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CHAPTER ONE GARDEN-VARIETY PSYCHOPATHS

The smiling assassin. That’s how I remember him. He was a boss of mine for a year or so. I don’t want to say where, because I’m not keen on a lawsuit. I’ll just call him Fred. He became my manager’s manager at a large company I worked for in my younger days and, at first, I liked him. Fred smiled a lot and seemed very charming and personable.

It didn’t take long for me to learn there was another side to his personality. My immediate manager started to tell me stories about his interactions with Fred. How he would say one thing to someone’s face and then the opposite behind their back.

When my manager had enough, he quit the company, and I reported directly to Fred. Although Fred assured me that everything was copacetic between us, that he liked me and thought I was a valuable member of the team, my colleagues started to whisper in my ear that Fred was out to get me. He was fishing for stories that he could use against me. There weren’t any such stories—but that was beside the point. When I took my concerns to the HR department, they did nothing to stop Fred. When I took my concerns to the managing director of the company, he did nothing to stop Fred. So, like my manager before me, I also quit the company.

Back then I thought Fred was just a bully. Today I realize he was probably my first corporate psychopath.

LET’S TALK MORE ABOUT PSYCHOPATHS

The majority of people have pretty simple needs and wants. They just want to live their lives, fall in love, knock out a few kids, get laid regularly, stay well fed, entertained, see some sights, and die peacefully, surrounded by the people they love.

For some people, however, that’s not enough. They want to own everything. They want to control everything. Enough is never enough. They have a winner-take-all attitude. Dog eat dog. Law of the jungle. Kill or be killed. People like that are often going to end up on top—because the rest of us let them. We don’t want to be on top enough to do the things that need to be done. We can’t sleep at night if we have to lie and cheat and steal and screw our way to the top. But psychopaths don’t lose a wink of sleep. On the contrary, they sleep better knowing they are #WINNING!

You know what I’m talking about. You know this kind of person. You’ve worked for this kind of person. Chances are you probably work for someone like this right now.

When discussing the diagnostic features of people with “antisocial personality disorder,” the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (aka DSM-5) says:

They are frequently deceitful and manipulative in order to gain personal profit or pleasure (e.g., to obtain money, sex, or power). The essential feature of antisocial personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood. This pattern has also been referred to as psychopathy, sociopathy, or dyssocial personality disorder.

Because psychopaths don’t care about the feelings or rights of others, they are willing and ready to do the things other people won’t to succeed. This makes them think of themselves as superior. They are the alpha males and females. They think of themselves as the winners. And therefore, in their minds, they deserve more power. For some, the way to get maximum power is to run a large organization.

It appears they have always been with us. I’ve spent the last fifteen years recording hundreds of hours of detailed podcasts about some of the “Great Men of History”—Alexander the Great, Julius, Augustus and Tiberius Caesar, Cosimo de’ Medici, Napoleon Bonaparte, Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt—and one of the questions I’m always asking myself is, “Was this guy a psychopath?”

They appear frequently in Roman and Greek mythology, in the Old Testament, the writings of Cicero, The Annals of Tacitus, The book of One Thousand and One Nights and in Shakespeare. In his Renaissance masterpiece The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote:

If you only notice human proceedings, you may observe that all who attain great power and riches, make use of either force or fraud; and what they have acquired either by deceit or violence, in order to conceal the disgraceful methods of attainment, they endeavor to sanctify with the false title of honest gains. Those who either from imprudence or want of sagacity avoid doing so, are always overwhelmed with servitude and poverty; for faithful servants are always servants, and honest men are always poor; nor do any ever escape from servitude but the bold and faithless, or from poverty, but the rapacious and fraudulent. God and nature have thrown all human fortunes into the midst of mankind; and they are thus attainable rather by rapine than by industry, by wicked actions rather than by good. Hence it is that men feed upon each other, and those who cannot defend themselves must be worried.

But it wasn’t until the German psychiatrist Julius Ludwig August Koch invented the term “psychopath” in 1888 that humans started to think about this as a psychiatric disorder. It was further developed as a field of study by American psychiatrist Hervey M. Cleckley in 1941 when he identified the major traits of a psychopath.

Unfortunately, when many people today think about psychopaths, they still think of serial killers, mafia dons, and ranting dictators—Ted Bundy, Al Capone, and Joseph Stalin. They don’t think of their local priest, CEO, their favorite politician, or police captain.

In every society, since the dawn of time, there has been a relatively small percentage of the population who feel it is their destiny to control as much power as possible. This is the primary goal of their lives, and they will do anything it takes to achieve it—fight, steal, murder, lie, cheat, bribe, fuck, and burn.

Many studies suggest they make up about 1 percent of the population but other experts go further. Psychiatrist Donald Black, co-author of the Introductory Textbook of Psychiatry and author of Bad Boys, Bad Men: Confronting Antisocial Personality Disorder, suggests the number of psychopaths in the adult population might actually be as high as 4.5 percent.7

Something about their brains is abnormal, and they are either born that way (a psychopath) or something happens to them when they are young kids that makes them that way (a sociopath).

They will sacrifice their loved ones and their friends to end up on top—the top of the company or just the top of the household, depending on their level of ambition. Most people aren’t built that way; we are happy to live simple lives, raising a family, enjoying our weekend, and smelling the roses. And this just makes it easier for the power-hungry people, the 1 percent, to hack and slash their way to the top.

In millennia gone past, some psychopaths, typically those born into aristocracy, probably ended up as kings and queens; warlords, emperors, popes, and cardinals; prophets, lords, and dukes; and the landed gentry. And there wasn’t much that the masses could do about it. They just accepted it as “the way things are.” The lower classes stayed in their village, in their poverty, and tried hard to survive and keep their children alive. The nobility, a fancy name for the richest 1 percent and their descendants, fought for power among themselves, while the other 99 percent quite often found themselves as battle fodder.

We have capitalism to thank for making it easier than ever before for more psychopaths to leverage themselves into positions of power.

In feudalist societies it would have been much harder for the garden-variety psychopath to rise to elite positions. Unless you were born into the nobility, it was pretty tough to get out of your class circumstances and engineer yourself into a place where you could rise above.

Until the Industrial Revolution, if you were a psychopath, but not a member of the aristocracy or nobility, let’s say you were the son of a blacksmith, what could you do? You didn’t have much chance of putting together an army or rising above your station in terms of wealth creation opportunities.

If you were born a plebeian in the Roman Republic, your chances of rising to power were kept in check by the tools of the aristocracy—the Senate, the army, and paid mobs. During the Roman Empire, a small number of plebeians rose through the ranks to become generals and even emperors, but they were few and far between. Some centurions of plebeian extraction were rewarded with property by Augustus Caesar, after his civil war with Mark Antony; they suddenly found themselves as the nouveau riche with a seat in the Senate—but again, these stories were extremely rare.

If you were a Hun in the 5th century, you could brawl it out with some other guys to see who the king of the tribe would be, but by the Middle Ages, these opportunities were scarce. There were rare people like the condottiere Francesco Sforza who, in the early 1400s, managed to use his father’s private army of mercantile soldiers to become the Duke of Milan—but again, those accounts are quite uncommon.

In theory, you could enter the Catholic Church and rise through the ranks to become a wealthy archbishop, cardinal, or even pope—and a few people did manage that—but these titles were typically reserved for people from wealthy families who could buy their way in by filling the coffers of the church.

For most of human history, if you were of humble birth, you stayed that way.

So, if 1 percent of the population were psychopaths, and 99 percent of the population were commoners, it stands to reason that 99 percent of the psychopaths probably stayed poor and, while they may have caused trouble for their immediate family and village, they usually never went further than that.

Then the Industrial Revolution came along and we entered the rise of modern capitalism. Now those 99 percent had a much better shot at unleashing their psychopathy on the world. They could get an education, get a job, and use their inherent tendencies to climb the ladder of power inside an organization—business, political, religious, academic, or military. Suddenly, after one thousand years of being trapped in their villages, the psychopaths had a ladder to affluence and dominance unlike anything before.

Studies show that most people who are born into modest circumstances continue to stay poor.8 But we live in a world where the psychopaths who are born underprivileged, and have no qualms about fucking over other people in their march toward power—who care as much about committing an unethical act as you or I do about what we ate for breakfast a week ago—have an open playing field.

Capitalism has unleashed an epidemic of psychopaths on the world.

CHIEF EXECUTIVE PSYCHOPATH

What makes me think psychopaths run our organizations?

Well, for a start, there is the obvious overlap between the traits of a psychopath and those of many cold-blooded, remorseless, empathy-lacking, power-seeking, charismatic modern managers. The presence of psychopaths in senior management might explain why our political, business, and religious leaders often make decisions that seem to willfully destroy economies, the environment, families, and, sometimes, especially during times of war, entire nations.

Then it’s just a question of the numbers.

Psychiatrists estimate that psychopaths make up about 1 to 4 percent of the adult population. Assuming this is correct, and taking the lower number, then Australia has roughly 184,000 adult psychopaths running around. The U.S. has about 2.3 million and the UK has five hundred thousand.

The global psychopath population would be in the vicinity of 60 million. SIXTY. MILLION. PSYCHOPATHS.

Let that sink in a minute. I’ll wait.

Australia had 1,123 opioid drug-related deaths in 2018 and that gets called an epidemic. What do we call 184,000 psychopaths on the loose?

And what are they all doing?

The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that there were roughly 43,000 inmates in Australian prisons at 30 June 2018.9 Even if they are all psychopaths (and, according to psychiatrists, it’s more likely that only 20 to 50 percent of them are), that leaves roughly 141,000 psychopaths walking around.

The United States has the largest prison population per capita in the world (roughly 2.2 million people) and it includes a lot of people imprisoned for minor drug offenses, who are probably not psychopaths. But even if 50% of the prison population are psychopaths, that leaves 1.2 million of them unaccounted for.

What are all of these people doing? Where would we expect a cold-blooded, power-hungry person to end up?

It makes sense to me that a lot of them are running our organizations.

It takes a special kind of person to rise to the top of any organization. The myth, of course, is that success just takes a combination of hard work, intelligence, dedication, and loyalty. Anyone who has worked inside of a significant organization, however, knows that there’s another ingredient—politics. While politics isn’t always Machiavellian by nature, there are always moments when you are going to have to smile while you’re sliding the knife in between someone’s ribs. We all know how it works—from pretending to laugh at your boss’s joke even when you’ve heard it a hundred times before (and it wasn’t that funny the first time), to playing golf with the boss or accompanying him to a seedy strip club while on a business trip. A worthy sycophant will agree with their boss on absolutely everything. To be a respectable flattering parasite, a person needs to be willing to subjugate their true feelings or opinions to curry favor with the people who can further their career. It usually involves doing whatever you can to keep yourself in their good books until they either get promoted, resign, fired—or until you finally manage to knife them when the opportune moment comes along. Et tu, Brute?

The “smiling assassin” is such an organizational archetype that they appear as stock characters in Hollywood films and TV shows, part-sycophant, part-Iago (think Dwight in the U.S. version of The Office), and while we may laugh at them on our screens, in real life they are far less amusing. Experts at the manipulation of others, you never can be sure of precisely where you stand with them—one minute they will treat you like a long-lost brother, and the next they will have you up against the wall down a darkened alley with a blade at your throat.

According to the Handbook of Organization Politics, political skill is “the ability to effectively understand others at work, and to use such knowledge to influence others to act in ways that enhance one’s personal and/or organizational objectives.”

There’s a fine line between influencing someone by openly presenting your arguments, letting them reach their own conclusions, and manipulating them into reaching the conclusion you want them to reach.

Most of us don’t like to manipulate others. We don’t like to be deceitful. It goes against our grain. We would rather have an open and honest discussion about the pros and cons of an idea and let the best idea win. We’re happy to state the reasons we believe in a certain idea or course of action, let others have the same courtesy, and then have an open and friendly discussion to determine which idea should be victorious.

None of us likes feeling manipulated and so, it’s natural to assume, the people we work with don’t like being manipulated either. This is the nature of the empathic response—if I don’t like something, I can understand that someone else probably won’t like it either. Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within the other person’s frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another’s point of view. So manipulating others to do what you want them to do requires a certain dampening or rationalizing of our empathic response.

Under the right circumstances, if we feel like our lives or livelihoods are being threatened, all of us can probably dial down our empathy. There are some people, however, for whom empathetic feelings aren’t a problem—the psychopaths.

Psychopaths care only about their power and success. They care only about #WINNING.

I remember seeing Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street when I was in my early twenties and not being sure whether I despised Gordon Gekko or admired him. That’s probably a sign of excellent writing and acting. I think most men have a natural, biological, grudging respect for the alpha male (thanks a lot, evolution), the guy who is all balls and bravado, who can talk his way in or out of most situations, the guy with the fierce laser eyes and the killer smile who first gets the money, then the power, and then the woman (a line from a different Oliver Stone film). As he recently told an Australian audience of finance industry workers, Stone didn’t mean for Gekko to be a role model for the audience:

“Gordon Gekko was an immoral character that became worshipped for the wrong reasons.”10

Gekko, the ultimate 1980s capitalist, the “greed is good” guy, was a psychopath. He didn’t care about the harm his financial wheeling and dealing did to others—the jobs that were lost, the careers that were ruined, the investments that disappeared. He just cared about his profit, his success. Unfortunately, it seems like many people, especially in the finance sector, missed the point. They thought Gekko was a hero. Stone himself says that Wall Street culture is much worse today than it was when he made the original film in the mid-eighties. Maybe many of the people who went into finance missed the point of the film—or maybe they were unable to understand it. Like Gekko, many of them care only about money and power.

According to Lawrence McDonald, a former vice president at Lehman Brothers, who wrote a book about the firm’s 2008 collapse, Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” ethos pushed Wall Street heavy hitters into taking greater and greater risks, which lead to the 2008 global financial crisis.

“There were Gordon Gekko types in all of these banks.”11

And they aren’t just in finance. Gekko types can be found in every industry. They don’t care about people’s feelings or society in general—they only care about power. In their minds, that makes them a winner.

It turns out that I’m not alone in believing that psychopaths end up in management.

Martha Stout believes that “the higher you go up the ladder, the greater the number of sociopaths you’ll find there.”12

Robert Hare, the inventor of the Psychopath Checklist, argues that while “serial killers ruin families.… corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”13

Christopher Bayer, a psychologist who provides therapy to Wall Street professionals, believes that the rate of psychopaths in the financial services industry might be 10 percent—or even higher.14

This apparently isn’t a new idea—and yet I don’t see anything being done about it. When was the last time you heard the media or the HR department referring to a senior executive, politician, or cardinal as a psychopath?

Over the last couple of years, we have all heard a lot about the 1 percent and the 99 percent, mostly due to the Occupy Movement.15 The basic idea is that a minute percentage of people in developed countries control the majority of the wealth—the rest of us live on the leftovers.

In the late eighteenth century, the richest 1 percent of U.S. households held only 8.5 percent of total income. In 2018, the richest 1 percent have 20 percent of total income.16 This means the top ranks of the elite in the U.S. today are roughly 250 percent better off, in terms of their share of the total income, than their predecessors were just after the American Revolution.

In January 2013, a report by Oxfam noted that the 100 richest people in the world earned enough in 2012 to end the extreme poverty suffered by the poorest on the planet four times over. According to the report, the richest one percent of the world’s population had increased its income by 60 percent in the last twenty years. And, thanks to the revelations of the Panama Papers, we now know that the rich have hidden their wealth away from taxation and oversight in offshore tax havens.

No one knows for sure how much money is stashed offshore, but economists estimate it’s $5 trillion to $32 trillion, or more than a third of the entire global domestic product.17

In the United States, “a family in the top 1 percent nationally received, on average, 26.3 times as much income as a family in the bottom 99 percent.”18

Of course, wealth disparity isn’t a new situation. Since the dawn of recorded history, society has been made up of the “haves” and the “have nots.” Even in our relatively small experiments with democracy and human rights, wealth typically ends up concentrated into the hands of the few.

Some argue that this is the natural order of things. I’ve often heard it said that if you took all of the money in society and distributed it equally, within a couple of years we would end up with the same situation—1 percent of the people controlling 99 percent of the wealth. Perhaps that is true, or perhaps it is just a myth perpetuated by the 1 percent to justify their actions—but even if it is true, it doesn’t justify the situation. The 1 percent will argue that they have accrued their wealth by simply working harder or being luckier or by taking risks that paid off, and some of this is true.

But psychiatrists estimate that 1 percent of the population are psychopaths and 1 percent of the population also control most of the power. I have to wonder if there is some overlap.

So why should the rest of us care that some people have more wealth than others? Are we just jealous? Are we lazy bums who don’t want to work, who just want handouts from the government with money derived by unfairly taxing the rich?

There will be some people who feel this way, certainly. But mostly this is propaganda, designed to push the blame away from the psychopaths and onto the public. It’s a version of “blame the victim.”

There are genuine concerns we should all have about the 1 percent situation.

The primary problem inherent in capitalism is this: with enormous wealth comes enormous influence. With enormous influence comes the ability to unfairly manipulate the economic, legal, and political systems in a democracy in order to make sure that your power will increase.

Here’s how one person explained it:

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

Who do you think said that?

Was it:

  1. a) Che Guevara?
  2. b) Fidel Castro?
  3. c) Vladimir Lenin?
  4. d) Noam Chomsky?
  5. e) Julian Assange?

Need to phone a friend?

It was none of the above, actually.

It was… Albert Einstein.19

I was shocked and surprised in my early twenties when I first read that quote. I had, up until that time, believed that capitalism was a benevolent force for good and that Western democracies were free, fair, and “by the people, for the people.” The fact that one of the most celebrated intellects of the twentieth century cast doubt on capitalism rattled me. Of course, being a brilliant physicist doesn’t mean you are necessarily right about everything, so I decided to learn more about what makes the world tick, to try to get to the bottom of things and find out if I agreed with Albert. As it turns out, I now do.

Most of us want to protect what we have. Nobody wants to lose their home, their savings, and their lifestyle. But a certain kind of person is more willing to cross over ethical norms in order to achieve their personal success.

One of the major issues with capitalism is that it inevitably concentrates the power into the hands of a relatively small number of people. This becomes an even bigger problem if those people with the power are psychopaths.

PSYCHOPATH VERSUS SOCIOPATH

Are you confused about the difference between a psychopath and a sociopath? If so, you aren’t alone. The literature on the topic is also more than a little bewildering. Some sources claim they are very similar, while others argue they differ quite a bit.

According to Dr. Xanthe Mallett, senior lecturer in forensic criminology at University of New England and author of Mothers Who Murder, they have a lot in common, including a lack of empathy and remorse. Both are manipulative and accomplished liars. Mallett believes psychopaths engage in more careful planning of their crimes whereas sociopaths are more spontaneous.20

Dr. John Grohol, the founder and editor-in-chief of Psych Central, lumps them both together, saying that “psychopath and sociopath are pop psychology terms for what psychiatry calls an antisocial personality disorder (ASPD).”21

Other experts disagree. Robert Hare and Paul Babiak, in their book, Snakes in Suits, claim that “sociopathy is not a formal psychiatric condition” and that sociopaths in fact have a “normal capacity for empathy, guilt and loyalty.”22

Another way I’ve heard it explained is that psychopaths are born that way, but sociopaths are made that way. The former come out of the womb with an empathy center that is broken, but the latter experience something devastating in their childhood that breaks theirs. It appears that there is some debate over the differences, so let’s not dwell on it. For the purposes of our model, let’s talk about psychopaths.

THE PSYCHOPATH CHECKLIST

So what makes someone a psychopath? According to Robert Hare’s widely used Psychopath Checklist test (known as the PCL-R),23 psychopaths tend to display many of the following traits:

When sitting the PCL-R test, a subject is ranked against each of the twenty characteristics. They get a score of 0, 1, or 2, based on how much they display each characteristic. The higher the score, the more likely the subject is a psychopath.

Why the lack of empathy? According to recent fMRI studies on the brains of psychopaths, their inability to empathize with others seems to result from a problem with the amygdala, the part of the brain that deals with emotions, memory, and decision-making. Instead of the amygdala lighting up when a psychopath imagines causing someone else pain (as it does when they consider their own pain), there was an increased response in the ventral striatum, part of the brain that manages our “reward system.” In other words, when thinking about causing others pain, a psychopath might feel pleasure instead of remorse.24

Other long-term studies on children indicate that these malfunctions in the brains of future psychopaths can be detected as early as three years of age, suggesting psychopaths are born and not made.25

Now, of course I don’t want to imply that all managers or business owners are psychopaths. That would be ridiculous. There are obviously some “very fine people” in the ranks of the elite.

So how do we tell the very fine people from the psychopaths? I think it comes down to looking at their behavior and the actions of the companies they run. If we see evidence of psychopathic behavior, e.g., a lack of empathy towards customers and staff and society as a whole, a desire for power, criminal activity without remorse, the failure to accept responsibility, then we have good reason to suspect psychopaths are involved.

It’s hard to deny that the character traits of psychopaths—in particular the charm, the grandiose self-opinion, the willingness to lie, the cunning, the lack of remorse and guilt, and the failure to accept responsibility (blaming problems on other departments, or on previous management, or their own staff, etc.)—might help them climb the ranks inside certain organizations. People who have a more realistic appreciation of their own weaknesses and are willing to admit them, who aren’t willing to lie and don’t like making decisions that hurt other people, probably aren’t going to climb the ladder as easily.

And if some managers are indeed psychopaths, it makes sense that society needs to be protected from their worst instincts. What’s worse than your garden-variety psychopath? A garden-variety psychopath with a huge bank account and plenty of power. That is a combination that could be incredibly destructive.

That said, we probably don’t want to remove psychopaths from power altogether. I have no doubt that there are positive contributions that psychopaths can make to an organization and to society—for example, innovative vision, a disregard for old ways of doing things, massive amounts of drive, etc.—but it is still necessary for us to protect ourselves from the negative aspects of their personalities.

There is a certain ruthlessness that is required to be a “master of the universe.” You have to be able to hold the lives of people in the palm of your hand and be willing to manipulate them as necessary. Not everybody has the stomach to fire thousands of people the week before Christmas or to pocket a salary that is fifty times what your employees take home (the average salary of an Australian Top 100 CEO in 2018 was $4.5 million—fifty times the salary of an average worker).26

In the United States, CEO pay has risen 300 percent since 1990—three times more than the profit of the companies they run! In this time the minimum wage has actually declined 9 percent.27

How many of us would feel comfortable taking home 300 times the salary of our colleagues at work? It takes a special kind of person to accept that their value is 300 times that of most of the people they work with. It takes a sense of grandiosity, an unrealistic sense of superiority, a sustained view of oneself as better than others. It takes a narcissist psychopath.

Of course, psychopaths genuinely think that they deserve these benefits. They have a thousand different ways to justify it to themselves.

“I worked hard to get where I am.”

“I made my own success.”

“I did things that others were not willing to do in order to succeed.”

And while some of these things might be true, it still belies an underlying narcissism.

The “I made it to the top all by myself” rationale, what we might call the “Ayn Rand Model,” after the Russian-American author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

THERE IS A WAR

One downside of being a psychopath today is that, since the rise of modern mass media in the twentieth century, it has become harder for the 1 percent to get away with certain kinds of behavior. Even if they control more power than the rest of society, there are always ninety-nine of us to every one of them, so they need to play their cards carefully. Gone are the days when they had private armies and fortified castles to hide in. The people’s revolutions around the world during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries were examples of what can happen when the majority of the population get fed up with being oppressed by a wealthy minority.

Why do we let them get and stay in positions of power? Why don’t we—the 99 percent—do a better job of preventing these psychopaths from taking power?

The method they use to get and stay on top of the power pyramid is by fighting a war. It’s not the “War on Terror,” the “War on Drugs,” or even the “War on Christmas.” There’s a much more significant war going on, but it doesn’t get talked about in polite company because, like Fight Club, the first rule of this war is that you don’t talk about it. If the general public became too aware of it, it would stop being effective. Instead, our leaders distract us by focusing our attention on the other wars, real and imaginary. They distract us with televised sport, reality shows, presidential tweets, celebrity gossip, and two-year-long election circuses. They won’t talk about this other war because it isn’t in their best interests to make the public aware of it.

This other war has been going on, in its present form, since the rise of modern democracies, and billions of dollars are spent on it every year—yet it gets almost zero coverage in the nightly news or from our elected leaders.

The war I’m talking about is the “Propaganda War.” It’s a war on your mind, a battle to control how you think, feel, and act regarding the political and economic issues of the day. It is being fought daily on the battlegrounds of television, talk-back radio, newspapers, films, magazines, books, and, now, the internet.

Or course the psychopaths weren’t going to just give up their power. They had to find new ways of staying in control of how the masses think.

In days gone by they used religion to control the masses—wealthy clergy (to get high ranking clerical jobs in the Middle Ages you often had to buy your way in) preaching from the pulpit that being poor was God’s will and the people should just suck it up and wait for their rewards in the afterlife.

When that slowly stopped working around the time of The Enlightenment, and revolutions started breaking out all over the place, the elite became experts at manipulating our thinking with political propaganda and distraction theatrics. We’ve been exposed to propaganda for so long that many of us aren’t even very conscious of it. It’s just part of the background noise that we’ve grown up with.

Think of it like the laugh track on a sitcom—it’s always been there, telling us when to laugh and what to think, how to vote and why we should go to war, what to focus on and what to ignore. Most of us are so used to it, we don’t even notice, let alone think much about it, and that’s precisely what the establishment are counting on—that you’ll accept their conditioning without questioning it or fighting it. They are counting on the fact that the average person is too tired after working a long day or feeling too helpless to take back control of their thinking. They are counting on us just sitting in front of the television (or Netflix or Fortnite) and letting it wash over us, every night and every day, for the rest of our lives. They will tell us how to think, how to vote, what to buy, and constantly keep us scared about the enemy du jour who is coming to destroy our way of life, or about looming pandemics, natural disasters, and our financial future.

Therefore, the psychopaths who make up the ruling class stay dominant and prosperous and in control of the engines of our economies. Thanks to a century of propaganda, we call them “capitalists,” “titans of industry,” or “CEO” instead of psychopaths—because it sounds far more respectable.

Capitalism may have lifted the standard of living of millions of people around the world, but it has also caused its share of damage. It’s not a binary situation; capitalism doesn’t have to be either all good or all bad. The same is true, by the way, of socialism, Christianity, and Hollywood films. Most things lie on a spectrum, providing both positives and negatives. There is even some good country music (but you have to search hard to find it). Hopefully, they provide a net positive, but sometimes it’s difficult to tell, especially when the media provides a constant narrative that only focuses on one side of the equation.

As I live in a country that is a capitalist democracy, I think it’s vital to understand the weaknesses as well as the strengths of our socioeconomic model, especially in terms of how easy it might end up run by people with psychopathic tendencies.

In Western countries, the forces of capitalism, controlled by psychopaths, keep the majority of the population distracted, broke, scared, and politically disempowered. That prevents them from launching a revolution or agitating for political and economic reform.

Through a simple framework of overlapping interests, capitalism allows a small number of psychopaths to maintain control over the rest of the population, creating a series of rippling negative effects.

Over the course of the book I’ll tell some stories about corporations, governments, and religions making horrible decisions that damage the lives of individuals, families, the environment, and economies and ask, “Would someone who is not a psychopath have allowed this to happen?”

Hardly a day goes by when we aren’t presented with evidence that another influential organization has led us astray in one way or another. Like the lies of Donald Trump, it’s hard to keep up with them all.

They lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They lied about the war in Vietnam. About child molestation in the ranks of their priests, bishops, and cardinals. About the cause of the global financial crisis. About recording our private telephone calls and reading our emails. About hacking our voicemails. About manipulation of election results. About deleting their private emails. About their dealings with Russia. About promises they made in their last election campaign which were broken as soon as they got into power. The list often seems endless.

When someone in the past has proven to be a habitual liar, would you implicitly trust everything they say in the future? Unfortunately, that’s the situation we now find ourselves in when it comes to the governments, corporations, intelligence agencies, religious organizations, and media companies in Western democracies. If someone has lied to you repeatedly in the past, isn’t it natural to keep a healthy distrust about everything they say afterward? Does it make you a “conspiracy theorist” to suggest that these organizations might not always be telling us the truth about their actions and statements?

Today, perhaps more than ever before, we have proof that the Powers That Be are deceiving us. According to Edward Snowden:

“Western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation destruction, using what they call ‘The Four D’s’—Deny, Disrupt, Degrade, Deceive—to mislead the general public and destroy not only the efforts of political activists but also their personal reputations, should cause even the most conservative member of the public to reconsider what kind of democracy–and how much of it—we have.”28

Too often, when such behavior is exposed, such as when companies are caught dumping toxic waste29 or when the Vatican gets an average of one credible rape complaint a day30 or when politicians are caught misleading the public,31 the suggestion is that it’s either the behavior of “a few bad eggs” or that some otherwise decent people made an unfortunate mistake—chalk it up to “bad intel.” This “few bad eggs” or “bad intel” theory of explaining organizational malfeasance is, I suspect, another deliberate attempt to mislead us from the truth.

Like the sugarcoated appellation “captains of industry,” the “bad eggs” euphemism is used to distract us from the fact that this kind of terrible behavior is actually a natural result of psychopathic organizational cultures.

That isn’t to suggest that all organizations are inherently psychopathic—on the contrary, organized efforts by significant groups of people are central to any significant undertaking. But I do want to propose that the survival instincts of organizations often provide them with an incentive to promote people who have no ethics and are willing to do anything for power.

Over the course of the book I will explore the kinds of personal behaviors that organizations tend to encourage, how they map conveniently to those that come naturally to psychopaths, and how the correlation of those two is destroying society.

Once you make the conceptual leap from “bad eggs” to understanding that it is often in the best self-interests of organizations to deceive us, it fundamentally changes the way you interpret the daily news—and suddenly things start to make a lot more sense.

By the end of this book, you’ll understand that you are being deceived by organizations on a regular basis and that this is precisely what you should expect from psychopathic cultures.

In order to understand how psychopaths end up on top of the power pyramid, we need to understand how organizational cultures have themselves become psychopathic.

To protect themselves from the possibility of another revolution, psychopaths have built themselves protective structures—organizations of scale and influence that are “too big to fail,” armed with PR departments and legal teams to deflect attention and threaten critics. They also spend enormous amounts of money on propaganda, waging a war on the minds of the public, trying to convince us that the psychopaths are actually “winners,” to be admired and put on the front cover of business magazines, while the rest of us are losers because we aren’t willing to go to the same lengths to gain power that they are. They invest heavily into political campaigns to ensure the politicians who agree with them get elected and enact laws that continue to protect them and stop the masses from threatening their power. And they invest in religions that will tell people not to worry about it, to have faith and wait for their rewards in the afterlife.