Seldom discussed, this is often at the root of most issues, and has the potential to destroy us.
I’m happy to see there is an increase in discussions of sociopaths online. Lex Friedman and Joe Rogan have both interviewed behavioral psychologists recently.
When I read Dr Stout’s book “The Sociopath Next Door”, recommended by my friend Chuck, I realized this was an important piece of the puzzle, if not the biggest. At the moment, I think there will be 3 or 4 parts to this discussion.
This is a view of the Normal distribution (Bell Curve) of intelligence.
I know, IQ isn't the whole story, I’m using it as a teaching device here, stay with me.
Notice there is a small band of colored sections. Imagine this is 4%, I made it larger.
Most of us normal people fall within the green stuff. At the top of that green hill, that’s you.
The colored band is for the combined 3% sociopaths and 1% psychopaths among us. It's a universal ratio due to evolution (it was useful to our genes to have people capable of eating their own family for survival during really hard times). The thing about these people is they don't have the same empathy the rest of us share. This makes them bored to death. They don't know friendship, love or passion.
And they too, fall into the a spectrum of intelligence. The dumb ones, in yellow, entertain themselves with addictions, violence and usually get caught. This is the prison bunch.
The blue ones, smart enough to stay out of trouble are usually skilled at lying, manipulating people and causing small mischief for their own entertainment. They also like to exert power and will end up in positions that lets them get away with abuse. Some of them are named Karen. The Military and Police attract them.
The red slice is the bunch that is smart enough to manipulate the rest of us into doing the violence, the mischief and the abuse. They can enrich themselves while lying, manipulating, causing abuse and harm, killing innocents, usually by getting into politics. From these positions, they can use the guys in the blue slice to do the dirty work and the guys in the yellow slice to scare the green bunch into making their status permanent.
I think of this as : the dumb ones are in prison, the average ones in uniform and the smart ones in politics.
I think this is the biggest problem humanity faces.
Previous civilizations handled this problem in various ways. For background on this, I highly recommend The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow.
Our civilization thought it could handle the 'kings' once and for all by establishing 'democracy' , only to see it get captured.
Now, I know this sounds like a single-source of all problems fallacy, broad generalizations and conspiracy-like simplifications with no nuance.
But it got your attention.
Like you, I really hate it when people fall for logical fallacies, ignore historical counter examples and jump to conclusions. In the next articles, we’ll dig deeper in all of this.