Francisco Gil-White | The Management of Reality | Aug 13, 2024
- Our Western bosses have caused outrageous suffering and death for millions of people.
- Is that stupidity?
- Or is it evil?
- What kind of system are we in?
In a recent podcast (which I highly recommend) Bret Weinstein asks this question: Should we model the bosses as evil psychopaths?
People usually don’t ask this question; they just assume the bosses are roughly like their own selves: normal. Normies. To understand the bosses they ask: ‘In their shoes, what would I want? What would I do?’
But this gives very bad predictions if the bosses are sociopaths or psychopaths, says Weinstein, because in that case you are nothing like them.
In that podcast, Weinstein—being Weinstein—was trying to understand the structure of the world by reasoning mostly about COVID policies. That’s a fine method.
Take, for example, the economic effects of the insane lockdowns: by the end of 2021 the lockdowns had pushed some 150 million people into poverty (World Bank estimate).1 Could the bosses possibly have done that on purpose? “I don’t know,” says Weinstein, “but I wouldn’t put it past them” (literal quote).
That’s it. That’s the whole method right there: you just bravely and calmly consider the possibility that the bosses might be psychopaths.
Weinstein says we should go ahead and build a model on this “simplifying assumption”—that the powerful world bosses are psychopaths!—and see if we cannot account better for their behaviors and also predict better what they’ll do next.
Try this suit on (for size…), he says.
That’s… kind of remarkable. Weinstein is inviting us to do conspiracy theory of the most extreme kind, where the bosses are not merely our enemies, but our psychopathic enemies. Should we follow him?
I have learned from Weinstein a useful term: to steel-man an argument. It’s the opposite of straw-manning an argument. It means this: before trying to refute someone, make sure you have the strongest, best version of what they are saying. For scientific progress, this is ideal.
Many, however, will be tempted to straw-man Weinstein’s proposal in order more easily to dismiss it, because that’s how we university-educated Westerners protect our identities: by enforcing the conspiracy-theory taboo, learned from our university professors.
Since any such taboo is bad for science, I’ll do what ‘polite society’ considers bad manners: I’ll steel-man Bret Weinstein’s invitation to do extreme conspiracy theory. Then you straw-manners out there can try and take him down (if you still think you can).
First, what is a sociopath or psychopath?
As Wikipedia explains, “The terms sociopathy and psychopathy were once used interchangeably [by psychiatrists]” (and they are still so used in Weinstein’s podcast). Except that sociopathy, psychiatrists now say, was not really a thing (they made a mistake there). But the personality construct psychopathy, according to Wikipedia, they now consider solid:
“Psychopathy … is characterized by impaired empathy and remorse, in combination with traits of boldness, disinhibition, and egocentrism, often masked by superficial charm and immunity to stress, which create an outward appearance of … normalcy.”
Okay, perhaps Wikipedia is right that psychiatrists think this way now, but they haven’t quite institutionalized it. And, actually, if all you look at is the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (the American psychiatrist’s ‘Bible’), you might think they’ve discontinued psychopathy as a concept (or else entirely cured the pathology). I say that because the diagnostic category psychopathy, though it was included in the first two editions of the DSM, has now been dropped!
Why?
The reason, according to an article from Monitor on Psychology (2022), and showcased on the American Psychological Association (APA) website, is that “some of those studying the disorder worried that a psychopathy diagnosis would stigmatize people too much,” so, for the third edition of the DSM, they changed the name to ‘anti-social personality disorder’ (ASPD).2
Also, to make the job of a psychiatrist easier, the focus was shifted onto behavior, because “others were concerned that clinicians would have difficulty in accurately assessing [personality] traits like callousness or cruel or indifferent disregard of others.” The diagnosis of ASPD therefore “focuses … only minimally on personality characteristics like callousness, remorselessness, and narcissism.”3
The upshot is that psychopathy as such is not even included in the latest edition, the fifth, of the DSM. What the DSM now has is an alleged ‘personality’ category, or rather a personality ‘disorder,’ ASPD, the diagnosis of which pays scant attention to personality characteristics! The closest thing to psychopathy in the DSM-5 is the following mouthful: “conduct disorder with a ‘limited prosocial emotion’ specifier.”4
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA
Despite all that, psychiatrists have continued to use the term psychopathy, and, as the aforementioned article informs me, “researchers are working to further clarify the nature of psychopathy.” Why? Well, apparently because, no matter what the DSM affirms, the category psychopathy, with its traditional connotations, makes obvious sense to psychiatrists.5
Needless to say, all of this has caused tremendous confusion.
Methinks a discipline that changes the official definitions of its concepts because somebody (psychopaths!) might be offended, and which alters its procedures because practitioners find some aspects of data gathering difficult, cannot (to put it gently) be considered a rigorous science.
But there is a way out for us non-psychiatrists: we can still speak reasonably. Who is going to stop us? We can all agree that people with “impaired empathy and remorse” exist. So let’s call them psychopaths. Why not? It’s a shorthand. And guess what? Everybody, including psychiatrists (when they are not editing the DSM), still talks this way.
It is obvious that whoever has “impaired empathy and remorse” will find ethical behavior more difficult, because empathy/sympathy and remorse are precisely those emotions by which you “love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19.18).
And the “newer line of thinking [in psychiatry],” they tell me, “views psychopathy on a spectrum—as a set of traits that varies continuously throughout the population.”6 That should have been obvious from the start. The existence of this spectrum is the reason that different psychiatrists—who were looking at patients situated on different locations of the spectrum—were coming up with different definitions of the ‘type’ psychopathy.
As we slide towards evil along this compassion-psychopathy spectrum, we’ll find humans whose empathy and remorse are not merely impaired but entirely lacking—they are utterly indifferent to suffering. Let’s call them severe psychopaths.
And if we dare continue until the spectrum’s evil far end, it’s polar limit, we’ll find humans there who cross the line into enjoyment of another’s suffering, feeling greater enjoyment as the suffering and humiliation become more intense, and especially when they get to inflict it. Such people deserve to be called extreme psychopaths.
Let’s go there. Take a breath (trigger warnings, etc.).
What is an extreme psychopath actually like?
For an illustrative encounter with psychopathy, consider the Hamas terrorist who phoned his parents on October 7, 2023 to brag about torturing ten Jews to death with his own hands. Here’s the exchange:
“I’m speaking to you from Kibbutz Mefalsim. Open my WhatsApp now and see all the dead people. Look how many I killed with my own hands, your son killed Jews! This is inside Mefalsim, dad,” he said.
“God protect you,” his father replied.
The Hamas terrorist continued: “Dad, I’m speaking to you from the telephone of a Jewish woman. I killed her and I killed her husband. With my own hands.
“I killed ten! Dad, ten with my own hands! Dad open WhatsApp and see how many I killed, dad. Open your phone, Dad, I’m calling you on WhatsApp. Open your phone, go. Dad, I’m inside Mefalsim. Dad, I killed ten! Ten! With my own hands. Their blood is on my hands, give the phone to mom.”
The father then responded: “Oh, my son, may God protect you.”
The Hamas gunman then ended the call with: “I swear, ten with my own hands, mom.”7
The above transcript is bad enough, but it gets worse, as that transcript is not complete. Another source provided the actual audio and several times the dad can be heard crying “Allahu Akbar!” (‘God is the greatest!’) as his son, the killer, by name Mahmoud, brags about the killings. And after the killer asks for his mom to be put on the phone, she can be heard, crying for joy, to exclaim: “Oh my son, God bless you!” The father can be heard yelling: “Kill, kill, kill! Kill them!” The killer’s brother (by name Alaa) also pitches in. And then the killer says to his father: “Hold your head up, father. Hold your head up.” In other words: be proud that your son is a Jew-killer, that your son tortures to death defenseless civilians. Then Alaa, worried about Mahmoud’s safety, implores that he come back, but Mahmoud replies: “What do you mean come back? There is no going back—it’s either death or victory. My mother gave birth to me for the religion, Alaa. What’s with you, Alaa? How will I return?” The mother also says to Mahmoud, the killer: “I wish I was with you.”8
This entire family is levitating for joy that this fella achieved his dream: mass murder of defenseless, civilian Jews. To call them extreme psychopaths sounds like English to me. I mean, if these people are not extreme psychopaths, then who is?
But why is this family like this? Because Hamas has indoctrinated them.
This was explained in an interview by an October-7th terrorist who was captured. The young man explained that “members of the terrorist group were instructed to slaughter everyone—including women and children—in their Oct. 7 assault.” According to him, “[Hamas] commanders tell the soldiers to ‘stomp on their heads, behead them, do whatever you want to them.’ ” Apparently this includes encouragement to rape their victims, even after they are dead: he “detailed how fighters raped the corpses of young women.”
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