Anger Override

To be successful at trading, bartering or debating, one needs to keep their emotions in check. This is easier said then done, but it's clear that those who manage to keep calm and collected are usually the better debaters and make most money while trading; they have a clear goal in mind and don't let their emotions cloud their rationality.

_{source: YouTube}

With the above in mind, we can also explain why psychopathy and sociopathy are found significantly more frequently among those who gain economical success; several studies have shown the obvious, namely that rich and powerful people are simply less concerned and less perceptive of other people's needs and wishes. The character Scrooge from "A Christmas Carol" is based on the extremely rich and successful people of our capitalist society; what does that say about how we've structured our society, what we tend to reward and what we tend to punish? Fact is that those who are less capable of showing empathy have the best chance of "making it big"; Wealthy Have Difficulty Detecting Emotions: Study.

In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley, Carlo M. Cipolla, published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity. He came up with 5 "Basic Laws of Human Stupidity":

1. Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
2. The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals.
5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

Now, it's important to understand that "stupid" in this study is one of the four basic categories assigned to humans, and that I don't necessarily agree with these categorizations. Prof. Cipolla holds some ideas I certainly don't agree with, one of them being that he believes all humans are not created equal. Here's what he said:

One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.

I distance myself from that completely. The four categories are the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit and the stupid. And fortunately the good professor states that we all incorporate all four categories in our personalities, just to different degrees. What's important to note here, is that 1) the entire study relates to behavior during transactions and 2) that it all supports the observation that people who are less empathic tend to fall in the "intelligent" and "bandit" categories. The fifth and final law, that a stupid person is the most dangerous type of person, stems from his conclusion that "intelligent bandits" do more good than harm to society as a whole; I don't agree with that at all. Still, the paper is an interesting read and can be found here.

Adding these things together, we can conclude that, in a society held together by a fabric of transactions, the sociopaths on top are the intelligent people, and the rest of us who don't have making a profit as our number one priority, are the stupid and helpless people. And when society is taken over by those "intelligent" people, when they shape our institutions and have bought our democracy, they will do anything to keep us stupid and helpless. Emotions override our rationality, so they'll keep us angry, they'll invent enemies for us to be angry at, and they'll use that anger to keep us fighting each other while they hold on to wealth and power.

And it's working. Society, especially in America, is as divided as it's ever been. Politics has become a sports event where political parties have their cheer-leading fanatics engaged in constant debate ruled not by arguments, but by outrage. Even the way elections are reported on looks like a sports event, with pundits keeping scores, making predictions and declaring winners and losers on huge scoreboards and a clock counting down to the conclusion of the match. It's all emotion and zero percent rationality or argumentation. The below linked video is about a possible solution to this problem; an "argumentation AI" that could help construct a way to help everyone make better arguments, check the validity of arguments made and expose rhetoric devoid of valid arguments. Watch it, it's interesting. But I'm not convinced if it'll help or even see the light of day...

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