Centralisation shapes Idealists into Cynics
So this is very tentative, this is mainly generated by thinking about the ways I would need to change to influence the centre.
By Cynics I mean what is being pointed at in the Gervais Principle, the Thick of It or Yes, Minister! They are not everywhere in the Centre.
It is not just cynicism, but a need for power.
There is something I’m going to call the Idealists journey, that I think turns some Idealists into Cynics.
An idealist wants to change the world
You an idealist notices something wrong with the world. It needs fixing and you are the one to fix it.
There are two paths you can go down. You can try and influence the centre and the stronger the centre the more tempting this is. Or you can try and influence the people. To influence the people you give them something, a new technology (like linux) or a new idea. You don’t know exactly what people will do with the new thing, so this seems like a risky idea. So you try and influence the centre.
Power is in the centre
In our capitalist, statist system power is in the centre. If you can grab some of it you can redirect some of it to the fix the problem you’ve noticed. Power being in the centre is not a fact of the world. For the majority of life’s history power has been decentralised, a tree mainly grew by itself, helped by the trees around it providing it shelter but also competing for resources. It didn’t need planning permission to grow or rely on a central bank to maintain liquidity in a currency so that it could take out a loan to pay for its resources. Centralization is an artifact of our current technology level, with more technology we may be able to be more decentralized.
To get power you have to have influence
So once you have decided down the central path you need to place yourself in the centre. People in the centre just don’t let other people come waltzing into the centre, psycopaths do not want to lose control and other Idealists need to be convinced that your idea is good. You need to convince them you should be in the centre in some way or for some reason. So you need influence.
To get influence you have to be ruthless
The more power you need the closer into the centre you want to go. So the more influence you need. Influence is zero sum, so you always have to be on the look out for people back stabbing you and you have to take those opportunities for influence that you get, even if it hurts other people. You have to make the consequentialist decision that hurting them is worth it to get to the power to get to your ideal.
Once you have power you have to spend power to maintain it
Everyone near the centre is playing this ruthless game. They are nipping at your heals. You can gain allies by giving them some bits of power or you can spend your time and energy trying to head off other threats. You have to be skeptical and afraid of new ideas in case they are plans to erode your power base. Paranoia lives in the centre.
So you do not have all the power you thought you would have to achieve your goals.
You may lose the ability to be flexible
Other people will use admissions of failure or being wrong as tools to bring you down. You cannot admit your mistakes quickly so you may be locked into a path you have chosen even if it is sub optimal because changing tack admits weakness and people lose trust. Eroding your power
You may lose the time to think about what should be done
Even if your are sure of fixing the problem, you may not have enough time to figure out how the power should be diverted to fix the problem. Because you need to work hard to maintain your power you cannot relax and be creative or find novel ways to solve the problem you have. You can divert some power to trying to solving your problem by delegating the problem, but you may just divert it to another Cynic in the making trying to get closer to the centre, so you may not get it solved.
The Cynics curse
This doesn’t seem like the good life. It is not relaxed or fun or happy. People should be able to trust other people and have time to be creative. The best worlds are ones where you don’t try to control the world and you don’t need to try to control the world.
This seems like the end of the Idealist’s path to a Cynics, but it is not all.
You may oppose decentralization as it erodes your control
So you maintain the current centralization of the world or even potentially make suggestions to strengthen centralization, so that you can gain more power over the world, so that one day you can make it a better place. This is the Cynic reflex trained from the skinner box of striving to get to the centre and achieve their goal.
There are good reasons to oppose decentralization, but you should be able to tell whether people have the Cynic reflex or legitimately think centralization is better. If both the positives and negatives of centralization and decentralized are discussed and not just given lip service, then you are in a good state. If decentralization is never discussed then it is likely you and the people around you have fallen into the Cynic reflex.
It is not their fault, the game made them this way. So don’t hate the player, don’t even hate the game. Hate the centralization that causes and shapes Cynic and makes the game occur.
If you have written a title for which you feel compelled to apologize in the second paragraph in order to explain what you mean, you have written a misleading title and this is behavior that I would very much like to disincentivize.
I’d hoped to that Sociopath would be a known thing and aid conversation. But apparently not. Edited
I think this form ends up a lot better. The explanation of what you, specifically, in this instance mean by “cynic” is still necessary and good, but since “cynic” doesn’t have the same valence as “sociopath”, it seems much less bait-and-switch.
The term sociopath is known, but sociopaths are people who have a lack of realistic long-term goals and poor behavioral controls . In many enviroments that’s not a good combination to achieve a position of power.
Using the term and meaning something different than the clinical definition can obfuscate the underlying issues.
Nobody in Yes, Minister is a sociopath.
Watering down the meaning of the term is bad. If you know whether or not a prisoner is a sociopath you know that certain interventions that decrease recidivism in non-sociopaths don’t work and rather increase recidivism.
I edited the post (before this comment) so I’m not sure what you are talking about now… I picked up the term Sociopath from this post and also this post.
The second of which was highly upvoted, so I assumed it was a known thing within this community. Cynic serves my purpose just as well.
Saying that for you “cynic” serves the purpose just as well doesn’t signal to me that you update in a way that you see that “sociopath” doesn’t fit.
The problem is not that it’s unknown. We talked previously about this Chapman post on LW and considered the phrasing to be harmful and it dilutes the academic concept of sociopathy and prevents us from speaking about real sociopathy when we lose the word to point ot it.
Sociopath wasn’t good. Cynic isn’t great.
I didn’t want to have to invent a new word, when one was used before in a community, with no replacement. What would expect the term to be?
Downvoted.
You basically propose a political narrative of how you think the world looks like. You stay with the narrative without trying to make a falsifiable model and attempted to check that model against the real world. At the same time you make generalized claims.
Politics is generally a topic that calls for higher standard when covering it on LW and I don’t think this post meets them.
Thanks for letting me know why you down voted.
I personally think we need equally good rigour on front page posts to do with human nature and the nature of organisations. Both can be stalking horses for politics.
For falsifiable predictions, and testing of them, I agree I could have done better. In the model I hold implicitly I expect politicians to be less agreeable, in the big 5 sense, than the general population of the same age. I’d be curious to know if politicians in multi-party systems were more agreeable than 2 party system countries.
In order to prove the hypothesis, it would be necessary to track peoples agreeableness over time and see if it decreased if they became a politician. Otherwise it might be that agreeable people preferentially don’t become politicians.
It would be interesting to look at openness and concientiousness over time as well as the climb the political ladder. I expect I won’t find this longitudinal data though. There was some research I saw on psychopathy in presidents/ceos, but I don’t know how reliable it is and whether they looked at simple agreeableness.
I’ll have a look at some point, but I wasn’t planning on spending much effort on what was not going to be a front page post and just a cross submission from my own blog.
If you believe that there’s a significant amount of psychopaths in politics it becomes even more important to be able to distinguish a psychopath from someone who behaves like the characters in “Yes, Minister”.
Realpolitical pressures don’t bring someone into the mindstate that’s typical for psychopathy.
I heard an interview with Jon Stewert where he made the point that Hilary Clinton is not smooth when she lies. She feel the normal kind of human anxiety that a psychopath doesn’t feel when lying.
She turned from a person who was idealistic and unwilling to compromize for realpolitikal reasons when she was first lady who pushed her healthcare agenda to a person who’s less idealistic and who has no problem with realpolitikal compromize and doing what needs to be done to be powerful but she still feel the kind of emotions when lying that a psychopath doesn’t.
Being a psychopath goes beyond ruthlessly playing the game.
How did you get from
To
I was contrasting the two. I mentioned the pyschopathy study because it was the only one I heard about on the psychology of powerful people. They are distinct things, agreed.