Lack of long term thinking manifests itself as a lack of responsibility

Government of Sociopaths

- Daniel Greenfield
Sunday, July 10, 2011

It’s politically risky to raise taxes. It’s politically risky to cut spending. The one thing that isn’t politically risky to do is go deeper and deeper into debt. Whatever agreement evolves or devolves out of congress it will likely allow Republicans to satisfy their base by cutting spending a little, allow Democrats to satisfy their base by raising taxes a little, and kick the ball down the road by going deeper into debt.

The real subject of this is not Medicare or the Stimulus plan—it’s long term thinking.

We did not suddenly go to sleep and then wake up the next day with a political class that acted this way. Or with CEO’s that act this way. The erosion of long term thinking is progressive. It begins slowly before becoming pervasive.

Lack of long term thinking manifests itself as a lack of responsibility. The difference is not in intelligence. Very intelligent people show no grasp of responsibility and no understanding of consequences. ‘Stupid’ behavior by intelligent people is often a symptom of that. Sociopaths, who often have very high IQ’s, yet a poor understanding of consequences, are at the farthest limit of that category.

What explains this behavior? Socialization and empathy. Sociopaths are often quite bright, but it is the company of other people that makes us fully human. Sociopaths are too detached from other people to be able to rationally calculate long term consequences in a social context. They understand rules in an abstract fashion, but they don’t internalize them. Because rules are socially internalized and given priority as higher truths over personal feelings only by an ego that has learned it is not master of the universe. A sociopath may be a physics professor, but if an impulse pushes him into a situation where the laws of physics are in his way, then they will be less valid to him than that impulse. The same goes for mathematics. The sociopath is irresponsibility taken to the extreme, but there is a long gradation on the way there.

What does a country run by sociopaths look like? It looks a lot like our own actually. Lots of short term fixes. Lots of ‘keep this thing running’ pragmatism. Short attention spans. No sense of responsibility. And no thought for the future.

This is the problem with filling a cabinet full of bright people who don’t understand responsibility or long term thinking. While their intelligence should allow them to solve most problems, the situations they are confronted with are social, not abstract. And they lack empathy for the people involved, any sense of them as individuals, and any real understanding that they will also have to live with the long term consequences of those decisions.

To the Sociopath, most situations come down to, “How Do I Make Person X Do What I Want.â€