What if the World is Run by Sociopaths?
Photo by Samantha Sophia on Unsplash
March 1 2020
The ‘inspiration’ for this story is certainly, regrettably, not a unique one: the severe and long term abuse that someone close to me experienced at the hands of their former partner.
While I was largely a bystander, it continues to shape the way I see the world. I am now of the firm belief that the world is for all intents and purposes run by sociopaths, widespread abusers of society as a whole, and that this reality must be first accepted before things get better.
At the height of the abuse, I remember talking to another family member about how to deal with it. We knew the situation was serious — we knew he was an abuser, and was doing horrible things to her. But we, and particularly me, still took a distinctly positive approach, one with hope in redemption and slanted towards forgiveness.
To simply write him off as beyond help, as a lost cause, was against my worldview at the time. Anyone shown the right amount of love could be saved, could be bought back towards the light. This person was no different. He, his soul, was still worthy of our consideration and attention.
Yikes. It was, in hindsight, a hopelessly naive approach. As brutal as it sounds, he was not worthy of anything from us.
He was in complete control of the situation, on one hand manipulating her and her family, and with the other, arranging his new life towards a new wife and family through a process of lying and distortion of reality in his favour.
It was despicable, ruthless, and incredibly — almost impressively — effective. I’ve crossed paths with a few scumbags in my time, but he was (and I use past tense deliberately, as beyond the constructive purposes for this story I wish to give his existence no attention) as close to a sociopath as I have witnessed in the flesh.
In the flesh, because since this wakeup call I now see evidence of sociopathic behaviour in the world today, everywhere I look. Sorry, not everywhere: I do still believe that the vast majority of people are good. When I look towards the top of the world.
I’m not going to name names. On an ideologically-slanted site such as Medium, I know exactly where the majority of minds have turned to straight away. But that is missing the point of the true sociopath, because they are the ones who are able to hide their behaviour from the world.
True sociopaths aren’t the ranting, raving, repulsive type of narcissists. They very rarely repel us, at least initially. Rather, they will come across as charismatic, enticing and attractive to us. They can do this, in large part, because they are also extremely clever, calculating and disciplined. You might say they exist along the mistaken line that many of us draw between charm, intelligence and morality.
And this is where things get tricky. The true sociopaths are the ones that likely aren’t obvious to us. They may even be some of those individuals that we direct much of our positive energy towards, even idolise. They may even be female!
There is no shame in being duped by a sociopath. In fact, one could even take it as a compliment. As this article points out, they often specifically target those who display desirable human traits.
When I look back at my past naivety — not to say I can’t make the same mistake again — I can see strong links to my fairly blinkered liberal/left/progressive worldview (I’m terrible with labels). One of the defining characteristics of this worldview, I have now decided, is naive virtuousness. And much of this naivety is directed at people on the same ‘side’.
We are all happy to hurl lounge room psychological diagnoses to those on the other side of the ideological spectrum, but how many of us are willing to consider that they may exist on our side as well? I looked up to many politicians, celebrities and other public figures that situated themselves in the centre of my worldview. Many of them I now understand to be the opposite of the persona that they present to the world.
Again, no names, because that is besides the point. I’ve decided it is valuable that each individual goes through this detachment process themselves. Plus, the nastiest ones might be those so ensconced at the top of the world that we haven’t even heard of them.
Why do I think this? Many of our most visible and powerful social systems are, I believe, fundamentally broken and corrupted, and it takes a special kind of terrible to make yourself at home in these systems. These systems are in effect made for the sociopath to ascend through, as they filter out those lacking the shamelessness and immorality to keep playing the game. Would a true sociopath, a truly competent and effective liar and manipulator, be content to mingle in the middle rungs of society? Will that satisfy their need for power and control?
I do say this with some reluctance, because who am I to say that everyone at the top of a social institution is awful. There are still good people fighting the good fight within every broken system — they are true heroes — and for them to be guilty by association is not fair. But, this is how the sociopath works; they are more than happy to bring people down with them.
I have decided that accepting the existence of sociopaths in high places, even and especially those we feel drawn towards, is fundamental to making sense of the world around us.
What does the world start to look like if we start to imagine sociopaths, or at least people demonstrating sociopathic tendencies, occupying the positions of greatest power in the world?
Let’s take an example that almost everyone will be familiar with, for better or worse. Most politically-minded progressive people would readily accept that the 2003 invasion of Iraq by Western allies was based around the fiction — the deliberate, coordinated, malicious lie — of ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’. It was, as we can see now playing out with Iran, the first step of a calculated and deliberate movement to destabilise the Middle East for the benefit of the Western/Israeli political alliance. They just needed an excuse — an excuse that people on multiple countries across both sides of the generic political spectrum were and continue to be complicit in.
If they were willing to create this excuse — at the cost of, according to the Council of Foreign Relations, the lives of 4,700 allied troops and more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians — where would such people draw the line?
To use a somewhere more controversial example, should we doubt that the same governments would be capable of undertaking staged acts of terrorism — false flags — as pretences to send its people to war? Even mass casualty events like 9/11?
Perhaps we should at least acknowledge that there is no reason why sociopathic Muslims are more inherently likely to have undertaken such an act as sociopaths within Western politicians and intelligence agencies. If they are truly sociopaths, then the nationality of the people impacted is meaningless. Perhaps we should also acknowledge that theories we might otherwise write off as conspiracies are not beyond the capabilities of a group of organised, intelligent and powerful people who collectively don’t give a fuck about you or me.
To accept this fact is not to let despair or hopelessness win, that we are all doomed and armageddon is upon us. It is not to give up on the fundamental goodness of humanity, it is not to abandon some souls to a biblical hell of eternal damnation. Accepting this worldview is not incompatible to our endeavours to create a world based on unconditional love and compassion (this is what you are trying to do as well, right?). It is to accept the current reality of the mess of our world and the spiritual sickness that is prevalent within it, and use this acceptance as extra motivation to create change, with the naivety stripped away.
Crucially, we can do all this without requiring a diagnosis: we can accept the existence of sociopaths without understanding how they came to exist. This might sound simplistic, but what if the cause isn’t actually that important: if we only acknowledge but then ignore them — stop giving them the emotional energy that they crave — the sociopaths will eventually go away?
As I said at the start of this story, I was largely a bystander to my first exposure to true sociopathic behaviour. It isn’t as personal for me like it is for many people, yet it is now a fact that forms a central component of my worldview. Those who have directly experienced and suffered through the actions of someone with this behaviour… well, I can only assume they are inherently more open to the fact that these people can rise to the most visibly powerful positions in the world than I am. And this fact gives me hope that a mass shift in awareness of this reality is not far away.
At the very least, try it out as a thought experiment, even for a short time. It may require letting go of the intellectual comfort of accepting without question the words of those we have decided to align with ideologically. A sociopath can, after all, say they want action on climate change and LGBTQI+ rights whether they mean it or not, simply because they know that is what they should say.
It may require taking seriously some of those ‘conspiracies’ that float around in the murkier edges of social discourse (just don’t go too far into the murk, please!). This not a comfortable process, but that’s ok. Because it may also mean that the world makes a lot more sense, and that we start doing our due diligence in putting our precious positive energy towards people who actually deserve it.