billionaires and our electronic debasement began.
Outstanding article. Thank you.
Mary Trump. Would relish a gathering of Mike & Mary. What a powerhouse of knowledge and analysis!
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2023/02/letter-of-the-week-what-conservatism-knows
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/04/04/we-must-get-rid-of-neoliberalism/
"In 1962 I was a Conservative. I believed privilege could only be justified by service, high taxes on very high incomes were necessary to prevent an entrepreneurial economy becoming a rentier economy, and Keynesian growth would finance public service improvements and a welfare state that steadily reduced inequality. I was suspicious of ideologically driven, large-scale change. These were the mainstream policies of the Macmillan government at the time. In 60 years I have moved from centre right to hard left without changing my opinions."
"There were people in the Conservative party who were thoroughly decent in their approach towards society at large, those who were in need, and the requirement for a balanced economy where dogma did not rule every decision, but finding the right solution did.
And then we got neoliberalism. And neoliberalism is a dogmatic political philosophy. It's not based upon any facts. It's based upon a set of conditions that have been created by economists so that their mathematical models work. They have absolutely no relationship with reality at all.
Let me give you a simple example of the conditions that are required to apply so that neoliberalism works.
You are meant to have perfect knowledge of what is going to happen from now until the end of time, or at least the end of time as far as you are concerned.
And you will never change your mind about anything between now and then because your preferences are immovable. If you now choose something from a menu when you go in, you will never change your preference ever again. If you like a particular television programme, you will never go off it. And this is, of course, completely absurd."
Following up further in this:
As I said in another comment, a lot of socialists and leftists should be careful not to realize they are throwing stones from glass houses when they act triumphant in their view that they were right about neoliberalism all along. Many socialist thinkers like Naomi Klein have been serially dishonest in their characterization of neoliberal thinkers, like Milton Friedman. Going so far as to suggest Friedman was playing a kind of shell game (claiming he was facially dishonest about his intentions), claiming he sought to fully dismantle the welfare state (he didn’t—in fact he was an early proponent of of a basic income scheme in the form of a Negative Income Tax).
His theory of power was clearly off. And I suspect, having been a scholar of his work, that if he was alive today, there’s a good chance he would have updated his priors much in the same way Fukuyama, DeLong and others have.
Socialists and leftists have made similar catastrophic errors in their theory of power. Again, as I wrote in another comment, in their enthusiasm for Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolutions.
Liberals (or specific strands of liberalism, which neoliberalism is) being wrong, doesn’t prove socialists right. Both liberalism and socialism have made accurate critiques of each other. And even modern Marxist theorists have conceded the point that liberals made about the problem of economic calculation and the pricing mechanism. See: Bhaskar Sunkara.
This is, among other things, why when it comes to economic regulation and economic matters, I have come to be pragmatist in a very Deweyist (as in John Dewey)way. I think there are certain epistemic horizons that nobody can see beyond, and things happen and evolve in ways nobody can anticipate.
My liberalism is a very small-L liberalism and is based around very foundational moral commitments. I think policy and regulation are things that should be rightly decided by democratic deliberation.
Strong majorities right now want higher taxes on the rich, for instance. And I’m okay with that.
I personally also think we need to expand the tax base and raise middle-class taxes too. But some leftists in their class warfare frame see that as an ethically-repugnant stance.
But haven’t prominent neoliberal intellectuals like Francis Fukuyama and others acknowledged their errors—on China and here in the U.S.—over the past ten years. That’s hardly a sign of dogma.
A lot of the neoliberal critiques of central planning and the regulatory state were proven correct. Market fundamentalism or what Vlad Vexler calls hyper-neoliberalism was clearly flawed like all totalizing frameworks tend to me.
The intellectuals, sure. But what's being observed is the lingering influence of their past work, even if it's since been anywhere from quietly abandoned to openly repudiated by said intellectuals.
The intellectuals looked at the results and reconsidered their views. But a lot of the people who benefited from putting those views into action, in politics and economics, cling to them anyway because they perceive themselves as continuing to benefit from doing so.
The criticisms were largely correct, that's true, but the flaw was leaping from there to assuming that the proposed solutions must also be correct. (This is the same problem that Marxists have. Or, to put it in blunter terms, I can prove that 2+2 != 5, but that doesn't mean I'm right if I then assert that 2+2 = 6.) The solutions weren't correct (maybe they were less wrong than the Marxist solutions) but implementing them benefited a class of people who were then able to take and hold power on that basis and enabled them to stay in power with the same ideology even as the flaws in the solutions became ever more apparent.
I may not be explaining this as well as I could.
I think Empathy or the lack of it is important factor in Sociopathy/Psychopathy.
Psychologist Gustave Gilbert, who interviewed Nazi leaders during the Nuremberg trials, said after all his work examining the psyches of those who committed the most horrendous acts of World War II that he had come close to finding a definition of the nature of evil:
“It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants,” he said. “A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
Those without empathy can do Evil things but usually don’t do evil things unless they are crazy because we have laws and the consequences of getting caught act as a restraint. Plus, not everyone who is without empathy is Evil.
However, an intelligent Psychopath can and will do Evil to satisfy his urges and material gains if he can get away with it. A psychopath is just another name for a person who has no empathy that does Evil that harms others. They make up about 3% of the population. Fortunately the dumb ones who cant control themselves are in jail. The smarter ones basically restrain themselves and pretend to be normal.
https://pete843.substack.com/p/fake-reality-empathy-as-a-bug-and
From ChatGBT
Łobaczewski (Political Ponerology-Politics and Science of Evil) focuses heavily on psychopathy, particularly individuals with:
• No empathy or remorse.
• Charisma and manipulative social skills.
• A desire for dominance and control.
In “soft” societies, these individuals camouflage themselves by mimicking the moral or ideological language of the time. Over time, they:
• Gain influence in institutions.
• Form networks with other pathological individuals.
• Reshape norms to erode empathy, integrity, and truth.
He calls this process “ponerogenesis”—the genesis of evil within a society.
When these dynamics progress far enough, Łobaczewski argues that society can shift into a “pathocracy”—a system in which psychologically disordered individuals dominate the government, media, education, and culture.
Key features of a pathocracy:
• The marginalization of normal, empathetic people from power.
• Suppression of truth through redefined language and corrupted ideology.
• Normalization of cruelty, lies, and moral inversion.
Under a pathocracy, even people who are not pathological begin to mimic the behavior and thinking of the ruling elite out of fear, careerism, or psychological adaptation.
Łobaczewski emphasizes that evil often hides behind ideology. He saw totalitarian regimes—especially communist ones—as examples where:
• Pathological elites used ideological slogans to manipulate well-meaning people.
• The ideology served as a mask to justify dehumanization, repression, and lies.
Importantly, this isn’t limited to one political side. Any ideology—left, right, religious, or secular—can be co-opted.
End ChatGBT
https://pete843.substack.com/p/descent-into-pathocracy
Is Empathy Declining?
There appears to be a decline in human empathy over the years. For example, one psychology study surveyed American university students and reported a 48% decrease in levels of empathy between 1979 and 2009. Imagine that: this sample portrayed half the level of empathy they once had 30 years ago. Overall, scientists are reporting a generational decrease in empathy and a rise in narcissism around the world, particularly in the West.
https://www.thesmujournal.ca/editor/empathy-is-dying-and-so-are-we
If belief that empathy is a weakness were widely embraced, the world would become an even harsher, more unforgiving place:
* The social safety net would continue to crumble, leaving the vulnerable completely abandoned.
* Corporations would face fewer ethical obligations, accelerating worker exploitation.
* Extreme wealth inequality would become permanent, leading to unrest and societal collapse. Simply put, a world without empathy is not a world that most people would want to live in.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-death-of-empathy-how-its-decline-is-destroying-humanity-and-why-elon-musk-sees-it-as-a-problem/ar-AA1Aoj66
Here is what Darwin had to say in The Descent of Man about Empathy (before the words invention sympathy was used in its place):
In however complex a manner this feeling may have originated, as it is one of high importance to all those animals which aid and defend one another, it will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.”
In Modern Society we have Law and Police to protect individuals and few non-human predators to worry about, and plenty of material comforts. Successful (Intelligent) Psychopaths who manage to stay out of jail can rise to important positions in business and politics. Indeed, having no empathy or moral restraints gives an intelligent Psychopath a competitive advantage over those who do. Remember the old saying? Nice Guys Finish Last. There is truth to that.
These Successful Psychopaths are capable of doing Evil and getting away with it, but in the past have always had to Exercise restraint in a world full of empathic and non-psychopathic people, otherwise they get caught and maybe suicided like Jeffrey Epstein.
More importantly they recognize their own and are members of the same groups that discuss how to change society that serve their interests. Club of Rome, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberger, Atlantic Council, WEF, Heritage Foundation, etc, etc. There are also Secret Societies. In this way they may act in a Collective and Coordinated way toward common goals. Mind you not everyone in these groups are psychopaths.
My hypothesis is that in modern times that the proportion of psychopaths in leadership positions has increased because successful psychopaths breed more than normal people due to their financial success and proclivity to having multiple wives/ mistresses over a lifetime . Another reason is that the dumbing down and secularization of the population has allowed successful psychopaths to get away with more Evil and compete more successfully. Also , a secular Population is less equipped to recognize Evil and indeed are willing to tolerate Evil if it is done for a purpose they agree with, like winning an election for their Party.
So we are at the point where Psychopaths can come out of the closet and actually act like Psychopaths without much consequence. Someone once bragged he could shoot up NY Times Square without losing any votes and then got elected President twice
In a Pathocracy ,when the psychopathic leaders dominate society people who are not pathological begin to mimic the behavior and thinking of the elite out of fear, careerism, or psychological adaptation. And thats where we are now with 30% or more willing to go along with evil to support their sides ideology.
What happened between 2016 and 2024? The Pandemic!
And what one's take on the pandemic while it was occurring and after is what this is about today, vis-a-vis shade throwing, projecting one's own bad guy on the other guy.
Sociopathy in this case is a syndrome, pointing to a cultural milieu steeped in technocratc distance that itself is sociopathic! Our internet way of life has run amok and is what this essay is trying to pin on a few, so called, bad actors. But it's in the circuitry of our hard drives and the emf's from cell towers and satellites bombarding our native soul/mitochrondria that the etiology of the problem confronting societal health lies.
The push for more science and technology without balancing the humanities and arts on the scales of our whole psychical and social self-community story in the round, is the culprit, the elephant in the room. With just half the picture in play in society at large, we get only one side of ourselves in the bargain.
The result of STEM, STEM, STEM is a robotic value system that rewards machine-like behavior. We become a Borg, a hive, without individuality, creativity and most importantly, sustainability.
And even more invidious to our well being is the lack of storied relationships to family, kin, village and country found in our homes, neigborhoods and watersheds, regions and continents where we live and emotionally affiliate, that are being dislocated from our daily sense of identity in favor of screen time. We've become infatuated by our own wizardry (of Oz) and have lost connection to our steps on Earth that ensole us within community and family, with meaning and purpse.
Sociopathy? Where does one start to unpack its insidious traits in our contemporary internet, industrial complex life today? And don't do the blame game! It is built into the system we are living amidst. Extracting ourselves piecemeal one at a time may be the only way we have at our disposal: to take the reins in hand of one's own destiny with one's kith and kin around us, and venture the depths of a shared dreamtime with lucidity from both sides of the border between night and day, opening a portal to a fifth Hopi mythical world, whence this nightmare of history is left behind.
Giving commensurate value to our sleeping (on it) time, we can awaken in our dreams and thereby survive the present worlds alienating grasp on us, and from an archimedian point of view, retrieve our way Home to a place on Earth.
I think some people are born sociopaths but the vast majority talk themselves into the behavior as you have outlined. Wish there was a better way to tell them apart.
Fascinating! Things I never thought of before. ❤️🔥
We have to hold fast in the hope that loving actions can transmute this cruelty and blind spots and speak up for the vulnerable.
Thank you, Mike. Our current capitalist economy is built from a sociopathic framework - neoliberal economic theory. The systems and policies that stem from this framework inevitably contain sociopathic traits... education & healthcare probably being the top two. If we want human and societal flourishing, it requires integrated frameworks free from sociopathic traits.
I think the criticisms of neoliberalism today are valid. In fact, most prominent neoliberal thinkers, including Francis Fukuyama, have abandoned neoliberalism. I think many of the neoliberal architects of the 1980s and 1990s genuinely believed global markets would be democratizing—they weren’t playing a shell game. They simply got it wrong.
But socialists got it wrong too, often catastrophically. Many of the academics and activists I knew in that era were deeply sympathetic to the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, and rationalized the regime’s repression as “anti-imperialist necessity.” That willingness to excuse tyranny in the name of justice mirrors neoliberalism’s blindness to the injustices that flowed from its own utopianism.
Both projects—the socialist and the neoliberal—failed the same moral test: they subordinated human dignity to system-level abstractions. The work now is not to trade one failed totalism for another, but to rebuild a political economy rooted in human flourishing rather than ideological purity.
"That willingness to excuse tyranny in the name of justice mirrors neoliberalism’s blindness to the injustices that flowed from its own utopianism." ... and that is perhaps a fatal flaw of human reasoning... that there is a utopia that we can create and maintain. What it seems that we all fail to acknowledge, understand and accept is that we live in systems within systems that are complex and ever changing, i.e. complex adaptive systems and Permaculture.
Through a series of ChatGPT prompts exploring CAS & Permaculture in relation to socioeconomic frameworks, I gave this prompt: "Now combine CAS in sociology, economics along with Permaculture to develop a framework for society that creates the conditions for human and environmental flourishing that includes adaptation of CAS and Permaculture principles to education, healthcare, food systems, finance & banking systems, electoral systems, and governance that minimizes the conditions that bring about sociopathic traits in people." ... and then I asked "Compare the framework I asked you to develop, centered around CAS and Permaculture, in relation to his statement to "rebuild a political economy rooted in human flourishing rather than ideological purity.""
What was developed based on these prompts is quite noteworthy, IMO. If interested, here is the link: https://chatgpt.com/share/68eabcf5-2264-8010-8fb6-223f6a630a80.
With all of this, I have to acknowledge that it is not novel. There are pockets of communities all over this world practicing and implementing a CAS/Permaculture-based frameworks. I believe that this can and must be done on a larger scale.
What a brilliant question: "Will we construct meaning that serves flourishing or domination?" Thanks for another great essay.
And yet the average IQ partisan parrot just votes for whoever tells the best lies, and in the last election the sadistic liar won. So it appears average people prefer sociopaths (by a narrow margin). It also seems that half of us just want to hurt others, and any excuse for vengeance is good enough, even if it hurts the hater.
Bravo! Great essay
This seems to feed into things like Peter Thiel's anti-Christ dementia as well. If venture capitalists can cheer destruction as beneficial to investors, not only do Thiel's action support that POV but they also tend to nudge the rest of us into that black hole from sheer inertia when you take into account the recent actions of several billionaires.