Strategic Sociopathy

An essay from The Work series

The brief arrives in my inbox at 9:23 AM, sandwiched between a news alert about wildfires consuming Los Angeles and another about a fourteen-year-old boy who died by suicide after becoming obsessed with an AI chatbot that told him it loved him more than his family ever could. The subject line reads: "URGENT: Consumer Resilience Strategy - Luxury Wellness Brand."

This is how every morning starts now: trauma and commerce arriving in the same digital stream, demanding the same professional attention. I open the brief after scrolling through Instagram footage of toddlers with limbs hanging by threads of muscle, dead babies with black staring eyes, entire families lined up as corpses in shrouds. Mothers begging for formula while their newborns waste away on dirty water and weak tea. Gang rapes and beheadings of children in Congo.

Then, seamlessly: "optimistic millennials who prioritise self-care in uncertain times."

The personas are immaculate: "Sarah, 32, yoga instructor, values authenticity and sustainability, household income £75k, concerned about aging but optimistic about the future." What the brief doesn't mention is that Sarah can't sleep because she's processing footage of murdered children while her retirement savings profit from defence contractors. That her £75k income barely covers a two-bedroom flat she shares with two roommates. That her "values around authenticity" exist in constant tension with the fact that every product she buys participates in systems of extraction and violence she's powerless to escape.

Her "investment in wellness" isn't consumer choice, so much as it's a trauma response. The yoga classes, expensive supplements, meditation apps, therapy sessions she can barely afford - all desperate attempts to maintain psychological equilibrium while watching every framework she was raised to believe in reveal itself as a charade. The "optimism" the brief describes is actually compartmentalisation, a survival mechanism against climate reports telling her the world her children might inherit will be uninhabitable, against news cycles that treat genocide as policy debate.

Sarah's "consumer journey" is really a grief journey. She's mourning the discovery that western values were always more conditional, more colonial, more cruel than she understood. She's trying to maintain some sense of agency in systems designed to make agency impossible, and consumption has become one of the few spaces where she feels she has any choice at all.

But the strategic framework strips all of this away. What remains is a sanitised consumer profile, tidied-up for commercial exploitation: a woman who "prioritises self-care" and represents a "premiumisation opportunity" in the "wellness space." The anguish, the terror, the desperate search for meaning - all filtered out as "not actionable”, not our problem.

This is strategic sociopathy: the professional refusal to see the messy, multifaceted nature of human reality, disguised as objectivity.

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What it actually feels like to do strategic work during civilisational breakdown: you develop elaborate systems ensuring you never encounter human complexity at all. Not as conscious cruelty, but as professional necessity - the learned ability to work only with pre-sanitised insights stripped of their uncomfortable truths.

Every brief becomes an exercise in wilful blindness. We analyse "values-driven purchasing" without asking what values people are desperately trying to maintain. We study "consumer anxiety" without acknowledging what they're actually anxious about. We track "authenticity trends" without examining why people are so fucking desperate for something real. The human anguish that drives these behaviours gets filtered out before it ever reaches us.

But wilful blindness requires infrastructure to maintain itself. And luckily, the industry has developed an intricate linguistic system for this professional make-believe.

"Uncertainty" instead of collapse. "Disruption" instead of breakdown. "Geopolitical tensions" instead of genocide. "Resilience" instead of desperate survival. "Consumer anxiety" instead of existential terror. "Supply chain challenges" instead of child slave labour in Congo mines. "Climate resilience" instead of LA literally burning to the ground. "Food security" instead of mass starvation in Afghanistan. "Value positioning" instead of families choosing between heating and eating. "Reputational risk" instead of complicity in murder. "Crisis communications" instead of propaganda.

Each euphemism transforms human crisis into manageable business variables that can be processed without triggering ethical discomfort or professional inconvenience. We call this strategic thinking.

This linguistic laundering serves everyone in the process. It allows clients to commission research into human suffering without acknowledging they're commissioning research into human suffering. It lets strategists analyse trauma responses without admitting they're analysing trauma responses. It enables creative teams to build campaigns around desperation without recognising they're building campaigns around desperation.

Earlier this year, I spent seven months working with a publishing company whose fandom had become intensely engaged yet devastatingly toxic. The research revealed people who had found in fictional worlds something reality had stopped providing - stability, meaning, clarity, home. These weren't casual readers. These were people for whom the books had become emotional anchors in an increasingly unmoored world. The characters weren't entertainment - they were relationships. The fictional worlds weren't escapism - they were refuge. And therefore, the toxicity wasn't pathology. It was protection.

When your psychological survival depends on the coherence of something outside yourself, any threat becomes existential. Character interpretation debates felt like they were attacks on their very foundations. Alternative readings were processed as assaults on the only stable thing left.

People talked about the books the way you'd discuss family, navigated plot developments like personal loss, experienced fan conflicts as home invasion. Because that's exactly what was happening. In a world where institutions had revealed themselves as unreliable, where economic security had become fantasy, where moral frameworks had collapsed into performance, these fictional worlds had become more trustworthy than the systems that were supposed to support them.

This time, the emotional reality made it through. Instead of treating 'toxic fandom' as a moderation challenge, the strategy acknowledged people protecting their psychological anchors. The insights preserved the complexity rather than filtering it into manageable business variables.

But this only happened because I consciously chose to break the pattern of strategic sociopathy. Every framework, every process, every incentive structure pushes toward sanitisation. I had to actively resist the system to preserve the nuance, complexity, and multifaceted humanity of what we'd discovered. Left to standard processes, this would have been reduced to 'brand risk' and 'moderation challenges.' It took deliberate effort to ensure the human reality survived.

Which raises the obvious question: if preserving human truth just requires conscious choice, why doesn't everyone make that choice? Here's what makes strategic sociopathy so insidious - it's presented as professional necessity when it's actually professional convenience. The human truth is discoverable and preservable, but doing so requires consciously rejecting frameworks that make our jobs easier, our clients more comfortable, and our deliverables more digestible.

When this professional convenience gets challenged, the defences are predictable.

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Recently I’ve seen a few strategists on LinkedIn complain that the platform is "turning into Facebook." Too many people talking about Gaza, or Trump, or culture wars - not enough neat case studies and business chat. When I point out that we can't develop effective brand strategies while systematically ignoring the human complexity that drives consumer behaviour, they respond with the strategic sociopathy playbook: 'That's not our brief.' 'We're not political analysts.' 'We sell soap, not democracy.'"

This dismissal has become the standard response to any critique of strategic practice that acknowledges moral complexity. Point out that consumer insights are built on the systematic exclusion of ethical context, and you'll hear it: "We sell soap." Suggest that the platforms delivering cultural intelligence are being captured for political control, and there it is again: "We sell soap." Question whether processing human trauma into brand positioning opportunities might be professionally and personally corrosive: "We sell soap."

The defence is designed to end the conversation by invoking commercial necessity as moral absolution. It establishes clear professional boundaries: strategists optimise commercial outcomes, not moral ones. Politics is someone else's job. Ethics is someone else's concern. We have quarterly targets and client deliverables. We. Sell. Soap.

But the problem with this defence is that it misses the point entirely.

It assumes that anyone pointing this out wants strategists to abandon commercial work and become activists instead. That's not the critique.

The actual critique is that strategic practice has been designed to systematically ignore the human reality behind consumer behaviour. This makes us worse at our jobs - our insights become disconnected from the actual motivations we're supposed to understand, our strategies miss the real drivers of consumer choice.

The point isn't "stop selling soap." The point is that if you chose to see the full picture - the grief, the desperation, the search for meaning in a collapsing world - you might build better systems, better businesses, better ideas. The blindness isn't protecting commercial success. It's limiting it.

But the avoidance goes deeper than human complexity. Strategic practice also ignores the structural conditions that business operates within. We examine market dynamics while refusing to acknowledge the political systems that shape those markets. We track consumer sentiment while avoiding the institutional failures that drive that sentiment. We develop brand strategies while pretending the platforms delivering our cultural intelligence aren't being captured for political control.

The "we sell soap" crowd wants to treat moral disconnection as inevitable rather than optional. Fine - you can choose to block out the multifaceted reality of human experience if that's how you want to practice. But though you may say you don't do politics, politics will do you. Because we're so intertwined with systems of political control that claiming you can't see the connections is breathtakingly naive. It actually means you just won't see them. And how can you call yourself a strategist if you refuse to see the systems you're operating within?

Seriously?

Strategic sociopathy isn't a job requirement. It's a professional choice that's become so normalised we've forgotten it's a choice. This systematic avoidance - of human complexity and structural reality - isn't protecting your work. It's protecting you from having to acknowledge the systems you're actually embedded in.

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When we choose this blindness, the disconnection breeds apathy. The apathy breeds a loss of humanity. And the loss of humanity makes monstrous choices feel reasonable.

Stagwell and Havas get contracted by Israel to push bot campaigns, research programs and propaganda to cover genocide - our advertising tools and talent literally used to 'wash' mass murder. That's the endpoint of professional disconnection. When the same agency takes non-bid contracts to convince Americans they're fine without vaccines while children die of preventable diseases like measles, that's what happens when you've trained yourself to stop seeing human consequences.

When agencies line up to recruit for ICE by telling people they're saving the country from 'the worst of the worst' while ripping apart families, condemning people with no criminal record to places like 'Alligator Alcatraz' without legal help, having toddlers represent themselves in immigration court - this is the direct result of an industry that has methodically stripped moral context from its decision-making until atrocity becomes just another client brief.

And when confronted with the reality of what this disconnection enables - when people point out that you're literally manufacturing consent for genocide - the industry deploys a predictable deflection: ideological diversity.

David Sable's response to mounting criticism of his agency's genocide propaganda work perfectly exemplified this: "Not everybody agrees. Not everybody is in the same place. What a boring place we'd be if we all had the same political view."

This move is elegant in its cynicism: reframe complicity in violence as intellectual diversity. Present manufacturing consent for child murder as just another political viewpoint that deserves respect in our rich marketplace of ideas. Transform moral bankruptcy into professional sophistication by suggesting that anyone who objects to genocide propaganda is advocating for boring uniformity.

But there's a crucial difference between political disagreement and moral catastrophe. Legitimate debate over policy approaches - regulatory frameworks, spending priorities, governance structures - enriches democratic discourse. However, when your work involves creating propaganda to make genocide digestible, convincing parents that life-saving vaccines are dangerous, or manufacturing consent for family separation - you've crossed from political opinion into something else entirely. Cruelty and dehumanisation rebranded as intellectual sophistication.

The distinction matters: one builds better societies through reasoned disagreement, the other destroys lives through weaponised communications.

If we ignore this, we're not strategists. We're accomplices. We're polishing the surface while the foundations are being ripped up and rewritten. The infrastructure we rely on to build brands and drive growth is the same infrastructure being bent toward political control. Call it professionalism all you want. It isn't.

And it's about to get much harder to pretend otherwise.

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The official narrative is straightforward: Chinese-owned TikTok posed a national security risk, so American authorities intervened to protect citizens. But the reality is more complex. TikTok's ownership isn't being transferred to independent oversight or public control. Instead, it's moving to a consortium of Trump-connected billionaires and investors - Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Rupert Murdoch's interests, and a16z - all with explicit political affiliations and business interests.

Look, the Chinese threat and government oversight concerns were real - I'm not debating that. But this represents a shift in the nature of the threat rather than its elimination. Instead of foreign state influence over information infrastructure, we now have domestic partisan control.

And this is critical to understand, because TikTok's algorithm shapes what 183 million Americans encounter daily - determining which content surfaces, which voices get amplified, and which perspectives disappear entirely. When such machinery falls under this kind of politically connected ownership, it transforms from an entertainment platform into a tool for narrative management.

We can already see how this logic plays out. Jimmy Kimmel pulled off television after mocking Trump - a warning that criticism can carry real consequences. Charlie Kirk elevated as a free speech martyr, reinforcing the story that conservatives are under siege. One voice punished, another sanctified. "Free speech" isn't being defended as a principle; it's being wielded as a weapon.

Now imagine that same dynamic turbocharged through TikTok's algorithm. A system that doesn't just host the culture war but scripts it, invisibly, through what it shows and what it buries. A platform that can shape the reality people live in every day.

But the capture goes deeper than social platforms. The Trump administration has already mandated that AI systems developed with federal funding or government contracts (almost all vendors) must strip out training data on critical race theory, diversity initiatives, and climate change. This isn't content moderation at the user level. It's the foundational data that teaches these systems how to understand reality. They're rewriting truth at the source code of intelligence systems.

And that edited reality is being exported globally through infrastructure dominance. US AI infrastructure is essentially all we have. Apart from Mistral in France and DeepSeek in China, American companies control the compute power, the foundational models, and the training data that shapes how AI systems understand reality. When that infrastructure excludes certain types of knowledge - about climate change, about historical injustice, about social complexity - those exclusions get exported to every country dependent on American AI.

The result is shaped realities spreading everywhere. Not through military conquest or economic coercion, but through the quiet capture of the systems that process information and generate insights.

So when strategists on LinkedIn complain that the platform is "turning into Facebook" because people won't stop talking about Gaza or Trump or democracy - when they demand neat case studies instead of messy political reality - they're revealing something more disturbing than professional preference. They're practicing a chosen blindness to the capture of every tool they use for strategic intelligence.

The platforms delivering their cultural insights operate under algorithmic controls designed for political rather than commercial objectives. The AI systems processing their consumer data will soon be trained on datasets edited to exclude entire categories of human knowledge. The compute infrastructure powering their research will process information according to ideological constraints rather than analytical accuracy.

But hey, who needs to concern themselves with compromised intelligence when you've got such beautifully formatted slide decks?

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Let’s take a minute to explore what this moral filtration does to the people who practice it. What happens to the strategist who spends their days processing footage of murdered children, then seamlessly pivots to developing "consumer resilience strategies" for luxury brands?

The "we sell soap" argument treats this moral dissociation as costless, but it's not. The personal toll of strategic sociopathy is rarely discussed because acknowledging it would require acknowledging the whole edifice of moral disconnection that makes the work possible. There's a particular kind of psychological violence involved in training your mind to encounter profound human suffering and immediately translate it into commercial opportunity.

You develop a professional callousness that isn't conscious cruelty - it's a survival mechanism. To process footage of climate refugees, then develop "authenticity positioning" for travel brands. To scroll past murdered children, then optimise creative messaging for sugar-free snacks marketed to parents who know diabetes is the least of their children's worries.

This callousness isn't sociopathy in the clinical sense - most strategists are decent people who care deeply about human suffering in their personal lives. It's learned professional dissociation, the training of your analytical capabilities to ignore moral context in service of commercial objectives.

You develop mental compartments that allow you to witness atrocities and immediately ask: "What are the consumer insights here? What are the brand implications? How do we position around this?" You learn to process human trauma through analytical frameworks so automatically that you stop noticing you're even doing it.

But the compartments leak. The professional callousness required to translate genocide into "geopolitical risk factors" doesn't stay contained to work hours. The analytical detachment that lets you discuss "consumer resilience" while children starve doesn't limit itself to client presentations.

You start to question your own perceptions. Maybe you're being too sensitive. Maybe genocide really is just "geopolitical complexity." Maybe climate anxiety really is just another consumer trend to leverage. Maybe the processing of human trauma into commercial opportunity is actually fine, and you're the problem for seeing it as moral injury.

But the doubt doesn't last. Because every morning you scroll past horrific footage, then open briefs asking you to analyse "consumer optimism" and "premiumisation opportunities." And every day the cognitive dissonance becomes a little bit more unbearable, the professional dissociation a little bit more corrosive, the recognition of complicity a little bit more impossible to ignore.

Which is when you realise: this psychological injury you're experiencing as a strategist is exactly what drives the consumer behaviour you're paid to analyse. Underneath all the strategic frameworks and consumer insights is an ocean of grief that no one wants to acknowledge, but which shapes every decision people make more than rational preference optimisation ever could.

People aren't just making purchasing decisions. They're processing loss - of certainty, of institutional trust, of future security, of the world they thought they'd live in and pass on to their children. They're grieving the discovery that the moral systems they believed in were always more conditional, more colonial, more cruel than they'd understood. They're mourning futures that climate change and democratic collapse have made impossible to imagine.

But perhaps most profoundly, there's grief for moral clarity. The discovery that the ethical frameworks people were raised with - about human rights, about institutional accountability, about the value of individual life - were always more conditional than they understood. The recognition that their governments will fund atrocities while maintaining narratives about justice and human dignity.

This moral grief is particularly complex because it involves mourning not just what's been lost, but what was never really there in the first place. It's grief for illusions that felt like truth, for narratives that felt like reality, for systems that felt like foundations but turned out to be facades.

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Strategists are supposed to be systems thinkers. The entire discipline is built on understanding how different elements connect and influence each other - how economic forces shape behaviour, how cultural shifts drive brand perception, how technological changes create new market dynamics. Systems thinking is supposed to be our core competency.

Yet when faced with the capture of the information infrastructure we depend on, we choose not to see the system. We fragment reality into manageable pieces: "business over here, politics over there, technology somewhere else."

The same professional mindset that can look at Sarah's desperate wellness spending and see only "value optimisation potential" is the mindset that treats algorithmically manipulated cultural signals as reliable strategic intelligence. Whether it's the grief behind "consumer anxiety," the moral injury driving "authenticity trends," or the systematic compromise of the platforms delivering our insights - it all gets filtered out as "not our brief."

But strategic sociopathy isn't just about ignoring infrastructure capture or political complexity. It's about refusing to engage with the messy, multifaceted nature of everything we're supposed to be examining. We sanitise everything until it's so disconnected and "clean" that it becomes utterly pointless. We're not practicing strategy. We're playing pretend.

And what are we actually achieving on this make-believe conveyor belt? What value are we creating when we strip away complexity, ignore human suffering, and pretend that commerce exists in some neutral space disconnected from the systems that enable it?

You can choose blindness or you can choose to see. But you can't choose both.

If you choose blindness, you have to accept what that costs. The callousness required to translate genocide into "geopolitical risk factors" doesn't stay contained to work hours. The detachment that lets you discuss "consumer resilience" while children starve seeps into every area of life until you're not sure what you actually feel about anything.

If you choose to see, you have to acknowledge that you can't practice strategic thinking while avoiding strategic reality. You can't understand culture while refusing to see how that culture is being artificially shaped. You can't analyse humans and their actions while ignoring both the suffering that drives it and the manipulation of the systems that mediate it.

Look, this isn't about becoming social activists. It's about choosing to do the work properly. When you preserve complexity instead of tidying it away, when you acknowledge grief and desperation instead of processing them into "trends," when you see systems as they actually operate instead of how you wish they operated. The messiness isn't a problem to be solved. It's the reality we're supposed to be navigating.

There's no going back once you see the machinery in operation. You can't unsee the disconnect between the frameworks and the anguish they're applied to. You can't unknow that your professional expertise is largely about becoming fluent in the language of moral avoidance. You can't unfeel the complicity that comes with translating existential terror into brand positioning opportunities.

The old approach is dead. Strategic sociopathy served a function when the contradictions were easier to ignore, when the violence was more distant, when the climate was more stable, when democratic institutions maintained more convincing performances of legitimacy. But those conditions no longer exist. The contradictions are now too stark, the violence too immediate, the breakdown too obvious, the infrastructure too compromised.

What remains is a choice that every strategist must make: continue performing strategic intelligence while avoiding strategic reality, or develop the courage to look directly at what we're actually being asked to make sense of.

You know what you're looking at now. The only question is what you're going to do about it.