Developing a comment from a couple of weeks ago, there’s been a lot of talk among some people recently of the world being ruled by psychopaths. There’s even a facebook group called ‘Psychopaths Rule The World‘ which has an unfortunate tendency to get into conspiracy theories. On the face of it is a plausible explanation for the fact that leaders go to war when their citizens don’t want it, or for the fact that they deliberately impose impoverishment policies on their populations in the name of austerity.
An article at Jacobin by one Cyrus Lewis refutes this standpoint on the grounds that it is looking at individuals when we should be looking at class relations:
It denudes class politics of class politics, leaving an intoxicating Manichaean social divide in its wake: Psychopathic Class vs. the class of Everyone Else. Toss out the psychos, and capitalism would be a-okay!
But the paragraph before that is interesting:
The recent panic of “psychos” at the helm reflects a need to assign blame to knowing agents behaving in a deliberate fashion. But it becomes a strange carriage-before-the-horse/chicken-and-egg scenario: Capitalism foments the rise of a “psychopathic class.” And a “psychopathic class” foments the grim successes of capitalism.
I don’t see that it does create a chicken-or-egg scenario. The last two sentences are perfectly consistent with each other. It’s just a feedback loop. Or to put it another way, like the chicken-or-egg problem, it isn’t a chicken-or-egg problem – they evolved together.
I agree with the author that looking just at the individuals in charge doesn’t get you very far. But I think that if you just look at the constructed category of ‘class’ you will also miss a lot of what is going on.
Can’t we explain the feedback loop above by saying that the organisational structures we have encourage the rise of people without functioning consciences through the ranks? So while it is true that we have structures that encourage otherwise empathic people to behave in a certain way, we also have structures that create filtering processes for getting to the top?
While these forms of organisation have historically been embedded in processes that go under the heading of class dynamics, it may be worth considering certain types of task-oriented hierarchical organising as worth re-thinking not just in order to in order to change social relations, but to more generally prevent people without consciences gaining too much power over us – a potentiality that remains even within a hypothesised classless society.
I don’t see why it is neccessary to pathologise this behaviour. I do not see any moral imperative for people to behave in any way other than as they want. Simply put, I do not critise lions for eating elephants. Or bacteria for causing tuberculosis.
Lions eat Elephants, bacteria eat lungs and executives eat society.
The question is not whether they should; nor is there any need in my opinion to decide if they are “good” or “bad” for doing it. The question, I think, is just what to do about it.
The reason I say this, is that even if we somehow managed to establish it was morally right (e.g. we all converted to CoE or something 😉 to have a ruling class feeding off of everyone else – I personally would probably still want to stop that.
I know what you mean. I think we have to accept these types of people in society, since we’re not going to cull them. And I think they are not all some product of class society – they will always be around. So I propose the best way of dealing with them is to keep them away from any position of power, or if they get power, ensuring we can take it off them pretty damn quick. In order to do this isn’t it worth pathologising their behaviour? Not in order to create some objective category of ‘badness’ but in order to promote particular social goals such as more caring societies?
I think it’s a problem of numbers. There just aren’t enough psychopaths to go round to fill all the top corporate jobs. So people with consciences have to be there as well. They may act in a schzoid way. The book, “The Corporation” talks about most corporate executives leading morally compartmentalized lives. “The people who run corporations are, for the most part, good people, moral people. They are mothers and fathers, lovers and friends, and upstanding citizens in their communities, and they often have good and sometimes even idealistic intentions.” They don’t, however, change “the corporation’s fundamental institutional nature: its unblinking commitment to its own self-interest”. http://idealoblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/interlude-all-of-them-witches.html
The real danger is corporate executives who are idealitic, who believe they are doing good through corporate responsibility. You can trace it back to Adam Smith. If we act in a self-interested fashion,he said, society as a whole will ultimately benefit. That’s an idealogical problem.Ie, it’s not true.
Psychopaths, if current understanding is correct, aren’t products of class society. They were always there – 1 or 2% of society. People without consciences may have been present at most of history’s terrible events, but so were people with consciences. The latter is the problem.
Yeees, but the claim needn’t be (and I think rarely is) that *all* top level jobs are occupied by psychopaths. I agree a lot of it happens through compartmentalisation as you describe (I have a post drafted on this but haven’t got around to posting it yet).
But surely if all we say is that psychopaths are *over-represented* at the top, e.g. compose 10 or 20% of the top echelons of society rather than 1%, then this is already a significant effect. We then need to ask how might these people behave differently to the people who merely compartmentalise – people who might at some point find they do have boundaries.
There is also a part of me that wonders how much it matters. I mean, I suspect Tony Blair to have psychopathic tendencies. Does it matter to me whether he joined the Catholic Church out of sheer guilt (in which case he’s not a psychopath) or because he was scared of his own lack of guilt? Perhaps it doesn’t matter much in the end, except to say that his psychopathic attitudes should not be rewarded.
But I think the issue of rewarding psychopathic behaviour is still, to go back to the main point, a technical structural issue as much as a class issue.
I think the question is how much it matters. You say,”We then need to ask how might these people behave differently to the people who merely compartmentalise – people who might at some point find they do have boundaries” Do they behave differently? Was Lehman Brothers led to ruin by psychopaths or executives just playing the rules of the game. To take a non-capitalist, non-class example, what about Soviet-era Communist parties. Were Stalin and Caesescu psychopaths? Maybe they were. But the cure to what they did wasn’t rooting out all the psychopaths out of the leadership positions of Communist parties, it was getting rid of the institution of Communist parties controlling the state. I think the same logic should apply today in a different context
I think it could matter, alongside a lot of other issues that also matter. I’m talking about structure, not targetting individual people who may be psychopaths. What if Russia had taken note of the fact that a psychopath had ruled them for a bit too long and asked the question ‘How can we structure our society so we aren’t ruled by a psychopath again?’ Would Putin be in now? Likewise it might help the Labour Party to ask themselves the same question.
The reason I’m pushing the point is that the same problems crop up in left wing orgs, right wing orgs, economic orgs etc, and I think the focus on a particular lens for society (class) has contributed to a failure to look at psychological aspects of how our organisations work.
But going back to the original Jacobin article,the particular lens of class is very important because corporations are legally required to maximise profit so the room for the personality of the corporate exec to make a difference is limited.
With left-wing organisations, the situation is very different. It was also different with Soviet-era Communist parties who resembled in the end absolute monarchies. So the personality of the ruler (personality cult) was much more significant. But I also think that a normal non-psychopathic person at the head of Communist party/state would end up behaving strangely simply by virtue of the situation they found themselves in. However, the cure for this institutional disease and the cure for psychopaths in positions of power is very similar – radical democratisation which admittedly is easier said than done. In any case if power attracts psychopaths how do you structure organisations that wield power to as to repel them? I don’t think you can apart from diffusing power so one individual doesn’t wield it.
Just on the subject of Stalin, I think a bunch of people have done research on and written about the question of if Stalin could be catagorised as mentally ill/personality disorder. Certainly some people have suggested that he was severly pathalogically paranoid. But it is a controvertial issue. Maybe he just liked killing millions of people or genuinely believed it was for the greater good or at least in his own interests.
A bit of perverted entertainment http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/jon_ronson_strange_answers_to_the_psychopath_test.html
Which also makes me want to link this http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/punishment-failed-social-experiment/
Pathologising and moralising psychopathy are connected but distinct. All morality is either consequential, tries to be, or should be. As you say, there are quite clear consequential goods in removing psychopaths from positions of influence and power, so in that respect it could be worth ‘moralising’ the issue. That said, while the condition may be societally undesirable there may be nothing any more ‘immoral’ about the condition than for instance learning difficulties or a low IQ. We used to(?) institutionalise, imprison and dehumanise those people too. We need to work for a more positive integration into society for psychopaths. Obviously we should start by respecting the grey areas and realising categorisation is fraught with trouble, but that needn’t lead to inaction. Should we attempt to diagnose and intervene?
Back to the topic, ‘fundamental attribution error’ seems very relevant here for explaining the actions of non-psychopaths, but also perhaps in considering the societally induced rise of psychopaths.
That considered, I assume we agree that psychopathy is more significant as a symptom of, than as a cause of, the current system?
I agree they are more a symptom than a cause. But I’m not sure a system has causes. Once you get rid of the idea of causes, everything begins to look like a symptom.
Yeah, in general I think it is a good idea to make systems that support people and generally help them to maximise whatever utility function they themselves define. So certainly producing systems which allow people with minority personality traits to co-exist and co-operate with each other and more common personality traits is a good idea. My general opinion is that variation amoungst animials is a desirable quality, at least in so far as survival is a desirable quality, as variation bettween individuals is an importaint driver in the accumulation of biological complexity. More than that, from a personal point of view, I like to live amoungst people who will have different opinions and approaches and take different attituteds on things. Being equip with a theory of mind, as I happen to be, this allows me to use empathy to somewhat see the world from points of view other than my own.
Of course sometimes there is good reason to pathologise a personality trait or mental illness. In particular the criteria I prefer to use is to look a the consequences for the function and happiness of that person, and secondariliy the need to manage any negative impact they may be having on the people around them – but I think it is a very complex, subtle and difficult decision to pathologise someone against their will….
preorg: Causes and symptoms as distinct entities is obviously a simplistic approach and has it’s drawbacks, but it makes things a lot more manageable/comprehensible.
Tim, I agree with all of your first paragraph, good stuff. What’s your (rough) theory of mind?
I agree with you that in pathologising we should attempt to hold to the Kantian imperative of using as ends and not merely as means. (I also believe that this and the Categorical imperative can be argued for, in general, as consequential not deontological), but there is an unavoidable difficult area, where, just like with ‘punishment’ we are necessitated to force some intervention on an unwilling individual. I think the best way to start is by recognising the necessity, the danger, and our own fallibility.