Psychopathy is the Linchpin of Civilizations
Psychopathy is the Linchpin of Civilizations
The history of how urban environments have sorted us like wild animals
Animals in the wild behave in relatively berserk, instinctive ways, as exemplified by the social mammals that tend to divide themselves into dominance hierarchies.
But just as all species have fuzzy edges, our genus began in a gray zone between animality and personhood since our early ancestors exhibited traits of both types in the late Stone Age. For tens of thousands of years, early human protopersons lived mainly in the wild but formed egalitarian groups that were in some respects morally ideal in that they respected their members’ individual rights.
Our norm of succumbing to dominance hierarchies and pecking orders would come only thousands of years after we became dependent on sedentary societies and artificial refuges from the wild.
This, then, is counterintuitive. Think of it crudely, for a moment, in terms of some pseudo-arithmetic:
multiply wild animals by a wild environment, as it were, and you get wild behavior (A x WE = WB)
multiply people by a wild environment, and you get relatively enlightened behaviour (P x WE = EB)
multiply people by a so-called civilized environment, and you get structurally wild behaviour again (P x CE = WB)
How can this be explained? Why would the social structure of dominance hierarchies that’s found throughout the animal kingdom re-enter human life mainly with the introduction of artificial environments that were supposed to be progressive, as in unnatural and culturally refined? Why would early humans have been more behaviourally enlightened, in a sense, than modern ones, when the early ones faced constraints imposed by nature’s wildness that necessitated gross power inequalities for most social animal species?
Four books can help us understand this oddity.
The rise and function of states
First, there’s Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler, which demonstrates that economic inequality is indeed baked into civilized states. Only catastrophic violence or the threat of it forces egalitarian social reforms — not governmental promises, unions, civil protests, or anything like that. And these reforms are only temporary, as the natural dynamics of the law of oligarchy soon enough reestablish themselves.
“Throughout recorded history,” Scheidel says, “the most powerful leveling invariably resulted from the most powerful shocks. Four different kinds of violent ruptures have flattened inequality: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics.” In each case, “by the time the dust had settled, the gap between the haves and the have-nots had shrunk, sometimes dramatically.”
In other words, only when a “modern” society’s infrastructures are violently torn down does the prehistoric egalitarian ethos peek through the edifice of civilization. What were supposed to be great innovations — agriculture and the state apparatus for managing large sedentary societies — structured societies in rather primitive ways, meaning that people too came to be divided into dominance hierarchies. Yet in our vast prehistory, foraging humans somehow freed themselves from that common social structure even as they, too, were immersed in the wild, like the wild animals.
Next, there’s James Scott’s Against the Grain, which details the fragility of early states, and runs contrary to the myth that civilized progress was inevitable and one-sided. Scott dwells on the paradox that
The first evidence of cultivated plants and of sedentary communities appears roughly 12,000 years ago. Until then — that is to say for ninety-five percent of the human experience on earth — we lived in small, mobile, dispersed, relatively egalitarian, hunting-and-gathering bands. Still more remarkable, for those interested in the state form, is the fact that the very first small, stratified, tax-collecting, walled states pop up in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley only around 3,100 BCE, more than four millennia after the first crop domestication and sedentism.
Again, says Scott,
If civilization is judged an achievement of the state, and if archaic civilization means sedentism, farming, the domus, irrigation, and towns, then there is something radically wrong with the historical order. All of these human achievements of the Neolithic were in place well before we encounter anything like a state in Mesopotamia. Quite the contrary. On the basis of what we now know, the embryonic state arises by harnessing the late Neolithic grain and manpower module as a basis of control and appropriation.
This means that early states weren’t obviously progressive since they had downsides, such as drudgery, disease, and a narrowing of food sources. Scott thinks of the “late Neolithic multispecies resettlement camps” as “a perfect epidemiological storm”: “a great many of the sudden collapses of the earliest centers of population were due to devastating epidemic diseases.”
As for “control and appropriation,” this was done through taxation, enslavement, and wars of conquest. Indeed, the reason for the book’s title is ‘the nexus between grains and states,” which lies ‘in the fact that only the cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and “rationable.” ’ ‘The “aboveground” simultaneous ripening of cereal grains has the inestimable advantage of being legible and assessable by the state tax collectors.’
The problem with taxes, though, was that assuming it “has enough to meet its basic needs,” a peasantry “will not automatically produce a surplus that elites might appropriate, but must be compelled to produce it.” Walls thus both kept intruders out and farmers in on the key lands that offered access to freshwater. “The imperative of collecting people, settling them close to the core of power, holding them there, and having them produce a surplus in excess of their own needs animates much of early statecraft.”
This is so despite the irony that as early humans cultivated nature with fire, and domesticated plants and animals, they tamed themselves in the process. Scott asks rhetorically, “Were not they [Homo sapiens] domesticated in turn, strapped to the round of ploughing, planting, weeding, reaping, threshing, grinding, all on behalf of their favorite grains and tending to the daily needs of their livestock? It is almost a metaphysical question who is the servant of whom — at least until it comes time to eat.”
Writing, too, crops up as an invention to serve that overarching purpose: “The entire exercise in early state formation is one of standardization and abstraction required to deal with units of labor, grain, land, and rations. Essential to that standardization is the very invention of a standard nomenclature…”
But the coercion itself was done through slavery:
Under the demographic conditions of early state formation, when the means of traditional production were still plentiful and not monopolized, only through one form or another of unfree, coerced labor — corvee labor, forced delivery of grain or other products, debt bondage, serfdom, communal bondage and tribute, and various forms of slavery — was a surplus brought into being. Each of the earliest states deployed its own unique mix of coerced labor.
Yet ‘Though the state might presume to a fine-grained administration of its subjects, it was, in fact, in a constant struggle to compensate for the losses from flight and mortality by a largely coercive campaign to corral new subjects from among hitherto “untaxed and unregulated” populations.’ Civilized folks called these free populations “barbarians.”
The third book is The Dawn of Everything, by Graeber and Wengrow, and specifically its section on the elaboration on this freedom of indigenous Americans, which influenced the founders of modern America. After all, “That indigenous Americans lived in generally free societies, and that Europeans did not, was never really a matter of debate” in their exchanges; “both sides agreed this was the case. What they differed on was whether or not individual liberty was desirable.”
That is, “Personal freedom, we tend to believe, is inherently good…Seventeenth-century Jesuits most certainly did not share this assumption. They tended to view individual liberty as animalistic.” One Jesuit missionary wrote about the Montagnais-Naskapi that “They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to any one whomsoever, except when they like. They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs.”
Moreover,
Native Americans who had the opportunity to observe French society from up close had come to realize one key difference from their own…Whereas in their own societies there was no obvious way to convert wealth into power over others (with the consequence that differences of wealth had little effect on individual freedom), in France the situation could not have been more different. Power over possessions could be directly translated into power over other human beings.
Of course, this isn’t to say that these egalitarian individualists who still lived as hunter-gatherers were saints. On the contrary, ‘There appear to have been bloody rivalries fought out in many northern parts of the Eastern woodlands even before the European settlers began supplying indigenous factions with muskets, resulting in the “Beaver Wars.” The early Jesuits were often appalled by what they saw.’
Captive enemies would either eventually be welcomed as a full member of the tribe or would be killed by excruciating torture. In the latter case, the Jesuits observed “a slow, public, and highly theatrical use of violence.” And the whole village took part in the torture, including the women and children:
The suffering might go on for days, with the victim periodically resuscitated only to endure further ordeals, and it was very much a communal affair. The violence seems all the more extraordinary once we recall how these same Wendat societies refused to spank children, directly punish thieves or murders, or take any measure against their own members that smacked of arbitrary authority. In virtually all other areas of social life they were renowned for solving their problems through calm and reasoned debate.
Finally, there’s a book that I think provides the linchpin that resolves the great paradox in question: Kings, Conquerors, Psychopaths: From Alexander and Hitler to the Corporation, by Joseph Abraham. Abraham posits that psychopaths have been disproportionately present in the ranks of the unproductive (parasitic) elites that have led states, and that this dynamic is so ingrained in history that the rest of us have become accustomed to it so that we readily make excuses for the elite’s amorality.
According to a 1996 Psychopathic Personality Inventory, as reported in the book, the psychopath’s antisocial traits include Machiavellian egocentricity, coldheartedness, carefree nonplanfulness, fearlessness, blame externalization, impulsive nonconformity, and stress immunity.
Rather than viewing psychopathy as a mental disorder, its prevalence in history indicates it’s an evolutionary adaptation. Indeed, some studies show an overlap between the genetic profiles of psychopaths and those of individuals who are “more likely to have children younger and to have more children overall.”
Psychopathy: the linchpin of civilization
Putting all this together, it looks like there are at least two roles for psychopaths to have played in dominating early states:
First, psychopaths would have been needed to accomplish the dirty work of statecraft, such as leading the state to war, and capturing and enslaving masses of people.
Second, as peasants were domesticated or trained to serve the less productive elites as farmers or soldiers, the psychopathic traits of those elites would have been ideal for free-riders who wished to exploit that emerging docility.
Psychopathic traits would have flourished, for instance, in the bureaucratic remoteness that called for the invention of writing. The impersonal quantification at the root of taxes would have dovetailed with the psychopath’s inability to form complex interpersonal attachments.
Consequently, psychopathic rulers would have left their mark on the state’s structure, namely on the dominance hierarchies that are also found throughout the animal kingdom. In essence, the impersonal genes that generate those pecking orders in animals (as an effective compromise that organizes social groups and prevents all-out war or chaos) find their psychological counterpart in the psychopathic personality. What evolves genetically in animals ramifies in human societies at the political and cultural levels.
Thus, we don’t think of our great leaders as psychopaths, but as godly heroes, kings, conquerors, and statesmen. We need only return to that list of psychopathic traits to notice how useful they’d be in a political context: Machiavellian egocentricity, coldheartedness, carefree nonplanfulness, fearlessness, blame externalization, impulsive nonconformity, and stress immunity.
Leaving aside the obvious relevance of the first couple of traits, carefree nonplanfulness may stand out as conflicting with the need for bureaucratic efficiency in calculating taxes. Yet that elite recklessness might have accounted partly for the failure of early states, as the rulers may sometimes have overtaxed the population, prompting peasant revolts.
Blame externalization would have informed the invention of organized religion and specifically the theistic mythos. The illiterate peasants were encouraged to blame the gods for society’s ills, not the elites who were ostensibly in charge.
Impulsive nonconformity characterized the budding aristocrat’s sense of entitlement, as the elites prided themselves on being culturally superior to the enslaved masses, despite their obvious common humanity.
Stress immunity is apparent in the travails of Donald Trump who should be collapsing from spasms of angst, given the chaos he stirs up and the legal backlash against his egregious flights of psychopathy, whereas instead, he’s running for president, seemingly free from worries in his many lengthy campaign rallies. The same immunity would have benefited early elites who had the grain data on hand as to whether the state was on the verge of collapse.
Why, then, is inequality baked into states, as Scheidel shows? It’s because an infallible marker of states — as distinct from bands of hunter-gatherers and the subsequent transitional societies — is the hierarchy between dominators and submissives. For most of the civilized period, that relationship was formalized in the laws that regulated most people’s literal enslavement. Historically speaking, master and slave are the preeminent political and economic categories.
We can imagine psychopaths coming to prominence to exploit the farmers’ self-domestication, and to perform the exigencies of imperialism to prevent the fragile state’s collapse or to expand its territory and replenish its fleeing population.
As Scott explains, states had to have been imposed on humanity because the foraging lifestyle had worked for hundreds of thousands of years, and as Graeber and Wengrow show, that earlier lifestyle would have maximized individual freedom. Rather than relying on relatively few food sources in a state, foragers ran the gamut from fishing to hunting to gathering. Once imposed, the state locked us into a quasi-sadomasochistic relationship between our ruling elites and our human workhorses.
These human hierarchies are wild, which is to say amoral, in that they approximate the dominance hierarchies that organize the social groups of many animal species, and their wildness is reflected in the fact that psychopaths established them and continue to flourish in them (in corporations, militaries, and organized criminal syndicates, for example).
Why, then, were hunter-gatherer tribes egalitarian and thus at least superficially moral in a liberal sense, respecting individual rights despite those tribes’ wild environments? The answer isn’t that those groups found no home for psychopathy. As indicated by Graeber’s and Wengrow’s remarks on Wendat wars and torture, and by the evidence of psychopathy’s evolutionary function, psychopathic traits would have arisen long before the advent of states.
What may have played out in hunter-gatherer tribes that hadn’t yet domesticated themselves with the drudgery of farming and the politics of submitting to parasitic elites is a strategy of mutually assured destruction. That is, the “savagery” or “barbarism” of uncivilized peoples would have indicated a greater potential for psychopathy, but one that was kept in check by the lack of a government that monopolized force in the group. These foragers had greater individual freedom, which gave them license to act with childlike abandon. But they knew that because everyone else in the group had similar liberties, they entered an implicit social contract, one that resulted in relatively equal rights and privileges for all the members.
Morality didn’t emerge out of love of God or humanity, but out of a stalemate between the psychopathic traits that would have been instrumental in prehistoric hunting and social conflicts. The division of labour between prehistoric men and women, in hunting and gathering, is reflected in the fact that while women may have some psychopathic traits, the full-blown capacity for antisocial violence is found mainly in men, which is why almost all of any country’s prison population is male.
Think of what’s required to hunt and kill an animal. You must shut off your inclination to empathize with your prey. You must objectify the animal to avoid pitying it or its family. Evidently, hunting is a proto-psychopathic endeavor in the sense that those who can most easily suppress their capacity for compassion and act with coldblooded precision will excel in it.
The opening paradox is resolved, then, when we reflect on how uncivilized hunter-gatherers in the Upper Paleolithic were as human as those who came to live in states, but the wild and artificial environments called for different behavioural solutions.
The wilderness encouraged psychopathy in hunting and intertribal conflicts, but human intelligence led to the stalemate, the implicit social contract, and the egalitarian values of prehistoric individualism.
By contrast, the state’s artificial environment — irrigation, farming, herding, walled enclosures, bureaucratic infrastructure, political dominance in slavery — was implicitly conservative rather than liberal or progressive in imposing the animalistic norm of empowering the few at the expense of the many. It wasn’t just that states were complex, so they had to be run by leaders, which required a centralization of power for the sake of efficient management. No, the running of early states, which set the paradigm for all future ones was a grossly inhuman business, requiring not just any leaders but the superpowers of blatant psychopaths. Luckily, the amorality of human genes obliged and filled that managerial niche.
To speak of an “artificial” environment, then, in the case of states, is euphemistic. This environment was ideal for conservatives, given their authoritarian personalities and their implicit social Darwinian deference to nature.
Likewise, “domestication” is euphemistic in this context. We’re speaking of morally insane political elites exercising godlike control over plants, animals, and lower classes of humans; more precisely, those elites capitalized on what Scott called the “late Neolithic grain and manpower module,” eventually enriching themselves by treating human workers as cattle.
The ongoing grotesque inequality in most late-modern capitalist states testifies to the fact that subcriminal psychopathy is instrumental to the “progress” of civilizations.