We like to think modern society rewards intelligence, discipline, and talent. But there’s a quieter pattern underneath. The more open a system becomes, the more it starts selecting for people who are simply more obsessed than everyone else. And obsession is not the same thing as stability.
Across the internet, there's a humorous list of mental disorders that make us suitable for various professions. The humor is based on exaggerating the supposedly characteristic traits of various occupations, taken to extremes. IT professionals are diagnosed with autism, writers with alcoholism, bloggers with narcissism, financiers with OCD, and so on.
The rise of the highly motivated
Not every profession attracts extreme personalities. But the more competitive and prestigious something becomes, the more likely it is to be dominated by people who are… a bit unusual.
This isn’t accidental. Real excellence, in most fields, requires something beyond just following rules or executing known patterns. It requires going further — pushing beyond what is strictly necessary. And convincing a normal, well-adjusted person to consistently do more than what is required is not easy. In fact, it’s rare.
More often than not, people who are willing to push themselves far beyond the baseline are driven by something deeper — something that doesn’t always look like balance. Modern systems don’t explicitly reward this, but they quietly depend on it.
In highly competitive environments, moderation is rarely a winning strategy.
You can see this clearly in places like startups or venture capital. Access has never been easier — anyone can try. But success is more concentrated than ever. The winners are not just building companies; they are pushing growth at a pace that often ignores long-term reality. The system doesn’t demand this behavior, but it consistently rewards it.
It wasn’t always like this
It’s not even clear that things were always this way. In the distant past, there were certainly eccentric people — but not nearly as many in positions of influence.
For most of history, people didn’t compete for professions in the way we do now. They inherited them. Blacksmiths raised blacksmiths, merchants raised merchants, artists raised artists. Most people lived within a structure they didn’t have to fight to enter, and because of that, most people were fairly normal.
Geniuses existed, of course, but they were exceptions — often people who combined inherited skill with genuine personal passion.
There was also another factor. In creative families, competition existed, but it was local and contained.
Take :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}. He became widely known as a writer, but for a long time his success was overshadowed by his older brother, :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}, who was considered the more serious author.
In a different context, Gerald Durrell might never have written at all. Access to tools and opportunities was limited — even owning a typewriter in the 1930s was a barrier.
The 20th century changed that. Today, your parents’ profession predicts very little about your own. Many fields became more accessible, but at the same time far more competitive. And the more people enter a system, the harder it becomes to stand out.
When access expands, competition intensifies
Modern systems removed barriers to entry but increased pressure at the top. More people can participate, but fewer people truly succeed.
And when success is limited, it doesn’t go to the average. It goes to those willing to push harder, take more risks, and stay longer in the game — further in effort, further in risk, further in obsession.
The dark side of meritocracy
This creates a strange paradox. The system looks fair, but it increasingly selects for extreme traits — not necessarily the wisest or the most stable, but the most driven.
You can see this in corporate leadership. Over the past decade, some of the most celebrated strategies focused on extreme efficiency — cutting costs, optimizing everything, squeezing margins. It looked like discipline.
But in many cases, companies optimized themselves so aggressively for short-term performance that they lost the ability to adapt. When conditions changed, they had no room left to move. What looked like control was actually a form of tunnel vision.
Power and personality
This becomes even more visible in politics. We tend to believe that democratic systems naturally filter out unstable or extreme individuals, but reality is messier.
To rise in modern politics, you don’t just need competence. You need relentless ambition, high tolerance for pressure, and a willingness to push boundaries — the same traits that help people win in competitive systems.
Which raises an uncomfortable question: are we selecting for good leaders, or just for effective competitors?
France, for example, chose :contentReference[oaicite:2]{index=2} — a young, highly unconventional figure who built his career quickly and outside traditional structures.
In the UK, voters once rallied around :contentReference[oaicite:3]{index=3} — charismatic, unpredictable, and anything but typical.
In the United States, voters often find themselves choosing between candidates whose networks and reputations raise more questions than answers.
These outcomes are not accidents. They reflect the same dynamic: those who rise are often those most willing to compete aggressively within the system.
The illusion of stability
From the outside, everything can look stable. Institutions function, elections happen, policies continue.
But underneath, something else is happening. Different parties, different ideologies, different labels — and yet increasingly similar patterns of behavior. Not always rational, not always predictable, but often driven by pressure, competition, and internal incentives that reward action over reflection.
A system that prefers the present
A more uncomfortable pattern appears in how large systems deal with slow-moving problems.
In many major economies, warning signs have been visible for years: demographic decline, growing debt, fragile supply chains. None of this is hidden.
And yet, response measures are taken, which are often delayed or avoided altogether – not because the risks are unknown, but because dealing with them is difficult, slow, and politically costly; it is better to start a good old war.
Short-term actions, even when they make things worse in the long run, are easier to justify. Over time, this creates a system where winning the present becomes more important than sustaining the future.
And this is not a failure of individuals — it’s a consequence of the system itself.
We are in a period where access is wide, competition is intense, and selection is psychological. Which means the people who rise may not be the most balanced, but the most relentless. And once they’re in power, they don’t suddenly become moderate. They continue doing what got them there.
Humanity has yet to invent a restraining mechanism—or, rather, develop it through evolution. If the idea that everything has happened before is true, then the answer, presumably, will be the "cyberpunk neo-feudalism" taking shape today.
It will also have countless vices (well-known to us from its long history), but it will perhaps mitigate the problem purely mechanically—by introducing into the elite alongside the maniacs also ordinary, essentially "random", but talented people who have gained power for a number of worthy reasons. And thereby diluting the intensity of the madness with a boredom that has long been absent.