The sociopath article
- Let’s not get bogged down defining the word “sociopath”. You know what I mean. You’ve met them before, they’ve given you orders at workplaces, there is a common use of the word. Help yourself to any of the models or diagnostic checklists, they all describe basically the same thing. If tempted by perfectionism, much like I often am, you can create a buffer definition of “if not sociopath, then asshole” which no PhD-haver can object to.
We’re talking people who lack empathy, and behave in ways that make others miserable.
- The books I keep trying to chew through in order to lend this piece respectability are Lobaczewski - Political Ponerology and Snakes in Suits - Paul Babiak, Robert D. Hare. They both describe the in different terms how some sociopaths don’t pursue the quick libidinal way of harming other people and instead backstab and intrigue their way up the ranks in organizations, chiefly businesses. Latter book has a power ranking of jobs most likely to contain sociopaths; no. 1 is “CEO”.
- I want to make the case for an expansion as to what empathy should entail. The normal understanding is that seeing someone get hurt and commiserating, helping recovery, preventing future injury, those all fall under an umbrella of common compassion, empathy. Academics might separate feeling from action, but that’s angels on pins. Beyond that there’s concern for the environment, vegetarianism, these expanded notions of what deserves to have its suffering be perceived, prevented, ameliorated. Whether these fall under “normal” or “too much” is up for debate. I suggest that there’s degrees of separation that allow for the topic to be debatable. If nature could yell “ouch!”, we would react intuitively. Cats squeal in pain, but fish don’t. Cows do, but abattoirs are far away, not on my mind, and hell, how much beef is in this patty, really, anyway?
- Degrees of separation perform the same function in interpersonal and economic interactions as they do in environmental debate. A megacorp CEO doesn’t have to smell sweatshops, look in the eyes of people he immiserates. Physical distance is easily overcome in the year 2026, so a non-sociopath CEO would have to make up other excuses for why he continues to exist. Ideology is the science of making excuses. Capitalism is unique in its programmatic, endless pursuit of infinite wealth at any cost. I think any human being capable of empathy is ultimately unable to maintain an existence analogous to those of hated moneyboys like Bezos or Musk for any real length of time. Only someone unable to feel empathy is capable of that. Modus tollens thus allows anyone to identify them. From here on, excuses perform not a therapeutic function for feeling CEOs, but an obfuscating function for non-feeling sociopaths in power.
- Capitalism contains uniquely unambiguous and uniquely powerful excuses for sociopathic behavior, employed as degrees of separation to obfuscate cause and effect. Where pre-capitalist societies contain mitigating mechanisms, including religion (Marx specifically mentions the church as limiting the excesses of western European capitalism) and concerns for maintenance of holdings into the future, but capitalism alienates seemingly as many things from one another as possible.
- The example that synthesizes most of the points I want to make is the idea of an “invisible hand”, a metaphor given life by innumerable econ 101 classes, asserting that selfish behavior actually leads to everything improving for everyone. Nothing could back a sociopathic play than asserting that selfishness leads to results not associated with selfishness, but actually the opposite. Tales of “the market” are trotted out whenever wages are to pushed down, jobs are cut. I wrote a paragraph about CEO behavior which would not be sociopathic, and was reminded that’s illegal. Capitalism is unique in how much permission to enact cruelty it gives, and then lays escape routes for those willing to cause others harm.
- Toward the end I would mention the black book of communism and how capitalism kills more in two years than communism ever managed to. Actually existing socialism is gone except for the last bastions of Cuba and North Korea, but the propaganda machine that made them out to be epicenters of evil is currently self-immolating its remaining few rare minerals against Shadeds over the Persian Gulf.
- The Goldwater rule should be abandoned as it empowers and protects sociopaths in power and rising to power, against the powerless. Tellingly, the Wikipedia article on Snakes In Suits talks about how bad sociopaths are for business, and how they’re prevalent among the upper echelons, and the only counter suggested is screening for new employees. Turn this around! Screen the assholes at the top. Pu Yi broke down once confronted, lived a reformed life afterward. These don’t seem like the actions of a sociopath. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, all those assholes that behave like sociopaths: they should be given a chance at redemption in re-education camps.
- End of article. What follows is anecdotes.
- The only question that AI is designed to answer is “how to drive down wages”. This is being done against most professions. There’s articles about kids worried their hoped-for future professions maybe no longer existing by the time they finish college. In the long-term, I don’t believe AI will replace anything but the most menial of tasks. In the short-term, media-aided manipulation of the labor market has already driven down wages and caused precarity for professions, even some that weren’t subject to overhiring during the pandemic. By itself, supporting this course of events, already is barely masked sociopathic behavior, but there’s a second line here. If today there are no entry-level positions, cut out of an imagined or real lack of need for them, that means there will not be junior employees trained to replace senior employees one generation from now. This isn’t mere lack of forethought. This is sociopathic disregard for simultaneously current young and all future generations. This kind of market manipulation is equal to yelling fire in a theater crowded with about four billion humans.
- Continuing the previous point, entirely without AI but by the same class, this has already been done to journalists. Journalism has been dying off and is currently dead in the mainstream, intentionally killed off by a ruling class that believed it a threat.
- I won't belabor, quote or cite the enviromental aspects of datacenters. They are universally known. The planet, livable space, air, water, soil, soundwaves are being poisoned in order to make the worst people on earth richer. The ability to divorce awareness of the direct connection between one's own actions and and these results that are visible merely one click away qualifies as willful disregard.
- As a final aside, I want to express my extreme distaste with “artistic” uses of genai. Immiseration of artists aside, it’s extremely ugly. Any economy that allows for the notion of “good enough” to trump “actually good” so long as it fulfills other markers, outside of emergencies and famines, should be firmly rejected. More than that however, people who cannot see how ugly these things are, how the averaged output of a billion pairs of shiny anime breasts can only look derivative, disappointing and repulsive, needs to be treated with the same kind of contempt the sociopaths in power deserve. The Iranian lego slop-gen videos can be understood to be stemming from a crisis, but people actually looking at that and beyond simply expressing tribal allegiance actually liking it need treatment. There should be re-education camps for these people. They too, deserve a chance at redemption.
- At least you should give them the stare.