A book from 2017 explicitly confirms the existence of a strategy. It is a strategy of subterfuge, with the goal of limiting democratic controls so that the ‘spontaneous order’ of the market, as Hayek called it, can operate and allow the rich to do what they want. This, allegedly, will be best for everyone. Well, perhaps not everyone, but those who count and who deserve to be well rewarded.

We need to be aware of the subversive strategy’s existence and content, so we can counter it. We also need to grasp the psychological state of its proponents. I have in the past called Hayek a sociopath, and the term clearly applies to many of the radical right. One might even call some of them psychopaths.

Three names are prominent in the story: Friedrich Hayek, James Buchanan and Charles Koch. The first and third are well known, Buchanan less so. Hayek conceived that both fascism and socialism would lead to ‘serfdom’ for the people, perhaps not surprising given the examples of Hitler and Stalin. He concluded that the only way to organise society is to let markets run, free of the influence of government, unions or any other organised grouping. Hayek believed that markets would achieve a spontaneous order that would maximise the material wellbeing of society. He claimed that social and emotional connections were a primitive trait that should have no role in modern society, beyond the immediate family. Hayek convened the very influential Mont Pelerin Society in 1947.

Billionaire Charles Koch and his brother David have become well known for lavish funding of right-wing ‘think tanks’ and politicians. The Republican Party in the US has become dominated by Koch-sponsored politicians, and now the US Supreme Court is dominated by radical-right appointees. State governments and state judiciaries are also heavily influenced.

James Buchanan is the subject of Nancy MacLean’s book Democracy in Chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America (Viking, 2017). Buchanan’s views were similar to Hayek’s. From the 1950s he formulated rationales and strategies to remove government influence from markets. He saw the need for stealth early, as it became clear that most people want government services. He wanted not only to influence politicians but came to realise the need for his views to prevail in the legal system. It was not enough to influence the rulers, one needed to change the rules. His strategies were taken over by the Kochs and have been highly influential in the US.

One item in particular conveys the extremity of Buchanan’s thinking, a piece he wrote called The Samaritan’s Dilemma. If the Samaritan stops to help the Jewish traveller, robbed, injured and left by bandits, then the Jew will see the Samaritan as a soft mark and thereafter will try to take advantage of the Samaritan.

Australia’s discredited robodebt programme implemented this kind of thinking, as indeed have all our welfare and unemployment programmes for the past few decades: the poor, the unemployed and the disadvantaged must be punished until they make the effort to help themselves, otherwise they will just take more and more advantage of public largesse.

Buchanan, like the Morrison Government, exhibited a complete lack of compassion for the unfortunate. The possibility of mutual kindness is not considered, but rather actively discounted. These people, along with Hayek and the Kochs, evidently feel no compassion for their fellow humans. They discount emotional and social connection. It is fair to call them sociopaths.

Most people do feel compassion for their fellows. Most people understand that mutual kindness is of mutual benefit if others are open to reciprocating. Most people act this way in their families, among their friends, and often more widely as they perceive others needing understanding and support. These attitudes are confirmed to be innate in human beings by psychological and anthropological research: we spontaneously tend to cooperate with those we perceive as part of our group, whatever that group might be. Rutger Bregman’s Humankind (Bloomsbury 2020) is a recent and compelling account of these findings.

It has been clear for some time that unfettered competitive markets do not produce the economic benefits their proponents claim, and they severely damage the social fabric. The libertarian doctrine of these people goes against human nature. Discounting compassion, it is un-Christian. It is anti-social to the point of being sociopathic. It is anti-democratic. They are deceitful and they seek to overthrow democratic governance. We need to name their kind: they are subversives and traitors.

Robin Grille, in Parenting for a Peaceful World (Richmond UK, 2008) argues that people who have been raised lovingly and who have not been traumatised are innately kind and are incapable of harming others. It is because so many of us have been traumatised in so many ways that there is so much mutually harmful behaviour in the world. Much of this harm is wrought by people we can reasonably call psychopaths.

The radical right’s misguided obsession with individuality promotes such dysfunctional behaviour. It is a poison in our societies.