Sociopathic Ethics and the Future of Human Kin
At the core of society is the ethics that shape, govern and define it. The sociopathic society is based on an ethics and culture of selfishness, egoism, authoritarianism, vanity, and greed, where self-interest rules over all human life. It is a society built on the image of the sociopath; a society that gives preference to sociopaths, that empowers sociopaths by giving them positions of power in society, encouraging everyone to become a sociopath, and giving preference to sociopathic genes by making the sociopath more attractive, resilient, and thus more likely to pass on their genes.
Sociopaths tend to seem charming and harmless on the surface, but they are manipulative, deceitful, and unempathetic. They are often narcissistic, always chasing the spotlight, wanting to be admired, and feeding their feeling of self-importance. The most successful sociopaths reach the apex of society by extracting and accumulating enormous amounts of wealth and power. They succeed by trampling over others while pretending to be great. They are celebrated by the sociopathic culture and admired by all who buy into it.
Sociopathic ethics influences all aspects of society, including culture, politics, and economics. Phenomenologically, sociopathic ethics translates into a feeling of indifference to the suffering of others. Whatever satisfies the greed of the powerful prevails, whatever the human cost. To the sociopath, only they matter. They are the only subject. Other people, including other sociopaths, become merely objects to be manipulated and used for personal gain. Their every move is designed to manipulate others, they don't come from an inner motivation. By manipulating others, they end up also manipulating themselves. And so, in that denial of others' agency, the sociopaths lose their freedom to be themselves, ultimately denying their own agency and subjectivity. The sociopathic society dehumanizes everyone, even the rich. Sociopathic ethics is parasitic on the human spirit.
Not everyone is a sociopath in the sociopathic society, but everyone is motivated to become one. From a young age, we are conditioned in society to compete against one another and to seek wealth and the acceptance of others. Sociopaths are admired and celebrated in all media. We are taught to look up to them and to desire to become one of them. Exploiting others, or being exploited through debt, are the only ways forward in the sociopathic society. Those who are not ruthless enough don't join the ranks of the rich and powerful. Those who are compassionate and refuse to comply are left vulnerable to be exploited. To become more exploitable, we are also conditioned from a young age to obey the authority of those who are considered to be our superiors.
The greedy person, having lost all his humanity to their blind pursuit of wealth and power, seeks to extract as much wealth from as many people as possible to feed their insatiable need for more wealth and power. For that reason, the sociopathic society is inherently unjust. It targets and punishes those who contribute the most to satisfy the greed of those who contribute the least. It punishes those who give and rewards those who take. It destroys all vestige of community, often even within family life, which in turn leads to trauma and the normalization of neglect and abuse, perpetuating sociopathy.
In this society, it can be deadly to be kind. You have to at least be shrewd enough to understand people in order to survive. If you are not shrewd enough, you may be taken advantage of. So you must watch yourself. Even then, if you are not born into a rich family, you start out in a more vulnerable position. Without assets to provide you with a steady stream of income, you are at risk of having to always work for others to survive and be exploited. Lack of wealth is a vulnerability. Those who have no wealth and have no steady passive income must work to survive, to pay for food and shelter, and that puts them in a vulnerable position where they have no choice but to accept whatever contract they can find that can provide the funds to survive. In order for the exploitation to continue, the worker must be paid as little as possible so that they don't have the funds to invest and build wealth, which would allow them to escape their vulnerable position. Some, who have high-paying jobs, may even gain some funds which they could invest to escape, but they tend to be kept in a vulnerable position through expenses and debts such as mortgages, student loans, medical insurance, and vehicle costs. Thus, in the sociopathic society, the rich are served by the poor, and the poor, in their vulnerable position, have no choice but to spend their lives serving the rich sociopaths.
Sociopathic ethics stimulates competition against one another for even the very basic necessities of life. To survive, we are forced to compete against one another for the scraps of the rich. The sociopathic society exploits the vulnerable, even those who are considered "middle class", and blames those who are even more powerless for the suffering it causes, promoting hatred among all who are vulnerable. In the pursuit of control over the minds of entire populations, it keeps us distracted and divided by manipulating us through the media and the internet. If we worked together, we could escape our vulnerable position, so we are kept divided, confused, and thus, powerless.
The sociopathic society is self-destructive. All the deceit and manipulation that it promotes destroy communication and trust. The foundation of a stable society lies in the cooperative principle that language is based upon. Paul Grice, a philosopher of language, introduced the concept and divided it into a few conversational maxims, which include being truthful, making your contribution informative, and avoiding relying on information without supporting evidence. By being manipulative and deceitful for their own gain, sociopaths destroy that foundation and make society unstable. That instability can lead to unnecessary conflicts and violence, which the sociopaths then capitalize on through "disaster capitalism".
There is nothing more rare than love in this sociopathic world. But despite the pervasiveness of the sociopathic society, the human spirit remains. For thousands of years, we have lived in a compassionate society, which the sociopaths don't want us to remember. In this compassionate society, we truly lived together and helped each other. That is what allowed us to not only survive but thrive. The family unit is the last vestige of that compassionate society. In that family unit, we are cared for since our birth. Our upbringing is very fragile, but it is in that fragility that we learn to perceive the universe. Through experience and language, we become conscious of ourselves and the universe. Without the compassion of our parents and the whole community, we could never accomplish that. Compassion gave us consciousness and allowed us to evolve into humanity. The sociopathic society succeeded in perverting many families, but it has never successfully perverted all. Thousands of years have ingrained the compassionate way of life deep into our being. It has always been an integral part of who we are. Without it, we are not human. And so the seed of our humanity can germinate once again and change the world. We don't have to live in a sociopathic society, we just need to remember how to live together again. Let me help you remember.