Between humanism and psychopathy
The winner of the Slovenian Best Essay award in 2026
The essay was first written in Slovene and published on 26 May 2026, in the oldest Slovenian literary magazine Sodobnost. It won the best essay award in the magazine’s annual competition.
I was weeding a bed of irises. I hadn’t touched it all year, and the matted, dry grass had completely covered the young, succulent buds. Fresh grass shoots were already rushing up among them. I attacked the intruders with my bare hands, first pulling them out roughly in bunches, then carefully, one by one, so as not to damage the fragile iris leaves. I was committing genocide on two square meters so that my chosen beauties would bloom better. The grass ruled all around, laughing in my face, saying, “We’ll let you have it this time, but you know, dear Sisyphus, that you will soon have to repeat the exercise?”
In my mind, I confronted their invasiveness with my own. I weighed what was moral, what was right, where the limits were, and why, as a human, I felt obligated to apologize for even this small massacre. Meanwhile, the grasses were already sending their tenacious underground fingers towards the sunlit patch, as if the erasure of their sisters had only inflamed them. I will come at them again when the moon turns, I will oppress them in their early youth, pull their roots out of the depths, grind them with a lawnmower, and tear apart their family ties like a psychopath. Am I any less of a criminal for not resorting to chemicals?
The only pleasure I will get from irises is aesthetic. I prefer their magnificent triple flowers compared to the grass inflorescence. Grass “flowers” are boring, and I would have to bend far down to the undergrowth to enjoy daisies and small Istrian orchids where they elbowed some space for themselves, and I would have to look very closely and pay attention to the fine contrasts with a patient eye. Wild nature is recognizable by its mattedness. In the garden, I want order and compact patches of color in selected harmony. Orderliness communicates care, care communicates intention, and without intention there can be no art. Yes, gardens are works of art, and irises matter as much as peppers on a colorful canvas.
The intention of art is not only aesthetic, of course, but there is survival in the mixture of colors and skillful strokes, first with a hoe, then with a brush, thirdly with a pen, and lastly … lastly with bare nails collecting black dirt. My garden is not worthy of the cover of any reputable magazine; it is not polished enough, and even the lettuce, which normally grows in straight lines, may grow matted so that my invasive order would not stand out excessively within the frame of bushes. The appearance of my garden beds expresses the quality of my psychopathy, my alliances, and blind spots. As casually as I dress up for natural and social contexts, I position myself in the realm of art. Spiritual mattedness alienates me from them all and creates an inescapable conflict, because sometimes I am too much of a psychopath, and sometimes not enough.
* * *
Every story of the pivotal conflict that has shaped literally every single society is the story of the battle of two psychopathies. One is purely destructive, unbridled, completely obsessed with power and control, shrewdly manipulative and sadistic; the other sees itself as self-protective, just, on the right side of morality, and cruel only when it is unavoidable. Although both sides are at least somewhat good or bad, later, in the story they tell, their side gets embellished and the other side denigrated. All peoples that have survived to this day have psychopaths to thank for first “weeding out” the previously dominant culture from a particular territory, embedding them on the map, and then keeping them there, since history is a long series of conquests and massacres. In the political ring, hitting below the belt continues to be the norm, and overly honest people would better stay out of it.
Through the prism of today’s European morality, it is difficult to imagine the hatred that peoples harbored and the fervor with which they killed each other. The weak succumbed to the stronger and either disappeared or transformed into some new version of themselves in order to survive. They were often forced to embrace the religion of their former enemy, or at least submit to it. The Christian medieval rule continued the Roman colonial policy, in which the conqueror did not massacre the conquered peoples, but gradually Romanized and evangelized them, while also allowing them to retain part of their old cultural identity. This increased the Roman emperor’s access to men who could be conscripted into the army, and after the initial setbacks, within a few generations, the umbrella religion got under the skin of the diverse peoples and united them. Islam did the same. This was a major civilizational innovation, and other conquerors imitated it. After the Pax Romana came the Pax Mongolica, then the Pax Britannica, and in the twentieth century the Pax Americana, to name a few. It cannot be overlooked that the peace was built on the foundations of war and hard rule, but it could have been worse.
Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian king of the 7th century BC, who extended the Assyrian Empire from Egypt to Babylonia, murdered and enslaved with terrifying cruelty like an old-school tyrant. He is considered one of the most ferocious rulers in history. Records have survived in which he boasts of, for example, filling entire valleys with corpses and staining rivers with blood when he destroyed the city of Elam. He was among the last Assyrian tyrants, ruling with unimaginable terror, which ultimately took its toll on his civilization. Sooner or later, the conquered peoples will rally against such an oppressor!
The line between good and bad psychopathy has only slowly moved towards what we consider humane today, and has often swung back and forth in the meantime, but for a long time many norms that would be disgusting by today’s moral standards were commonplace: torturing and murdering heretics, mistreating children, women, the crippled, the weird, and animals, not to mention slavery and public executions in the city square. And a lot of what we consider commonplace today will probably seem disgusting to future generations, such as the rampant deforestation in the Amazon, bare-handed mining in the Congo, industrial slaughterhouses all across the world, not to mention genocidal massacres.
If Hitler had come right after Ashurbanipal, he would have been just another brutal tyrant among others, but he came at a time of unique moral maturation in Western society. Cruelty was still rife around the world, of course, and the First World War was still fresh in our memory, but humanism held out the promise of universal humanity. After all, people have the same intrinsic value, regardless of ethnic, racial, and religious background, right? The Holocaust cut sharply into this noble hope that had begun to develop fragile buds among the staunch, ancient instincts. If Hitler had been more methodical and strategic and had managed to extend the reign of the Third Reich for a few more years, there might not be any Jews or Roma in the world, the Slavs would have been decimated, and all “ignoble,” non-Aryan races dehumanized. It’s horrifying how Nazism brought the bar of good psychopathy so low that an officer could be smiling and playing with his children one moment, and then herding despised minorities into the gas chamber the next.
We must remember that the Nazi regime carefully trained psychopaths to be capable of this; it convinced the masses with a mythical (in other words, religious) story of a chosen people, a promised land, and a just war; it was systematically re-educating the youth since as early as 1922. If you think that something similar is impossible today, you underestimate how malleable we are under the weight of authority and how deeply we can be drawn into psychopathy. Total genocide may seem improbable to us, but let us not forget that there are millions of people in the world today for whom the extermination of certain peoples would not seem like a bad idea. Many wars are being fought at the moment, and that shows that we are far from outgrowing our genocidal tendencies.
Different peoples go through periods of greater and lesser humanity. The line between good and bad psychopathy is relative, depending on context, moral integrity, and political intentions. When one people begins to violently interfere with another, the latter must lower its moral standards and use force to stop it. The rules of the game that suit peacetime no longer apply, and good psychopathy, which otherwise expresses itself in the domain of civilian life (politics, health, law, sports, etc.), must don a black uniform and sling a rifle across its chest. In an ideal case, like any highly humane society, it respects a code of military ethics that constrains bad psychopathy; in other cases, such a code gets ignored.
* * *
When I’m putting the adjective “good” before “psychopathy,” you’re probably wondering, isn’t this just an oxymoron? I admit, I, too, scratched my head when I came across psychologist Kevin Dutton’s writing about good psychopathy. Dutton’s core thesis is that a functional society depends on people who can take responsibility for demanding tasks that the average person can’t do. For a surgeon to drill a hole in your head and rummage through your brain, he has to be a bit of a psychopath. The same goes for a politician and a CEO who shoulder millions of dollars in risk; this requires a certain amount of moral flexibility. A lawyer defends a murderer, a top tennis player crushes an opponent in cold blood, a butcher serially slits throats… and I could go on and on.
The five key characteristics of psychopathy are: ruthlessness, fearlessness, self-confidence, emotional detachment, and calmness under pressure. The additional two are expressed in a negative sense, namely as the lack of conscience and empathy. To some extent, all these traits are key factors for success in a competitive job market, especially in professions that are very dangerous or require extreme moral flexibility. A manager sometimes has to fire an employee who is stifling his entire team’s efficiency, even though the poor man is taking care of four children and a disabled wife. A politician must be emotionally detached when fighting for a compromise in the political ring. A firefighter is the epitome of fearlessness, and a top athlete of calmness under pressure, the former when heading into a burning building to save a child, the latter when standing at the top of a snowy slope, determined to win the Olympic gold medal. A farmer suppresses weeds to make nutrients available to his crops, and he would rather see his poultry end up slaughtered for humans than in the throats of weasels and foxes.
In this essay, I would like to highlight a psychopathic vocation that may surprise you: priesthood. Dutton believes that psychopathy among priests is not difficult to understand, considering the great power that religious authorities have over their congregations, while their institutions simultaneously offer them a kind of moral immunity. In the church hierarchy, psychopathic traits come in handy for every advancement. Priests may carry power responsibly and serve their communities as pillars of reconciliation and moral clarity, but manipulation is equally within their reach.
It doesn’t matter if a particular priest doesn’t believe in God, because no one will know, and at the same time, he will live quite comfortably at the expense of the community and under the protection of the religious institution. Search the Internet for the documentary Marjoe from 1972 and admire the psychopathic quasi-priest at work! Marjoe exposes to cameras how charismatic preachers, such as himself, manipulate the naive masses. Not all priests are deceitful (i.e., bad) psychopaths, of course, but some certainly are, as is clear from the recurrence of major and minor scandals, known to anyone who has reached a sufficiently high position in a religious hierarchy, later left it, and dared to speak out about it. Of course, such a person must be morally blameless and have thick skin, because exposing a psychopath can provoke a harsh backlash.
Not only that! The psychopath will keep a calm face, convincingly act as if he were innocent, and feign remorse. He will wait months until the right moment for sweet revenge. He will not even blink when you mock him in a bar, but three months later, he will intercept you in a dark alley and beat you up. He knows that such a retaliatory measure is excessive, but that won’t stop him. He knows that he is acting immorally, but nevertheless (or maybe exactly because of it) he will insist on his way. He is so sure of himself that the masses follow him, or at least can’t say no to him.
I shivered when I watched the footage from the White House as the attacks on Iran began and the (tel)evangelical pastors blessed the US president, the US military, spoke of one people under God, prayed for blessings in the name of Jesus, wisdom from heaven… and when I listened to the president talk about destroying the regime in Iran with complete emotional detachment, occasionally garnished with ice-cold delight. The slogan Make America Great Again! suddenly sounded to me like Deutschland, Deutschland über alles! Like that first, forbidden stanza, not like the third, which now unifies a peaceful country that had been divided for half a century.
The line between good and bad psychopathy moves back and forth; it is relative, depending on the context and intentions. At one extreme are Ashurbanipal and Hitler, at the other, with highly developed pacifism, live the Micronesian people of Ifaluk from the atoll of the same name. The islanders supposedly have to look back several generations to find an example of a noteworthy violent conflict. The chiefs are not authoritarian; all roles in the hierarchy are assumed by the tribe members with pride, so the inevitable everyday quarrels don’t escalate. From the point of view of Europeans, the greatest moral sin of this people is that they relish dog meat and sometimes indulge in it. The peoples of the nearby islands still remember the ancient times when the bloodthirsty Ifaluk warriors relished not only dog but also human flesh; it is not entirely self-evident to them that former cannibals have become pacifists.
Even Europeans a hundred years ago would have winced in disbelief if someone had enthusiastically tried to convince them that there would once be a pan-European union where no wars would have raged for decades, and all trade flowed unobstructed. They would have had difficulty imagining that the colonial reality of most of the planet could be transformed into national sovereignties, assembled in the institution of the United Nations in the pursuit of peace. Or that women would have the right to vote, that racial equality would prevail, and that children would be protected in the safe harbor of education until the age of twenty. Before these virtues could find their place under the sun and form such a unique framework for good psychopathy, bad psychopathy had to swing to an extreme. Another world war had to happen, and this war of all wars had to be sealed by the atomic bomb.
For the events after World War I to unfold as they did, German National Socialism had to carve out its youth with ideological rigidity, rigorous upbringing, and massive indoctrination, making them fit for drastic psychopathic assignments a decade later, which even Ashurbanipal himself would have applauded. A proof that by then the world was morally different is the fact that the Nazi killing machine could not afford to publicly boast about the rivers of blood in Dachau and Auschwitz, but they carefully concealed the industrial massacres as long as they could.
Two generations after the Germans’ moral confrontation with the horrors of the Holocaust, the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme: the grandchildren of serial killers have elevated the value of peace even above democracy and individual freedom. But the pendulum is swinging back, and in recent years, due to the increasingly prolonged unrest in its relative vicinity, Germany has been moving from a distinctly pacifist stance to a more realistic peacekeeping, which includes increasing the defense budget and strengthening the military industry. True, bad psychopathy is creeping up on good, but does Germany have any other choice?
A wise society’s response to the rise of collective psychopathy in its surroundings is to reinforce it within itself, even at the risk of exacerbating internal pathologies. This is the toll it has to pay if it wants to defend its cultural integrity. Ideally, it nurtures institutionalized good psychopathy, activating it temporarily when necessary, keeping it self-restrained, protective, and allowing cruelty only when it’s absolutely unavoidable. It severely sanctions bad psychopathy, which is unbridled, destructive, sadistic. A good psychopath does not give up when confronted by failure; it only incites him to try harder next time. A bad psychopath, after a failure, hits below the belt, connives, and sabotages. Decisive, principled social institutions are the best tool for disciplining bad psychopathy with difficult but necessary moral decisions.
Entire societies are constantly leaning in one direction or another, and no level of morality guarantees that barbarism cannot repeat. Under the pressure of poverty or war, bad psychopathy always intensifies, and any means become acceptable to avoid the growing threats: lying, stealing, violence, murder. In such times, the priest is called upon to play the decisive role. The unfortunate masses have no choice but to increase the level of their psychopathy, and to relieve their bad conscience for having killed, stolen, and lied, the priest provides a mythical story in which alien subjects are dehumanized and demonized, while all those who wear the sacred symbol, there, next to the rifle on their chests, are members of the chosen people. Moreover, God commands, under threat of eternal damnation, that the godless mob must be shot—for our good and theirs. They can find sufficient reason in aesthetic considerations just as I do when I’m suppressing the grasses next to the irises.
Constantly making sure that we have more and they have less is a kind of safeguard for times of crisis when resources are insufficient for everyone. The permission to kill, granted to us by God himself, is a convenient privilege. No wonder the foreign people toward whom we direct spears, cannons, and drones respond with an equivalent retaliation: their priests make a pronouncement that they have received God’s blessing to kill us, the invasive invaders. Bad psychopaths have no reservations about generalizing this “permission” and extending their conquests into a millennial standard.
On the sidelines of psychopathy and at the same time permeated by it, life unfolds: farming, trade, science, rituals, love… spiced with the presently acceptable dose of barbarism, frequently blessed by a priest for the sake of the sacred covenant, where the criterion of belonging is often of an aesthetic nature. For example, the aesthetics of the penis. For Jews, circumcision of newborns on the eighth day after birth is so important that they are allowed to perform it even on their holiest holiday, Yom Kippur. Circumcision is the prevailing practice in Islam as well. Many Christian denominations differ from Judaism and Islam in their prescribed genital aesthetics, but in many places, boys’ circumcision is the common standard even among them; supposedly, half of Christians globally are circumcised.
In many parts of the United States, newborn circumcision is a routine procedure, listed along with cutting the umbilical cord, determining the Apgar score, weighing, vaccinations, vitamin injections… The cold-blooded medical act is “religious” in the sense of cultural dispensation and automatism within the framework of the prevailing, from the society’s point of view, necessary and therefore good psychopathy. In many countries where boys are circumcised, circumcising girls is considered barbaric, in other words, bad, and therefore this procedure is termed “female genital mutilation”, but there are still many cultures where any uncircumcision is considered indecent or shameful.
If we step out of cultural automatism, we have to label the amputation of any healthy tissue as mutilation. And there is something more: severed foreskins, like placentas, are valuable to the biotechnology, dermatology, and cosmetics industries, and their trade takes place in a great ethical vacuum, which Georganne Chapin dissects poignantly in her book The Penis Business. Body tissues become a self-evident “donation” for the good of science, and the penis business in the United States makes significant profits from it. This is why certain scientists passionately defend circumcision, not only for aesthetic and religious reasons. The vast majority of people don’t care about such finesse, be it moral, medical, or theological; what matters when it comes to belonging is appearance, and belonging is all that matters.
Aesthetics carries more weight than all philosophy and theology in placing individuals in cultural realities. Men have “turtlenecks” and “mushroom heads” in their trousers, bell towers and minarets rise above the city squares, under one neck there is a jacket and tie, under another a kurta, one face wears makeup, another a niqab. Underneath all this are oral traditions and centuries-old folklores, on which both the priest and the believer build the character of their psychopathy.
* * *
Ethical relativism is not difficult to understand if we note that until recently, all cultures of the world were highly religious, and disrespecting dogmas was unthinkable. One such dogma is that Jews are the culprits on duty. After World War II, the institution of the Catholic Church gradually softened its centuries-old hostility towards Jews and reached a point of highest interfaith tolerance with Pope Francis, but distrust of Jews is deeply rooted in the deepest social tissues, and new ethical relationalities still struggle to make their way into general cultural norms. In Christian sects that are not bound by the authority of the Pope, attitudes towards Jews are very diverse, sometimes Zionist, sometimes neutral, and sometimes distinctly intolerant.
Ironically, many anti-Semitic fundamentalists share with Jews the aesthetic of the penis, while uncircumcised Catholics seek reconciliation with them. Progressive Jews are moving away from Zionism and radical interpretations of their own tradition, calling for the reformation of the barbaric circumcision ritual called brit milah, and proposing alternatives named, for example, brit shalom, where parents ritually “circumcise” a pomegranate instead of the penis or wash their son’s feet. If they must, they can perform a minimal blood sacrifice with a tiny prick for a single drop of blood.
This is, of course, unacceptable to Jewish fundamentalists. Many sincere Christians, Muslims — and everyone else, including atheists — have a hard time overcoming hatred of them, and for a reason. Conspiratorial folklore blames Jews for banking manipulations, Christian folklore blames them for crucifying the Lord, and in Islamic folklore, they are archetypal antiheroes. The identity of the believer is frequently embedded in an unbending dogma that struggles to accommodate 21st-century humanist morality. Priests are wired to psychopathy, whether good or bad. The good resist seditious interpretations, the bad incite them.
Jews don’t have it easy while they are sitting on the dock (or at the defense table in the US). Often quite rightly so. The Romans considered Judea one of the most problematic regions, and this reputation still holds true today, as it furiously elbows its way alongside shattered Palestine. How wonderful it would be if the identity of peoples could be boiled down to the aesthetics of the penis, and there they would recognize each other in psychopathic equality. If you looked in both of their underwear, you wouldn’t see the difference, but this is perhaps exactly the main stumbling block and the reason why two circumcised peoples remain stubbornly entrenched in their categorical right. As newborns, they endured ritual torture that could not not leave a furrow in the reptilian layer of their brains.
I don’t even want to imagine the tiny penis writhing in pee-soaked diapers after circumcision or, more accurately, genital mutilation. Georganne Chapin compares the fine tissue at the head of the penis, exposed during torture, to the nail bed under a fingernail; between the lines, she invites us to imagine how we would feel if someone pulled out our fingernail and then wrapped our finger in a diaper soaked in our own piss for two weeks. In the face of such barbarity, it is difficult to expect healthy primal bonds and instinctive trust between an infant and its mother, which may, actually, be beneficial in an environment where it’s risky to be overly friendly and trust strangers. With the ritual of circumcising the penis (and clitoris), a society makes sure its psychopathy wouldn’t be (too) good and (too) lenient, so it makes it easier for its members to take demanding moral decisions and endure suffering.
Regardless of the relevance of utilitarian reasons, according to humanistic morality, chopping off any parts of the genitals is completely unfounded and inexcusable. Parents expose their children to trauma that marks them for life. The pagans started it all, the Jews and Muslims continued it, the latter on a completely new level. Many Christians kept up with them. Thus, they placed (bad!) psychopathy in their children’s cradle, so that, in the case of violence against them, the vindictiveness would never end. If our enemies are cannibals, let us be too! I will circumcise my son’s penis to help him relate to the abominations demanded of us in our times, to absolve his conscience once he’s murdering some demonized subjects, and so he wouldn’t question the dogmas repeated hypnotically by the priest. Even if we have to harden our psychopathy, maybe we could choose less drastic rituals.
Humanism expects everyone to actively oppose every inhumanity, such as ritual amputation of healthy tissue, and every dehumanization, such as antisemitism, to name just two of the countless rigidities that stubbornly resist being torn from the grip of religious dogma. The authority of religion exceeds the authority of humanism in both circumcision and antisemitism. And in many other manifestations of psychopathy. We won’t change this with mere reason, and this humble essay will have no impact on the situation in the world. Israel’s aggression against neighboring territories hardly helps shift the psychopathy’s center of gravity towards humanism and away from hardened dogmatism, but instead only heats up the ancient hostile instinct and gives it legitimacy.
It is very easy to awaken this instinct. In the countries of the former Yugoslavia, we experienced this firsthand just a few decades ago, when religious feelings flared up in a previously superficially secular society, leaving behind such deep furrows that Croatia completed the demining of its entire territory only in 2026, and in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this problem is still vastly unresolved. This kind of “weeding” is a completely different beast compared to my battle with grasses. A nervous stealth psychopathy still hovers over the Western Balkans. Dogmas hide deeper than mines; they can explode repeatedly and are passed down from generation to generation. I have no idea how to extract from our souls the traumas that hypnotically incite us to evil deeds, I only know that we should never give up on this ideal.
* * *
After weeding the bed with irises, I continued with the lilies. I dug my fingers and hoe as deep as I could. I tore the sinewy roots, sometimes with ease, sometimes with hassle. The well-being of these lilies depends on my good psychopathy; I decide about their survival with cold-blooded shrewdness, still like Sisyphus, without chemicals, no matter how much the grasses laugh in my face!
They know how to grow long fingers from the ones I have pruned and branch them out in fertilized beds. It seems that they are even tougher when pruned. I could build a wall around their roots, but not their seeds. They are unruly, unstoppable; my institution of garden has to rely on strict psychopathy to put limits on their psychopathy, and my survival is no less important a factor than aesthetics, in other words, art. Grasses will always overgrow our human ethics and aesthetics when we look away for just a while. Thin fingers lie dormant in dry sand, and it only takes a drop of rain to reawaken them.
Attila and Genghis Khan, like grass roots, dug in deeply into the vast steppes from Mongolia to the Urals, then into Transcaucasia, the Tatras, and the Balkans. They mixed their psychopathy into the gene pool of a large part of Eurasia. They were not at all delicate, not at all sensitive like my irises, because they did not need my aesthetics. Like all the grasses of the world, they left behind shallow traces in the landscape, horses and blood. As befits nomads, they lived in tents and did not build monumental architecture for themselves like Justinian or Theodoric the Great.
The psychopathic fingers of grasses remain invisible until they shoot up fresh tufts for the horses galloping by. From the grasses emerges the conquerors’ ancient instinct. That’s precisely why nomadic armies have been the fear and trembling of every country that has built its institutional psychopathy in cities. The polished neighborhoods of London, Paris, Madrid, and Vienna require the institution of fences, weeding, and chemicals, lest they be swallowed up by the invasive psychopathy of raw nature or subdued by the sword of nomadic conquerors. Cities eventually subdued select grasses, renamed them grains, and built empires on their calories; grains, in inevitable reciprocity, subdued people to tend them as carefully as I tend my flowers. The interactions between these and other psychopathies have shaped today’s cultural landscape of metropolises, fields, highways, airports, bell towers, monuments, steppes, forests, fires, and minefields.
As my fingers dance along the roots of the lilies, they’re joining the all-encompassing psychodrama and adding a tiny piece to the mosaic. I take a photo of a copious pile of grass to brag about on social media, and I remember Ashurbanipal’s boasting of rivers of blood. I search my memory to pull from some spiritual tradition God’s forgiveness, or better yet, an order to justify my tiny genocide. Finally, nature herself relieves me of my sense of guilt when near the lily leaves, I notice the first dandelion flower of the year, next to it some young chickweed and ragwort, and a little further on, bittercress and yarrow. Biodiversity flourishes on the battle line between two psychopathies: one of grass and the other of my garden. Is psychopathy necessary for cultural diversity, I wonder?
Two psychopathies, rubbing against each other, form an inevitable battle line, and sooner or later, that’s where diversity flourishes, just as at the junction of forest and meadow, there’s a variety of shrubs. The institution of the garden increases biodiversity, I console myself, without it, there would be neither the cultural landscape nor thousands of works of art. As if he knew I needed him to end my essay, Francis Bacon brings a smile to my face, whispering in my ear: “God Almighty first planted a garden.”