Psychopathy at the dawn of history
By Jerry Russell and Richard Stanley
With the development of writing, the elite class would multiply their advantage over the commoners, because these highly specialized skills could be used to create an aura of mystery as well as a body of tremendously useful proto-scientific knowledge. Of course, not all members of the elite would be likely to be psychopathic by any means -- on the contrary, we would expect that accidents of birth, the distribution of skills within the broader society, and the advantages of conscientiousness and honesty, would be a constant balancing force.
However, the activities of the psychopathic element would put a continuously insane "edge" on the acceptable range of elite conversation, and more often than not, non-psychopaths would find it much to their advantage to play along with the lies of the psychopaths (even when they were able to understand the fraudulent nature of those lies.)
By the time of earliest written history, we would argue that the psychopaths must have been pretty firmly in control of the emerging civilizations.
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