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“The Self-Proclaimed Savages: How Grant Weaponises Psychology to Excuse Elite Psychopathy” - 11 August 2025

Breaking Down the Manipulative Playbook of a Libertarian Ex-Con Who Glorifies Toxic Leadership While Condemning Systemic Change

Ivor Jones The Māori Green Ltn

11 Aug 2025 — 14 min read

Mōrena koutou,

Damien Grant, the self-described libertarian liquidator turned Stuff columnist, has delivered yet another masterpiece in the dark art of privileged self-justification. His latest piece, masquerading as intellectual curiosity about psychopathy, is actually a calculated exercise in normalising the very antisocial traits that allow the wealthy to exploit working whānau while positioning themselves as evolutionary winners. This is not mere opinion writing - this is ideological warfare dressed up as Sunday morning philosophy.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/society/360785175/damien-grant-why-difficult-people-sometimes-rise-top

Context and Kaupapa

Grant's article, dripping with faux academic concern about "difficult people" rising to power, arrives at a moment when Aotearoa faces unprecedented inequality, housing crisis, and corporate power concentration. Yet rather than examining how our economic system rewards antisocial behaviour, Grant uses pop psychology to legitimise the psychopathic traits of business elites while simultaneously confessing his own dark personality markers. This is neoliberal ideology at its most insidious - turning personal pathology into market virtue.

The timing is no accident. As corporate psychopathy research shows that one in five CEOs displays psychopathic traits, Grant's piece serves to precondition readers to accept this as natural rather than systemic. His confession of having "five" antisocial traits becomes not a warning but a boast, positioning antisocial behaviour as the rational response to market conditions.

Unpacking the Manipulator

Grant's background reveals the perfect storm of privilege, criminality, and ideological extremism. Sentenced to 30 months in prison for fraud in his twenties, he served 16 months before reinventing himself as a liquidator and libertarian pundit. His conviction involved ten fraud charges in 1994, yet he has parlayed this criminal history into a platform for defending corporate malfeasance.linkinghub.elsevier+1

Grant's admission to taking $63,266 from the COVID wage subsidy despite believing his business would survive without it reveals his true character. While families struggled through lockdown, Grant treated public funds as his personal entitlement, justifying theft through libertarian ideology about government overreach. This is the moral foundation upon which he builds his defence of psychopathic leadership.linkinghub.elsevier

The Seven Deadly Traits of Antisocial Supremacy

Barbara Oakley's research identifies seven traits of antisocial personality disorder, with just three qualifying for diagnosis. Grant proudly claims five. Let us examine how these traits manifest in his ideological project:

The Seven Traits of Antisocial Personality Disorder - Having just three qualifies for diagnosis

Deceitfulness permeates every aspect of Grant's public persona. He positions himself as a reformed character while simultaneously celebrating the antisocial traits that enabled his criminal career. His battles with professional bodies over his insolvency licence reveal an ongoing pattern of manipulation designed to maintain access to corporate power.onlinelibrary.wiley

Lack of remorse manifests in Grant's casual dismissal of the wage subsidy theft as merely taking back "money the government took." No acknowledgment of the families who went without while he enriched himself, no recognition of the healthcare workers whose safety depended on public funding. This emotional void extends to his liquidation work, where he dismantles businesses while showing zero empathy for displaced workers.

Serious irresponsibility appears in Grant's failure to examine how his ideological prescriptions harm working communities. By promoting antisocial traits as evolutionary advantages, he abandons any responsibility for the social destruction that follows psychopathic leadership.

The Dark Triad's Corporate Playground

Grant's fascination with the Dark Triad of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy is not academic curiosity but professional identification. Research confirms that these traits are overrepresented in corporate leadership, creating what Grant celebrates as "successful reproductive strategy" but which Māori understand as spiritual sickness.Damien-Grant_-Why-difficult-people-sometimes-rise-to-the-top-_-Stuff.PDF journals.lww

The libertarian worldview that Grant espouses depends entirely on celebrating antisocial behaviour as rational market response. Neoliberalism's emphasis on individual responsibility and meritocracy provides perfect cover for psychopathic exploitation, reframing harm to communities as personal failing rather than systemic violence.mdpi

Corporate psychopaths in CEO positions create organisational cultures of bullying, staff withdrawal, and declined revenue. Yet Grant's analysis completely ignores this harm, focusing instead on the evolutionary "advantages" of antisocial behaviour. This wilful blindness is itself a psychopathic trait - the inability to recognise or care about harm caused to others.link.springer

The Libertarian-to-Fascist Pipeline

Grant's ideology represents a crucial link in the libertarian-to-fascist pipeline that threatens Indigenous rights across the settler world. His celebration of psychopathic traits in leadership provides intellectual cover for authoritarian strongmen who promise to restore "natural" hierarchies through violence and exploitation.

The connection between libertarian ideology and white supremacy becomes clear when we examine who benefits from "evolutionary" justifications for antisocial behaviour. Corporate psychopaths create toxic workplace cultures that disproportionately harm women and minorities, yet Grant's framework positions this as natural selection rather than systemic oppression.linkinghub.elsevier

His casual reference to Genghis Khan having "littered his DNA throughout the steppes of Asia" reveals the genocidal implications of his worldview. When psychopathy becomes evolutionary advantage, mass violence becomes natural selection. This is how libertarian ideology morphs into fascist justification for ethnic cleansing.

The Whakapapa of Exploitation

From a Māori perspective, Grant's celebration of antisocial traits represents the complete severing of whakapapa - the relationships that bind us to each other and to the land. The psychopathic individual exists in spiritual isolation, unable to comprehend the interconnectedness that sustains life itself.

The seven traits Grant celebrates are precisely the characteristics that enabled colonisation: the deceitfulness of broken treaties, the lack of remorse for stolen land, the reckless disregard for Indigenous life. His ideology provides ongoing justification for neo-colonial extraction, reframing spiritual sickness as market virtue.

Māori concepts like manaakitanga (care for others) and kaitiakitanga (guardianship) become impossible under Grant's framework. When antisocial traits are evolutionary advantages, Indigenous values become evolutionary disadvantages to be selected against. This is cultural genocide dressed as scientific analysis.

Grant's piece functions as manufacturing consent for psychopathic leadership through several sophisticated mechanisms. First, he normalises antisocial traits by positioning them as common rather than pathological. His admission of having five antisocial traits becomes relatability rather than warning.

Second, he biologises social behaviour through references to brain structure differences, removing antisocial behaviour from moral consideration. The smaller hippocampus and amygdala in psychopaths become not disability requiring support but natural variation requiring celebration.journals.sagepub

Third, he historicises exploitation through references to Churchill and Steve Jobs, positioning contemporary corporate psychopathy as continuation of heroic tradition. The harm caused by these figures disappears, replaced by mythologised achievements that justify current suffering.

Hidden Connections and Power Networks

Grant's position as both liquidator and media commentator reveals the symbiotic relationship between corporate destruction and ideological justification. His role in liquidating major housing developments while defending antisocial business practices creates perfect cover for systematic wealth extraction.berghahnjournals

The network of libertarian think tanks, corporate media, and insolvency practitioners forms what we might call the "dismantling economy" - a system designed to extract value from failing businesses while preventing systemic analysis of why they fail. Grant's media platform serves to legitimise this extraction by reframing corporate failure as natural selection rather than policy choice.

His connections to overseas libertarian networks, including Barbara Oakley's residency through the New Zealand Initiative, reveal the international coordination behind seemingly local ideological projects. These are not isolated opinion pieces but coordinated campaigns to reshape public understanding of acceptable behaviour.

Implications for Tangata Whenua

Grant's ideology poses direct threat to Māori self-determination by positioning collective values as evolutionary disadvantages. When antisocial traits become market virtues, Indigenous concepts of shared responsibility become impediments to economic efficiency.

The libertarian opposition to co-governance arrangements becomes not racism but evolutionary realism - the recognition that antisocial individuals are naturally superior to communities bound by reciprocal obligation. This provides sophisticated justification for dismantling Treaty settlements and Indigenous rights protections.

Grant's framework also threatens Māori approaches to justice and healing. When antisocial behaviour is biologised rather than understood as spiritual disconnection, restorative justice becomes impossible. The psychopath cannot be healed because psychopathy becomes natural variation rather than separation from whakapapa.

The Māori Green Lantern fighting misinformation and disinformation from the far right

Reclaiming Our Spiritual Authority

Damien Grant's article represents everything that is spiritually bankrupt about neoliberal ideology. His celebration of antisocial traits, wrapped in pseudo-scientific justification, serves to normalise the very behaviour patterns that are destroying our communities and our planet.

But we must recognise this not as intellectual discourse but as spiritual warfare - an attempt to convince us that connection, empathy, and collective responsibility are evolutionary weaknesses rather than the foundations of sustainable society.

The answer is not to engage with Grant's framework on its own terms but to assert our own spiritual authority. Māori have always known that the individual severed from whakapapa is not evolved but sick, not successful but spiritually starving.

We must reject the lie that exploitation is natural, that cruelty is clever, that antisocial behaviour represents human advancement. These are the delusions of the spiritually broken, desperate to convince themselves that their isolation is superiority.

The future belongs not to the psychopaths Grant celebrates but to the communities that remember how to care for each other. Our task is to build that future while protecting it from those who would destroy it for personal gain.

Kia kaha, kia māia, kia manawanui.

The Māori Green Lantern

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