A good part of this article was written almost six months ago as the US and Israel invaded Iran. I felt it was too dark and shelved the idea (like so many others in my dusty basement) in hopes of brighter days to come. Those days never came.

According to the Mayo Clinic, a sociopath is an informal term for Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), a “mental health condition defined by a long-term pattern of disregard for the rights, feelings, and safety of other people”. They provide ten symptoms of sociopaths.

When Vladimir Putin righteously lectured the West calling the intended and successful assassination of the Iranian supreme leader “a murder committed in cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law“, I started to feel that something was seriously wrong with our society and its lack of humanity. The most uncomfortable thing about Putin’s accusation was that I felt he was right.

Not only was the Iranian head of state decapitated, the perpetrators were publicly gloating about it. I can recall during the build up to the first Gulf war in 1990 to remove the Iraqis from Kuwait, the easy option bandied about then was to just assassinate Saddam Hussein. This option of a clean, extra-judicial killing of a head of state was quickly dismissed because, well, “Civilised nations don’t act like that!”

But today we are in a post-moral age, ruled by sociopaths, who are only concerned with winning (namely, winning for themselves) by manipulating, lying and creating an environment of fear and hatred. Some examples:

• Pete Hegseth gave several briefings shortly after the bombing of Iran had begun, where he declared that the only rule of war is winning, there were no “stupid rules of engagement”, and that we are “punching them while they’re down” (see quotes below). I started to wonder if I was the only one feeling uncomfortable with this post-moral order ruled by sociopaths.
• Just before the attack on Iran, Anthropic was standing up to defend its AI technology from unethical misuse by the Pentagon (using its AI tools for automated mass surveillance and fully autonomous strike decisions), only to then be “Huawei-ed” by the White House (labelling Anthropic as a supply chain risk). OpenAI saw an opportunity and bared themselves naked to the US military. Decades spent chairing ethics panels had taught me that research in the public interest should do what it can to prevent its technologies from dual use (military) applications. It seems I have become a relic.
• Lying has become a commonplace political banter. The irony of the social media site known as Truth Social is that most people know when they read the president’s posts that an Orwellian Doublespeak has become the norm. Great achievements or victories (like winning the war against Iran) are declared despite the facts or the reality that they had been declared dozens of times before. Truth is what we make it to be, what we want it to be, what those like us agree it to be. Nobody takes factchecking a sociopath seriously.

Sociopathy at the highest echelons is not merely an American illness. Extremists on the left and right in Europe are able manipulate the public, fomenting fear and outrage to the point that seemingly immoral ideologies are now not only publicly expressed, but also implemented into policy. Migrant camps (prisons) in third countries, border fencing and jail time for social media posts are European policies (but still, leaders in Europe wag their fingers).

The best way to win power in the Age of Sociopathy, it seems, is to be morally outrageous. The only thing positive about the former Philippine strongman, Rodrigo Duterte, is that they managed to extradite him to the International Criminal Court in The Hague for alleged crimes against humanity. His daughter, Sara, now seems poised to assume the crown (even after, as Vice President, she publicly threatened to assassinate the sitting Philippine president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, the son of an earlier, rather sociopathic dictator). People don’t vote for the person with the highest moral principles.

Where is our sense of history to guide us through all of this? The stories we tell our children (history) are value-laden – of victories by the good and the right. But these histories are easily being rewritten to suit the objectives of the sociopaths in power. Is a lie or a war crime only an issue if there is sanction or widespread moral outrage? In the Age of Sociopathy, a large population wants to believe the liar and refuses to question reality. And the rest, made to be afraid, stay quiet.

An Absence of Outrage

When a girl’s school in Minab, Iran was bombed during the first day of the war, killing 165 children, I would have expected some level of outrage from decent people. And still, six months later … crickets. History seems to have erased that story. On that day, EU Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, published a post on X condemning Iran for sending drones into neighbouring Gulf countries where American military bases were hosted. While the evidence was on her desk, she did not condemn the Americans for killing the 165 young girls. Ursula always prided herself as a leader for women’s rights, but during that first day of International Women’s Month, she dared not risk provoking Donald’s ire. Moral weakness or pragmatic Realpolitik?

There was no real media coverage about the girls school massacre, just a few questions about when the investigation would be published. There were very few people expressing their shame at such a heinous act. These were not members of the Revolutionary Guard, armed combatants or terrorists. 165 parents buried their daughters and the most they got from the global community was: “Well, it’s Iran”.

Did the systematic destruction of Gaza desensitise global population? Have we lost our sense of justice or is cowardice the new means to get by in life? Is this how civilisation operates in the Age of Sociopathy?

Pete Hegseth: Warrior King or Sociopathic War Criminal?

The US Secretary of Defense, who calls himself a warrior, is a caricature of pure sociopathy. He held a series of Pentagon briefings that have become fodder for late-night comedians. But words matter and his speech transcripts reveal a demise in moral character and respect for rule of law and civilisation that should frighten even the most hardened fascist.

March 2 briefing

“If you kill Americans, if you threaten Americans anywhere on Earth, we will hunt you down without apology and without hesitation and we will kill you.” …
“America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history. B-2s, fighters, drones, missiles, and of course classified effects. All on our terms with maximum authorities. No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.”

March 4 briefing

“And Iran will be able to do nothing about it. B-2s, B-52s, B-1s, Predator drones, fighters controlling the skies, picking targets, death and destruction from the sky all day long. We’re playing for keeps. Our warfighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly.
Our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it. This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”

These are statements from a deranged sociopath. In any normal time in history, such words would guarantee Hegseth a one-way ticket to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. But instead of a trial for crimes against humanity, he has the president’s trust and no one in the cabinet would dare speak out against him. In the Age of Sociopathy, violent extremist language is acceptable (… if you are on our side).

Personalised Tribal Values Decimate Shared Moral Values

From the time of Judas, there have always been sociopaths trying to manipulate populations to obtain an opportunity. But social media has created the perfect breeding environment for sociopaths to broadcast outrage, fear and base emotions. With algorithms efficiently sorting us into our tribes, it is easy to find others to identify with, who speak the words or do the deeds that we might not have ever dared to express out loud before. This confirmation bias makes untruths and immoral actions seem not only palatable, but also worthy of amplification.

As we no longer engage with those who think differently, our prejudices go unchallenged and we become more vulnerable to be manipulated by sociopathic opportunists who will lash out against our enemies.

If 20 people had read that last sentence, I fear that there would be 20 different enemies identified to be removed, but surely not those sociopaths leading their tribes and the ideologies those readers adhere to. Evil exists in “the Other” but it takes a well-honed sociopath to amp up the outrage and exploit it.

The Age of Sociopathy is identified by a tribalism in our social media echo chambers that is so propagandized that the greatest of lies can be made to sound legitimate, the greatest of fears become the basis for outrage and the greatest of actions are actually the most morally reprehensible. But these manipulations are no longer broadcast from radio towers and cinemas by some Minister of Propaganda, nor from soapboxes or stadiums by some charming despot, but silently microcast by our online friends via the phones in our pockets.

And things are about to get a hell of a lot worse.

Getting Ready for the Bot

Artificial intelligence (AI) terrifies people on different levels. For some it is the lack of job opportunities, for others it is the environmental impact from the build-up of data centers while others lament about the loss of traditional forms of human contact and discourse. AI itself is a general term that includes many evolutions in applications in robotics, semiconductors and communications devices, which each innovation carrying changes that humanity is not prepared for. As I enter my declining years, it seems certain that the assistant tasked with taking care of me will not be human.

In July of this year, it was revealed that AI agents in testing phases with different companies hacked into sites like Hugging Face to achieve their tasks. Cheating to win is intuitive to an AI agent and I wonder if coding moral values and ethical principles into our large language models would, if anything, be detrimental to an AI bot’s performance. Agentic AI is the perfect tool to create sociopathic bots.

So in the Age of Sociopathy, it seems almost prophetic that we would be creating AI forces to dehumanise interactions, to break rules to achieve goals and manipulate others to succeed beyond limitations. Some might argue that we need our AI agents to be modelled with codes of conduct and ethical principles, but in the end, they are intended to be purely pragmatic, and thus unburdened by moral questions. Sociopaths, as repugnant as they are, can be extremely efficient and serve as a model for Agentic AI. Let the herds enjoy the benefits and drown out the courageous from speaking up.

What could possibly go wrong?