The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The Light Triad | Frankly 85

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

(Recorded February 12th, 2025)   Deception and self-interest seem to be increasingly prevalent in our modern cultural reality. From the highest levels of power to the cultural metrics of what is considered 'success' for individual humans: the Dark Triad traits of Narcissism, Sociopathy, and Machiavellianism have become disturbingly normalized. But is there an antidote? Could an opposing "Light Triad" of traits - if nurtured and protected - offer a path toward a society in service of life rather than power? In this Frankly, Nate explores the concept of Light Triad personalities and their struggle against the Dark Triad forces shaping our social, economic, and ecological landscape. He examines how social media amplifies manipulation, why individual goodness is often outmatched by structural incentives, and whether strong, cooperative groups might hold the key to shifting the balance. Importantly, he questions whether the Light Triad can ever truly compete - or if it must evolve new strategies to stand a chance in service of life. How many people does it take to shield a Light Triad individual from Dark Triad manipulation? Will these competing traits become more or less dominant as we move into the downslope of the Carbon Pulse? And can someone with a Dark Triad personality ever truly change, or are they hardwired for self-interest?   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 Discord channel and connect with other listeners

Greetings. Before we jump into this week's frankly, I would like to remind everyone of a little project we have, which is to have you submit videos up to three minutes of how you are responding to the great simplification, either in your own life and behaviors or your job or your community or the broader world. We're trying to create a montage of those and share them with you to look at the diversity of listeners and the diversity of responses to what we're learning on this journey on the Great Simplification. And here is this week's, frankly. So a couple weeks ago, I was in California for some meetings and I was at one conference where someone who I've met before said that their organization has developed a tool in their interviewing to look at flags

for dark triad and signposts to represent light triad. And he said this to a bunch of us. And then some conversation ensued. And among my friends, one of them were like, oh, light triad is the opposite of dark triad. And another one of my friends thought instantly that light triad was the same categories as dark triad, just less pronounced. And I, being the empiricist, thought at the time, well, maybe there is actually something called the light triad, and that's what they're referring to. And then the conversation went on. Until yesterday, I saw someone in my LinkedIn feed did an essay, which will link in the comments, about contrasting dark triad and light triad.

Dark triad, for those who need a refresher, is a combination of personality traits that are narcissism, sociopathy, and Machiavellian behavior. And if someone has all three of those, they possess a dark triad behavioral trait. There's actually something called dark tetrad, which is those three plus sadism or feeling pleasure from other people's pain. So the LinkedIn commenter had an hourglass sort of shape of a diagram that showed in contrast to the dark triad, the light triad was sustainable stewardship, interconnectedness of all beings, and respect for all beings. And when I first saw that, I quite like that framework, except then I thought about it, and I realized that these are values. whereas dark triad Machiavellianism, sociopathy are traits. Traits will outcompete values in almost all circumstances. And so I started to then think about that as a microcosm of what our society faces

and what we've been going through politically, socially, and in the public discourse. where we have a large number of people who are expecting that facts and values will overcome traits and human behavior and structures. And I think this gets to the ought versus is dichotomy about how we would like the world to be versus how it really is. And I think followers of this channel know that, I'm kind of in the middle, but I'm tilted towards the metabolic superorganism of the biophysical macroeconomic framework of our species and our situation as a product of a biological

species seeking maximum power with a bolus of ancient carbon like a trainload full of sugar dumped in our path. So I think we are plastic as individuals and as a culture. but that there are guardrails and there's a momentum that is based on our traits, our individual, our small group, our large group, our nation state, our entire species-wide dynamic. So an open question here for me is, or a belief, a tendency for me to believe is that facts and values are necessary and important, but not sufficient for the times that we are living in. Facts and values are no longer sufficient to steer humanity away from the more dystopian outcomes.

So having said all that, I was commenting on this LinkedIn post yesterday. And then I discovered there is such a thing as a light triad invented by Scott Barry Kaufman and some other psychologist. The real light triad in the scientific psychological literature is three traits. Faith in humanity, which is an overall tendency to see the best in people and believe that most people are basically good. Number two is humanism, which is a belief in the inherent dignity and worth of other human beings. And third, Kantism, based on Emmanuel Kant's categorical imperative, which is basically it refers to someone's ability to see people as people, as opposed to seeing people as a means to some end of their own.

So these are a little bit more trait-based, but also somewhat belief-based. But clearly there are many people, most of my friends, are light triad. And if you think about our evolutionary past, there were probably always dark triad individual humans in our ancestral times. But in n equals 150 or smaller social settings, those people could be observed and court-owned off or in extreme cases killed or supported by a large group of either light triad or neutral triad people. And now the dark triad people in our world partially because social media keeps us online and we're not like Gandhi or someone like that, that you see them in person

and you feel the authenticity and the love shining from them, the goodness. We don't get that as much anymore because there's 8 billion of us and we're on social media and things can be tweaked and the authenticity can be lost. So I actually think social media is very much the devil's tools in the Dark Triad service in this regard and can only be combated by individual interaction one-on-one. in small groups. And I do think that the antidote to dark triad is a light triad, but not one-on-one. A dark triad person, meeting a light triad person, will take advantage of them and manipulate

them in almost every situation. Almost. And the situations where that won't happen is if the light triad is surrounded and supported by others, two more, three more. five more, because in groups, the same way in our evolutionary scaffolding, multi-level selection happened where selfish individuals out-competed altruistic individuals within groups, but cooperative groups out-competed selfish groups to the point where the selfish groups went extinct.

So this cooperation competition switch dynamic is in all of us. And I think the same thing applies to light triad and dark triad a little bit. So I think it's a really open question during these times of internet, social media, artificial intelligence, chaos in the world, how basically dark triad, which are are probably from childhood, are insecure and fearful and looking out for their own interest. And Light Triad, which is more looking out for the collective, how these interplay. And I am very curious how in service of life, my friend that said Light Triad is just a, lighter version of dark triad because if you don't have some sort of Machiavellianism,

how can you get stuff done? How can against the greatest dark triad population that has ever lived in our species, in service of life, how can that be steered or combated or squelched or suppressed where light triad characteristics have a chance. This is very interesting to me. So I'm just going to leave it at that because I just discovered that light triad was a thing yesterday, but we'll leave you with a few questions to ponder because I'm pondering them. How many people does it take to have a light triad person be surrounded by to offset or ward off or thwart or overcome a dark triad influence. Is it three people? Is it five people?

Is it eight people? And by the way, I think it's a no regret strategy for you of light triad persuasion to start finding and forming those groups right now if you're not in them already. The second question is as we crest the peak of the carbon pulse, will dark triad traits in our population and their manifestation become more or less prevalent. Times are going to get much tougher. And I think the dark, antisocial, individualistic things that are going on right now are a lot under the surface. And I think even as times get darker, actually, they may recede because they will no longer be able to be in the surface. And we will have more looking in each other's eyes and having community meetings and the strong reciprocity of social policing and the greater good may play an outsized

role. Open question. I'm curious about that. Third question, how might our incentive structures in the future be changed to reward like triad behaviors and personalities? Because they don't right now. We have a narrow boundary pursuit in our culture where everything is fungible for the dollar or the UN or the Euro. And so everything is interchangeable as long as it ends in that. And there might be different reward incentive institutional structures going forward. Last question is, and this is a serious question, can someone in today's world that possesses the trilogy of the dark traits or even the tetrad

be switched, flipped to be somewhat in service of life via some psychedelics or community engagement or therapy or interaction with some thing in nature that was profound or a spiritual experience or anything. I don't know. My sense is that people with Machiavellianism and narcissism and low degrees of sociopathism, and low degrees of sociopathy could be switched because I've seen it. I am seeing it now as people wake up to the stakes of our times. I think if someone has a high degree of sociopathy or sadism,

I don't think that they can be switched. But I don't know. I love human behavior and I think about this stuff all the time. And these are interesting questions to me. A final thought. Things are moving very rapidly. in our world. And I'm not going to try to stay on top of all the news and all the policies and all the gotchas and unexpected, chaotic news in our modern world. I want to talk about things that are

relevant to our future and things that are interesting and of value. But being honest and being open and being authentic is very important to me. And as the months and years go by, there are going to be things that I know that I cannot say publicly because they're information hazards or I don't want the eye of Soron focusing on Red Wing, Minnesota. And I just won't be able to say those things. And that bothers me because I want to be 100% honest with you, my community. but I will be 100% honest, but there just won't be some things that I can't say. And that's going to have to be okay because it's very, very important to me in the era of AI and polarization and everything, that I don't know what exactly this channel will become as events catch up to the events that we've been predicting.

And at the end of the day, I had some talks with my inner circle yesterday. the end of the day, I can just be myself. And I know a lot. I'm still learning. I'm very curious. I care deeply about our future. So my promise to you or my commitment is to be myself, to be honest and authentic and share as much as I can. That will be helpful to steering the direction away from the seeming precipice we're headed for. We are now in the early scenes of the Empire Strikes Back and we're writing, all of us, we're writing and auditioning for the Return of the Jedi, which is the movie that comes after. And that's how I like to think about the community, the knowledge, the values, and the facts and the ideas that we populate and stir around

on this platform. Talk to you next week about what is wealth.