Maybe I’m giving the original comment too much leeway, but my interpretation is that he isn’t necessarily assuming a clinical diagnosis, just observing that there are people who have an easier time discarding empathy or exhibiting other traits that we commonly associate with psychopathy and that those people tend to be the ones establishing or perpetuating the system because it’s easier for them to adapt to the system they create.

I personally waffle back and forth on this - I agree that it’s both inaccurate and damaging to the discourse to assume the capacity for cruelty (or massive or extreme cruelty) is the product of genetic abnormalities or some other traits that render the perpetrator somehow exceptional compared to the baseline human condition, but there are also observable qualitative differences between the people that fall in line and those that don’t that haven’t been fully explicated and might have underlying dispositional components. The idea that the system is purely an emergent phenomenon and that those who perpetuate it are essentially a random sample of the population also feels reductionist to me. I don’t think that we’re generally equipped with a common vocabulary to discuss the differences among the active/passive participants and the active/passive opponents, so there’s a tendency to fall back on clinical language without an explicit intent to apply a formal classification.