The Rise of the Sociopath Economy
The new trolley problem
You’ve probably heard of the trolley problem. It was invented back in 1967 as part of a constipated Catholic theological argument about whether it’s okay for a pregnant woman to abort her baby to save her own life.
The original version of the trolley problem had a train bearing down on 5 people. If you did nothing, five people would die OR you could divert the train and save their lives, at the cost of being personally responsible for killing someone.
Eventually, it moved on to pushing the victim in front of a train to save those five lives, and over time, it took on a life of its own with all sorts of funny scenarios being shoehorned into this model:
The trolley problem is extremely interesting because it seems to increasingly be a model for how modern life works in America.
Certainly not in EVERY case.
There are still lots of win/win scenarios out there.
For example, let’s say you need to get the leaves raked in your yard and offer me $100 to do it. Then, I do it, and you pay me the money. That’s a free and voluntary exchange of resources between two individuals. It’s very win/win.
Of course, not everything in life is that simple.
Today, all across America, people are facing a trolley problem that looks more and more like this:
It’s easy to see how this can happen.
Let’s say you love to bake. Next thing you know, you start a small bakery and pretty much all you sell is cakes, cookies, doughnuts, and cupcakes. In other words, it may taste great, but all of it is terrible for people. You rationalize that by saying something like, “It’s not going to hurt someone to have a delicious treat for their birthday, at a Christmas party, or every once in a while. Heck, those little deserts enhance people’s lives and give them something they can look forward to on occasion.”
While all of this is true, what do you say when you have an extremely overweight customer who comes in every day and buys whole cakes, boxes of donuts, and dozens of cupcakes? As the months go on, he looks worse and worse, and you know that you’re part of that. Do you tell him to stop coming in, eat some healthy food, and go get a trainer? No, you don’t. You may wish him well, but you keep taking his money, and you tell yourself, “It’s not my fault if he misuses the products he buys from me.”
There are lots of examples that are kind of like this, and we certainly wouldn’t want to look or crack down on this kind of thing because we could easily go too far into the realm of shutting down personal choice.
For example, hang gliding is a dangerous hobby. So is mountain climbing. Fertilizer can be turned into a bomb. Prescription pain meds stop an immense amount of suffering, but they’re also frequently abused. People die in car crashes all the time. Hell, more than 100 Americans die in their bathtubs every year.
Some things you have to just chalk up to the unfortunate price that has to be paid so that people can live in a free society where people can make their own choices.
But we’re increasingly seeing something different in American society. People, corporations, and political entities that don’t look at the world as win/win. Instead, they look at it more like a variation of the new trolley problem.
They intend to win at everyone else’s expense.
That’s fine if you’re talking about a football game or who gets the highest grade in class, but what happens when your whole society becomes increasingly overrun with people who think like hitmen and drug dealers?
What else would you call Big Pharma companies that deliberately lie about their drugs and still make a huge profit after paying a fine afterward? Just to name one example, there are estimates that Merck & Co killed somewhere between 27,000 to 140,000 people by deliberately hiding safety data about their drug Vioxx. They were willing to do that for a drug that generated 2.5 billion dollars in sales per year.
How about social media companies using algorithms that push their users toward conspiracy theories, rage-bait, and ultra-polarization because it increases the amount of time those users spend on the site?
Who supports illegal immigration even though it’s bad for America? Business owners who want to profit from illegals and pass the costs on to everyone else, and liberals who hope to turn them into citizens, hook them on welfare everyone else pays for, and turn them into a huge, reliable new voter block for big government liberalism.
Along similar lines, one of the Democratic Party’s core political strategies is trying to convince different groups of Americans that Republicans hate them as human beings. They don’t care that it’s not true or about the enormous number of problems and grief it causes; they care about helping their election prospects:
Another strategy Democrats have been using for a number of years when Republicans are in office is deliberately trying to gin up riots in liberal cities because they believe it will be good for their political prospects. Unfortunately, for everyone else, the price of helping them at the polls has been billions of dollars in damages and a lot of dead Americans.
Mainstream media outlets habitually lie, distort the truth, and frame every single story differently depending on whether a Republican or Democrat is involved. This is because their audiences have become increasingly liberal, and that’s what they want to hear. It would be hard to complain about that if they were openly partisan operations, but when you’re talking about media outlets that used to (and still do) try to convince everyone that they’re non-partisan, straight down the middle of the road outfits, it’s a disgusting and disgraceful lie that harms anyone who is foolish enough to believe it.
Along similar lines, our education system in America has gotten way out of whack. Public education is supposed to be non-partisan, but instead it tilts off the scales to the Left. This is undeniably harmful to many of the Americans paying for our school system with their tax dollars, who have a right to not have their views trashed to their own children by people who are just supposed to be teaching them reading, writing, and arithmetic. Subverting our education system is absolutely wrong.
Of course, it doesn’t stop there.
Because of the way the social media algorithms work, saying some of the most controversial things imaginable – whether they’re true or not and whether they’re good or evil – has become a pathway to success.
Promoting hatred of other people, hatred of other races, calling for violence against people you disagree with, encouraging misandry or misogyny, being deliberately offensive, posting rage-bait, spreading bizarre conspiracy theories – these have turned into regularly used strategies by some of the most popular political influencers in America.
The problem with being in a society where people can see that acting like a sociopath is a competitive advantage is that it’s guaranteed to lead to an awful lot of people acting like sociopaths. If we don’t want to live in a society like that, we have to punish that behavior and reward people who do the right thing. Ultimately, you get what you reward, and if we turn life in America into a trolley problem where “success” means throwing everyone else onto the train tracks to get ahead, we’re going to end up with a lot of blood on the tracks.
Very good piece, and if China wanted to weaken and ultimately destroy America, what would it do? Pretty much all of that.
I loved this piece, John. Great work.
Yes, the moral dilemma that can be describes as egoism (doing for me) vs egalitarianism (doing for others in need). Or it is also a pursuit of short-term individual gain over long-term collective pain.
What has governed our choices of these things over the ages has been a foundational morality that we all shared. We just were taught as young children the importance of doing no harm and leaving the campground cleaner than we found it.
Secularism has destroyed the foundation morality and given rise to a new fake morality where the pursuit of any individual benefit is justified as righteous.
In my opinion the milestone event for when we started a significant slide down to this situation where individual greed and resentment, egoism if you will, began to override historical moral guiderails, was when our President, the leader of the free world, went on national TV to tell his baldfaced lie "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinski" and then later during his Senate testimony hedged on a question saying his famous "it depended on what the definition of is is."
At that time the world was educated to believe that getting away with behavior that was easily identified as immoral would be considered acceptable if one can get away with it.
We were already sliding down the moral slippery slope, but Clinton gave it a big push.
And it isn't just the secular left going immoral. I have debates with my Christian conservative friends claiming that free markets are a near religion and that millions of displaced working Americans is just an accepted outcome for maximizing their Wall Street returns.