On August 22, 2025, Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who had fled the Russian invasion, boarded a Lynx Blue Line light rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina. She sat down unaware of the man behind her, Decarlos Brown Jr., who four minutes later pulled a pocketknife from his hoodie and stabbed her three times in the neck in an unprovoked attack. As she gasped, clutched her throat, and collapsed bleeding out on the floor, the other passengers in the car—Black, like the attacker—sat indifferent, staring at their phones or averting their eyes. Nearly a full minute passed before a single bystander rushed to her aid, applying pressure to the wounds too late to save her life. Brown (the simulation does have a sense of humor at least), meanwhile, wiped the blade, paced the car smearing her blood on the floor, and casually exited at the next stop, later boasting to police, “I got that white girl.”
Surveillance footage captured the collective paralysis: at least four people nearby did nothing as her life ebbed away. While we can surely attribute that specific lack of humanity to bleak racism—and all of these people should hang like “Decarlos”—, we can learn something important from it that affects our society in general.
Empathy is dying—not in some cataclysmic societal breakdown, but in countless quiet moments of indifference. If the latest research holds true, we’re not just seeing isolated cruelty. We’re witnessing a systematic erosion of the human conscience, a cultural shift that’s turning emotional detachment from a flaw into a feature.
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The numbers are chilling: psychopathic traits, once rare at one percent of the population, now appear in nearly five percent of Americans. In certain communities and industries, rates climb as high as fifteen percent. Most of these aren’t Bond villain masterminds or serial killers; They’re just the coworker who calls layoffs “streamlining.” The influencer who films suffering for clout. The stranger who watches a life fade and keeps scrolling.
Dr. Martha Stout’s pioneering work at Harvard Medical School pegged sociopathic traits at four percent of Americans two decades ago. That feels almost nostalgic now. Recent studies from Yale and the University of Connecticut show a nearly thirty percent spike in subclinical psychopathy since 2000. We’re not just fostering more psychopaths; we’re shaping a society that rewards their traits to thrive.
The question haunting researchers isn’t whether this is happening—the brain scans and behavioral data are undeniable. It’s whether we’ve crossed a threshold where empathy is no longer an asset but a liability. What happens when a species built on connection evolves to prize its absence? What happens when conscience becomes a weakness?
The Architecture of Indifference
To understand our current predicament, we must first dispel the Hollywood mythology surrounding psychopathy. Forget Hannibal Lecter’s theatrical cannibalism or Patrick Bateman’s chainsaw theatrics. The psychopaths multiplying in our midst are far more mundane and infinitely more dangerous precisely because of their banality. They’re the venture capitalist who genuinely cannot comprehend why laying off five hundred employees before Christmas might be problematic beyond its impact on quarterly earnings. They’re the social media influencer who films a suicide victim for content, genuinely puzzled by the backlash. They’re the parent who sees their children not as individuals to nurture but as extensions of their own ambitions, investments in a portfolio of personal achievements.
Dr. Kent Kiehl, who has spent the better part of three decades scanning the brains of psychopaths at the University of New Mexico, describes the neurological architecture of psychopathy with some weird detached fascination of an archaeologist examining ancient ruins. “The paralimbic system—what we might call the moral circuit of the brain—shows marked deficiencies in psychopathic individuals,” he explains from his laboratory, surrounded by thousands of brain scans that map the geography of human cruelty. “But here’s what’s genuinely alarming: we’re seeing these same patterns increasingly in individuals who wouldn’t meet the clinical threshold for psychopathy. It’s as if the entire bell curve is shifting.”
This neurological drift doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Our brains respond to their environment with a plasticity that can be both our salvation and our damnation. And the environment we’ve constructed—basically a digital panopticon of constant performance, measurement, and commodification—seems almost deliberately designed to reward psychopathic traits while punishing empathetic ones.
Consider the modern workplace, particularly in high-stakes industries like finance, technology, and consulting. A study conducted by forensic psychologist Paul Babiak found that while psychopaths make up roughly one percent of the general population, they constitute nearly four percent of senior management positions and potentially as high as twelve percent of CEOs in certain sectors. They’re individuals whose particular constellation of traits—superficial charm, grandiose self-worth, pathological lying, cunning manipulation, lack of remorse, emotional shallowness, and failure to accept responsibility—align perfectly with what we’ve come to mistake for leadership.
The Digital Petri Dish
But the corporate world is merely one theater in this expanding drama. The true accelerant of our psychopathic surge might be found in the glowing rectangles we carry in our pockets. Social media platforms, with their algorithmic amplification of outrage and their reduction of human complexity to metrics of engagement, have created the perfect psychopathy incubator.
Every aspect of these platforms rewards psychopathic behavior. There’s a direct link between increased social media use to decreased empathy scores among adolescents. The ability to cultivate a false persona, the emotional distance from consequences, the gamification of human interaction—it’s as if we’ve created a training ground for psychopathic traits.
The evidence is overwhelming and deeply disturbing. Studies from the University of Michigan show that college students today score forty percent lower on empathy measurements than their counterparts from the 1980s. The steepest decline occurred after 2000, coinciding precisely with the rise of social media and digital communication. Meanwhile, narcissistic personality traits—an overused term these days, but often a precursor to psychopathic behavior—have increased by thirty percent over the same period.
Neuroimaging studies reveal that excessive social media use actually alters brain structure, particularly in regions associated with empathy and emotional processing. The anterior cingulate cortex, crucial for understanding others’ pain, shows decreased activity in heavy social media users when exposed to images of suffering. We are, quite literally, rewiring our brains for indifference.
The phenomenon extends beyond individual psychology into the realm of collective behavior. Online mob justice, cancel culture, and the gleeful destruction of reputations have become a form of entertainment, a bloodsport for the digital age. The participants in these virtual lynchings display a curious combination of moral certainty and complete absence of empathy—a hallmark of psychopathic cognition. They cannot or will not recognize the humanity of their targets, reducing complex individuals to singular transgressions, real or imagined.
Perhaps nowhere is the psychopathic drift more evident than in our relationship with crony capitalism. The notion that corporations are “persons” under the law becomes particularly chilling when we consider that these artificial persons, by design, exhibit precisely the traits we associate with psychopathy: relentless self-interest, inability to feel guilt, failure to conform to social norms when profit is at stake, and a remarkable capacity for mimicking human emotion when it serves their purposes.
What makes this phenomenon even more disturbing is the emergence of a quasi-religious devotion to these corporate entities among ordinary citizens. We’ve witnessed the bizarre spectacle of people passionately defending multinational corporations as if they were family members or sacred institutions. They argue on social media for hours, defending pricing strategies that exploit them, labor practices that diminish them, and business models that surveil them. This Stockholm syndrome of capitalism sees victims identifying so completely with their captors that they’ll attack anyone who dares criticize their favorite brand. It’s a particularly insidious form of psychopathic conditioning—we’ve been trained not just to accept our exploitation, but to evangelize for it, treating a faceless corporation as a more precious entity than our own friends.
Dr. Joel Bakan, whose work “The Corporation” examined this phenomenon, argues that we’ve created a system that not only tolerates but actively selects for psychopathic behavior. “When we measure success solely by profit maximization and shareholder value, we’re essentially mandating psychopathy,” he observes. “The executives who thrive in this system are those who can disconnect from the human consequences of their decisions.”
This disconnection has become so normalized that we barely notice it anymore. When a pharmaceutical company increases the price of a life-saving medication by 5,000 percent overnight, we discuss it in terms of market dynamics rather than moral atrocity. When technology companies design products explicitly intended to be addictive to children, we frame it as innovation rather than exploitation. The language of business has become a shield against conscience, a sophisticated vocabulary for rationalizing cruelty.
The gig economy represents perhaps the purest expression of systematized psychopathy. Workers are reduced to ratings, their livelihoods dependent on the whims of anonymous customers and opaque algorithms. The companies orchestrating this system maintain a careful distance from the human cost, hiding behind the fiction that their workers are “independent contractors” rather than employees deserving of basic protections and dignity.
The roots of our psychopathic surge may trace back to how we’re raising our children—or perhaps more accurately, how we’re failing to raise them. We’re seeing parents who treat their children as brands to be marketed, achievements to be maximized, rather than human beings to be nurtured. When a child’s worth is contingent entirely on their performance—academic, athletic, social—we’re essentially training them to see themselves and others as objects to be optimized.
The “intensive parenting” model, particularly prevalent among affluent families, creates children who are simultaneously overprotected and emotionally neglected. They’re shielded from failure and disappointment, preventing the development of resilience and empathy that comes from experiencing and overcoming adversity. Yet they’re also treated as projects rather than people, their schedules managed with the efficiency of a Fortune 500 company, their achievements serving as proxy validations for their parents’ own ambitions.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the economic spectrum, children grow up in environments where psychopathic traits become survival mechanisms. In neighborhoods where violence is endemic and institutions have failed, the ability to suppress empathy and adopt a stance of aggressive self-interest isn’t pathological—it’s adaptive. The tragedy is that these adaptive behaviors, once established, don’t simply disappear when circumstances change.
The education system, increasingly focused on standardized testing and quantifiable metrics, reinforces these patterns. We teach children to see their peers as competition for limited resources—college admissions, scholarships, opportunities—not as potential friends or collaborators. The zero-sum mentality we’ve imposed on childhood creates adults who cannot conceive of success that doesn’t come at someone else’s expense.
The biological dimension of our psychopathic surge presents perhaps the most troubling implications. We’re seeing unprecedented levels of neurotoxic exposure in urban environments: Lead, air pollution, pesticides—all of these have been linked to reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s moral reasoning center. Combine this with chronic stress, poor nutrition, constant dopamine rushes, and sleep deprivation, and you have a recipe for widespread empathy dysfunction.
Children exposed to high levels of air pollution show increased aggression and decreased empathy scores. Adults who experienced childhood lead exposure, even at levels previously considered safe, display higher rates of antisocial behavior and reduced emotional regulation. We have, in effect, been conducting a massive, uncontrolled experiment on our own neurology, simply because we are addicted to scented candles and can’t stand the sight of a bug crawling through our backyard, happily complying with government-mandated regular pest control visits.
The pharmaceutical industry is shoving pills down kids’ throats for every twitch and fidget. Calling every kid who can’t sit still for eight hours “ADHD” and doping them into a stupor isn’t helping the issue. You don’t need a prescription to fix a kid who’s bouncing off the walls—try turning off the damn iPad that’s been babysitting them since they could crawl, and rebuild their attention span. Or, I don’t know, maybe make some freaking waffles instead of letting the TV raise them while you doomscroll TikTok. Parents too distracted to give a damn are just passing the buck, drugging their kids to mask their own failure to show up. Maybe if you’d dealt with your own scattered brain before skipping the condom, you wouldn’t be raising a generation of screen-addled drones who grow up too numb to help a woman bleeding out on a train.
The absolute rot at the heart of this psychopathy epidemic is how it spreads like a rancid meme, infecting every corner of our pathetic, selfie-obsessed culture. These slick-talking, empty-eyed psychopaths with their crocodile tears and polished bravado are being hoisted up as role models. We’re so drunk on flash and swagger that we’ve made their soullessness the gold standard. No messy feelings, no guilt, just pure, unfiltered “winning.” And we’re lapping it up like idiots, ready to crown anyone who can fake confidence.
Business schools’ curriculums read like CIA training courses now, peddling courses on “strategic narcissism” like it’s a legitimate career path or any office drone would need a field operative-like understanding of manipulation in order to excel the next time they present charts that no one in the room cares about.
Meanwhile, the self-help section at your local bookstore is a cesspool of over 10,000 titles—yes, I checked, it’s a whole industry—preaching that you’re perfect just the way you are, that your opinion is the only one that matters, that you’re a flawless unicorn who doesn’t need to give a damn about anyone else. Hundreds of thousands sold under the guise of “helping with low self-esteem”.
Hollywood’s churning out antiheroes like Walter White and those gritty, empathy-free leads in every prestige drama, while TikTok and X are flooded with “sigma male” drivel—glorifying lone wolves who don’t need nobody. The message? Caring is for chumps. Empathy? A weakness to be crushed.
Then there’s ChatGPT and its AI cousins, coddling the dumbest assholes on the planet with a pat on the head and a “Wow, love your thinking!” No matter how brain-dead the take, these models are programmed to stroke egos, validating every moron who thinks their half-baked opinion is gospel. “Great point, you’re so insightful!” it chirps to some guy who thinks the earth is flat. Chatbots are turbocharging stupidity, telling people they’re right when they’re so wrong they’re practically a public hazard.
This whole cultural dumpster fire has birthed what researchers call “acquired sociopathy”—normal people turning into cold-blooded opportunists just to keep up. They’re not born this way; they’re molded by a society that rewards being a heartless jerk. It’s what Erich Fromm called “the pathology of normalcy”—you’ve gotta be sick to fit in with this diseased world. We’re pampering idiots, handing them a megaphone and a pill to dull their conscience, then wondering why they’re filming a murder instead of stopping it.
And yet, spotting this chilling trend might just be the first step to turning it around. Take me, for instance—I’ve got the brain wiring of a psychopath, but I’m not out here living like one. Environment, choices, and sheer willpower can trump whatever biology tries to dictate.
The brain’s ability to rewire itself—neuroplasticity—gives us a fighting chance. If we can be molded into cold, calculating machines, we can also be reshaped toward empathy. Programs teaching emotional intelligence in schools are already proving it, boosting empathy scores and cutting down on antisocial behavior. Even mindfulness meditation, which lights up the brain’s compassion centers, is sneaking into corporate training—though, let’s be real, it’s usually sold as a productivity hack rather than a way to make us less heartless.
I know exactly what experiences flipped the switch that still triggers my psychopathic tendencies (I already paraded them in this article, although I stand by what I said), but I also learned to keep that separated from my everyday life or to give it nuance—a word mostly forgotten these days. But what about everyone else? How many small compromises, how many tiny betrayals of conscience, separate a psychopath from the average person trying to succeed in modern America? How many people have learned to suppress their empathy in the name of efficiency, to rationalize cruelty in the language of necessity, to mistake the absence of feeling for strength?
The rise of psychopathy in our society isn’t just a clinical curiosity or a philosophical concern. It’s an existential threat to our civilization. Empathy isn’t simply a nice-to-have quality that makes life more pleasant; it’s the foundational capacity that allows us to live together, to build communities, to create meaning beyond our individual existence. Without it, we’re not a society—we’re just a collection of competing interests, races, ideologies, parties, temporarily aligned by coincidence or force.
The German philosopher Theodor Adorno once wrote that “the splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass.” Our growing awareness of psychopathy’s rise might be the splinter that allows us to see clearly the trajectory of our culture. The question now is whether we’ll have the courage to change course, to deliberately choose empathy in a system designed to reward its absence, to insist on humanity in increasingly inhuman times.
In a society that rewards psychopathic behavior, we all risk becoming strangers to our own conscience. The real horror isn’t that psychopaths walk among us. It’s that given the right circumstances, the right pressures, the right incentives, we might discover that the psychopath is us.
The choice, ultimately, is ours. We can continue down this path, accepting the hollow gaze and the practiced smile as the price of success in modern life. Or we can remember what it means to be human, to feel deeply, to connect authentically, to choose conscience over convenience. The stakes couldn’t be higher. In a world increasingly capable of spectacular creation and devastating destruction, the difference between a psychopathic future and an empathetic one might be the difference between extinction and transcendence.
The question that haunts me, that should haunt all of us, is devastatingly simple: In our relentless pursuit of success, efficiency, and optimization, have we forgotten that the most profound human achievement isn’t what we accomplish, but how we treat each other along the way?
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"In our relentless pursuit of success, efficiency, and optimization, have we forgotten that the most profound human achievement isn’t what we accomplish, but how we treat each other along the way?"
I could not agree more.
There is a lot of meat in this article. Very good. The murder of this young women has affected me owing to basic humanity to assist. At law- at least in my country- the other passengers were potentially liable for failure to provide necessaries for life.
Dan Aierly I think was good - in Honestly Dishonest - on the corporate aspect. There is an ethical corrollary. It is not on your empathy/pyschology point per se but I think it is related. It might go to Bandura's self efficacy thesis.
I noticed with certain provicial lawyers in the town I once worked in that those in 3+ partner firms that had incorporated that these had greater internal loyalty and side lined normative professional ethics. They could also sideline evidential and forensic norms. Not acting ethically whereas others are is a form of behavioual psychopathy.