
How Sociopathic Capitalism Came to Rule the World - mundus
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/11/sociopathic-capitalism/506240/?single_page=true
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nibs
My fiance Aunt works with troubled youth in a relatively at risk community. In
her decades long career, she has met a single clinical sociopath (many
psychopaths but those are not as interesting, primarily characterized as a
lack of empathy and a high need for stimulation). The sociopath was best
characterized as chronically violent (history of physical abuse to pets,
siblings, partners, parents and police) and disturbed every professional they
came into contact with on the basis of their ability to transcend and violate
your emotional boundaries with ease (and seeming satisfaction). 10x more
charming, manipulative and sadistic than most people could conceive of being.
Ie. A sociopath.

The organization of the world economy is not sociopathic. The orgnization of
the world economy involves money, people and resources numberated in values
not easily comprehended by our relatively linear cognitive abilities. It is
comprised of a very large number of primarily good people making a primarily
well intentioned effort to be successful for themselves, get respect, live
well and if they can do useful things for other people. There are many reasons
why people might still be in the gene pool but depending on the conditions of
the environment they (and their ancestors) were raised in, the ability to be
zero-sum competitive and hyper focused on what your competition does, could
have been useful at one time and still may be.

HN nerds appreciate and give status to activities that try to create positive
sum wealth for people, but the markets we work in can be just as zero-sum and
unpleasant as winning an election or becoming CEO of a bank. It is not bad to
win zero sum contests, we just need to create status incentives to make new
things and create new wealth in favour of ruthlessly battling for old
resources and zero sum opportunities to have power but do little good.

People think they are mad about capitalism but really they are mad about how
hard it is to topple the faceless natural oligopolies that have taken over as
default economic institutions as a result of the complexity and regulation in
our globalized world. Instead of villainizing "capitalism" or giving up on
trade and growing vegetables on your apartment balcony, I think we should do
things that create new value and opportunities for people. It is a leadership
bottleneck, to value creativity and give it status over role-based power, and
an ongoing battle between people oriented towards different things.

