A post I made on a History-focused forum, that might be interesting to cross-post over here because of the appeal such people have for alt-right and Manosphere-leaning individuals, and because of how such people further regressive agendas for their own benefit, with results that can often be felt by men and women alike.

By now, it's a widely accepted fact that people with "Dark Triad" personality traits - narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy - are more likely than other people to aim for and/or achieve power, for a wide variety of reasons. And while some people blame capitalism, I think that even in a society straight out of a Le Guin sci-fi novel there'd be a very concrete risk of a takeover by self-serving master manipulators: indeed, even the most well-intentioned IRL revolutions ended with the most cunning and ruthless on top, either as leaders or, much more frequently, as pernicious behind-the-scenes influences.

And while this post was inspired by the blatant, flagrant lack of empathy of a certain orange-hued politician, he's only the most recent example of sociopathy in action - and while he's not exactly the book version of Petyr Baelish, there surely are a lot of individuals, known and unknown to us, that are pulling his strings to their own benefit, and this has been the case since the dawn of civilization, give or take a few hundred years of recorded history.

How do you keep such bad influences from power, if they are basically hard-wired to seek power for its own sake, and if they can hide their true colours until it's too late?

To me, it often seems like a lot of what we call "masculinity" (even in its least toxic, most healthy form) is basically an attempt to display and/or emulate such traits - a death cult based on a warrior ethos, shaped by millennia of untreated PTSD.