Society of Vampires
The Cumulative Effect on Society of Sociopathic Elites
Where is the virtue in a legal system that frequently attaches greater value to achieving a conviction than it does to delivering justice—with the demonstrated result that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people continue to be incarcerated, even executed, for crimes they didn’t commit?
Is the
What are the long term prospects for an economic system that flaunts the exploitation of the many for the benefit of an elite social class?
How has the nation that was once widely viewed as the champion of the world’s poor and oppressed been transformed into a “rogue state” pursuing a unilateral strategic agenda that includes pre-emptive incursions into other countries?
These are some of the questions this article either explicitly or implicitly addresses. It illuminates the growing impact of the sociopathic behavior characteristic of critical elements of our nation’s institutional and political leadership. It shows that the original cultural intention that created the
Should the current trend continue, we will join history’s other sociopathic cultures, and suffer the implosion that inevitably destroys such cultures. So, in the end, we will explore how our society might begin pulling itself back from the brink. We will consider what we might do to re-invigorate the original impulse that created the
Part I: Real Vampires Don’t Drink Blood
According to Dr. Martha Stout of
Their’s is a cold hell. They perceive the people among whom they live, even their own children, as animate objects, as tools to be used to attain their goals. They live in a universe similar to ours, but it is without the warmth of human connection or the hope of a self-transcending future. Being the center of their universe, they literally feel that everything begins and ends with them. Their existence is synonymous with exploitation.
Superficially, they are indistinguishable from the rest of us. They have talents, ambitions, appetites and intelligence just like ours. We often initially find them attractive, spontaneous—even charismatic. Their personalities radiate a frisson of edginess—a dangerousness which excites our desire for adventure. Having only the moment, they can be incredibly alive to it.
Psychology actually knows quite a bit about these extreme egoists, considering how poorly people in general understand them. The term of art for them is “sociopath” and research suggests that they make up about 4% of the population of the
For most sociopaths, personal satisfaction is intertwined with domination and control. Winning is genuinely an ecstasy and defeat is literally dreadful. Since satisfaction is bound up with the psychological experience of victory, they can be ruthless and single-minded about pursuing it. Not surprisingly, the most adept of them can achieve elite positions. They have an uncanny ability to play dirty without anything sticking to them. Having no affection, they aren’t tripped up or restrained by empathy, shame or guilt.
For the rest of us, imagining that everyone is more or less like ourselves, it is easy to misperceive their coldness as exceptional dedication, even enviable ambitiousness. Some of us even imagine that we can deploy these people to carry out our intentions—like a medieval hunter who launches his “tame” falcon at prey. Yet, the failure to grasp the nature and potential of these people usually has dreadful consequences.
Hjalmar Schacht, famous for ending the run-away inflation that destroyed
Research on cannibalism in non-human species suggests that there might even be an evolutionary niche for sociopaths. The speculation is that some species use cannibalism as a last ditch strategy to protect their kind from extinction. In his observations of one species of fish, Conrad Lorenz discovered that a small but consistent percentage of the population is cannibalistic, a few in a thousand. Under normal circumstances, when food is abundant, the cannibalism is relatively insignificant. Only under starvation conditions does it emerge as a significant behavior. He speculated that this sub-population made the species more resilient in the face of ecological catastrophe—at least the cannibals might survive to produce a new generation.
Given this, you might conclude that affection and conscience are liabilities, or, at best, luxuries. As it turns out, you would be wrong. Research on games, called Game Theory, demonstrates that cooperation is a far more productive strategy than winner-takes-all competition. In fact, without external intervention, cooperation drives out competitive behavior simply by producing obviously higher returns on investment. Predators may win more often than not, but they don’t win much when compared with the rewards that accrue to cooperators.
Capitalism, the most successful economic system in history, originated as a group of strategies to reduce risk and thereby promote investment. Reducing risk, as cooperation does, makes it easier to mobilize resources. Having sufficient resources increases the likelihood of success. Increasing the likelihood of success increases the scale of projects undertaken. Increasing the scale of opportunity expands participation. All of this is a self-reinforcing “virtuous” cycle—trust breeding success. Capitalism has since evolved into something less benign, but we will get to that later.
So why don’t we live in a paradise: lion bedded down with the lamb and all that? Well, there is the problem of maintaining a level playing field. Predators are not interested in fairness, justice or sharing; those values make absolutely no sense to them. Remember, in their experience they are the center of the universe; they have no affection or conscience, just the drive to win on their terms. Most of their activity on any given day is devoted to warping the playing field toward their advantage. To that end, they are quintessentially Machiavellian in their behavior. If they can get the job done with an efficient lie, fine. If it takes subverting powerful people, the government, even the law itself, well, that’s just another exciting challenge for them. Character assassination, murder, war—all in a day’s work.
Sociopaths realize early in their lives that they are different from most of the people who surround them. They quickly come to fully appreciate how uncomfortable “normal” people are with differentness in general and with “coldness” in particular. They tend to be astute observers of behavior, with a talent for identifying and using people’s vulnerabilities. The successful ones are adept at disguise and manipulation. One misapprehension is that sociopaths are violent criminals of the serial murderer-Hannibal Lecter sort. Some are, but that’s uncommon. While they do often derive pleasure from inflicting pain, they aren’t compelled to behave criminally any more than are you or I. They just have no internal governor—no empathy that would make hurting people uncomfortable for them. When you and I look at another person, we see someone like ourselves—there is an experiential recognition. A sociopath only sees an object that may or may not be useful—there is no experiential recognition of similarity.
You and I might also treat people as objects. Stanley Milgram’s research, done at
Because they are recognizably different, sociopaths with a thirst for either power or wealth and the talent to pursue them face a dilemma. The absence of conscience makes them ruthless and fast. Their vitality often makes them attractive. Their insight into personal motivation makes them skillful manipulators, charming or intimidating as necessary. These are formidable competitive advantages. They are also potential liabilities, if their manifestation invites close scrutiny.
Richard Christie and Florence Geis developed a test (MACH-IV) for measuring manipulativeness—Machiavellianism—in people. Using the test, researchers discovered that bright individuals who are highly manipulative tend to be successful. By contrast, less intelligent high scorers tend to get crushed. People almost universally distrust, and often despise, obvious manipulators. At the same time, almost all of us indulge in some degree of manipulativeness—who would dare tell grandma what we really thought of the blouse or tie she sent us for Christmas. Smart sociopaths learn early in their lives how people are likely to react to their manipulations. Consequently, they become adept at hiding who they are and what they are doing.
Part II: The Destructive Impact of Elite Sociopaths on Society
In order to understand the full impact of elite sociopaths on society, we need to appreciate a particular competitive strategy. There is an ultimate strategy of strategies, one that is intuitively obvious to the sociopathic personality. Sun Tzu, renowned general and author of The Art of War, wrote about it in the 6th century BC. He focused on achieving victory through deception and distraction rather than by winning pitched battles. Three quotes from him will give the flavor of his approach to conflict; "Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy," "Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate," "The best victory is when the opponent surrenders of its own accord before there are any actual hostilities...It is best to win without fighting." Sun Tzu focused on controlling the playing field and the rules of the game, rather than direct conflict.
According to Sun Tzu, the task is to make the opponent defeat himself. Deception, distraction and speed are the primary tools for accomplishing this. For Sun Tzu, the purest victory is in convincing the enemy that struggle is futile, pointless or, best of all, unnecessary. Covert manipulation is the essential tool for this strategy. Ingratiation, seduction, intimidation, provocation are used to cause the enemy to self-destruct.
The sociopath consistently relies on this strategy to achieve his ends. Like Sun Tzu, he very clearly understands that exposure not only undermines his ability to control situations, it also puts him at personal risk. The logic of the predator demands that he disguise or hide himself and his actions from his prey. Simple observation of nature tells him that the best place to hide is in plain sight.
The most sophisticated sociopaths, those with whom we are concerned, recognize that the best way to hide in plain sight is to make sociopathic behavior normal rather than exceptional. If everyone behaves like sociopaths, then true sociopaths are just the most accomplished performers.
If you are old enough, you grew up with society telling you that trustworthiness was essential to personal success. Society insisted that how you played the game was more important than winning—meaning that fair play, sportsmanship, modesty, and self-sacrifice demonstrated good character. Good character was the bedrock on which one’s reputation and society itself grew—a rising tide that lifted all boats. It wasn’t so long ago that men dueled to the death to defend their “honor.” What a difference now. A commentator at the 2006 Winter Olympics insisted that the only way for one contestant to “redeem” herself was by winning a gold medal. What was her sin? She only won a silver medal at the last Olympics. If there is a newly dominant sentiment in American popular culture, it is, “winning is all that counts.” Do we really have to wonder why the abuse of performance enhancing drugs has exploded over the last twenty years? One look at the transformation of the Olympic gold medal from a small medallion into a neck straining chest saucer says it all.
An ethos of “take-no-prisoners” competitiveness serves the interests of sociopaths: it plays to their strengths. It’s only natural that they would act to promote and reinforce it at every opportunity. A cultural atmosphere suffused with selfishness further acts as a catalyst for the formation of sociopathic elites.
It’s best to think of sociopaths working together as birds wheeling together in a flock. They are moving on parallel paths based on common circumstances. This has nothing to do with empathy, affection or cooperation, only self-interest. Sociopaths do not experience, therefore do not trust, the power of emotional bonding between people. They do understand the power of domination. Sociopaths treat relationships as commodities to be stolen, bought or sold to suit their advantage. Having no experience of love or compassion, they regard altruism as stupid and any manifestation of it actively threatening. Altruism represents something beyond their control and therefore dangerous. Instead of mutuality, they attempt to structure relationships purely in terms of indebtedness. In practice, they talk about relationships almost exclusively in terms of “loyalty.”
If you imagine that an elite group of sociopaths functions in the manner of the typical secret society, like Yale’s Skull and Bones fraternity, or like a basketball team, you don’t quite understand sociopaths. While they are perfectly capable of creating conspiracies and organizations, the bonds that hold them together are only as strong as their perception of self-interest. Their willingness to appear cooperative is purely mercenary. They recognize this in their kind. In fact, it’s what they are most comfortable with as well. They discourage cooperative attitudes—self-transcendance, altruism or self-actualization. Instead, they go to extraordinary lengths to seduce, buy or coerce loyalty, essentially self-sacrifice, from their subordinates. Stalin’s reign of terror was particularly effective because any failure was regarded as disloyalty and the consequence of disloyalty was death. During World War II, he ordered that soldiers who attempted to retreat, even in the face of certain defeat, were to be shot. It is easy to understand the abject terror of him demonstrated by his immediate subordinates, the most powerful men in the
Because of the primacy of predatory competitiveness in their world view, sociopaths naturally promote a consistent philosophy with little need for social coordination. The founder of the
Elite sociopaths singly or in agglomerations, have promoted variations on this philosophy probably for as long as they have existed. We see it throughout history: “Might makes right;” “Let them hate, so long as they fear;” “Nature red in tooth and claw;” “last gladiator standing;” “me or you;” and as some wit parodied it, “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine too.”
Since Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, their propaganda has taken on a pseudo-scientific tone. In the nineteenth century, their vampirism was defended as “survival of the fittest.” While they attribute this concept to
We see evidence of sociopathic thinking and behavior all around us on a daily basis not just throughout history. We see it in politics—scratch a hegemon or imperialist and you will likely find a sociopath. We see it in religion—some priests have preyed on the vulnerable since babies were sacrificed to Baal thousands of years ago. Any institution that is hierarchical, powerful and wealthy is especially attractive to sociopaths. Armies have always been irresistibly attractive, though this has waned somewhat with the advent of world destroying weapons. Without the possibility of winning, there is no glory in mutually assured destruction. We see its influence in the systematic deconstruction of democratic procedures in Congress—excluding minority party members from hearings for example. We see it in the rapid emergence of an imperial Presidency—a president who signs 750 bills into law with the stated intent that he will refuse to enforce those parts to which he objects. We see it in the extreme gerrymandering intended to thwart the electoral process and assure the re-election of incumbent politicians. It leaps out to grab at our throats through the endless lying that has become normal behavior across the media—from blatantly false advertising to the widespread substitution of infotainment and propaganda for investigative journalism. No one can have missed the triumph of the looters mentality that emerged with the shift from traditional to managerial capitalism. Most disturbing, the tax system has been flagrantly used by the Bush administration to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars borrowed from foreign countries to the economic elite, while leaving the rest of Americans saddled with an historically unique and likely catastrophic level of foreign debt. You know the cultural rot has reached the breaking point when the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union assumes that he can attempt with impunity to limit the freedom of speech of his board of directors in the middle of a campaign to raise money to protect freedom of speech.
The business community has become one of the preferred venues for spreading the philosophy of extremism in our culture. For instance, sociopaths have been tireless champions of laissez-faire arguments in economics. The refrain is always that unfettered competition is the key ingredient in an efficient economy. This idea is correctly attributed to Adam Smith, as much the inventor of capitalism as any single person, but as with the attribution of “survival of the fittest” to
Financial rationalism promotes the idea that if everyone acts on their “pure” self-interest without regard to any mediating factors, the economic system will work perfectly. No self-respecting economist—certainly none familiar with Utility or Prospect theory—is benighted enough to sincerely believe this. Nevertheless, significant segments of the financial and business communities promote it religiously. If you have come under their spell, try this thought experiment. Imagine what would happen if you removed all the traffic lights in
In just such an experiment, broad segments of the financial, corporate management, accounting and political communities colluded over roughly the last thirty years to eliminate traditional business and government regulatory systems in the
As pathological levels of greed blossomed into blatant criminality during this period, a few of the most flagrant corporate malefactors, like Enron, collapsed. This precipitated some very modest re-regulation, and subsequently over 1,500 major corporations were forced to correct years of deceptive accounting and restate their earnings. It is not coincidental that during the last twenty years, compensation of top corporate executives ballooned from 30 times that of the lowest paid corporate employee to 250 times (at one point in the late 1990s, it exceeded 500 times).
The shape of the modern corporation has been a particular triumph of the vampire elite. Psychologists use a simple test to assess whether or not someone is likely to be a sociopath. It looks for the presence of symptoms like; “lack of remorse after having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another person,” “deceitfulness, manipulativeness,” “reckless disregard for the safety of self or others,” and “failure to conform to social norms.” Anyone who exhibits three or more of the seven characteristics of sociopathy is suspected of being a sociopath. While it might seem strange to give a psychological test to an institution, this was recently done for a documentary film called “The Corporation.” The rationale used was that, as the law treats corporations as though they were people—with equivalent legal rights, let’s give them a psychiatric exam to see just what kind of people they are. The modern corporation scored seven characteristics out of seven.
You might wonder how one of the central institutions of our society could become so prone to pathological behavior (Enron, WorldCom, Merrill Lynch, AIG and Halliburton as recent, newsworthy examples) that it requires constant monitoring to control its depredations. From the mountain of regulations imposed on them, you would think corporations are potentially more dangerous than nuclear power plants. Measured in terms of body count, they are, devastatingly so. At the same time, corporations are immensely useful, productive and just as capable of behaving as good citizens as they are liable to being bad citizens. In fairness, most are like WalMart, who while noted for over-exploiting its employees on the one hand, is credited with good samaritanism on the other; being well ahead of the Federal government in delivering, by the truck load, life-save supplies to victims of hurricane Katrina. What the corporate vehicle has become, in the last quarter century especially, is near perfect cover for the exploiter elite.
The incremental but dramatic tilt toward a culture of exploitation and the glorification of vampirism have not been the work of a monolithic conspiracy, though doubtlessly there are any number of well organized efforts involved. It is the result of elite groups of people with little in common except their lack of humanity working toward a common material and cultural agenda. More than any specific policy or act, their triumph is psychological and political, in making narcissistic materialism and Social Darwinism not only acceptable, but admirable, and seemingly inevitable, in the public consciousness.
Humanity pays a high price when it comes under the spell of sociopaths. Sociopaths almost inevitably crash and burn. When winning is all that has meaning, life becomes serial competition. If there are no ready “enemies,” the sociopath creates them. Having conquered
Each of us has an ego—a sense of a self as distinct from others. We are also acutely sensitive to differences—variously welcomed as novelty or abhorred as perversion. This discriminative ability is essential to survival. Consequently, at the root of human relations, there is a tension—me/you—that readily expresses itself competitively. Yet, the default state for people is cooperation, not competition. In fact, research indicates that Homo Sapiens is the most cooperative species on the planet. For most of us the self is not precisely bounded as it is for a sociopath. Self includes family, and readily extends to community, and nation. For many, the inter-dependence of all life, an expanded sense of self, includes the whole planet—all for one, one for all.
This is very important for our future together. Compare chimpanzees with baboons. When a group of chimps is out foraging, if one of them spots a leopard stalking the group, he is likely to sneak away rather than raise the alarm. He survives, but the leopard adds chimp to its menu. By contrast, if a baboon spots a stalking leopard, he alerts the troop. Two of the most powerful males will break away, stalk the leopard, attack and often kill it. Invariably one of the baboons dies, frequently both do, but so does the leopard. What else do we know about chimpanzees and baboons? Chimps are an endangered species and baboons are among the most successful animals in
Cultures, of necessity, harness human aggressiveness. Sociopaths glorify it. They celebrate competition as the foundation for strong character and the source of innovation. As misapprehensions go, this is a tragic one. The value of competition is in the implicit dialogue among people, no one of whom has perfect understanding. Winning a contest is no prize. When the emotional excitement of competition overwhelms the core conversation, the value that might be gained is lost in self-sustaining circuits of reprisal.
Conflict is epidemic in societies obsessed with competition. Labor disputes, legal actions, turf battles, hostile takeovers, interpersonal conflicts, marital strife, political vendettas, crime and simple misunderstandings annually leach trillions of dollars from economies worldwide. Tension, instead of creating dynamism, devolves into conflict. This pattern undermines the fabric of social relations, reduces quality of life and, too often, results in the destruction of careers, families and lives. Provoked by trans-national sociopathic elites, this friction inflames societies worldwide. Usually, it is only a sullen smolder, but, too often, it ignites in the indiscriminate conflagration of war.
Cultures that elevate competition over cooperation, domination over reciprocity, become imperial in success and vindictive in failure. They necessarily over-extend, exhaust their resources and cultivate the hatred of those they dominate. Empires don’t last, they eat themselves. They die, and the land they cultivate often dies with them. The Garden of Eden, the once fertile plain between the Tigris and
Very rarely does one face such a clear choice. We can continue slavishly emulating the sociopathic elites in their relentless pursuit of excess, complicit in the exploitation from which that excess derives. Or we can give up our pretensions, surrendering our grandiosity, and live lives defined by compassion, intimacy and service.
Part III: It Takes More than Garlic and Wooden Stakes to Deal with Vampires
The struggle between cooperators and predators is perennial. It’s not an accident that so much of world culture, law and government is dedicated to protecting cooperators from predators. Societies, especially fast-evolving, technological ones, are uniquely dependent on trust and transparency. Modern complexity demands a high level of participation. If people begin opting out or just pretending to participate, eventually it all falls down. Shortly before the collapse of the
Trust is essential, because it is both efficient and liberating. Investments can be undertaken that would be, without it, inconceivable. The creativity and innovation at the heart of complex societies always entails risk. What does it take to declare independence from the world’s largest maritime empire and found the world’s first representative democracy? Benjamin Franklin wasn’t kidding when, at a particularly divisive moment, he reminded the Continental Congress that they would “hang together or hang separately.” What does it take to sustain the collegiality at the heart of so much of
Societies are perfectly capable of promoting or limiting sociopathic behavior. In contrast to the United States, where one person in twenty-five demonstrates evidence of anti-social personality disorder, in Taiwan and Japan that figure shrinks to only about one person in one thousand—40 times less. Alarmingly, the 1991 Epidemiologic Catchment Area study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health reported that between 1975 and 1990 the incidence of anti-social personality disorder nearly doubled among young people in the
This is a cultural phenomenon. The genetic make-up of our kids didn’t change overnight. Like individuals, cultures can become unstable—diseased. A diseased culture promotes values and behaviors that will ultimately bring about its collapse. People are the cells in the body of a culture. The sickness attacks and changes the people who bring the culture to life.
Cultures are built up around shared memes—constellations of self-perpetuating ideas. Memes are to cultures as genes are to species. Some genes can be so selfish that they have the potential to drive their species to extinction. These genes cheat—they trick the biological machinery of individuals into reproducing them at the expense of the species as a whole. Consider Wolbachia, both a bacteria and a parasite. Passed only from mother to daughter in insects, it tampers with the host’s reproductive system so that daughters are produced rather than sons. Obviously this leads to a potentially catastrophic decline in the male part of the population. Through mutation, effectively the same thing can happen at the genetic level. Such mutated genes are called selfish because they cause their host to reproduce in such a way that the species as a whole faces extinction.
The same thing can happen in cultures. Consider the micro-cultures that emerge around massively multiplayer computer games. These are games that are played by thousands of people interacting with each other in real time over the internet. According to Tony Ray, the president of the Houston-based company Even Balance, when the game QuakeWorld came out online, it developed a huge community. "There was serious competition and an enormous amount of online status. Then the cheats showed up, and almost overnight it went from something that was a hugely popular community into something that was a wasteland.''
A much more disturbing example of micro-cultures is the evolution of gangs in the
If you think there are no cultural mechanisms capable of this kind of influence in our broader culture—of spreading selfish memes—watch some of the adolescent and young adult oriented reality TV programs, play some of the teen and mature rated videogames, and listen to talk radio with the ears of a child. As you observe the kind of culture that corporate-controlled media are promoting, keep the following list at hand. Assess the characters being presented to you and your children as cultural icons. Remember that consistently exhibiting just three of the diagnostic symptoms is enough to lead a clinician to suspect that the person in question is sociopathic. If some of these characteristics strike a little too close to home for comfort, consider that while you are probably not a sociopath, culture shapes behavior, including yours.
Diagnostic symptoms associated with sociopaths:
1) Failure to conform to social norms,
2) Deceitfulness, manipulativeness,
3) Impulsivity, failure to plan ahead,
4) Irritability, aggressiveness,
5) Reckless disregard for the safety of self or others,
6) Consistent irresponsibility,
7) Lack of remorse after having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another person
Additional documented characteristics of sociopaths
· Refusal to acknowledge responsibility for errors
· Shallowness of emotion and a callous lack of regard or empathy for others.
· Grandiosity
· Glib, superficial charm used for seduction
· Extreme risk taking
· Substance abuse
Cooperation is the essence of civilization. We measure a civilization ultimately by its ability to do work and its longevity. The ancient Egyptians were able to build pyramids. The ancient Romans built thousands of miles of roads. Modern societies have built millions of miles of indoor plumbing. From primitive pecking orders to the emergence of religion, social evolution has been driven by the need to win the benefits of cooperation and reduce the damages of conflict. One of the most significant breakthroughs—the codification of law—was invented by the Sumerian King, Hammerabi, only 5,000 years ago. In the last few hundred years, the practice of politics has evolved from a simple attempt to reduce the violence of power struggles into sophisticated procedures for balancing and harmonizing the interests of more and more finely characterized constituencies.
It is very likely that the intellectual demands of extended cooperation are what made us human. Anthropologists have struggled for over a hundred years to understand the origins of our species’ high intelligence. Why did Homo develop the big brain? Arguments have volleyed back and forth contending that upright posture, tool use and social interaction are the catalysts for our ancestral transformation. While all of these must have contributed, none is definitive. Our ancestors walked upright for millions of years before our brains leaped ahead of the monkeys and great apes. Most of the great apes demonstrate some use of tools, and primates generally maintain complex social relationships. In an attempt to better understand our roots, Richard Leakey, who has spent his life making some of the most extraordinary anthropological discoveries about our ancestors, tried seeing humans from a chimpanzee’s perspective. What his imagined chimp found most extraordinary about humans was that when we found food we didn’t immediately eat it ourselves, but took it back and shared it with the others in our group. He also pointed out that we are the only primate that gathers together in super groups that extend beyond immediate family or local ties to groups of communities. We’ve evolved to better cooperate.
Cooperation is a very complex ability. It requires a capacity for high level abstraction. This was illustrated in a research study done a few years ago. The scientists wanted to know if chimpanzees could do arithmetic. Researcher set up problems that required two chimps to add or subtract M&Ms in order to divide them fairly. The researches quickly discovered that the chimps could easily do simple addition and subtraction, but they couldn’t share. In the final version of the experiment two chimps were separated from each other and the candies in Plexiglas cubicles. Each chimp in turn did the math problem assigned using numbers and then the researchers divided the M&Ms accordingly in front of the chimps. In every case, the chimps understood how many they were supposed to get, but they were, nevertheless, frantic over having to share any at all.
They had the mental capacity to do some abstract thinking—relating numbers to M&Ms, but they couldn’t make the next leap. That numbers gave them a means to manage equitable sharing. Making that leap would have required an appreciation of the value of cooperation.
As a metaphor, imagine that human beings have two sets of genetic wiring. One set is organized around competing and the other is organized around cooperating. When getting dinner may require intimidating lions and tigers and bears, you need a keen and highly tuned sense of how to compete. You don’t have time to think about it. On the other hand, cooperation has an obviously higher return on investment so that when you aren’t dealing with the local predators but other human beings, you want to be just as efficient at cooperation. Again you don’t want to have to spend time and energy figuring out how to cooperate every time the opportunity presents itself. Over a few million years, the mental machinery for cooperation keeps being reinforced because the better you are at cooperating, the more likely you are to pass on your genes. In time the whole species develops a bias toward cooperation and away from competition. Nevertheless, in the face of a threat or the appearance of a threat, the competitive wiring tends to kick in automatically. You can actually see the two sets of wiring at work in differences in the behavior of men and women. When men feel threatened they tend to immediately become aggressive. By contrast, when women feel threatened they initially try to make friends.
While our biological wiring may be biased toward cooperation, obviously it is only slightly so. For all of our social progress from the first mud-walled towns in ancient
A few years ago biologists did an experiment in which they genetically modified a bacterium so that it was unable to produce a single critical enzyme. They then put it together with an equivalent sample of its original, unmodified mother culture. As long as the missing enzyme was supplied in the food fed to both bacteria, the daughter culture invariably overwhelmed the mother culture. The minute faction of energy saved in the modified bacteria was applied to reproduction. That tiny advantage enabled it to reproduce faster and quickly take over. Although it is a different kind of culture, something similar happens with societies. Small influences can undermine cooperation as easily as reinforce it.
Over the generations, the best parts of American culture have been aimed at reinforcing cooperation. And that has paid off for us. While Europe regularly destroyed itself, the
As far as our modern institutions have taken us toward increased cooperativeness, we still have a long way to go before we tap the full potential of the human species. One of the greatest threats to continuing progress remains the prevalence and burden of sociopathic behavior. Aggressive, exploitative behaviors trigger the compete wiring in everyone they touch. At some point, society roils like the surface of a pond in a thunderstorm. The Civil War was such a time, and its aftermath continues to resonate in contemporary politics over six generations later.
With interpersonal differences and tensions inevitable, most of us are ready to believe competition and conflict also are inevitable. Much of the power of sociopathic elites depends on that intuitive anxiety. But even if those differences among people that are often at the root of conflict are inevitable, competition, contest and combat are not. Dog-eat-dog competition may temporarily consolidate wealth and power, but it also creates self-sustaining cycles of retribution. The violently-accumulated hoard ends up being defensively squandered. The sociopath may often triumph in an egoistic sense, but everyone ultimately suffers when cooperation is undermined.
Part IV: Promoting Cooperation
If, as Robert Wright contends in The Moral Animal, “human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse,” then we know what we have to do. Most of us have the necessary equipment, and we appreciate tragedy when we see it, so that leaves the problem of constitutional ignorance. It’s that constitutional ignorance that leaves us vulnerable to reactive competitiveness and exploitation.
In fact, sociopaths are only peripherally our problem. The real danger that we face is the insidious spread of sociopathic behavior. Biological sociopaths may be with us always, but they are a very small part of the population—probably a handful in a thousand. It’s the proliferation of sociopathic behavior that threatens the future of our society, as it seems to have undermined other societies in the past. Sociopathic behavior is like the heat-generating electrical resistance in a computer chip. As heat builds up, the performance of the CPU begins to degrade—enough heat and it altogether fails.
In the abstract world of game theory, where computer simulations are used to test the successfulness of different games, there is a near perfect strategy for creating “success.” It’s called Tit-for-Tat. Tit-for-tat, devised by Dr. Anatol Rapoport, relies on two rules; cooperate on the first move, then on succeeding moves respond in kind to the other players’ moves. It can thank three properties for its success. First, it is nice. Nice rules — those that are never the first to defect — have been more successful than those that start by defecting. Second, it retaliates. It punishes defectors immediately, which helps it to resist exploitative strategies. Third, it forgives. It only remembers the previous move, so it stands ready to re-establish fruitful cooperation with any like-minded approach. Since tit-for-tat is very hard to push around, it makes sense to cooperate with it. It demonstrates a practical amalgamation of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” “an eye for an eye,” and “turn the other cheek.”
Two other games can marginally outperform Tit-for-Tat. But they do so at a cost that is significant when translated out of the mathematical world of computer agents into the real world of human beings. One is a modified version of Tit-for-Tat, which adds a third rule. If another player is obviously a sucker, take him for all he is worth on the first move. While this works in computer simulations, it is not a “nice” game. It gets its edge from defection. It is a short term strategy because in the real world perception does not always match reality; the apparent sucker turns out to be the bait in a trap. Even if successful, word gets around so the pool of potential suckers shrinks and non-defectors refuse to play at all. Unlike true Tit-for-Tat, when translated into daily practice, it creates spreading ripples of distrust and increases the risk inherent in cooperation. Raising risk reduces benefit, and as far as society as a whole is concerned, you are back on a downward spiral toward a sociopathic culture where increasing energy is devoted to artificially creating suckers for an, increasingly conspicuous, elite to exploit.
The second strategy that sometimes out performs Tit-for-Tat depends on collusion among a group of agents some of whom sacrifice themselves to force a Tit-for-Tat agent into the less productive adversarial mode of operation while pre-selected colluders continue to cooperate. While both of these games can beat Tit-for-Tat, neither has as high a long term potential for return on investment. In the real world they both suffer a burden of overhead that Tit for Tat does not. Identifying or creating suckers in the first case and enticing or coercing sacrifice in the second, carry significant social price tags in the real world. Both of these require energy that could otherwise be productively deployed.
It is in the best interests of society to extinguish exploitation. If exploitative economic, political and social systems dominate, people continually attempt to manipulate those playing fields in order to maximize the number of suckers available to be exploited. Contrary to conventional wisdom, suckers aren’t born, they are created. By default, suckers are ignorant and ignorance can be created through disinformation or deception. Systems that are clearly rigged create discontent and are eventually abandoned.
The unfortunate history of communes and other cooperative groups is well known. Most fail abysmally. A recent study published in the journal Science by German economists suggests why. It reveals that clear methods of punishing group members who become selfish or exploitative are essential to successful cooperation. Groups that punish defectors are more profitable than groups who do not. Since such punishment seems contrary to the idealism typical of cooperators, typically their efforts fail.
The researchers discovered that groups with few rules attract exploitative people, who then proceed to undermine the cooperation that initially made the group successful. On the other hand, communities that punish defectors and distribute power equally attract people who will enforce cooperative behavior, even at their personal expense. According to the study's senior author, Bettina Rockenbach, who was joined in the research by Bernd Irlenbusch, now at the London School of Economics, and Ozgur Gurek, "The bottom line of the paper is that when you have people with shared standards, and some who have the moral courage to sanction others, informally, then this kind of society manages very successfully." She observed that being exploited appeared to cause deep frustration and anger in most of the student participants.
Assuring fairness is critical to superior and sustained individual performance. Research on reward systems bears this out. Reward systems, especially “merit pay” systems that provide extrinsic rewards for specific outcomes, actually undermine both performance and morale. In No Contest and several successive books, Alfie Kohn has exhaustively reviewed the research on the effects of interpersonal competition and the reward systems that competition engenders. His conclusion, based on overwhelming data, is that the destructive effect of competition and systems of extrinsic reward, whether in the workplace or on the playground, far outweigh the putative, largely mythic, benefits. Kohn says, “To the best of my knowledge, no controlled scientific study has ever found a long-term enhancement of the quality of work as a result of any incentive system. In fact, numerous studies have confirmed that performance on tasks, particularly complex tasks, is generally lower when people are promised a reward for doing them, or for doing them well. As a rule, the more prominent or enticing the reward, the more destructive its effects.”
Kohn cites four reasons for the failure of extrinsic (pay-for-performance) reward systems. The first is that they are manipulative and patronizing. Maurice Holt notes that such systems shift “accountability away from politicians and administrators, who invent and control the system, to those who actually do the work." Secondly, they undermine collegiality—cooperating carries the risk that one might surrender an advantage. Systems that set up merit pay as a competition are especially destructive. As Kohn points out, “Merit pay based on rankings is about victory, not about excellence.” Third, artificial rewards imply that people could be doing a better job, but are choosing not to perform up to their potential. At best, this is confusing, at worst, it is insulting. Kohn says, “researchers have demonstrated repeatedly that the use of such extrinsic inducements often reduces intrinsic motivation. The more that people are rewarded, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.”
Finally Kohn refers us to the complications surrounding adequate measurement. He cites W. Edwards Deming, the premier authority on statistical quality control, who said, "The most important things we need to manage can't be measured." Lord Kelvin may have been correct when he said that, “We are what we measure,” but the problem is that we can’t fully measure what we are. Consequently, reward systems will always seem arbitrary, however well-intentioned. Kohn concludes that the best formula for compensation is to, “Pay people well, pay them fairly, and then do everything possible to help them forget about money.”
A large body of management research points to the critical role that fairness, equality and participation play in successful outcomes. It’s been known since the early 1960s that the surest way to secure long term improvements in performance is to give workers the information and power necessary to participate in the design and improvement of their work process. This has been an essential factor in the extraordinary successes of Japanese manufacturing. As we will see, superior performance seems to be the outcome of systems that focus attention on promoting participation and guaranteeing fairness. For instance, a recent major study indicates that democratization of decision making in corporate governance dramatically enhances profitability.
The study, published in 2003 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, compared the performance of corporate “dictatorships” to that of corporate “democracies.” According to its authors, Paul Gompers, Joy Ishii and Andrew Metrick,
Corporations are republics. The ultimate authority rests with the voters (shareholders). These voters elect representatives (directors) who delegate most decisions to bureaucrats (managers)… One extreme tilts toward democracy, reserves little power for management, and allows shareholders to quickly and easily replace directors. The other extreme tilts toward dictatorship, reserves extensive power for management, and places strong restrictions on shareholders’ ability to replace directors.
This very sophisticated study, which ranked 1,500 companies across 28 governance provisions, compared the performance of the 10% of firms with the most dictatorial governance against the performance of the 10% of firms with the most democratic governance. Through the 1990s, the returns from the stocks of the Democracy Portfolio outperformed the Dictatorship Portfolio by 8.5 percentage points per year. A difference of this amazing magnitude can mean the difference between extraordinary achievement and abject failure.
Another study compared the performance of companies that opened their accounting books and taught their employees how to understand them against companies that didn’t. Again, the more transparent companies outperformed those that closely held their accounting information.
Over and over, meticulous research tells us that fairness, equality and inclusiveness translate into superior performance. This doesn’t mean that cheaters can’t be successful. Political history and the whole structure of managerial capitalism deny such a Pollyanna conclusion. The average pay of corporate CEOs didn’t jump from 30 to 200 times that of their lowest paid employees in the last twenty years because the modern corporate system is fair. The dramatic and accelerating consolidation of the
Part V: Getting Specific
In effect, the degree of cooperativeness in a society is a measure of its intelligence. Nurturing in our society the fairness, equality and inclusiveness that makes a culture vigorous comes down to how we make decisions, both interpersonally and institutionally. Since a culture that does a good job of making and implementing excellent decisions is effectively more intelligent than a culture that consistently makes poor ones, a great deal hangs on how we make our decisions. A society is not so different from a brain; people are the cells. If all the cells in a brain are working efficiently together, you get good decisions, quickly, and with surprisingly little expenditure of energy. If the cells aren’t cooperating efficiently, it takes more energy and more time to make comparable decisions. Fortunately science has amassed over 100 years of research on decision-making. We even know enough now to list the minimum requirements for making wise decisions. Wise decisions are practical and produce positive results with a minimum of unanticipated consequences. In effect, this research gives us the capability to improve the “intelligence” of society by improving the quality or our decision-making.
The large volume and consistent message of this research makes it definitive in its core conclusion. It is a conclusion that is violently unwelcome to some (especially sociopaths), contrary to experience for many, and, most unfortunately, generally disregarded by Americans. With appropriate rules and processes to organize them, groups consistently make better decisions than the smartest individuals in them and do so just as quickly and often faster.
Alan Blinder, both an economist and a past vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, and
The implications of this and the rest of the research on group decision making are transformational, and not just for improving our ability to sustain a productive economy. Just the intuition that people in the aggregate are smarter than the smartest individuals was enough to inspire a small group of Englishmen to reconsider the relationship between people and their governments, and subsequently, in 1776, launch a revolution that created what is now putatively the most powerful country on earth. What a shame if their descendents, knowing to be true what the founders only suspected, continue turning away from that enlightened and enlivening wisdom.
In his book-length exploration of the research on group decision-making, The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki, pulls together information from several fields including economics, organizational dynamics, sociology, psychology, politics and even traffic control. He explores the characteristics of good group decision-making, contrasting them with the characteristics of collective decision-making gone wrong. What he discovers illuminates why it has become so difficult in our society to generate, and especially to implement, solutions that match the nature and scale of the problems they purport to address.
His review of the research illuminates a consistent set of core characteristics that characterize superior decision-making. These are inclusiveness, independence, diversity and synthesis. There is some complexity underlying these four simple words. Inclusiveness pertains to who participates.
Inclusiveness means that the people affected by a decision participate, either directly or indirectly, in making it. If relevant constituencies are inadequately represented, the likely effectiveness of intervention declines and the risk of blowback balloons. Yet, inclusiveness is increasingly unwelcome in our society. We have strayed very far from the United States of President Andrew Jackson, who complained that entirely too many Americans felt they had the right to walk into “their” White House, without an invitation, and sit with their muddy boots on the furniture. A mania for exclusivity is ingrained in the exploiter mindset promoted by sociopaths. As that mind set has come to dominate society, inclusiveness has come to seem naïve or even threatening. After twenty years of consulting, I am convinced that most people in positions of power in our country perceive themselves to be at odds with the people on whom their success depends. One of my colleagues reported a lunch conversation that he’d had several years ago with two executives from competing American car companies. He had joked that the competition between their companies was so ferocious that they probably shouldn’t even be in the same room at the same time, much less having a conversation over lunch. Both had laughed and one responded, “But we’re not in competition with each other, we’re in competition with our customers.”
In twenty years as a strategist consulting to senior executives, in only a handful of cases has this author managed to convince leadership to undertake planning as a communal process. In the cases where enlightened management has included its customers, vendors and other members of its strategic community directly in planning, the results have consistently been phenomenal by any measure of performance. But, even in the face of a flawless record of performance, the perceived threat attached to opening the decision-making process overwhelms the rationality of most leaders in our culture. In complete disregard of demonstrated success and massive research, no leadership I’ve worked with has been willing to formally institutionalize inclusiveness as part of their decision-making process.
The second requirement for wise decision-making is participant independence.
What greater threat is there to independence? A lie is disinformation—bad data with an agenda. Disinformation travels just as widely and easily as information. If allowed to, it crowds out good data—that’s what a lie is intended to do. When people take action based on conclusions derived from falsified or biased data, more often than not, the results are inappropriate. Behaving inappropriately is a defining characteristic of both ignorance and craziness. When we lie to people, we undermine their ability to be effective—we make their behavior less likely to be intelligent. If we surround ourselves with misinformed people, we damage the effectiveness of our own support system—our colleagues, friends neighbors or family—we risk damaging ourselves in the long run, whether or not anyone catches us in our lies. Misinformed people are not likely to make intelligent decisions. This is especially true for governing society, wherein the consequences of disinformation affect whole populations.
When reading history, we are astounded by the disinformation campaigns of the Third Reich, the militarists in
Nevertheless, in the
We are warned that people who forget their history are forced to relive it. When people grow up in a society that casually disregards or obscures its history, politicization of information becomes habitual for them—perception is treated as though it were reality, with predictable consequences.
The ancient Egyptians made a big deal of telling the truth. Apparently, they prized it above every other virtue. One can’t help thinking that there might be a connection between that cultural characteristic and the extraordinary longevity of their civilization. Perhaps a civilization that promotes, or even tolerates, lying condemns itself to degeneration and demoralization. The experience of living in a house of lies resembles trying to find a way through a carnival house of mirrors; frustrating and scary! Prolonged, the experience is deadening. If it is their experience of life, eventually most people will give the search for a way out or not try in the first place. Perhaps, from the perspective of vampiric elites, that’s the point.
The assault on independent thought pervades modern life. Ad hominem argument is casually accepted in public and professional discourse; if the facts don’t support your position, attack your opponent’s character. There are no serious social consequences for such misbehavior, not even shunning. Casual humiliation of people, dissing or roasting them, is considered a laudable form of entertainment. The kinds of verbal assault that would have occasioned a duel to the death at the beginning of our national history have become too common to be noteworthy. People with the integrity to point out wrong-doing (whistle-blowers), have to be protected by law and, in any case, they almost invariably suffer for their conscientiousness. Our corporate controlled media gives fawning attention to the bad behavior of celebrities, but generally, at best, ignores courage and self-sacrifice in the service of society. It is common to hear pundits equate the effectiveness of political leaders with their ability as enforcers—to command party line votes in Congress—rather than by their ability to promote the public discussion essential to the emergence of meaningful solutions to critical national problems.
The value of independence has been debased through the corporate controlled media by substituting polling for investigative reporting. This substitution of popular bias for critical analysis undermines social intelligence.
Consider how the issue of global warming has been treated. It is almost impossible to find a knowledgeable, independent expert who does not consider the research on global warming conclusive. How corporate media, government and other institutions deal with conclusions they don’t like is indicative of what is happening throughout society.
If leadership doesn’t like a conclusion, but feels obliged to address it publicly, they present all positions on the issue as having equal merit. Panels of “experts” are convened to present their views, and if there are three scientists on the panel to represent overwhelmingly definitive research, there will also be three people (often not even experts in the field) to present contrary, disingenuous or ad hominem discursions. This gives the impression that scientifically settled issues are controversial. Then public polls are taken to see what percentages of the population agree or disagree with the various positions presented. These polls are treated as though they have some relevance—as if, so long as a majority of people didn’t believe in gravity, one needn’t have any fear of falling. When enough people indicate a preference for the approved conclusion, this conclusion is formally elevated to the level of policy, law or custom. [Of course the earth is the center of the solar system. It’s obvious to the rest of us that the sun swings around the earth, what’s wrong with you Galileo?] Instead of assembling accurate information and presenting it to people in a way that they can fully understand it, the public is presented with a mirror that only reflects a carefully manipulated popular prejudice—political talking points rather than facts.
Diversity is the third requirement for making wise decisions. It improves decisions both by insuring that critical information isn’t overlooked and by expanding the options available for action. Repeated studies demonstrate that a mix of local knowledge and expertise along with input from “outsiders” improves the creativity and quality of decisions. As much as is practicable, more diversity is better. With the right process, good information reinforces itself while simultaneously driving out bad information.
This presupposes that the participants are independent. In circumstances in which people are disposed to “group-think,” more information can actually lead to bad decisions. Stock market speculators exemplify this. Constantly spun by vested interests and gaming the psychology of other investors, their stock portfolios consistently under-perform the market as a whole because they speculate rather than actually invest. Stock market bubbles are a classic case where, because of a failure of independence, more information actually exacerbates already unrealistic expectations. A wonderful study done by economists at the Experimental Economics Laboratory at Caltech, illustrates how this happens.
Students were given shares to trade and money to buy additional shares. They were given a fixed number of opportunities to trade (15). This means that the true value of the shares could be easily ascertained for each round of trading. The initial value of a share was $3.60. At the end of each trading period the students were paid a dividend of 24 cents (360/15) for each share that they owned. With each round of trading the real value of a share fell by 24 cents. There was no uncertainty about the value of a share as the trading counted down. Yet, when trading began the price of shares immediately jumped to $3.50 and stayed there until very near the end. Even when the actual value of the shares was only $1.00 some people continued to trade them at around $3.50. Most of the participants were speculating on the behavior of the other players rather than investing in the actual value of the shares. And that is the essence of stock bubbles. Bubbles expand as the proportion of non-independent investors—people speculating against the behavior of other investors—overwhelms the proportion of people independently investing in actual value. The bubble inflates. Speculators are the enemy of market driven economies, but as they are such easy prey for the professional sharks who exploit them, the financial system promotes speculative behavior rather than restraining it. From a vampire’s perspective, why wait for suckers to be born when you can farm them?
One of the great successes of modern societies has been the extraordinary diversity of information and insight available to citizens and decision makers. In the Middle Ages, the average European was exposed to about the same amount of information in a lifetime as someone today garners from a single edition of the Sunday New York Times newspaper. Recent estimates suggest that as of the beginning of the twenty-first century, the sum of human knowledge doubled annually.
One of the unappreciated values of so much information coming from so many sources is that it becomes harder to use disinformation to manipulate people’s perception of reality. Contrary to one of the most malevolent sociopathic memes in play, perception is not reality. Those who devote their attention to manipulating perception to confound reality run a greater risk of being caught in the act. The collusion of the accounting profession with managerial capitalists to promote the market speculation that culminated in the cascade of business collapses after Enron is one example. The Bush administration’s efforts to doctor economic reports and other government data that included firing senior civil servants who refused to go along with their disinformation campaigns is another. Since it is almost impossible to control the impact of diversity without limiting inclusiveness and independence, these three aspects of decision making create a harmony whose disruption is acutely noticeable to anyone paying attention.
Synthesis is the last essential requirement for wise decision-making. It is also one of the least understood and most counter-intuitive for Americans. The idea that apparently conflicting information and points of view can be synthesized goes against the grain of a society that believes in the infallibility of competition. Trial by combat seems to have a primordial hold on human consciousness. When baldly stated it seems a ridiculous a way for determining truth or creating practical solutions to pressing problems. Yet, we see it taken for granted, even lionized, throughout popular culture. Polarization, whether of ideas, groups, societies, nations or ideologies, is the default response to differences. This is especially ironic in the scientific community. While scientists don’t put on boxing gloves to defend their interpretations, even these acolytes of objectivity regularly substitute political maneuvering for relevant data to win their cases and their funding.
Synthesis can be accomplished through any number of methods. Some are simple, such as the one used to find a lost nuclear submarine. Others are more complex, for example, the process used to create a strategic action plan for “homeland security” for the State of
When the
Spurred by the sheer impossibility of the task, Craven came up with a novel approach. He created what has since come to be known as a decision market. First he described a wide range of scenarios for what might have happened to the Scorpion. Then he assembled a team of specialists from very diverse backgrounds. Some of them were submarine specialist and marine salvage experts, but others like mathematicians knew little or nothing about submarines or the ocean. Instead of consulting with each other, the members of his team were instructed to independently study the alternative explanations and rate their plausibility. They did this in the form of wagers. The team members bet on a wide range of likely factors including the cause of the sinking, how fast the submarine sank, the descent path, etc.
Using Bayes’ theorem, a mathematical model from the eighteenth century that tells how to update or revise beliefs in light of new evidence, Craven built a picture of what most likely happened to the submarine. Using this he was able to estimate a probable location for the wreck. This conclusion was a true synthesis of many points of view. It was also a brilliant one—the Scorpion was found a little over 200 yards from where his decision market predicted.
While the problem was anything but simple, the method used was almost as familiar as setting the odds in a horse race. The most surprising thing about this method of synthesis is how rarely it is used and how controversial it can be made to seem when it is.
The very first known study of group decision-making was undertaken as a fancy to prove what the experimenter thought he knew with certainty—that groups are less smart than their smartest participants. Francis Galton, the British scientist who undertook it in 1906 learned that his assumption was wrong. We have been relearning it for 100 years, but, as a society, we remain captive to the elitist myth that the best and the brightest will inevitably know best.
Our politically polarizing, party-driven system of governance has made achieving synthesis in public affairs seem like a fanciful dream of the European Enlightenment. Even though a process of political synthesis served to create the United States, ever since American politics has degenerated toward more and more closeted approaches to policy making. In spite of this unfortunate trend, wise decision-making in the public sphere is still possible.
Soon after the new federal Department of Homeland Security was established in response to the terror attacks of 9/11, the Governor of Maine,
To meet the requirement for inclusiveness, the consultants worked with the General to recruit credible representatives for every constituency likely to be touched by homeland security. The group that was ultimately convened ranged from small town fire chiefs, local and state police, business owners, public health bureaucrats and health workers, the State’s Attorney General, a deputy secretary of the federal Department of Homeland Security, newspaper editors, the Coast Guard, MEMA, to State legislators. In all, 81 people convened to represent roughly 100 constituencies.
Over four days, using software developed by the consultants, the participants created a vision, strategic objectives, strategic priorities, identified strategic and tactical constraints to achieving the vision and set out an agenda for action complete with defined measures of success. Governor King immediately adopted the plan on his return from vacation and it was posted on the State’s website. The Maine Emergency Management Agency immediately began implementing it.
The Governor’s plan came together quickly—concept to start of implementation took about four months. The actual planning took four days. The proposed approach was so transparent that it successfully surmounted partisan attacks that included the threat of a legislative boycott. It was so powerful that it led to a revelation that contradicted a critical pre-conception shared by most of the participants. Almost everyone attending thought that the primary bottleneck to achieving security was a lack of funding for “first responders.” Through the synthesis of their different perspectives, they discovered that the real bottleneck was a lack of knowledge about the nature of potential threats. Finally, the plan was so compelling that even when the money promised by the federal government to fund it’s execution was delayed for over a year, a new governor from a different political orientation took office, and FEMA funding in the State was reduced, it was still aggressively implemented.
This effort was so successful because the process used by the consultants adequately fulfilled the requirements for wise decision-making: inclusiveness, independence of participants, diversity and synthesis. At the end of the four day process, every participant backed the conclusion of the whole. There was no minority opinion to undermine the effort. The press shifted from being aggressively hostile to the effort to highly laudatory. When the plan was done, it really was complete in the eyes of all the participants and their constituencies. There were no political barriers left to implementing it.
This is the power of synthesis. It transforms differences, even entrenched positions, into constructive, creative consensus. Methods of synthesis exist for almost any kind of challenge from supremely complex technical issues to politically controversial social issues. When combined with the other elements of wise decision-making, it is unparalleled as a method for solving problems.
Wise decision-making is antithetical to the vampire mindset and agenda. It confounds all of the rationales for exploitative and elitist behaviors carefully nurtured over the course of human history. For sociopaths and people trained to behave sociopathically, the premises underlying wise-decision processes inspire dread, if not outright hostility.
For them, transparency is something to be avoided at all costs. They fear that effective, efficient democracy would justify an egalitarianism that would inevitably threaten their expanding and carefully protected prerogatives. They know intuitively what research has confirmed, that cooperation drives out competition. The corollary proposition, which they fear, is that cooperators, once mobilized, will drive out competitors. Since competition is all they know and domination through winning is their primary joy, they will do whatever is necessary to forestall that happening.
Part VI: Conclusion
A democratic society reinforced by a participatory, pluralistic culture has little to fear from sociopaths. For one thing, compared with the general population, they are relatively rare. Proportionately few have the wherewithal to gain the kind of influence that shapes societies. The cooperativeness, appreciation for diversity, and transparency on which a successful democracy depends all limit the damage that the conscienceless are likely to do. In such a milieu, sociopathic behavior is self-defeating. It is self-extinguishing, just as game theory predicts.
Unfortunately, democratic societies with cultures tolerant of elitism and authoritarianism are particularly vulnerable to subversion. Since making hierarchies—“pecking orders”—is genetically ingrained in most species including Homo Sapiens, every democracy is at some risk of being undermined by exploiters eager to leverage a relatively benign tendency into full-blown despotism. Exclusivity, cronyism, dynasticism, factionalism, tribalism and imperialism are all conducive to the promotion of sociopathic behaviors and provide cover for elite sociopaths. Vulnerable democracies have to take programmatic actions to protect themselves.
The P-Scan, developed by Dr. Robert Hare of the
Since elite sociopaths do the most critical damage to a society through their influence on its culture, a democratic society must take aggressive responsibility for its cultural values. This is especially difficult because so much of culture is tacit. It resides in a dimension outside of consciousness—a realm of unexamined assumptions. Asking people to evaluate their values is like asking them to analyze the air they breathe. Intangibles, even one as common as air, are difficult to objectify scientifically. How much harder is it for us to bring into consciousness and characterize freedom, fairness, compassion, responsibility, commitment, integrity and the many other values essential to sustaining a vibrant, self-renewing society?
In their book The Seven Cultures of Capitalism published in 1993, Charles Hampden-Turner and Alfons Trompenaars compared the value systems of the business communities of what were at the time the major capitalist countries; United States, Britain, Japan, Germany, Sweden, France, and Netherlands. Their research revealed that values, habits and cultural styles usually associated with social development turn out to be critical indicators of economic success.
Of the seven,
All three cultures believe in universalism: that there is a standardizable solution to any requirement. All are analytical: anything can be understood by reducing it to its individual elements. They are committed to individualism: that championing the interests of individuals first best serves the community. Their cultures believe that status should be determined through achievement: that reward is based on accomplishment. They champion equality: that all people should have equal treatment and consideration. Finally all three treat time sequentially: that raw speed of performance is more important than synchronization of effort. In only one critical value do the Swedes differ from the other two.
While the Americans and British are inner directed (one should rely on one’s own perception and judgments), the Swedes, along with the Japanese, Dutch and French are outer directed (it is essential to integrate the perceptions and judgments of others with one’s own thinking). This one difference turns out to be very important. By almost every measure of quality of life, civilized behavior and economic success,
According to Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars, the Swedes are the most successful of any culture in integrating individual freedom with social commitment.
More than any other culture examined in this book, Swedes begin with the individual, his or her integrity, uniqueness, freedom, needs, and values, yet insist that the fulfillment and destiny of the individual lies in developing and sustaining others by the gift of his or her own work and energy.
Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars convey how this plays out in day-to-day relations by recounting a Swedish fairy tale.
Ronia loved the son of a family with which her own family had a bitter feud. The other family lived geographically and symbolically on the far side of a deep gorge, separating the two houses. To miss one’s footing in crossing this gorge was certain death. Ronia’s true love visited her by stealth in her house but was discovered by her father, who seized the young man and imprisoned him, regarding his prisoner as a valuable hostage in the continuing feud. To prove her love, Ronia leapt to the ‘enemy’s’ side of the gorge, risking her life to save her relationship to her beloved and to equalize the bargaining power of the two adversaries.
Now that each adversary held the other’s child, the breach between them could be negotiated and the lovers united in marriage. This very Scandinavian version of Romeo and Juliet replaces tragedy with a sensible, negotiated solution initiated by the young upon their elders. It is a cultural parable of risk taking to achieve equality and fulfillment of desire.
Ronia lifts the two families from a relationship grounded in exploitation to the mutually advantageous “I/Thou” relationship necessary for the negotiation that makes productive cooperation possible. Given what we know from other areas of research, Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars conclusions from their cultural research will not be surprising.
We have seen that the ethos of competitive individualism, persons displaying themselves with the purpose of beating other individuals, is negatively correlated with economic development. We found no exceptions to this trend.... Moreover, persons directed from within, by resolute moral convictions, are ill adapted to kaleidoscopic world changes. The ‘conviction leader,’ of whatever gifts, cannot for long sustain an organization or country by feats of ‘brilliant’ manipulation.
Effectively, a nation is a group of people constantly making decisions and taking action. We know what is required to make wise decisions. We know what values are most productive. We already have conceptual and technical tools to support cooperative behavior.
Now we have to decide whether or not we want to live in a smart culture or a dumb culture. If we decide that the long term advantages of a smart culture outweigh the burden of responsibilities inherent in living in one, we need to start a movement capable of restoring equity, civility and inclusiveness in our society. Certainly our children will think well of us if we opt for smartness whether or not we see the benefits of it in our own lifetime. It has taken generations to distort and fracture American culture, but it doesn’t need to take generations to smarten it up. Cooperation is, if anything, more natural to human beings than competition. We just need to take ourselves away from bad influences.
The first step toward re-invigorating our culture is to require of ourselves, and those around us, that we be open in our dealings and play fair with each other—no more manipulative deception, no more exploitation—all for one and one for all. Doing the right thing just because it is the right thing will always be a risk, but great rewards demand great risks.
A society can tolerate the depredations of the occasional vampire, but a society of vampires eats itself alive.
