Western academic literature links neoconservatism along with aggressive political orientations with the psychopathic characteristics lumped together as the “Dark Triad> .
Notice that I said “western” academic literature, meaning behavioral concepts culturally bound and developed in universities in Europe and the Anglosphere —and in no way scientific, despite the pretense otherwise — often ambiguous and easily misapplied, generating a plethora of interpretations with the consensus constantly changing.
Everyone has an opinion about Trump, of course who is often held up as an example of a “Dark Triad” personality except in the case of Ukrainian psychiatrists who like to characterize Putin as exhibiting all the worsts aspects of the “Dark Triad”, worse than Trump and obviously possessed by the Devil.
Despite all thatm you can find nuggets of wisdom in the shifting sands of academic nonsense.
Basically, the “Dark Triad” is all psychopathy.
The NeoCons as a group exhibit certain characteristics that are hard to deny – their “hawkishness” is often accompanied by obvious callousness, lack of empathy, and supremacism as a lot of other stuff and you can see in the graphic above. . Some of the best examples are women – Madeline Albright, Victoria Nuland, and Hillary Clinton. They don’t care about children blown to bits. Or torture. Or any kind of atrocity, that they cannot put to use in self-serving propaganda. And they have friends.
The academic reports are dry but some of them point in interesting directions.
In 2013 M. Arvan wrote an article in Neuroethics “A Lot More Bad News for Conservatives, and a Little Bit of Good News for Liberals.” which surveyed moral judgments which found a strong correlation between-the so-called “Dark Triad” and aggressive, neoconservative positions on the rule of law, punitive justice, and military interventionism —as sub-clinical psychopathy . There appears to be widespread agreement among academics in the field, who generally tend to identify as “liberal”, that psychopathy and what we call “neoconservatism go hand in hand.
That is nothing new as I have written in special articles for coffeebuyers on “ponerology”, the study of political pathologies.
By and large, people with these traits lack emotional sensitivity and do not empathize with the suffering of others, prioritizing in-group loyalty and authority/respect – a sort of “us versus them” attitude, or as George Bush put it, “you’re either with us or against us”. Power matters more than love.
If we accept the rather controversial concept that neoconservatism is driven by some form of psychopathy we must distinguish Primary Psychopathy which is genetically driven, cold, and fearless and Secondary Psychopathy which is environmentally driven, emotionally volatile, and reactive .Yes, the two often go together.
We must keep in mind as I said, that psychopathy is not one thing — is is a spectrum. Hundreds, if not thousands of genes are involved, with a few hundred NCmiRNA operators.
No, it’s not ALL your fault, Mommy, that little Donnie is a serial killer.
Or maybe it is!
Twin and triplet studies consistently show that psychopathic and “callous-unemotional” (CU) traits have a heritability rate of 40% to 60%.
Only about 1.2% of the population are true psychopaths say the “experts”; then qualifying that to say as much as 30% of the population exhibit “low”, “medium” and high” levels of psychopathy. What is a “true” psychopath?
Hollywood knows!
Structural differences in the amygdala result in a genetic predisposition not to experience fear, anxiety, or stress – which means the brain is insensitive to punishment cues. and normal criticism or reprimands or threats of consequences do not register. A low functioning monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A) gene can result in aggressive and antisocial behaviors— triggered and exacerbated by a harsh environment.
Genetics are a kind of baseline That’s nature.
But there is nurture, too.
Most people would immediately think of severe physical abuse and assault as primary “causes” of “dark triad behaviors’ But caregivers failing to care emotionally blocks healthy human attachments and, over time, a child may completely detach from emotional reciprocity as a survival mechanism.
In addition, a chaotic, dangerous, or unpredictable family environment can reinforce a child’s sense that the world is a hostile place where resources are scarce, people are selfish and a“fast life strategy” is best—exploiting others, focusing on short-term self-interest, and abandoning empathy to survive
In children with psychopathic tendencies, traditional disciplinary parenting methods backfire dramatically:
When parents use harsh, authoritarian, or cruel lpunishments on a child who is biologically insensitive to fear, it creates a toxic feedback loop.
The child does not learn right from wrong; instead, they learn that sheer power, dominance, and aggression are the tools used to get what you want. Might makes right. Psychopaths don’t have consciences.
However, warmth, positive reinforcement, and collaborative boundary-settingfoster conscience development, which strongly suppresses to some extent the expression of psychopathic traits later in adulthood.
The worst case is when a child with a fearless, reward-seeking genetic makeup is raised to see the world is an unsafe, dog-eat-dog environment. As adults they are taken over by Social Dominance Orientation (SDO).
It’s a cute academic term, but you get the idea: the need for personal hegemony and fuck you very much.
If they are politicians, SDO-ers view international relations, governance, and foreign and domestic policy through a lens of absolute hierarchy, zero empathy, and the necessity of pre-emptive, aggressive dominance over all non-compliant “others. For them, pain really does look great on other people.
Such people are uniquely equipped to thrive in the competitive, individualistic world of politics – especially in electoral democracies The fraction that will seek absolute power is small, but a minority of like-minded pathocrats can easily outmaneuver larger groups of empathetic individuals to take control of state institutions and establish organizational or systemic hegemony. .
Psychologists note that successful, high-functioning people in this category are not “crazy”—but instead hyper-rational in an instrumental sense, highly calculating, completely unburdened by emotional hesitation, or conscience and exceptionally skilled at telling others what they want to hear, that is, to lie.
They excel at building powerful institutional networks, using think tanks, and persuasive, if sophistical arguments, faking evidence to attain military or economic dominance, and a lot of dirty tricks.
They are completely self-serving, with a total inability to accept responsibility for failure. In this regard, they are calculating — they don’t avoid failure; but outsource the consequences of it When a policy collapses, an “instrumentally” rational leader will immediately blame “poor execution” by subordinates, a lack of resolve from public voters, or betrayal by allies. There are any number of excuses and scapegoats.
Take the architects of the 2003 Iraq War— a textbook neoconservative policy failure. The Presidential Half-Wit got most of the blame. The rest? They stepped in shit and threw the shoes away and bought new ones. They didn’t lose their homes, their wealth, or their lives , they personally avoided the consequences of their sins even while their policiescost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives.
But people like this have a huge blind spot
They assume everyone else is driven purely by transactional self-interest, power, or fear. They completely fail to calculate how deeply other cultures value abstract human concepts like national pride, religious conviction, or resentment of foreign occupation.
Fearlessness –genetic or acquired --translates directly into unrealistic inflation of personal capability (such as a war will be “quick and easy”). They ignore historical data and warnings from experts because of their long term predisposition to ignore warnings and their reluctance to accept anyone knowing more than them.
Paul Babiak and Robert Hare describe these individuals as “organizational destroyers”. They successfully climb the corporate or political ladder by looking brilliant, confident, and rational. However, because their underlying motives are entirely self-serving, they will happily burn down the institution, the country, or the company to ensure that they are the ones standing on top of the ashes
Fundamentally, these people are parasites. They destroy their hosts.
When one host dies, they find another.
They are highly successful at protecting themselves, but their decisions are fundamentally irrational for the collective good.
As established, these actors are hyper-calculating not emotionally unhinged. They treat geopolitics like a cold transaction. For them, everything is a transaction. Just business.
If a non-nuclear state is well-defended and capable of delivering a devastating local retaliation that harms U.S. forces, regional bases, or the domestic homeland, the “cost” of the transaction instantly skyrockets.
Because they are highly rational about avoiding their own personal failure, they will not launch a first-strike nuclear weapon simply out of spite or wounded pride if the predictable blowback dismantles the very system that grants them power.
The core of neoconservative ideology is hegemony—maintaining unchallengeable dominance.
A first-strike nuclear detonation on a non-nuclear state would permanently shatter global alliances, trigger massive domestic unrest, invite economic collapse, and invite localized military ruin.
Destroying America’s global standing and inviting a devastating retaliatory strike destroys their hegemony. They cannot rule over a collapsed system. Therefore, their obsession with power acts as a natural restraint against self-destructive behavior.
Historically, neoconservatives do not engage in conflicts where the enemy can punch back with equal or devastating force. Their entire strategy relies on absolute asymmetry.
They aggressively advocate for interventions against states that are weakened, isolated, or incapable of direct retaliation against the U.S. (e.g., Grenada, Iraq, Libya).
When facing well-defended states that can retaliate heavily (such as Russia), their behavior shifts dramatically.
Instead of direct military options, they pivot to rational containment, proxy conflicts, crippling economic sanctions, and covert operations. They intentionally avoid the direct kinetic trap because they know the blowback would be politically, if not existentially fatal to them
If such a state wounded their “pride” or challenged their authority, an instrumentally rational pathocrat would not launch a reckless nuclear strike. Instead, they would try to outmaneuver the threat safely:
They would launch a massive information campaign to frame the adversary as an imminent global threat, shifting public perception to justify an asymmetric gray-zone war.
They would fund, arm, and train neighboring states or internal insurgencies to fight the well-defended state, letting others absorb the devastating local retaliation while the U.S. remains insulated.
They would leverage international banking systems and cyber warfare to cripple the target state’s defense infrastructure from a safe distance, minimizing any risk of direct harm to themselves.
While a pathocratic leader completely lacks empathy for the millions of lives a nuclear weapon would destroy, they possess a hyper-acute awareness of their own safety. They will happily sacrifice foreign populations or lower-class soldiers in asymmetric conventional wars, but they will not cross the nuclear threshold against a well-defended state just for pride, because doing so risks burning down the very empire they intend to rule.
As long as you have electoral democracy, there is nothing much you can do. That’s why the Greeks used sortition.
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