The Downside-Up: How Dark Strategies Destroy Institutions

Why do we sort the worst people to the apex of power? And how to we stop them once they get there?

“…there will be special opportunities for the ruthless and unscrupulous… And as there will be need for actions which are bad in themselves, and which all those still influenced by traditional morals will be reluctant to perform, the readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion and power.”

F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944)

As a close observer of modern American decline, I am concerned that we have reached an accelerated phase of institutional destruction that will be difficult to stop or repair in the way we hope. This is not a prediction of apocalypse, but I do think we have entered a dynamic that has the potential to cause systemic institutional failures in the near term, with significant societal disruption as a result.

This is not only a political problem. It is a math + psychology problem which doesn’t have an easy way out, although it does imply counterstrategies.

Dark Factor

I believe we’re watching an autocatalytic process of institutional constraints being progressively weakened by Dark Factor (D) personality traits (narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, sadism)—the traits most associated with willingness to gain an unfair advantage over others.

Autocatalytic: a process that accelerates itself. In institutional degeneration, each weakened constraint increases the power of actors willing to weaken the next one.

Psychologists Morten Moshagen, Benjamin Hilbig and Ingo Zettler define D or Dark Factor as the common disposition toward maximizing one’s own utility while disregarding—or deliberately causing—harm to others, along with beliefs that justify it.

The dark core of personality (2018)

Once in power, high-D personalities will leverage their position to further reduce institutional constraints, allowing even more high-D personalities to rise. Without intervention, this can become a recursive, accelerating process that mathematically leads to the destruction or capture of the institution.

Capital D

For example, capital should theoretically retain a relationship to value: labor, ideas, property, etc. Capitalism is the set of rules and institutions that constrains capital to being fairly traded—or doesn’t, as the case may be. But when capital becomes controlled by people with high Dark Factor personalities, they only see constraints in terms of what they can get away with. Fairness to a high-D personality is optional. This creates a mechanism for capital to deviate far from value.

Let’s take two people, an average person with empathy, morals, and values, and a person with strong D personality traits, and compare the options they have in capital markets:

average person options = legal and ethical transactions

Dark Factor (D) options = anything they can profit from—and get away with

Unless institutional constraints are strong enough to reduce or eliminate the D advantage, a small minority of high Dark Factor personalities will not just use their options-advantage for profit; they will actively weaken other constraints, creating a selection environment that advantages D even more—and so on.

Organizational psychology has already observed major components of this feedback mechanism: dark traits and competitive environments are reciprocally associated. People with Dark Triad traits (narcissism, psychopathy, machiavellianism) disproportionately find environments that reward competitive behavior.

In other words:

In a capitalist system, the weaker the constraints on capital, the richer the worst people in society get, because their advantage increases.

But it’s not just an issue of personalities. This dynamic results in value and capital becoming less and less correlated over time. In a weakly constrained market, capital may quickly trend towards becoming a proxy for the kind of people who only focus on collecting more capital, rather than creating value.

Model

To create a minimal dynamical model for this degenerative process, the math is very straightforward. This diagram just means that as institutional constraints (C) decrease, institutional pathology (P) increases. Without intervention, this becomes a self-reinforcing loop that accelerates over time.

Unless institutional constraints are restored, this accelerates until it hits a boundary condition: capture, collapse, or new constraints. The degenerative loop must be interrupted or it will destroy the institution it afflicts.

There is experimental evidence for precisely this interaction. In economic games, low-Honesty-Humility subjects exploited others much more when given absolute power—but that personality difference largely disappeared when their power was constrained or shared.

Power influences the expression of Honesty-Humility: The power-exploitation affordances hypothesis (2019)

I believe this has been happening to US institutions and the billionaire class for decades, accelerating with every cycle.

There is evidence that the environment can feed back into personality itself. A 2025 PNAS study of nearly 1.8 million people across 183 countries found that earlier societal conditions marked by corruption, inequality, poverty and violence predicted modestly higher subsequent Dark Factor levels.

Aversive societal conditions explain differences in “dark” personality across countries and US states

Silicon Valley elites, for example, are a kind of laboratory test case for much of an industry being taken over by high Dark Factor personalities.

Dead End: The Necrophilia of Elites (Not That Kind)

But the current federal regime, including SCOTUS, has smashed regulations—legal constraints on capital—with a new ferocity. Trump’s government is openly trying to finish off liberal democratic institutions by destroying the constraints that hold them together, while systematically replacing people who possess ethical limits with high-D personalities.

This is what many “accelerationists” really want: an institutional death spiral.

Perfectly Adapted

The president of the United States and the richest man in the world are two of the clearest products of this degenerative loop. Both Trump and Musk exhibit extreme Dark Factor personalities—messianic narcissists with no conscience, morals, or empathy—making them creatures perfectly adapted to take advantage of weakened constraints.

Now at the apex of global power, almost entirely unconstrained by institutions, they are free to further destroy anything that limits them, including the rules. If you pull back, this does not look like an aberration; it looks like a system collapse—a rapid reversal of the polarity of normal human behavior to advantage a trait matching a famous definition for evil: “the absence of empathy.”

Fever: Why the World Is Ill

Downside-Up

We are living in the Downside-Up where a small minority of dark personalities rule the world and the normies serve them. But this is never a sustainable model. Any organization of predominantly high-D personalities will be ultimately be unstable, hyper-competitive, and self-destructive.

While the United States is not nearly as weak as Weimar Germany in the 1920s, Weimar showed similar patterns of institutional and political degeneration after WWI. This was relatively gradual until the Reichstag Fire, which Hitler used to accelerate a process which quickly removed all constraints on his own power.

The resulting cycle of institutional degeneration and rising psychopathologies enabled the worst conflict in the history of mankind.

The Nazis called the process of deliberate top-down institutional destruction and replacement Gleichschaltung: “the coordination of German institutions into a cohesive, Nazified whole.” But the Holocaust Museum also describes a version which was bottom-up, Selbstgleichschaltung: institutions and individuals voluntarily “coordinating” themselves with the new regime. The selection pressure became anticipatory.

“everything is going much faster than we ever dared to hope.”
—Adolf Hitler, on Gleichschaltung (1933)

People don’t have to be ordered to become more authoritarian; they adapt to what the new environment rewards in advance.

“Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy.”
—Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (2017)

Other examples of humanitarian disasters controlled by these destructive dynamics include: Stalin’s takeover of the Soviet Union where institutional erasure or capture by the state was the primary goal—including NKVD death squads with arrest and execution quotas; Jonestown, where psychological, geographic, and physical constraints against the unthinkable were slowly stripped away from followers by a Dark Factor personality; and NXIVM, which created a progressive indoctrination process that radicalized itself over time.

Federal Degeneration

While it stuns me to write it down, the U.S. federal government in 2026 is exhibiting a similar degenerative loop to these tragedies. For example, two years ago the leadership of the U.S. Armed Forces reflected, for the most part, character, competence, principles, and values.

Within 18 months, former backup Fox host Pete Hegseth has systematically stripped those traits away in favor of a violent, christofascist, manosphere culture that regularly commits war crimes, and is in the process of losing a catastrophic war to Iran.

“No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.”
—Pete Hegseth, September 2025

Similar self-immolations have taken place at FBI, DOJ, State, HHS, and almost every federal organization. Someone with high-D, or more precisely, a willingness to use dark strategies, has been inserted at the top of every agency to weaken or destroy its rules and constraints—and to eliminate or replace anyone the regime suspects is not on board. The cycle keeps repeating with more and more radical people.

While this may seem like an impossible problem to solve. I think the mechanism itself provides a number of clear counterstrategies.

Corruption Is the Key

First, it should be said that using a distant diagnosis of psychological traits as a pretext to take any kind of action against people is neither moral nor practical. No one should ever be punished for what goes on in their own mind. Many people who have these traits are well-integrated into society, and many can improve with treatment or therapy. It should never be a scarlet letter.

However, if someone’s behavior shows a pattern of corruption, that person is by definition exhibiting strategies associated with high D, and is likely very destructive to the institution. Corruption is a roadmap to failures of institutional constraint. Wherever corruption succeeds, it identifies a place where formal constraints have ceased to function effectively.

In the U.S. Constitution, the founders only expressly specified two crimes that were impeachable: Treason and Bribery. The broad but unspecified category of “other High Crimes and Misdemeanors” has been the cause of great debate through history. Why not specify murder, or theft? Seen in the context of institutional degeneration, it’s much easier to understand.

While there are far worse crimes against people than bribery, there is no worse crime against the state, because the act of bribery inverts the function of government to serve an individual at the expense of the people, and provides a platform for other more serious offenses. It represents a total disregard of constraints and provides a mechanism for making psychopathology self-reinforcing.

We will never be able to eliminate dark traits, nor should we try. However, if we can identify the behaviors those traits enable and create appropriate restraints around them, institutions can survive the full range of human personalities.

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
—James Madison, Federalist 51 (1788)

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