The hubris of aggressive predators

The insufferable Dominique Strauss-Kahn used to be Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (2007-2011), but has been in the news since that time mostly because of a series of trials brought on by his innumerable sexual escapades. As part of his defense against accusations of bullying and mistreatment of scores of prostitutes and girl-friends, he explained that his only crime was in fact to have a greater and more brutal sex-drive than most men.

This type of brazen eructation means that DSK is definitely one of those toxic personalities that I have been denouncing over the years. Like his nominal ancestor Genghis Khan, he belongs to a long list of sexual predators that have been nonchalantly ruining millions of other people’s lives since the beginning of recorded history. That list includes such well-known aggressors as Mao Ze-tung, Joseph Mobutu, JFK, Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby and thousands of others, all of whom have in common not only their insatiable appetites for sexual domination, but also their hubristic attempts to justify their behavior as just another innocent aspect of their obviously superior personalities. Some of the world’s most powerful women are (or were) also quite capable of behaving in this manner, but most of the well-known historical examples are men.

What makes people like these so important in human society is not so much the sexual aspect of their collective rottenness as their capacity to get away with whatever kind of predatory activity that they choose to adopt. Sexual predation, after all, is just one of the ways in which the world’s most aggressive people make their domineering presence known to their endless numbers of victims. Instead of sexual appetite, the thirst for power is probably the most well-recorded motivation for sadistic violence, the leaders of all the world’s most important empires, past and present, vying for first place on the Olympic podium of cadaver making.

Every culture and every religion known to mankind can be justly proud of its own leading contributors. In recent times as well as in ancient times, the world’s most powerful people have done their best to kill as many enemies as possible, collateral damage to millions of innocent bystanders greatly enhancing their competing claims to fame. Some of the more modern aggressors have only succeeded in amassing greater quantities of corpses for themselves than more ancient participants because of technological progress and the much larger human populations that have become more recently available for slaughter.

But sex and power are not the only recorded justifications for rotten behavior among our leading citizens. Historically, the search for wealth has always been invoked as just as important as any of the other competing sources of motivation. During the past several centuries, every major financial crisis can be traced back to the insatiable appetites of the world’s greediest investors. Corrupt politicians in every part of the world have all taken considerable pride in making sure that their favorite millionaires and billionaires could always pass on most of the negative side effects of their colossal greed to the unsuspecting, small-time stakeholders that they were only nominally supposed to be representing.

Since the beginning of the current century, this particular motivation for aggressive predation has taken on a new wrinkle. Nowadays, the world’s leading politicians are all engaged in a frenzied rush to become more competitive than those of any other jurisdiction, by providing the maximum number of additional tax breaks and subsidies to the world’s largest holders of capital, the same ones responsible for the sub-prime crises, the enormous bribes doled out to win important contracts, the illegal tax dodges and the undercover funding for terrorist groups. To be sure, the corrupt politicians always pretend that they only want to encourage big-time owners of capital to stop hoarding and invest their money instead, thus providing jobs for millions of unemployed people. Even if, in extreme cases, those jobs are just to act as cannon fodder in foreign wars.

However, the crisis of confidence among all the world’s most important vulture capitalists since 2008 has been so overwhelming that most of them are simply holding onto their ill-gotten gains and pocketing all the legal tax breaks, alongside the illegal ones. All over the world, every single austerity program aimed at controlling public expenditure has thereby been turned into a massive political gambit that seems to be deliberately aimed at further increasing the already colossal income gap between the social classes.

Instead of alleviating some of the most negative effects of casino capitalism on ordinary people, like some of them were supposed to have done in the past, elected and non-elected politicians nowadays are doing exactly the opposite. Their thoroughly misleading programs only serve to increase the enormous quantities of unused capital that none of the world’s leading vultures dare to invest in anything useful, less they too be ripped off by their even more bloodthirsty, fellow vultures. Instead of investing in environmentally sustainable economic development, today’s financial predators are just moving their money around from one ultra-speculative pile of cash to another, avoiding doing anything that might give anyone else an opportunity to deprive them of their hard-earned booty.

Unfortunately, not a great deal can be done to stop any of these different kinds of world-class predators (often the same people). If it were only the world’s VIPs acting like monsters something could presumably be done about overcoming this disease. But everyone who has ever been witness to playground or schoolyard bullying knows for a fact that each victimized child is pretty much on his or her own, long before the reluctant authorities bother themselves sufficiently to intervene. This pattern of official identification with the aggressor, that every human being is forced to witness over and over again, has continued throughout recorded time to be a major component of human social behavior.

What is different about the current, ultra-individualist period of history, however, is that a large number of extraordinarily dangerous excuses for acting like a spoiled brat or an egotistical maniac are being increasingly tolerated, even more than they were in previous periods. There are dozens of different examples to choose from nowadays.

Probably the most important example is environmental damage, in which the criminal activities of the world’s biggest polluters, most of them in the extractive industries, are being strongly supported by large numbers of small-time collaborators. Modern transportation is the most obvious arena in which millions of gas-guzzling, individualistic SUV owners merrily condone the doctored science of climate-change deniers, funded by the suppliers of the world’s most important fossil fuels. Not having to use public transit, and therefore not having to rub elbows with lesser forms of human life, provides the red-blooded, freedom-loving suburbanites with the kind of existential elbow-room that only methane and carbon dioxide emissions can safely provide.

Another fascinating example of popular support for billionaire nihilism is the rising tide of ultra-conservative religious fundamentalism. Although this seems at the outset to be an entirely different kind of phenomenon than those already mentioned, it turns out that most religious fundamentalists in this world also support laissez-faire libertarianism. Succeeding in life without seemingly getting any support from government social programs is very popular with Christian fundamentalists all over the Western world, most of whom purport to believe that “God helps those who help themselves”. Conservative parties in the West, like the Republicans in the USA, have been bringing together radical religion, radical individualism and militarized forms of patriotic propaganda for decades.

Curiously enough, however, libertarian sentiments in social policy are also very popular in places where Christianity as such is no longer being tolerated. The entire Muslim world, not only in Muslim majority countries of either the Sunni or the Shiite versions, but also among Muslim minorities inside Western countries, is currently embroiled in several alarming attempts at turning the moderate masses sharply toward the extreme right. Billionaire-funded organizations on the Sunni side include the very extreme Islamic State in western Asia, and its African branches in Libya and Nigeria, the slightly less extreme Muslim Brotherhood, and dozens of similar organizations elsewhere. While on the much smaller Shiite side, the Iranian theocracy is trying its best to capitalize on support from the Iraqi government, the Lebanese Hezbollah and similar movements in places like Yemen and Bahrein.

At the same time, inside the Muslim diaspora throughout the Western world, the same ultra-reactionary movements are trying to provoke as many radicalized immigrants and converts as possible to attack non-Muslim Western targets. Their goal seems to be not only paying back Western empires for recent military adventures in Muslim countries, but also to provoke Islamophobic reactions among ultra-right wing Christians and Jews.

The overall idea seems to be to turn Samuel Huntington’s twentieth-century fantasy about a world-wide clash of civilizations into a functioning scenario. India has recently re-elected a Hindu nationalist movement as well, similar to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Christian fundamentalists in also supporting laissez-faire libertarianism. Comparable movements are also active among various extreme Buddhist factions, notably in Burma (Myanmar), Thailand and Japan. Each major world religion seems to possess a large and growing neofascist component, billionaire-funded in every case and infecting every large-sized group of emigrants to other parts of the world.

What all these different groups of people have in common is their complete lack of a social conscience. Belonging to the human race does not seem to have any effect at all on today’s ultra-libertarians, who want their individual rights to be guaranteed, without accepting any responsibility whatsoever for the effects of their egoism on the society around them. This is true whether they are the world’s most important people (sexual predators, empire builders, vulture capitalists), or just very ordinary people (suburbanites and radicalized religious folk) who feel that since we are all living in the most individualistic period of human history, they too should be democratically permitted to get away with whatever it is that they feel like doing.

In many countries, politically-correct sycophants are using national and international charters of human rights as a convenient method of providing cover for radicalized extremists. Freedom of religion, for example, is being extensively misinterpreted to include neofascist behavior, particularly among Muslim reactionaries, from the relatively innocuous wearing of anti-feminist, cover-up, clothing all the way up to the killing of Western cartoonists. Those found guilty of drawing caricatures of Mohamed are said to have brought their deaths on themselves by provoking their murderers, much in the same way that women all over the world are said to have brought rape on themselves by wearing provocative clothing.

Religious-minded people in particular enjoy referring to charters of rights for the obvious reason that none of them seem to have included freedom from religion in their lists of rights. Unbelievers are probably the largest group of people in today’s world who do not enjoy any kind of human rights protection at all. Curiously enough, however, the same apologizers also try to provide political cover for religious and philosophical sects that do not believe in supporting modern medical science, even to the extent of refusing vaccination for their children. In other words, over-accommodating religious extremism could easily plunge humanity back into the kind of world we used to live in before penicillin was discovered.  

Now more than ever, human societies are afflicted with all different kinds of egotistical aggression. Libertarians with a great deal of money or power are doing their best to convince as many ordinary people as possible to rally round whichever populist flag they happen to be flying. The world’s VIP predators end up being considerably more dangerous than the less powerful ones, not just for their own direct crimes but also for their radicalizing effect on the world’s remaining moderate majorities. As a result, even though the number of cadavers has declined slightly since the collapse of the Iron Curtain, if current trends continue we should be getting back to higher numbers again very soon. It should not take too long before the combined efforts of the neoliberal mobsters, the billionaire-funded religious barbarians and the world’s other leading predators manage to catch up with their top-scoring predecessors from the Cold War period.