Why Awful People are Always in Charge: The Pathocracy Problem
- Kevin Lankes
- Aug 12
- 9 min read
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/tMm5DFJ2VNI
Some social scientists argue that this particular issue is the one of the biggest problems faced by the human race. And I tend to agree. My question to get us started is, why does it seem like the people in charge of things are always just the actual worst people of all time? In the very best case, you could argue that they mislead, or deflect, or distract, because they really like the way things are going and they don’t want things to change, because they benefit from being in power, and improving conditions for everyday people genuinely gets in the way of their own upward ascendancy. On the other hand, in the worst case scenario, we have a lot of people in office who are actively working to make things worse for us, so that they themselves gain even more wealth and power. It’s this second group that we’re going to be talking about today. Maybe it’s the cynic in me, but it really does feel like not a lot of our elected representatives are in it because they actually want to help.
And lots of people have noticed this over the years, too, including Polish psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski. He coined the term Pathocracy to describe what he saw. You might have a sense from the word itself where this is going, but Pathocracy is a portmanteau that takes its etymology from the word pathology. Lobaczewski grew up under Nazi rule in Poland. Then, after the war was over, he suffered through the Soviet occupation that replaced the presence of the Third Reich in his homeland. He lived his formative years witnessing the worst of society’s inclination toward Pathocracy. And he defined it as a system of government 'wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people'.
Over his lifetime, Lobaczewski was arrested and tortured because the subjects of his work currently ran the country he lived in, while he was studying them for being gigantic pieces of shit. So they proved him right by torturing. He eventually escaped to the U.S. in 1980 and from here he could do his work without fear of reprisal. Well, if he were around today that would be a problem again. Which brings us to the things that he found out.
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What Lobaczewski really wanted to understand was why it seems so easy for people with personality disorders to rise to positions of power in government. How they just seemingly take over, and why no one stops them. Human beings have always had a history of cruelty and violence, but Lobaczewski argues that human beings aren’t naturally terrible, just some of us are. And those particular people often rise to positions of power and hold sway over the rest of us for various reasons. And before you know it, you’re “just following orders,” and committing vast evils in the name of someone else.
He said that this whole sordid mess begins when one individual with a disorder storms the public narrative and takes over the culture. Dr. Steven Taylor, who’s a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, elaborated on the idea when he wrote that “While some members of the ruling class are appalled by the brutality and irresponsibility of the leader and his acolytes, his disordered personality appeals to some psychologically normal individuals. They find him charismatic. His impulsiveness is mistaken for decisiveness; his narcissism for confidence; his recklessness for fearlessness.” Which is basically what people have been saying about trump forever. That he’s an idiot’s idea of a genius, or an economically illiterate person’s idea of a successful businessman.
So why is it personality disorders that tend to dominate positions of power? Well, because of the nature of the symptoms. People with narcissistic personality disorder, for instance, just automatically come into their various fields believing they’re better than everyone else. They have the answers, and only they can fix it. This is a playbook we’ver heard over and over from a certain tangerine tyrant. Only he has the answers, he’s a very stable genius, and he can’t be wrong about anything, which is another textbook trait of NPD.
Personality disorders are classified into groups of three separate clusters. Cluster A, B, and C. I’m not going to go through all of them here, because this video would be too long if I did, so I’ll put them up here on the screen while we keep talking about them. We don’t really know exactly what causes personality disorders to arise in people. Some of the theories are always the theories, things like genetic disposition, childhood trauma, abuse, and possibly some culturally-specific factors as well. And each of them individually have their own risk factors for developing. But what they generally have in common are things like not having a stable sense of self, and possessing an extremely heightened sense of self-esteem or an incredibly diminished sense of the same. And close relationships are often very difficult to maintain.
According to the National Institutes of Health, the prevalence of any personality disorder among U.S. adults is 9.1%. Of course, this is difficult to gauge accurately. For one thing, the numbers NIH is using come from over twenty years ago. And then mainly it’s hard because personality disorders are famously difficult to treat, and that difficulty begins very early in the process because a lot of these disorders make it impossible for people who have them to realize they need help in the first place. So kind of a problem for accounting purposes, but we try our best. Also a factor is that the majority of people with personality disorders also have other mental health comorditities, and those are often the reasons they look for help to begin with. 67% of people who are diagnosed with a personality disorder also have another mental health challenge. Inside that population, 52% of them have an anxiety disorder, 24% a mood disorder, another 24% an impulse control disorder, and 22% a substance abuse disorder.
Estimates conclude that around one percent of the general population could be psychopaths. It’s not a lot, but the issue is that they likely concentrate in certain circles. The data we have focuses mainly in the professional realm. A 2011 study found that 5.6 percent of people had supervisors that were actual psychopaths. A study from 2021 found that about 12% of corporate leadership exhibited psychopathic traits. A lot of executes tend to show the dark triad traits that express an incredible thirst for power and extreme lack of empathy. And there are multiple studies that show that psychopathic college students tend to be attracted to degrees in business-related fields. And we’ve done studies on “strongmen” leaders to find if the same situation translates to politics as in business. The answer seems to be that it does. Of fourteen strongmen world leaders studied in a three-year analysis, researchers found all fourteen of them scored very highly when assessed against the dark triad.
Now, in his 2018 book Disordered Minds, Ian Hughes argued that democracy was a system designed to protect people against psychopaths and others with personality disorders who wanted to use power for their own ends. And that’s why when we see them attain power, they immediately begin to dismantle the structural supports of democratic government. Things like voting and fair elections, freedom of the press, and they’re known to just generally show complete incompetence for governing and dismiss all of the rules and practices in favor of whatever’s good for them.
Pathocratic governments are dangerous for many reasons, but one key problem is that they’re infectious. Lobaczewski said that pathocracies encourage psychopathic behavior in otherwise normal people. Everyone falls into a mob mentality and spreads the worst traits of humanity like a virus. And pathocracies work in a similar way to jingoistic, ultra-nationalist states. They offer the promise of some fantastically better society off into the future, but the only way to get there is always through eliminating populations of people that the leader says are undesirable. We can see all of this happening right now in America. You can see the cult of personality firmly established around one noisy demagogue, and the mass movement that’s full of self-righteous hatred toward people who are different, and the spreading behavior consistent with ignoring social mores. It’s textbook.
Pathocracies tend to attract more disordered individuals into the fray. Lots of people with similar personality disorders as the figurehead will come out of the woodwork and attempt to use the situation to gain power and influence for themselves. So this is why you can end up having an entire presidential cabinet full of laughably unqualified morons.
There’s this ubiquitous notion out there, in literature particularly, but the overall culture in general, and it’s become an idiom, maybe even a cliche: “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And I think that is a part of why we see such a breakdown in genuine leadership capacity in representative states, but I also think that research shows us that the people who are already inclined to be corrupt are the people who seek out office to begin with. People with some personality disorders, not all of them, have this lust for power, and they need to experience how it can make them feel inside about themselves. It reaffirms their unrealistic vision of themselves and their capabilities, and they have to find avenues to reinforce that elsewhere through external validation via public opinion. It’s possible the exact wrong people are going to Washington and seeking out those kinds of backroom deals and welcoming the corruption that comes with quid pro quo politics. Frank Herbert summed this up nicely in the final book of the Dune series when he wrote, “All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”
The issue is identifying these people and then figuring out what we can ethically do with them. How do we defeat pathocracy by preventing certain people from taking office? Some mental health professionals insist that you can’t diagnose someone from afar, especially public figures. This is why we had the unofficial Goldwater rule. But lots of professionals in the field felt very strongly that we had enough evidence to diagnose trump that many of them did speak out. Professionals believe that he’s a malignant narcissist. He demonstrates symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder and all of his actions fit very neatly into the definition and the signs to watch for.
The good news, I guess, is that pathocracy is not forever, because the figurehead is not forever. And they also come and go when the normal people decide that enough is enough. This is actually a vistigial anthropological mechanism. According to Christopher Boehm, an anthropologist who studied altruism and the evolution of morality, hunter-gatherer groups, both modern and past, had a way of punishing people who tried to take over the group. Because society for them was egalitarian and fair, because it had to be in order to ensure survival. The social Darwinism thing is just totally wrong, and completely unscientific, because all the evidence suggests the complete opposite, that early humans were cooperative and communal. Boehm coined the term ‘egalitarian sanctioning’ to describe how hunter-gatherers will handle those who disrupt society with their own ambition. It can involve barring certain people from positions of leadership or outright banishing them from the community altogether. Some psychologists have suggested adapting this practice for modern-day politics. I mean yeah, why not screen people for psychopathy if they want to be in charge of making the rules of the society we live in. A lot of similar tests have been proposed for various things, like becoming a parent. The issue with testing like this where the goal is to limit the rights of people is always the fact that someone would have to make the call, and who in the world would we pick to do that? Because if someone wanted to do it, then that’s a red flag. If they wanted to screen out political candidates for personality disorders, if they volunteered for a job with that kind of authority, that would be suspicious because maybe it means they’re a psychopath. It’s a real catch-22.
An interesting solution I saw in an opinion piece on the issue was a call to form more citizen assemblies inside of politics. The argument being that jury systems work pretty well for court cases, and they’re by no means perfect, but a collective of grouping of everyday people who just want to get to the truth of something is a good system. And it might translate well for political problems. There’s some research that seems to back that idea, anyway.
Another way we might make sure that certain people don’t attain power is to have better recourse when it does happen. Americans don’t have a good enough recall system like the rest of the world does. Our impeachment process is a total joke, and it’s never been used in the way it was designed to hold presidents accountable. It’s political, not criminal, and we’ve stopped ourselves from being about to prosecute presidential crimes, now maybe forever with recent supreme court decisions. So yeah, we sort of have no real options for dealing with a situation like we’re currently in. An obvious grifter with malignant narcissism takes control of the government and uses every chance he can get to enrich himself. We should really just have an easy off switch for that situation. I think that’s a sign of a functional democracy, personally: being able to actually stop things when circumstances have gotten too extreme. Everyone is just too willing to go along with it, and maybe that’s because they benefit. Because we live in a pathocracy. So I don’t fully know how to fix it, I just know that we desperately need to try. Let me know in the comments what you think we could do to possibly get out of this mess where the people in power are always just in it for themselves, and potentially also not well.
But you stay well, so we can get together and do some f*cking good about our current political predicaments. See you next time.
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