The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis: The Rules of the Game Keep Us Trapped with Greg Elliott | TGS 231

**Greg Elliott** (0:00)
We all have jobs, we all pay debt, we're all familiar with propaganda. These are effectively control architectures. They keep people playing a game that they may not feel is satisfactory, but leaving the game is more costly than staying within the game itself. And so people become entrapped in a game that they didn't design, nor do they want to play in the first place.
The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis is a way of understanding why certain harmful trajectories become selected, institutionalized and difficult to reverse. It explains why we are where we are today and where we can go from here.

**Nate Hagens** (0:44)
You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagens. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together, and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming Great Simplification.
Today, I'm joined by the author of The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis, a new book by Greg Elliott to discuss how dark triad traits have created a positive feedback loop of incentives in our society, slowly leading us down the path of an increasingly psychopathic civilization. Greg Elliott is a Siemens Solutions Consultant specializing in data science and artificial intelligence, as well as the co-founder of Orbyfy. His research of the Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis led him to found the Institute for Symbolic Selection, an interdisciplinary research program investigating how human-created symbolic systems shape our behavior, institutions, and the long-term evolution of civilization.
In this conversation, Greg and I discuss what he calls instrumental behaviors, which include dark triad traits such as psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism. Specifically, Greg explains how game-theoretic dynamics and the growing scale of human society have given advantages to humans who possess these traits, especially during the agricultural revolution and then again with the rapid expansion of fossil fuels in the last 200 years. Greg's research further probes into how winning the game has allowed psychopathic individuals to slowly change the rules of the game itself, increasing the incentive for everyone else to also be forced to behave more psychopathically in order to survive. This was a pretty dense and technical topic, but the core dynamic that Greg lays out rhymes with the core of the logic and the story that we've been telling on this website. During the episode, Greg also references several game theory concepts. And for those unfamiliar with game theory, we will link to some learning resources in the description, which I recommend you take a look at. This was another eye-opening contribution to The Great Simplification. Please welcome Greg Elliott.
Greg Elliott, welcome to the program.

**Greg Elliott** (3:45)
Hey, Nate. Great to meet you. Great to connect.

**Nate Hagens** (3:48)
So you are a systems theorist and an independent research who is focused on the intersection of game theory, evolutionary biology, and institutional analysis, which led you to recently write the book, The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis.
Boy, that should be a best seller. Recently, we had Nancy McWilliams and Reed Malloy on the show, where they spoke about psychopathy and dark triad traits at the level of an individual human. The reason I invited you to this platform is to build on that. I want to talk to you about our civilizational selection of psychopathic traits, and what happens if civilization itself becomes psychopathic, if that's possible. I mean, I have tons of questions, but I'd like you to start, maybe walk us through the idea from the ground up. What do you mean when you say psychopathy is being selected for at a civilizational scale? Can you maybe tell us how you first arrived at that framework and model?

**Greg Elliott** (4:57)
Yeah, Nate, no, it's a fantastic question, and obviously, it's a question I've been getting a lot. This is something I've been working on for about five or six years. I recently published the book back in May, and yeah, I'm super grateful for all of the attention that it's been getting.
For example, Professor William Rees has been endorsing the work and Bill and I have become pretty close friends.

**Nate Hagens** (5:25)
I've known Bill for 25 years. He's been on this show as well.

**Greg Elliott** (5:28)
He's a great guy.
Again, grateful to Bill. Then obviously, I've been connected with Professor Zach Stein. But I think to kick off, the psychopathic selection hypothesis really came out of, I think for me, just a lived experience. One of the things about my background is I spent many years working in financial markets.
I became fascinated by the relationship between the intersection of personality or behavior power. I think a lot of books I've read, Manufacturing Consent and so on and so forth, and really thinking about an institutional selection. So I want to be very careful because I'm not suggesting when I was working in banking that I was clinically diagnosing anyone as a psychopath. But I would say it's probably the lived experience of people who worked in that environment that I repeatedly encountered what I would define as behavioral profiles that seemed unusually well adapted to the competitive environment.