Why the wrong people end up in power | Brian Klaas, Bill Eddy, & more

The people who end up in power are not representative of the rest of us: They are not average, and they are not normal. People who are power-hungry tend to self-select into positions of power more than the rest of us. And as a result, we have this skew, this bias in positions of power where certain types of people, often the wrong kinds of people, are more likely to put themselves forward to rule over the rest of us.

There are high-conflict people in the world. I see them as potentially maybe 10% of people. They're now getting into politics because they're seeing that their ability to grab attention gets them much bigger attention and gets them elected to power positions.

You have some people who are genuine politicians. In short, to be a politician, you almost by definition need to be narcissistic and Machiavellian. I mean, if you're running for president, that's the height of narcissism, to think that you are good enough to rule a country, to run the United States. What kind of ego do you have to have to think that you're going to be good at doing that? You also had to have gotten there. So your skills of persuasion and manipulation need to be pretty well-honed.

'I welcome this kind of examination because people have gotta know whether or not their president's a crook. Well, I'm not a crook.'

These are the wrong people to put in positions of power. It's nothing about politics. These folks are Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals. They're at every level of society; it's not about politics, it's about personalities, and we have to learn how to spot them.

And start to get a handle on what the negative possibilities are because I think we're only beginning to start to see them.

Corruptible people are more drawn to power than the rest of us. People who are rotten and power-hungry in the first place are more likely than the average person to seek and obtain power.

So high-conflict personalities, or people with those, and I refer to them as HCPs, have unmanaged emotions or intense emotions, and they actually shift everything to the emotional side, which helps give them power. Emotional repetition is the key to how high-conflict politicians communicate with and excite everybody. They excite their followers, but they also make their opponents angry and ineffective as they get emotionally hooked and fight with each other. But it's the emotional message, and part of it is understanding how our brains work. The parts of our brain that are paying attention the most to human emotions are the relationship parts of our brain.

And so, they can form a relationship with people by doing this at an emotional level without really thinking. And in many ways, it's a seduction process. Just like a conman would seduce a woman that they want their credit card, or they wanna marry them and then spend their money on the next person. They say all these emotional things, "You're wonderful, you're beautiful, you're the best thing that ever happened to me," and high-conflict politicians say, "You're wonderful. We agree with each other. We're the best thing for each other," when in fact, it's all calculated.

And then they engage your emotion, and they do that through the craft of storytelling. Again, you know, now we have our protagonists. Now we've got them, you know, they know that they're part of the story. I'm on their side. And now let's tell the story where they are actually acting. So they are going to be part of this script unraveling around them, and they are going to buy it because it's a story where they're the protagonist and it's the story they want, because you've done the put-up so incredibly well that you know how to tell the story that your mark wants to hear. You show them the world as they already see it, as they want it to be.

So con artists are really, really wonderful at not just telling any story, but a story that grabs you and that draws you along and that makes you feel like you're really part of something bigger. Because at the end of the day, all of them, from the Monty Hustler to Bernie Madoff, t...