can we chill with the ableism? “sociopathic manipulators” vs “honest intelligent people” is a fucked up way to think about the world. “manipulative sociopaths” are, in fact, people, who are just as complex and inconsistent and deserving of life as “honest intelligent people.” no one is born evil, there are no demons hiding amongst you, it’s just people. an individual can be honest and intelligent and manipulative and do harm and prevent it and end up popular or ostracized. these qualities aren’t mutually exclusive or moral and do not exist in a vacuum.
the ruling class is not full of “manipulative sociopaths,” it’s full of people who are incentivized to stand together to serve themselves by exploiting and oppressing everyone below them. it has everything to do with their circumstances and almost nothing to do with their ‘nature.’
you understand a “sociopath” to be inherently evil, and this leaves you vulnerable to anyone who claims they can identify the evil in the room.
Are you having some psychotic episode? Show me where I mentioned anything about evil. You’re literally arguing with yourself here.
Are you having some psychotic episode?
please don’t use psychotic as a pejorative. please stop using ableist rhetoric.
constructing a dichotomy between “manipulative sociopaths” and “honest intelligent people” is a moral argument. you are literally casting one of these groups as not people.
you are nitpicking my assertion that saying someone is not a person is interchangeable with calling them evil. this is not an important part of what i said. if it helps, you will reread my comment and replace ‘evil’ with ‘not a person’ and then respond to that.
Not really, there a tendency, but framing it like that sounds idealist. It’s not about who or how people are in themselves that makes them popular and powerful. It’s how useful they are to the ruling class. Being a manipulative sociopath certainly helps in not caring about other human beings, but if they help to justify the oppressive system in power, it doesn’t matter whether they are intelligent or not. They can also honestly believe to do the right thing, while doing terrible things, if they don’t understand the economic system they find themselves in and it’s contradictions.
Take Robert Owen, during his time, he was the most popular person in the British empire. He wasn’t manipulative, evil or sociopathic. He was just wrong. As an utopian socialist, he lacked the proper understanding about how capitalism functioned. By chance he became a very rich capitalist, exploiting many people. Out of goodwill, he became the first philanthropist. His workers lived way better lives than usual, but they were still exploited. His message that capitalism could be profitable and humane made him extremely popular, because it served the ruling classes.
Then he came to understand his error. His workers, even though they worked “only” ten hours a day instead of the usual twelve, were still completely depended on him. In his words, they were still his “slaves”. He detested that and took action. He tried to convince everyone, that the whole system had to change radically. He was immediately shunned and hated by the establishment. Excluded from business he still tried to do everything he could think of to help the poor. He died poor himself.
But being useful to hegemonic oppressors is not the only way. There’s another way for us to gain power, but collective power instead of individual one: through solidarity, class struggle and revolution.
So would you say the ruling class are manipulative liars then
As a class, abstracted from individuals, yes, the class rule of a minority has to be manipulative or the majority wouldn’t tolerate it. Hegemony means generalization of particular minority interests. They make it our business, that their profits keep flowing. In a profitability crisis, they make everyone else suffer for it.
Any society has norms which inevitably conflict with 100% honesty. A sociopath does not care about honesty and leverages these norms and human nature to their maximum advantage. Anyone who preferences honesty over these norms will experience friction commensurate with the difference.
Well, sociopathic manipulators manipulate people into liking them, including lying and flattery.
Honest intelligent people value truth and accuracy over popularity, so they’re much more likely to tell people things they don’t want to hear.
Would you say it’s a common trend through history for sociopathic manipulators to be popular/respected
No… some of them are, and the combination of sociopathy and popularity can have devastating consequences that create a selection bias when we think of historical examples. But I don’t think that’s the typical outcome for a normal sociopath—most of them are recognized for what they are before they earn any significant respect.
honest intelligent people are shunned and ostracized?
Again, no: when we think of cases of people being shunned and ostracized, we think of cases where those actions had major consequences. But those are the exceptions that prove the rule: when capable people are heeded, or incompetent people are ignored, it’s expected and doesn’t attract our notice.
That’s not to say that there aren’t certain circumstances where the expected outcomes regularly fail and the exceptions become more common. But the “common trend through history” is the invisible background that makes those exceptional circumstances stand out.
Would you say that the trope of politicians being lying manipulators isn’t very accurate?
Our version of politics is just a popularity contest rather doing what’s beneficial for the future. Would you think that most politicians, at least the faces for each party, tend to lie or tend to tell the truth? I’m not the most read up on politics but I can’t really think of many examples of politicians that I would consider truthful, yet they are chosen for positions that are elected by people.
