Prisoners of war, plantation slavery in the antebellum South, and most hostages have one thing in common: They are made victims of Homo Sapiens single worst design flaw, namely, pointless, purposeless abuse and cruelty.

Pause and reflect on that for a moment. The kind of abuses and evils that almost always take place in captivity serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever. There is no definable goal, much less a constructive goal behind it.

What is gained, accomplished, or even contributed to the furtherance of Homo Sapiens by the evils that were inflicted on the late Republican senator, John McCain while a prisoner of war? What purpose is served by the evils that MAGA wished had been done to WNBA star Brittney Griner during her kidnapping by the Russian government?

It is purposeless, it is pointless, and it plays no role in the survival of the human species. No greater good, or even any good at all, results from it.

Many behavioral psychologists assert that the capacity to do this particular kind of evil deed exists in every one of us.

I dispute that. I don’t believe that is true. But either way, the propensity to commit such purposeless evil amounts to a serious design flaw in the human DNA.

About 18-25% of the human population is highly predisposed to falling under the spell of an authoritarian demagogue. Another 23% or so are also predisposed but less resolutely than the hardcore 18-25%. When percentages close to a neat fraction of quarters or eighths keep turning up, e.g. 1/4 who are apparently hard-wired for authoritarianism and 3/8 easily swayed toward it, I begin to suspect a genetic basis.

Clearly, there are roughly 25% who have no problems at all with purposeless abuse and cruelty if a demagogue commands it. And a smaller fraction of that 25%, maybe 13% by my own estimation (unscientific, but gleaned from years of analysis of election results) would actually delight in inflicting it. There’s another neat binary fraction: 1/8.

It is this 1/8 who will do anything whatsoever to obtain the power that they crave to be able to pointlessly harm as many people as they can.

They are the ones most driven to seek political power for right wing purposes.

The 1/8 are MAGA.