Turning the Dials Back on Psychopathy: Decent People, Indecent System | Frankly 157

**Nate Hagens** (0:00)
Good morning. I have been thinking about psychopathy and its influence on modern human culture and the biosphere. We just had on the author of the Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis, Greg Elliott, on TGS. Last year, we had Reed Malloy and Nancy McWilliams on to discuss dark triad traits and their role in modern society. And following that, I did a frankly on why humans, as individuals, as opposed to humanity, in aggregate, why humans are better than we think, pointing out that 99% of us are generally pro-social and kind, but we live in a system that selects and rewards predatory behavior. Greg's episode merged unexpectedly with my logic of a global metabolic superorganism, in that he likened our economic system itself to psychopathic expressions, though he used the term instrumental behavior as opposed to psychopathic. So just like last year, after reading Nancy, this week's Frankly is my follow on thoughts and integration of what I learned from Greg's episode.
So we've never really covered game theory on TGS until this week. So here's a 30 second version for anyone unfamiliar. A game at its simplest is merely players, choices and payoffs. And we play these games every day through the choices we make when we interact with other people. A strategy is a way of playing the game. For example, do you choose to act for the benefit of the whole group or to act selfishly? And this gets to the core idea from Greg's framework. Which strategy wins is actually mostly not decided by the players of the game, but by the rules of the game. Even though we often just blame the players or praise them for it. So Greg Elliott's central claim is really a theory of evolution. Take the same humans, change the conditions of the game, and suddenly different strategies start to win. What he calls instrumental behavior is a strategy typically used by psychopaths. It loses badly in a certain kind of environment and wins in another. And once we lay this all out, Greg's framework points out seven conditions that held true during our crucible years as a species that have all been flipped the other way by scale, energy surplus, and abstraction.
And these are the settings of a system that decide what can happen within the system, and he calls these boundary conditions. So today, I'm going to parse these boundary conditions into seven dials, which can be turned up or down to change the incentives of the system and in turn what behaviors would lead to success. The short version of everything Greg and I talked about is that for 300,000 years, more or less, cheating didn't pay. But in today's economic system, it does. And because over the last 10,000 years, seven dials got flipped, bringing us to the world we see today. Okay, I'm going to go into these one at a time.
Dial one. Picture two restaurants, a mom and pop diner in a small town, and a flashy restaurant on a busy highway. Same business, similar kinds of humans working in the kitchen. But the key difference is the people working at the diner are likely going to see their customers again in the near future. And the place on the interstate highway typically never sees its customers twice. You can already intuit which restaurant would get away with continually serving a so-so meal at a high price and get away with it. The small town diner, which probably has better food with lower prices, doesn't have better or worse people. It's just playing a different game. So, Dial 1, will I see you again? In ancestral times, the answer was later today for dinner. When we hunt, when we care for each other's children, when we play practical jokes, when we huddle around the campfire tonight and tell stories. Every tribal interaction was one move in a lifelong game that had thousands of moves. And the game theory winning strategy of tit for tat only works when there is a next round, because helping others today pays off, because they're probably going to help you, or at least they might help you in the future. But what if the dial turned off the repeated iteration setting? And I'm never going to see this person again. So fast forward to today, our economic system rarely has consistent repeated interactions. Most of what we do in our normal course of daily life, at least in the global north, is with people we might never see again, the customer service representative, the internet form we fill out and the like. And Greg told the story of his broker years, and I lived a similar story in the Chicago currency pits. My job was to extract the maximum spread from a client I would probably never meet, and I was taught the questions to ask to figure out how much I could get away with. And on the podcast with Greg, I blurted out, they're teaching psychopathy, but now I see really they were just teaching the game. So, put simply, the strategies that manipulate and take advantage of others in round one never get punished in round two because there is no round two. So, the psychopathic instrumental strategy never fails and it becomes cheaper and cheaper. So, my angle on this is if you place it in the wide boundary context of The Great Simplification, cheap energy is largely responsible for this dial being flipped because it gives us a social reputational mulligan. Cheap energy has been the get out of Seattle or Topeka or Toronto free card. If you burn your relationships, you just fly somewhere else and start over. And at our tribal setting, the next round of interaction was guaranteed by close physical proximity. And now how much of our life repeats is mostly a function of how cheap it is to leave. And leaving has been very cheap for antisocial actors on the upslope of the carbon pulse. Okay, so how do we turn this dial back? In the episode, Greg mentioned moving towards smaller, more tightly coupled communities like cooperatives, where you have repeated iterations with the same people again. And I would add suggestions like spend money where people know your name, and the mechanic and the local farmer, as opposed to on platforms, build for one-off strangers, and join things that have attendance or a league, or a grange, or institutions whose entire function is actually scheduled repetition of meeting. And lastly, stay put on purpose. Put down and deepen your roots where you already are. We get Dial 2, Visibility. You remember the one-way mirrors in those interrogation rooms on police drama shows? Someone's watching from the dark side, and you can't see them. You can only see your reflection. We never think about it much, but in today's world, which side of that mirror do we live on? So Dial 2, can everyone see what I did in our tribal setting back in the day when we lived with 50 to 150 people, and there were no walls, or maybe some walls made of straw? If you hoarded something, someone saw. If you lollygagged on a hunt, someone saw that. And reputation mattered and was visible, and doing good for the tribe increased your status, and causing harm led to consequences. Now, the carbon pulse has not only brought social interaction mulligans, but also extremes about visibility and invisibility. The system sees everything about you, your purchases, your location, your internet searches, and even what you hesitated over before you clicked to buy. However, the people and entities that move things like our rent and our savings pretty much operate through shell companies and fancy structures and closed doors meetings with people that we can never know the names of, for the most part. And on the rare occasion, someone forces visibility. Greg mentioned the Panama Papers. The system reacts like a body rejecting a splinter or something. And it's often the person who blew the whistle who ends up being punished. So what this does is, in effect, individuals and social groups can't punish what they can't see. And the current game makes it hard for us to actually see bad actors.