Why Power Structures Select for Psychopathy and Defection

Jim Rutt reframes the problem of evil as an emergent property of game-theoretic dynamics rather than a metaphysical puzzle. The core tension is irreducible: in any social species, group-optimal strategies demand cooperation and costly sacrifice, while individually-optimal strategies favor free-riding — capturing the benefits of collective action without bearing its costs. In the ancestral environment of forager warfare, the group needs every member to fight bravely, but each individual's fitness is maximized by hanging back. Natural selection's response was not to resolve this tension but to equip agents with the capacity for strategic defection — sneakiness, the ability to exploit group solidarity while evading detection and punishment. This is a structural origin of evil, not a moral failing but a fitness strategy.

The second vector is genetic variance in empathy. Psychopathy — the near-total absence of concern for others — appears in roughly one to two percent of the population as a natural variation. Forager societies developed what Christopher Boehm identified as "reverse dominance hierarchies": collective mechanisms to detect, constrain, and if necessary eliminate individuals exhibiting dominator behavior. These social operating systems were remarkably effective at suppressing the expression of psychopathic traits in leadership.

Modern institutional architecture — what Rutt's framework calls "Game A" — inverts this selection pressure. Corporate hierarchies, political systems, and financial markets actively reward traits associated with psychopathy: ruthlessness, superficial charm, low empathy, risk tolerance. The result is concentration: C-suite psychopathy rates of ten to thirty percent in some industries. Evil becomes not mysterious but mechanistically predictable — a convergence of unresolvable game-theoretic tension, natural psychological variation, and institutional selection that elevates precisely the traits our ancestral systems evolved to suppress.