Imagine it’s 7500bce… Most humans are still hunter gatherers but in a few places people have started banding together to form cities. The world is savage, hard, and dangerous. Life is short and cheap, and just like chimpanzees today don’t feel any moral qualms about murdering rival troop members, humans hadn’t really evolved socially to the point of thinking of all humans as inherently “special” or worthy of life… Some could say we still haven’t all evolved to this point.

In that context what we were left with was a bunch of sociopaths. And no wonder. Most people would be somewhat sociopathic if their siblings died in infancy or were carried off to be slaves or eaten by wolves, their parents were murdered in front of them, their village was slaughtered and burned, etc. So these city people, and soon the surrounding people’s, saw sociopathic behavior as normal and even something to be worshipped. (Again, some of us still do)

Sociopaths don’t hesitate to harm other people to increase their own power and wealth, even when they don’t really need anything more to live comfortably. In a world where might makes right, this was a huge advantage and the most horrible and brutal sociopaths rose to become kings of their city states.

There is some evidence that hunter gatherers groups would occasionally get a sociopath among them, but more often than not that person would be shunned and banished from the family. It was only when cities became a thing that there were tons of people from many families, so even if you’re family kicked you out, you could just find other sociopaths who had been kicked out, and together you could just kill anyone who denied you.

There’s also the fact that as soon as people started settling down and using agriculture to create excess food, the hunter gatherers around them started trying to take that food because hey, free food. So then you need to start defending your food stores, and again sociopaths rise to the top because they are the most ruthless “defenders”.

Those sociopathic traits continued in the ruling class throughout all of human pre history and history. Right down to today where people continue to worship the sociopaths like Musk, Trump, or even Hillary. It’s a childish thought process of “my dad can beat up your dad”, which makes me feel safer, even if sometimes my dad also beats me.

Edit: just to add that the only reason we can even have this conversation is because, for the first time in human history, large swaths of the human population HAVE socially evolved to the point of recognizing innate human value, and thus can also recognize sociopathic behavior