Did you know that roughly one person in a hundred is clinically a
psychopath? These individuals are either born with an emotional
deficiency that keeps them from feeling bad about hurting others or they
are traumatized early in life in a manner that causes them to become
this way. With more than 7 billion people on the planet that means there
are as many as 70,000,000 psychopaths alive today. These people are
more likely to be risk takers, opportunists motivated by self-interest
and greed, and inclined to dominate or subjugate those around them
through manipulative means.
Last year, the Occupy Movement drew a distinction between the top 1%
and the remaining 99% — as distinguished by measures of wealth and
income. Of course, this breakdown is misleading since there are many top
income earners who sympathize with the plights of others and are not
part of the problem. Now the real defining metric reveals itself: 1% of
the global population is comprised of people who exhibit psychopathic
tendencies.
The global economy we have today is built on a deep history of
top-down hierarchies that promote domination and control. There have
been plenty of feudal lords, warrior chieftains, and violent dictators
throughout the last 6000 years of burgeoning civilization. The modern
era saw the ascension of “corporate personhood” as an amoral entity
enshrined into law by an 1886 ruling of the US Supreme Court. This
provided a new mechanism for mobilizing capital by the moneyed elites to
deploy their wealth into the realm of public policy and civil society —
creating the dysfunctional economic system we must now contend with as
we struggle to address global challenges. We find ourselves in a
situation where economic philosophies that celebrate selfishness can be
implemented through a web of legal and financial tools that elevate and
reward those individuals with psychological tendencies toward
self-interest — the same people who also have a predisposition to game
social contexts to their advantage regardless of impacts on others. Thus
the psychopathic corporation was forged as a Frankenstein monster that
enabled the constant flow of psychopathic blood, continuously
replenished by the 1% of the population born into psychopathy in each
new generation, to rise into positions of power as stock traders,
corporate executives, and corruptible politicians.
What can we do collectively to contain and manage this small minority
of people who are driven by selfish motives with no concern for others?
How must we include them in our plans so that global civilization can
transition to a configuration of peaceful cooperation and environmental
balance? This is the defining question for global financial stability
and environmental sustainability. It runs right to the core of our
inability to garner collective action on such systemic challenges as
climate change, global poverty, and corporate corruption. It is the
central issue of political power that has so far eluded our
environmental and social justice movements.
We can start to sketch out the solution by drawing on
cross-disciplinary research about human nature and our evolutionary
past. The key questions are:
What are the evolutionary advantages for having psychopaths in the
gene pool? How did our ancestors keep their anti-social tendencies in
check? What is the positive role for psychopaths that needs to be
preserved in the new economic system?
Partial answers to these questions can be found in the pioneering
work of anthropologist, Christopher Boehm, in his recent book Moral
Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. Professor Boehm
has dedicated much of his career to the study of primates in an attempt
to explain where pro-social behaviors originally came from. Along the
way he realized that a critical piece of the puzzle was how
hunter-gatherer tribes dealt with would-be cheaters and dictators in
order to maintain an egalitarian ethos in their social groups. Every
hunter-gatherer society has a long history of democratic governance that
provided cohesion and stability to the small bands of humans who had to
cooperate in order to survive long periods of climatic instability and
changing landscapes.
These small bands had particular difficulty with their psychopaths
when it came to hunting big game. They depended heavily on the wealth of
nutrients provided by large animals, yet were unable to successfully
acquire meat without cooperation. It was in this context that the
cheaters and bullies had to be suppressed — through a consensus process
amongst tribal members with the power to ostracize or, in extreme cases,
execute these typically male would-be upstarts. They did this to keep
them from disrupting the social order that enabled the group to survive
and thrive.
Things changed with the invention of agriculture and its associated
patterns of human settlement and increasingly sophisticated economic
structures. The rise in population size, combined with a division of
labor into social castes, enabled the would-be upstarts to sow division
in the ranks and rise in power through physical and political
domination. The checks-and-balances of tribal society no longer held
them in place. And so it happened that the psychopaths in our midst were
able to begin the process of consolidating power and manipulating the
masses for personal gain.
But why were there psychopaths in the first place? What possible
advantage could they bring to the genetic mix that promotes human
flourishing? It is vital that we keep in mind that being psychopathic is
NOT the same as being violent or criminal. A psychopath is simply a
person whose brain does not register stressful feelings when they
observe harms inflicted on others. Someone with this characteristic
might be more likely to deceive and manipulate others for personal gain,
but they quite often are aware of social sanctions (and the punishments
that follow) and so constrain their behaviors accordingly.
On the positive side, a person who experiences less emotional angst
about harm to self and others is well suited as a risk taker whose
attempts to ‘rise in the ranks’ of material wealth bring pioneering
innovations to the group. They also handle the hardships of war and
stressful negotiations with other tribes without the compounding harms
of emotional trauma that would be inflicted on a more sensitive soul. In
today’s context, such a person would be a great fit for working as a
field medic during times of war (or in the aftermath of a natural
disaster) since they could operate on many people without accumulating
post traumatic stress disorder.
Such benefits to society may be small in comparison to the harms they
inflict upon us all when their power goes unchecked. But the stubborn
fact remains that they comprise a persistent part of our progeny —
regardless of their perceived worth to the whole — and must be included
in our thinking about how to build robust political and economic systems
in the future.
With this goal in mind, I’d like to offer some preliminary thoughts
about how we can make use of insights like these to both accurately
diagnose our root problems and engage in active redesign of global
civilization to enable humanity to cooperate on the scales necessary for
our long-term survival. First, a few reflections on the nature of the
problem:
The primary issue of concern is one of design oversight that failed
to include psychopathic tendencies as a parameter for political and
economic systems. We simply did not know how to handle them when
civilization began 6000 years ago, and have yet to update contemporary
global systems to mitigate the potential harms they might cause.
In recent centuries, a set of legal instruments were put in place
that encourage and reinforce psychopathic tendencies through a system of
incentive structures that reward selfish behaviors. This enabled the
misguided philosophies of neoclassical economics and neorealist politics
to gain undue influence over our thinking about social policy and
institutional design.
A profound gap now exists between what needs to be done to ensure a
prosperous future for humanity and the current trajectory of
civilization. We must contain the innate psychopathic tendencies that
comprise a small portion of the human gene pool if collective action is
to be taken that harnesses real economic and political power to tackle
global challenges like climate change, human insecurity, and corruption.
Taken together, these observations begin to paint a picture for what
the solution looks like. Not only must we stop celebrating greed (and
enabling it to run rampant through our policy choices), we also have to
provide supports for pro-social cooperative behaviors that embody the
altruistic and compassionate aspects of human nature that are expressed
through the remaining 99% of us.
A sketch of the solution might look like this:
Gather together the best knowledge we have about human nature – as it
emerges from the cognitive and social sciences — to inform the design
of institutional policy, legislation, incentive structures, and
regulatory bodies. Employ it to critique long-standing assumptions about
economic behavior and political power.
Diagnose the current global economy to reveal pathways where
psychopathic tendencies are expressed. Target these areas for policy
reform as a “damage control” measure while engaging in broader debate
about how to build replacement structures.
Create policy-development frameworks that promote cooperative
behavior amongst people and with the broader environments on which we
depend for our survival. This includes new metrics of success (e.g.
replace Gross Domestic Product with more systematic measures like
General Progress Indicators or Gross National Happiness), greater
investments in societal infrastructure (e.g. public education, medical
research, Earth monitoring systems, etc.) that enable us to integrate
our increasingly sophisticated knowledge about global change into the
management of social and economic systems.
Introduce incentive systems (with clearly defined and enforceable
punitive measures) that enable our psychopaths to participate in society
in a more beneficial and less disruptive manner. We need to recognize
that people with these behavioral tendencies will likely always be part
of the societal mix. Helping them find ways to participate as productive
members of society will go a long way towards containing the harms they
might produce and promoting social cohesion across our pluralistic
societies where past harms remain to be fully healed.
I have intentionally set out these parameters at a broad conceptual
level because this topic is too nuanced and complex for any one person
to hold all the answers. Hopefully what I’ve written here will encourage
you to think more deeply about what is happening in the world — and
what role(s) you might fill in helping to create a new economic system
that serves us all. It is safe to assume that I’ve made significant
omissions and that much more needs to be brought into the conversation
before we can begin to implement the solutions I recommend or any others
which improve upon them.
For now, it is my hope that the ideas presented here create new
insights for us as we struggle to articulate the path beyond the
political impasse that has stalled action on financial reform and
climate change in recent years. Perhaps these thoughts will also inform
our next steps as we ponder how to improve upon the Occupy Movement and
Arab Spring of 2011 to elevate and meld together the social movements of
the world into a coherent new economic and political system capable of
delivering complex outcomes for our interconnected and rapidly changing
world.
Can we contain the 70 million psychopaths in the world today? Only if
we come together and create effective sanctions on their destructive
behaviors before it’s too late. The future still resides in the strength
of our communities as we struggle together to find solutions that match
the severity of existing threats during these turbulent times. As a
recent political slogan decried, “Yes we can!”
And, ultimately, we must if we are to deliver our children into a livable world.
Joe Brewer is founder and director of
Cognitive Policy Works,
an educational and research center devoted to the application of
cognitive and behavioral sciences to politics. He is a former fellow of
the
Rockridge Institute, a think tank founded by George Lakoff to analyze political discourse for the progressive movement.
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