The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The Influence of Psychopaths: Why Humanity Is Better Than We Think

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

In this week's Frankly, Nate reflects on intraspecies predation (ours) and the impact psychopathic actors have on the mean and median of human behavior – in the past all the way up to our modern society. Human evolution was shaped by both cooperative, pro-social behavior and a competitive, predatory approach for survival – resulting in a balanced distribution for most of humanity's existence.   But, as agriculture, surplus, and other factors propelled more hierarchical social structure, aggregate human behavior and culture has slowly shifted over time to express more psychopathic traits. This thread of behavior continues to run through our modern society, where a relatively small (but disproportionately powerful) segment of the human population can pull societal behavior towards anti-social and individualistic values – even if the majority of people still inherently operate from a place of reciprocity. Why might our modern society provide a more fruitful breeding ground for psychopathy than past societies did? What do chickens and eggs have to do with psychopathy and the economic superorganism? And ultimately, what strategies could we begin to think about in order to shift mean and median human behavior back towards a more cooperative, prosocial middle? (Recorded September 22nd, 2025)   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

Good morning. I have learned a lot these past few weeks, especially from the podcast from Luke Kemp this week and Reed Malloy and Nancy McWilliams on psychopathy. And I want to kind of integrate that into something that I didn't understand about what I refer to as the global human economic superorganism. If you're like me and if you follow this channel, many of you probably are, you often or constantly experience some cognitive dissonance, looking at your friends and your own values and your community and your feelings and the things you care about and contrast that with the headlines of our pell-mell crazy polarized dystopian functional, dysfunctional world headed for all the things that we imagine.

There is a delta between who we are as individual humans and who we're expressing ourselves are as a global species. So today I want to talk about the median human, the mean human, and the predators. And my thesis on its surface is depressing, but just underneath the surface is actually quite hopeful. At least I find it. So I'm going to start with some definitions, give a little background and setup to my thesis and offer some brief conclusions on the logic underpinning the economic superorganism. Okay, first with definitions from the podcast last week, psychopathy. On Wikipedia is defined by a personality construct characterized by impaired empathy and

remorse, persistent antisocial behavior along with bold, disinhibited, and egocentric traits. These traits are often masked by superficial charm and immunity to stress, which create outward appearance of apparent normalcy. Another definition is predator. an organism that preys on and eats other animals. And a big old asterisk there. This channel is known for wide boundary perspective. We think of predators as a bad thing with respect to human on human predation, which I'm going to talk about.

But from a wide boundary ecological sense, everyone watching this podcast is a predator. are apex predators, at least writ large and historically. But today we're talking about interspecies predation. Last definitional term is median versus mean. The median is the middle of a distribution of people or things. And the mean, also known as average, is you take all the number of people. And divide by the thing. So let's talk about income.

In 2022, the median income in the United States was $40,000. And the mean or the average was $60,000. So the median meant that half the people made more than 40K and half the people made less than 40K. But the mean was much higher because there were some outliers that made 10 million or $100 million a year that made the mean income 50% higher than the median. And as you might be thinking ahead, I'm going to apply this same stretching of the tails on our behavioral characteristics.

Okay, some background and setup from the crucible in Tanzania, the Old Divide Gorge, where we all came from was the environment of ancestral adaptation, where for millions of years, pre-Homo sapiens and hundreds of thousands of years for our species, Homo sapiens, we evolved in small bands of hunter-gatherers. And recent biological research highlights the importance of both competition, and cooperation in the selection of what traits survived. This is called multi-level selection. Famous example, which I've talked about before,

David Sloan Wilson was on this show explaining it, is a popular egg sales company in the United States, hired some evolutionary biologist to have more eggs laid per cage. And they did this experiment and they selected the hens that laid the most eggs and then put them all together thinking they would increase their egg production. But what ended up happening is the average egg production went down because what they had done is actually select for aggression. Another variety of that experiment is they combined cooperative chickens together in the same cage. And the production per cage went up. So this is an example of switching birds.

The game theory of hawk dove, multi-level selection, where hawks will out-compete dives, but a group of doves will out-compete a group of hawks. And this explains why in our ancestral time, both competition. and cooperation were hardwired. Now, with respect to antisocial traits like psychopathy, we learned from last week's episode that around 1% of adult human males are clinical psychopaths and around 1 fifth of 1% of adult females. So 1% of adult males is around 30 million humans are clinical psychopaths.

much, much more than that, have traits that lean psychopathic or dark triad, but those are subclinical. So historically, in bands and villages of our ancestors, face-to-face ties, immediate feedback, and kinship curbed exploiters and psychopaths. And callous and high-risk strategies were checked by reputation and exclusion and sometimes banishment. So what I learned from Luke Kemp's episode, which I had kind of missed, I had talked about the birth of the economic superorganism is when humans 10 or 12,000 years ago switched to agriculture.

And this created storable surplus. And Luke taught me that it wasn't only store. that was important, it was lootable. And if it was lootable, that changed the game theory where psychopaths or very aggressive humans could make a hawkish choice and steal other people's surplus and higher warriors and shaman and accountants and other occupations. And from that, hierarchy and the roots of the economic superorganism were born. I wish my podcast with Reed and Nancy could have been three hours because I had a ton of questions, but I've done some research about what typically happens when you drop one psychopathic actor into a group of humans. And there's a number of things that happen.

And then in aggregate, I'm going to suggest what I think has happened. Number one is that cooperation unravels. I mean, humans are great imitators. And most people give as long as others give. This is called in biology conditional cooperators. And when cheating becomes visible and also goes unpunished, we pull back from this conditional cooperation. Effort and generosity and altruism and honesty ratchet down. because a visible free rider or rule breaker disincentivizes pro-social behavior and the group

contributions slide over time. This is a well-replicated pattern in public goods experiments. The second thing that happens is trust falls and costs go up. So when trust drops, people substitute was what once was reciprocal altruism with contracts and surveillance. valence and watching their back, which raises transaction and coordination costs in the whole system. And Eleanor Ostrom's work, Nobel Prize winning work, and ecological economics shows that communities need monitoring and fair sanctioning to keep cooperation afloat. And when those weaken the free rider problem, aka the aggressive chicken, increases. Number three is that norms drift via a bad apple dynamic, a single persistently negative member in a group can degrade the morale, distract attention, and reduce performance, kind of like the classic bad apple spoils the barrel dynamic. Another thing that happens when we drop a psychopath into a group is misconduct can spread by example.

Seeing an in-group member cheat and get away with it increases others' willingness to bend the rules and steer towards the competition dynamic of our behavioral repertoire away from cooperation and trust. Furthermore, if the person gains authority, and this is widespread in our current global economic system, the harms intensify. If psychopaths are in leadership positions, abusive supervision has been linked to lower employee well-being, higher burnout, and more conflict because the toxic triangle of the dark triad explains how destructive leaders flourish when followers are susceptible in a conducive environment. And lastly, something I'm kind of familiar with is there's punisher fatigue and moral injury because a few fair-minded sheriffs step up to confront the behavior, but when they get little backing, they burn out and eventually disengage. We can see this happening in real time in the United States

and around the world. The group loses its antibodies against the aggressive chicken. So you add a persistent predator to a healthy group of humans. And two things happen. The average behavioral traits shift because outcomes get pulled by the tail. And the median, the midpoint, slides towards less pro-social behavior because decent people then adapt with less trust, more guarding, fewer contributions. And this is happening now. So humans are not angels, nor are we devils. But at large numbers, our personalities and traits form a distribution. And most people cluster around reciprocity and fairness.

Last night I was driving home and I had my brights on and I forgot about it and someone flashed their brights at me. I will never know who that person is, but there are these shared social agreements that we generally trust and are kind to other people. Reid said that 1% of adult males are psychopaths because in our history there were times in the evolutionary bottleneck that we needed predatory expertise, that there was no empathy and there were good at hunting and Machiavellian and it's been in the gene pool, but at small population sizes it was managed. So now there's this thin tail of our modern population is comfortable with deception, low empathy for outgroups, and ruthless reward-seeking. And this has had an enormous impact on our structures, incentives, and social organization.

The good news, if you're waiting, at least it's, I perceive it as good news, is our baseline as human individuals is better than our current headlines as a culture suggest. The norm for most people, the world over, is still reciprocity. We return lost wallets. I was in Helsinki a few years ago and I left my wallet at a chicken sandwich shop in a giant full mall. I left my wallet with like several hundred dollars, my passport, my credit cards and everything. Someone from that restaurant tracked me down in the shopping mall and said, sir, you lost. your wallet. We return lost wallets. We coach youth sports teams. We help after storms. We turn our

brights off when we see a car come in, et cetera. The median behavioral traits of humanity have not vanished, but they've been outcompeted by structures that amplify the behaviors of the tail. And if rules and structures change, the mean could snap back. quickly to the medium. So the thesis is this, combine large numbers of humans plus surplus, plus drop in 1% of adult males being psychopaths, and you get something that looks like an economic superorganism globally and in ultra-social hierarchies, short time horizons, plus the hunger for status, plus low empathy, plus comfort, with harming out groups can be and has been adaptive for the actor, for the individual human,

especially where there's been a delay in feedbacks. Even if only a small minority behaves this way, selection and amplification means outsize influence at key choke points in our social systems like finance, media, politics, security, And on large tech platforms, moral, emotional, and novel content spreads faster. We're beginning to learn this. Falsehood outruns truth and small numbers of manipulators behind those tech can enormously tilt the public narrative and the policy agendas away from the median humans values, what we care about and how we express ourselves.

And if you have iterations of this and time, we're off to the races. And what it ends up looking like is something like today's world. So a small percentage of psychopaths living in a modern world with porous and open borders for behavior, for money, for technology, and both the median and the mean of human behavior shift us away who most of us really are. Human behavioral traits did not change overnight or even over centuries that much. But the context did. Scale, energy surplus, and speed of iterations shifted what has been selected for and amplified. So what to do? Well, of course, I don't know. But the very first thing we can do is not be naive about this dynamic.

It's very interesting in talking with experts about this. More of reality is perceived by non-psychopaths than psychopaths because psychopaths miss everything that requires empathy, kindness, and collaborative care. Because the closest friendship and bonds a group of psychopaths could ever have is to be frenemies. So love makes no sense to a psychopath. They perceive it either as BS or that the person expressing love is an idiot. This, in my opinion, is the Achilles heel and the grand opening for some sort of pro-social future. And maybe an important recognition for us as a species because if non-psychopaths engaged in the human predicament can truly understand this, it opens other important doors.

I think I'll leave the solutions to this for another episode, or not at all. But here's some initial thoughts. We're not going to delete the tails. 1% predatory psychopaths and adult males. That's been adaptive. That's pretty much who we are. What we can do is change the gradients and the guardrails so that the median can pull the mean back towards decency.

So a few just brief suggestions on how we might do that. And again, I'm thinking about this and I would love to hear your thoughts as I'm learning as I'm pulling away the layers of the superorganism onion. First thing is select at the right level. So we would have to design institutions to reward team level performance and long horizon stewardship, something that many of the viewers of this program care about, as opposed to just individual quarterly wins. So we would have to start thinking more like best cage, as opposed to best hen, which our culture currently rewards. Leading to status reframing, we can't remove

status drives from who we are. This is part of our revolutionary heritage, but we can point them at accuracy, In service of life, resilience, we can celebrate people who maintain systems, teach skills, reduce fragility, have prosocial demeanors. Human traits are always going to chase status. So we need to point status in our social system at what the future of humanity and the biosphere needs. What is the human version of more eggs per cage? So, in conclusion,

I started out as a peak oil guy and now I'm talking about psychopathy and chickens. But I keep delving deeper into what is driving us, what is happening in our system and what might be some of the pathways that are better than the default. There is a huge difference between who we are as individual humans and our aggregate human culture. and how it's expressing itself in the world. It may seem like where we are, where we've landed today was inevitable. Maybe, maybe not. But being aware of this and integrating into our model of reality, in my opinion, is a very important, necessary first step towards more benign futures.

Perhaps the most important question isn't who we are as humans, but rather who we are now today in 2025 doing what we're doing and knowing what we know. Lots more to say. Thank you. I'll talk to you next week.