Stochastocracy (1):
Psychopaths Ride the Curve
by Peterson F. Whalley, dean of Grantchester College, Cambridge,
and member of the NETWork Interested In Telling-it-like-it-is
[There are three articles on this topic. At the end of each of the first two articles is a link to the next article in the series.]Representative liberal democracy is in crisis. It has been for some while but the crisis has now approached a threshold; further erosion will irrevocably shift the countries that enjoy this form of government into a terra incognita in which liberal democracy will have degenerated into a new form of autocracy, which we call "spinocracy". To retrieve liberal democracy now requires radical action. Yet the solution is at hand - Stochastocracy.
That's right, Stochastocracy - government by random selection.
First we need to explain the plight we are in. This is not a solution in search of a problem. We would not promote a seemingly bizarre concept like stochastocracy if there were any more orthodox rescues available that might have a reasonable chance of success without enormous bloodletting. This first article in a series focuses on the core problem - the control of psychopaths. Eventually we'll get around to describing in more detail how stochastocracy might work.
We make the bold assertion that political history is the history of psychopaths. Democracy is the only means yet devised for the control of power by psychopaths. This has provided an interregnum, a respite of perhaps 100–200 years. The psychopaths are slowly taking over again.
What do we mean by a "psychopath"?
Let's be clear that we have no pretensions to any kind of clinical diagnosis. There are official psychiatric diagnostic manuals for that. We mean someone who lies at the far edge of the bundle of characteristics we call "human", in particular with respect to those characteristics that have to do with consideration for others, e.g., caring, empathy, etc.. This means that psychopaths have a great advantage over "normal" people when it comes to self-promotion; they are manipulative, uncaring and ruthless. Their only concern is for their own advancement.
To explain this properly we need to talk about statistical analysis. Yes, statistics. Everyone's eyes still open? Paranthetically, pandering to the belief that understanding statistics is simply beyond the average reader and, in any event, boring is one of the key reasons so little about the world is explained by conventional media. The sister site to NIH is a beacon to those who dare to think otherwise.
Back to the theme. The central idea that is the link between pychopathy, democracy, spinocracy and sthocastocracy is that of a distribution (this is also the main idea behind Darwinism, evolution and thermodynamics - and baseball batting averages and much, much else, including electricity prices - but that's for several other days).
A distribution begins with classification. There is no distribution of oneitem or one event - as soon as we classify we can contemplate distributing whatever it is we're classifying into two or more boxes. You buy a bag of apples. You decide some look better than others, so you make two piles; nice apples and not-so-nice (i.e. "niceness challenged") apples. On reflection, you decide to create another category, bruised apples, which is a subset of the latter. We may imagine the following distribution: nice - 4; not-so-nice but unbruised - 3; bruised - 3.
That wasn't so hard, was it?
As you look into this apples business, you might find that you make more and more distinctions. Some nice apples are red, some are green, some orangey. Some bruised apples are blotchy. And so on.
All of these boxes correspond to various characteristics of apples. Just as we may construct a distribution of apples into qualitative categories, we can construct quantitative distributions of each characteristic or combinations. We can create an index for "redness"; we can count "blotchy spots" and so on.
If we have count a large enough the distribution will often start to take on a distinctive shape; the normal distribution, often called the bell curve or, in homage to the genius who "discovered" the distribution and formulated most of the related mathematics, the Gaussian distribution. This is the familiar bell-shaped curve. Many important distributions have this shape, or one reasonably close to it.
The bit that turns people off is when the subject turns mathematical, so we'll skip that. Not because it's boring or because it's not useful. It's just not essential for understanding the main issues. For example, we might be interested in finding out if green apples bruise more easily than red ones. We can count bruised red and green apples but what might this tell us about apples in general? By making some key assumptions about inference, we may be able to formulate some rules based on our knowledge of apples that have general applicability.
Means, medians, modes, percentiles, variances, etc. - these are all numerical ways of describing the distribution curve for more exact analysis. For our purposes, let's just talk about boxes and representing the contents of the boxes as a proportion of the whole distribution. In our apple distribution above four out of ten apples were nice; if this were true in general, then we would expect 40% of any apples we happen to buy would be nice.
Turning now to humans, we may imagine literally an infinite number of classifications. This is the same as one (technically, it's a uniform distribution). As another digression, all of the ballyhoo related to Rushton, Murray, Eysenck etc. is due to their raising certain characteristics (colour of skin, measures of intelligence) to a degree of importance far exceeding all of the others. This tells us much more about these authors than about humans in general (or about generalities about specific groups).
One of the limitations, it seems, of the human brain is an inability to comprehend the infinite. So, to develop what we, pitifully, call "knowledge" we make distinctions. At different times and in different places - what we might label "cultures" - humans have developed a huge assortment of classificatory schemes.
The classification system that we argue is of pressing relevance to political theory and practice concerns peoples' interrelationships.
So, at the outlying end of the distribution of human relationship characteristics is the group we call the "psychopaths". We acknowledge here that there are significant technical issues associated with this characterization. We have lumped together a bunch of features of the human personality and behaviour and constructed a scale that includes as an outlier group this category we call "psychopaths". This is an example of three highly abused techniques; indexing, factor analysis and scaling. Yet, allowing for a "grey area" of those classified in or out of the "psychopath" box, akin to "nice" or "not nice" apples, we assert that there is "intuitive" support for our classification scheme that does not require a detailed technical defence. We beg the reader's patience at this point. Read on and see if you agree or not.
Let's guess that a reasonably well-defined psychopath box represents 1 in 100,000 people. When there were only 100,000 humans there would be, in any generation between none and probably no more than four psychopaths, generally just one. Distributed over much space and organized in small social units psychopathy wasn't much of an issue. When there were 1 million humans each generation would have an average of ten widely dispersed psychopaths. With 6 billion, though, we would expect 60,000 psychopaths.
Moreover, they will be clustered by a selection principle.
The idea of a selection principle is another momentous idea. Here's an example.
Suppose we poured a box of apples through a coarse but uniform sieve. We would get a selected group of apples below a certain size. The sieve is our selection principle.
The most famous and most misunderstood selection principle is natural selection. Here, the selection principle is reproduction. Nature filters out species that don't reproduce.
The massive over-representation of psychopaths among the powerful is strong evidence of a selection principle at work. That principle is the advantage psychopaths have over "normals" in the pursuit of power. Where there are large numbers of people there will, by chance, be relatively large numbers of psychos, but, in addition, where power is also concentrated, there will be disproportionately large numbers of them. New York and Washington are likely to have the largest concentrations of psychopaths on the planet.
In very small groups psychopaths are rare, soon discovered and shunned (or jailed, or killed). In larger groups - typical of tribes - they are likewise rare, discovered, shunned but given some socially-acceptable function, like shamans. In larger societies they are much less rare, much harder to discover and, precisely because they are unfeeling and manipulative, often rise to assume political authority.
This, then, is what we assert the historical record shows. Civilizations, as we call them, are largely the history of competing psychopaths and the war of psychopaths against the normal humans.
This is pretty shocking. You mean Alexander the Great was a psychopath? Julius Caesar? Attila? Charlemagne? William the Conqueror? Napoleon? Peter the Great? Surely not!
This intuitive test of historical leaders seems to confirm our working hypothesis. But what about Cromwell? Washington?….Lincoln?
This is where it gets murky. Why? These names coincide with the rise of liberal representative democracy. In this form of government, to gain power you have to get people to vote for you. This radically undercuts the natural advantage of the psychopath. Unfortunately, as the population has grown and the selective advantage of psychopaths has gone to work we have entered an era in which the psychopaths have found ways to gain control.
Our analysis of and solution to this problem is basically that proposed by Karl Popper. Representative democracy is to be preferred because it provides a method of preventing authoritarianism. Unfortunately, Popper's favoured solution - proportional representation - will not work. This is because it neglects the rise of psychopathic control of the system that governs the elected leaders - which is to say the giant private and public bureaucracies, especially the former.
As the electoral system has become increasingly a money game, elected politicians have turned to the largest sources of money - private business corporations. These are ideal breeding grounds for psychopaths.
The promotion process in large private and public bureaucracies embodies a selection principle that heavily favours the psychopathic personality. Psychopaths have no difficulty denigrating fellow workers or claiming credit for work done by others. They are the quintessential power-lunchers, breakfasters, stay-after-workers. While it's probably true that psychopaths prefer not to take on fellow psychopaths as protégés, there's no reason to suspect that the ability to read personality is more acute in psychopaths than in the normal population, whereas they are likely just as susceptible to the sycophancy at which psychopaths are so adept on their rise to the top.
Let us be clear. This is a statistical process. Not everyone in the executive or managerial ranks is a psychopath. But those with psychopathic tendencies are over-represented in these positions.
The majorities of managers and executives are likely to be normal. This is what makes the problem intractable. There's no way to weed out the psychopaths. Yet, we assert, as you go up the chain, the chances of encountering pseudo and genuine psychopaths increases.
Moreover, it is likely that psychopathy runs in families, not so much because of genetics as the subtle but pervasive influence of family mores and behaviours. The single biggest factor determining who is in the senior ranks of large organizations is socio-economic status, which means family. Which means that what is still relatively rare among most of the world's inhabitants becomes quite prevalent at the exalted levels occupies by the World's power elites.
As another intuitive test, think about the following list of names, from robber barons to contemporary high-profile figures: Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, Kurt Waldheim, Boutros-Boutros Ghali, Kofi Annan, Jeffrey Skilling, Chainsaw Al Dunlap, Martha Stewart.
Let us conclude this piece by revisiting US presidents. The US is not only the World's only mega - hyper-? - power, it is also the site of the most advanced forms of the tendencies we've discussed. In our view, none of the presidents before Nixon, with the possible exception of Hoover, would rank as a genuine psychopath. Neither Carter nor Reagan were psychopaths but Reagan was a stooge of the Republican wing of the cabal that has assumed control of US politics. As for Clinton, the jury is still out, but the Bushes, that's another matter…
Next instalment Posted February 26, 2004
Stochastocracy (1): Psychopaths Ride the Curve © Peterson F. Whalley, 2004
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