Where an Idea Came From
By Ceci Ellis
Ideas come from interesting places. One came from the christian myth about The Rapture. It is one of those ideas that comes back around every few years, whether it's from a sermon or a headline. The Left Behind series alone is still sitting on half the shelves in Christian fiction almost twenty years after the last book came out.
I began wondering what would happen if it worked the other way around. (Full disclosure: I wonder… a lot, about a lot of things!)
What if it wasn't the righteous who disappeared, but those who are genuinely evil?
An abandoned balloon in the desert
Then I came up with the title, And the Meek Shall Inherit the Earth, comes straight from the Beatitudes. Of all the promises in that passage, that's the one that stuck with me, mostly because those who are considered meek, are very rarely the ones actually running anything. Wanting to that the promise literally, I asked what the world might actually look like, if that came true, not metaphorically, not eventually, but tomorrow, all at once.
So I did some research, and the real numbers turned out to be more interesting than the round figure I'd had in my head going in. Psychopathy sits around 1% of the general population using the clinical gold standard[1], narcissistic personality disorder somewhere between 1% and 6% [2], antisocial personality disorder about 2 to 3% [3]. Small slices on their own.
One study of corporate professionals found 21% scored at clinically significant psychopathic levels.
But look at leadership specifically and the picture shifts: one study of corporate professionals found 21% scored at clinically significant psychopathic levels, on par with rates found in prison populations [4]. Other studies land lower, somewhere between 4 and 12%, and there's genuine academic disagreement about how overblown the "corporate psychopath" idea actually is.
Politicians show the same pattern in the research, without one clean number attached to it: people high in narcissism and psychopathy are consistently found to have a stronger drive toward political ambition and campaigning than the general population does [5]. Either way, something about power seems to concentrate exactly the kind of people this idea would remove.So the real question underneath it isn't really about the rapture at all. It's about what's actually left standing once you take away the people running most of it.
This is just one idea out of a genuinely long list I've got rattling around right now, and if I'm honest, part of why it's grabbed so much of my attention is that it came with actual research attached, which doesn't happen with every idea. Most of them start as a feeling. This one started as a question I could go look up the answer to, and the answer was stranger than I expected.
I'm not ready to say whether this turns into anything more than a premise I like turning over. For now I'd rather let it sit with you the way it's been sitting with me.
Sanz-García, A., et al. "Prevalence of Psychopathy in the General Adult Population: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis," Frontiers in Psychology, 2021. frontiersin.org
Stinson, F.S., et al. NESARC study on narcissistic personality disorder prevalence, summarized in Psychiatric News. psychiatryonline.org
Antisocial Personality Disorder overview, Cleveland Clinic. my.clevelandclinic.org
Brooks, N., Fritzon, K., & Croom, S., corporate psychopathy research, summarized in Psychology Today. psychologytoday.com
"The Dark Triad and nascent political ambition," Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 2019, summarized by Susquehanna University. susqu.edu
