Having some vague thoughts about “evil people”. In the movies the heroes love everything and fight to save it, and the villains hate everything and fight to destroy it. I feel like in real life, the heroes love power and control, they want the world to be a certain way, and that happens to be a good world for some others too, and they happen to have good ideas about how to do it (eg USA founding fathers, Xi Jinping) instead of stupid bad ideas (Mao, Stalin). There seems to be an innate human drive for revenge and for genocide of other ethnicities, but besides that, humans don’t seem to come packaged with anything that makes us crave death and destruction.
I thought about this because I was thinking about my past choices to avoid psychopaths in my personal life. It is certainly the safe choice to avoid them. But maybe I should put more thought into their preferences and ideas, instead of stopping analysis once psychopathy is obvious.
Like if you are friends with both Mao and Xi Jinping then you shouldn’t just think “man those guys are real politicians”. You should look closely at what they want and whether their ideas will succeed or fail. Probably obvious to many people, but not me.
Most of the “evil” people I have encountered in life didn’t especially care what happened to other people. They didn’t seem to have much of a moral system or a conscience. If these people have a strong ability to predict the consequences of their actions, they will often respond to incentives. If they’re bad at predicting consequences, they can be a menace.
I’ve also seen (from a distance) a different behavior that I might describe as “vice signaling.” The goal here may be establishing credibility with other practitioners of various vices, sort of a mutually assured destruction.
I think the problem with trying to learn from psychopaths is the fact that they lie all the time. Their words have no relation to reality other than “does it seem that saying these specific words will help me get something I want?” (including amusement). Even in things that are easy to verify, if they believe that the expected damage from you catching them lying is negligible, or smaller that the expected benefit. Their words are literally “speech acts”, sequences of otherwise meaningless syllables emitted only to make you do something; not reflections of their actual model of the world.
So if you believe that Mao was a psychopath in the clinical sense of the word (I don’t know if he was, maybe yes, maybe no), then no matter how many books of his collected writings or speeches you would read, they contain almost zero evidence about what he actually believed. They will probably contradict themselves because why not.
The only source of information would be to examine their actions (while carefully ignoring their words, because those are designed to mislead you). But do you have a reliable source for that? How many things that other people say Mao did, was actually something Mao told them that he did? How many things no one dared to put in writing? Either because they were afraid of punishment, or because they realized that story would be unbelievable and they had no hard evidence to support it.
What I am trying to say is that learning from actual psychopaths seems so difficult to me that it’s practically impossible.
Having some vague thoughts about “evil people”. In the movies the heroes love everything and fight to save it, and the villains hate everything and fight to destroy it. I feel like in real life, the heroes love power and control, they want the world to be a certain way, and that happens to be a good world for some others too, and they happen to have good ideas about how to do it (eg USA founding fathers, Xi Jinping) instead of stupid bad ideas (Mao, Stalin). There seems to be an innate human drive for revenge and for genocide of other ethnicities, but besides that, humans don’t seem to come packaged with anything that makes us crave death and destruction.
I thought about this because I was thinking about my past choices to avoid psychopaths in my personal life. It is certainly the safe choice to avoid them. But maybe I should put more thought into their preferences and ideas, instead of stopping analysis once psychopathy is obvious.
Like if you are friends with both Mao and Xi Jinping then you shouldn’t just think “man those guys are real politicians”. You should look closely at what they want and whether their ideas will succeed or fail. Probably obvious to many people, but not me.
Most of the “evil” people I have encountered in life didn’t especially care what happened to other people. They didn’t seem to have much of a moral system or a conscience. If these people have a strong ability to predict the consequences of their actions, they will often respond to incentives. If they’re bad at predicting consequences, they can be a menace.
I’ve also seen (from a distance) a different behavior that I might describe as “vice signaling.” The goal here may be establishing credibility with other practitioners of various vices, sort of a mutually assured destruction.
I recommend “Beyond Good and Evil” by Nietzsche
I think the problem with trying to learn from psychopaths is the fact that they lie all the time. Their words have no relation to reality other than “does it seem that saying these specific words will help me get something I want?” (including amusement). Even in things that are easy to verify, if they believe that the expected damage from you catching them lying is negligible, or smaller that the expected benefit. Their words are literally “speech acts”, sequences of otherwise meaningless syllables emitted only to make you do something; not reflections of their actual model of the world.
So if you believe that Mao was a psychopath in the clinical sense of the word (I don’t know if he was, maybe yes, maybe no), then no matter how many books of his collected writings or speeches you would read, they contain almost zero evidence about what he actually believed. They will probably contradict themselves because why not.
The only source of information would be to examine their actions (while carefully ignoring their words, because those are designed to mislead you). But do you have a reliable source for that? How many things that other people say Mao did, was actually something Mao told them that he did? How many things no one dared to put in writing? Either because they were afraid of punishment, or because they realized that story would be unbelievable and they had no hard evidence to support it.
What I am trying to say is that learning from actual psychopaths seems so difficult to me that it’s practically impossible.