The Secret World of Psychopaths: Why Psychopaths Have Always Ruled the World and Always Will
“Kings ought never to be seen upon the stage…seen AS THEY WERE, their power and their pretensions look monstrous and ridiculous.”
- William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays
Have you ever imagined yourself as a great hero, saving the world at the last second from certain doom?
Maybe you ripped through the Harry Potter books or watched the Star Wars series over and over and imagined yourself as Harry or Hermione or Luke or Rey?
What is it that makes a hero? Think about all the characteristics you love and admire in your greatest champions:
· Grace under pressure
· Radiant charm
· Inspiring people with soaring words
· Fearlessness
· Bold risk taking
· Iron willpower
· Intense focus
What if I told you that every one of those traits are psychopathic characteristics too?
You probably think “psychopath” means “serial killer” but they’re not the same.
Like all things in life, psychopathology exists on a spectrum and serial killers make up only a tiny percent of that spectrum. You know the psychopaths who make the news because they got caught burying twenty human heads in their backyard but I call serial killers “failed psychopaths” because they have zero impulse control and no ability to strategically weave their way into the fabric of society.
So where are the rest of the psychos? The vast majority of them aren’t found in jail cells.
They’re found in positions of power.
If they have the desire to kill, they vault themselves into a place in society that lets them openly sate that desire. A wise psychopath, with a murderous and bloodthirsty will, skillfully works his or her way into a job that lets them kill in socially acceptable ways.
They might become a judge so they have the power of life and death over people every day. They might go into politics so they can use the law to dominate and control people. They might become corporate lawyers who relish destroying small business owners and leaving them with crushing debt that collapses their business. They might become a special forces operator, so they can channel that instinct into societally acceptable murder, meaning the enemies of a particular nation state. As long as they only kill the designated “bad guys” and they don’t go off the rails and shoot up a liquor store or murder a hooker in their attic, they can go on killing openly and even end up celebrated for it as heroes.
The line between hero and psycho is thin as tissue.
Psychopaths excel at certain kinds of jobs, like surgery, law and corporate leadership, where their cold-blooded calm keeps them intensely focused when everyone else is cracking under the pressure.
In the book The Wisdom of Psychopaths author Kevin Dutton outlines a number of successful psychopaths, like a surgeon who’s one of the best in the world. He has one of the most flawless track records for successful surgery and patients seek him out from all over the planet.
You may think you don’t want a psycho surgeon but what you don’t want is a surgeon who wilts under pressure or who sees you as a real person that he or she might lose when things inevitably go wrong on the operating room table. You want someone who disassociates and who doesn’t flinch or panic when they nick the wrong artery.
A psycho surgeon doesn’t feel any attachment to you. You’re not even real to them. You barely exist. The only thing they feel an attachment to is their goal to get the surgery perfect every time. They loath failure and their megalomaniacal focus drives them to be the best of the best, which means keeping you alive not because you matter to them, but because you matter to their track record.
That’s the person you want cutting you open.
The History of the World is the History of Psychotics
Psychopaths aren’t like you and me. They have a goal and they go after that goal at all costs.
Ask yourself this question: Would you kill someone to get what you want in life? How about dozens of people or hundreds? How about thousands? Millions?
The vast majority of people would answer no to killing even a single person. A small percentage would kill a few people but not hundreds or thousands and definitely not millions.
So what we can we say of the people in history who murdered at every turn? They killed their way to the throne or used the law to enslave and slaughter people from afar without having to bloody their own hands. They marched armies over mountains and through forests and set their warriors to rape and pillage and kill with impunity.
And yet we don’t call it psychosis. We call it history.
You don’t have to look far into the pages of history to find psychotics everywhere you look, hiding in plain sight.
You’ll find them in the greatest positions of power all over the world, throughout all time.
We lionize Alexander the Great as one of the most incredible generals to ever live but the bloody prints of psychosis stain every chapter of his life. As soon as he ascended to the throne he consolidated his power by slaughtering multiple rivals, including a cousin. His mother had one of her own daughters burned alive to help his rise to power.
Stop for a moment and consider what kind of person sets their own daughter on fire or has a cousin murdered as easily as he eats his breakfast.
It doesn’t take long to realize you’ve been staring into the icy eyes of psychotics and their history for your whole life. It’s only been hidden from you because of the effect of time.
When enough time passes and the people who suffered and died under the rule of psychotics are gone, all we have left are facts. A king went here and did that. A thousand people died in a fire. This person married that person. A ship sank into the sea. But the emotion is gone in the parade of facts and we never try to look beyond them to see the people behind those cold and impersonal details.
We think of something like Hitler’s reign as the embodiment of supreme evil because we’re still close enough to the horror of it, but his Night of Long Knives, where he slaughtered a thousand political rivals, including his close “friend” Ernst Röhm, looks eerily similar to the way Alexander and thousands of other dead kings and modern political masterminds eliminated their rivals with ruthless ease.
The Nazis are responsible for one of the greatest genocides in the history of mankind and yet Alexander is lauded for invading dozens of sovereign territories, slaughtering their armies and citizens, raping and pillaging, and casting millions into slavery. At one point, his army was so tired of campaigning that they revolted because they wanted to see their homes, wives and children, while Alexander wanted to keep invading more territory. He led them back through brutal deserts that killed many of them through sheer exhaustion.
What’s the difference between these two men?
Only the thinnest of lines in the sand.
Psychopaths have always ruled the world and they always will. That’s because they have a very distinct advantage over the rest of us. They’re willing to do anything and pay any price to get it. Martha Stout puts it best in her book, The Sociopath Next Door, (sociopath is often used interchangeably with psychopath):
“Imagine — if you can — not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame…no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken …You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences, will most likely remain undiscovered. How will you live your life? What will you do with your huge and secret advantage?”
While the rest of us have a moral compass that limits us and traps us in narrow range of behavior, psychopaths are utterly free of the burden of consciousness. They see the rest of the world as laughably suffering from the chains of their tiny morals.
They treat other people just like boards and chairs. We’re just another thing in their way or we’re a thing that helps them get to their goals. It’s simple black and white to them.
It might surprise you to think that most psychopaths are necessary and often even beneficial to the world. That may seem strange but without psychopaths we’d have no bridges, none of the great kingdoms and nation-states of yesterday and today, no great cultures and monuments and works of wonder like the pyramids.
Most of them fit in the “green zone” of psychopathology. They’re your doctor, or the special forces operator who kills so you don’t have to get your hands dirty. They run corporations at the highest level or make laws.
Like a serial killer, the green zone psychotic would answer the question of whether they’d kill for their goals with a resounding yes. The difference is the limits they place on themselves. Those are your heroes, the ones who can set limits on themselves, even if those limits are much farther than the ones you and I consider normal. They’re the ones who send armies over borders to kill the “bad guys” but who don’t lose much sleep when the bad guys’ wives and children die in the bombings too.
But there’s a very dangerous kind of psychopath that’s rarely discussed, one infinitely more dangerous than any serial killer:
The red zone psychotic.
They’re the ones with no limits and they’re willing to do whatever it takes to get what they want.
Unlike the failed psychopaths they’re strategic long-term thinkers and they possess a fierce determination and shark like intelligence that guides them into positions of supreme power, which gives them control over a vast array of people and resources, whether at the government or corporate level or both.
Portrait of a Serial Killer
The traits of the red zone psycho are easy to spot if you pay attention.
During World War II, the US Office of Strategic Service compiled this list of psychotic characteristics about Hitler:
“His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
These traits are universal in the red zone psychopath.
Look across the world today or in the pages of history and you’ll find them again and again.
When you see them in any person, public or private, you should take great care because you’re dealing with someone who doesn’t think or feel like you. They might as well be aliens in the way they perceive the world.
How are they different? Here’s a simple test. If I gave you 10 million dollars and said do whatever you want for the rest of your life, what would you do?
95% of the population would do what they love for rest of their life, eat, drink, see friends, make love, read, travel, dance and have fun and play games.
But not psychopaths in the red zone.
No matter how much they get they want to control and dominate more, to play a game with people as pawns. Power for the sake of power is their ultimate goal. And once they get into power they’re nearly impossible to remove until they die or they’re killed by other psychopaths.
The destruction red zone psychopaths bring is massive and widespread. Their psychosis ripples out into society and creates a reality distortion field on other people near and far. They induce altered states in everyone around them, as if the air is laced with drugs. People become crazier and more violent and insane around them. The worst traits in people come boiling to the surface.
Society breaks apart like a series of explosions that ruptures the fabric of people’s consensus reality. Protests erupt. Violence. Hatred. People turn on their neighbors with glee, no longer able to see them as human at all. Then open shooting and war.
More than anything, a master psychopath gives people the room to express their worst characteristics with ease. He gives them an outlet.
You might think the Donner Party and the Nazis are someone else, but they’re us when our darkest natures come roaring to the surface. The great horrors of history are just regular people given the chance to do great horrors.
The Nazi policy that allowed parents and the state to kill mentally or physically challenged children started with a single letter.
The letter came from a father who wrote to Hitler asking if he could kill his own mentally challenged child. An ambitious Nazi who controlled the mail saw it as an opportunity and brought the letter to the great psychotic. He got the policy approved.
The policy allowed hospitals that cared for the disabled to fill in a form. If 3 doctors put an X on the form they could kill the child. In a classic example of how policies spiral out of control under psychotic leadership, hospitals soon skipped the form all together.
Empowered hospital staff simply selected the children they wanted to kill and then put down the cause of death in the register as measles or some other innocuous disease.
But how do psychopaths get into power in the first place?
Helped into Power
They’re often helped into power by great economic disasters or by fear of threats from the outside.
Chaos and crisis are the perfect soil for authoritarianism to take root and grow. And in that dark soil the red zone psychotic grows like a like twisted weed.
In 1928 Hitler and the Nazis got a measly 2.6% of the vote. The vast majority of the German population rejected them as a tiny, insane fringe party.
But by 1932 the Nazis won 37.3% of the vote, just four years later.
Their message hadn’t changed. They still said the Jews should get ejected from public life, that the end of World War I was a conspiracy and that Germans were betrayed into ending a war they were winning and that democracy was the betrayer. It’s just that now people were ready to hear it because the world economy had taken a brutal turn for the worse at the beginning of the Great Depression.
Now people were out of work, inflation ran rampant and people were angry. Young men on the streets battled it out while waiting on bread lines. Extremist parties of the left and right gained more and more angry members. When the system fails, extremism metastasizes and quickly corrupts the organs of society.
It’s no surprise really. When a loaf of bread costs a month’s salary something’s got to give. People will look for anything to save them and that’s the moment when the authoritarian personality rises to the surface of society.
What’s the authoritarian personality?
They’re like sleeper cells in any society.
They’re activated by crisis and they respond to any perceived threat by calling for a strong man to take power and force their will on the world as a way to save it. They’re too stupid to realize that when you let a Cobra loose in your house it won’t just bite the people you want it to bite, it bites everyone.
It was the everyday people in Germany who voted to end their democracy and give power to a psychotic in the vain hope he could save them from run-away inflation and economic collapse.
Germany’s democratic politicians also helped Hitler in his quest for absolute power. They made the same mistake too many people make when they’re dealing with a brilliant psychotic.
They thought they could control him.
People throughout history thought they could control a brilliant psychotic once he got into power but the story is always the same. They’re soon shown how delusional they are as their lives are ripped apart under his rule.
The problem is other humans think they’re playing by the same rules. They imagine everyone has some level of empathy or consciousness and they don’t realize red zone psychotics are playing a game that is much different from theirs, one with no rules except to win at all costs.
The Big Lie
Imagine if you could lie about absolutely anything at all without any guilt or shame.
What would that get you?
If you rammed someone else’s car from behind while you were drunk you could scream at the other person that it was their fault and they hit you and they needed to pay for it. And then imagine you could easily make the other person believe it because your anger terrified them so much or because you were so charming or both.
Soon they’re apologizing and offering to pay for the damage when you hit them.
No matter how insane and absurd your story, you could lie as easily as someone else breathes and not only that, you could double down on it if you got caught and act as if the other person were crazy.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that the average person will only tell small lies to themselves and to others in their life. They would never dream of telling a big lie. They wouldn’t say they won a golf tournament when they cheated at it or didn’t even play. They won’t say they worked at a place they never worked or say they won an award for a something they weren’t even nominated for in the first place.
“It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”
What he’s saying here is essential to understand and hints at a very uncomfortable truth at the heart of the world.
He’s saying that even if you expose the great lies of the master psychopath to people, many won’t believe it. They’ll believe the lie is true no matter how insane and obvious that lie is to people paying attention.
Why? Because of one of the great flaws in the human mind.
And that makes them intensely vulnerable to psychotics.
The Great Chain of Belief
More than anything master psychopaths exploit flaws in people’s self-awareness.
What is self-awareness?
It’s the ultimate characteristic of true intelligence.
We tend to think of lots of mental horsepower as intelligence but it’s not. A person could have a brain that wins 50 games straight on Jeopardy and solves advanced math equations for breakfast and be no more self-aware than the Basil plant your brought home from the grocery store.
To rise beyond the bounds of your Basil plant you need self-awareness but what does that even mean?
Most people believe that what’s true for them is true for everyone. They can’t step outside of themselves and see it from another perspective. They believe that what they think about the world is actually true because they have no self-awareness whatsoever. There is no difference between what they believe and the real world.
That wouldn’t be a problem if people were really good at lining up their beliefs with actual reality but they aren’t very good at it at all. Most people’s beliefs are nothing but illusions. People make quick judgements about things and those judgements are filled with flaws and logical inconsistencies that they brush over and ignore with blissful ease.
In the end what we are is really advanced biological learning machines. Our personalities are created by the random inputs of our life and experience: where we grew up; what we saw; who our parents were; what we learned or failed to learn; what we read or saw or watched.
We form ideas and beliefs about the world that seem very real and true but those beliefs are nothing but a construct really. They’re the map, not the territory. But the average person can’t see the limits of their beliefs, instead they fully identify with their beliefs.
What does that mean?
It’s like being an actor in a great play but you don’t know you’re an actor. You’re totally blind to the fact that you’re playing a role in a play you didn’t create.
Unfortunately, we can’t see or know everything and often the things we believe are hopelessly limited and incorrect. Imagine a giant ball that’s the sum total of all knowledge. Now imagine a tiny dot, no bigger than a pixel on that ball and that’s you and me. That’s what we can know about the world, based on our limited experience and processing power.
What we don’t know is infinitely greater than what we do know.
But it gets worse. Now imagine that you think the dot is the whole world, everything there is to know. There is no big ball. There is nothing outside of that dot. What you think is true is absolutely true to you, as real as the sun rising in the morning or the blood when you cut your finger.
Even worse people cling to those beliefs as their very identity. We are what we believe. Losing their beliefs is like losing themselves to madness. For most people the death of their beliefs is the same as real death.
That lack of self-awareness leaves you open to the red zone psychotic who exploits that quirk in your mind with the utmost efficiency.
If I know your beliefs are an illusion and you don’t then I can use those beliefs to control you by framing everything within those beliefs.
The red zone psychotic uses all the things that people cling to for their identity against them.
Nation states. Religion. Laws. Race. Authority. Pride. Money. Fame. Power. Love.
One of the most effective exploits for red zone psychopaths is mass organizations, most notably religion, followed closely by tribal nation-state affiliations. Race is another exploit. You can think of race as the ultimate mass organization or tribal identity. The vast majority of people identify with some higher power and/or the place they came from/where they were born and/or the color of their skin.
The psychopath manipulates these hard-wired, human, existential desires to understand their purpose and place in the Universe with propaganda, media, stadiums, torch light rallies and games to keep people’s energy funneled where they want it to go.
Hitler exploited race and patriotic fanaticism with brutal efficiency. Many every day Germans believed Germany was cheated and betrayed into surrendering in World War I even though they were actually winning. The belief took root and spread after the war. The real truth was that WWI had claimed millions of lives and every nation on Earth was tired and wanted it over. Yet, many people in Germany believed Germany was winning and they were betrayed by Jews and a weak democratic government.
Why?
Because their very identity hinged on pride in being German.
If I’m taught I’m the greatest my whole life and suddenly I have to face the uncomfortable fact that I lost and lost badly, that can’t possibly be true because I’m the greatest so there must be another explanation.
If you think your nation is the greatest, any insult to it or suggestion of its flaws and imperfections isn’t seen as a critique, it’s seen as a threat to your very existence. It’s as if someone has a knife to your throat because you fully identify with the belief that your nation is supreme above all others rather than just another arbitrary line in the sand drawn up by some dead people who came before you that you don’t know.
More than anything the red zone psychotic knows how to marshal the forces of humans at scale.
The psychotic Roman emperors used gladiator games and the world’s first professional armies. The Nazis used torch light parades and mechanized warfare. Mao used “struggle sessions” and constant terror and propaganda in the Cultural Revolution. Modern psychopaths uses mega-churches, social media and control of digital choke points to warp your mind.
The red zone psychopath knows the power of putting thousands or tens of thousands of people together all at once. It creates a massive mind-altering effect as the dynamics of crowds and peer pressure at an awesome scale come together to force people into a single, seemingly unified will, like individual drops of water in a rushing river.
And with these mass scale exploits the red zone psychotic can lead the mass of men by the invisible ring in their noses.
But despite their power, there’s a fatal flaw in the psychotic’s self-awareness that makes them more dangerous than a lowly serial killer.
The Mote in Their Eyes
The great flaw in the red zone psychotic’s awareness is that they don’t know that their goals are not real too.
If they want power or sex or money they don’t know that desire is just as ephemeral as the rest of our beliefs.
Our goals make humans unique. Unlike animals or insects, our goals aren’t predetermined.
A gorilla will always organize into a small tribe of 10 or 15 gorillas. You’ll never see a gorilla decide to strike out on his own to express his true nature. You won’t see a band of ten thousand gorillas who decided to get together to form a new kind of gorilla society. Their narrow choices in life are preprogrammed and predetermined.
But we choose our own goals.
What will you with your life? It’s not set in stone.
You could become a sinner or a saint, a guru, or a rock star, or doctor, or a million other things. Do you want a family or do you want to strike out and become an artist and world traveler? Do you want to create a massive corporation filled with thousands of employees or do you want to start a new religion?
Those things are all possible in the spectrum of human behavior. You get to choose whether you go after fame and fortune or the quiet life.
But no matter what you choose, that goal is as much a construct as anything else in our personality. You could as easily pick one thing as another. You could start off trying to be a doctor and then shift gears and become a painter.
Yet the psychopath labors under the delusion that their desires are real. They think they’re just as real as the person with no self-awareness at all.
If you put those two things together, their awareness that other people’s beliefs are not real while still believing their own goals are real, then you have a terrifying personality will make countless lives miserable as they pursue those goals with relentless and ruthless determination.
No matter how many people they kill or have killed or how many lives they destroy, it doesn’t matter because only their goal matters.
Once they get into power, they hold onto that power by any means necessary and controlling them becomes a fool’s game. Society gets sicker and sicker as more and more people are drawn into the web of their madness.
In the end the red zone psychotic cannot be controlled and the inevitable outcome is mass suffering and death on a scale that few can imagine. They’re helped into power, usually by an economic disaster or external threat and once they’re there they don’t leave until they’re carried out in a body bag.
This scenario plays out again and again in history with near 100% consistency.
I call it the Dark Hero’s Journey.
It’s most brilliantly dramatized in the first Avengers movie, by Thanos, a red zone psychopath who successfully wipes out half the galaxy to “save it.”
When the psychopath comes to power in your world, your world is forever altered. If you are lucky enough you can join the revolution that holds them back from getting into power, a crisis averted heroically at the last second.
But more often than not, the brilliant psychotic will find a way to exploit the minds of enough people around you to get into power. They don’t need everyone, just enough people to beat back all the people who disagree with them.
My old friend Peter used to say, if you put 100 people in a room and they can’t agree, who gets their way?
The guy who gathers up five violent true believers to beat everyone else into submission.
A red zone psychotic will stop at nothing and they’re more cunning and more seductive than almost everyone else on the planet. They can see the unconscious inner workings of your great fears and desires and warp your goals into their goals. They will kill, rape, destroy, deny, lie, cheat and steal to achieve whatever they want in life.
And the worst part is that it’s all for nothing.
Millions suffer for a cause that turns to ash in a blinding flash.
Psychopaths build great monuments to themselves and then those monuments are nothing but shells when their regimes inevitably collapse on themselves. The great secret police buildings in east Germany that terrorized the populace are just apartment buildings now. The great Karl-Marx Allee that tanks rolled down to show the might of the communist state are just bike paths today. It’s nothing but another big street slicing through the heart of the city. The people passing over it today have no memory of the psychotic ideology of blood and horrors that built it.
The empires of yesterday are all dust like all the empires that came before them. The red zone psychotics wanted power of power’s sake but all that’s left of them is a fading memory and the decaying bodies of people who suffered for nothing under their delusional dreams.
As Carl Sagan said of our pale blue dot of a planet:
“Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.”
And think of all the little people who died so those masters of war could hold the iron throne for a brief, flickering second of time, including the self-deluded authoritarian personalities who followed their dear leader down to dusty death, never waking up and realizing their mistake until the very last second of their pathetic little lives.
When a red zone psychotic runs out of imaginary enemies to demonize, he turns on his own followers. Perhaps nobody is more surprised than the former follower of a psychotic ideology who is now getting garroted, hung, shot or stabbed by his former comrades in arms for not being pure or true enough to their imaginary cause.
The psychotic philosophy is like a cancer that eats everything around it and then feeds on itself until it finally collapses and balance has a chance to return to a traumatized society.
But the return to balance is not an easy path and there’s no short cut. It’s only achieved by weathering the societal storm of insanity the leads regular people to bloody rage and to unspeakable atrocity and cruelty to their fellow man, who they can no longer see clearly.
Only when the psychosis has passed away can average people make sense of what has happened to them and begin to rebuild in the wake of destruction. When the hold of the altered state is broken it’s like waking up from a nightmare.
Except the nightmare was real.
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I’m an author, engineer, pro-blogger, podcaster, public speaker. I also run the Practical AI Ethics Alliance and the AI Infrastructure Alliance, two open communities helping bring the canonical stack into reality and making sure AI works for all of us.
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