Hyper-individualism and the big lie technique

The human race as a whole is not adequately facing up to any of the major issues that currently threaten not only to prevent any further political, social, economic or cultural progress, in every part of the world, but also to do away with every good thing that civilized society has so far been able to put into place. Environmental pollution, caused largely by a persistent over-reliance on fossil fuels, continues to get worse and worse all the time, in spite of everything that all sorts of people in power are supposed to be doing to combat it. The same thing goes for the imminence of major new economic crises (due to repeated failures to act on any of the causes of the 2007-2009 crisis), unsustainably high and deliberately exacerbated income gaps between the social classes, the long series of geopolitical confrontations between major powers that are getting increasingly difficult to prevent from breaking out into a world-war configuration, the enormous new military power of organized crime in dozens of different countries, world-wide levels of addiction to almost everything that have never been seen before in times past, and the impossibly high levels of agricultural and industrial production required just to keep up with the never-ending increases in total world population.

Instead of reacting to these multiple threats to our continuing existence by developing some kind of concerted international effort to overcome them all, however, a great many people are reacting in a perverse way by attempting to deny that any of these things are really happening. Thereby freeing those deplorable people’s little minds so that they can focus all their attention on some irrelevant kind of personal or “tribal” obsession that has nothing to do with helping solve any of the world’s most serious problems. As if all of those major issues would simply go away all by themselves, if everyone would just concentrate their feeble and wholly inadequate mental capacities on relatively minor issues instead.

Joseph Goebbels big lie technique Is the number one method being used by all of those swelled-head, hubristic people so that they can pass off every one of the huge problems mentioned above as some kind of fake news. Their basic idea is first to consciously design what they hope to become the world’s most reactionary political program, and then to accuse their foreign and domestic political opponents of doing exactly what they just did. As a result, ultra-right-wing populism has become extremely important not just in DJ Trump’s USA, but also in Latin America (Brazil, Peru, Guatemala, Honduras, Salvador, Haiti, etc.), Europe (Russia, Poland, Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Britain, Spain, etc.), Africa (Libya, Eritrea, Sudan, the Central African Republic, the “Democratic” Republic of the Congo, Zimbabwe, South Africa, etc.), and Asia (China, India, Myanmar, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc.).

Which means that each separate cluster of spoiled brats, spread out all over the world, can thereby project all its negative emotions onto the heads of its political enemies, accusing “those other people” of deliberately doing everything wrong that it is humanly possible to do, instead of them. All the neoliberal (laissez-faire) programs adopted just about everywhere since 1979 belong to this “open conspiracy”, as do the even more devastating neofascist programs, that reinforce neoliberalism instead of replacing it. In other words, the vast majority of the world’s governments and political movements nowadays belong to the selfsame half liberal/half conservative swamp, everyone in the swamp accusing everyone else of not doing anything to properly govern any given society, let alone coordinating world policy decisions.

This is precisely the same approach to human life on this planet that has already been used, since time began, by every narcissistic pervert in this world in order to transfer his (or her) totally immature personality onto everyone else. As professional manipulators, these malignant narcissists are incapable of genuine love or empathy for others, and try instead to overcome their own abysmally low self-esteem by using their expert seduction and acting skills so as to play on their intended victim’s guilt feelings. Thereby belittling their targets as “inferior” people and attempting to con them into accepting the manipulator’s “inherent superiority” and domination. Like five-year old children, these immature adults adopt frequent changes in opinion and emotions, as well as fuzzy and indirect methods of verbal and non-verbal communication, to convince their intended victims that the sacrificial lambs are the “real” bad guys and that the manipulators are the “real” victims after all. Although business and politics are definitely not the only fields of human endeavour dominated by these ultra-individualists nowadays, such upside-down people do have a distinct tendency to congregate in those two particular domains.

Donald Trump’s administration in the USA is the most obvious example of this kind of perversion, but far from being the only one. Trump himself excels at projecting his own malignant personality onto all of his opponents, domestic and foreign, relying on his own experiences as a cut-throat deal maker in real estate and casinos, as well as his kingpin role in one of the USA’s most unrealistic “reality” shows. Making a spectacle of his own stupidity in those two endeavours was excellent preparation for his current role as the worst president in US history (which is quite a feat all by itself), Trump being considerably dumber than even his relatively recent, tinseltown predecessor, Ronald Reagan. He has spent his entire political career so far making extremely racist and/or sexist comments one day, then issuing statements the next day denying that it ever happened. Nothing is more debilitating than watching this severely under-educated and extremely dangerous madman trying to ruin as many different aspects of American policy as he can get his grubby hands on.

The most well-known example of his completely inadequate behaviour is his administration’s total denial of anthropogenic climate change, and all the other negative effects of industrial pollution on everyone’s health. Which is just a neat way for them to get their corporate allies, especially in the extractive industries, off the hook for the immense profits that they are constantly gleaning from everyone else’s misery. But it is not just in the USA that these kinds of policies are being continually advocated. On every issue, not just on climate change, almost all the major political parties and movements in today’s world are divided almost equally between two particular options. On the one hand, there are those who agree with Trump and his supporters that nothing has to be done, since none of the above-mentioned problems really exist except in other people’s minds. And on the other hand, there are those who say that they honestly believe that something has to be done right away about every one of those major issues, before it is too late to prevent a major collapse in civilization, but then never seem to get around to making any real decisions about any of those things.

Another good example of this same kind of ultra-narcissistic behaviour, but not nearly as well-known, is the corporate backlash against the North American union movement (or what is left of it) and its current campaign to install a 15-dollar minimum wage across the continent. According to all the pro-employer sycophants, trying to make sure that the working poor earn at least 30 000 US dollars per year (15 dollars times 40 hours a week times 50 weeks) cannot do any good, because it will necessarily result in the loss of several million jobs throughout the USA and Canada. Economists working for the Bank of Canada came out with a report on this issue just a couple of weeks ago, claiming that major job losses would be inevitable, given the absolute need of all employers to transfer the effects of those salary increases onto someone else, through shorter hours or total lay-offs for their workers, or significant price increases for their customers, or all of the above, thereby impoverishing almost everyone around them. In other words, according to Canada’s central bank, the workers supporting that cause turn out to be the “real” bad guys, with the employers ending up as part of the very large group of their potential victims. Turning reality on its head is by far the most popular method of rhetoric in today’s world.

The Bank of Canada’s opposition to the 15 dollar an hour campaign is based on a totally bogus argument, but one that is nevertheless thoroughly supported by most of the CEOs of Canada’s top 100 corporations, who make an obscene average of about 2500 dollars per hour in (officially reported) income. These are the same people who make as much money in a few days as the average Canadian makes in a year. They are not, however, the richest people in this country, since the real owners of those same corporations (in Canada as well as everywhere else) have all salted most of their capital gains away in such tax havens as Barbados, havens that the Canadian government and most of the politicians in its parliament have repeatedly refused to investigate.

The reason why such corporations cannot simply absorb the cost of those working-class salary increases through reduced profits is not often supplied. Aside from the very superficial “explanation” according to which the deliberate division of many corporate empires into dozens of theoretically “independent” dealerships and franchises, makes it impossible for any such empire to deal with such problems except on a strictly local level, where the artificially imposed small bosses are not deemed to be nearly rich enough to live up to any social responsibilities whatsoever. Such structural divisions, however, do not seem to prevent any of those “independent” local employers from passing on most of the accumulated profits from every division to a “higher corporate authority”.

On the face of it, the fact that most of the world’s leading corporations have accumulated several trillion dollars of unused capital, as currently displayed on their official balance sheets, in every one of the world’s major economic regions, would not seem to indicate any obvious incapacity to pay such slightly increased salaries, if they really wanted to do so. The only other reason occasionally supplied in the media, for corporate incapacity to do anything at all for ordinary people everywhere, “at this time”, is the cut-throat competition between all the world’s fiscal administrations, aimed at constantly lowering taxes (on corporations and on rich people’s incomes) in order to attract more productive investment from all those gigantic pools of stagnant capital.

However, tax evasion does not seem to be much of an argument to explain low wages, and only adds more benefits to the profit side of the ledger. The tax evasion argument does, however, make all the world’s governments look like bad guys, along with all the trade unions, thereby taking the onus even more off of the corporations. But only if we forget the fact that it was Big Business itself, through the copycat effect of neoliberalism over the past forty years, that eventually turned all the world’s governments into full-fledged corporate sycophants in the first place. Which makes that argument an excellent example of the “fuzzy and indirect methods of verbal and non-verbal communication” (i. e., “creative lying”) used in the above definition of malignant narcissism, which also applies quite well to today’s vulture capitalism.

The leading political commentators, otherwise known as professional myth-makers, in all the world’s leading media, also regularly repeat the positivist mantra according to which humanity, after all, has made a great deal of social progress in recent decades because the number of extremely poor people in the world has been cut back from two to “only” one billion people. Because of successful industrialization in parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America, “middle classes” of industrial workers, small merchants and professional people have replaced a large proportion of the ultra-poor peasants of days gone by. But the fuzzy thinking obvious in that particular fable comes from the fact that the official United Nations definition of the “ultra-poor” is anyone making less than two dollars a day! Which works out to an annual income of about 730 dollars per year. It only looks like progress to people trying desperately to find something to feel good about.

And those variegated “middle classes”, in what used to be called the “third world” (about 85% of the entire world population), are mostly living on incomes that do indeed lie in-between those of the ultra-poor and those of the ultra-rich in all of those countries, but only amount to about 10 or 15% of what is currently considered “lower middle-class” in Canada, the USA, most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. In other words, even in the most optimistic approximations, the average world income per capita, per year, is only about 3000 dollars. Even if the cost of living in the world’s median countries is considerably less than that prevailing in the richer countries, 3000 dollars per year do not add up to a great deal of progress. In reality, average living conditions and working conditions in most of the world’s countries are truly disgusting, making the corresponding conditions of the working poor in North America (Canada and the USA) look like paradise by comparison. (Not to forget, however, that millions of people living in dozens of “pockets of poverty” inside those same two countries are a lot worse off than most of the working poor.) In other words, progress is in the eyes of the beholder.

Another leading example of fuzzy thinking is the book published in 2011 by a psychology professor at Harvard University, Steven Pinker, called The Better Angels of our Nature. This highly influential publication tried to make the case that violence as a whole (including such diverse forms as murder, war, genocide, domestic violence against women and the spanking of children) has declined considerably over time, not just in the Western world but everywhere else as well. This type of popular psychology forms part of the “jovialist” variety of amateur philosophy that I have been denouncing for several years now, comprising a strange group of professional commentators in every field who are always emphasizing how much better everything is now than it was before, rather than the other way around. These people firmly believe that it does not do any good for anyone to worry about any of the major issues cited above, which do not really exist anyway, and that instead everyone should just sit back and enjoy life in a (falsely) epicurean fashion.

Pinker is one of those thinkers who believes, for example, that since the Cold War never degenerated into a nuclear war, that this is just one more proof of a general tendency among world leaders since 1945 not to indulge as often as before in direct warfare between competing states. He acknowledges that several civil wars have been going on in recent decades, but he seems to consider that those are somehow less important than state versus state warfare. Nevertheless, those “civil wars” include such events as the “Great Leap Forward” (1958-1961) and the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (1965-1975) in the “People’s” Republic of China, both of which killed off tens of millions of ordinary Chinese during the Maoist period. Or the civil war in the “Democratic” Republic of the Congo (DRC), that killed at least five million people (mostly through famine) between 1998 and 2003, and is still continuing nowadays (albeit less actively than before), the different sides in that multifaceted war over the control of mineral resources being militarily supplied by rival foreign powers.

For some reason that is hard to fathom, Pinker also claims that genocide is less popular since the Second World War than it used to be in times past. In spite of the 1,5 million people killed during the Khmer Rouge period in Cambodia (1975-1979), just prior to the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia and the Chinese counter-invasion of northern Vietnam right after that. And in spite of the 800 000 people killed during the Hutu massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, that also spilled over after 1994 into the DRC civil war mentioned above. Many of the dead in the Congo war being Hutu refugees (often ex-perpetrators of genocide) executed by forces sent into that country for that express purpose by the newly-formed Tutsi government in neighbouring Rwanda, which is still in power today. Pinker’s idea seems to be that since the overall world population is much higher now than it used to be, and the overall number of dead people is (according to him) still a lower percentage of the total population than it was in previous decades, that therefore things are getting better after all, all the time.

To be sure, Pinker cannot be blamed for the civil war that broke out in Syria during the same year in which he published his book. However the number of people killed or exiled since 2011 in that war did not just suffer because of a civil dispute, but also, as in most of the other examples furnished above, because of international interference in all those conflicts. In other words, the world’s major powers seem to have generally avoided direct military confrontations between them, at least since 1945, by engaging in proxy wars elsewhere. For example, the USA and several of its allies were very much involved in both the Korean (1950-1953) and Vietnamese (1957-1975) civil wars, each one of which killed off at least two or three million people, but that included only a very small number of soldiers coming from the leading power in the “Eastern” bloc, the Soviet Union. It did, however, involve several million Chinese soldiers in the Korean conflict, of whom about 900 000 also died.

Many of the Western powers (the USA, Britain, France, Belgium) also supported opposing sides not only in the Rwandan civil war and the one in the DRC, but also in such prior conflicts as the civil war in Nigeria (“Biafra”) back in 1969-1971. Another example of foreign participation in other country’s civil wars being India’s involvement in the very bloody civil war between western Pakistan (today’s Pakistan) and eastern Pakistan (now called Bangladesh), in 1970-1971. Or the involvement of both Syria and Israel in the civil war in Lebanon (1975-1990). Or US involvement in the “liberation” of Koweit during the first Gulf War (1990-1991) and the overthrow of local dictator Saddam Hussein in Iraq (2003). Or the even more deadly implication of the USA, France, Russia, Saudi Arabia and its allies (through the Islamic State movement), as well as Iran and Israel, in the still-ongoing war in and around Syria.

What are we supposed to think also about Pinker’s historical statistics concerning a general decline in violent deaths in the USA, in spite of all the random shootings that now take place two or three times per day? Official statistics are probably not much use either in Mexico, given the ever-increasing number of victims in Mexico’s not-so-civil war between the government and that country’s drug cartels, in which some of the cartels are often allied with opposing factions inside the government. What about Pinker’s claim of a general decline in violence against women, just prior to the “outbreak” of thousands of different accusations of rape and sexual harassment against hundreds of leading movie moguls, well-known musicians (including classical musicians) and politicians (including Donald Trump), not only in the USA but also in dozens of other countries the world over? How can Steven Pinker also complain about how his critics are always mixing up “really important” kinds of violence like genocide with so-called, “relatively minor” kinds of violence like rape, when he made the same kind of amalgam, over and over again, in his book? Like he is still doing nowadays, such as in the interview published in the December 2017 issue of the French magazine, Sciences humaines.

Are we supposed to presume that Pinker believes that the accusations by “lower-ranked” female victims against their “higher-ranked” male tormentors really became an example of declining violence against women, after all, because those victims finally thought that they could publicly denounce those evil men without being ridiculed all the time, like they used to be in the past? If so, we are still left with the pro-male rebound effect, whereby those female victims have recently been attacked by millions of those men’s supporters in the social media. As well as by hundreds of well-known female apologists such as the leading ladies in France led by actor Catherine Deneuve, who signed a media protest letter of identification with the aggressors, accusing the rape and sexual harassment victims of having “gone too far in their feminist rage” against those poor beleaguered men.

As usual in such cases, dozens of intellectual sycophants have also once again stepped up to the plate, saying that even though what those leading politicians, film-makers, musicians (and so on) did was obviously wrong, nevertheless we should not be destroying any of those leading men’s careers, since their contributions to society, and to art, were nevertheless so very important. Film-makers like Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, for example, as well as distinguished musicians like symphony conductor Charles Dutoit, must still be recognized as geniuses in their fields in spite of their “occasional transgressions”.

In reality, however, supporting evil geniuses in this way is not a new phenomenon. Many leading personalities from the past are also regularly supported even nowadays for their contributions to whatever field of endeavour in spite of also having possessed many “regrettable” personal characteristics. The French author Louis-Ferdinand Céline, for example, apparently wrote several pieces of great literature in spite of also having penned several extremely anti-semitic essays back in the 1940s. A major French publisher (Gallimard) has decided to reprint those essays these days because it is so important, after all, to “read everything written” by such a great writer. This recent decision, in fact much more a contribution to that firm’s bottom line than to anything else, has touched off a major political storm in that country, forcing the publisher in question to “suspend” the reprint until all of that bad publicity blows over.

More or less similar to the political storm in the USA that broke out just after presidential candidate Trump was pilloried during the campaign for having pointed out how easy it was for major personalities like himself to get way with grabbing women’s crotches in public. Hundreds of thousands of similar scandals have also broken out all through history, in every single country, affecting every single political and religious culture in the world. In every human society that has ever existed, VIPs have always been supported for everything they do, by those who like to identify with every passing aggressor, no matter what the nature of their actions. More or less in the same way as dominant apes (“silverbacks”) usually get away with anything they feel like doing in the animal kingdom.

Steven Pinker, however, has managed to defend himself quite well against one possible additional charge against him, by pointing out that he in no way believes that any of the recent trends (according to him) toward lesser degrees of violence, will necessarily continue into the future. Which brings us back to all the ultra-right-wing populist (neofascist) governments and political movements that I mentioned earlier in this text. Whatever positive trends in some countries that may have existed during the previous period of history (1945-1979), before neoliberalism and neofascism started to become so increasingly popular, the prevailing trend nowadays is toward a simultaneous, world-wide revival of both nineteenth-century laissez-faire and twentieth-century fascism. Which are not really as unrelated to one another as most people seem to believe. And that also means that such countervailing tendencies as the female victims successful denunciations of their male tormentors, may very well not last much longer. Unfortunately, it looks like the useless old mantra of “be strong, move on” is still going to be an attack victim’s only possible defence, even nowadays.

Equally unfortunate is the recent rise of several other leading examples of malignant narcissistic behaviour. One of those is the current tendency among many theoretically left-wing movements to vehemently denounce recent, Western Christian examples of imperialism, racism, sexism and neofascism much more virulently than they denounce very similar ultra-right-wing political activity among any of the “Eastern” countries and religious cultures. Many of those people vehemently object to the use of the expression “Islamic fascism”, for example, apparently because it was used quite often a few years ago by neoconservative supporters of George W. Bush, when he was president of the USA. Coming mostly from Western Christian-majority countries themselves, those leftists seem to think that everything that is wrong with this world during the past 500 years has all been caused exclusively by Western imperialism, which (according to them) turned all the other countries on this planet into formal colonies for a very long period, and continues to control them all indirectly even nowadays, through various kinds of neocolonialism.

As I pointed out already in several of my previous blogposts, however, imperialism, racism, sexism and ultra-reactionary methods of social control such as slavery, existed in every major culture, all over the world, centuries before the rise of modern (largely Western) imperialism. During the colonial period, even in those countries that were in fact totally dominated by Western empires, previously-existing local elites (traitors) were easily coopted into collaborating with those empires in the political, economic, social and cultural exploitation of their own populations. In British India for example, back in 1900, there is no way that the 90 000 British citizens then living in India could possibly have controlled the then population of 300 million Indians, without considerable help from the local elites. Since the advent of modern forms of neocolonialism, many of those same elites have broken away, at least partially, from foreign control and are currently rebuilding their ancient empires, as in the example of the current Chinese revival of the great silk roads from days gone by (“make China great again”).

So far as Islamic fascism is concerned, it is certainly true that several Western empires (especially the USA, Britain and France) have often helped their ultra-conservative Islamic allies retake control of many of the Muslim-majority countries in this world, as a method of fighting against the influence of communism and economic nationalism in those same places. But it would have been entirely impossible for those foreign empires to have cooperated with ultra-right-wing movements in those countries if those local antediluvians had had no popular support whatsoever. Foreign armies and intelligence services cannot simply invent such movements all by themselves.

Fundamentalist religious factions, after all, are the primary source of popular support nowadays for ultra-reactionary regimes all over the world, not just in the Muslim world, but also in the Christian world, and the Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Confucianist, Shintoist and animist worlds as well. Which also applies to every one of the leading branches of those religions, such as the Sunnis and the Shiites inside Islam, or the Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant (evangelical) sections of Christianity. The religious leaders of all those ultra-right-wing populist movements are every bit as much malignant narcissists as are the political leaders, as well as the cultural misogynists like Harvey Weinstein. All the world’s leading reactionaries possess very similar psychological profiles.

Many religious-minded people all over the world also have an irritating tendency to practise their religions in simultaneously ultra-conservative and hypocritical ways. Millions of Muslim women, for example, have recently taken to hiding their faces and bodies behind tribal-origin garments like the hijab and the niqab, in a highly individualistic effort to interpret the Koranic verses in favour of female modesty in the most ultra-reactionary ways possible. Which, however, does not at all prevent them from also using as much ultra-modern make-up as possible, even if only their eyes are showing.

This type of opportunistic behaviour, however, is by no means confined to people from the Muslim religion, nor to women. In Canada, for example, there is quite a large Sikh community, that has a coast-to-coast tendency to support the Liberal Party more than any other mainstream political party. Several Sikh men have risen in the ranks all the way to the top, such as Canada’s current minister of defence, Harjit Singh Sajjan, who also fought with the Canadian Army in Afghanistan. Which has not prevented him from being accused by the chief minister of the Punjab region of India as a clandestine supporter of the Khalistan movement (militant Sikh separatism), including the Sikh terrorists who downed an Air India airliner back in 1985, killing several hundred Canadian citizens in the process.

Another prominent Canadian, Jagmeet Singh, also from the Sikh religion, was recently elected as the head of Canada’s third-largest political party, the New Democratic Party. Both he and Harjit Sajjan are also well known for their strict observance of the Sikh dress code, including the obligatory beard and the small sword (or “kirpan”), the wearing of which in public has been upheld by the Canadian Supreme Court even for high school students. Jagmeet Singh has also been accused of supporting the same militant separatist, and terrorist, movements as Harjit Singh. Both of these men are also apparently on record as not choosing to support the traditional Sikh rejection of such social practices as adultery and homosexuality, presumably because such ultra-conservative traditions are often condemned by most Liberal and NDP supporters. Rather obvious contradictions such as these ones certainly seem to put both men into the opportunist category, behaving both as “good Sikhs” and as “bad Sikhs” at the same time.

But once again, such curious combinations of both fervent traditionalism on the one hand and obvious hypocrisy on the other are by no means confined to minority religions in Canada, like the Sikh and the Muslim religions. Stephen Harper, from the Conservative Party, was the Prime Minister of Canada for about ten years, from 2006 to 2015, during which time he presided over a decidedly neoliberal (laissez-faire) government that was fervently supported by most of Canada’s Christian fundamentalist churches. That did not prevent him, however, from simultaneously refusing to implement legislation, or even to openly debate, such conservative social policies as opposition to abortion and to same-sex marriages. That non-observance of the social side of the conservative mindset was also caused by blatant opportunism, Harper being very aware of the fact that supporting such policies would have prevented his government from ever being elected, those points of view not being all that popular in Canada, at least in recent years.

All of these distinctly hypocritical and individualistic interpretations of religious principles, and the words written down in holy books, are also a lot like the similarly “eternal” principles of the written constitutions of most of the world’s countries. Those highly prestigious documents are also regularly misinterpreted to suit the current needs of many different governments, political movements, or individual narcissists in positions of leadership. The “emoluments” clause in the US Constitution, for example, has never been invoked by any American government, and the second amendment has been almost as diversely interpreted over the years as there have been competing administrations.

Canada’s charter of human rights, imbedded in its constitution since 1982, has been subject to any number of conflicting interpretations, such as the current controversy over the access to federal government funding for religious organizations refusing to recognize women’s reproductive rights. For its part, the 1948 Universal Declaration of human rights is supposed to be binding on all member states of the United Nations Organization, but has been violated since its adoption more often, by more states, than it has ever been upheld. Which works out to a great deal of perverse narcissism on the part of many hundreds of world leaders over the past seven decades.

The same general problem of malignant narcissism has also shown up recently in the efforts of many trans-gender people (mostly ex-males) to achieve complete equality and recognition of all the rights (theoretically) granted to biological women. On the face of it, there does not seem to be anything wrong (as the writers of the old Seinfeld television show might have put it) with biological males deciding to re-identify themselves in public as women. However, there are necessarily quite a few problems that biologically complete women have in every human society that simply cannot apply to every trans-gender male, no matter how much such people might wish it were so.

Last but by no means least, narcissistic perversion has always been one of the more unfortunate characteristics of competitive sports since human societies first began to practise them. All over the world, the media are full of stories about the harm that individual players and the people who surround them are constantly doing to those players bodies in the name of competitive sport. Practically every sport on this planet is chock full of numerous cases of harmful doping, concussions caused by vicious aggression, and so on and so forth. As usual, no one seems to be capable of doing anything about this problem, most of the players and the teams involved always putting victory, or the sale of tickets, far ahead of health, or legal sanctions against criminal acts. More or less in the same way that most business people treat their bottom lines better than their employees, or that leading politicians all over the world feel the need to treat their opponents (foreign and domestic) as swamp creatures, rather than to acknowledge their own membership in the same swampy menagerie.

All these different kinds of hyper-individualism, and the extreme popularity of the big lie technique, seem to have infected every country, ideology and religion on this planet, as well as every political, economic, social and cultural domain of human endeavour. Which means, unfortunately, that things are not only not getting any better these days, but indeed threaten to become a whole lot worse in the very near future.