Today’s Rant: The War Between Sociopathy and Empathy
May 3, 2011
I recently heard on Mike Malloy’s program that Ayn Rand’s hero and model for her book’s protagonists was a child-abducting serial killer named William Edward Hickman. She basically wrote that he was some kind of superman because “other people don’t exist for him, for him they simply don’t need to.” For you see, Ms. Rand was a sociopath herself, and she had real admiration for people who act with no sense of responsibility towards others. Such admiration, in fact, that she codified sociopathy into a philosophy called Objectivism. In this “philosophy” greed is good, and self-interest is virtue. Qualities such as empathy, humility, or compassion are looked on as weak, and those that possess them as insects.
Although there are not a huge number of sociopaths, they tend to seek positions of power due to their nature and their ability to single-mindedly focus on getting what they want at any cost. History has been writ large generally by psychopaths who decided to get serious about enabling their delusions of grandeur. The thing is, sociopaths really don’t have a great deal of power all on their own. Generally most communities will remove them by death or imprisonment once their social malady is realized. But Objectivism also gathers adherents who aren’t sociopaths but want to be.
I’m not kidding. A much bigger subsection of people on the sociopath side are the enablers, highly selfish people who just want in and are happy to be thugs for the sociopaths as long as they get to feel like big shots and get a cut of the action. This group probably outnumbers the sociopaths by an order of magnitude. But they help conceal and legitimize the presence of insane people who are really running the show.
I know this sounds like a bunch of wild nonsense, but history is full of powerful crazy people. Hitler is a great example for the usual reasons, but also because when you examine the German population as a whole and their compliance with Hitler’s psychopathy you couldn’t conclude that the population was a bunch of sociopaths, but rather Hitler attracted in record numbers the kind of “me-too” bully boys who didn’t have the imagination to have much of a moral sense about anything, as long as they thought they were doing it for some glorious future. Truly it was on the ranks of this enabler group that allowed Hitler to do what he did.
The United States economic and political systems have been hijacked by sociopaths, people who have overwhelming self-interest or at least an interest in keeping their in-group of de-facto economic aristocrats as small as possible.
Usually I would say that the saving grace of empathy is that sociopaths don’t understand it and hence tend to underestimate it. It can often take a lot to get people to start behaving compassionately, but generally when a whole group of douchebag fascists have been identified by a majority they will be dealt with.
So it would seem to me that developing a way to reduce or eliminate empathetic qualities in the general population would be a good way for these pigs to remain in power, because selfish people don’t often have the sense to band together to accomplish things they can’t do alone.
This is one place where technology really broadens the field in both directions. I think the information age both allows the possibility of empathy on a scale like we’ve never seen as well as constructed realities of incredible delusions. Fox News shows the power of technology to allow corporate fascists to propagandize, whereas in the revolutions in the middle east the internet has often proven helpful in organizing people to demonstrate effectively.
The internet has magnified the age long contest between sociopathy and empathy to cold war, nuclear threat levels. The potential for great gain and great harm both exist and in many ways I feel like the social history for the next century will be written by the side that finally manages to reach the next game-changing level in information control and distribution. But who knows?
