The world we live in today is structured in such a way that the most aggressive among us always end up on top.  According to Darwin, this is the natural order of things.  Survival for the fittest.  From politics to business to geopolitics to the workplace, the people who are willing to do anything to get ahead are the ones who ultimately end up winning.  The ones who are the most relentless, persistent, aggressive, ruthless, cunning, willing to lie, cheat and bribe in pursuit of a goal are the ones who end up on top.  The world rewards such behaviour.  But if you think about it, is this the ultimate way for our world to be structured?  Because let’s face it, who among us are the ones most likely to thrive in such an environment?  Who are the most aggressive people among us?  It’s the psychopaths!  They are the ones who have no boundaries, no limits to what they’re willing to do, no pesky conscience to bother them in the pursuit of their goals and no empathy or guilt to prevent them from destroying anything or anyone who stands in their way.

Who are the most aggressive people among us?  It’s the psychopaths!  They are the ones who have no boundaries, no limits to what they’re willing to do, no pesky conscience to bother them in the pursuit of their goals and no empathy or guilt to prevent them from destroying anything or anyone who stands in their way.

When we hear the word psychopath, most of us immediately think of is the Ted Bundys and the Hitlers of this world i.e., murderers, rapists and the criminals of society.  But today we know that psychopaths can be very high functioning individuals and can live their entire lives without being detected or called out for who they are.  They are masters at creating convincing façades that hide the truth of who they are.  While they spend most of their days dishing out emotional and psychological trauma to the people around them, they will nonetheless keep their psychopathy hidden behind charming personas and the image of success.  Unfortunately, we have been conditioned to admire outward displays of success to the point that if someone is successful, we believe that they are worthy of admiration and emulation.   And psychopaths can be among the most successful people due to their driven nature and single-minded focus on getting ahead.  They are well represented among CEOs, politicians, lawyers, surgeons and business owners.  You will also find them in professions we have been taught to revere such as policemen, the military and believe it or not, church leaders.  Hence the kind of abuses you hear about in churches for example the paedophilia in the catholic church or the abuse of children in the Canadian residential schools.

How did we end up having a system that is rigged to favour psychopaths without us even being aware of it?  First and foremost, psychopaths are the ones who have been writing the rule book.  It is said that history is written by the winners and if the winners are psychopaths, then they will manipulate the narrative to suit themselves.  So, for example, the imperialists who go out and conquer faraway lands and subdue people through brutal force become our heroes.  The countries that take all the resources on the planet and leave everyone else starving and poor become the admired countries while the poorer countries are despised and blamed for the condition they are in.  The billionaires who siphon all the wealth leaving everyone else to make do with the little that is left over are held up as the models of success that we should all strive to emulate.

Secondly, psychopathy is a condition that hides in plain sight because we are not trained to see it.  Psychopaths have an outward, superficial charm that easily deceives most people.   They are the people who tell the funniest and best stories and are fun to be around.  But when you spend enough time with them, you start noticing that they are not really who they say they are.  You will notice that their behaviour is not aligned with the way they portray themselves.   You may notice how they bully people and emotionally abuse people and how they seem to induce fear in those working close to them.  Psychopaths have an uncanny ability to abuse without the object of the abuse being aware that they are being abused.  They may make you feel that you are special to them but suddenly turn on you and attack you.  This causes your mind to go into denial because you cannot believe that the person you’ve come to trust could turn on you so ruthlessly.  Psychopaths are also pathological liars.  They will say one thing today and later completely change the story.  They lie so much and change the story so much that they are not even able to keep up with the lies themselves.  And so, their reality just keeps changing to become whatever is most convenient at the time.  If confronted, they will just create a new version of events and the new version becomes the new reality.  You can never win with them because their version of the story is the truth and that’s the end of the story. 

Below are some ways in which psychopaths have managed to infiltrate the system and rig it in their favour allowing them to dominate the planet to the detriment of us all:

Politics

The political systems in most parts of the world are designed to favour the most aggressive, rewarding them for their ability to do whatever it takes to win, their ability to eliminate the competition, their ability to mount aggressive campaigns, their willingness to bribe voters, etc.  Even in countries with so-called ‘mature’ democracies, the most aggressive people still manage to find their way in and rig the system in their favour.  Money talks in politics and those who have the most of it can influence the outcome of elections.  You end up with situations where people are manipulated into seeing themselves as being on one side of the divide in opposition to those on the other side.  What they don’t see is that it doesn’t matter which side wins, the elites ultimately end up winning and everyone else loses.  Voters are manipulated into thinking there are only two options and they must choose the lesser of two evils.  We are manipulated into thinking that the obscure candidate who represents the kind of qualities we want is a loser not worth wasting our vote on.  And so, we continue voting in the same aggressive types because we don’t see any other option.  I think it would be better to abstain from voting than to vote for someone you don’t want just because they represent the lesser evil.

Business

Does profit have to be the only motive in business?  We have been taught that profit and maximizing shareholder value is the only motive for business, but is this a sound idea?  What is the result of this ideology?  It’s what we see today, businesses mindlessly pursuing profits at the expense of integrity, the environment and their employees.  People are viewed not as human beings but as human resources.  Have you ever wondered where that idea came from?  If you put human beings at the same level as capital or land and you see them as resources, then you have a right to treat them as a resource and not as human beings.  You have a right to ruthlessly cut down on staff whenever the need arises to save on costs.  You have a right to pay them as little as possible because it is none of your concern how they survive on the little you pay them.  Your greatest concern is keeping as much as possible for the owners of the business.  You don’t need to be concerned about what happens when they fall sick because you don’t need to think of a resource in such terms.  You don’t need to concern yourself with what happens when they give birth.  You don’t need to concern yourself with how they manage to get to work at 8 am every day and how they get home when they leave at 5 pm.  You don’t need to care for them, you just need them to work and deliver the results you need.  You view them as workers, not partners.  But if you think about it, is it possible for a company to achieve anything without every employee doing whatever it is they are supposed to do?   From the top person to the lowest-ranked person, everyone has to play their part for the business to run smoothly.  If the cleaner doesn’t clean the office, can we work?  Employees should be seen as partners, not as resources that are there to serve the owners who see themselves as the important ones. 

Workplace

Starting from the point of recruitment, the system is completely rigged to favour the most aggressive.  When we recruit, especially for leadership positions, we look for the most confident, outgoing personalities and we overlook the more gentle, reserved people as if they have less to offer.  The person who can express himself or herself with confidence and charm easily finds their way into leadership positions.  What about career advancement, who is the most advantaged?  It’s the most aggressive and assertive people.  The more willing you are to show off your achievements, flaunt your credentials and take credit for other people’s work, the more likely you are to climb up the corporate ladder.  So, the system ends up supporting the most aggressive people and by the time you reach the top of the ladder, you find narcissists and psychopaths being very well represented.  I think it should be possible to weed out narcissists and psychopaths from the very beginning of the recruitment process.  There are psychological tests that are designed to detect these traits and these should be administered at the point of recruitment.  Then you select out the most aggressive before they even come in through the door.  Our processes for promoting staff should also be more discerning, not just looking for the most outspoken people and assuming they are the only ones capable of leading.  Even that very soft-spoken, timid person given a chance and the right training would surprise everyone with just how capable they are to lead teams and add value to the organisation.

I think it should be possible to weed out narcissists and psychopaths from the very beginning of the recruitment process.  There are psychological tests that are designed to detect these traits and these should be administered at the point of recruitment.  Then you select out the most aggressive before they even come in through the door. 

Geopolitics

The world is structured in such a way that some countries are extremely wealthy while others wallow in poverty.  And it is accepted that this is just the way the world is and it can be no other way.  The ones with the biggest weapons have a right to take all the resources on the planet and leave everyone else to scramble for the few remaining crumbs.  The most developed countries have a right to forcefully change regimes and foment wars in the name of bringing democracy to the people.  They have a right to do this while loudly condemning others for human rights abuses.  They have a right to bomb other countries and call these ‘righteous strikes’ because everything they do can only be righteous.  They have placed themselves in positions whereby they judge everyone else’s actions but no one can judge their actions.  They have given themselves the monopoly of violence in the name of maintaining world order.  Does it seem hypocritical that western nations consider it acceptable to have ever-increasing numbers of nuclear weapons but consider it a crisis when countries like Iran or North Korea acquire these weapons?  What makes it okay for them to have nuclear weapons while everyone else is not allowed to have them?  Is it because they are the most responsible and unlikely to start nuclear wars?  No, the opposite is true; they are the ones continually starting wars in different parts of the world and therefore they are the last people anyone would want to have nuclear weapons.  The hypocrisy is simply mind-boggling.

Mainstream Media

What is the role of the mainstream media in rigging the system?  It is to normalize all this.  It is to report on all these things as if they are normal and that is just the way the world is.  The media teaches us to be observers of events, not participants.  We are taught to be passive consumers of news, never really looking too closely at what is happening or questioning what we are told or analysing things too deeply.  We are given a certain worldview in which there are people out there who are the experts, who know what is happening and who are the deciders of what happens.  The media divides the world into those who make the news happen and the rest of us who are the consumers of news.  So, if for example, war breaks out somewhere, we are supposed to just assume someone somewhere had a good reason for deciding that the war should start.  We don’t question this.  We don’t ask what are the issues, why isn’t diplomacy being used, why do some countries have the power to veto things at the UN?  This is the role of the media, to help you accept that the world created by psychopaths is normal and there is absolutely nothing to see here, just go back to your daily grind and let the important people make decisions on your behalf.  The media also keeps us distracted while important things are happening on the world stage.  They distract us with sports, entertainment, celebrity news, etc.  We become the proles who concern ourselves with mundane things while big brother manages world affairs.

Education

Our education systems teach us from a very tender age that life is a competition and we should view others as our competitors.  We are taught from a young age to see ourselves as competing with other people and this is done through exams and ranking systems and reward systems, etc.  Our education systems program us to accept the idea that the person who wins is somehow better than everyone else and therefore deserves to be rewarded.  This is called meritocracy, whereby you need to prove yourself worthy of the good things in life.  In other words, just the fact that you are a human being does not qualify you to enjoy the good things in life.  You have to prove your worth.  Instead of education systems being places where our creativity is allowed to flow in whichever direction it wants to flow, we make it places where we have to prove our worth as human beings.  So, we learn to aggressively pursue academic excellence as this is what guarantees that we will have the best lives afterwards.  Instead of each person seeking to discover what makes them tick, what they enjoy doing, what they excel at, we have this competitive spirit out of which the most aggressive emerge as the best people.  Everyone else then has to make do with second class lives because the system is already separating and weeding out the weak and rewarding the strong.  Is this Darwin at work or is the system deliberately rigged to work this way?  Is it survival for the fittest or is it the most aggressive creating a system in which they are the most likely to thrive?  We need to question some of these very deeply held ideas and ask ourselves whether they are true or whether they have been made true by the ones who make the rules.

Hollywood

Hollywood plays a very important role in creating a reality in which the most aggressive people are the most admirable people.  They portray an upside-down world in which the guy who goes shooting everyone in pursuit of something is to be admired.  The cop who turns the city upside down, destroying property and killing people to catch the ‘bad guy’ is an admirable person.  Soldiers who go to fight wars are heroes.  The idea that we should thank soldiers for their service and give up our seats for them is presented as a valid idea.  So, we learn to view things in an upside-down way, where wrong becomes right and right becomes wrong.  Those who refuse to fight wars are cowards and wanting peace is a cowardly thing.  And what about all the dystopian movies they keep churning out?  Have you ever noticed that Hollywood never imagines a future in which the world is in a utopian state?  It is always a future in which the world has been destroyed by some catastrophic event.    It’s always a future where some people wallow in poverty while others exist in some technologically advanced state.  Hollywood never seems capable of imagining a good future for humanity, it is always the worst possible vision of a dystopia that no one would ever want to exist in.

Could our world possibly be structured differently such that the system favours the majority who are just normal people trying to live their lives?  I believe this is possible when we start to understand how the system is rigged against us by the minority.  We need to reject the idea that human beings are inherently aggressive beings and that competing with each other is a normal state for us to be in.   We can cooperate and create a world in which everyone thrives.  There should be no need for anyone to have to prove their worth.  If we could just see through the programming and change our mindset regarding how we exist with other people, then, we could surely end up in a world where the most aggressive could not possibly dominate and enslave the rest of us.