#157 | Frankly
Turning the Dials Back on Psychopathy: Decent People, Indecent System
This week’s Frankly builds on Nate’s recent conversation with systems theorist Greg Elliott, who came on the platform to discuss why our institutions themselves have become psychopathic and how that affects the behavior of the average human. Nate maps Greg’s framework onto the global economic Superorganism through the imagery of seven “dials” that can be turned to change the incentives baked into the system – from those that might be present in a small-scale, collaborative community to those of the modern, complex society we live in today. Together, these dials help explain how a species whose ancestral social world rewarded cooperation could construct institutions that increasingly reward extraction.
Nate also explores how the same prosocial people who might individually tend toward reciprocity, empathy, and coordination can behave very differently when the conditions around them change and begin to reward psychopathic traits. The carbon pulse brought forward cheap energy, abstraction, enormous scale, and concentrated power – making it easier than ever before to hide responsibility and detach economic measures from the living systems they represent. The central question of this episode asks what can still be rebuilt at the human scale, whether it’s in the form of deeper local relationships, shorter feedback loops, mutual dependence, or institutions where ordinary people can still participate in writing the rules of the system.
Which of these seven dials is most flipped toward the economic Superorganism in your own life, and can you turn it back – even if only partially? How do we remain more prosocial when systemic incentives reward the opposite? And what interventions might we make to bring the system itself more into alignment with our biophysical reality?
Show Notes & Links to Learn More
Download transcriptThe TGS team puts together these brief references and show notes for the learning and convenience of our listeners. However, most of the points made in episodes hold more nuance than one link can address, and we encourage you to dig deeper into any of these topics and come to your own informed conclusions.
This Frankly is Nate’s follow-on to his conversation with systems theorist Greg Elliott on the Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis, and it is best experienced in its video version on YouTube or Spotify, where the seven-dial panel Nate refers to is on screen. If you haven’t yet, begin with Frankly #108 | The Influence of Psychopaths, which introduced the distinction between humans as individuals and humanity in aggregate, and which this Frankly builds on throughout.
Grab-and-Go Resources:
Start here:
- The Great Simplification Ep 231: Greg Elliott, The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis
- Greg Elliott’s Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis: A Guide for Readers
From the archive:
- Frankly 108: The Influence of Psychopaths
- Reality Roundtable 19: Dark Triad Personality Traits
- Reality Blind: The Games People Play
Foundations: Game Theory, The Evolution of Cooperation
Take action – Nate’s suggested fixes, dial by dial:
Dial 1, repeated interaction:
- Finder: co-op developers near you, all 50 states
- Directory: find a local Grange chapter near you
- Directory: independent business alliances by city and state
Dial 2, visibility:
- Donate: Fund for Investigative Journalism grants,
- Organization: whistleblower legal help and support
- How-to: publish your nonprofit’s financials, earn transparency seal
Dial 3, attribution:
- Directory: find a CSA farm share by location
- Directory: check a clothing or beauty brand’s ethics rating
- Toolkit: true cost accounting handbooks, guidelines and course
Dial 4, delay:
- Directory: soil-testing labs to mail your sample to
- How-to: find where your home is losing energy
- How-to: get your own drinking water quality report
Dial 5, lowering your exit costs:
- Guide: CFPB essential guide to building an emergency fund
- Directory: find and enroll in your state Master Gardener training
Dial 5, mutual aid with structure:
- Toolkit: mutual aid legal structure, with sample bylaws and checklists,
- Directory: find a mutual aid group by state,
- Directory: find a tool library or library of things
- Finder: makerspace and fab lab directory, filter by country
- How-to: start a childcare cooperative
- Directory: find a time bank near you
Dial 6, who writes the rules:
- Tool: official USAGov finder for your local elected officials
- Tool: nonpartisan search for local offices you could run for
- How-to: prepare for and speak at a school board meeting
Dial 6, safeguards in the bylaws:
- How-to: writing board terms, term limits and staggered rotation into bylaws
- Model: a governance agreement with scheduled decision review
Dial 7, symbols and proxies:
- Tool: ENERGY STAR Home Energy Yardstick, scored from your own bills
- Finder: Freecycle town search, join a local give-away group
- Guide: cooperative extension beginner’s vegetable gardening handbook
- Library: free step-by-step repair guides for almost anything
Resources by Timestamp:
00:01 – Psychopathy
00:10 – Greg Elliott, The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis, The Great Simplification Ep 231
00:16 – Reid Meloy, Nancy McWilliams, Dark triad traits, Reality Roundtable 19
00:23 – Micromotives and Macrobehavior, Prosocial behavior in most individuals, Frankly 108
00:43 – A system that selects for and rewards predatory behavior
00:48 – The metabolic, economic superorganism (Explained in 7 min)
00:57 – Instrumental behavior
01:13 – Game theory (Video explainer)
01:34 – A game as players, choices, and payoffs, Strategy
01:52 – Cooperation versus competition
02:05 – Institutions as the rules of the game
02:16 – Symbolic selection, Evolutionarily stable strategy
02:42 – Seven boundary conditions
02:53 – Scale and large-scale cooperation, Energy surplus, and Abstraction and the severing of feedback
03:28 – *Homo sapiens arose over ~300,000 years ago, Holocene
03:53 – Dial one: Repeated interaction, Repeat customers and reputation in a small-town diner versus a highway restaurant
04:43 – Cooperative breeding, Food sharing, and Oral storytelling in hunter-gatherer bands
05:00 – Iterated games, Shadow of the future, Tit for tat
05:29 – One-shot anonymous transactions in the modern economy
05:56 – Chicago trading pits, Bid-ask spread
06:53 – Mobility and reputational enforcement
07:36 – The Carbon Pulse
07:47 – Smaller, tightly coupled communities, Cooperatives
07:57 – Spending where people know your name
08:10 – Scheduled repetition and staying put: The Grange, Rootedness in place
08:33 – Dial two: Visibility, The one-way mirror of the interrogation room
09:01 – Dunbar’s number
09:08 – Free riding, Hoarding, Reputation, Social status
09:34 – Surveillance of individual purchases, location, and searches
09:59 – Shell companies and opaque beneficial ownership
10:14 – The Panama Papers, Whistleblower retaliation
11:08 – Empathy as a sense organ
11:26 – Transparency and attribution at the level of elites, Sousveillance
11:56 – Investigative journalism, Whistleblower protection, Opening the books of a nonprofit, a co-op, or a town budget
12:24 – Dial three, attribution: Collective responsibility, The dent in the door and the note under the wiper
13:15 – The problem of many hands
13:39 – Just-in-time, Six-continent supply chains
13:49 – Cobalt mining and Industrial water pollution behind a smartphone
13:58 – Externalities, Firms that externalize harm out-compete firms that internalize it
14:15 – Intergenerational equity
14:38 – Wide boundary versus narrow boundary (Nate and DJ’s book covering such)
15:03 – Buying food with a farmer’s name on it
15:17 – Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, Ecological economics, True cost accounting,
15:41 – Dial four: Delayed feedback, The bill that arrives at your grandchildren’s table
16:37 – Debt
16:51 – Committed warming and the lag between emissions and effects
17:12 – Short time horizons, Status seeking, Low affective empathy, Steep discount rates
17:59 – Shortening feedback loops with proportional accountability
18:17 – Bills mailed to the future now arriving: Carbon, Aquifer drawdown, Inequality
18:32 – Measuring what you depend on: Soil health, Household energy use, Local water supply
18:58 – Dial five, mutual dependence: Interdependence, The threshing machine shared around the neighborhood
19:27 – Cheap diesel and farm mechanization
19:45 – Division of labor in the band: Hunter-gatherer subsistence, Healer and shaman, Oral tradition
20:09 – Asymmetric bargaining power in the labor market
20:19 – The 25-year employee eliminated as a headcount
20:41 – Entrapment games
21:08 – Energy slaves, Fossil labor, Approaching 20 terawatts of global energy use
21:42 – Humanoid robots, Cognitive labor from Large language models, Chinese humanoid robot displays
22:05 – Lowering your exit costs with an emergency fund and less debt
22:15 – Learning skills your own community will need
22:28 – Mutual aid with structure: Tool libraries, Makerspaces, Childcare cooperatives, Time banks
22:54 – Dial six, who writes the rules: Resource control theory
23:28 – The Agricultural Revolution and the ability to store a surplus
23:46 – Reverse dominance hierarchy: Ostracism, Coalitionary punishment, Execution of persistent free riders
24:26 – Meta-power
24:40 – Buying the game board: Acquiring competitors, Vertical integration, Horizontal integration
25:06 – Purchasing information and data, Regulatory capture, Corporate fines as a cost of doing business, State capture
26:07 – Collective action problem
26:33 – The laws of thermodynamics and Planetary boundaries as rule books that cannot be bought
26:50 – Punisher fatigue and the cost of Altruistic punishment
27:20 – Individualization of responsibility
27:37 – The more-than-human predicament
27:44 – School boards, Town councils, Local bylaws, where the rules are written by whoever shows up
28:22 – Tribal safeguards written into bylaws: Term limits, Rotating leadership, Sunset review
28:46 – Fall of the Western Roman Empire, Monasteries as commons that carried Literacy and Brewing through the Early Middle Ages
29:23 – Dial seven, symbols and proxies: Surrogation, The broken fuel gauge
29:53 – Goodhart’s law
30:27 – Human-created game boards: Markets, GDP, Legal systems, Algorithms
30:57 – Symbolic fitness decoupled from actual fitness, Perverse incentives
31:22 – GDP rising after a disaster destroys a community; Broken window fallacy
31:36 – Collapse of the Newfoundland cod fishery
32:38 – Money as a claim on energy, materials, and ecosystems
33:17 – *World population of 8.2 billion, fed by the Industrial food system
33:40 – Measuring in Kilowatt hours, Bushels, and Hours of your life per purchase
33:54 – Off-ledger reciprocity: Barter, Gift economy, Potlucks
34:08 – Repair cafés
34:30 – Gallbladder surgery
34:42 – All seven dials flipped at once as the Economic Superorganism
35:10 – Moloch, Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine
35:23 – Bioregion
35:34 – Everyday prosocial acts: Flashing your high beams, Returning a lost wallet, Organizing a meal train
36:16 – The Great Simplification
36:38 – Reciprocal altruism versus Entrapped cooperation
36:52 – *Prevalence of clinical psychopathy in the global population
37:09 – Hawk-dove game, Multi-level selection, The evolution of cooperation
37:55 – Nate’s theory of change and The Great Simplification community on Hylo
