The Sociopaths Among Us–and How to Avoid Them

One missing observation from this article is the existence of the sidekick gang that normally follows these types. Unlike their leader, then tend to be generally good people, but tolerate their leader as a means to an end. We see this everywhere, and it helps destroy our business, politics and social lives.<p>What I&#x27;ve come to realize over the years is that good people are reluctant to take the job in power, but allow bad people to float into those positions without much thought. That&#x27;s a simplification, but it takes a warped personality to be able to distance yourself from the social or civic responsibility of having that much control. Speaking a bit from experience, the times when I actually managed a team larger than a few dozens, I couldn&#x27;t actually cope (internally, not outwardly mind you) without thinking about people&#x27;s well-being every waking hour. Most leaders with more responsibility above me in work seem to be able to suppress those worries (or maybe hide it like I did). I&#x27;ve come to believe a little narcissism is somewhat required in those roles. You really need to believe in yourself above others. The good folks always seem to step down after they&#x27;ve achieved whatever manner of success they set out to achieve.

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&gt;We can extend this ethical hygiene to the culture at large—by withholding our attention, time, support, and resources from the Dark Triads in public life who coarsen our society and threaten the commonweal.<p>&quot;Ethical hygiene&quot;? That sounds like an incredibly dangerous phrase or concept, with an attempt to lighten it by tying it to physical hygiene, which can be shown effective scientifically.<p>That aside (and it&#x27;s hard to put it aside), while identifying this is important, you need to figure out if these traits are treatable. If it is treatable, it isn&#x27;t fair to leave them untreated and ostracize them. If you aren&#x27;t willing to highly encourage or force treatment, then you can&#x27;t hope to address this issue as a society.<p>This article also paints this as these traits being intentional. What if someone can&#x27;t help being like this? If someone is conditioned to be like this (and it&#x27;s not a problem with the brain), then that&#x27;s great since it&#x27;s probably treatable.<p>If it is a problem with the brain, you really need to stop painting them as the bad guys, as these people are sick and not just assholes.

There seems to be a pop-psychology obsession with sociopaths which doesn’t seem much based on reality. One’s ability for empathy is something of a spectrum, and there’s no magic number where a specific lack of empathy renders someone a sociopath. Further, lack of empathy doesn’t necessarily render someone a sociopath; they also need to be aggressive and cruel. (Many people who lack empathy are perfectly nice, and are simply socially awkward-but-well-intending)<p>People seem to be afraid of the “sociopath” in their midst, but I wonder what they’re not just misidentifying people who disrespect them, or don’t get along with them very well. For instance, perhaps the “sociopath” bullies a victim, but is perfectly empathetic to some of the other people in his life. His empathy is applied at least somewhat selectively. And selectively applying empathy seems to me to be a description which could fit almost anyone.

There is a seductive aspect to articles like these that play on a lot of common insecurities. The articles always lead with a story about a person being charming and charismatic and then attribute the readers disappointment in them to some deeply pathological evil.<p>Given the exceptional occurrance of extreme charm and charisma, let alone co-occurring with high intelligence, statistically for them to co-occur with these other pathological traits makes this sociopath character a kind of evil unicorn, and effectively an object of superstition. They may plausibly exist, but the likelihood of encountering one, or that the person you are mad at happens to be one - is vanishingly small. They aren&#x27;t masterminds, and they shouldn&#x27;t be elevated to the level of a folk devil. Like most people, they&#x27;re just people with some shitty tools. Sympathy pieces like this that encourage readers to call the people they don&#x27;t like sociopaths are misleading, dehumanizing, and actively stupefying. I hope the author sees this comment.<p>What&#x27;s more likely, that someone reading that article has encountered one of these evil unicorns, or that the article is cooing and excusing for normal and flawed people people whose own occasional malice, fibs, and viciousness doesn&#x27;t have the patina of charm and charisma they envy? Take care of yourself, set boundaries and standards for yourself, and these bogeymen just aren&#x27;t a thing. I&#x27;m surprised &quot;victimhood porn,&quot; isn&#x27;t a more widely known commonsense filter, as I would recommend not being seduced by something that is about as healthy and edifying as porn.

&gt; More useful for the other 93 percent of us is advice on how to identify and avoid Dark Triads. The traits to look for are self-importance, a sense of entitlement, vanity, a victim mentality, a tendency to bend the truth or even openly lie, manipulativeness, grandiosity, a lack of remorse, and an absence of empathy.<p>&gt; So rather than spend time dodging Dark Triads, look for their opposite. Happily, Kaufman and a team of psychologists profiled this type for us as well, which they call the Light Triad.<p>&gt; The characteristics of a Light Triad include faith in humanity (trusting in people’s fundamental goodness), humanism (believing in the dignity and worth of each person), and a Kantian adherence to the idea of universal moral law (in this context, refusing to objectify or instrumentalize others). Compared with the 7 percent that are dark, Kaufman finds that fully 50 percent of his international population sample qualify as Light Triads, and that the average person has more light than dark personality traits.<p>&gt; Look for these three characteristics in people you might date, work with, or befriend. One way to test for this is simply to see how you feel around a particular person. Do they inspire you to be a better, more loving person?

It seems that large (American?) institutions draw psychopaths like moths to a flame. Every large company I&#x27;ve worked for seems to be primarily a vehicle to turn psychopathy into money, and so I mostly tend to avoid them as much as possible.

Moral judgement likes to pose as science, but that does neither any good. I understand that calling some of those things scientific can help someone to avoid hanging out with people who are bad to them, because &quot;science&quot; can feel like a good authority, but ultimately i don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s the best approach to taking more responsibility for one&#x27;s life, if only because it&#x27;s just slightly delusional

I&#x27;m not so sure that the Dark Triad model is that useful. Reading about narcissistic personality disorder and anti social personality disorder will probably yield a better understanding of these cluster B types. Both are low in empathy and high in selfish behaviour, but they have very different aims and produce very different results. The narcissist main goal is to acquire narcissistic supply and is willing to feast on those closest to them to get it. Psychopaths main goal can be sex, money, power, control and they usually do not care at all for the admiration and opinions of others (with the obvious exception of narcissistic psychopaths).<p>Thoughts?

Are all sociopaths narcissist ? I didn&#x27;t think this was a requirement.

Interesting article, but I think the issue is that we are at an inflection point in human history where there are particular groups trying to manufacture sociopaths.<p>There are certain cults (I speak specifically of freemasonry but there are many affiliates) that seem to make a thing of trying to manufacture sociopaths through the application of behavioural psychology and coercion to Stockholm syndrome victims into joining their agenda but also to induce sociopathic behaviour.<p>Those inducted are led to believe that they are on a righteous path, are part of a special few that have the true knowledge (while the rest of society are ignorant) and that the agenda is ultimately for a greater good. Of course this greater good is used as the justification for a tyranny of little people; pretty much like every other sociopathic agenda through history. The only difference is that this time it&#x27;s happening on a scale that&#x27;s unprecedented, it&#x27;s the cause of much of the strangeness in politics and indeed within the media and is all about re-engineering the human condition.<p>I&#x27;ve long held the belief that trying to prevent something often manifests it for we focus our energy on it. These sociopaths suggest that the world is heading for catastrophe and that&#x27;s part of their justification for breaking the system for their perceived greater good. I offer the suggestion that this is uncharted territory and I suspect those behaving despicably thinking they are working to a righteous agenda may well go to their graves realising they created a greater evil than humanity has ever known. But of course such sociopaths never believe THEY are the problem - it&#x27;s always everyone else, right?