Social parasites in leadership positions

A small percentage of people are social parasites. They take more than they give and feel fine about it.

Leadership positions attract exactly these people. Studies of top managers find psychopaths at three to four times the normal rate. The ladder doesn’t accidentally let them climb – the ladder is built for their kind of climbing.

It gets worse. Power doesn’t just attract the wrong people – it changes the good ones. Give a kind person power and their empathy reduces. There are two roads into the same corner office – parasites climbing in, and normal people changing on arrival.

That’s why “let’s just pick better leaders” doesn’t work. You can’t sort people that well. And who applies for the job of sorter? The same kind.

The only thing that has ever (temporarily) worked: build systems that survive bad leaders. Limits on power, transparency, and above all – an exit for everyone below.

Power reveals

People say power corrupts. It doesn’t – it reveals what was already there.

Give a person power and it reveals the traumas (s)he had normalized so they wouldn’t mess with his/her life. What kept those traumas quiet is that the world pushes back. If you are not nice friends will leave, bosses will fire you, etc. Failure grounds people.

Power removes the pushback. Nobody tells the king no. With nothing pushing back, the managed wounds spill out – onto other people.

Experiments confirm it – give power to a selfish person and they become more selfish. Give it to a generous person and they become more generous. Power is a magnifier of whatever was already there. That’s why every powerful person goes bad in their own particular way – the damage has the shape of their own story.

Two ways back

How does a powerful person become good again?

One way: let them eat themselves full of power. If their wound is the fillable kind (the need to finally feel safe, seen, enough) then once it’s filled, they relax and return to who they really are. Example – the ruthless tycoon who ends up building libraries.

But some wounds are bottomless. Power doesn’t fill them. It feeds them, and the hole grows with the feeding. Doctors have a name for leaders who get worse the longer they rule: hubris syndrome. Filling up never cures these people. Only the second way does.

The second way: the rollercoaster. Power, failure, power, failure. A crash is the one piece of feedback a powerful person can’t fire, can’t bribe, can’t ignore. Every crash forces them back to reality. Enough rounds of this shape even the hard cases into someone that’s ok.

Look at democracy through this lens. Elections were never a machine for picking good leaders – we’re clearly bad at that. Democracy is a machine that guarantees the crash: a scheduled, bloodless fall every few years, even for those who would never voluntarily leave.

Now add AI

Here’s what worries me about the most powerful AI ending up exclusively in the hands of a few.

Notice what each kind of person wants from it. Scientists and engineers rush to use AI to invent new cures and new technologies. The parasites want a different list: war tech, surveillance, mass control. Tools that increase their lead and keep everyone else in check. Step out of line and your money switches off. The phone in your pocket tells them where you are, who you talk to, what you read. The next thing on their wish list is reading minds. After that it will be tech we can’t yet imagine.

A ruler whose AI beats everyone else’s stops losing. No lost wars. No lost elections. No market punishment. The rollercoaster stops – at the top.

Superintelligence in few hands doesn’t just make the powerful stronger. It makes them uncrashable. And the crash was the only cure we ever had that worked on the worst cases.

There is not much time left to keep superintelligence from falling into the hands of a “chosen” few. Once they get a big enough lead, there is no catching up.

Every bad ruler in history eventually crashed – lost a war, lost an election, ran out of money. The crash was how humanity recovered. A ruler who cannot crash puts humanity in a situation we’ve never been in before.

What if we can’t get out of it?