WE must stop the Dark Triad or we’re Done for

There is a cluster of behaviours which have come to be known as the Dark Triad and they have overtaken the world. If we are to save ourselves we need to find ways to fight back.

I would like to propose a change be made to the children's fable Three Little Pigs. Basically the plot stays identical – it's a technical discussion of construction technologies and how they relate to environmental change (in this case a wolf). I'm not looking for a reimagining from the emotional perspective of the wolf or to use it to explore identity and belonging.

Nope, it's only nine words I want added; “The Big Bad Wolf displays the Dark Triad traits”. Of late I think that one of the most fruitful things we could possibly do to save western society is rapidly educate people on the psychology of destruction and why it is, well, destroying everything.

This isn't all neat, but it is simple. The details require a lot of nuance but the idea is broad brush. It's the difference between psychiatry as a metaphor and neurology as a science (we don't actually get 'brain freeze' and 'overwhelm' is a sensation, not an identifiable brain activity, for example). So let me talk over what this is, why it is important and how we might use this to, well, save us all.

First, what is the 'Dark Triad'? This is an amalgamation of three personality factors which often appear together at the same time and reinforce each other. In popular parlance think manipulative, egomaniacal psycho.

The technical terms are more precise. The three aspects of the Dark Triad are a willingness to manipulate others towards your own goals (Machiavellianism), an indifference about hurting others in the process (sociopathy) but a burning need to centre yourself in every conversation (narcissism).

All these terms are both precise and imprecise. The rate of sociopathy in society may potentially be as much as one in ten (one in 20 is more usually cited) and that is a vast range of real-world behaviours. Narcissism and solipsism are very similar but not the same (narcissists need to be seen positively, solipsists just need to be seen) and they do not neatly divide.

And all of us show some Machiavellian traits – you should have seen the length of deceit I had to go to to get aubergines into my son's tea when he was younger (we'd get them in a veg box so they had to get used). So this isn't pregnancy; it's not binary.

Plus you don't really need to have all three traits to show all three traits. Right now in the US there are thousands of young men online who've been told they ought to have these characteristics and so are faking them. Some genuinely Dark Triad types don't have one of the characteristics. For example, Donald Trump is far, far too visibly needy to really be a proper 'Dark Triad', but he acts like it because his dad truly was Dark Triad and Donald is pretending to be his dad.

So let's not get into semantics. I can think of a particular character I have to work with sometimes who is classic Dark Triad but for whom I do not have any official diagnosis. That doesn't matter, because what isn't in doubt is the behaviour.

And that is our global problem. When you isolate the behaviours that the Dark Triad displays, you start to realise that in the US they all fall under a sort of blanket term – 'freedom'. That is how DT-types in the US brand themselves.

The behaviours now are so ingrained we forget they have alternatives. I have a duty to do what is right by me and mine (no you don't, you're choosing your own amoral sense of selfishness and making it sound like an imperative). I don't want my choice taken away from me (don't regulate my behaviour so I can do as much damage as I want and let someone else clean up).

My first duty is to make profit for my shareholders (which is only because I insisted that it be made my first duty – it could have been 'make sure the company is strong for the next generation of owners, workers and customers' like in the olden days of before 1983). You can't beat human nature (so why do you spend so much money trying to do exactly that, in the wrong direction?).

I could keep going on like this but you will just keep recognising 'everything that exists now'. Fake-it-'til-you-make-it is Dark Triad as could be. Wife beaters standing in masks in the street claiming to be protecting women is far end Dark Triad. Anti-net zero is peak Dark Triad, as is drill baby drill or anything else which posits profit over survival (looking at you AI).

AI is critical here, because the darkest corner of the Dark Triad is Silicon Valley. Remember when we were all seduced by 'a better future'? Is that what they produced? The whole of the US tech industry is based on 'move fast and break things' and there is simply nothing that better encapsulates the spirit of the Dark Triad.

It controls and manipulates us and it has zero interest in the harm it does us or others. In fact they celebrate it. Sam Altman is like a poster boy for the Dark Triad and it never occurs to him not to say out loud 'bad things have to happen to you if good things are going to happen for me'.

The whole internet and social media world is now Dark Triad. Picking on the Andrew Tates is way too easy; every single person on the internet seems to accept that lying and exaggerating and play-acting is all completely fine as long as it makes you money. There is very little good on the web now. I mean, just read about Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg and feel cold, escalating fear. They control your life.

“We are still in the celebratory phase, egging on the psychopaths and narcissists”

Everything else follows. Monopolies and merger policy is Dark Triad, but then so is the entire (largely fraudulent) 'economic growth' ruse. The immigration debate is Dark Triad. The school exam scramble with its expensive tutors and complaining to the school because you're middle class and expect your child to have advantages over others is Dark Triad.

And the entire debate about defence is Dark Triad as could be. Literally one million parts 'prepare to destroy our enemies' to zero parts 'let's negotiate a global de-escalation agreement like we used to and which saved us from nuclear annihilation'. And hidden in that statement is the cause – and the solution.

When did we stop negotiating solutions rather than trying to bomb them out of existence? When did we change all the economic governance rules? When did we reverse out of the old world where some basic concern for your fellow man (it was gendered back then) was not considered a bad thing?

Thatcher. We all regularly misread what happened even though she told us out loud what she was doing. We all still think it was a programme of economic reform and it wasn't. As Thatcher made clear, that was the tool. The goal was to engineer our souls to her specification – Dark Triad. In fact no phrase could better encapsulate the real meaning of the Dark Triad than 'there is no such thing as society'.

That means 'all that exists is me and barriers to what I want'. Everything is secondary. And in the parlance of AI, it is self-recursive, it builds on itself. Sociopathy encourages more sociopathy by normalising it. Narcissism which is not checked spreads. And once you believe those things, being manipulative on your way to getting what you want is a duty to yourself.

This self-driving, self-reinforcing proliferation of Dark Triad behaviours has an end point. It goes like this; first, there is no such thing as society, then eventually there is no such thing as 'anyone who isn't me'. I struggle to get across to people that when the AI nutters (the hardcore believers who drive its development and are so Dark Triad it is literally scary) say they want to replace humans, it is literal.

They see other humans as a waste of resource, a pointless mass of flesh to be farmed for as long as it is necessary and disposed of later. When they talk blithely about a superintelligence replacing humans they are just little boys wrestling with their mortality, imaging that when they end, everything else might as well end. Look at Musk; even his children are a transaction for him, not a future.

It's not just the right. Identity politics is Dark Triad. The identarian efforts to destroy and exclude people who do not reinforce their own internal monologue is as Dark Triad as could be. It wasn't only some of our souls Thatcher reengineered.

Look out your window or at a newspaper (I know those both sound quaint now – check your feed). See everything that is collapsing? All of it? Every bit of it is because the Dark Triad won and it literally wants to tear our society apart because it hates society, duty, sharing, empathy, everything. It is like a beast not in us but outside of us which wants to consume us – and we have been persuaded to let it.

How? Remember the Silicon Valley promise of a better world? That is because, like a child abuser, the Dark Triad grooms us, seduces us, makes itself sound virtuous, good. But only for as long as it has to. When the abuse starts, the seduction ends.

But the answer can be found a few paragraphs back as well. We used to negotiate our way out of crisis like rational beings, not emotional spasms in clothes. We used to have lots and lots of normalised social conventions for moderating the Dark Triad. And the Dark Triad knows it. That is why its disciples have been strategising for ages on how to get rid of them.

For example, via the algorithm. By making you think you chose the abuse you get online you normalise it as 'part of life'. It didn't use to be. Facebook has entire marketing departments there to explain to you that you always wanted nude pictures of your teenage children spread all over the internet – because of how much you love freedom and want to be connected.

In fact Facebook shows how this happens. Slowly, slowly, the creep from 'just trying to connect you to your friends' to 'here, have some Nazi propaganda'. To get back we need to replace what has been lost, those moderating forces. Sociopaths need stopped, not encouraged. Much can be done through resorting rules, regulation, the law.

But we also need to reengineer the souls Thatcher distorted into ugly, selfish caricatures of family-as-excuse-for-psychopathic-behaviour. And to do that we need to tell people this has all happened. We are still in the celebratory phase, egging on the psychopaths and narcissists. I mean, go and look at a Manchester City fan site and check for signs that anyone thinks breaking the rules is wrong.

And to have a chance of fighting that fight we need to start turning the villains back into villains again. To do that we need to start explaining why they're such a threat to us. And to do that we need to name our pain, shine a light on the dark corner of our broken psyche where these people hide until they can find a way out. We need to fight back against them.

So the kids need to know that the Big Bad Wolf isn't the goodie, and we need to explain to them why. Then we need to help people understand that Darth Vader and Nigel Farage are on the same side.

They fought a campaign of immorality to cast our world in the darkness they have inside them. We need a campaign of morality to fight back.