The Dark Triad
The psychology of leadership is an important issue generally, but it seems especially so today. Leadership in good times is challenging, but leadership in difficult times is imperative. We are in some of the most difficult times the world may ever have seen. I know we are all prone to a degree of hyperbole in thinking that our problems are greater than all others, but the truth is that as cyclical as the world and history may be, there is a progressive and mounting demographic beast which is hard to ignore. The population juggernaut that finds us at 8.1 billion people in a world that some people feel should max out at 2 billion and which is projected to get to 10.4 billion by 2100. If it feels like that exponential expansion of population is slowing, you would be correct. Trees don’t grow to the sky and neither does the population expand at the same pace forever. Unless you are Jeff Bezos, who predicts that human population will reach 1 trillion as it spreads across the universe, most demographers will admit that we are near maximum scale as a population and well over a “comfortable” level. That makes this an unprecedentedly difficult time in a manner that is particularly difficult to govern and lead.
World population has apparently not gone in one straight upward path, but has been knows to fall back at times when things got particularly difficult, but those times tended to be about external environmental issues like meteors that polluted the air and unsettled the seas, floods caused by climate change and surging shorelines and volcanic eruptions that spread deadly ash that perilously polluted the atmosphere. Besides the Biblical tales of a great flood that is pegged to have occurred about 4,500 years ago and that almost eradicated the earth’s population, and another glacial lake flood in North America about 12,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, there was an eruption of a super-volcano on Sumatra, called Toba, that happened about 74,000 B.C. and that came very close to ending humankind. Strangely enough, through advances in genetic mapping, scientists can now see that there was a genetic narrowing of the species during that same time, reinforcing the population calamity theory. The genetic math tell us that this problem may well have reduced the population to a scant 10,000 souls, which seems pretty post-apocalyptic in number. An interesting side note is that that same genetic mapping has been used to estimate that the existence of the original Adam of Genesis fame received his “spark” of life from God somewhere between 120,000 and 156,000 years ago. While humanoids have left bits and pieces of evidence of their existence as far back as 300,000 years, it is consistent to think that they may not have yet had sufficient cognitive ability (as measured by brain size) to be worthy of God’s attention. But the point remains, that we may be reaching a new type of population bottleneck this time less because of natural disaster and more because of the weight of our own scale in numbers.
What we know for sure is that the larger the size of the population, the harder the society is to control and thus govern. Leadership is suddenly at a premium and that is happening just when the world is flailing to find a common governing path. Governance dates back to the Sumerians about six thousand years ago, so before the great flood. Indeed, it might have been that Sumerian autocratic rule that gave rise to the biblical legends of a population out of control and in need of a reboot (as explained by God to Noah). But democracy was only introduced, as we know it, to the world in 500 B.C. in Athens, well after the Great Flood. By any anthropological definition, our collective human society has, on average, prospered tremendously since the introduction of democracy, even despite occasional bouts of tyranny and autocracy. That causes me to conclude that the constantly evolving and changing forms of collective governance and leadership are a necessary component of continued prosperity of the human race. All of the current day cries for less government simply do not jive with the continuously growing population of the world. What might better be said at any time and perhaps especially now, is that we need a newer, better form of governance and leadership than we have at the moment.
Enter the Dark Triad, which psychologists say are the prevalent and most dangerous personality traits of people who specifically aspire to political leadership: narcissism (a mental health condition in which people have an unreasonably high sense of their own importance), Machiavellianism (a personality trait that denotes cunningness, the ability to be manipulative, and a drive to use whatever means necessary to gain power) and psychopathy (a neuropsychiatric disorder marked by deficient emotional responses, lack of empathy, and poor behavioral controls). If that all sounds familiar to you, just put in the political leader of your choice and assume that the longer they want to stay in power, the more of those traits they exhibit. So, in a world where we need more governance and more leadership to deal with an increasingly disconnected and divisive world with far more threats coming at us by the moment, how do we get to first base on finding a leader who can actually help us?
A recent guest opinion by Adam Grant (a Wharton Professor or Org Behavior) in the New York Times clued me into an idea that I must admit I had not heard about and therefore had never considered. He starts by suggesting we eliminate elections altogether. You see, leaders who live in the Dark Triad are, not surprisingly, attracted to authority, but they are also more attractive to voters for some perverse reason. As Grant says, “A common explanation is that they’re masters of fearless dominance and superficial charm, and we mistake their confidence for competence.” This is sounding more and more familiar. The suggested alternative is something called sortition, which is the selection of public officials using a random representative sample, not unlike jury selection only with some minimum threshold standard of knowledge of civics and competence. Lots of research indicates that the outcomes from such leadership are considerably superior to the outcome from popularly selected leaders. Such a lottery would greatly reduce the risk of a really bad leader even though it likely eliminates the considerably more rare outcome an exceptionally good leader. Overall, it is considered to lead to a more democratic process by eliminating such dysfunctionalities such as gerrymandering and perverse waste as from the mess that is campaign finance.
Sortition is not as radical as it sounds. It is already being used in more enlightened countries like Canada, the Netherlands, France, the U.K., Germany and Ireland, initially in less expansive areas like environmental forums and groups to specifically study how to improve democracy, but who knows what’s next. What we need to get to a consensus on is that democracy is critically important, not just to equality and fairness, but also and most importantly (because it is so easy to agree about), to sustained prosperity. Because once you get there, as Grant states so eloquently in his finishing lines, “The lifeblood of a democracy is the active participation of the people. There is nothing more democratic than offering each and every citizen an equal opportunity to lead.” I like it.