This note won’t make sense to anyone who isn’t already familiar with the Sociopath framework in which you’re discussing this, but I did want to call out that Venkat Rao (at least when he wrote the Gervais Principle) explicitly stated that sociopaths are amoral and has fairly clearly (especially relative to his other opinions) stated that he thinks having more Sociopaths wouldn’t be a bad thing. Here are a few quotes from Morality, Compassion, and the Sociopath which talk about this:
So yes, this entire edifice I am constructing is a determinedly amoral one. Hitler would count as a sociopath in this sense, but so would Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
In all this, the source of the personality of this archetype is distrust of the group, so I am sticking to the word “sociopath” in this amoral sense. The fact that many readers have automatically conflated the word “sociopath” with “evil” in fact reflects the demonizing tendencies of loser/clueless group morality. The characteristic of these group moralities is automatic distrust of alternative individual moralities. The distrust directed at the sociopath though, is reactionary rather than informed.
Sociopaths can be compassionate because their distrust only extends to groups. They are capable of understanding and empathizing with individual pain and acting with compassion. A sociopath who sets out to be compassionate is strongly limited by two factors: the distrust of groups (and therefore skepticism and distrust of large-scale, organized compassion), and the firm grounding in reality. The second factor allows sociopaths to look unsentimentally at all aspects of reality, including the fact that apparently compassionate actions that make you “feel good” and assuage guilt today may have unintended consequences that actually create more evil in the long term. This is what makes even good sociopaths often seem callous to even those among the clueless and losers who trust the sociopath’s intentions. The apparent callousness is actually evidence that hard moral choices are being made.
When a sociopath has the resources for (and feels the imperative towards) larger scale do-gooding, you get something like Bill Gates’ behavior: a very careful, cautious, eyes-wide-open approach to compassion. Gates has taken on a world-hunger sized problem, but there is very little ceremony or posturing about it. It is sociopath compassion. Underlying the scale is a residual distrust of the group — especially the group inspired by oneself — that leads to the “reluctant messiah” effect. Nothing is as scary to the compassionate and powerful sociopath as the unthinking adulation and following inspired by their ideas. I suspect the best among these lie awake at night worrying that if they were to die, the headless group might mutate into a monster driven by a frozen, unexamined moral code. Which is why the smartest attempt to engineer institutionalized doubt, self-examination and formal checks and balances into any systems they design.
I hope my explanation of the amorality of the sociopath stance makes a response mostly unnecessary: I disagree with the premise that “more sociopaths is bad.” More people taking individual moral responsibility is a good thing. It is in a sense a different reading of Old Testament morality — eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge and learning to tell good and evil apart is a good thing. An atheist view of the Bible must necessarily be allegorical, and at the risk of offending some of you, here’s my take on the Biblical tale of the Garden of Eden: Adam and Eve were clueless, having abdicated moral responsibility to a (putatively good) sociopath: God. Then they became sociopaths in their own right. And were forced to live in an ecosystem that included another sociopath — the archetypal evil one, Satan — that the good one could no longer shield them from. This makes the “descent” from the Garden of Eden an awakening into freedom rather than a descent into baseness. A good thing.
I apologize if this just seems like nitpicking your terminology, but I’m calling it out because I’m curious whether you agree with his abstract definition but disagree with his moral assessment of Sociopaths, vice versa, or something else entirely? As a concrete example, I think Venkat would argue that early EA was a form of Sociopath compassion and that for the sorts of world-denting things a lot LWers tend to be interested in, Sociopathy (again, as he defines it) is going to be the right stance to take.
Rao’s sociopaths are Kegan 4.5, they’re nihilistic and aren’t good for long lasting organizations because they view the notion of organizational goals as nonsensical. I agree that there’s no moral bent to them but if you’re trying to create an organization with a goal they’re not useful. Instead, you want an organization that can develop Kegan 5 leaders.
This doesn’t seem like it’s addressing Anlam’s question though. Gandhi doesn’t seem nihilist. I assume (from this quote, which was new to me), that in Kegan terms, Rao probably meant something ranging from 4.5 to 5.
I think Rao was at Kegan 4.5 when he wrote the sequence and didn’t realize Kegan 5 existed. Rao was saying “There’s no moral bent” to Kegan 4.5 because he was at the stage of realizing there was no such thing as morals.
At that level you can also view Kegan 4.5′s as obviously correct and the ones who end up moving society forward into interesting directions, they’re forces of creative destruction. There’s no view of Kegan 5 at that level, so you’ll mistake Kegan 5′s as either Kegan 3′s or other Kegan 4.5′s, which may be the cause of the confusion here.
This note won’t make sense to anyone who isn’t already familiar with the Sociopath framework in which you’re discussing this, but I did want to call out that Venkat Rao (at least when he wrote the Gervais Principle) explicitly stated that sociopaths are amoral and has fairly clearly (especially relative to his other opinions) stated that he thinks having more Sociopaths wouldn’t be a bad thing. Here are a few quotes from Morality, Compassion, and the Sociopath which talk about this:
I apologize if this just seems like nitpicking your terminology, but I’m calling it out because I’m curious whether you agree with his abstract definition but disagree with his moral assessment of Sociopaths, vice versa, or something else entirely? As a concrete example, I think Venkat would argue that early EA was a form of Sociopath compassion and that for the sorts of world-denting things a lot LWers tend to be interested in, Sociopathy (again, as he defines it) is going to be the right stance to take.
Rao’s sociopaths are Kegan 4.5, they’re nihilistic and aren’t good for long lasting organizations because they view the notion of organizational goals as nonsensical. I agree that there’s no moral bent to them but if you’re trying to create an organization with a goal they’re not useful. Instead, you want an organization that can develop Kegan 5 leaders.
This doesn’t seem like it’s addressing Anlam’s question though. Gandhi doesn’t seem nihilist. I assume (from this quote, which was new to me), that in Kegan terms, Rao probably meant something ranging from 4.5 to 5.
I think Rao was at Kegan 4.5 when he wrote the sequence and didn’t realize Kegan 5 existed. Rao was saying “There’s no moral bent” to Kegan 4.5 because he was at the stage of realizing there was no such thing as morals.
At that level you can also view Kegan 4.5′s as obviously correct and the ones who end up moving society forward into interesting directions, they’re forces of creative destruction. There’s no view of Kegan 5 at that level, so you’ll mistake Kegan 5′s as either Kegan 3′s or other Kegan 4.5′s, which may be the cause of the confusion here.