Have you lately felt like the world is changing too fast? Maybe the economy doesn’t feel that great anymore. Maybe you’re making less money, at least adjusted for inflation. Maybe you’re one of the many people that have been laid off recently. Or maybe you’re one of those that have been laid off multiple times in the last few years because companies are acting bipolar. Or maybe you find it hard to cope with child abusers being protected in the Epstein files.
Things of this sort have happened throughout history, but why does it feel like it’s accelerating?
This is all happening because the psychos are winning. How some of them would say, they are winning “bigly”. This is, of course, a personal opinion and should be treated as such.
What is a psycho?
Psychopaths are controlled, manipulative, and often highly successful. They are excellent at mimicking human emotions and can be very charming, even though they don’t actually feel empathy. They are calculated risks-takers who rarely leave a “paper trail” of their misdeeds.
Their main characteristics are:
- Disregard for laws and social norms.
- Deceitfulness (lying or conning others).
- Lack of remorse for hurting others.
- Tendency toward manipulation.
They don’t walk into a room looking like a villain, they walk in looking like the most interesting person there. They are excellent conversationalists. They have a knack for saying exactly what you want to hear.
A psychopath is essentially a professional actor who never leaves the stage. They “mirror” the people around them. If you are sad, they will perform sadness. If you are excited, they will match your energy. The “mask” often slips if you catch them off guard. You might notice their expression go from intensely emotional to completely blank (dead eyes) the second they think no one is looking.
In their mind, they are the protagonist and everyone else is an extra or a tool. They have an inflated sense of entitlement. They believe laws, office rules, or social etiquette are meant for lesser people. They often take credit for others’ work and feel zero shame about it. They truly believe they deserve the best of everything without putting in the actual human effort.
While most of us have “diffuse” attention (we care about the vibe of the room, how our friend feels, what’s for dinner), a psychopath has predatory focus. When they want something they lock in. They are incredibly observant of others’ weaknesses and will use those vulnerabilities to get what they want. If they have to step on you to get what they want, they don’t feel bad about it. To them, it’s just logic.
Because they don’t feel deep emotions (like love or awe), the world feels very grey to them. They are “adrenaline junkies” in a social sense. They might stir up drama, take massive financial risks, or lead double lives just to feel a spark of stimulation.
Physiologically, psychopaths are hard to rattle. If a balloon pops loudly behind a normal person, their heart rate spikes. A psychopath’s heart rate often stays perfectly level. This “coolness” under pressure is why they often thrive in high-stress jobs.
An interesting note from some AI I was asking about the topic while researching this:
“While Hollywood loves to portray these individuals as serial killers, most people with ASPD (Anti-Social Personality Disorder) aren’t violent. They are more likely to be found in boardrooms or high-stakes environments where “cold” decision-making is an asset, or simply living lives that are characterized by unstable relationships and legal trouble.”
Why are they ‘winning’?
I believe we are witnessing a perfect storm of different factors that is playing to their advantage. Economics and politics are playing a very important role in this. But more importantly and more fundamentally, the way in witch us, all other people, the non-psychos, have changed has played to their advantage. This evolution is not something that has occurred over the last few years, it slowly happened over decades and it compounded until… here we are. And we’ve let it happen like the boiling frog.
Let’s first talk about the economy. We live in the perfect economic environment for psychos. Since they are extreme risk-takers, they do that financially also. They make risky investments and they over-leverage, rising to the top in a bull market. These are behaviors that work for a while, but normally they would get severely punished in an economic downturn or a bear market. In such a situation they lose everything, including their visibility. Psycho billionaires can lose it all, psycho CEOs either put the company into the ground or at least lose their job because of the terrible situation they’ve put the company in. And this has obvious medium term effects. Investors learn not to give their money to psychos because they lost it. Company boards learn not to hire psychos to lead their company because last time they almost put it out of business. It’s a form of recency bias against psychos. But the problem is that recessions and bear markets have been outlawed. the financial crisis in 2008 has been so bad for everyone that governments took away the following: never again, whatever it takes. So we, as a society, keep bailing out the psychos every time there’s a problem in the economy. Attempts by the governments to make it easier for the average person are hijacked by these guys. If you’re not familiar with the Cantillon effect, it basically says that the rich benefit more from money printing. An increase in the money supply does not raise all prices simultaneously. Instead, those closest to the source of new money – such as banks, corporations, and the wealthy – spend it before inflation kicks in, while those at the end of the chain (workers/consumers) face higher costs, causing wealth inequality.
Their risky behavior keeps getting rewarded and it compounds. Investors are desperate for the most extreme psychos so that they get the best return on their investment. Your company keeps making record profits every quarter? Fire more people so that the growth accelerates. Your profits are growing at a rate of 20% yearly because of all the risk and leverage? The employees that are left after the layoffs only get a 2% raise. No remorse, no looking back. Otherwise, the other psychos might get ahead of you.
The fact that they are in charge of most of the economy has obvious downsides for the rest of us. The most obvious one is that they are accumulating wealth at an accelerated pace, leaving everyone behind with no remorse. This chart from the Federal Reserve shows the percentage of total net worth held by the top 1% over time.
Another consequence is the job market. It used to be the case that when a company was doing well, it would share that with it’s employees. But this has changed, I believe especially after the COVID-19 pandemic hit and people started working from home. It is partly push-back for what happened during the pandemic. I lead remote teams where it was obvious some developers were working 2 jobs and that’s indeed very frustrating. But they are transforming this into a sort of class war just to show who’s boss. The psychos are now in a synchronized effort to devalue humans and pay less for labor. They only synchronize because it’s in their shared interest, not because they enjoy collaboration.
Yet another, more dramatic consequence is what kids learn form this. Children are very good observers. They see what happens around them and they learn. And the key takeaway form the dynamics in our society is that this is how you get ahead in life. You must treat fellow human-beings like trash, step over dead bodies and basically behave like a psycho in order to be rewarded by society.
But you see, the psychos never have enough. Since they basically have no feelings, they cannot be happy. So it’s not like they get to 100 hundred billion dollars and they can just live happily. It’s not gonna happen at 1 trillion or 100 trillion. What they want is more. And the next step up from money is power over other people. Because you see, some desires cannot be fulfilled by money alone. For example, maybe you can’t stand a certain category of people and would like to see them dead. Or at least thrown out of your country. Well, in order to achieve such goals, you need to rule the country. This is why Silicon Valley went after political power. They are the richest people in the world, but they could not enforce their views upon the world. So they are buying power by buying the politicians. Getting such power has the nice side-effect that laws stop applying to you. Money gets you god status, more powerful than elected politicians.
But the psychos are not the only ones to blame. Some of this is of our own making. First, it’s natural for a psycho to lie with charm. But boy are we easily fooled. We can’t just play the victim. It is up to every adult in this world to recognize the psycho’s patterns and not let him succeed. What is needed is partly intelligence and partly emotional intelligence. I think more of the latter, but both can be trained and both are worth training.
There are certain patterns you can start recognizing in the media, both classic media and social media. Because it’s well known they own both. An example of a pattern is when you see a synchronized effort by TV show hosts and social media influencers to send out a specific message. Why are they trying so hard to convince you of something? Simply because that something is not true. A lot of times the exact opposite is true.
Another pattern is when the same media is trying to make you feel something: anger, resentment, resignation. Whatever the sentiment is, the purpose is to make you act a certain way. It’s a trojan horse into your mind. Into your soul. Be afraid of war so you pay more taxes and support the military complex. Be afraid of terrorists so you give up some of your freedoms. We need to monitor everyone 24/7 so the terrorists don’t come get you. See how everyone is evading taxes? You need to give up cash and adopt CBDCs, giving us full control over how you spend your money. They create a problem and put either a solution or a savior in front of you. Both are fake.
Another way in which we are facilitating them is the decline of real connection between people. People are spending less time with other people and more time in isolation. There’s probably a lot of reasons for this: the modern lifestyle, the 9-to-5, the technology with lots of distraction. Whatever the reasons are, we talk less to each other. And we hate each other. This is related to my previous point, these are feelings instilled into us. There’s not that many psychos and there’s lots of normal people, but divided we stand no chance. The middle class hates the lower class, the lower class hates the middle class, white people hate black people, black people hate white people and nobody notices the psychos.
What are they winning?
I would say not much, but they’re destroying the world along the way. As I already mentioned, the psycho doesn’t have a specific tangible goal in mind. The goal is more. More money, more power. It’s a race against other psychos, because each one wants to be the top guy, dominating everybody else, having everybody else’s life in their hands, deciding who lives and who dies. So they’re basically just fighting each other to climb to the top. There’s a good YT video on the topic if you’re interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqTWzHZ9vHM.
So even if they succeed, nobody gets anything out of it. They win, they get the money, the power, but they’re incapable of joy. So it’s all pretty meaningless in terms of ‘winning’.
Why is that a problem for the rest of us?
But there’s a lot to lose for the rest of us. The psychos have the power to change our lives and they are changing it for the worse. Because they basically view all other people as cattle. Most people feel empathy when they see somebody else in need or suffering for some reason. Either physical or psychological suffering. But the psychos only see humans as tools they can use to achieve their next psycho goal.
In the end, with the rise of AI, we might not be needed. Keep in mind that Sam Altman compared the power consumption of AI to humans needing food to grow. To quote him: “People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model – but it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes about 20 years of life – and all the food you consume during that time – before you become smart.” Let that sink in. What is the alternative? Not have the human in the first place? Given a finite amount of energy, should we be choosing between having AI and having people? To them, it makes no difference if the work gets done by a human or by a robot or a device. All it matters is that they are served.
You can argue it can be a gradual decline, that it will be just through people having fewer children. Even if you take that view and you don’t care about anything beyond your own lifetime, our lives are significantly more unpleasant than they could be. For one thing, with the immense amount of innovation and productivity gains we’ve had over the last 50-100 years, if all that progress would have been shared equally, the average human would have been much better off. Just look at this graph of the S&P 500 vs the median income:
So instead of both parents having to work, sometimes multiple jobs, if this progress would have been distributed more fairly, people could have worked significantly less, spent more time with family and friends, collaborating on ideas outside of work, getting more educated, accelerating progress even more. These things still happen to some extent, we don’t live in a complete dystopia, but it cold have been significantly better.
If it’s a problem, why is it not more discussed?
I believe this has to do with two points I mentioned in transit earlier, both of which the psychos have power over. One is that the media and social media are controlled by the psychos themselves. And while some voices are speaking up, especially in social media, they won’t have a lot of visibility. They will not be pushed by the algorithm, they will be demonetized.
The second is that people talk less to each other, they share ideas less. So even if there’s a significant mass of people that gets fed up with the psycho bullshit, they will never know about each other. So when you open your phone or your TV or your phone, you only consume the psycho agenda.
What can I do?
I’m a big advocate for people taking ownership of their own decisions and not blaming other people or their environment. Working for the psychos is such a decision. Any individual is free to choose not to work for companies lead by these guys. This has obvious financial downsides, but we do individually have that freedom. There is however a problem. The psychos control a big majority of the world’s wealth and they synchronize very well. So they can influence the labor market in a big way. In the last few years, big S&P 500 companies have been laying off workers even with their profits and stock prices reaching new all time highs every year.
We’ve all gotten used to staying in our place, minding our own business. But if each individual behaves in such a way, who is going to speak up? Who will stand up for truth? For justice? We each must do that. Talk to other people. Express your frustrations. Talk about how things could be. How they should be. There is right and wrong. There’s good and there’s definitely evil out there. Choose a side and do your best to promote it.
Is it easier to ignore all of it? I don’t know, maybe. But I feel like not all of our existence should be about taking the easiest route. Comfort is not the ultimate goal. You should decide who you are, what you care about, and stand for it.
Don’t give up on the truth. The more bullshit and lies out there, the more valuable truth is. So speak it. Speak it often and speak it when it matters most. The more honest we are, the more we stand on the right side, the more out of place they feel. They probably don’t care, but they won’t feel welcome either.
Trust other people unless they prove they are not trustworthy. This is something very insidious. You see, the psychos are very successful and very visible. And they’re definitely not trustworthy. Your brain might have a tendency to infer that all people are like that and some of them randomly raise to the top. But you see, they are at the top exactly because they are psychos. So there’s still a lot of good in the world. Trust other people and be trustworthy. If they divide us, they win.
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