How Will the 99% Deal with 70 Million Psychopaths?

I suggest you read the whole article.

Some researchers put the proportion of psychopaths/sociopaths at about 1 in 25, or 4%.

A problem I see in dealing with this problem is that so much power is in the hands of psychopaths, and they are not motivated to care about the future of our species, much less the web of life, much less expend effort and resources to solve the problems they themselves are causing.

http://www.cognitivepolicyworks.com/blog/2012/07/24/how-will-the-99-deal-with-70-million-psychopaths/

by Joe Brewer on July 24, 2012

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.

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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.

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[An answer by the author of the article to a question from a reader:]

I completely agree with you that many people who exhibit selfish behaviors are not in fact psychopaths. Psychopathy is a particular feature of people whose brains are not able to produce fully developed empathic responses. As such, they are unable to develop socially appropriate emotional responses to situations that require them to express moral behaviors. That said, they may actually acquire learned responses that enable them to participate as though they did experience empathic feelings.

Back to your more general point, I am not suggesting that all capitalists are psychopaths. Nor am I implying that those who are motivated by self-interest are reducible to psychopathy. My argument is more subtle — namely that there exist a small number of people in every society who exhibit the neurological condition of having an insensitivity to empathic development. Such people are capable of lies and deceit, having inflated self-importance, and seeking to manipulate or dominate others for personal gain.

In a world where our economic system is set up to reward those who “win at all costs” these behaviors are given free rein and have undue influence over us all. I am describing a contagion effect where a cultural system enables that small percentage of the population lacking the emotional capacity for fully-mature moral sensibility to game the system to their advantage to the detriment of the whole.

This phenomenon is well documented throughout history in the various forms of dominator cultures (e.g. slave holding city states, warrior fiefdoms, dictatorships, and exploitative capitalism). It is also statistically supported by the higher rates of psychopathy amongst stock traders, politicians, and corporate executives (roughly 10%) than then general population (slightly less than 1%). This tells us that those people with the neurological proclivity for insensitive and exploitative behavior are able to find their way into positions of influence and power within the economic/political system we have today.