Here's my two cents: I've come to believe the most fundamental problem facing humanity is the issue of psychopaths. For whatever highly unfortunate reason they seem to be born at a consistent, single digit percentage of the population. There's some interesting theorizing about the evolutionary reason for this, but in practice the theory …
Here's my two cents: I've come to believe the most fundamental problem facing humanity is the issue of psychopaths. For whatever highly unfortunate reason they seem to be born at a consistent, single digit percentage of the population. There's some interesting theorizing about the evolutionary reason for this, but in practice the theory doesn't matter because this is the world we've got. If institutions/civilization/humanity is to find a way forward that doesn't involve creating one unnecessary wave of suffering after another, or a complete loss of trust in everything we need to trust in order to function, we'll have to NAME this as a real problem and actively be talking about what to do about it.
Fauci - he's a psychopath that looks like a gnome in some tacky suburban garden. But pick your historical despot, it's more or less the same. There will always always always be a few humans in the world that are willing to murder millions, tens of millions, often with no apparent reason other than "just 'cuz". We cannot orient our society around our ability to convince people that are nuts that they are nuts, that will be a lost cause every time. "Facui, please confess your sins!" Humanity's problem is, rather, the (potentially) sane people that go along with these programs. For example, the ever-renewing spinelessness of the NYT or NPR, etc, or those around Fauci detailed in this article. It's easy to blame Fauci but his power is related to the insiders that go along with his lies, and then, the tens of millions that still unflinchingly believe anything they read on the internet in 2023. The only difference between Fauci and a psychotic person yelling crazy things on the streets of SF is that people listen to Fauci. And just like people (in these cases, folks that lean left politically) seem to have no idea how to deal with crazy people in the streets, they don't know how to deal with it when they're in political office, either. That's the problem. If it weren't Fauci, or the Sacklers, or all those doctors that mutilate the genitals of little girls, etc, it would be someone else. I cannot emphasize this enough: we as a society have to shift our focus towards this hard problem of what to do with psychopaths and how to create ample social defenses to keep them out of positions of power, and, deal with them effectively when they inevitably weasel their way in as they will. At present we have no mainstream institutions dedicated to this task (with journalism and the universities out of the picture) and I can tell you that my own field (psychotherapy) has little to prevent terrible people from entering the profession. All this is that is much more of a problem than a garden gnome.
Here's my two cents: I've come to believe the most fundamental problem facing humanity is the issue of psychopaths. For whatever highly unfortunate reason they seem to be born at a consistent, single digit percentage of the population. There's some interesting theorizing about the evolutionary reason for this, but in practice the theory doesn't matter because this is the world we've got. If institutions/civilization/humanity is to find a way forward that doesn't involve creating one unnecessary wave of suffering after another, or a complete loss of trust in everything we need to trust in order to function, we'll have to NAME this as a real problem and actively be talking about what to do about it.
Fauci - he's a psychopath that looks like a gnome in some tacky suburban garden. But pick your historical despot, it's more or less the same. There will always always always be a few humans in the world that are willing to murder millions, tens of millions, often with no apparent reason other than "just 'cuz". We cannot orient our society around our ability to convince people that are nuts that they are nuts, that will be a lost cause every time. "Facui, please confess your sins!" Humanity's problem is, rather, the (potentially) sane people that go along with these programs. For example, the ever-renewing spinelessness of the NYT or NPR, etc, or those around Fauci detailed in this article. It's easy to blame Fauci but his power is related to the insiders that go along with his lies, and then, the tens of millions that still unflinchingly believe anything they read on the internet in 2023. The only difference between Fauci and a psychotic person yelling crazy things on the streets of SF is that people listen to Fauci. And just like people (in these cases, folks that lean left politically) seem to have no idea how to deal with crazy people in the streets, they don't know how to deal with it when they're in political office, either. That's the problem. If it weren't Fauci, or the Sacklers, or all those doctors that mutilate the genitals of little girls, etc, it would be someone else. I cannot emphasize this enough: we as a society have to shift our focus towards this hard problem of what to do with psychopaths and how to create ample social defenses to keep them out of positions of power, and, deal with them effectively when they inevitably weasel their way in as they will. At present we have no mainstream institutions dedicated to this task (with journalism and the universities out of the picture) and I can tell you that my own field (psychotherapy) has little to prevent terrible people from entering the profession. All this is that is much more of a problem than a garden gnome.