Psychopath Cowboys, Sociopath Herds: A New Theory of How Evil Happens

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Summary: If you want a simple but accurate explanation for why civilizations sometimes veer toward evil, here's a theory worth considering: Psychopaths are overrepresented in positions of power and they make sociopaths out of large numbers of us. Robert Hare, psychology's most famous expert on psychopaths distinguishes psychopaths from sociopaths as follows. Psychopaths are without conscience and incapable of empathy, guilt, or loyalty to anyone but themselves … Sociopathy is not a formal psychiatric condition. It refers to patterns of attitudes and behaviors that are considered antisocial and criminal by society at large, but are seen as normal or necessary by the subculture or social environment in which they developed. After WWII, many people suspected that there might be something about the German temperament that made them so willing to comply with Hitler’s orders to hurt fellow humans. In one of psychology’s most famous experiments Stanley Milgram demonstrated that most of us, regardless of race, religion, gender or nationality will readily comply with an authority figure’s instructions to hurt fellow humans. In Milgram’s experiment a man in a white lab coat instructed subjects to administer what they believed to be successively intense electrical shocks to another person. Coaxed only by such statements as “Please continue,” and “The experiment requires that you continue,” 65% of subjects inflicted the maximum 450-volt shock and none of the remaining 35% insisted the experiment be terminated or left the room to check the health of the victim without requesting permission to leave. All right, so it’s not just the Germans. More generally then, what would make any of us sociopathically deferential to a Hitler-like psychopath? Are we all subconsciously sadistic? No, we’re subconsciously bovine. We become herd animals and follow the leader. Once we have determined that someone is in a position of moral leadership, we shift from moral autonomy to moral deference. We don’t shirk responsibility so much as surrender it to a higher power and it’s understandable that we would. A true moral leader deserves our allegiance and support. Aligning with moral leadership lends our leverage to his or her righteous cause. Think of where we would be today without the allied soldiers’ deference to moral leadership in WWII. We survived Hitler because the Greatest Generation sacrificed their moral autonomy to true moral leaders. Theirs was not to wonder why; theirs was just to do or die. The problem isn’t in our deference to moral leaders but in how lousy we are at determining who is a moral leader. Hitler wasn’t one and yet masses of people thought that he was. Our deference explains why psychopaths are over-represented in positions of power. By their nature psychopaths have no conscience and will fight as dirty as they can get away with fighting. This gives them an enormous edge in competition. Just think how your fortunes would rise in any game if you could cheat and your opponent couldn’t. A psychopath’s fortunes would rise in game play too but not nearly so much as they rise in politics. In games the line between fair and unfair play is well defined so it’s easy to spot cheaters. In politics the line is fuzzier which makes it harder to spot cheaters, easier to cheat, and easier for the psychopath to defend himself by pleading ignorance and self-defense saying, “I don’t think I crossed the line and anyway I think my opponent crossed it so, if I got close to the line it was merely in self defense.” Also, clearly the object in games is to win and therefore deferring like a herd animal to a moral leader would be absurd. You probably haven’t done that since you were cowed at seven into teaming up with your big brother to beat your little brother at Monopoly. As