Psychopathy
Psychopathy refers to a very specific personality disorder marked by antisocial behavior, impaired empathy, conscience, and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, and egotistical traits. Under civilization the incidence of psychopathy grew rapidly. Since civilization’s collapse, those numbers have dropped, but they still remain significantly elevated. Though rare, psychopaths sometimes cause chaos for generations to come.
#Evolutionary role
Homo sapiens as a species invested heavily in social bonds as an evolutionary strategy. Human intelligence seems to have arisen primarily from the challenge of navigating the web of social bonds. Most basic human behaviors, from laughter to crying, seem rooted in achieving group cohesion. Humans need social contact on a level nearly as basic as food and water. But evolution works on diversity. No matter how committed a species becomes to a particular strategy, it retains certain traits, which could become the root of future development if conditions in the world change. Psychopathy seems like just such an evolutionary backup plan in many ways. If H. sapiens has dedicated itself so completely to the strategy that we can achieve more together than we can alone, psychopaths, with their basic inability to empathize or feel remorse for hurting others, seem like a sort of alternative humanity that could become a solitary predator, like a tiger or a hawk.
Psychopaths do not experience the full range of emotions that normal human beings do, but they can learn to mimic those emotions quite skillfully. Normal human beings have a very difficult time spotting this performance. Oddly, other psychopaths seem to have a much easier time at this.
#Pathocracy
Psychopaths struggled through the first few million years of human evolution as a tiny minority. In the context of egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands, a psychopath’s compulsion towards antisocial behavior made life quite difficult. Close social bonds provided each individual’s best chance to survive and thrive, but psychopaths found themselves driven to sabotage those relationships on a regular basis.
Humanity’s brief experiment with hierarchical social organization proved the golden age for psychopaths, though. With their inability to feel remorse or empathy, psychopaths proved much more adept than normal human beings at tolerating and succeeding inside of a hierarchy. Because of this, psychopaths tended to rise to the top of those hierarchies that they belonged to (which, in time, meant all of them).
Psychopaths don’t entirely understand the thought processes of ordinary humans, rooted in drives like empathy, compassion, and social good. Rather, from the positions of influence that they gained by climbing the hierarchy, they made decisions that made more sense to them. Over time, this meant that hierarchical organizations and institutions came to embody the logic of psychopathy, becoming “pathocracies’’. The success that they achieved made psychopaths role models to emulate in such groups so that even ordinary human beings came to emulate the thinking and behavior of psychopaths.
#Incidence
Hierarchy gave psychopaths the chance to flourish. Greater success brought admiration, and both brought more children. This caused the incidence of psychopathy to rise steadily. By the time of its collapse, several civilized countries had reached the point where psychopaths numbered more than 1 out of every 100 people.
With civilization’s collapse, so too collapsed the conditions that so favored psychopaths. The Rusting Age proved in many ways the last great contest between psychopaths and ordinary human beings for the shape of humanity’s future, with the psychopaths ultimately destroying themselves.
The restoration of the old egalitarian ways have placed psychopaths under the same pressures that confined them for millions of years before civilization’s rise. But that recent history has not altogether faded yet. The incidence of psychopathy remains high in the Fifth World compared to the past before pathocracy. Rather than 1 in 100, psychopaths in the Fifth World number closer to 1 in 200.
While that might seem rare, that means that a hunter-gatherer band of 30 people has a 14% chance of including at least one psychopath — or a 45% chance of including at least one in four generations. A village of 150 has a 53% chance of including at least one psychopath, or a 95% chance of including at least one in four generations. This carries grave significance because psychopaths so often stir up chaos and violence that can afflict a community for generations.
#Living with psychopaths
The term “psychopath” comes from ancient psychology texts long forgotten in the Fifth World, but the disorder remains, just as it existed long before the term. As always, psychopaths in the Fifth World find “scripts” specific to their time and place with which to act out their impulses. The sorcerer and the ogre provide the best-known and most widely-distributed examples.
Communities differ widely across the Fifth World on the question of how to deal with psychopaths. On one end of the spectrum, some communities blame this disorder for the rise of civilization and the near annihilation of life on earth and conclude that they bear a duty to put any such individual to death. In practice, most such communities balk when they discover evidence that one of their own bears this curse. They might try to rationalize away the evidence of sadistic rites, and the psychopath — often possessing quite a bit of charm and guile — helps make it easier. But because psychopaths feel compelled to take ever greater risks, they usually begin leaving more and more obvious evidence. If it reaches the point where the community can no longer deny the reality of the situation, as it so often does, they find themselves facing the grim prospect of putting a beloved community member to death. They often balk at this and send the psychopath into exile instead. These exiled psychopaths often continue their behavior preying on other communities in other lands. As they seek out greater risks and their crimes become more brazen, they usually attract the attention of the community they’ve come to prey upon — who generally show far less concern for their wellbeing.
Such violence — from the secret crimes and murders that a psychopath might commit against his own community before they discover him, to the depredations of a mysterious stranger lurking on the edge of the community’s territory — have an outsized effect on life in the Fifth World. These incidents often spark arguments and feuds, which may lead to other disagreements even after the revelation of a psychopath’s role.
Other commuities believe that they can manage psychopathy, and that it can even represent a gift to the community as a whole — albeit a very dangerous one. They often think of psychopathy, as explained above, as a sort of alternative path that humanity might have followed, and treat psychopaths like tigers or hawks. Humans can, and often do, deal with such creatures quite profitably, but the key lies in understanding their nature. Appeals to empathy or compassion will never work, but if you can make sure that the relationship remains profitable for the predator, it can remain profitable for everyone else, too. Unfortunately, it does seem that most attempts to treat psychopaths simply teach them to better mimic normal human emotions and become more adept predators, so such communities may also naïvely produce more vicious monsters.