When I compare western democracy with an oligarchy, I see this one big difference:
In a democracy, the people have a say in who governs them. In an oligarchy, most of the people have no say.
I am an example of this profound difference. My heritage is from the peasant classes of Eastern Europe. My destiny, had I been born a century earlier, was to have been a low-wage worker, not an inventor of an alternative democracy. I can be such an inventor because western democracy has chosen to educate people from the lower classes.
History also says peasants do not usually participate in politics. If they do, their role is to provide the violence to effect change. But I got to spend six years in a Canadian political party. While I saw no violence, my experience was that the internal party elections are inconsistent for finding the better people. Sometimes the process finds good people. Other times it finds alcoholics, fools, and arrogant jerks.
And there have been a few politicians who could be diagnosed as psychopaths and sociopaths. Maybe more than a few? The internal party elections are no filter for finding the better people to govern us.
Looking to clinical definitions of psychopathy and sociopathy, I didn’t find clear unity from the experts. And there are various shades of grey within these mental disorders. Rather than offend people who might not like my chosen definitions, let’s just say that, in general, psychopaths and sociopaths cannot connect with people at a true empathetic level. There is something in their nature or nurture that prevents their brains from making these connections. This definition should work well enough for this article.
I also include narcissists with these two mental disorders. Narcissists also don’t care much about the feelings of the people around them.
Speaking of shades of grey, I sometimes wonder if I have a bit of these attributes in me. I have been working at this TDG project since 1997 — and I have nothing to show for it! That is a sign of a mental disorder, isn’t it?
While a few psychopaths and sociopaths should spend their lives in prisons or mental institutions for they cause too much damage, many can live functional lives in society. But their drive to “be good” is more influenced by not going to prison rather than “I don’t want to hurt this person.” They can be trained to be sociable, but it is not a true sociable.
Many psychopaths and sociopaths have a strong desire to be in control. I got tired of working under idiots higher in my corporate ladder. So I went into business to compete against my former employer. Looking back, life would have been easier and more financially rewarding to go with the corporate flow than to start that business. Control is what I wanted. That is one reason why I wonder about my psychopathic tendencies.
Often that desire to control manifests itself in control of other people. Many psychopaths and sociopaths strive for positions of authority. When they tyrant underlings around, they get a little psychological high that proves they are in control. When they are being tyranted by their superiors, they see their plight as incentive to move higher in the pecking order. To psychopaths and sociopaths, the corporate ladder is all a big fun game to them: profits, career accomplishments, and personal connections are all distantly secondary to their accumulation of power and control — and being a tyrant.
Politics is a good occupation for psychopaths and sociopaths. By rising higher, they gain that sense of control they so crave. They enjoy manipulating normal people. They enjoy outplaying other psychopaths and sociopaths. But they are not motivated by the betterment of society; they just like the playing game to outsmart others and inflict a little tyrant on them. The successful psychopaths and sociopaths in politics are clever at long-term planning to rise higher.
Some psychopaths and sociopaths gain a sense of how far to push life so they don’t get kicked out of the game. If they are skillful, they understand the formal and informal boundaries — and tend to play close to those boundaries, just enough to make other people uncomfortable. After all, that’s where they find their little buzz, isn’t it?
Western democracy seems to have anticipated psychopaths and sociopaths will find their way into politics. Hence, there are all sorts of checks and balances — like periodic elections — that have been developed to keep the behavior of psychopaths and sociopaths on the more human side of that boundary. In essence, western democracy has “corralled” all its politicians to behaving within certain limits as to minimize the damage psychopaths and sociopaths can cause.
Again, the prime motivation of psychopaths and sociopaths in politics is the game itself, not the betterment of society. Even if they are corralled, this still means too much of their thinking has become part of our societal deliberations and decisions. Do we really want that?
Here’s another downside to corralling psychopaths and sociopaths. Normal people seek life situations with fewer psychopaths and sociopaths around them. So many normal people would avoid politics as a life choice. So psychopaths and sociopaths have a more open field to rise in politics than they have in other fields. How can that be good for society?
Tiered Democratic Governance (TDG)
My alternative democracy makes it difficult for psychopaths and sociopaths to succeed in politics. They cannot hide their tendencies behind a party banner, playing the party game. They must earn the trust and respect of their neighbors to get elected into the first tier. If they manage to win their neighborhood election, the neighbors will be watching them closely. Too much lack of empathy might find them unelected in the next annual election.
The first tier of the TDG is not high in TDG governance. There really is not much control at this level. Psychopaths and sociopaths will not be satisfied in this role.
But they might have their eye in the higher tiers and see the first tier only as a game to play skillfully to rise higher. But to rise to the second tier, they need to play a different game. At the first tier, they can manipulate their neighbors and maintain a façade to stay elected at that level.
But the game changes for the second tier. Collectively, the first-tier representatives will have a better understanding of how the TDG should work. If any psychopathic and sociopathic tendencies show up at meetings of the first-tier representatives, not many votes will be cast toward those tendencies.
And it gets harder to hide these tendencies with the higher tiers. In other words, the tiered nature of the TDG is a filter to keep psychopaths and sociopaths away from the decision-making at the higher levels.
Rather than having some checks-and-balances to inhibit the natural actions of the psychopaths and sociopaths who have risen in western democracies, the TDG puts these mental illnesses into the sidelines. These people can still watch; they can still vote; and a few can find their way to the practice roster. But they won’t be on the first line of the team.
More importantly, if more normal people are elected, they will be happy to serve alongside with other more normal people.
When the TDG is working well, everyone will see the TDG representatives working well together, at least much better than the partisan players of today. This example will creep into all our psyches; we will be less contentious, less combative, and less conflictive.
Even the psychopaths and sociopaths will be changed for the better. They will become “nicer” than they were before. Modifying their behavior is a good thing, right?
If you think keeping psychopaths and sociopaths out of governance is desirable societal goal, then you should investigate the TDG.
Published on Medium 2023
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