So let’s reasonably state that 65% of the population are untrustworthy zombies and 10% are overt or covert psychopaths/sociopaths; that gives us 75% of the population—3 per 4 free-living people in the population—are potentially dangerous.
As such, you and I are interacting with psychopaths and sociopaths every single day of our lives when we interact with any group of people.
“65% of the population are potentially-cruel/sadistic rule-followers who are at the ready to become SECONDARY PSYCHOPATHS when placed under any PRIMARY PSYCHOPATH, such as a politician, religious figure, or other person of influence and perceived authority, including talk-show hosts, musicians, and other entertainers.
The figure of 65% has been established by the research of Milgram and was done so without any incentive, payment, or reward for cruelty; obviously the percentage of people vulnerable and willing to become SECONDARY PSYCHOPATHS would be much higher with payment, social reward, government propaganda, television programming, personal/ego/sexual gratification, and ‘proper education’.” DrV
Quick overview of 3 groups:
OVERT/obvious/active PRIMARY PSYCHOPATHS: The worst 1% of humanity—These are people with abnormal brains that do not process sociability, fear, and anxiety. These people have a “primary” problem because their problem originates within them and is not due to an external/secondary cause. These people are usually abnormal, antisocial, and/or violent since childhood—but not always; if they are in a controlling environment and/or rewarded for “good behavior” they may be able to mask their antisocial traits until adulthood until “the mask falls” and all hell breaks lose.
Primary overt psychopaths are anti-moral and anti-social and they cannot stop themselves from acting out. They are bombs waiting to explode, even if that violence takes decades to manifest.
Overt psychopaths specialize in physical violence.
Milder, more subtle COVERT PSYCHOPATHS: 10-20% of the population with abnormal antisocial brains—These people also have abnormal brain function but they can “hold it together” and “force themselves to appear normal” in order to get jobs, get education, and mostly “fit in” with society. These people can still be deadly dangerous; in fact, most criminals are in this category, just barely able to function in society until “something snaps” and they commit heinous crimes. These are the abusive bosses and abusive parents who take advantage of having power over people.
Primary covert/hidden psychopaths are immoral and can barely restrain themselves from acting out. They might be killers, but more often they are manipulators and gaslighters.
Covert psychopaths specialize in emotional abuse, gaslighting, manipulation, like my former bosses in academia:
Sociopaths and Secondary Psychopaths: The 65% of people who will demonstrate antisocial, abusive, and violent tendencies when given permission or placed in a cult-like environment such as a social echo chamber or violent political group—These people don’t have their own identities well established so they are easy to influence. These are also people with high anxiety who are looking for a “leader” to tell them what to do, even if that is violence and abuse toward others. People who become antisocial because of the influence of their environment are called “sociopaths” as if the “society made them into psychopaths” but generally these people would have been considered normal before the setting changed them.
Sociopaths and Secondary Psychopaths are amoral and will do what they are told.
Sociopaths and Secondary Psychopaths specialize in opportunistic and permissive abuse and violence.
The fourth possibility is that any person in the groups above can “worsen” when under the influence of alcohol, drugs, following a traumatic brain injury, or with the onset of dementia. For example in our recent and present history, a somewhat mild COVERT PSYCHOPATH (10-20% of the population with abnormal antisocial brain function) is likely to become more antisocial and violent and bizarre with the onset of dementia, especially those brain disorders like FTD—frontotemporal dementia—that damage the frontal areas of the brain responsible for patience, consideration, social contextualization, and “normal human social behavior.”
DEFINITIONS of the Main 3 Groups:
1. OVERT/obvious/active PRIMARY PSYCHOPATHS: 1% of the population with abnormal violence-prone brains
PRIMARY “overt/active” PSYCHOPATHS are the 1-10% of the population with observable and measurable psychopathic traits, including:
MISSING OR “NEGATIVE” TRAITS: lack of empathy, remorse, and guilt; impressively unable to learn from their experiences, making them “habitual offenders” and unresponsive to punishment,
PRESENT OR “POSITIVE” TRAITS: manipulative, impulsive, and antisocial behaviors.
Measurable brain abnormalities in connectivity, function, and responses to experimental cues.
The most severe primary psychopaths tend to be career criminals and are typically violent and thus incarcerated starting at an young age; milder primary psychopaths have more restraint and are therefore less likely to be caught or their crimes only become obvious well into adulthood. Secondary psychopaths (described below) are the 65% of the population that is mostly normal but can get swept into political and social trends of violence under the influence of a political leader or charismatic charlatan.
PRIMARY PSYCHOPATHS are pleasured by cruelty, criminal behavior (not just the gains from thievery) and harming and humiliating other people.
LACK OF ANXIETY/FEAR is one of the main defining and differentiating characteristics of PRIMARY PSYCHOPATHY.
2. Milder, more subtle COVERT PSYCHOPATHS: 10-20% of the population with abnormal antisocial brains
These are people with milder and more subtle forms of psychopathy.
These are the people who harm others in less obvious ways, such as emotional abuse, manipulation, and workplace political games.
These are the gaslighters, not the overtly and obviously violent criminals.
These are the people described in In Sheep’s Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People by Dr. George K. Simon—see video clip linked below.
3. “SECONDARY PSYCHOPATHS” or “potential SOCIOPATHS”: up to 65% of the population
SECONDARY PSYCHOPATHS are the 65% of the “normal” population willing to behave like primary psychopaths under social influence. Secondary psychopaths have milder degrees of the same behavioral traits seen in primary psychopaths; they show milder degrees of the measurable brain abnormalities in connectivity, function, and responses to experimental cues.
In contrast to PRIMARY PSYCHOPATHS with no fear or anxiety about misbehavior, breaking social norms, and harming other people, SECONDARY PSYCHOPATHS have higher-than-normal anxiety, and anxiety and insecurity are likely what lead them to seek simplistic solutions under PRIMARY PSYCHOPATHS such as POPULIST POLITICIANS AND RELIGIOUS CULTS justifying use of nonsolutions such as use of racism, discrimination, and violence.
Secondary psychopathy is also noted in the famous Stockholm Syndrome, in which 1) victims first align with their abusers and then 2) the victims join with and become abusers themselves.
The Silent Majority: up to 65% of the population are SECONDARY PSYCHOPATHS” or “potential SOCIOPATHS”
The classic and famous psychosocial studies by Milgram showed that the clear majority (>65%) of people will follow rules mindlessly and will inflict pain on others for no other reason than their mindless and flaccid submission to an authority figure.
Stanley Milgram’s 1963 article, "Behavioral Study of Obedience" (Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371–378), famously demonstrated that a high percentage of ordinary people (65% in the initial study) would obey an authority figure's orders to administer seemingly painful, dangerous electric shocks to another person.
Based on this data, we can reasonably state that 65% of the population can be described as any variety of the following: unconscious, weak, blindly submissive to authority, and with the very real potential to be cruel for no reason other than being instructed by a stranger to be cruel to others. That’s pretty damn sobering, but its data that we might reasonably accept based on clear and replicated data:
Beginning on August 7, 1961, a series of social psychology experiments were conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, who intended to measure the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting a fictitious experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a "learner". These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.[2] The experiments unexpectedly found that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey the instructions, with every participant going up to 300 volts, and 65% going up to the full 450 volts. Milgram first described his research in a 1963 article in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.[3] 1
Thus per the data above, for efficiency, we could say that 65% of the population are potentially-cruel/sadistic rule-following zombies.
Another way of stating the same is to say 65% of the population are potentially-cruel/sadistic rule-followers who are at the ready to become SECONDARY PSYCHOPATHS immediately when placed under any PRIMARY PSYCHOPATH.
“High-functioning” Psychopaths: educated professionals in positions of social authority
Other research in psychopathy and sociopathy has shown that roughly 1% of the population is overtly psychopathic/sociopathic (eg, “natural born killers”, serial criminals, etc) while up to 10% of the population are high-functioning psychopaths—people with clear psychopathic/sociopathic traits but who are able to function in society even at a high level, including business administrators, doctors, military/political leaders.
Famous political psychopaths
Adolf Hitler was a primary psychopath who converted Germany into secondary psychopathy.
Former journalist Benito Mussolini was probably a secondary psychopath, who reluctantly sought power at the urging of his wife and when he saw that the social conditions were ripe for him to ascend. As a youth, he demonstrated some violent and antisocial tendencies, which is consistent with antisocial personality disorder, but this may also have been due to the influence of his father who was active in social discord.
Augusto Pinochet “was a dictator who would stop at nothing to consolidate his power. His regime eliminated thousands of opponents. During the dictatorship, arbitrary executions, arrests, assassinations, torture, and “disappearances” were standard practices. Tens of thousands of Chileans met their fate at the hands of Pinochet’s ruthless regime (p. 7)…the acts attributed to Mr. Pinochet constitute crimes against humanity and grave infractions of international humanitarian law.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047235222000216
Famous “covert” and “high-functioning” psychopaths
These people have a tendency to be “odd” and “unusual” but they are not overtly sadistic/psychopathic/sociopathic until and unless certian circumstances are met.
Two excellent examples of recent high-functioning psychopaths/sociopaths that I have studied are:
Colonel David Russell Williams is a Canadian serial rapist, murderer and former colonel in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Williams was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, England and his family later immigrated to Canada. He studied economics and political science at the University of Toronto Scarborough before embarking on a career in the Canadian Forces. He was also a decorated pilot who had flown Canadian Forces VIP aircraft for dignitaries and heads of state.2 The case of 47-year-old Col. Russell Williams — commander of Canada’s largest air base by day; sexual predator and killer by night — shocked Canadians as it ran its course last year. When it finally ended, on Oct. 21, 2010, Williams was sentenced to two life sentences with no chance of parole for 25 years for the murders of Jessica Lloyd, 27, and Cpl. Marie-France Comeau, 37, and scores of other crimes.3
Dr Shirley Jane Turner—doctor who killed her boyfriend and eventually killed their child.4 She probably had borderline personality disorder. I first saw the documentary DEAR ZACHARY5 back in 2010 and it helped me accept the concept of high-functioning psychopaths.
Thus per the above, we could reasonably state that at least ~10% of the population is overtly psychopathic/sociopathic (eg, “natural born killers”, serial criminals, etc) or up high-functioning psychopaths, with potential behaviour ranging from manipulation, to subtle or overt abuse, to serial murder.
OBVIOUS CONCLUSIONS: So based on the above, let’s reasonably state that 65% of the population are untrustworthy zombies and 10% are overt or covert psychopaths/sociopaths; that gives us 75% of the population—3 per 4 free-living people in the population—are potentially dangerous.
As such, you and I are interacting with psychopaths and sociopaths every single day of our lives when we interact with any group of people.
As such, if you're not actively defending yourself against psychopathic people and businesses, then you're probably being abused.
Remember—the vast majority of businesses and institutions do not care about you and they are unable to care about you; they will make promises about “customer service” and “community” but they (the bosses) are primarily interested in accumulating power and making their money. In other words: most businesses are psychopathic and predatory by design because of their capitalist structure and direction – they don’t care about you. They’re in the business to make money not to protect you or care about your feelings. If you get hurt, but they make money they don’t care.
When we moved back to the USA in 2022, I noticed a clear shift in people and in the way that businesses performed—making money was clearly the chief goal and most people and businesses performed at a sub-par level with very low performance. I presume that the previous 3 years of lock-downs, political chaos, and brain-damaging injections were the main causes.
OBVIOUS ACTIONS: 1) become aware, 2) notice the patterns and signals, 3) enter into all new personal-business relationships with skepticism not blind pollyanna enthusiasm.
See my previous suggestions such as the videos linked immediately below on dealing with manipulative people.
Read books on the topic, eg, In Sheep's Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People by Dr. George K. Simon (Ph.D. Clinical Psychology from Texas Tech University)
Here are 2 excellent videos/documentaries on Colonel David Russell Williams and Dr Shirley Jane Turner—these are provided for your convenience but these are not without disturbing content.
Watch at your own discretion, but—again—the content is very real and also very disturbing if you’re a normal person, especially if you are a normal person who 1) trusts that people are good and who 2) has an optimistic view of life and humanity.
For better or for worse, I find only the trailer for the DEAR ZACHARY documentary but of course you can search for the complete video online:
Here is the full-text PDF article of the famous Milgram Experiment—thanks for making it to the end!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Williams_(criminal)
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna41665374
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Andrew_Bagby_and_Zachary_Turner
https://www.dearzachary.com/
