Wealthy, Powerful Predators
To start solving problems, we need to understand the cause of the problems. The more specific we can be in describing the cause, the more effective our solutions will be. We will now identify the cause as being a specific behavior pattern of a specific group of people.
Who and Why
The idea is obvious. But we’ve all had to live with it for so very long, for so many generations, on such a massive scale, that it is easy to become blind to it (because an enormous amount of effort is put into keeping us blind to it). But, deep down, we all know what is happening.
The fact is that there is a group of individuals who share a common dysfunctional mindset causing these kinds of problems since we first came down out of the trees. Although some of these individuals have been ultimately prosecuted for what they do, the group itself has never been confronted directly with any of the problems they cause.
It is this group, and the individuals within this group, these human-on-human Predators, that are the reason the world sucks.
Ignore who they are and what they look like. Watch what they do.
It is not white men who are responsible for systemic oppression (although most of those responsible in the Western Hemisphere are white men). It is not wealthy people who are responsible for economic inequity (although most of those responsible are wealthy). It is not conservatives or liberals, Christians or Muslims or Jews who are responsible for the massive inequity and exacerbate our problems into existential crises (although most of those responsible do profess all kinds of self-declared political and religious beliefs).
All organizations and demographics are susceptible to infiltration by Predators and committing Predations, even those organizations which have been created to protect us against Predators or founded with anti-Predation missions.
Oft-denigrated demographics like the poor, or people of color, or smart people or uneducated people, or rural folk, or city folk, or people with some particular sexual orientation are never responsible, though we often get the blame. We are, all of us who are ordinary people, always taking it on the chin and having to suck it up – suffering and getting the blame for the suffering. And it has been like this forever.
All this suffering is really just collateral damage from wealthy, powerful Predators pursuing more wealth and power.
Follow the money and power. Who is really suffering? Who is getting wealthier and more powerful?
It is time to single out those extremely wealthy and powerful individuals who are social, political, cultural, and economic gold-collar criminals. (We call them Predators because they prey upon people for fun and profit.) It is these relatively few people who are the ones responsible for most of the pain and suffering in the world. It is time to expose them and fight them and stop them, with all the power that good people, we Everyday People, together, can bring to bear.
The first step is to please stop respecting these people.
Please stop caring about every little thing they say, or do, or demand, or whine, or threaten.
All they want to do, always, no matter what, all they ever do, is to try to exploit us. Exploit us by whatever means, no matter how brutal and unethical, no matter how bizarre and debasing, just to increase their power and wealth. That’s it. Everything they are ever, ever going to say or do. It is always, always, always only about increasing their wealth and power.
Yes, they are people too, but their actions are truly those of ravenous animals starving for attention and addicted to acquisition of other people’s stuff.
Many Predators are good at predation. Many make a lot of money from it. Many become famous within the Predator community doing it. And they are directly responsible for a significant percentage of the world’s problems.
Predators’ Predations are why the world sucks.
How Predators Do It
We identified the cause of our problems: Predators and their Predations. Taking a step back, we try to understand a little more about how we got ourselves into this situation which has the most powerful of us preying on the rest of us.
There have always been people who make their livelihood by preying upon other people. Originally, they used rocks and sticks. But Predators have kept up with changes in technology and societal structures over the centuries, and today the most powerful ones are part of well-funded Predatory organizations and have embedded themselves in almost all public and private organizations, some of which even welcome Predators into their ranks.
Wealthy and powerful Predators are committing traditional crimes using very old methods with very modern technologies. Their “gold collar” crimes are truly massive in scope and scale, targeting millions of people and involving billions of dollars.
Predators are either responsible for, or significantly worsen, the world’s most serious problems in their pursuit of more wealth and power. These problems include everything from economic disasters and inequity to political gridlock, from trickle-down healthcare to cultural strife, to oppression, to war.
The rest of us have let Predators make the world suck for millennia [1]. Politics, economics, culture, society, and religion all have played their part in preventing us from even thinking about doing something to stop them.
A telltale sign of Predation is millions suffering in order that very few people benefit, usually with those same few people scamming the majority into accepting Predation as a necessary evil, or even a good and prudent plan of action.
Sounds simple because it is simple. But it is extremely hard to get our heads around the fact that things can be different – and in fact must be different – if we are going to survive as a civilized technological species.
Predators prey on large numbers of people, millions at a time, instead of the one-on-one Predations we have laws against. They use scams and narratives that enable them to steal from, brainwash, terrorize, and kill members of large, targeted demographics – just a little bit every day – making themselves just a little bit wealthier and more powerful every day.
We have all been programmed into believing that this is just the way things are. Programmed by – you guessed it – the Predators.
Everyday People are those who still have their wits about them. It is very likely that you are one of these people. For as long as we can remember, Everyday People have not liked what the Predators and their rank-and-file are doing to their prey. Sometimes we care, often deeply, that “something should be done about it.” However, we are not sure exactly what to do about it, and not even sure who to blame, and the number of Predations is so large we don’t even know which ones to start with. So, until now, most of us are forced to just look away in anger and frustration.
This tension between the strongly felt need to do something and the ability to do anything has been steadily increasing across all demographics.
This is a very powerful force. Obama tapped into this during his first run for office in 2008. He then squandered it. It was tapped into again in 2016. Also squandered. The people in a position to do something are either Predators themselves or had Predators screaming at them their entire time in office to keep the machinery of Predation substantially unchanged.
It is the goal of this book then to convince you that Predators exist, and that they are committing real crimes when they prey on us.
If we want to enjoy our lives without all this social, economic, political, cultural, and physical terror all around us all the time, we need to do something to prevent Predators from preying upon us.
Our goal then is to prevent wealthy, powerful Predators from preying upon us while staying true to our sense of morality and ethics, our sense of honesty and truth, and our sense of justice and fair play.
Scams and False Narratives
Predators, by rigging the system (taxation, wages, and cost of critical services) to transfer any excess wealth from the poor and middle class to the investment class. By using propaganda and scams they target people who are not consumed with making money, not contributing to the GDP and consumer economy as much as they possibly could, as “lazy,”“bad for business,”“anti-jobs,” and most recently, “socialists.” We can safely call their propaganda and scams “bullshit” because the overwhelming evidence shows that their arguments are based on lies, fear, and heavy application of Brandolini’s law.
Brandolini’s Law: Also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. It states that “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”[2]
When people think back fondly about a functioning government, they think of a government with both sides of the aisle pursuing more or less aligned interpretations of the “common good.” In reality, this was only “good” for the white middle and upper classes of the first world. It was in fact a broad consensus by those in power that Predation on the poor, on people of color, and on the third world was, to some degree, in the national interest. Later, in response to the white middle class’s objection to some of their Predations (e.g., civil rights, the Great Society, anti-war protests) the Predators expanded their Predations to include the middle-class as well. Now everybody who is awake understands what it means to be their prey.
And, sticking my head out here a little, and just my opinion, of course, but being preyed upon sucks.
These people, these abusers, these Predators, are fundamentally non-partisan and non-denominational. They opportunistically favor any political construct, ideology, or theology that presents the fewest obstacles to their attainment of more wealth and power. They wrap their Predations in fuzzy and emotional hyperbolics like nationalism, conspiracy theories, and interpretive theology. They market their Predations with cute slogans like “free market economy,”“trickle-down economy,”“good for jobs,”“state’s rights,” and hundreds of others.
What we are experiencing, the problems we are trying to understand, are essentially just the “collateral damage” from a few very wealthy and very powerful people’s pursuit of more wealth and power.
Please understand that although this model may appear to be just another variant of a simple polarized model of two equal warring factions – the Predators versus “everyone else”– it is not. The “everyone else” encompasses the entire human race in all its wonderful diversity, opposing opinions, and imaginative organizational structures, and the planet itself. The “everyone else” just wants to be left alone to live their lives.
Predators claim it is their right to be able to prey upon everyone and everything in order to satisfy their hunger for more wealth and power. This is by any measure a declaration of war by Predators on the rest of us.
They have been fighting this war for millennia.
[1] The first evidence of warfare appears about 10,000 years ago. Haas and Piscitelli in “The Prehistory of Warfare: Misled by Ethnography,” a chapter in “War, Peace, and Human Nature.”