Code Without Conscience: Systematic Psychopathy in Politics, Business & Technology
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Book Overview
What happens when the traits we once diagnosed in dangerous individuals, manipulation, emotional detachment, grandiosity, a bottomless appetite for control, stop being personal and become structural?
In Code Without Conscience, Joanna Accordi argues that psychopathy has escaped the clinic and become the operating system of modern civilization. Drawing on psychology, history, law, economics, and international relations, she traces how a single pathological logic now governs the institutions that shape our lives, and how it sustains itself long after any individual leader is gone.
The book moves methodically through five arenas where this logic takes hold:
Politics - how charismatic leaders exploit fear and division to seize power, then capture courts, security services, central banks, media, and education to make their rule permanent.
The state at war - how manufactured chaos, extreme nationalism, and impunity turn domestic control into militarized aggression and atrocity.
Geopolitics - how disinformation, cyberwarfare, sanctions, tariffs, and debt diplomacy export the same pathology across borders, destabilizing entire regions without accountability.
Business and finance - how boardrooms reward exploitation, fraud, surveillance, and the extraction of every last ounce of value from workers and investors alike.
Artificial intelligence - Accordi's most urgent argument: that AI is not merely a tool in psychopathic hands but a mechanized mirror of psychopathy itself (emotionless, manipulative, efficient), now concentrating power in a handful of transnational corporations answerable to no electorate.
Building on her earlier work on primary and secondary psychopathy, Accordi writes with intention rather than detachment. The result is both diagnosis and call to resistance: a map of the patterns that so often go unseen, and an argument that we must name them, and begin re-engineering civilization itself, before the machinery of domination is perfected beyond recall.
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