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This is sorta why I think capitalism is both a useful pragmatic system and a terrible idea.

It’s the whole greed is good thing. It’s this clever little hack of “well let’s let the greedy sociopaths be that way, and we will just arrange the game so it benefits everyone.”

It sorta work in the beginning stages of capitalism. They realize that they can make profits exploiting workers and go to town and consumers reap the benefits of there being lots of stuff to buy to meet their needs.

Sure your boss is an amoral exploiter, but it means the widgets get made.

But capitalism is not static, it’s a game played over time where those least bound by morals and ethics trap greater and greater rewards. Leading to where much of western civilization finds itself today, beholden to a handful of the worst human beings.

The only mechanism to keep them in check is competition, and it’s a system that devolves over time to have little to no competition, so we shouldn’t be surprised.

I often wonder what the world could be if we took seriously the job of restraining the impulses of that 5% of the population. We teach young children to share and be kind and the golden rule. Then you reach adulthood and realize that all of that is still true but unrewarded, and the way to get ahead is to exploit people. The wealthiest and most “successful” amongst us in this society are those most willing to exploit their fellow man for their own benefit. You get a billion dollars by being willing to steal a billion dollars from your workers. No one can earn a billion dollars you have to have thousands of people working for you everyday, and for each one of those people you have to be willing to extract value out of them, what in any other context we would call theft.

Individualism is a dead end, the forces you describe are powerful because society is organized for their benefit. The cruel and psychopathic have avenues to make themselves useful to the ruling class. This is a social construct not an individual virtue or vice.

We can only make changes together. I def think people need to be more individually courageous, but the most common source for courage is social support, not some inherent trait. Some people are oppositional defiant in a way that can make them practical for a time, but without something larger steering circumstances then these individuals end up becoming tyrants all the same.

I mean there are some options for dealing with that.

A. Early monitoring in childhood followed by extensive therapy

B. Eugenics if a genetic link is identified (least savory option and likely not possible)

C. Rebuild our social circles and communities

To expand on C, I think a lot of what you're identifying as narcissistic behavior or sociopathy is actually caused by the destruction of our communities. The way our society is built it rewards anti-social action with money and it's cold and depersonalized. It's easy as a upper executive to fire 500 people you've never once met and you will never meet. You don't have to know them beyond a few spreadsheets of data. People will absolve themselves of personal responsibility and refer to the financial aspects. Additionally, our communities have been destroyed. The addition of the nuclear family structure encourages you to provide as much as possible to as few individuals instead of valuing extended family and community. Plus in some places in the world it is possible to go days or weeks without ever interacting with members of your community.

I agree that this is the root of all human problems, but I think there's more to it also. There aren't 95% of people willing to resist it. I imagine the opposite kind of people, those deeply selfless and incapable of tolerating injustice, also make up less than 5% of people.

And so even though only a small minority are naked power seekers, something like 80+% of all humans are just looking for someone to tell them what to do. They don't want responsibility, power, or self-determination. They want to be made to feel safe, and be given orders.

Is authoritarianism also cluster b? There are a lot of people who seem to get off on being part of the group. Like, it brings them chemical joy to be screaming in a crowd about how that other group of people need to die. Those people kind of suck, too.

I don't think every maga hat is a narcissist, but a lot of them are trash humans who value their in-group feelings of solidarity over everything else.

Well it would be nice if we ever return to normalcy to overturn CU and clamp down HARD on the issues that enable the rampant abuse of the system. Like I'm talking union busting levels of "No you're complicit in this more than X% you are out, forever"

Another pseudoscientific theory about how a small minority of society are naturally bad in a way that causes all social ills?

Has anyone made a tarpit for these types? Some sort of scoring system to trap them in.

Fucking YES. Thank you, extremely well said