In an era of psychos we must learn from sociopathy
If the world seems like it is behaving as if we are run by psychopaths, there is a good reason for that. We need to learn the lessons of the modern study of sociopathy - and apply them.
We've got two rescue turkeys, Bubble and Jock. They are delightful creatures and I love them. This time last year Bubble disappeared into her house and came out a month later with a wee baby turkey. This was the cutest, most adorable thing you ever saw.
But if you know anything about turkey babies you will know that they are also clueless and incredibly curious. The attrition rate among young turkeys is high. The wee soul snooped around a bucket of water next to a raised path, fell in and died. Heartbreakingly, Bubble sat next to the bucket and didn't move for 48 hours. It was devastating.
Bubble and I share no language – yet we shared that grief intensely. I shared her grief. I still find it painful to think about. She has been sitting on eggs for a few weeks; I am walking round the garden with the eyes of a baby turkey right now. I'd install baby gates if I could.
This raises the following question: what the fuck is wrong with everyone? Or not everyone, but too many people for me to feel comfortable about our species. Where is your empathy? How can you not care?
What is wrong with Israelis? How can they allow this to be done in their name? What is wrong with Reform voters? You think desperate children seeking a fighting chance, risking their lives to get to a safe place, are your enemy? What on god's earth is going on with Labour who seem to hate (in no particular order) poor people, old people, the disabled, Palestinians, bats, newts and environmental campaigners.
What is wrong with the extremes of each side in the gender wars and can't they drag out a word about those on the other side which doesn't drip with hatred? How can you run a social media company and sleep at night with what it is doing to our children? How can you make money out of climate change denial and ignore the impact on the developing world?
How can you be a corporation of any sort, scouring the land for whomever is weakest and finding ways to make them as poor as you can? How can you see the 80th anniversary of the Second World War and conclude that flag-waving, foreigner-hating far-right nationalism is the obvious response?
There is an answer to all of this and we can find it in sociopathy.
If you are a neurologist or a specialist you'd be able to correct my interpretations, but I find them useful. I became interested in sociopathy more than a decade ago when I increasingly realised I was coming across them in politics – a lot. That was also the era when the thesis on 'corporations are psychopaths' was still live. So I read quite a bit and still do.
This is the very simple summary of my findings; basically there are about one in ten to about one in 20 people who are born with a brain which does not function exactly like the brains of the rest of us do. This only became properly clear once we had various forms of brain imaging technology. You can actively see different neural activity.
Sociopaths are born with a lower than usual response rate in a part of the brain which is associated with shared feelings. This is what 'lights up' when the rest of us feel empathy because we are shown a picture that generates either distress or warm feelings in us, but not for those with 'sociopathic brains'.
That does not mean they are bad people. It means nothing of the sort, any more than any other 'neurodivergent' brain represents 'goodness' or 'badness'. The vast majority of sociopaths go on to be positive, constructive members of society. This is, very simply, because they learn through experience what most of us are born with.
A sociopath in a happy family no more wants to upset his or her mother (I'll come back to 'his or her') than anyone else. They just need to learn what unhappiness looks like while the rest of us can just 'sense it'. But they do learn (quickly), and they become as capable of understanding and demonstrating empathy as any of us. Just differently.
If, on the other hand, they experience trauma or extreme disruption when young or fail to grow the stable attachments in early years which save most of us, or if for whatever reason they learn to enjoy the suffering of others, this all goes in a very different direction. I think of these as psychopaths, or 'non-socialised sociopaths'.
To be clear, I've had good friends I am virtually positive were sociopaths. They were lovely, good company, just different in some ways. I've worked with god knows how many people professionally I'm pretty sure were sociopaths and we were regularly on the same side. Sociopaths have weaknesses, but it also confers some great strengths – not least single-mindedness.
And one of the big recent discoveries is that rates of sociopathy in men and women are almost certainly very similar. It's like autism – we diagnosed it as a 'male condition' so all our diagnostic tools were based around male behaviours like coercion, dominance, gaslighting or lack of interest in others. Women sociopaths behave differently. They are much more likely to manipulate, tell lies about others, talk behind people's, turn people against other people and so on.
“Sociopathy is both a real condition and also a perfect metaphor for our institutions - we need to learn from one to understand the other”
What we have seen so far is that sociopathy is only a starting point. It is not a life sentence, it is a condition that is then shaped by environment. This takes us to corporations and big organisations like the military – or for that matter any organisation. By definition they aren't human and so can't have 'automatic empathy'. What matters is what environment we place them in.
In the era of Rockefeller and Carnegie, big business was explicitly psychopathic. It did not believe it had any duty to anyone but its owner. And they became awful, hated institutions that led to a revolution. Roughly, big business had a conscience transplanted into it. That conscience was called 'a trade union'. Like a loved sociopath baby (I'm uncomfortable writing that, but you get the idea), an environment was created which enabled big business to be a better version of itself.
Likewise, we had two world wars and there resulted very little sentimentality towards militarism, generals, bombs and violence. As a young man I used to have lunch with the guys of the British Legion on Remembrance Sunday. I'll tell you what; the sceptical way they talked about the Second World War (not glorious for them, necessary but awful) would get them thrown out of Reform.
Disgracefully, it was Gordon Brown who did most to import the glorification of militarism into Britain with his spurious 'Armed Forces Day'. We used to see war as occasionally necessary but always ugly and expected warmongers to be held in check as best as possible. That was what made our attitude to war and violence healthy. We have taken away that environment.
What I'm trying to get across here is that we have now entered the Age of the Sociopath. All these balancing institutions and attitudes that took the inherent risk of sociopathy found in all institutions and shaped it for the better have been removed. War and selfishness are now ubiquitous and viewed uncritically.
The only thing that is venerated across our media is a self-centred mindset that believes in me first and dominance over all. Stop the Boats! They're not real people. The only good Palestinian is a dead Palestinian. Oil and gas are a human right and those that die from climate change should have lived somewhere else.
Sociopathy is both a real condition and also a perfect metaphor for our institutions. We need to learn from one to understand the other. Big business will by nature destroy anything if that makes profit and anyone who stands in the way of that profit will also be destroyed. Militaries will expand and kill if they are not kept in check. We will all go along with it if no-one reminds us to look in our hearts.
If you see a turkey sit by its dead child for 48 hours and don't feel what I felt then, first, I feel for you. My pain is part of my humanity. I was intensely sad but that sadness reminds me I'm alive, makes me better. But I don't blame you – either you are in a small category of people who needed help to find real empathy and you didn't get it, or you were born with empathy and you've been trained to ignore it (because empathy is 'girly', or 'sandal-wearing shit' or its not 'how you get ahead').
Until we understand this we will struggle with our big problems. Prisons are filled with non-socialised sociopaths. Our care service seems designed to take children born into poverty who need help and transport them towards prison, abandoned. And because they didn't get that support when they were young, we now write them off for life. No rehabilitation for sociopaths.
But it's climate change, and its poverty, and violence against women, and bullying. It's also Ticketmaster and Facebook and Elon Musk and Donald Trump and the IDF and the extermination of Gaza. All – all – are functions of something that looks exactly like sociopathy.
If we are all to survive we need to find it where we see it and create environments that lead us and our institutions and organisations away from it. No more talk of 'just be nice'. No more summits to 'save democracy'. Find where we are failing and put back in place the checks and balances that made us better people. It is our only chance.