In our society, we do not push psychopaths off the ice when nobody is looking. In our society, we let them rule the world.
Reading by Tim Foley:
If there were a thousand people living on an island, and one of them began making life miserable for everyone else, there would soon be 999 people living on the island.
How strange, then, that a few oligarchs and empire managers get to push around an entire planet full of humans.
I mean, right now we’re all sitting around hoping a few sociopaths in Washington and Tel Aviv don’t collapse the global economy with their reckless warmongering against Iran. There are so many of us and so few of them, and yet everyone’s sitting around going “Golly gosh I sure hope I’ll be able to afford food in the next few months, hopefully the orange guy acts sane and normal for a while so my family gets to eat.”
These are not gods sitting on Mount Olympus exerting omnipotent control over our fate from on high. These are ordinary men with ordinary flesh and bone bodies, walking upon the same earth we walk on. They have soft skin and internal organs. Their heads must remain firmly attached to their necks if they’re to continue to draw breath.
And yet they are permitted to terrorize the people with whom they share a planet.
I am reminded of a quote from Scientific American about an Inuit tribe’s perspective on the problem of psychopathy:
“In a 1976 study anthropologist Jane M. Murphy, then at Harvard University, found that an isolated group of Yupik-speaking Inuits near the Bering Strait had a term (kunlangeta) they used to describe ‘a man who … repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and … takes sexual advantage of many women — someone who does not pay attention to reprimands and who is always being brought to the elders for punishment.’ When Murphy asked an Inuit what the group would typically do with a kunlangeta, he replied, ‘Somebody would have pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking.’”
In our society, we do not push psychopaths off the ice when nobody is looking. In our society, we let them rule the world.
We’ve set up systems which elevate those who are willing to do whatever it takes to get to the top, and which protect them once they get there. The ones with the most wealth are the ones who crushed their competitors and exploited the working class the most ruthlessly. The ones who get elected to office are the ones who agree to protect the interests of the rich and powerful no matter how underhanded they have to be. The ones who get promoted to leadership in the military and spy agencies are the ones who’ve demonstrated unwavering loyalty to the bloodthirsty empire they serve.
These systems shield people from the natural consequences of their actions. If you have a lot of money your survival doesn’t depend on getting along with the other members of your tribe; you can just buy whatever services you need, and you can treat the people providing those services like garbage if you pay them enough. If you get elected to office your survival doesn’t depend on advancing the interests of the electorate; you can be as horrible as you like and rely on your security services to protect you.
This is a perversion of the natural order of things. The rich and the powerful should not be allowed to do whatever they want to us and get away with it. They are massively outnumbered. Everything they have, they only have because of us.
Their wealth is dependent on workers and consumers. Their power is dependent on our collectively agreeing to treat made-up rules about government and law like real things. Their lives are dependent on our collectively agreeing not to turn against them in massive numbers and tear them to pieces.
We can have revolutionary change whenever we want to. We already have the numbers. All we need is the will.
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