WORLD’S BIGGEST PROBLEM
The World’s Biggest Problem? Psychopaths in Positions of Power
The author says power needs to be made attractive to normal decent people. Right now, it's not attractive to them. Self-selection bias causes power-hungry people to seek power and get power more than others. Humans are programmed by evolution to want a large, strong man as leader, but we need to retire that programming.
1h,6',00" SOLUTIONS.
We need to change institutions to make power unattractive to power-hungry people. And then we need to enforce the new rules.
The author thinks there should be a certain question to ask people who seek positions of power.
And that question is this. What would it take for you to think that you are no longer necessary in power? In other words, What is the goal that you want to achieve with your power, that if you were to achieve it, you would think it's time to step down. And the reason that question is so important is because it would cause most politicians to freeze like a deer in the headlights. They've never thought about it. For them, power is the goal. It would expose them as having never thought about it. And for those who do actually answer that question, they would put themselves on the record as what they think their power is for, such that if they actually achieve it, they can retire. And I think that's something that would be a great screening mechanism, to see how people answer that question. For the most part, ordinary and decent people who then put themselves forward for a position of power actually have an answer. They actually think about this, and they say as an example the reason I am running to be a member of my local school board is because I want to do X.
MORE SOLUTIONS.
Use oversight committees of randomly selected people to compare their decisions with decisions of government bodies to help determine if the latter may have ulterior motives. Require passing psychological tests for those who seek the highest levels of power. Criminal background checks are especially important for people seeking high offices.
After seeing the video, I found that there's at least a partial transcript of it. Following are the last two paragraphs.
TRANSCRIPT
Why we keep giving power to the wrong people https://bigthink.com/series/the-big-think-interview/corrupt-systems/
... If you're in a corrupt police department, if you're in a corrupt bureaucracy everybody around you is skirting the rules. A lot of the people around you are breaking the rules they're abusing them, but it's normal. It's what's done. So the system is this key mediating factor. Trying to change a bad leader is hard. Changing systems is something that we can actually achieve. I think part of the problem is we don't systematically evaluate these questions when we have choices about who to recruit or how to hire someone or how to promote someone. So what I often will tell people is imagine that the worst person in the world is trying to get the job that you are advertising for. Imagine that the worst person in the world is running for the political office in your political party or in your election. Now, design every system with that idea in mind. You then have screening processes to try to weed them out during the actual recruitment process. If they manage to wriggle through you have checks and oversight to basically eliminate them from those posts of power if they've made it that far. And then when it comes to promotion and the top jobs that's where scrutiny has to be the absolute most robust because those people are the ones who do the most damage. The Enron scandals, the major abuses of power, those happen in the corner offices where nobody is checking your chair, no one's monitoring your screen. Rather than trying to punish and regulate every person who might steal a paperclip, think about the people who can actually bring the company down and inflict enormous damage on our societies.
You're always going to have power hungry people show up and try to take power. What you need to do is dilute them and block them. And that's where the system design is crucial. And I think we haven't thought carefully about that in a series of roles of power around modern life. We just sort of assume we can advertise for a position or advertise for a promotion and wait for the right people to come. It doesn't work like that. We have to actively counteract this impulse of power-hungry people to seek and abuse power. And when we design systems in an intelligent way we can screen out and topple the psychopaths of this world.
ANOTHER ROUTE: UNANIMOUS RULE
Majority Rule and Minority Rule are generally abusive. Sociocracy is a form of unanimous rule that doesn’t allow minorities or individuals to prevent consensus or action. I believe it prevents psychopaths from taking power. Governments may not be able to institute sociocracy soon, but political parties can adopt it and thus win elections and then gradually make it law.
Sociocracy – basic concepts and principles https://www.sociocracyforall.org/sociocracy/
What Is Sociocracy and Why Does Democracy Need it? https://www.sociocracy.info/what-is-sociocracy/
SOCIOCRACY IS: A social ideal that values equality and the rights of people to determine the conditions under which they live and work, and an effective method of organizing associations, businesses, and governments, large and small.
What is Sociocracy? Introducing a Toolkit for Agile Organizations: A complete introduction to Sociocracy and Sociocracy 3.0 https://www.holaspirit.com/blog/sociocracy
Sociocracy for All https://www.sociocracyforall.org/content/ Sociocracy topics: Consent; Circles; Meetings; Performance
Evolve Effective Collaboration At Any Scale: Sociocracy 3.0 https://sociocracy30.org/
Sociocracy 3.0 in an Nutshell: Sociocracy 3.0 (S3) is social technology for evolving agile and resilient organizations at any size, from small start-ups to large international organizations.
Using S3 can help you to achieve your objectives and successfully navigate complexity. You can make changes one step at a time, without the need for sudden radical reorganization or planning a long-term change initiative.
Involuntary leaders?
You know... Those humble types that don't like the limelight.
Ideas on how to find them and how to get these quite types to be elected?