Political Games Advantage Psychopaths
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I went to a talk recently by Arthur Brooks, who's a Harvard Business School professor who teaches about happiness. The talk itself was good in that it gave voice to the wisdom of the ancients. Faith, family, friends and work are the essential ingredients of happiness, according to him.
At the end of the talk, he gave us, the audience a challenge. His analysis was that the dark-triad personalities were responsible for creating much of the unhappiness we see and experience. These are the people with offensive personality traits that include narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. His complaint was that too many of those people are now in control of institutions leading to a great deal of unnecessary and civilization-destroying strife.
I largely agreed that there's a small minority that causes a lot of the evil, but what I wanted to say and didn't get to say due to time constraints is that the current system incentivizes these types of people getting into positions of power. Hence, in my frustration at my not having had a chance to explain my reasoning, I write this essay.
Dark triad personality traits thrive in zero-sum games. Well let me qualify that. They thrive in zero-sum games where there are a lot of players, a lot being larger than Dunbar's number (~150). Under that number, it's hard to get away with dark-triad behavior because there's a collective moral intelligence at work. When in small-ish communities, dark triad traits are weeded out or at least marginalized. But beyond that number, most people know only a relatively small percentage of the people in the group and they instead have to back leaders based on limited information.
And this is where dark triad traits thrive. They are master manipulators and they can win these zero-sum games by doing the unethical. They generally give great first impressions, and only later are they found to be lacking empathy or morals. Sadly, society is currently full of large scale organizations where these dynamics are at play and you can see their operation in almost every institution. And that game has a name: politics, and nearly everything is infected with it.
Put simply, dark triad personalities have a massive advantage in political, zero-sum games and as such, they will be way over-represented in leadership positions. The largeness allows such people to get away with their immoral behavior and creates a lot of opportunities for them.
Sadly, nearly everything is large scale enough where dark triad traits win. Government, business, academia, media, education. It's pretty hard to come up with places where the dark triad traits *don't* have a massive advantage.
Yet there is one area of the economy and and it's small business entrepreneurialism. And no, I'm not talking about VC backed startups. The Silicon Valley VC world is a large institution where political maneuvering matters just as much as government or media and dark triad traits still have a massive advantage as witnessed by Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann and Sam Bankman-Fried. When I say entrepreneurialism, I'm talking about normal small businesses like a deli or a car wash. There's much less politicking there and little room for dark triad personalities to take the reins. The environments are too small and there are not enough places to hide for people like that to win. Positive-sum games like market transactions, give no room for rent-seeking dark triad behaviors. Such behaviors don't work where value has to be provided specifically because of the immediacy of needing to make a profit.
Small businesses are what built civilization. It's only in the last 100 years or so with the advent of central banking that politics and zero-sum games have infected everything. So the question to ask isn't how do we stop these dark triad personalities from getting to the helm of these institutions. The correct question is how do we change the system so politics and zero-sum games are not so prevalent.
And this is where we need to talk about the economic system we are all under. It's way more Marxist than we'd like to believe. Marxism is what creates large political organizations where dark triad traits thrive. These are cancers to civilization and they're unfortunately growing in what were formerly thriving nations.
The 5th plank of the communist manifesto was the control of money by the government. The reason we have the system we have now that's getting closer to Marxism is because of the monetary system.
So to answer the professor's question, the economic system is the reason why dark triad personalities thrive. The permanent average reduction in happiness that he pointed out in 2008 and 2020, were argued to be the result of social media and corona lockdowns. I would argue that they were both massive inflationary events for the world economy. If you study hyperinflation, monetary debasement correlates strongly with unhappiness, probably because people don't like having their stuff taken away from them by inflation or otherwise. I would suggest that this is because monetary debasement adds a lot more zero-sum games giving huge advantages to dark-triad traits, which combined with the concentration/centralization of power which debasement also induces, makes everyone more miserable.
To fix the problem of evil people thriving, we must change the system so it doesn't produce such bloated, inefficient, zero-sum institutions that give evil people so many advantages.
