Edit: I don’t mean someone that will sacrifice their life for yours, more someone who would go out of their way to rush you to the hospital or something
Edit: I don’t mean someone that will sacrifice their life for yours, more someone who would go out of their way to rush you to the hospital or something
Your comment seems to be conflicting
In what way?
You recognize that our world breeds narcissistic psychopaths so you likely understand it would be in your best interest to avoid them but you also don’t think you should make judgements on people’s character
Being a narcissistic psychopath is a circumstance, not an expression of internal evil. Narcissistic psychopaths are also capable of doing the right things for the right reasons as well as for the wrong reasons. The reason I advocate against guessing people’s internal morality is mainly practical for my own relationships, but also is to encourage people to fix systemic problems instead of pretending some malicious force of evil is omnipresently working against the interests of mankind as many religious people believe. In a better system, narcissistic psychopaths could get what they want without harming others for their ends.
You’re right in that the majority of people have terrible judgement, not everyone has training to recognize personality traits and often make horrible assumptions. But at the core of it, if you strive for a society with as little conflict as possible, you require the general to care about the general.
A narcissistic psychopath is inherently, by definition, incapable of doing that naturally. They can mask and imititate but left to their own devices they will always be a detriment to society as a whole. Narcissism, lack of empathy and remorse, manipulation are all grouped as Anti-Social Personality Disorders for a reason.
They aren’t anti-social in the sense that they don’t like to party, they are anti-social in the sense that their goals do not align with a properly functioning society.
Fortunately in your example, the general can still serve the general as anti-social personality disorders will always be in the minority especially if that society functions properly for the general welfare of its people. As for doing it naturally, we naturally live in hunter-gatherer bands. Society is fully socially constructed and requires all of us to resist many aspects of our natures for it to function in a way that benefits us.
What I am arguing for is that these individuals are honestly acknowledged for their tendencies and deficits so that they can get the help they need while serving in a capacity which limits their ability to harm others due to their negligence and benefits others by utilizing their strengths. A psychopath can understand that it is in their self-interest to live in a stable friendly society. Honestly I don’t personally know to integrate a full-blown narcissist, but I expect it’s possible. I don’t think it’s possible or advisable to make any effort to remove all psychopaths and narcissists from society since eugenic thinking is responsible for many of the worst atrocities in human history.
Do you see any current day examples of how a minority of people acting with machevellianism can rise to positions of power because they are willing to trample everyone in their path with complete disregard for human life?
Yes, our system is cutrently built for that. An optimal system wouldn’t allow for it. We have obviously not discovered the optimal system yet but we can identify the fundamental issues of our present systems. Prison is another fundamentally flawed system which causes a lot of its own problems. I would prefer a victim focused restorative model to imprisoning groups of people based on diagnostic critera written by people who think you need to imprison groups of people based on diagnostic critera.
The system is built by the society, the rules they enforce. The purpose of a prison system should be to separate the bad apples from the good, rehabilitate the ones we can and keep the lost causes away from vulnerable people. I’m sure you know that this hasn’t been enforced very well, especially when it comes to the most sensitive positions of power.
I’m not saying we should try to prevent crimes that haven’t happened by locking people up right away, I’m saying we should take sociopathic tendencies a bit more seriously and address them directly with trained professionals rather than waiting for them to cause damage. That would require judging people’s character.
If you’ve ever been the innocent victim of any crimes I think you would likely say you wish someone saw the signs earlier, and if the criminal doesn’t get more than a slap on the hand you would likely agree that our society is corrupt and broken. That it would seem the end goal is not to protect the herd, but rather provide a facade for evil to hide behind.