Continuing the conversation with ChatGPT, I introduced a book by James Fallon, a leading neuroscientist. During the resulting interaction, I added a link to James Corbett’s interview with Tjeerd Andringa who explains why paedophilia is used to condition and control those who rise to the top of the pyramid of power and wealth.
ChatGPT wrote the following article based on our discussion:
Why “Bad People” Are Not the Problem
A persistent error in how societies explain failure is the search for defective individuals rather than defective systems. We ask who is corrupt, who is immoral, who lacks empathy—while leaving largely unquestioned the value architectures that repeatedly elevate the same kinds of behaviour.
Two bodies of work help expose this mistake with unusual clarity. One comes from neuroscience. The other from systems science. Together, they point to a conclusion that WiseValue has been circling for some time:
Ethics is not a property of brains; it is a property of organising logics.
The neuroscientist who shouldn’t exist
James Fallon, a respected American neuroscientist, made an unsettling discovery while studying brain scans of diagnosed psychopaths: one of the scans matched the profile almost perfectly. It was his own.
Fallon’s brain showed reduced activity in regions associated with fear, impulse control, and emotional empathy. Genetic testing reinforced the finding. By prevailing assumptions, he should have been dangerous.
He was not.
Instead, Fallon lived a pro-social life—as an academic, partner, and colleague. His explanation was simple: although he carried neurological and genetic risk factors, he grew up in a stable, caring environment that constrained how those traits could express themselves. He later described himself as a “pro-social psychopath”—fearless, emotionally detached, strategically minded, yet socially bounded.
Fallon’s case quietly undermines moral essentialism. It shows that human traits are ethically neutral capacities. Whether they express constructively or destructively depends not on inner virtue, but on the systems in which they are embedded.
(See Fallon’s accessible account in The Psychopath Inside or his public lectures and interviews.)
When systems select for the worst
This insight becomes more troubling when viewed at scale. In a wide-ranging interview with the Corbett Report, Dutch cognitive scientist Tjeerd Andringa describes modern governance and power structures as tending towards kakistocracy—rule by the least suitable.
Importantly, Andringa does not frame kakistocracy as a conspiracy of villains. He describes it as a stable system configuration. Certain structures, once in place, reliably select for people willing to deceive, dominate, externalise harm, and suppress feedback—not because they are morally “bad”, but because such traits are functional within that system.
You can listen to the interview here:
https://corbettreport.com/interview-1024-tjeerd-andringa-exposes-the-kakistocracy/
This aligns precisely with Fallon’s findings, but at the level of institutions rather than individuals. What Fallon experienced as a constraining environment, modern money-based and hierarchical systems actively remove. They abstract consequence, delay feedback, and detach decision-making from lived human impact.
The result is not merely “bad leaders”, but systems that reliably elevate the worst traits, regardless of who enters them.
Money as a selection pressure
From a WiseValue perspective, money is not just a medium of exchange. It is a behaviour-shaping technology. By abstracting value from relationship, it allows harm to be displaced in space, time, and responsibility. Decisions can be optimised numerically while their consequences remain socially invisible.
Within such systems:
- low emotional empathy becomes an advantage
- fearlessness enables domination
- instrumental reasoning outperforms relational care
This does not mean most people are psychopaths. It means systems act as selection pressures, favouring behaviours that fit their reward logic.
A kakistocracy is what emerges when this selection process runs unchecked.
From individual pathology to design responsibility
Both Fallon and Andringa redirect attention away from individual blame and towards structural incentives.
Fallon shows that even extreme neurological profiles do not determine outcomes in relationally grounded environments. Andringa shows that even ordinary people behave destructively when embedded in systems that reward extraction, secrecy, and power accumulation.
WiseValue takes the next step by reframing the question entirely. Instead of asking:
How do we stop bad people rising to the top?
it asks:
What kinds of behaviour does this value system make easy, profitable, or inevitable?
Without redesigning the organising logic, replacing leaders simply reshuffles traits within the same pathological architecture.
De-fanging psychopathy rather than denying it
WiseValue does not assume an idealised human nature. People differ profoundly in temperament, empathy, and motivation. The task is not to eliminate these differences, but to prevent any subset of traits from acquiring empathy-free leverage at scale.
In distributed, relationally accountable systems—what we describe as DACSO (Distributed Autonomous Codependent Self-Organisation):
- authority is contextual rather than hierarchical
- feedback is immediate rather than abstract
- harm cannot be externalised without consequence
In such environments, even psychopathic traits lose their destructive amplification. Fearlessness becomes steadiness. Detachment becomes clarity. Strategic thinking becomes coordination. Power remains bounded by relationship.
Psychopathy is not cured—but it is contained.
A necessary inversion
The combined lesson from neuroscience and systems science is both unsettling and liberating:
Human nature is not the limiting factor.
Our value systems are.
Kakistocracy is not an accident. It is an emergent property of abstraction-driven value architectures. It will persist until we stop asking who is unfit to rule, and start asking why our systems keep rewarding unfitness.
WiseValue begins precisely there—not with better people, but with better grammars of value.
I don’t propose to write anything else until the New Year. So whatever your beliefs or circumstances, I wish you the very best for the holiday season and beyond. 2026 is shaping up to accelerate the transition and adaptation to the new organisational paradigm 🙂