The World Run By Psychopaths

What would that be like? Part one.

Photo by L B on Unsplash

Something that I hear quite often from people is that psychopaths rule and run the world. That all the terrible things that happen within it are caused by these nefarious self-serving psychopaths. This isn’t true, and self-serving nefarious people come in all stripes. It is human nature to be such, and why people are so surprised to see it baffles me. To the point, however, psychopaths do not rule the world. Nor are all politicians, billionaires, medical workers, or anyone else, all psychopathic. However, this does bring to mind what the world would be like if the percentages of psychopaths to neurotypicals were reversed.

Psychopathy affects the structure of the brain, and how it processes chemistry. That certainly affects the person’s view of the world, but it doesn’t direct their behavior within it. This means that psychopaths still all have their own personalities. The other psychopath and I are quite similar in many ways, but there are stark differences as well. Not in how we think, per se, but certainly in what we like, who we are attracted to, and things that grab our attention. Male and female psychopaths differ as well. Based alone on the fact that males have testosterone, and females, while they have some, do not have it to the degree that it is going to create aggressiveness.

When attempting to break down a world made up of psychopaths there are many issues that I confront trying to do so, but the largest of which is that I truly have no idea. I know one other psychopath, and while we are similar in many ways, we live very different lives. What I prioritize and what he prioritizes are not the same. What we do agree on as a priority is not dealing with unnecessary noise. We like things to be convenient, straightforward, and logical.

Neither of us would have a great deal of patience for low-functioning psychopaths and their lack of impulse control, for instance. We both like our stuff and have no interest in our stuff becoming someone else’s pilfered prize. This brings to mind how a justice system might work. I think that it might be much more like a contract that you are entering into the agreement with the government that you will adhere to the expectations, and if you do not, you will have a prescribed outcome that you can rely on.

Psychopaths don’t respond to punishments like neurotypicals do. We can adapt to anything, so the idea of a psychopath being sent to prison by another psychopath, or a group of psychopaths is not really going to have a great deal of effect. In fact, I could see more lazy and entitled psychopaths seeing this as a way to have the state pay for them while they figure out how to make the prison system work for them.

Psychopaths tend to follow the tit-for-tat system. What you do, you get. I would also imagine that society would be set up on an incentive structure, not that of punishment. You aren’t going to gall psychopaths into doing what you want. We are staunch individualists that are reward-driven. You have to play to that to make a decently functioning society. The less desirable a job, the larger the reward for doing it. Farming is tough, but people have to eat. You would have to make being a farmer a very desirable position if you want to meet the needs of the people. Mind you also, these people aren’t going to have any compunction about removing you with prejudice if you can’t do your job well.

As for social order, coming to an agreement in a room full of psychopaths could either be incredibly easy, or impossible. Being stubborn is something that both the male psychopath and I definitely are, but when disagreements arise, we do tend to find ways to settle a matter. An example might be going out to eat and not being able to agree on where. We would just go to both places, get the food to go, and then we are both happy. Neither of us wanted to compromise what we wanted, but making an extra trip is a reasonable solution that appeals to both of us.

And this is where I stop with the thought experiment.

Why? Because the fact is I have no idea what a world of us would be like and pretending that I would is hubris. I know me, and I know one other like me. We aren’t the same person, but we are compatible enough with each other to have agreements and disagreements. There is no way to even consider what a society of psychopaths would be like because literally everything that I know about society has been formulated by people that do not have a brain that works like mine. Psychopaths are individuals, and it is individuals that construct a world, not fantasy. I can have all the ideas in the world, but someone else may be able to pick them apart in ways that I personally am unable to see. That person would have necessary input, because I don’t know what I don’t know. Without that input, I have no idea what ideas of mine are garbage and what might be good, and that isn’t even the half of it.

I could wax poetic about the logic and reason that would be injected into society and that emotion wouldn’t cloud decision making, but the fact of the matter is that society is built on many things that have existed in many forms for many years. It takes societies to rise, to war, to suffer, to prosper for the good and the bad to make themselves evident, and after that, it takes the wisest of those societies to pluck out those lessons and illustrate the value of them.

Frankly, I am consistently annoyed by people that believe that the functional society that they live in has anything to do with them. It doesn’t. Outside of you following the rules, and not mucking things up, you’re standing on the shoulders of giants. You are just living in the fruits of intellectual labor and blood that waters the grounds on which you walk. Consider what you take for granted and imagine yourself coming up with it on your own.

This is known as Blackstone’s formulation, and this is not how most of history ran. Most of the time it was far better that ten innocent people suffer, lest one guilty escape judgment. Blackstone’s Formulation finds its roots in the Bible, where God spoke to Abraham and told him of the coming destruction of Sodom. Abraham asked him if he would sacrifice the righteous as well as the guilty. Would he destroy fifty righteous men and then negotiated with God down to if ten righteous men could be found, would God spare Sodom.

I have spoken about Blackstone’s Formulation in the past, and it is a very easy thing to agree with if you believe in the idea of innocent until proven guilty. It is quite different if you realize that much of the world operates on the idea that it is upon you to prove your innocence. You are presumed guilty until you can show otherwise. Could you come up with that? Could you be okay letting the person who murdered your child go free if it meant saving someone else that committed no crime, or would you let them rot because they deserve it and you feel that your child deserves justice?

From the psychopathic perspective, it is logically unsound to let ten guilty problems go free because of the mess that it would cause society. I don’t agree with that perspective because I personally have no interest in going to prison for something I didn’t do, so I am relying on someone else’s idea to protect me from that harm. It takes a great deal of insight and thinking beyond the immediate to arrive at the decision that innocence is inherently valuable. Would I have it? I don’t know, and I will never know because the world in which I live takes this value for granted. It is understood to be “the right thing” without any consideration as to why that would be, and how it would be without that inherent good.

It is easy to imagine that the world you construct would be Utopia, but the reality is that whatever world you construct, unless it has certain ideals in place, it is bound to be a catastrophe of imprisonment and death. Utopia can never exist because it requires complete agreement by all that live there. Ten humans can agree. Even a hundred might be able to, and govern themselves efficiently, but beyond that, what you will have to do in order to keep perfect agreement will be a campaign of death and torture of anyone that dares disagree with you.

What I understand about a functioning society did not come from me sitting at a keyboard and designing a world that would only function if I were the sole resident. It came through all the history that proceeds me in this world. What I value about the world are not my ideas. I value them, which means I agree with them, but I am not so arrogant to believe that I have the wherewithal to come up with them on my own. Nor do I think that my ideals would represent the ideals of others that just so happen to be wired like me. I am not of the mindset that a world of psychopaths would be as this person insists:

You are either not a psychopath or a lying or not very smart psychopath. The first thing we would see in a society of only psychopaths is the most inhumane society that humankind has ever seen. More powerful psychopaths exploiting less powerful and capable ones like animals. We would see the return of slavery all for the convenience and commodity of the powerful. In brief to gather all the possibilities you can say that all the inhumane but practical and effective social constructs that you can think of would be seen in a society like that.

But I am also aware of my own limitations. A society of psychopaths would have to have their own history, and their own lessons that have been plucked from it’s fires and failures, taught to their children, and valued by them in order to continue them on. I can’t write that history, because it isn’t mine to write. It would have to be written in the blood of those that lived and died long before the idea of me was ever conceived.