This is among those topics that Sam has touched on especially well in The Moral Landscape, that I wish he would spend a lot more time talking about. I believe this topic may be fundamental to solving the vast majority of our global issues - which are all, at some level, social issues, in that they must be solved by humans cooperating.

Psychopathy may affect something like 1% of the global population to some degree. I think it really is the single most undermentioned phenomenon facing us as a society, and yet very few commentators insist on it being the root cause of any of our major concerns. We all speak as if everyone is capable of caring, when we know that a significant number of people, between 0.1 and 1.5% (perhaps more if we just look at specific traits) may well not be. The fact that we argue among each other so much without considering some people simply cannot be reached, means we make more problems for ourselves, and suddenly it looks like everyone who disagrees with us must be crazy or a psychopath - and honestly I think that's how they have succeeded so well.

It's about so much more than just empathy, but our entire suite of emotional and social faculties which are intrinsic to what differentiates our healthy minds from theirs. Depending on where a psychopath falls on the spectrum, they just don't care and cannot find the want or will to care about the vast majority of social justice issues. It just isn't a part of how they are built. What many of them do care about though, are various hedonistic pleasures, including every depravity you can think of, along with an almost ubiquitous zeal for power and dominance. While that does require cooperation with the rest of us, if they could cheat, lie, or otherwise deceive their way to getting what they want, they will do so without hesitation if they think they can get away with it, or they may be the type that thrive on the risk of getting caught, or on the attention of actually being caught. Their motivations are literally just what occurs to them (what else could they be, as Sam would say), and since they still retain all of the other fundamental needs, and all the same variety of personality and personal interests, they can apply all of the rationality of how to solve a problem, to the full exclusion of any externalities that will not threaten the plan.

Of course, I suspect the vast majority of people who are on the psychopathy spectrum retain enough of their empathetic center, or at least have come to believe - as a result perhaps of keen intelligence, a healthy domestic environment, a society with strong social norms, and a good education - that at least behaving and acting in accordance with social norms is the most rational way to live. But, that also means there is a good chance they'll simply emulate the prevailing norms, which may not be ethical norms at all. Again, when we expect their ranges of intelligence and other skills to be as equally diverse as our own, it remains very unclear who and who isn't a sociopath deep down. While they may have certain tendencies, such as to be naturally charismatic, most charismatic people are unlikely to be psychopaths. But there is another 1% among whom it is clear to me the majority must be sociopaths. I am referring of course to the very richest people in society, who appear to have rode the capitalistic freight train into global dominance and have - for eons perhaps - enjoyed playing their own power games at the expense of everyone and everything else.

What inspired this latest desire for me to have this discussion was my immediate reaction to the whole Blizzard Activision incident. This reaction was, "who in the fuck would have thought this was a good idea? Taking away a legitimate winner's money because he supports a cause he believes in, all because of the threat of losing money from those 5% of your investors who are Chinese. Then I read everyone's outraged comments, and saw how everyone else is wondering as well, and complaining about our important social values as if they think the people at Blizzard who made this decision are actually capable of caring. But they're not. They're sociopaths. They must be. And that means the only reason they will do anything in response to all this push-back from gamers, is because it might end up doing more financial damage than bowing down to China ever could. They'll call up their top developers and spokes people - who they know have the reputational clout along with the necessary emotional concern - and get them to appease the masses with what will actually be genuine apologies.

I don't know what the solution to psychopathy and sociopathy is, but I do think we need to start thinking about how we can live in peace alongside our psychopathic brethren, while somehow dismantling their control over capitalism. It's a mighty tall order, and I have no idea where to start. One idea that springs to mind is again just raising attention to the issue. But I also think, as I do about many such things, that the taboo needs to be lifted. We need to be able to first come to learn, and then decide it is rational to admit that we might be psychopaths. I have never heard someone say this or anything that would imply it matter-of-factly, such that I really believe they are. For whatever reason, those who know (and many surely must) almost never deign it to be pragmatic to reveal. And I don't blame them; not given how successful they can be if they keep it a secret. We need to shape our society such that such success becomes all but impossible.

There's more to it though; we need to live alongside them because they're a part of the human community, just like all the other oft maligned groups which includes LGBTQI peoples, those with various philias, and so on. We're a diverse group, and it's quite possible that all of these seeming "abnormalities" are in their own way fundamental to our success. After all, capitalism wouldn't work without sociopaths, and capitalism is indisputably responsible for bringing us modern medicine, modern technology, and thus the means to raise the average standards of living the world over (if only by accident; since it wouldn't have happened if it didn't help meet their own goals).

In any case, that is all to say that we must find a way to accept and live with the problem openly. Most people with psychopathy are very likely to be good people, or are at least trying to be their best selves for those others that they do care about. I think we need to be able to readily admit to others that we do not understand why, for example, that caring for others may be good for its own sake. That way we may actually be made aware of just how differently our own mind might work compared to those of others. Rationally motivated empathy is better than none at all, and fortunately there are very good arguments (such as those in The Moral Landscape) that posit rational bases for why the most moral choices are often the best ones. Together with this, we need to get much better at detecting the problem, and shaping our institutions around it - for example our prison and legal justice systems. What deters or rehabilitates one, may have no effect, or even the opposite effect, on the other.

Anyway, I'd like to go on and talk about how ignoring the problem of psychopaths could really lead to those distopias we imagine in cinema (and then I'll stop - this is getting book sized, haha).

The distopian future I think most likely is the one we see in the movie Elysium. Sam has come very close to stating this plainly, but stops short for some reason: Automation may lead to the working and middle classes not only becoming universally unemployed, but literally redundant human beings in the scheme of a functional capitalism, and that means they (which is to say we) will no longer be needed by the ruling sociopathic elite. If technology gets good enough, they'll be able to produce almost everything they need to live without us, and so we will become expendable. And I don't mean this as some "NWO" conspiracy, because they're not new, and I don't think it's actually planned - it just makes the most financial sense given a lack of caring about human life. I mean if you lost 50% of the global population but retained the world's best teachers, scientists, technologists, and engineers, that would drastically reduce the load on our earth's resources. Meanwhile, if the earth doesn't survive the purge, at least they can all retreat to Jeff Bezos's orbital paradise, while robots continue to mine the planet for energy and resources, and those of us who remain, fight among ourselves for the leftovers whenever we're not running or hiding from the robots. Anyway, I very much enjoy works of fiction in this vein for sure, but I really do hope it remains science fiction and nothing more.