We Are Ruled by Psychopaths

Perhaps it's time to try something else. (DN 4.16)

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Lord Acton’s famous quote has become a dictum of political thought. Power, so the conventional wisdom goes, has a corrupting effect.

That is clearly true. Powerful people experience temptations and incentives that the rest of us do not. They can tell people what to do. They can spend other people’s money. The halls of power offer many rewards—for bad behavior as well as for good.

As it happens, however, that wasn’t Acton’s only point. Indeed, it was not even his primary point. Here is the quote in its broader context:

“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”

There is much we can say about this passage, but Acton’s main point, frequently misunderstood, is not that good people are made bad by power. It is that bad people are attracted to power—and are then made even worse by it.

“Great men are almost always bad men.”

If Lord Acton were alive today, he would have science to support his claim, and he could replace the generic term “bad” with something far more specific: psychopathic.

The data have been accumulating for a while now: psychopaths are attracted to power:

[P]sychopaths are vastly over-represented in positions of power. Depending on the study you look at, the numbers range from four times to one hundred times more psychopaths in positions of leadership than in the general population, with some of the best studies putting the figure closer to twenty-five times higher.

This should not come as much of a surprise. Dr. Robert Hare, an FBI profiler and leading expert in psychopathology, observed that “psychopaths generally have a heightened need for power and prestige—exactly the type of urges that make politics an attractive calling.”

Politics not only attracts psychopaths, it also rewards their unique traits:

Psychopathy is a psychological condition based on well-established diagnostic criteria, which include lack of remorse and empathy, a sense of grandiosity, superficial charm, conning and manipulative behavior, and refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions.

Sound familiar?

When we hear the word psychopath, we tend to think of serial killers. With the help of shocking news stories and popular entertainment, we picture Ed Gein wearing human skins or the character “Dexter” channeling his inescapable urge to murder.

Some do fall into this category. Yet, according to the author of Corruptable: Who Gets Power and How it Changes Us, these are the undisciplined ones.

Such “unsuccessful” psychopaths end up overrepresented in prison populations. The successful ones, by contrast, end up overrepresented in positions of power. And in such positions, being a psychopath can actually come in quite handy:

Research has shown that disorder may confer certain advantages that make psychopaths particularly suited to a life on the public stage and able to handle high-pressure situations: psychopaths score low on measures of stress reactivity, anxiety and depression, and high on measures of competitive achievement, positive impressions on first encounters, and fearlessness.

As Oxford professor Kevin Dutton notes: “Any situation where you’ve got a power structure, a hierarchy, the ability to manipulate or wield control over people, you get psychopaths doing very well.”

People in positions of power are more likely to score higher in measures of narcissism, Machiavellianism, sadism, and psychopathy. They are overrepresented in fields that confer fame and the ability to control and manipulate others. They are more likely to be politicians, business people, and police or military personnel.

Let loose, they commit crimes against humanity, but even under the putative restraints of a democratic system, they don’t stop being psychopaths. Not all politicians are psychopaths, but they are far more likely to be, and power confers upon them the ability to do terrible things and cause drastically disproportionate damage.

Frank Herbert, Author of the Dune series of books, understood Acton’s quote quite well:

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.

Let us emphasize two crucial words: “All governments suffer a recurring problem.” Herbert understood something that we, as a species, must face:

This problem ain’t going away.

Neurological research has been producing a wealth of data for decades, all of which points to a disturbing conclusion: psychopathy appears to be primarily a physical condition. Empathy, compassion, conscience, and remorse—all traits that are diminished or missing in psychopaths—are mediated by specific structures in the brain. And when those structures are sufficiently damaged or under-functioning, psychopathy is the result:

Psychopaths tend to have “structural and functional abnormalities” in areas of the brain such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex; “abnormal size, shape, or activity” of the amygdala; cortical thinning; reduced volume in the middle and orbital frontal gyri; and a host of other incapacities and abnormalities. Impulse control—an essential function for morality—is processed in the anterior cingulate cortex. And sure enough, a recent study at the University of New Mexico revealed that criminals with lower levels of activity in this area of the brain were more likely to re-offend.

Unless and until we begin diagnosing and treating psychopathy in childhood (a prospect with its own chilling ethical implications), psychopaths simply aren’t going anywhere.

Out of this swirling maelstrom of bad news, we can formulate two premises:

1. Systems of power attract psychopaths and reward them for their psychopathic traits.

2. Psychopaths will continue to be with us for the foreseeable future.

What conclusion should follow from these premises?

If we engage in conventional thinking—such as the claim that we cannot possibly function without some variant of our current power systems—our solutions are likely to look like rearranging deck chairs on a psychopathic Titanic. More “checks and balances.” More attempts to create “limited government.”

The halls of power are dominated by people who do not feel empathy, conscience, or remorse. Hey, I know—let’s shrink the width of those halls a little. That’ll show ’em.

Sarcastic? Yes. But the record of history justifies a healthy measure of sarcasm—and skepticism that any such solutions can work for any appreciable amount of time. Psychopaths do not care for limitations. They will always find ways around them. Why?

Because they’re psychopaths.

Other suggestions for managing this problem stray into outré territory, or territory with its own set of ethical issues, including early diagnosis, transhumanist technology, and eugenics.

So, we either play around on the margins of premise one and try to fix government, or we go for premise two and try to fix psychopaths. But are those our only options?

If the argument is that humans are too rotten to function without a government, how does it make sense to create a government that attracts the most rotten among us? Our current system of governance (to which none of us ever actually consented) not only empowers psychopaths—it gives them inescapable power over the rest of us. It gives them the official authority to use violence against us—taking our property, forcing us to fight in wars, and subjecting peaceful people to various forms of coercion.

It gives that power to psychopaths.

Shouldn’t we consider other options? Shouldn’t we consider the possibility that continuing to support and empower such systems—and to claim that nothing else is or ever will be possible—is standing in the way of solutions that might actually work?

If psychopaths will be with us for the foreseeable future, and if our systems of government inevitably give psychopaths power over the rest of us, then perhaps the conclusion is that we need different systems.

But we cannot possibly have security, justice, and roads without government.

Are you sure? The free market has done an amazing job of providing everything else in our lives. Isn’t it worth at least considering that the free market might be able to provide those things as well?

We all know the informal definition of insanity: trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We who have awakened…we who are building our fledgling distributed nation…we freeholders of Earth—we are not insane. We’ve tried involuntary government imposed by psychopaths. It’s time to consider something new.

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Cover page | Preface | Introduction 1 | Introduction 2 | Introduction 3 |

(Part I) Why: 1.0 | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 1.5 | 1.6 | 1.7 | 1.8 | 1.9 | 1.10 | 1.11 | 1.12 | 1.13 | 1.14 | 1.15 | 1.16 | 1.17 | 1.18 | 1.19 | 1.20 | 1.21 |1.22

(Part II) What: 2.0 | 2.1 | 2.2 | 2.3 | 2.4 | 2.5 | 2.6 | 2.7 | 2.8 | 2.9 | 2.10 I 2.11 | 2.12 | 2.13 | 2.14 | 2.15 | 2.16 | 2.17 | 2.XX | 2.18 | 2.19 | 2.20 | 2.21 | | Where: 3.0 | 3.1 | 3.2 | 3.3 | 3.4 | 3.5 | 3.6 | 3.7 | 3.8 | 3.9 | 3.10 | 3.11 | 3.12 | 3.13 || Who: 4.0 | 4.1 | 4.2 | 4.3 | 4.4 | 4.5 | 4.XX | 4.XY | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.8 | 4.9 | 4.10 | 4.11 | 4.12 | 4.XZ | 4.13 | 4.YX | 4.14 | 4.15 | 4.16

The original version of this article was posted at Advocates for Self-Government.