>>14111363In finance, as a profession, the spectrum between investing and speculating and outright fraud follows attitude to risk, however calculated, between those without primary psychopathy and those with it. At one end there's the likes of a Peter Lynch, and at the other there's the likes of a Bernard Madoff, and it is because of this that the chartering and operating of regulatory agencies is undertaken by people who can take a broader and longer view of things, and persons, than primary psychopaths are capable of. Likewise for the uses to which private gains are put. Compare the founder of the Atlantic Philanthropies to Steve Jobs. The ways that the power to perceive & mitigate risk, and the the general preference for tranquility, are hampered by primary psychopathy, are even more apparent in literature. Shakespeare sent up Christopher Marlowe as the bastard Edmund in King Lear, but a primary psychopath like Marlowe cannot conceive of how any of that works, thus can only send themselves up in monotonously narrow projection, their work empty of the accents of affection, brimming with cartooonish villains and hapless dupes, but little else. Likewise In statecraft, the difference in internal ordering of authority between social democracies and military dictatorships is only too obvious, but as with everything else, there can't be ability to characterize what such differences are rooted in, in whom the will to so much personal transparency is lacking from the outset--in men whose motives are opaque even to themselves. They are anything but masters at reflection.
