Mind Categories as an Ancient Equilibrium Distribution

Babiak and Hare (2006) conducted psychology experiments in which the antics of what they called “hucksters” were shown to randomly-selected audiences, after which each audience member was interviewed about their impressions of the huckster. The audience members fell into approximately equal thirds in their responses, numbered herein according to the order of their mention in Babiak & Hare:

• Category 1: About a third of those interviewed felt enamored of the huckster and felt that he or she had “charisma”.
• Category 2: About a third of those interviewed “felt their skin crawl” during the presentation of the antics and had an instinctive aversion to the huckster even before being interviewed.
• Category 3: “What happened?” The authors used this phrase to describe the reactions of this audience member category to their questions about the huckster. These intervewees apparently didn’t understand what they were being asked, as though indifferent to or unable to parse the words, actions, character or perceived intent of the huckster. It’s possible they were simply averse to controversy and were withholding their true impressions but this was their response when interviewed.

The researchers then revealed to each audience member the underlying trickery of the huckster. The Category 1 members felt the huckster had been misunderstood and unfairly treated by the experimenters and stood firmly by their original impressions; the Category 2 audience members felt their instincts had been vindicated and stood firmly by them; the Category 3 members again reacted as before: “What happened?”. In no case did any of the audience members change their initial assessment of the huckster. Apparently it wasn’t a matter of rational analysis, according to which the subsequent revelations should have changed the minds of the Category 1 people and awoken the Category 3 people to the existence of bad people. While it’s possible that no one wanted to admit they had been fooled, each subject seemed hard-wired to have the reaction they had and to maintain the original assessment they had made of the huckster and the huckster’s antics.

Then there’s the “huckster” category itself. While Babiak & Hare didn’t classify the huckster as a psychopath or NPD sufferer, that’s what their book is about because those are the people they’ve made careers of studying and feel they are qualified to write about. This category represents about 1-5% of a given population. Babiak and Hare are two of the world’s leading experts on psychopathy in its various forms, and on Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which they differentiate from psychopathy. Personally, I believe NPD to be just another “style” of psychopathy based on 6 years of experience with an NPD sufferer at an aerospace company during which I was also exposed to what Babiak & Hare would most probably have identified as a puppetmaster psychopath who employed the macho style, which they associate in historical context with Hitler and Stalin. While the manner of the NPD differed, I’m not so sure the methods did and the results and apparent intent were the same: identify, attract, subjugate, use and discard one victim after another on an uncontrollable quest for total domination of their social and professional circles. The macho psychopath did it with swagger, character assassination and outright lies of such contortion and audacity as to defy refutation in any context short of a formal courtroom setting while the NPD did it with smiles, charm and endless self-promotion, creating a sort of swirling vortex within which it was impossible to have a normal conversation or make a point without it being converted in real time into a reinforcement of the NPD’s centrality and preeminence in the order of things. To me after long and careful observation as the hand-picked target of both denizens, the NPD sufferrer’s antics seemed just another style of mainstream psychopathy because he and the macho style psychopath sought and achieved the same results.  Both also, it should be noted, weaved the kind of endless and endlessly revised social fiction which the experts associate with psychopathy, calling it the psychopathic fiction.  It quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, so why not call it a duck?

It is instructive to compare the results of statistically controlled surveys to these numbers. While we cannot positively correlate them without repeating the Babiak & Hare experiment itself using the same subjects, we can see the survey results in a new light. Those of us with enough life experience not to need more experimental results can also refine and strengthen our world view. When someone matching the extreme psychological profile of a psychopath or someone with NPD enters politics – and many would argue that we’ve seen both varieties in droves – it becomes useful to compare the associated poll numbers to the putative equilibrium distribution discussed above. We are free to compare numbers, moreover, without drawing conclusions that might inspire criticism of our methods because our only method here is to compare numbers and speculate freely on their meaning. We may compare numbers to gain insights and perhaps inspire future controlled experiements without committing a priori to formal methods and without drawing final conclusions. It would cost more than most research institutions will ever be able to afford, for example, to conduct an experiment on the grand scale of a presidential election that someone with NPD just happens to win – setting aside the question of whether “just happens” captures the most accurate assessment of the outcome – yet here we find ourselves having wandered into just such a situation without spending a dime, which is not meant to suggest, of course, that it won’t end up costing us a pretty penny in the long run to have done so. Notwithstanding the Goldwater Rule, any psychopathologist hoping to contribute to society where it counts the most is just not doing their job if they ignore an opportunity like this. I’m not even a psychopathologist, but I sometimes think that psychopaths and NPDs are pulling numbers from a grocery counter in Hell for a turn at targeting me. Somehow I don’t think I’m alone in this perception and the exposure gained amounts to years of clinical experience provided it is appreciated in the context of modern research results.

Before delving into the quantitative data, I’d like to establish their basis in what has become a fairly broad professional consensus on the qualitative state of President Trump’s mind. Let’s keep two things in mind as we do this:

• Narcissistic Personality Disorder, like Psychopathy, has been preferentially characterized as congenital and untreatable, although the present consensus according to Wikipedia includes such statements as “Treatments have not been well studied” and “Therapy is often difficult as people with the disorder frequently do not consider themselves to have a problem”.
• The Goldwater Rule continues to discourage many professionals from speaking out about public figures who exhibit the symptoms of NPD or other mental disorders.

Firstly, therefore, about the state of President Trump’s mind (the qualitative analysis):

• 2017-02-20: Jeffrey Flier, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and Higginson Professor of Physiology and Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Formerly Dean of Harvard Medical School, tweets:
  • “Narcissistic personality disorder. Trump doesn’t just have it, he defines it. ‪#trumpdiagnosis”

• 2017-08-25: According to the Independent in UK, A group of psychiatrists has written to Congress to warn Donald Trump poses a “clear and present danger” to the world.
  • “It no longer takes a psychiatrist to recognise the alarming patterns of impulsive, reckless, and narcissistic behaviour,” the group claims.

Secondly, in the qualitiative context thus established, here are the numbers (the quantitative analysis):

• 2017-03-28 (37%): Anchor Poppy Harlow mentioned a daily tracking poll of Trump’s approval, which on Saturday hit a new low of 37 percent. She pointed out, accurately, that Trump still has strong support from his base, and the conversation quickly moved on.
  • While the journalist initially misquoted the source, the poll number was accurate.
• 2017-05-09: Trump Fires FBI Director James Comey
  • thus setting the stage for a response in Trump’s poll numbers.
• 2017-05-11 (36%): Just 36% of voters approve of the job President Trump is doing as commander-in-chief, a new poll out Thursday shows.
  • By this measure, firing the FBI director had no statistically significant effect on his approval rating.
  • While Republicans have traditionally taken a hawkish, “conservative” stance against communism in general and against Russia in particular, for example, these “special” Republicans don’t seem to care how Trump got elected, nor how blatantly he attempts to obstruct justice when people try to find out if the Russians helped him.
  • On the contrary, his base held strong, suggesting either a stalwart rational approval of this firing or a profound disconnect within his base between their approval of this candidate and his actions as President.
• 2017-06-12 (35-36%): President Trump’s Disapproval Rating Just Hit Another High.
  • “As of June 11, 59% of voters disapprove of the job Trump is doing as President, according to the Gallup daily tracking poll, while just 36% approve.”
  • “That same day, his Gallup approval rating reached an all-time low of 35%.”
  • As you can see, I’m referencing “new low” approval and “new high” disapproval ratings to avoid having to compile my own statistics on a daily basis.
  • While saving me work, this also means that you can’t argue with me about these numbers because I’m just the messenger.
  • To challenge these numbers, you’d have to argue with the national pollsters I’m referring you to.
• 2017-06-15 (35%): DONALD TRUMP’S LATEST APPROVAL RATING PLUNGES AS SUPPORT AMONG REPUBLICANS, WHITES DROPS.
  • As you may have noticed, the hyperbole used by advertising agencies masquerading as news organizations (AAMANO) to describe numbers that aren’t actually changing is beginning to wear thin.
  • For the purposes of this survey, however, I for one am only interested in the numbers and can therefore disregard the hyperbole without throwing out the numbers.
  • The number we should be keeping in mind is that 33.33% or Babiak & Hare’s “about a third” of those surveyed about a “huckster” as we watch the “new low” approval ratings fluctuate over time.
  • So far, the huckster’s “base”, as the AAMANO call it, has refused to drop below 33% in ANY poll at ANY time over the months covered in these poll results regardless of the political circumstances, suggesting that they’re driven by something other than politics.
• 2017-06-27 (36%): GOOD NEWS FOR TRUMP: THE FORMER LEAST POPULAR PRESIDENT’S APPROVAL RATING JUST SURPASSED FORD’S.
  • “According to the latest poll Monday from Gallup, Trump’s approval rating was just 36 percent, compared with 58 percent who disapproved.”
• 2017-06-28 (“a third”): Storm clouds: Independents turn away from Trump while his base turns inward
  • “Only a third of American adults think that Trump is proving to be a more effective leader than Obama was, the poll found.”
  • The bar chart at the bottom of the cited article breaks the Trump support statistics down into those for:
    • All adults (the number of interest for the present analysis)
    • Democrats
    • Independents
    • Republicans
    • Trump supporters
• 2017-07-16 (36%): DONALD TRUMP ISN’T HAPPY ABOUT NEW POLL SHOWING HE IS THE PRESIDENT WITH LOWEST APPROVAL RATING IN 70 YEARS.
  • “The ABC News/Washington Post poll shows the president currently has just a 36% approval rating, showing a drop of 6 points since a similar poll taken after his first 100 days in office.”
  • In the context of the other polls taking place over this period, we are once again reading a new headline about a new poll showing the same approximate approval rating framed as a new low by market makers masquerading as news executives.
• 2017-07-17 (36%): Poll: Trump’s approval rating drops to 36%.
  • “Only 36% of Americans approve of President Donald Trump’s performance in the Oval Office, a new Washington Post/ABC News poll has found.”
  • Again, we see more and more of the same hyperbole announcing a new low while the numbers themselves continue to hover between 33 and 37 percent.
  • As most of us can well appreciate, phrases like “A new poll”, “A new low”, “approval rating drops” and “approval rating plunges” draw more eyeballs to the SUV ads than “holding steady at the well-studied resistance level”, even though the latter phrase more aptly describes the dynamic we are seeing based on the numbers themselves, given that these numbers are not inconsistent with the statistics reported by Babiak & Hare (2006).
  • The latter phrase would also require more background explanation, which would of course draw different and much fewer eyeballs to the SUV ads – eyeballs whose knowledge-hungry owners would be less apt than most to consider buying an SUV on impulse.
  • We can thus well appreciate in this context that enlightenment tends to run rather opposite the direction of the SUV market, which underscores the fundamental conflict of interest between news reporting and advertising.
• 2017-07-18 (38.7%): TRUMP VOTERS, REPUBLICANS OVERALL ACTUALLY DON’T CARE IF THE PRESIDENT SHOOTS SOMEONE ON FIFTH AVENUE: POLL.
  • “The weighted average from data-focused website FiveThirtyEight pegged his approval rating at just 38.7 percent Tuesday. As Trump approaches the six-month mark, that’s the lowest-ever approval figure for a president at this point in his tenure.”
  • There’s an excellent graphic at the FiveThirtyEight link above showing Trump’s approval rating slowly sinking toward but never dipping below what’s beginning to firm up as a theoretical hard lowest possible support level for a President with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, though I should mention that I did see in a subsequent report a figure of 32%. As any statistician will tell you, 32% in a context like this is not significantly distinct from 33.33%.
  • Needless to say, it would cost billions of dollars to conduct an experiment on this scale but now we don’t have to. We just have to collect and interpret the numbers.
• 2017-07-22 (37%): POLLS SHOW TRUMP, THE LEAST POPULAR PRESIDENT EVER, IS PLUNGING EVEN LOWER.
  • “Gallup pegged his approval at just 37 percent Friday, while 58 percent of Americans disapproved.”
  • “That’s not quite the all-time low for Trump in the Gallup tracking poll—he sunk to just 35 percent in late March when the GOP’s first health care plan flopped before the House could even vote—but it’s getting close and earlier this month the president had briefly risen back to 40 percent.”
  • So far the approvers in all of these results can be interpreted as Trump’s “base” (those born into Category 1 as defined above) along with a smattering of “swing” approvers in Category 3 ranging from 0 to 6%.
• 2017-08-02 (33%): Trump’s approval rating hits new low.
  • “The poll showed that just 33 percent of US voters approve of his job performance while 61 percent disapprove.”
  • This number is important because it represents a statistical low resistance limit according to a broad interpretation of the results of Babiak & Hare (2006).
  • By this interpretation, the approval rating of a psychopath or NPD sufferer clever or wellborn enough to stay out of jail (a “huckster” in the language used by Babiak & Hare in describing their experiment) won’t ever go below “about a third”, which is 33.33% should we wish to use a precise number in place of their approximate language.
• 2017-08-02 (38%): TRUMP’S FAVORITE RIGHT-LEANING POLL SHOWS THE LEAST POPULAR PRESIDENT EVER IS PLUNGING EVEN LOWER.
  • “Trump’s approval rating stood at just 38 percent Wednesday, down one percentage point from his previous all-time low Monday.”
  • “Sixty-two percent of voters, a record high, said they disapproved of Trump, according to Rasmussen Wednesday.”
  • As we can see for ourselves in the history of this number since 28 March across several polls, 38% is more like an all-time high approval rating for Trump than an all-time low.
  • The commercial news media are in the business of moving products, however, and so we must suffer their endless hyperbole and try to keep our focus on the approval rating figures, which are giving credence more and more to a rock-solid resistance level at about 33%.
  • As amply noted above, this is not inconsistent with the experimental results of Babiak & Hare (2006).
• 2017-08-07 (33%): Trump claims base is bigger ‘than ever before.’ Polls suggest otherwise.
  • “According to a Quinnipiac University poll released last week, just 33 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as president.”
  • Meanwhile Trump himself according to this article was declaring his base “far bigger and stronger than ever before” – knowing from experience that the bigger the lie and the more often you repeat it, the more people will believe it – at least, the more strongly that stalwhart 33% will believe it who constitute his base.
  • Within a broader audience, one could also read this rule to mean that the more nuts people believe you to be, the more afraid certain of them will be to contradict you.
  • The main point upon which Trump can rely is that this technique is proven and effective in the short term, though the end result of the dynamic it sets in motion is a different matter.
  • The short term is usually enough to seal deals and make profits, however. In that sense the technique carries benefits that can outlast its effectiveness.
• 2017-08-08 (36%): Trump’s approval rating stagnant despite surging confidence in the economy – which is at a 15-year high.
  • “Confidence is the economy is at its highest point since June of 2001”
  • “Yet Trump’s approval rating remains stagnant at 36 percent in a CBS poll”
• 2017-08-08 (38%): TRUMP SHOULD BE ON ‘24-HOUR SUICIDE WATCH’ BECAUSE OF LOW APPROVAL RATINGS, SAYS FORMER TED CRUZ AIDE.
  • A CNN poll released Tuesday showed Trump’s approval rating had dropped to 38 percent, the lowest number for any president after 200 days in office.
  • Again, we’re looking at an approval rating near the high end of Trump’s range since 28 March, yet the headline casts it as “the lowest number for any president after 200 days in office”.
  • While the commercial news media run on hyperbole, science runs on numbers and we’re seeing very consistent numbers indeed.
• 2017-08-14 (34%): Trump drops to new low in Gallup poll, matching George W. Bush’s popularity on the day he left office.
  • “Gallup’s daily tracking poll showed Trump with just a 34% approval rating, his lowest since taking office in January, and a 61% disapproval rating.”
  • Comparing this to the foregoing Gallup numbers, we do find it to be a new low for that poll, but not by much.
  • Taking all of these numbers at a glance, we are seeing what can fairly be called strong resistance at a statistical low limit of 33%.

2017-08-26: PopSugar summarizes Trump’s poll numbers during his first 7 months in office according to “nine of the biggest, most respected polls on the matter” in surveys spanning 23 January 2017 to 13 August 2017:

Given that Trump qualifies as a “huckster” by the standards of Babiak & Hare (2016) and that the one third of survey subjects in the third “What happened?” category described by those authors are easily swayed to approval or disapproval, the key figures to note throughout the foregoing results are the lowest approval rating (33% according to the summary) and the highest disapproval rating (62% according to the summary). As described in more detail above, Babiak & Hare reported that amongst their test subjects, about a third stood in unwavering admiration and support of the huckster (Category 1), about a third stood firm in their instinctive revulsion to and distrust of the huckster (Category 2) and about a third seemed indifferent to the huckster or lacked an understanding of what they were being asked by the experimenters (Category 3). The numbers above are not inconsistent with these test results if we understand what the B&H results predict in such a political mix: about a third would stand in unwavering support of Trump (Category 1), corresponding to a “hard deck” unyielding low approval rating of about 33.33%; another third would prevent his approval rating from rising above 66.66% (Category 2); and about a third in such surveys would lack instincts (Category 3) and rely instead on the preponderance of minutiae in popular discourse and media coverage on the day of their participation. What we see in the summary above is a 33% hard deck (guarded by those in Category 1), a 62% ceiling (guarded by those in Category 2 and kept short of 66.66% by a few stragglers in Category 3) and an otherwise free swing of variation between these two hard limits thanks to the easily-swayed survey participants in Category 3. We might also attribute the low bias in the approval rating summary to the predominantly negative media coverage of Trump during its period of coverage, which would explain why the highest disapproval rating (62%) fell short of the theoretical value of about 66.66% and why the average approval rating fell short of the statisticall mean of 50%. This low bias serves to illustrate, however, just how firm the low-side resistance stands at “about a third” against a predominantly negative socio-political consensus: 33% actual according to the summary results vs. “about a third” or 33.33% predicted by the results of Babiak & Hare.

It is interesting to examine the following Obama poll results from 3 years ago in light of these findings.

• 2014-07-02 (33%): Poll: Obama worst prez since WWII.
  • “According to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday, 33 percent of voters think the current president is the worst since 1945.”
  • Were it not for that strikingly familiar figure of 33%, we might be inclined to dismiss these results as unrelated. I beg to differ.
  • It would be interesting to see the results of this Obama negativity survey conducted concurrently with a Trump approval rating survey using the same subjects.
  • I would expect a strong, perhaps even complete overlap between those who consider Obama to have been the worst president since 1945 and those who approve of Trump’s performance in March-August 2017. Yes, it’s that naggingly consistent 33% we keep seeing.

Once in a while a clever media denizen of means conducts an original experiment to shed more light on the disconnect between politics and policy amongst those enamored of hucksters, such as this one in which:

• Jimmy Kimmel Just Completely Trolled Trump Supporters Into Loving Obamacare
  • All he had to do was change the name to Trumpcare.

When we encounter numbers like this in the general population, it would be foolish to assume that they stabilized only recently at their present values. It is much more likely that we’re seeing a long-established equilibrium distribution into which the general population falls into 3 approximately equal thirds except for a smattering of extreme cases represented by the “hucksters” themselves. Perhaps this distribution became established in these ratios during the Industrial Revolution, or perhaps much earlier when people began concentrating in cities. Lao Tzu in Chapters 41 and 50 of the classical arrangement of his Tao Te Ching divided people into three main categories in the 6th Century BCE based on some combination of his life experience and the Imperial Archives at Loyang under his keeping and could have been perceiving the same equilibrium distribution in his own way. Perhaps it became established instead with the species itself before or during the development of tribal behaviors in prehistory. Perhaps it even predates the species itself and was common to now-extinct hominid species, and perhaps it is common even today to the few surviving primate species; the findings of Jane Goodall are not without hints of psychopathic tendencies in some of the wild chimpamzees she studied, for example, and their hierarchical social organization is undisputed. It would be much harder, however, to break chimps out into Categories 1, 2 and 3, without a common language and culture within which to assess experimental results.

All of these scenarios are possible but those that posit ancient origins for this distribution are the more plausible until a mechanism can be identified by which such a distribution could be suppressed by environmental selection pressures – conditions of adversity, for example, with which people in, say, Category 1 would not be able to cope because their individual and collective search for a “charismatic” (self-deluding) leader would pose too much of a distraction from rational perception and proactive adaptation. One could cite the silverback-dominated gorilla social structure on the one hand and their close proximity to extinction on the other. Inasmuch as silverbacks represent a much higher proportion of gorilla populations (one in each troupe) than 1-5%, it is easy to characterize them as otherwise normal gorillas more apt to beneficially govern and protect the troupe than to abuse them for individual benefit as might an aberration. To mathematically counterbalance the obvious short-term benefits to the individual of psychopathic behaviors, the fact alone of the mere 1-5% representation of extreme personality profiles within a given human population today stands on plain statistical grounds as evidence of the great magnitude of the destructive effects they have on their host societies.

We therefore end up with the following Equilibrium Distribution of NeuroAnanomical ArcheTypes:

• Psychopaths and NPDs (1-5%)
• Category 2 (33%) – Rational but occasionally discordant over small points.
  • Why isn’t this the ONLY archetype?
  • Did Neanderthal interbreeding sully the human genotype?
  • This is not meant to suggest that Neanderthals had a different equilibrium distribution than we observe in modern humans, only that the mixing of DNA could have produced a statistically significant proportion of anomalous neuroanatomical phenotypes.
  • Argument for: New Clues to How Neanderthal Genes Affect Your Health by Michelle Z. Donahue of National Geographic, 5 October 2017.
  • Argument against: Human-Neanderthal interbreeding would normally be expected to infuse beneficial heterozygous alleles producing an overall gene pool quality known as heterosis or hybrid vigor. This weakens the case for modern aberrations as a remnant of Neanderthal-Cromagnon interbreeding.

• Category 1 (33%) – Enamored of psychopaths & NPDs
  • addicted to the psychopathic bond;
  • thinking hierarchically rather than rationally;
  • always pining for the next psychopathic leader.
  • A strong case could be made that monotheism arises when the pining of Category 1 people goes unrequited for too long.     They get together and agree to worship a certain deity – an imaginary leader – who fills the void in their psyche that demands a leader who can convince them that he or she is all-powerful. They agree to “make” the deity all-powerful in the stead of this leader to satisfy this longing.*
    • 2017-10-03: Pat Robertson Blames Las Vegas Massacre On ‘Disrespect’ For Donald Trump, which he conflates with a disrespect for God and for authority in general. It is this attitude and the authoritarian dynamic it sets in motion to which documents such as the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights are most particularly addressed. The leading words of the First Amendment, inspired by Edward Gibbon’s legendary autopsy of Roman civilization, sets the tone of this anti-authoritarian theme by specifically separating church from state – a principle of which Thomas Jefferson said he preferred to be remembered as a champion more than for his better-known accomplishments such as authoring the Declaration of Independence and serving as America’s third President.
    • 2017-10-14: Michele Bachmann Offers Her Thoughts On Donald Trump Being A ‘Man Of Faith’, in which the former congresswoman asserts that “There’s nothing better than a man under authority” after being told by the evangelist Vice President Mike Pence that Donald Trump is now a “committed believer” of Jesus Christ and a “man of faith” who has “asked God for help and wisdom.” Meanwhile the narcissistic President for his own part, recapturing attention diverted to God by Mike Pence, was known to mock his VP’s faith by asking people who had just spoken with him “Did Mike make you pray?”

• Category 3 (33%) – Unable to perceive, unwilling to discriminate or possibly just indifferent to neuroanatomical archetypes.
  • Easily swayed to one side or the other, the members of this category decide by their very indecision the outcome of many elections.

How can we explain the establishment of such an equilibrium distribution? What, if any, evolutionary advantage might it confer upon the species as a whole?     Is it an evolutionary adaptation that imparts an advantage to the species, or is it the result of a self-organizing dynamic that benefits only individual psychopaths and NPD sufferers in the obvious ways that we can observe and understand, yet flies in the face of collective advantages and will eventually doom the species?

Working Hypothesis 1: This equilibrium distribution confers an evolutionary advantage to the species.

• The interplay between psychopaths – intentionally conflated herein with NPD sufferers as described above – and the 3 main categories of people whose responses to them fit into approximately equal thirds is an equilibrium distribution in which:
  • Category 2 people (those having characteristics normally associated with human qualities in art and literature) have stabilized at about 1/3 of a given population because:
    • Any less would result in social, cultural and technological stagnation;
    • Any more would result in stagnation by reason of too many conflicting opinions.
  • Category 1 people (those who instinctively align with psychopaths and other “hucksters”) have stabilized at about 1/3 of a given population because:
    • Any less would leave too much of a power vacuum to be filled by Category 2 people (see above).
    • Any more would so impede the social, cultural and technological progress of Category 2 people as to threaten the stability of the polity.
  • Category 3 people (those unable to recognize or unwilling to acknowledge these distinctions) have stabilized at about 1/3 of a given population because:
    • Any less would afford too small a pool of “swing votes” for Category 1 and Category 2 people to exploit during formal or informal democratic decision-making events.
    • Any more would afford so may “swing votes” as to destabilize the polity.
  • Psychopaths have stabilized at 1-5% because:
    • on the one hand, their behavior patterns always accrue a following among Category 1 people and because of the tremendous short to medium-term individual advantages they confer upon the psychopath personally, while
    • on the other hand, the periodic social upheavals this leads to (such as that created by Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s, whom Babiak and Hare have posthumously diagnosted with macho-style psychopathy) pose an ongoing threat to the survival of the species.
    • Thus, any more psychopaths than 1-5% have historically led to the destruction of the host society, and
    • Any fewer psychopaths, while a tremendous relief to the host society, is not stable because as noted above, any less would leave too much of a power vacuum to be filled by Category 2 people, who can’t agree on much of anything without periodic distraction by the social upheavals caused by psychopaths and those who align with them.

• In this scenario, the equilibrium distribution of mind categories confers upon the species:
  • stability in human social dynamics:
    • Psychopaths and their followers provide an ongoing menace and distraction, which selects against complacency, hubris and corruption among Category 2 people.
    • Psychopaths and their followers keep Category 2 people on their toes, preventing them from becoming mired down in minor differences of opinion.
  • periodic disruptions that foster social progress:
    • The episodic social upheavals created by psychopaths and the organizing dynamics of Category 1 people periodically clean the slate of human progress, allowing Category 2 people to start over in their progressive improvement of the human condition based on more current knowledge and environmental conditions.

Working Hypothesis 2: This equilibrium distribution results from a self-organizing dynamic that confers no evolutionary advantage to the species and as such is a solution to the Fermi Paradox.

• The haphazard courses of DNA recombination and natural selection in humans (and perhaps in all sentient beings) foster over time by means of a self-organizing dynamic the differentiation of human minds into the categories observed by Babiak and Hare.
  • Category 2 people (those having characteristics normally associated with human qualities in art and literature) have stabilized at about 1/3 of a given population because:
    • As a group they are responsible for the substance of society and its progressive standard of living and would foster much faster progress without distraction, yet
    • They have been displaced by Category 1 people to the extent of the ongoing influence and organizing power of psychopaths over Category 1 people.
    • They have been displaced by Category 3 people to the extent that the innate or calculated neutrality of Category 3 people on the subject of mind categories has shielded them from harm by psychopaths and Category 1 people while also making Category 3 people the perennial pawns of informal or institutionalized democratic processes – a position one might imagine would work decidedly to their advantage as a group inasmuch as both Category 2 and Category 1 people would be constantly vying for the alliegance of Category 3 people in their eternal political struggles against one another.
    • In other words, nature is still experimenting with hierarchical social structures in Homo Sapiens as a fallback to more rational and fault-tolerant ones because of the young age of the prefrontal cortex in relation to the full history of human evolution.
  • Category 1 people (those who instinctively align with psychopaths and other “hucksters”) have stabilized at about 1/3 of a given population because:
    • They have displaced Category 2 and Category 3 people by virtue of their innate compulsion to align themselves with psychopaths and thus self-organize into political groups that seek power for its own sake on behalf of the psychopaths.
    • By forcing conflict over questions whose answers most rational people would consider obvious, Category 1 people prevent Category 2 people from having the conversations they need to have in order to make meaningful progress.
    • In other words, as above, nature is still experimenting with hierarchical social structures in Homo Sapiens as a fallback to more rational and fault-tolerant ones because of the young age of the prefrontal cortex in relation to the full history of human evolution.
  • Category 3 people (those unable to recognize or unwilling to acknowledge these distinctions) have stabilized at about 1/3 of a given population because:
    • Be it accidentally or by intent, they have carved out a protective niche for themselves by keeping a low profile and by staying out of the inevitable frays between Category 1 and Category 2 people.
  • Psychopaths have stabilized at 1-5% because:
    • Their behavior patterns always accrue a following among Category 1 people and confer tremendous individual advantages upon the psychopath personally, while
    • on the other hand, the periodic social upheavals this leads to (such as that created by Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s, whom Babiak and Hare have posthumously diagnosted with macho-style psychopathy) often result in the destruction of their host societies and pose an ongoing threat to the survival of the species.
    • Thus, any more psychopaths than 1-5% have historically led to the destruction of the host society, and
    • Any fewer psychopaths, while a tremendous relief to the host society, is not stable because of the tremendous personal advantages that psychopathic behavior patterns confer upon the individual psychopath. DNA recombination is a random process that does not make moral judgments and cannot stop itself from endlessly repeating this ancient experiment because of the tremendous success it confers on the individual psychopath, and at least temporarily on those who fall in behind them.

In case you missed the link above under Category 1, the idea that minds in this category think hierarchically rather than rationally has gained scientific grounding since the 2016 US presidential election.

• Trump Voters Driven by Fear of Losing Status, Not Economic Anxiety, Study Finds

A person who thinks rationally must take a big, difficult and initially disorienting step back from the canvas in order to truly grasp what it means for a person to think hierarchically rather than rationally.  This difficulty arises for two reasons:

1. A person who thinks rationally doesn’t see the rational point in thinking hierarchically.
2. Even a person who thinks rationally can easily miss the fallacy of the preceding point.

The fallacy is called ignoratio elenchi (missing the point, also known as a red herring or irrelevant conclusion).  The point missed should be obvious: the notion of a person who thinks hierarchically rather than rationally.  The point made by the first statement above is not relevant to the point it misses because a person who has been stipulated to think hierarchically to the exclusion of rationality, it should be clear, does not think rationally.  A person constantly arguing rationally may develop over time the habit of always striving to persuade others of the validity of his or her point of view.  The real possibility that not everyone thinks rationally can easily throw such a person for a loop.

Speaking of aerial maneuvers (at the risk of appearing initially to veer off course), let me draw an analogy from the world of aviation.  In aviation we make a habit of studying the sequence of events leading up to known incidents and accidents so that we can avoid making the same mistakes ourselves.  We do this for a very simple reason: only those who survive an accident can learn from it.  One situation that once in a while strikes inexperienced pilots (John F. Kennedy Jr., for example, or so it has been plausibly hypothesized) is called the graveyard spiral.  A graveyard spiral begins when a pilot not adequately trained to rely solely on the instruments loses visual contact with ground references such as a horizon, city lights, the ocean surface, mountains, rivers or other landmarks.  To place this in present context, think of these visual references as facts to be organized and used in rational discourse.  When these references are lost, the overwhelming instinct is to grip the yoke and over-control the airplane in a desperate attempt to hold the present course and speed.  To make a somewhat longer story shorter, the lack of reliable visual references creates a feedback loop that puts the plane into a graveyard spiral, which ultimately drives it into the ground or ocean at top speed.  All the pilot needed to do to survive was look at the instruments and use what they indicated about the airplane’s speed, heading and attitude to climb out of the soup and into the sunlight or starlight.  Failing this, they could have just let go of the controls, set the throttle to full and let the plane fly itself out of the soup as most planes are designed to do.  It would be very simple for them to do this but the instincts as pointed out are universally overwhelming without the proper training and most of those who find themselves in this situation without adequate training never do.  They die not because they made the wrong choice but because they failed to change their view of the situation, step back from the canvas and perceive the proper course of action logically before pressing forward with routine thought and action.  In general terms, this is what most people do when confronted with the idea of hierarchical thought processes in others.  Irrational thinking doesn’t make sense but that does not make it implausible nor even necessarily improbable.  There is already an established body of scientific knowledge according to which – shall we call them vulnerable? thinkers exist in substantial proportion within any random sample of people and are not looking for rational arguments in the people they admire nor in the candidates they support.  They are looking instead for that euphoric, heady or perhaps giddy feeling they get when someone with just the wrong type of mental disorder reels them in using an emotional snare that clinical psychologists and professional criminal investigators call the psychopathic bond.

So let’s repeat here something that’s worth repeating:

• Not everyone thinks rationally.

Stop for a moment, step back from the canvas and try to appreciate the enormity of what that means for a democratic society and for the thought processes of the voters who drive its politics – not to mention the importance of voting whenever the opportunity presents itself.  If you vote only for perfect candidates then technically you can never vote.  Though the pickings may sometimes be slim, the act itself of voting should always be a no-brainer, not a judgment call.

Let us know what you think. As you can see, the dynamics are much the same under either working hypothesis about the equilibrium distribution of mind categories because we can readily observe these dynamics in action in world affairs and in the historical records. What differs between the two hypotheses is our interpretation of those dynamics and of how they have resulted in the equilibrium distribution we can observe and measure today. While the differences may seem subtle or unimportant from a scientific standpoint, our understanding of the dynamics is important from a social standpoint because under Hypothesis 1 we have no immediate motive to intervene while under Hypothesis 2 we should intervene so as to safeguard the survival and cultural growth of the species. The sooner this problem space can be made tractable by modern methods, the sooner we can formulate and polish workable and testable social models to find out which hypothesis converges more quickly and certainly to the observable equilibrium distribution while creating historical outcomes that most closely parallel the historical records.

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* I use “monotheism” in place of “religion” in this context because there is a much better suited hypothesis for the emergence of polytheism in developing cultures. As language develops, adjectives are invented to conveniently identify certain qualities of human conduct, experience and governance. Examples include activities described as just, concordant, discordant, fortunate, fateful, amusing, furious, graceful, etc.     In usage, people unavoidably begin to use such adjectives as nouns – justice, concord, discord, “dis” this, “dis” that, fortune, fate, muse, fury, grace, etc. To people always looking for explanations of why things happen the way they do but without access to sufficient accumulated explanatory knowledge, the next step is equally unavoidable – to personify these nouns. Justice, Concord, Dis, the Fortunes, the Fates, the Muses, the Furies, the Graces – all of these became gods and goddesses in the Greek and/or Roman pantheons – simply because of the human tendency to personify influences for which no abstract, mechanical or other reductionist explanation has yet been devised. Even today we still have Murphy’s Law, an urban myth among technology organizations which personifies the quandary about why things inevitably do go wrong simply because they can go wrong. This quandary is more aptly addressed as a manifestation of statistical inevitability but invoking this mythical lurker named Murphy – roughly analogous in usage to the Roman god Dīs Pater – is usually more fun, wry and tongue-in-cheek. In the ancient world, people without suitable explanatory culture and thus inclined may choose in similar fashion to invent imaginary Olympian bureaucrats and elect by consensus to place them in charge of these otherwise unexplainable phenomena. As the Greek and Roman examples illustrate, this works well enough when they do and provides a picturesque canvas upon which to paint these concepts when instructing the next generation.