In Defense of Psychopaths
Can't live without 'em.
"White cop kills unarmed black woman." Sean Grayson switched police departments five times in four years. He was dishonorably discharged from the army for drunk driving. Sounds like a psychopath. If Sean Grayson is a psychopath, he still managed to avoid killing anyone (outside of military service) for the first 12 years of his adult life. Maybe it’s the fact that he has stage three colon cancer that set him over the edge to take an unarmed woman’s life.
Sean Grayson may be a psychopath. But psychopaths aren't evil. We need psychopaths.
Are psychos evil?
I have a pretty high standard when it comes to evil. If I were to put my thinking into a superstitious metaphor, it would sound something like "I don't think people can be evil unless they are possessed by demons." Child molesters? Possessed by demons. Serial killers? Possessed by demons. Chihuahuas? You get the drift.
This idea of being "demonically possessed" isn't very useful if we extend it to every bad thing anyone ever does. I don't think a cop who shoots an unarmed woman is possessed by demons. I think he's a psychopath. There's a difference. But not for the reasons you would think.
DMV, PTSD: day 1.
Imagine the DMV from hell. Five hour lines all around the building. Constant thunder and lightning, power outages. Toilets are constantly backed up. No parking. Every time you reach the front of the line, some rule or law has changed, forcing you to correct your form, all the way at the back of the line. You can't pay via check, cash, or card... Only via money order, but a specific money order directly from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, notarized. You must obtain this in person. Those are the rules.1
Imagine working at this DMV. Even if you were a perfect angel, the nicest person in the world, the customers you would deal with might be peeved. They might even be ticked off. They just got through 5 hours of waiting to be told that their form needs to be updated and re-done. You're the one to tell them this. “Don’t shoot the messenger!” How do you think they will treat you?
Your first day of work just ended. Wow, that was terrible. You just got yelled at by angry people for 8 hours. Welcome to the wonderful world of customer service. You fall asleep, hoping the next day is better.
day 2.
It isn't. It's actually worse today.
One of the customers has gone "postal" and has decided to shoot up the DMV. You duck for cover under your desk. Security finally gets the headshot and drags his corpse outside, leaving a gruesome trail of blood behind. 25 people were wounded, and 24 of them thankfully survive somehow. How do 24 people get shot, but only one person dies?2 Was he intentionally shooting their feet and hands?
The only upside to this traumatic mass shooting event is that you get to go home early. Maybe since it's a crime scene, you'll get the rest of the week off. Nope. Your supervisor texts you. "Can you come in early tomorrow?"
day 3.
There's a protest outside the DMV. People have given up on trying to get their driver's licenses, and have started chanting "Death to the DMV! All y’all are bastards! DMV are pigs!" As you make your way to the front door, security pushes the crowd back, but you're hit in the back of the head with an egg. You make your way inside to the bathroom (the toilets are still clogged, by the way) to wash the egg out of your hair. You didn't bring a change of clothes, and the faint smell of eggs never really goes away. Did I mention there's no air conditioning?
day 4.
A customer has finally filled out their form correctly. You're about to give them their new license, when your supervisor motions you to come into the back room. That was a counterfeit form, apparently. This is your final warning. Make that mistake again, and you'll get fired.
day 5.
You come into work wearing a disposable rain jacket to protect from rotten eggs. On top of it, you wear a motorcycle helmet as well, because some of them have started throwing bricks too. Yesterday was really close. You almost got fired. A customer comes up, same as the day before, with an almost perfect form. But you notice the lack of watermark. You hit the red button under your desk, and the sirens go off. Security grabs the perp and takes them outside to viciously beat them. "Better him than me, I suppose." Your boss gives you a pat on the back and lets you go home early. That was a close one.
By now, you are no longer a soft and scared little newbie. You are a hardened DMV commissar. You have completely dehumanized the customers, not because you wanted to, but because they dehumanized you first. They demonize you for reasons outside your control. It's a job. You do what you’re told. You get paid. You survive.
What type of person makes it to day five? A psychopath. Whether or not such a person was born a psychopath, whether or not they have a genetic predilection for psychopathy, or whether they were made into a psychopath by the abusive environment they were forced to endure, the result is the same. You would have to be crazy to work this job and not quit.
Not all policing is this bad. But sometimes, it is this bad. Criminals spit on you. Liberals hate you. Politicians blame you. It’s not too different from being a criminal: people hate you and are trying to hurt you. Just as the criminal lifestyle attracts sadistic psychopaths, the policing profession also seems to attract that personality.
Types of cops:
There are a few types of cops:
Mall;
Negligent;
Corrupt;
Psycho.
Mall cops:
Everyone has seen mall cops. They wander around the mall, scanning little bar codes on the wall with their phone to prove that they are actually walking around (otherwise they would just sit around somewhere on their phone). They “make the rounds,” carrying a fake badge and a flashlight.
If something terrible happens, their job is to call the real cops (psychos). Unfortunately, mall cops aren't just in the mall anymore, and they have made their way into real police uniforms with real badges. If they carry guns, the best thing that could happen is that they choose not to use them.
Are mall cops more likely to mistake an acorn for gunfire and kill someone?3 The argument goes that weaker cops are not equipped to deal with the stress of potential violence, and are therefore more likely to use deadly force. Before you buy into this Sam Hyde bit on female cops shooting everyone, consider the evidence that female cops are no more “trigger happy” than male cops.4 But female cops are definitely more likely to be “mall cops.”
If mall cops are called to a scene, they show up late, park their cars, and wait for backup. Once the victims are all dead, they put up yellow tape and begin to fill out forms. Getting out of the vehicle is not an option. If somehow they do find themselves outside the safety of their vehicle, you are sure to find them cowering in fear as a school gets shot up, "waiting for backup." Like lemmings, hundreds of these mall cops will cower outside a school full of children as the psychopath inside continues executing children. This is grim, but it is the reality of the “mall cop” mentality.
Negligent cops:
Negligent cops are an intermediary between mall cops and the others. Negligent cops could bust into the school and chase down the school shooter, if they felt like it. All depends on how they're feeling. Negligent cops are better, because there's a small chance they will do something. They're not total cowards, they're just selfish and lazy.
Corrupt cops:
Corrupt cops are actively committing crimes. They are often interconnected with organized crime, and at some point, they become indistinguishable from a gang. They intimidate witnesses, plant false evidence, steal, murder, pimp, rape, deal drugs, and do everything that a gangster would do, just with a badge and a uniform. The Rampart Scandal, which inspired officer Dorner to go on a rampage, is clear evidence that a percentage of police departments around the country are simply gangsters with badges and uniforms.
Critics of Dorner cast him as an early anti-racist activist with an axe to grind against white people. He may have even been a psychopath.5 On the other hand, the manhunt to capture Dorner eventually revealed that the cops were actively collaborating with Backpage.com, which facilitated human trafficking. The website was seized by the FBI in 2018.
Just like other gangsters, corrupt cops may sometimes do good things if it aligns with their sense of "owning the turf." For example, they might kill people and sell drugs, but if you try to shoot up the local school, they might actually come to save the day.
Somalia can be thought of as a society run by corrupt cops. The Taliban, Mafia, and Russian leaders like Putin and Shoigu can be thought of as corrupt cops. Many societies throughout history have been run by corrupt cops, and corruption is a spectrum. Some degree of corruption is the human default. It’s hard to find men who are incorruptible.
Psycho cops:
Psychopath cops are last, but certainly not least. These are true soldiers and warriors. They don't deal drugs, they don't steal, they don't lie (much), they don't plant false evidence or facilitate prostitution. They "do their job." But their job, like the DMV job from hell, requires a level of psychopathy.
These categories of cops are Platonic ideals, and real-life cops are always some mixture of the three.
To use a dog analogy: mall cops are chihuahuas, corrupt cops are pit bulls, and psycho cops are German Shepherds. The chihuahua isn't actively dangerous, but it could never protect you. The Pitbull can sometimes protect you from others, but it might also bite your toddler. The German Shepherd would never bite you or your toddler, but if a lady with schizophrenia makes a sudden move in your direction, it might just bite her face off. Did she deserve it? No. But this German Shepherd is a psycho. And we need psychos.
Every (effective) military from the beginning of time has been filled with psychos. As Joe Rogan has so eloquently described, chimpanzees are psychos. They will rip your arms off. Psychopathy is a natural and adaptive response to violent conditions. In times of peace, it seems evil. We live in exceptionally peaceful times.
All mental illnesses are originally adaptive behaviors which have become too extreme or find themselves out of place. To count the raindrops, an autistic rain man is just what I need. To be creative, off-the-wall, spontaneous and out-of-this-world, schizophrenia is very helpful. To conform to an alien environment without causing any conflict or ruckus, a co-dependent depressive would be excellent for the job. To crush enemies, see them driven before me, and hear the lamentations of their women, psychos provide simple solutions to complex problems.
Put the schizo in charge of counting raindrops, and he would tell a story about how the rain is the tears of God, and never shut up. If I put the autistic guy in charge of creativity, I would get a neatly compiled stack of papers with printed out responses from ChatGPT. If I put the depressive in charge of my warband, they would end up surrendering. If I asked a psycho to be meek and mild in the face of aggression, someone would end up dead.
In defense of social workers, too.
Conservatives have been making fun of liberals, again. This time, they're making jokes about how social workers will be sent out instead of cops, and how the social workers will get shot up and robbed by criminals. Maybe. But imagine a 911 call like this:
"911, what is your emergency?"
"My mom is having a schizophrenic episode, she's off her meds and I'm afraid she's going to hurt herself again. Last time she threw herself down the stairs. I'm really scared and she texted me all this stuff and won't pick up the phone. I'm 3 hours away but I'm really scared."
In that situation, who would you send: a psycho, or a social worker? Let's do another one:
"911, what is your emergency?"
"THE SCHOOL IS GETTING SHOT UP, PLEASE HELP THEY'RE KILLING EVERYONE!"
It doesn't take a genius to realize that maybe different situations do warrant different responses. Is that really so hard for conservatives to understand?
Sure, maybe the social worker shows up and gets stabbed by a schizophrenic woman. It happens. Or maybe the cop shows up to the school and accidentally shoots a kid with a fake gun. The kid was the one who put in the fake 911 call because he was intending to commit suicide by cop. In both situations, the wrong call was made. Maybe the schizophrenic woman needed a psycho, and maybe the school shooter needed a social worker. Reality is messy. Mistakes will be made. No one is perfect.
Sympathy for a psycho.
I don't know if psycho cops are born that way. I don't know if as five year olds, in between giving other kids wedgies, they look off into the distance, wistfully, and think, "man, I can't wait to shoot unarmed black women." I would hope not. But anything is possible.
There are generally three paths open to psychos:
Combat sports (I'm looking at you, Sean Strickland)
Criminal activity
Employment by the government (DMV, military)
The fourth option is to use some kind of psycho detection method to neutralize these people before they can do anything bad. Think "Minority Report" with Tom Cruise, but he's going around castrating 5 year olds, or putting them in jail, or taking them to their own private island. Maybe he makes a mistake, and some non-offending psychos end up recreating the plot of the Lord of the Flies on Epstein's defunct island. Brutal.
The absolute worst case scenario is that psychos end up becoming criminals and hurting innocent people, which also happens to be the most common scenario. Probably 3% of the population of America has gotten in trouble with the law, at some point or another, for being absolute psychos. Drug use, violence, vandalism, threatening people with a machete at 3am, banging on my door in the middle of the night and screaming at me, telling me to stop having sex, telling me I'm going to hell for having sex... That last one might be more schizo than psycho.
The point is, as much as I have enjoyed hours of combat sports, it's not technically a contribution to society. This sort of entertainment does not fulfill a "need."6 On the other hand, we do actually need psychos to go into war zones and solve complicated problems with simple solutions. Even if you're a big anti-war isolationist, we still have massive cartels on our southern border that deserve the psycho treatment. You have to fight criminal psychos with lawful psychos.
When lawful psychos become unlawful psychos, I refer to that as corrupt cops. But a cop who kills an innocent, unarmed person in the line of duty is not corrupt. They are not seeking profit. So why does it happen? Why do lawful psychos shoot innocent people?
One explanation is racism; another explanation is PTSD; another explanation is pure sadism. It's difficult to peer inside the head of a psycho and tease out exactly which reason it could be. Let's start with racism.
Are psychos racist?
Maybe the problem isn’t psychos, but racism. Assume that if a white cop shoots an unarmed black person, it's pure racism, nothing else. If that was the case, we could replace all the white cops with black cops. Problem solved. However, there is an inconvenient fact when it comes to police shootings: black cops are as likely to shoot people as white cops.7 It is still possible that white cops are racistly shooting black people, but that anti-racist black cops are even more psychopathic than white cops, and so black psychopathy and white racism cancel each other out to produce racial equality.
If you want to decrease "metaphysical, ontological, undetectable" racism, like a ghost buster turning on a vacuum cleaner in a haunted house, sure, go ahead, fire all the white cops and replace them with black ones. But if you actually want to stop innocent people from getting shot by cops, waging war on white psychos and replacing them with black psychos might not produce the desired outcome.
gangster culture.
There's a second, possibly even more inconvenient fact, which would also result from any sort of "affirmative action" in the police force: black and Hispanic cops tend to be more corrupt.8 A young black or Hispanic teen has fewer degrees of separation to juvenile gangs than white teens. A sizable proportion of black and Hispanic teens know someone in a gang, even if they are not in one themselves.
Assume there are one million gang members in America, and in 2011, 35% of these were juveniles (under 18). This means there are 350,000 juvenile gang members, 46.2% of whom are Hispanic, 35.3% of whom are black, and 11.5% of whom are white.9 (24,500 were “other.”)
Let’s assume that all juvenile gang members are ages 15 to 17 (this is unfortunately not true, but let’s say 99% of them are older than 14). There are 12,528,687 juveniles in America, which means that 2.3% of juveniles ages 15-17 are in a gang.
However, there are 161,700 Hispanic 15-17 gang members, 123,550 black 15-17 gang members, and only 40,250 15-17 gang members. Now, let’s look at the total populations of each group, to figure out what the percent “gangsta” each one is.
The result is that whites ages 15-17 are only 0.6% gangster, which is not too far from the percent of female 15-17 gangsters, at 0.42%.
“Other” 15-17 (native American, mixed race, Asian) are 2.79% gangster; Hispanics 15-17 are 5.23% gangster, and blacks are 6.7% gangster. This means that Hispanics 15-17 are 8.7x more likely to be gangsters, and blacks are 11.2x more likely to be gangsters than whites.
This doesn’t mean that all blacks and Hispanics 15-17 are gangsters. However, let’s say, on average, each black teen has 5 friends. Each friend has a 93.3% chance of not being in a gang. However, roll the dice 5 times, and the total chance of having a gang member friend is 29.3%
This isn’t exactly how friendship works, though. People don’t make friends at random. There is “assortative friendship”: people become friends with people of similar temperaments, values, and personalities. Gangsters tend to be friends with gangsters. Good kids stick with the good kids.
At the same time, however, consider that each person has siblings, cousins, uncles, neighbors, and classmates who are not necessarily “friends,” but can still influence cultural outlook. Maybe 29% of blacks don’t have “gangster friends,” but they might have gangster family or gangster neighbors.
Compare this with whites. Assuming that each white 15-17 year old has 5 close friends, family, or neighbors who influence him. In that case, there is only a 2.96% chance that a white kid is influenced by gang members.
If we expand this number of “influencers” from 5 to 20, (the average size of a classroom), then 11% of whites and 75% of blacks go to class with a gangster.
But reality isn’t monoracial.
All of this is assuming total mono-racialism: whites go to all white schools, blacks go to all black schools. This is of course not true. As whites have more black friends, the more their chances will skew toward the monoracial black rate; as blacks have more white friends, their rate will decrease toward the white rate. How many schools in America are monoracial, if we define monoracial as 90%+ of one ethnicity?
In 2018, [..] 18% of White students [went to 90%+ white schools]. The share of Black students attending schools where at least 90% of their classmates shared their racial background [..was] 13% in 2018. The percentage of Hispanic students attending schools where at least 90% of students are Hispanic is [..] 16% in 2018-19.”10
While “monoracial” white schools are most common in rural areas (Kentucky, Vermont, or Wyoming), monoracial Hispanic schools are most common in the south-west (southern Texas, Arizona, New Mexico), and monoracial black schools are most common in the Mississippi delta and inner cities (Atlanta, Jackson, Detroit, Birmingham, Memphis, Baltimore, New Orleans, Newark, Cleveland, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Milwaukee).
Why is gang affiliation significant to predicting police corruption? First of all, the personality types which lead to gang activity and to corrupt police are extremely similar. Whether this is caused by nature or nurture, we should expect corrupt cops to “cluster” in their friend groups with gangsters during this crucial period (15-17 years old). That is, before either group becomes differentiated (one goes to police academy, the other deals drugs on the street), the set of personality traits which result in these “careers” will cause these two groups to be attracted to one another during their formative years. Like attracts like.
This isn’t just a statistical fact, but is also reflected culturally in films like The Departed (2006), where corrupt cops and gangsters often grow up in the same neighborhoods and adopt similar values. In the film El Chicago (2018), Diego becomes a cop, while his childhood friend José becomes a gangster. In Blood In Blood Out (1993), Paco becomes a police officer, while his cousin Miklo becomes a gangster. Hollywood dramatizes these divisions between cop and gangster for theatrical effect, but the idea of a friend group dividing itself into cops and criminals is based in reality.
Masculine, violent, and authoritarian young men are attracted to both careers for the same reasons. Lines are blurred, and often crossed. The distinction is not as clear as we’d like to think.
Young psychos develop life-long bonds on either side of the line. Kids who become cops, even those with an officially clean record, are much more likely to emulate gang culture within the police force if they have grown up around that culture all their life. Some psycho white kid from the suburbs may think torturing frogs is cool, but he's not necessarily going to start dealing drugs and pimping hoes.
Criminal behavior is not like the Hogwarts sorting hat, where you get assigned a random crime based on your Meyers-Briggs type. Criminal behavior is highly correlated with early life experiences. People who grow up with drug dealer friends and connections are much more likely to deal drugs; those who grow up around sexual violence are more likely to emulate that; beatings beget beatings; scammers beget scammers. Not all criminals are the same. There are different forms of criminal activity, each with its own culture.
This isn't a moral contention. I'm not saying that the suburban white psycho is any less "evil" for torturing frogs11 than the drug dealer. They're both psychos. But the impacts that they have on society, and the type of police force they fashion, is vastly different.
Fire all the whites?
If social and political pressure caused all white cops to be fired in the greater St. Louis area, this would significantly increase police shootings and corruption. The result would be a massive white flight from the city, with millions (billions?) of dollars lost in tax revenue. This already happened to an extent during the Ferguson riots, but things can always get worse.
The blacks who are left behind will be driven deeper into poverty, violence, and tied ever more closer to the drug trade and prostitution as a means to survive. If anything, it would only contribute to the racial segregation of our country, as white people with money would flee to whiter areas, and black people with no money would be stuck living under a more corrupt and more violent police force. Black people certainly do not benefit from firing all white cops.
If you're a real estate developer, firing all the white cops is a great idea. All of those white flight refugees have to live somewhere, and that somewhere is going to be formerly rural areas that are now building suburbs. If you buy 100 acres of land for $1M, 30 minutes away from St. Louis, what will happen to the price of that land during a white flight exodus? It will skyrocket. Instantly, your $10k per acre parcels shoots up to $20k per parcel. You've just doubled your money (or more).
What's more, when the price of housing in St. Louis drops like a rock ($10k per house), you can buy up an entire block of houses with your profits and then begin to rent plots to scarf-wearing gentrifiers. These gentrifiers demand coffee shops, which raises the value of these plots, and you can then resell everything you bought at astronomical mark-ups.
I wonder if there's any relationship between the people screaming "defund the police!" and the guys tripling their money on suburban sprawl and development.
The alternative to firing all the white cops is to accept that, yes, white cops will sometimes act like psychos and shoot a schizophrenic lady who is acting erratically. Cops of all races will make tragic split-second decisions. There is no evidence that white cops are more trigger happy than anyone else. Sometimes, it’s just a tragic mistake, and I have sympathy for anyone in a high stress situation.
The news.
Maybe that's not an excuse, and sympathy doesn't always mean forgiveness or lack of consequences. Cops still need to be fired for doing crazy and stupid things that result in people getting hurt. But what about making it a national news story and suggesting that white cops are engaged in some kind of low-level race war against unarmed blacks? What is the consequence of that?
The consequence is very simple: the further DMV-ification of policing. As the news media demonizes white cops, the stories trickle down to the activist class, and eventually into the ears of impressionable poor people. They come to believe the hype: thousands of blacks are being executed, openly, in the streets, in broad daylight, simply for the crime of being black. When will the killing stop? What do we have to do to make our voices heard? And what do they deserve? How many of them have gotten away with it, and still walk the streets?
When any population believes that it is being occupied by a violent, genocidal, foreign racial gang, it gets a bit peeved. Even ticked off. Just like in the DMV, cops start to feel like their "customers" (the civilian population) hates their guts. As a result, the "good cops"12 quit. This leaves behind a pool which is selecting for ever greater levels of 1. psychopathy; 2. negligence; 3. mall cops; 4. corrupt cops. The traits which make an optimally good cop (willing to rush headlong into danger to sacrifice his own life, kind and gentle, forgiving and hesitant to use force, culturally understanding, upstanding and honest) become more rare.
I don't know how to solve this problem without limiting the freedom of journalists and academics. Perhaps they could be deported to the Congo, where they could test out their theories about white supremacy on the Congolese.
Most people do not benefit from news. This is a problem of democracy: voters, ostensibly, need to be informed, but most voters are impressionable and will believe anything if it is shouted loudly and repetitively. How do we decrease the "race war" narrative promoted by journalists without infringing on free speech?
It seems difficult. "Free speech" has consequences. China doesn't have this problem, but China also hasn't had any inventions in the last 500 years.
addendum.
My preferred solution would be to move people around. I think the government should build millions of homes in the middle of nowhere and relocate everyone on welfare into rural housing. I think geography has consequences. I can't drive around Ferguson Missouri without feeling hopeless. The bombed out buildings, the overgrown grass, the drugged-out zombies wandering the streets. I wouldn't want anyone to grow up there.
We've got plenty of vast plains in Kansas and Oklahoma where people of all races could live in a less dystopian setting. I'm not saying it would solve everything, but I think reducing population density might help decrease gang activity. It's harder to form a gang when there's no street corner — just miles of corn fields as far as the eye can see. Sounds peaceful to me.
There is some data to suggest that rural blacks have lower crime rates than urban blacks. In states where blacks are highly concentrated in urban areas (Kansas City, Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia), the black-white crime gap is the greatest. In states where blacks tend to be more distributed throughout rural areas (Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky) the black-white crime gap seems to decrease. It seems that urbanization increases black crime — de-urbanization could help.
Maybe this is a stupid idea, but I don't see any other serious propositions besides "fire cops" and "opportunity zones." Maybe Detroit will hit rock bottom, get gentrified, and start to improve. Writing all this makes me really want to buy some crumbling brick buildings in Detroit. I'm not going to, but I have the itch.
Thanks for reading.
Kafkaesque!
The manhunt for Dorner resulted in police firing on a car they believed matched the description of Dorner’s car, without bothering to visually verify the occupants. A mother and daughter were killed — no man was inside the vehicle. The manhunt cost at least $5 million dollars in direct payouts for “tips leading to arrest” and to the victims of the wrongful shooting. Since a manhunt costs, at minimum, $1.5 million per week, Dorner’s two week rampage probably cost the government at least $8 million. Who knows how much crime went unsolved while cops were busy searching 5% of the American landmass for a single person.
On the other hand, one example of a real need would be you becoming a paid subscriber to my Substack. Since you are such a careful and thorough reader, maybe you would appreciate this 50% off discount.
Black areas specifically have less police success in homicide clearance: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1825247331824136479
All reports on police corruption find a strong correlation between minority areas and corruption: https://policescorecard.org/
This assumes that the racial proportions of juvenile gang members and the racial proportion of adult gang members is the same. However, the demographic decline of white Americans indicates that, among juveniles, gang membership even more tilted toward blacks and Hispanics.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/12/15/u-s-public-school-students-often-go-to-schools-where-at-least-half-of-their-peers-are-the-same-race-or-ethnicity/
I refused to cut open the frogs in school. I wrote the essay instead.
“Weaklings” — and I would be one of them!
I don't think you understand psychopathy well. It is merely lack of empathy, it is not necessarily evil behaviour (some psychopaths work with their therapists to develop rule-based ethics), nor does it mean they are OK with people throwing stuff at them - for themselves, they certainly have pity.
I think you are writing about more a generic category of crazy. Like, I know an American woman who was dating an older British SAS veteran who was hunting IRA terrorists his whole life, and was more alpha than Alpha Centauri and it was all very exciting until one day he got crazy, thought she is an IRA agent and nearly killed her.
My impression was that the taliban had moved away from Mafia like behavior after winning the war, cracking down a lot on drug and violent crime.
Although rural lumpenproles are better behaved, I would expect that if you relocated Fergusons population somewhere else it would just become a new Ferguson. The same already happens with MENA lumpenproles. Some combination of carrots and sticks would need to be employed to change their behavior.