The Allure of Social Predators

1. Parasites & Predators

All life requires energy and resources to sustain itself. One way of gathering resources, the way adopted by the plants, is to take it from inanimate nature – water, dirt, sunlight. Another way is to take it from other living things. Those are the only two possibilities. In the latter method, there are two sub-variants: predation (which kills the other organism) and parasitism (which weakens but doesn’t kill it). (Yes, I know this is a weird classification, since then herbivores count as “predators” or “parasites”. Just go with it for the sake of drawing a metaphor.)

There is something similar within human societies. All human beings require resources to live and prosper. That includes biologically necessary resources like food, water, and air, but also, in a broader sense, we need things like money, and relationships, and maybe social status. There are two ways of gathering these resources. One is to do useful work, producing value from non-valuable stuff. Usually you then trade it to others. The other way is to take value from other people. The latter is social predation or parasitism.

The classic predators and parasites are psychopaths. In fact, this might not even be a metaphor; they may literally be predators in the biological sense. Lions are predators because they were designed by evolution to prey on gazelles (and other animals). Lions exist because that ecological niche exists, because gazelles exist. As soon as there were animals, it was inevitable that there would be predators.

In the same way, perhaps, psychopaths have been designed by evolution to prey on normal people. That’s the biological function of psychopathy. As soon as there were normal people, it was almost inevitable that there would be something like psychopaths – people whose “niche” was extracting resources from others. They’re a small portion of the population, just as lions are greatly outnumbered by gazelles. A population of prey animals can only support a small number of predators.

I’m not just interested in literal psychopaths. There are many parasitic people who would check off some but not all of the psychopath traits. I’m interested in the broader category of social parasites and predators, of which psychopaths are an extreme case.

2. The Charisma of Parasites

Here is something interesting that you often learn about social parasites: you often learn that they were charming, charismatic people.

Ted Bundy

Ted Bundy, the notorious psychopathic serial killer, was also handsome and charming. That is how he got women to go with him to isolated locations, where he would murder them.

Perhaps Bundy’s most remarkable feat is that, while he was on trial for murder, he started a romantic relationship with Carole Ann Boone, whom he wound up marrying just before he was sentenced to death for the third time. She had his child before he was executed. I don’t know about you, but I think I would find it pretty hard to get a date if I was currently on trial for murdering multiple women, and even harder to get a woman to marry me after I’d been convicted of said murders.

Here is Bundy’s final interview before his execution:

If you watch the interview, he comes off as a nice guy. You would never guess at the cold-blooded monster inside. He’s being interviewed by a journalist for a Christian publication, and he appears to show regret for how he has fallen, which he blames on pornography.

He is so good at what he does that I think I actually have to tell you this: it is all a total act. He is a psychopath. He has no regret whatsoever, he does not know what “morality” means, he was not led into his path by pornography (he’s just saying that because it’s a Christian interviewer), and if he somehow got out of that jail, he would be out murdering people for fun the next day. Nothing that comes out of his mouth can be taken at face value. He would murder that interviewer in a second if it was somehow to his advantage.

You might wonder why he would bother trying to manipulate the interviewer, since he’s about to be executed anyway. The answer is that it’s his nature. He is biologically programmed for manipulating normal people. So he keeps doing it right up to the end.

An interesting contrast is Aileen Wuornos, who was also interviewed before her execution:

. Unlike Ted Bundy, she actually comes off as a crazed killer. She’s not a psychopath; she’s just a person full of anger and hate. That’s why you have no trouble at all telling that she is a dangerous person.

Elizabeth Holmes

A less violent case of parasitism is that of Elizabeth Holmes (

). She was the CEO of Theranos, a company that was dedicated to making at-home blood testing machines which were supposed to work with a single drop of blood. She founded the company in 2003 at the age of 19 and kept it going till 2018. At its peak, it was worth $10 billion.

Yet the company was a total fraud. They never had the technology they pretended to have, nor did they have any realistic hope of developing it. When they got blood to test, they diluted it with water and tested it using devices made by other companies, etc. Holmes was finally convicted of fraud this year, 19 years after she started the fraud.

What is remarkable is the confidence that she inspired in other people, how she recruited experienced investors and famous people to her cause. In one video, former President Bill Clinton praises her as some kind of prodigy. Former Secretary of State George Shultz sat on the board of directors and was a strong believer in Holmes. Chemical Engineering Professor Channing Robertson sat on the board and still believed in Theranos as late as 2018. Holmes also managed to recruit former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, General James Mattis, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, and former Senator Sam Nunn.

It seems like it would be hard to recruit all those people even with a good product in hand. It’s remarkable that Holmes could do it when she was a young woman who did not have any real accomplishments, did not have the product that she was promising, and did not have any realistic way of producing it.

What did she have? Force of personality. When people interacted with her, they were impressed. They had such confidence in her that they didn’t need proof that the technology would actually work.

Donald Trump

At the risk of starting a political battle, I note that the former President is also an interesting example.

Some people, maybe even some of my readers, will indignantly insist that the opposite is the case. If you think Trump is totally sincere and trying to save America, there’s probably no point in reading this; just skip to the next section.

If you’re still reading, I’ll assume that you’re not among Trump’s dupes. (In the Bundy and Holmes examples, I doubt that any reader would be on their side at this point. But the same situation would hold for people under their spell – it would probably be pointless to try to reason with a Bundy fan or a Holmes fan before those two were caught.)

Trump’s business advice, if you stop and think about it, is all about manipulating other people. It’s never “here’s how to lower costs and increase quality” or “here’s how to make sure customers are happy”. It’s always, “here’s how to trick other people into giving you more money or taking less money from you.” And of course that’s his approach to politics as well. Basically everything that comes out of his mouth is an effort to manipulate people. He’s the most brazen yet somehow successful liar I’ve ever seen – he would tell you that the sky was red if it was in his interests, and half of the country would believe him.

He has inspired a lot of hatred. But he’s also inspired remarkable devotion. As he said during his first campaign, he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and he wouldn’t lose any supporters. In 2016, he managed to beat out 16 Republican challengers, including very seasoned and successful politicians, besides of course beating the Clinton machine.

3. How it Works

So the above people have a remarkable kind of charisma. These people inspire more confidence and devotion than possibly any normal person who is genuinely doing good things for the world.

Each of them, of course, appeals to different kinds of targets. Trump targets less educated Republican voters. Holmes targeted elites of our society. Bundy targeted young women. Each type of predator somehow knows instinctively how to manipulate their target.

At first, it’s surprising that serious criminals would seem charming. But if their ecological niche is that of manipulator of normal people, then of course they would have developed a charming appearance. The psychopath’s charm is like the lion’s claws – or, better, the camouflage of a snake.

One of the predator’s secrets is that not caring about other people makes you more charismatic to other people. The reason is that people who care about other people have social emotions that interfere with performing. They are prone to feeling anxiety or awkwardness, they may worry about whether they are being accurate or fair, and so they hesitate or qualify their statements. The social predators don’t give a shit about you, so they don’t feel any anxiety. They don’t give a shit about the truth, so they make unhesitating, unqualified statements with total confidence. We interpret their confidence as a sign of reliability, because if a normal person makes statements with total confidence, it’s because they’re definitely correct. The predator’s social ease is interpreted as a sign of success and dominance, which makes normal people want to be on the predator’s side. In reality, the confidence is a sign of being completely unscrupulous because you don’t give a shit. In a sense, social predators are trusted because they are untrustworthy.

4. Lessons

(1) You cannot just rely on your instinctive feelings. If you meet a psychopath, he is not going to look to you or sound to you like a monster. You’re probably going to instinctively like him. Ted Bundy was so likeable that, right after sentencing him to death, the judge said to him:

"Take care of yourself, young man. I say that to you sincerely; take care of yourself. It is an utter tragedy for this court to see such a total waste of humanity, I think, as I've experienced in this courtroom. You're a bright young man. You'd have made a good lawyer and I would have loved to have you practice in front of me, but you went another way, partner. I don't feel any animosity toward you. I want you to know that. Take care of yourself."

That was how the judge felt after listening to the evidence proving that Bundy had committed absolutely heinous, sadistic murders worthy of the death penalty.

Rather than instincts, rely on objective evidence. E.g., when you hear a politician or an entrepreneur trying to convince you of something, look for independent verification or refutation.

(2) Don’t trust extreme confidence. Staring straight at you and speaking very fluently is a sign of scamminess, not reliability. A little awkwardness or anxiety is a sign of sincerity.

Sometimes, I wonder if our society wouldn’t be better off if, instead of offices going to the candidate with the most votes, they went to the candidate with the least votes. No, I’m not literally saying that we should have that system. But I do think that the people who would make the best leaders are also people who would never get elected in a million years, even if they tried.