Anomalies and their Followers as Drivers of Episodic Social Upsets

While episodic social upsets driven by psychopaths and their followers are both painfully obvious and abundant to the point of distraction in the historical record, it is enlightening to place these upsets into the context of Babiak & Hare‘s psychology experiments.  In these experiments, as treated further in another post, the minds in a random sample fall into more or less equal thirds having, as far as I know by education or experience, no known correlation to ethnicity or gender:

• Those in Category 1 (call them acolytes) are instinctively enamored of such anomalies and are inclined to enthusiastically support them;
• Those in Category 2 (call them skeptics) are instinctively repulsed by psychopaths and other “fraudsters” and are inclined to resist them;
• Those in Category 3 (call them agnostics) either cannot or will not differentiate fraudsters from normal people and always reserve judgment.

Let us therefore pose a solution to the Fermi Paradox in which, over time:

• Skeptics, when left to their own devices, incrementally build social structures aimed at improving the human condition.  The personal and common survival value of these behaviors should be obvious.  Although the mix of socialist and capitalist motives can vary, in a putatively ideal free society the socialist motives build the infrastructure upon which to build capital markets and the capitalist motives generate wealth from which to draw fairly for social services and to further improve the supporting social infrastructure.
• Acolytes episodically commandeer the social structures built up by the skeptics for personal gain.  They do so by building socially vacuous confucio-machiavellian hierarchies on top of the pragmatic social structures built and maintained by the Skeptics.  They do this under the auspices of machiavellian political figures whenever such opportunities emerge, as they are often apt to emerge with or without democratic processes.  These upsets (all them cognotype inversions) always end up straining or collapsing the underlying pragmatic social infrastructure for lack of any common benefit. Whenever their efforts gain them the opportunity, they plunder the social infrastructure in their Machiavellian drive to dominate.
• Meanwhile the agnostics become useful tools by which to bend favor between normal and anomalous candidates within democratic societies or between would-be despots in the absence of democracy, as they have no instinctive attraction or aversion to either type of candidate and are easily swayed.  They are universally courted as what some have referred to themselves after the fact as “useful idiots”.  As a group, they are for this reason perennially immune to political disfavor.

The darwinian selective advantages of each of these three cognotypes and their social niches is clear enough, and the resulting dynamics sort well with the historical record.  It is important to understand the short-term selective value of each cognotype because these are what maintain the demographic balance and whose motivational differences in turn drive the episodic disruption cycle.  Unfortunately with the march of technology, the episodic upsets thus engendered become increasingly dangerous, as the short-sighted acolytes, as perennial champions of vacuous hierarchies, find more and more powerful tools at each turn of the cycle – tools which could be used to set back the underlying tangible infrastructure by leaps and bounds of steadily increasing magnitude.  While a society dominated by skeptics can and often has been envisioned to progress rapidly and progressively, the historical record and the Fermi Paradox sort better with the findings of Babiak & Hare, which find convincing support amid the recent emergence of reliable political statistics.

It is not difficult in hindsight to understand this mix, nor how it came to be given the short-term darwinian selective advantages of each category and the dynamics of their interaction, both of which are plainly visible to anyone who wishes to understand them scientifically.  Less obvious are the lengthy result cycles of the complex social dynamics thus set in motion, which lie beyond the tractability of natural selection.  The process of natural selection is a random one and can’t associate malefactors with end results the way a detective or jury can when, for example, the malefactors succeed over time by making the benefactors fail over time.  Nature can’t select against malefactors it can’t track and has a long history of selecting in favor of highly-evolved predators.  As a result, the host society as a whole either succeeds, fails or drags along in misery with no end in sight.  The episodic self-destruction of social orders is thus beyond the power of nature to select against in a surgical manner that might improve the dynamics going forward, and so it blindly selects instead against the host society en masse, leaving as a challenge for the host society to correct itself if it can.

The pragmatic difficulty in social self-correction arises in reconciling these social dynamics and the players that drive them with the traditional precepts of egalitarian society.  In treating all individuals as equal under the law, we afford in perpetuity to all, regardless of mind category, a license to disrupt forward social progress at the expense of the common good.  The mix is tolerated because the alternative is to confront a problem far more vast and inexorable than most are willing to confront.

Limitations on candidates for office are already in place, such as the requirement for native birth in candidates for the US presidency.  While limitations based on mental health are vulnerable to political interpretation and manipulation, one cannot deny their importance in comparison to the limitations already in place.  What we need, therefore, are criteria of mental health as easily and universally defensible as the criterion of native birth.  Since the Electoral College is obsolete in the internet age for purposes of counting votes, why not repurpose it for the psychological evaluation and underwriting of political candidates using widely accepted quantitative criteria?  The alternative is to place limits on who can vote.  While such limits are not without precedent in US politics, the general approach is fraught with its own disadvantages and is just as vulnerable to political interpretation and manipulation as would be mental health criteria for political candidates.

If people really are created equal then our politics should reflect that.  If nature is found to differ from this perspective, on the other hand, then our political apparatus is duty bound to guard itself against nature’s certifiable anomalies.  While the free press contributes to such safeguards, its inevitable entanglement with politics and commerce marries it to controversy, volatility and sensation over progressive change and pits state-controlled news media against the more purely market-driven news media.  (I challenge the reader to discriminate a third category of news media.)  More socially responsible and legislatable safeguards are needed to avert catastrophic social cycles the likes of which dominate the historical record.  The historical record is, after all, a solidified concrete object lesson, not just a warning.