Although the Psychopath acquires higher cognitive functions throughout his life he will invariably never use them in his day to day cognitive processes except for IQ tests and maybe solving puzzles. Instead he amplifies through trial and error those 3 infantile mental tools: Mimicking; Associative Recall (memorising) and the manipulation of others by using seduction, rejection and menace.
Unfortunately modern education has evolved largely based on the exact same cognitive template as that of the psychopath. It trains us to think like a psychopath and without any restraint, to become somewhat sociopathic.
Because the psychopath's thinking has evolved to
overwhelmingly dominate in competitive and conflict-based environments and
because we have accepted competition as our default economic and even social
dynamic, modern education attempts to equip us to become competent under
those sociopathic rules and conditions.
So then modern education by default, to offset the effects of our main competitive liability, namely empathy, attempts to camouflage or sanitise to varying degrees: competition, opportunism, single-mindedness, egocentricity, ruthlessness, manipulativeness, deviousness, sophistry, hierarchy and exploitation ("winning") all the characteristics that allow psychopaths to prevail as predators.
The psychopathic personality is the ideal evolutionary adaption to conflict or competitive environments, even to chaotic environments. His tactic as an opportunistic ruthless "head kicker" lets him move fast by making self-serving decisions unhindered by concerns of any further levels of consequence which may well be borne by others or the environment ie "Collateral Damage".
Having Tar Sands extraction destroy the Athabasca River system; or 1.5 million people die to "rid Iraq of its WMD"; or to cut and burn millions of hectares of Tropical Rainforest in order to create plantations for Palm Oil; or even bring in increased quarterly profits by firing staff, increasing workloads and reducing wages -- No consequences beyond the original self-serving intention are actually considered and when any further issues arise, mostly unforeseen, they are dealt with poorly and episodically - one at a time.
The cognitive tactics of the psychopath make him the ideal battlefield warrior and as such he has been with us from time immemorial both causing and defending in conflicts- His ruthless aggression, opportunism, single-mindedness, lack of conscience and fast but simplistic thinking make him useful to defend the tribe during an attack by the psychopath's tribe next door, but then trying to put him in a box when wise decisions need to be made during peace time became the overwhelming problem.
We can assume that spinning the idea of terror from without or within with his deviousness, manipulativeness and skilful sophistry would help keep him in a leadership position, despite a morbid inability to deal with relationships and complexity and despite his general lack of proficiency with all things peaceful! And therein lays the secret source of the continual failure to reach our extraordinary potential as a social species.
Psychopaths freely and actively operating in societies keep it in continual conflict, competition and infantilism with all their attending poverty, crime, waste, inefficiency, pollution, and general exploitation of the peaceful by the more aggressive. Psychopaths promote sociopathy arising among those not empathetically retarded, as the rest of society mimic their behaviours in an attempt to compete and survive. The price we pay is that all our organs of society such as education, economics, governance, welfare, health and even science, have evolved to operate at the cognitive level and processes of the psychopath. Even more so, collective organisations like for instance, the corporation, with its goals, structures and processes are modeled largely on the workings of the psychopathic mind!
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