Content warning: My opinions only, reflecting my necessarily limited understanding, but I haven't bothered to qualify every sentence
Yeah. I came to the realisation a few years ago, after seeing a documentary on TV about it, that psychopathy is really the root of all our problems. Psychopaths lack a conscience and empathy, so they can end up rising to positions of power by exploiting others remorselessly. Because they don't empathise, they see the world as populated by NPCs who they can manipulate to progress through life, which they see as a game to play and win.
There aren't all that many psychopaths, as a proportion of the population, but they cause a lot of the problems. I guess the trait must have evolved as something that would benefit our speecies in some way (or maybe just the individuals with it, I suppose), but presumably that benefit mainly showed up before the "information age" (wow, that's a term I haven't seen used in a while) when they maybe couldn't cause quite such widespread harm, or at least couldn't spread their misinformation as easily.
Oddly, I remember the researcher the documentary I saw focused on actually discovered some diagnostic method to find out if someone was a psychopath (I don't remember if it was a brain structure he imaged or a gene variant or what, but I'm sure there was something), and he actually discovered that *he had it*. While I suspect all the worst people in history (and the present) are psychopaths, it's not the case that all psychopaths are evil. Like most things biology-related, it's fuzzy and complicated.
I'm definitely not sure which documentary it was, now. I thought it might have been Horizon: What Makes a Psychopath? (2017), but skipping through it, I think not. Maybe The Psychopath Next Door (2014) although I haven't found some specific parts I remember in it (yet). It's not easy to find old documentaries base on vague memories of bits of their content, I'm finding!
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said. “There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.” -Elon Musk, March 6, 2025
“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trials 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.” -Captain G. M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trials
