The core human problem is Sociopathy / Narcissism (Cluster B Personality Disorders). 5% of people cause 95% of all problems. And it has always been that way.
No matter what systems or institutions you put into place, public or private, and no matter how rock-solid your constitution or by-laws or institutional culture is: eventually and inevitably, one day, sociopaths and narcissists will conspire to take it over, by hook or by crook, and ultimately they will succeed.
Government, company, charity, church, club, movement, whatever; they all fall to sociopathic takeover, no matter how initially well-led, well-planned, well-founded. In fact, the more successful your organization or movement, the more lucrative a target for takeover it becomes. Corruption, therefore, is inevitable. The best you can do is keep it at bay as long as you can before the cycle of corruption, destruction, and renewal takes place.
It’s the ever-perennial Problem of Evil.
No one has ever solved it, though many have tried.
You cannot educate it away, you cannot religion it away, you cannot forgive it away, you cannot shame it away, and you cannot punish it away. It keeps coming back.
You cannot teach Character. For example, Seneca attempting to tutor Nero into becoming a man of Wisdom and Character is a tragic tale as old as human time. To a Narcissist, everything is merely a tool for gaining power and influence, even lessons in Ethics and Character. Pearls before swine.
Only a Sisyphean resolve to constantly and persistently RESIST, every hour, every day, every generation - every moment that one can, no matter what, and knowing that bullies and a control-freaks will always be with us, and the struggle to resist and restrain them will ever be refreshed anew with every sunrise, that is all we have right now.
Learn the signs of Malignant Narcissism. Be proactive. Protect yourself. Stand up to bullies.
Individualism is a dead end, the forces you describe are powerful because society is organized for their benefit. The cruel and psychopathic have avenues to make themselves useful to the ruling class. This is a social construct not an individual virtue or vice.
We can only make changes together. I def think people need to be more individually courageous, but the most common source for courage is social support, not some inherent trait. Some people are oppositional defiant in a way that can make them practical for a time, but without something larger steering circumstances then these individuals end up becoming tyrants all the same.
It’s a temporary short term solution that is repeatable. If my time working under capitalism has taught me anything it’s that a temporary short term solution works perfectly well as a long term solution if you accept it as maintenance. Just gotta clear out the cunts every once in a while.
This is sorta why I think capitalism is both a useful pragmatic system and a terrible idea.
It’s the whole greed is good thing. It’s this clever little hack of “well let’s let the greedy sociopaths be that way, and we will just arrange the game so it benefits everyone.”
It sorta work in the beginning stages of capitalism. They realize that they can make profits exploiting workers and go to town and consumers reap the benefits of there being lots of stuff to buy to meet their needs.
Sure your boss is an amoral exploiter, but it means the widgets get made.
But capitalism is not static, it’s a game played over time where those least bound by morals and ethics trap greater and greater rewards. Leading to where much of western civilization finds itself today, beholden to a handful of the worst human beings.
The only mechanism to keep them in check is competition, and it’s a system that devolves over time to have little to no competition, so we shouldn’t be surprised.
I often wonder what the world could be if we took seriously the job of restraining the impulses of that 5% of the population. We teach young children to share and be kind and the golden rule. Then you reach adulthood and realize that all of that is still true but unrewarded, and the way to get ahead is to exploit people. The wealthiest and most “successful” amongst us in this society are those most willing to exploit their fellow man for their own benefit. You get a billion dollars by being willing to steal a billion dollars from your workers. No one can earn a billion dollars you have to have thousands of people working for you everyday, and for each one of those people you have to be willing to extract value out of them, what in any other context we would call theft.
I think we underestimated the harm that capitalism would do in terms of normalizing greedy sociopaths. It’s turned into a giant propaganda machine that serves to gaslight the masses into believing that the sociopaths are good and right and deserve what they’ve stolen.
And we’ve built a world that silos people away from other normal people so it’s even harder to use your community to fight back.
It’s going to be incredibly hard to do any sort of reset now. Most people refuse to even see any sort of problem with it.
Adam Smith agreed with you in the 1600s when he thought up the system. He specifically said that capitalism couldn’t be the end goal, but he wasn’t aware of what the end goal would be, just that it would necessarily benefit the people, not the rich.
I agree that this is the root of all human problems, but I think there’s more to it also. There aren’t 95% of people willing to resist it. I imagine the opposite kind of people, those deeply selfless and incapable of tolerating injustice, also make up less than 5% of people.
And so even though only a small minority are naked power seekers, something like 80+% of all humans are just looking for someone to tell them what to do. They don’t want responsibility, power, or self-determination. They want to be made to feel safe, and be given orders.
I think you’re right, and this is why it’s so important to protest and create a movement, be visible and make a noise in every way you can. Those 80% will follow a movement but they won’t act as individuals.
Don’t forget their cowardly base that will claim ignorance of the Paradox of Tolerance while they claim those who are intolerant of intolerance are just as bad and evil. Those who would step in front of the only solution found to work with any permanency. The fascist apologists and enablers.
Is authoritarianism also cluster b? There are a lot of people who seem to get off on being part of the group. Like, it brings them chemical joy to be screaming in a crowd about how that other group of people need to die. Those people kind of suck, too.
I don’t think every maga hat is a narcissist, but a lot of them are trash humans who value their in-group feelings of solidarity over everything else.
I imagine early intervention helps, but right-wing (ie: authoritarian) people don’t want to invest in quality education. Not the kind with a good teacher-student ratio and time spent on social skills.
I mean there are some options for dealing with that.
A. Early monitoring in childhood followed by extensive therapy
B. Eugenics if a genetic link is identified (least savory option and likely not possible)
C. Rebuild our social circles and communities
To expand on C, I think a lot of what you’re identifying as narcissistic behavior or sociopathy is actually caused by the destruction of our communities. The way our society is built it rewards anti-social action with money and it’s cold and depersonalized. It’s easy as a upper executive to fire 500 people you’ve never once met and you will never meet. You don’t have to know them beyond a few spreadsheets of data. People will absolve themselves of personal responsibility and refer to the financial aspects. Additionally, our communities have been destroyed. The addition of the nuclear family structure encourages you to provide as much as possible to as few individuals instead of valuing extended family and community. Plus in some places in the world it is possible to go days or weeks without ever interacting with members of your community.
Yeah these days it’s just altering in vitro. We have the tech, but we are rightfully frightened by it. It’s hard to deploy in a way that it does good and is not abused
Even sterilizing people to try and produce a specific result is eugenics.
… not that I’m in favor of it without a TON of causational evidence for something, since plenty of great people come from absolutely shit parents. Not to mention that not all people with “undesirable” traits behave undesirably.
The sad thing is we do have the potential to shape a healthier human race. The potential to cure all genetic diseases and have a better future. We have the technology today.
Unfortunately we cannot be trusted to use it. It will 100% be used to target minorities and harm people to create something racists ideal. It’s kinda sad
Yeah some inbred ancient greek ivory tower assholes couldnt teach someone to be good in between beating their slaves and fucking their kids and believing lightning came from an old guy with a big fluffy beard whike changing nothing about their surroubdings. Someone else tried one thing three thousand years ago, and im all out of ideas. guess it’s impossible. Shows great passion for the subject.
This is all fundamental elemental unchangeable nature of humanity. Our social system has no effect on what that is or how it manifests. the system has zero culpability for the outcomes it produces, it could have been no different.
And we obviously know this. You can look at neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat baguettes and neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat deep fried twinkies and neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat poutine and neofascist empires where they eat borscht and neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat fried rice(i know, but too many distinct regional cuisines) and neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat sushi. Plus accounts from a bunch of their current and former subjects, and historic accounts of monarchic slave societies. Weve got data on people from all kinds of society. All kinds of culture. And they all turn out some percentage of shameless manipulative bastard-monster. Allof them! Every possible kind, even the cutthroat neoliberal one that just eats boiled sheep! So obviously no ither proportion of humanity is possible. Weve even done formal studies on upperiddle class male college students from a couple of these places to confirm it!
And, look, heres where we get into much harder science: it’s in the DSM as a disorder. That means its always bad and always gonna be bad. There’s no social arrangement or technology that can make it benign. Just cant be done. That’s not just some shit some guy decided so he could get home and start nursing the hangover from his four martini lunch and the mountainous pile of cocaine he snorted for his daily insight into normal humanity-that’s a fact.
Well it would be nice if we ever return to normalcy to overturn CU and clamp down HARD on the issues that enable the rampant abuse of the system. Like I’m talking union busting levels of “No you’re complicit in this more than X% you are out, forever”
I agree that our only way, truly, out of our current mess here in the United States is to get hardcore, focused, and doggedly persistent. Overturning CU, if we ever have a remote chance of even getting close to doing it, will be a hard slog, but it is fundamental, absolutely necessary, and singularly non-negotiable.
It should be our primary issue, I think, even though it’s not a sexy one.
If Democrats don’t deliver on this fight, then we must fight the Democrats tooth and nail, too.
The real problem is that our elected representatives are not sufficiently afraid of us.
We should be verbally abusing Democratic party leadership until they “radicalize” with us, or join MAGA in fighting us outright.
If good, strong, brave people can fight the good fight and win, then perhaps we can turn the tide and we’ll keep evil at bay for another 40-year cycle or whatever.
Or it might be too late, and we have to go through a real destructive cycle of severe suffering at the hands of tyrants first. I hope not, but I don’t know.
Spoilers: Democrats have already failed repeatedly on this task. Americans are also too stupid and stubbornly independent to properly unionize against this BS, so it’s suffering under tyrants as your only option unless you can figure out a way to unbrainwash the dumbest mother fuckers in this county.
The core human problem is Sociopathy / Narcissism (Cluster B Personality Disorders). 5% of people cause 95% of all problems. And it has always been that way.
No matter what systems or institutions you put into place, public or private, and no matter how rock-solid your constitution or by-laws or institutional culture is: eventually and inevitably, one day, sociopaths and narcissists will conspire to take it over, by hook or by crook, and ultimately they will succeed.
Government, company, charity, church, club, movement, whatever; they all fall to sociopathic takeover, no matter how initially well-led, well-planned, well-founded. In fact, the more successful your organization or movement, the more lucrative a target for takeover it becomes. Corruption, therefore, is inevitable. The best you can do is keep it at bay as long as you can before the cycle of corruption, destruction, and renewal takes place.
It’s the ever-perennial Problem of Evil.
No one has ever solved it, though many have tried.
You cannot educate it away, you cannot religion it away, you cannot forgive it away, you cannot shame it away, and you cannot punish it away. It keeps coming back.
You cannot teach Character. For example, Seneca attempting to tutor Nero into becoming a man of Wisdom and Character is a tragic tale as old as human time. To a Narcissist, everything is merely a tool for gaining power and influence, even lessons in Ethics and Character. Pearls before swine.
Only a Sisyphean resolve to constantly and persistently RESIST, every hour, every day, every generation - every moment that one can, no matter what, and knowing that bullies and a control-freaks will always be with us, and the struggle to resist and restrain them will ever be refreshed anew with every sunrise, that is all we have right now.
Learn the signs of Malignant Narcissism. Be proactive. Protect yourself. Stand up to bullies.
Individualism is a dead end, the forces you describe are powerful because society is organized for their benefit. The cruel and psychopathic have avenues to make themselves useful to the ruling class. This is a social construct not an individual virtue or vice.
We can only make changes together. I def think people need to be more individually courageous, but the most common source for courage is social support, not some inherent trait. Some people are oppositional defiant in a way that can make them practical for a time, but without something larger steering circumstances then these individuals end up becoming tyrants all the same.
Luigi.gif
I don’t think this is a long term sustainable solution.
It’s a temporary short term solution that is repeatable. If my time working under capitalism has taught me anything it’s that a temporary short term solution works perfectly well as a long term solution if you accept it as maintenance. Just gotta clear out the cunts every once in a while.
Only needs to work a couple thousand times.
That’s what many think about punitive systems. And you are correct. But we are at the magical point where a large number are just fine with that.
Hard to see such a thing. At least we can take some satisfaction from Luigi events.
This is sorta why I think capitalism is both a useful pragmatic system and a terrible idea.
It’s the whole greed is good thing. It’s this clever little hack of “well let’s let the greedy sociopaths be that way, and we will just arrange the game so it benefits everyone.”
It sorta work in the beginning stages of capitalism. They realize that they can make profits exploiting workers and go to town and consumers reap the benefits of there being lots of stuff to buy to meet their needs.
Sure your boss is an amoral exploiter, but it means the widgets get made.
But capitalism is not static, it’s a game played over time where those least bound by morals and ethics trap greater and greater rewards. Leading to where much of western civilization finds itself today, beholden to a handful of the worst human beings.
The only mechanism to keep them in check is competition, and it’s a system that devolves over time to have little to no competition, so we shouldn’t be surprised.
I often wonder what the world could be if we took seriously the job of restraining the impulses of that 5% of the population. We teach young children to share and be kind and the golden rule. Then you reach adulthood and realize that all of that is still true but unrewarded, and the way to get ahead is to exploit people. The wealthiest and most “successful” amongst us in this society are those most willing to exploit their fellow man for their own benefit. You get a billion dollars by being willing to steal a billion dollars from your workers. No one can earn a billion dollars you have to have thousands of people working for you everyday, and for each one of those people you have to be willing to extract value out of them, what in any other context we would call theft.
I think we underestimated the harm that capitalism would do in terms of normalizing greedy sociopaths. It’s turned into a giant propaganda machine that serves to gaslight the masses into believing that the sociopaths are good and right and deserve what they’ve stolen.
And we’ve built a world that silos people away from other normal people so it’s even harder to use your community to fight back.
It’s going to be incredibly hard to do any sort of reset now. Most people refuse to even see any sort of problem with it.
Adam Smith agreed with you in the 1600s when he thought up the system. He specifically said that capitalism couldn’t be the end goal, but he wasn’t aware of what the end goal would be, just that it would necessarily benefit the people, not the rich.
Well, comrade smith maybe fucked up.
He didn’t fuck up, and his work is important in early leftist literature.
The fuck up was everyone after him not listening except to the bits they wanted too.
I think on some subjects, when writing publicly, that really needs to be considered.
just got to reset it every 100 years or so. we may be overdue
Many ancient societies had recurring debt jubilees on approximately that time scale… for basically this reason.
Debt jubilee season comes, everyone’s debts are wiped clean.
Sucks for the lenders, great for the borrowers, but also everyone knows when it is scheduled.
That is pretty close to a reset of the playing field of your economy in many ways…
… though of course slavery did also exist in many of these societies, so… far from a perfect reset.
Capitalism might be the mechanism, but it’s not the root cause. Any system will eventually be corrupted in the same way without constant vigilance.
The worship of capitalism certainly contributed. Capitalism needs heavy controls.
I agree that this is the root of all human problems, but I think there’s more to it also. There aren’t 95% of people willing to resist it. I imagine the opposite kind of people, those deeply selfless and incapable of tolerating injustice, also make up less than 5% of people.
And so even though only a small minority are naked power seekers, something like 80+% of all humans are just looking for someone to tell them what to do. They don’t want responsibility, power, or self-determination. They want to be made to feel safe, and be given orders.
I think you’re right, and this is why it’s so important to protest and create a movement, be visible and make a noise in every way you can. Those 80% will follow a movement but they won’t act as individuals.
Don’t forget their cowardly base that will claim ignorance of the Paradox of Tolerance while they claim those who are intolerant of intolerance are just as bad and evil. Those who would step in front of the only solution found to work with any permanency. The fascist apologists and enablers.
Is authoritarianism also cluster b? There are a lot of people who seem to get off on being part of the group. Like, it brings them chemical joy to be screaming in a crowd about how that other group of people need to die. Those people kind of suck, too.
I don’t think every maga hat is a narcissist, but a lot of them are trash humans who value their in-group feelings of solidarity over everything else.
We need a preventive cure for authoritarian personality, rather than the extant extremely violent cure.
I imagine early intervention helps, but right-wing (ie: authoritarian) people don’t want to invest in quality education. Not the kind with a good teacher-student ratio and time spent on social skills.
Well yes, the virus is tryong to breed. It does that in pig shit ignorance and filth. Suffering and inchoate rage.
Yes.
I don’t know, but I suspect there might be a link.
I mean there are some options for dealing with that.
A. Early monitoring in childhood followed by extensive therapy
B. Eugenics if a genetic link is identified (least savory option and likely not possible)
C. Rebuild our social circles and communities
To expand on C, I think a lot of what you’re identifying as narcissistic behavior or sociopathy is actually caused by the destruction of our communities. The way our society is built it rewards anti-social action with money and it’s cold and depersonalized. It’s easy as a upper executive to fire 500 people you’ve never once met and you will never meet. You don’t have to know them beyond a few spreadsheets of data. People will absolve themselves of personal responsibility and refer to the financial aspects. Additionally, our communities have been destroyed. The addition of the nuclear family structure encourages you to provide as much as possible to as few individuals instead of valuing extended family and community. Plus in some places in the world it is possible to go days or weeks without ever interacting with members of your community.
hitler approves
Fun fact: Eugenics doesn’t have to mean killing them.
Yeah these days it’s just altering in vitro. We have the tech, but we are rightfully frightened by it. It’s hard to deploy in a way that it does good and is not abused
Even sterilizing people to try and produce a specific result is eugenics.
… not that I’m in favor of it without a TON of causational evidence for something, since plenty of great people come from absolutely shit parents. Not to mention that not all people with “undesirable” traits behave undesirably.
The sad thing is we do have the potential to shape a healthier human race. The potential to cure all genetic diseases and have a better future. We have the technology today.
Unfortunately we cannot be trusted to use it. It will 100% be used to target minorities and harm people to create something racists ideal. It’s kinda sad
Dude we can’t even take polio. You think we’re ready to fuvk with our own genomes for this shit?
I mean we can, we have the tech but not the will.
Oh my god this essentialist bullshit.
Yeah some inbred ancient greek ivory tower assholes couldnt teach someone to be good in between beating their slaves and fucking their kids and believing lightning came from an old guy with a big fluffy beard whike changing nothing about their surroubdings. Someone else tried one thing three thousand years ago, and im all out of ideas. guess it’s impossible. Shows great passion for the subject.
This is all fundamental elemental unchangeable nature of humanity. Our social system has no effect on what that is or how it manifests. the system has zero culpability for the outcomes it produces, it could have been no different.
And we obviously know this. You can look at neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat baguettes and neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat deep fried twinkies and neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat poutine and neofascist empires where they eat borscht and neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat fried rice(i know, but too many distinct regional cuisines) and neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat sushi. Plus accounts from a bunch of their current and former subjects, and historic accounts of monarchic slave societies. Weve got data on people from all kinds of society. All kinds of culture. And they all turn out some percentage of shameless manipulative bastard-monster. Allof them! Every possible kind, even the cutthroat neoliberal one that just eats boiled sheep! So obviously no ither proportion of humanity is possible. Weve even done formal studies on upperiddle class male college students from a couple of these places to confirm it!
And, look, heres where we get into much harder science: it’s in the DSM as a disorder. That means its always bad and always gonna be bad. There’s no social arrangement or technology that can make it benign. Just cant be done. That’s not just some shit some guy decided so he could get home and start nursing the hangover from his four martini lunch and the mountainous pile of cocaine he snorted for his daily insight into normal humanity-that’s a fact.
For fascists, sure. If we killed all the sociopaths, who would cut us up when we’re sick/injured and run into our burning buildings?
If we kill all the mentally ill, who ths fuck would make our art? The actually good stuff?
Well it would be nice if we ever return to normalcy to overturn CU and clamp down HARD on the issues that enable the rampant abuse of the system. Like I’m talking union busting levels of “No you’re complicit in this more than X% you are out, forever”
I agree that our only way, truly, out of our current mess here in the United States is to get hardcore, focused, and doggedly persistent. Overturning CU, if we ever have a remote chance of even getting close to doing it, will be a hard slog, but it is fundamental, absolutely necessary, and singularly non-negotiable.
It should be our primary issue, I think, even though it’s not a sexy one.
If Democrats don’t deliver on this fight, then we must fight the Democrats tooth and nail, too.
The real problem is that our elected representatives are not sufficiently afraid of us.
We should be verbally abusing Democratic party leadership until they “radicalize” with us, or join MAGA in fighting us outright.
If good, strong, brave people can fight the good fight and win, then perhaps we can turn the tide and we’ll keep evil at bay for another 40-year cycle or whatever.
Or it might be too late, and we have to go through a real destructive cycle of severe suffering at the hands of tyrants first. I hope not, but I don’t know.
Spoilers: Democrats have already failed repeatedly on this task. Americans are also too stupid and stubbornly independent to properly unionize against this BS, so it’s suffering under tyrants as your only option unless you can figure out a way to unbrainwash the dumbest mother fuckers in this county.
Another pseudoscientific theory about how a small minority of society are naturally bad in a way that causes all social ills?
Has anyone made a tarpit for these types? Some sort of scoring system to trap them in.
Fascist uprisings are the closest we’ve come.
Fucking YES. Thank you, extremely well said