Capitalism rewards sociopathic behavior. By design. That’s pretty much a given. A sociopath (with limits) will achieve far more effective goals than someone who worries about what their co-workers are thinking.
So does that mean that the human race must, under this intense pressure, evolve into something without empathy?
Sort of.
With a caveat.
And an important one.
There’s two competing factors here
(1) sociopathic behavior which is rewarded by capitalism and (2) cooperative behavior rewarded by all of human cultural evolution and exhibited by those “losers” of the capitalistic system who are trying to survive and pass along their genes.
Capitalism, by its nature, is energy intensive. It requires a massive energy input to maintain the needs of a highly competitive human being (including enhanced recovery from unnecessary conflicts and accidents).
That places it firmly in the realm of memetic evolution, not physical. This means, in a practical sense, that we are seeing shifts in behavior, with some epigenetic changes that will impact generations but nothing long, long term.
Why? Because evolution on a genetic level is slow and capitalism, by design, is very quick. A behavioral change, which we -excel- at, is the quickest way to press your advantage.
However, capitalism is also reaching its limits as it devastates its resource base. As an application of chaos theory, the system will start to distribute -needed- resources to maintain a capitalistic system in an unequal and often unexpected manner.
Take Iowa… (the winds they were a’ blowin’)
For example, who could have reliably predicted the loss of over a third of their economy? And a large chunk of their infrastructure destroyed due to a 45-minute derecho event?
Since our change is at a behavioral level, this dictates that some folks will act in accordance with sociopathic impulses and die because the resources they need to maintain their behavior are, literally, no longer available.
Others will alter to the human default, cooperation, and press out the sociopaths.
It also shows a way forward
Those people already trained in both capitalism AND in cooperation can take advantage of the insecurities of the situation to form resilient cultural strategies moving forward, potentially even preempting sociopathic intent before it gets lethal to the group in question.
tl;dr I firmly believe the assessment that sociopathic behavior wins the capitalist ‘race’ is correct. But the change is at a behavioral (cultural) level (with some trauma issues to be sorted out) and is (a) fixable and (b) leads to hope for the future.