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kleinbl00  ·  601 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: July 27, 2022

I've read enough books about enough different things to start having original ideas.

One of the things made clear in Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test, Ariely's The Honest Truth about Dishonesty and Yuval Harari's Sapiens is that sociopaths do really goddamn well at capitalism. The competitive nature of the economic system combined with the penalties assessed by loyalty and ethics mean that those with none of the prerequisites of humanity are better at being inhuman.

And one of the things made clear by a dozen and a half books on economics is that capitalism does better for the general sweep of humanity than any other economic system, but that left to its own devices it fosters brutal inequality. The Chicago School has argued for 70 years that "brutal inequality" is not the problem of the economic system, because the economic system is not society. That's something that sets Chicago School economics apart from any other theory that came before - the idea that the participants in an economic system owed nothing to the system.

The result has been a system in which psychopaths become bosses. Full stop.

The Peter Principle was half right - people rise to the level of something. I don't think it's incompetence, though. I think it's viciousness. You rise to the level where you're meaner and more cunning than the people below you, but not as mean and cunning as the people above you. Which is not to say that sociopathic managers can't choose to be humanitarian, and many do. But we all have an ethical line we won't cross on principle. The more sociopathic you are, the better you are at pretending your line is closer to humanity.

Add in a little Jonathan Haidt, and conservatives have an advantage: they can dissociate anyone not from their tribe from humanitarian considerations. A liberal member of the Nazi party is going to have problems with Krystallnacht because they can empathize with the Jews. A conservative member of the Nazi party knows down to their very bones that they will never be Jewish and that Jews will never be humans. That's Union Carbide, Nestle, BP, any multinational you care to name.

Your boss has risen to the level where she can't support her schemes, so you're stuck with her evil. I'm sorry. That's the sort of shit that makes me very happy to not have a boss.