The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale by Simon Clark

Part 3 of 3

Voluntarily coming clean is truly an anathema for humans.  “I can’t do this anymore.  My conscience is killing me.  I need help.”  Very, very, very few people will ever say this in their lifetime, and I am no exception.  We all suffer boiling frog syndrome.  We do something unhealthy or harmful in life, and we get away with it, so we just keep doing it.  Coming clean is the last thing we want to do despite the accumulation of effects on ourselves and those around us.  Unfortunately, it is more human nature to continue our downward spiral until outside forces become too much to bear and we are uncovered, our health fails, or we just die. 

There are some cases of people coming clean, but it often takes a rather rude shock or harrowingly close call.  Someone who drinks and drives will fall asleep at the wheel and crash into a tree, but nobody will catch them, and their injuries are not too grave.  This is the wakeup call that will save their lives and make them take rideshare.  For some it may actually take a DUI conviction.  A morbidly obese man will experience the death of his morbidly obese wife or mother and change his life around by eating better and less and exercising.  It does happen, but it takes a rather big shock to the system to work.  This is why sometimes interventions work.  When all your remaining social support network gives you an ultimatum to come clean or they will all ditch you, this could be sufficient to shock you into turning your life around. 

Another way is to simply be lucky enough to find yourself surrounded by better role models.  You unconsciously mimic and copy those around you.  You desperately want to fit in.  When you join a new group or club, you tend to change your wardrobe.  If I were to join some yoga class, I might start out wearing shorts and a t-shirt, but I may ultimately switch to whatever they’re wearing instead.  When I went to Burning Man, I wore cargo shorts, a t-shirt, and a boonie hat.  I felt immensely out of place.  If I ever went again, I’d wear a fur vest, an ironic military hat, and sparkling tights, okay maybe not sparkling tights, but a shiny pair of pants or something.  Had Naqvi started to hang around a better crowd, maybe he would have come clean, but he was surrounded by yes-people sycophants and brethren elite con-artists. 

* * *

If you’re an investor making huge financial deals, you need to know if the people handling your money are trustworthy.  You would think that this would be an easy job.  You can tell if someone is trustworthy by how they behave over a long period of time.  You notice how they treat people, how they handle stress, how they handle disappointment and difficulties, etc.  But at the top of the game with hundred million and billion-dollar deals, you have an entirely different set of qualities in people.  They’re greedy, aggressive, showy, egomaniacal, arrogant, charming when needed, and they also have extremely high tolerance for risk.  That’s how they made big money in the first place.  But these are the exact qualities that correspond to people who can’t be trusted.  It’s a total paradox. 

How does anything get done?  The answer is, there’s a lot of waste, corruption, crime, and backstabbing at the top.  You know that people are only using you to move up the wealth pyramid.  They’ll be kind and generous to you so long as you serve their higher purpose.  So you have to realize that you can only trust people for a short period of time, perhaps you’ll luck out and they’ll give you huge returns to make them look good before screwing over the next guy down the line.  When people at the very top say it’s a cutthroat, dog-eat-dog world, they’re not talking about the entire population.  They’re talking about people at the very top, the 1% of the 1% who have clawed their way up there through a huge amount of luck and connections and initial wealth, and then a fair dose of high risk-tolerance, arrogance, egomania, charisma, and con-artist charm.

* * *

One of the tricks companies use to control their workers like a cult is to expect long hours.  This does a number of things.  First, it converts the worker’s focus from their family and social life and outside hobbies and interests to mostly their work life.  The worker then turns their workplace into their family and friends and rely on coworkers for emotional support and friendship.  This way, they are reluctant to quit, because they will be losing all their social support at work.  Their work becomes their entire life.  Second, from experience, when you put in long hours, your frontal lobe performance deteriorates.  This means that you can’t think conscientiously and methodically.  You can’t weigh multiple options in your head.  Because of sleep deprivation and long hours, your brain tries to spread its energy over a longer period of time.  In order to do this, it stops feeding the frontal lobes.  You tend to prefer to do mundane, routine tasks that require as little conscious thought as possible.  In other words, you’re sleepwalking through your job.  When you do this, your morals lapse.  You see problems, and you don’t address them.  You ignore them or delay responding to them.  You get into a routine that you find comfortable and easy to perform over a long day.  In this state of mental fog and low-power output, you can’t see the big picture.  You become narrow-minded and myopic.  You can’t see consequences and social impacts.  You can only see one minute ahead at a time.  If you encounter something ethically questionable, you’re too mentally tired and confused to see it clearly and respond appropriately.  Perhaps years later after you’ve quit or been fired, you realize all the terrible decisions you made and just how impulsive you were. 

Working long hours is also unsustainable.  You don’t have time to exercise, to unwind, to distract your mind from stress at work, and when you work long hours, your body prefers quick energy in the form of sugar, caffeine, simple carbs, and junk food to slow energy in the form of protein, vegetables, fruits, and complex carbs.  You essentially become a burned out mess.  But your company doesn’t care.  Its eats workers up, chews them up, and spits them out.  The company doesn’t want long term employees.  First, older people usually get promoted and cost the company more money.  Second, long term employees know too much about the company.  When the company is rotten and trying to hide things, it’s best to continually rotate workers in and out so nobody accumulates sufficient knowledge about how the company operates.  Fresh workers are also easier to brainwash. 

* * *

I liked the ending of the book where the author noted that the idea that billionaires and private companies investing in and buying poor companies to help throw fresh, First World money into poor nations can help fix poverty is a similar fairy tale that the state can fix poverty by raising taxes and redistributing wealth to the poor.  Both are con jobs, and both attempts have been made by countless con-artists.  Billionaires and large private equity companies and corporations have every incentive to exploit the companies they purchase in poor or developing countries and exploiting their customers as well.  That is how billionaires and large companies became so wealthy and powerful.  They didn’t get there by making companies more efficient, innovative, and streamlined.  Rather, they made huge profits by substituting out labor and quality ingredients with cheaper labor, less labor, and poorer quality ingredients.  They made huge profits by moving factories to places where labor was significantly cheaper, and in some cases, used prison laborers.  Trusting them to help the poor is just as misguided as trusting government. 

The author proposes that the state and the notion of democracy should help the poor, but this is equally misguided.  Government, time and time again, has proven that its mission is to keep itself relevant by not solving problems but by causing more problems.  The war against drugs did nothing to reduce drug use and the social problems associated with drug us but rather made it all worse by exposing otherwise nonviolent drug users and sellers to the violent world of prisons, traumatizing them and transforming them into career users or sellers. 

What is not proposed is supporting microlending and small business enterprises in truly free markets liberated from laws, rules, and licensing fees designed to make it near impossible for the little person to enter the market and compete with institutions that have colluded with government for hundreds of years.  For example, in the US, it takes more training to become a hair stylist or barber than it takes to become a paramedic.  The vast majority of laws sell the notion that they exist to keep us safe but in fact exist to keep the profits of the existing business institutions safe. 

No billionaire or private equity fund owner is going to ever tell you that.  Countries keep their people poor, because it provides them a huge source of cheap labor and soldiers.  The story of Arif Naqvi, the con-artist who conned centimillionaires and billionaires is actually a comedy, because he did to them what they have been doing to us forever.  In fact, because he joined their club, he got to acquire their immunity from the law.  To this day, he has not stood trial for his crimes.  Once you join the billionaires club, even if you screw over fellow billionaires, the powers they have accrued to keep them above the law extends to you.  He is living proof that the rich and powerful have taken ownership of the law as well as the government, its politicians, the banks, the money supply, and our economy. 

* * *

One of the pet peeves I have at work and elsewhere is when people do things in reaction to some new problem or have some new idea, and it makes no sense.  It doesn’t conform to any fundamental principle or long term goal.  It just seems impulsive and arbitrary, like, hey guys, let’s change the color of our logo, let’s take away one of the customer options, let’s raise our fees by $2.37.  One time we were pricing a new service and I was actually in charge of pricing, but my boss decided upon the price, and there was no analysis of any kind whatsoever.  He just thought up a number in his head and seemed right and went with it.  At the very least you have a benchmark, the existing revenue per cost rate, and you go from there.  Would the customers value the new service at a higher or lower rate?

Another pet peeve is mission creep which is a subset of not following any guiding principles.  You introduce a costly temporary fix to a problem, but then you go, well, it worked, might as well keep doing it.  No!  You did it as a temporary fix, you need to shelve it and fix the root cause of the problem.  You need to prevent the problem in the first place and not rely on the costly temporary fix just because it worked.  You have to wonder about people who don’t follow any guiding, fundamental principle in life.

These people are true idiots, but even worse, they’re also often morally challenged, because the whole point of morality is that you can’t just make impulsive, arbitrary decisions without consulting the moral code which ought to underlie every decision you make in life.  For example, you see an unattended wallet, and you pick it up.  An impulsive, arbitrary decision would be to take the cash and throw the wallet back on the ground, hopefully for the owner to find it again.  At least they’ll have their ID and credit cards.  But you don’t do this, obviously, because you have a moral code that tells you this is not appropriate no matter your short term financial gain from taking the cash. 

Naqvi’s lack of morality was also mirrored by his lack of business principles.  Yes, he sought undervalued companies in conflict zones that Western investors ignored or avoided, and this was a great business principle, but he ignored other principles like due diligence in researching the company to determine its existing debts and costs and potential flaws.  He didn’t do that for a number of deals that blew up in his face.  He became overconfident from his initial successes.  As any psychologist would tell you, he overattributed his initial successes to his own talents and abilities and under-attributed it to pure random luck.  He was like a gambler who hit it big early.  One of the first few times I gambled, I lost $100 on my birthday and I’ve never gambled that much money on a single day since.  But what if I had won $1000.  I would have become a gambling addict. 

When you abide by a moral code, you also tend to abide by other long term principles as well.  For instance, one long term principle is taking care of your health.  So instead of eating junk and not exercising, you often compel yourself to eat better and exercise more even when you don’t feel like it.  Obviously, Naqvi had a problem with long term principles as his health was terrible from overdrinking, partying, working long hours, and never exercising.  Of course, you don’t want to discriminate against people who are overweight.  Certainly, many of them do work out and eat right, they’re just heavy.  But you do have to question people who can’t stick to their long term health principles. 

Another long term principle is relationships.  You don’t screw people over for short term gains.  You don’t try to embarrass and humiliate people to win arguments or just to be proven right.  In every conversation and interaction you have with someone, you need to remind yourself that you have long term relationship principles that prevent you from hurting other people for temporary gain or some short term principle of being proven right or proving others wrong.  There are times you may not want to help out a friend, drive them to the airport at 6 AM in the morning, or pick up their kids from soccer when they’re in bed sick, but you just do it, because you have long term relationship principles that require you to do it. 

The trick in life and in business for that matter, is to find people who abide by long term principles and stick to them rather than people who are just impulsive and arbitrary and often hurtful to others just to be proven right.  Of course, Naqvi is just a normal, dysfunctional, dark triad dude, but because of the profession he chose and his early successes, he became a world renown billionaire con-artist.  The real story here is that there are Naqvi’s all around us, most are dirt poor, because they don’t get hundreds of millions of other people’s money to invest or in his case misallocate into his personal offshore bank accounts. 

And just to complicate things a bit, there are people who have excellent long term principles they abide by, but they sacrifice all other long term principles for them.  They too should be avoided.  These people are supremely ambitious and show extraordinary willpower and discipline.  They’re impressive until you realize they’re willing to sacrifice all other long term principles for one single one.  They’re willing to sacrifice their health for making money, or they’re willing to ignore all their family and friends to become a super athlete, etc.  Each long term principle must be balanced with other long term principles.  In a sense, Naqvi did have one long term guiding principle and that was to become famous and rich, and he was willing to do anything to achieve it including putting in the long hours but also backstabbing investors and misallocating their funds.  The author and Westerners would have you believe Naqvi is some deranged foreign interloper in the elite circles of the ruling class, that his style and arrogance was endemic to his culture and background, that he lacked the pedigree and DNA to play it fair and straight in the world of high finance, but that’s all toxic gaslighting garbage.  What they don’t want to admit is the fact that Naqvi was their mirror image.  He just didn’t play the long con like Bill Gates, Trump, the Clintons, the federal government, the Federal Reserve of private banks, and entire global ruling elite.  You don’t suck so much blood the host dies, you do just enough to make it a disoriented, anemic, confused, idiotic flag-waving, government-loving, law-abiding, boot-licking blob of misdirected fear and loathing.

The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale by Simon Clark

Part 2 of 3

This is yet another book I’ve read recently that has mentioned the ‘dark triad’ of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism.  One common thing these people have is trauma, experiencing great pain and suffering concurrent with a sense of not having any control in the situation.  Trauma does not occur as intensely or even at all if the person experiencing the pain and suffering feels that they are in control and can somehow mitigate the pain and suffering.  An athlete for example will endure extraordinary suffering on purpose for the goal of building up their endurance, stamina, or strength, but it isn’t traumatizing for them, because they feel like they’re in control.  (Of course, they might be traumatized if you told them on the side that only one part of them is making them suffer while the other parts of them have no choice in the matter, hence, those parts should be traumatized.)

Naqvi has certainly experienced some sort of trauma in the past, perhaps bullying by his father or classmates.  The author mentions that being Pakistani exposed him to a lot of racism, and I would agree that it would be a factor, but I would argue unless the racism was accompanied by torment and bullying by white people, it wouldn’t explain why he’s a lot more different than other Pakistani businesspeople or people in general.  Certainly, growing up in such a corrupt and impoverished country as Pakistan would, in my opinion, be a much greater factor. 

The worst part of trauma is that it makes you distrustful of others.  Other people are usually the cause of the pain and suffering whether it is abuse, bullying, or discrimination.  The first thing people do is stop trusting other people with their fate, because the trauma, by definition, is an experience where they have little control over their fate.  Second, the traumatized person stops communicating, at least in a collaborative way.  They may continue lecturing people, bullying, berating people, and using language to intimidate and manipulate people, but they stop using it to express themselves honestly and form trusting relationships.  Language becomes a tool of manipulation not a tool of building trust.

From reading about exploitative Wall Street firms, I’ve come to realize that one of the common characteristics of exploitative firms that only care about profits and themselves is a hyper-competitive, machismo culture involving drugs, alcohol, and sex.  Employees are tested for their loyalty but also their ‘alpha’ status, a contrived mythical ability to ruthlessly dominate and inflict great suffering upon others while absorbing great pain and suffering.  They work hard and then party hard together in some homoerotic bonding ceremonies over drugs, alcohol, and sex.  For them, sex is not about love or romance but rather using women with low self-esteem to get off.  They look down upon women as mere sex toys, trophies, and status symbols.  It reminds me of Universe 25 where some mice no longer cared about procreation and instead excessively groomed themselves and formed male gangs to attack other mice including female mice and their children.

* * *

You are your social influences.  If you want to get in shape and become a big, buff gym rat, you hang around big, buff gym rats.  If you want to be an accomplished violinist, you hang around elite violinists as well as practice eight hours a day.  Unfortunately, when you hang around the world’s wealthy elite, you don’t necessarily become a wealthy elite.  What you start to do is become a brash, arrogant, over-confident, aggressive, and reckless gambler.  A lot of rich people inherit their wealth and simply invest wisely in conservative stock index mutual funds and live off the dividend income. 

The elite are another animal altogether.  The reason they’re centimillionaires and billionaires is not because they sat on safe, stock market index funds.  They’re the 1% of the 1% because they took giant risks.  Of course, they’re not going to help out just anyone.  They’re cutthroat and Machiavellian, probably the entire dark triad to boot.  They’ll only help you so far as you can be of profit to them.  So in all likelihood, they’re going to con and prey on you.  They’re not good people.  You’re basically hanging around con-artists, criminals, and gambling addicts.  If you want to become moderately rich and be able to live off your investment income for the rest of your life, then you would hang out with the millionaires and decamillionaires who invest wisely and safely.

In my opinion, Naqvi wasn’t so much influenced by his poor upbringing in Pakistan as the Western elite might have you believe, but rather simply being around the Western elite, he was influenced by their conspicuous consumption, absurd displays of wealth, and manipulative and greedy behavior.  Had he tried to enter the exclusive world of the elite and discovered that they were all level-headed, wise, compassionate, intelligent, and modest people, I believe he would have followed in their footsteps or simply been rejected by them as an arrogant, dangerous interloper.  Instead, there was something about him that attracted the attention of the elite, and that was the reflection of themselves in his arrogant, over-confident, bullying, narcissistic, and reckless demeaner. 

I mean if you really think about it, of all the people, wouldn’t the super elite of the world be the least likely to be duped by a con-artist?  I mean, wouldn’t you assume them to be most sophisticated, savvy, intelligent, and resourceful people around?  Wouldn’t they have private investigators at their disposal to completely scope out a potential partner or collaborator or investor?  Why were so many people willing to immediately trust him?  The answer is simple.  The super elite are not the most sophisticated, savvy, intelligent, and resourceful people around.  They’re the most lucky along with heaping doses of over-confidence, high-risk tolerance, connections through family privilege, and sheer arrogance from living a life of immense entitlement and wealth.  Instead of accepting their successes as luck including the luck of being born into wealth, they assume it’s all because of just how smart, sophisticated, and brilliant they are.  It’s then easy for a con-artist to come along and pump up their egos in order to gain their confidence and patronage.  Nobody knows how to better con a con-artist than another con-artist. 

Whether you like it or not, this world is not run by the smartest, wisest, most visionary, compassionate, brilliant minds in the world as you have been raised to think.  It is not a natural selection of the smartest and wisest.  Unfortunately, it is rather natural selection of the most cunning, conniving, hyper-aggressive, over-confident, risk-seeking, greedy, short-term minded, arrogant, and incredibly lucky and entitled people you could ever imagine.  They own the media and politicians and rewrite history and the current socio-political narrative.  It’s all a fairy tale while in reality, it’s a horrific nightmare, because not only to do they allow poverty, injustice, and conflict to occur, they profit from it.  In their zero-sum game, billions must suffer in order for them to become billionaires.

* * *

The cultish, alcohol-drenched culture of Abraaj reminds me of so many Korean and Japanese companies.  The employees are not allowed to go home after work and enjoy a good work-life balance spending precious time with their spouses and children.  Instead, they’re expected to hang out with their bosses in a hedonistic, drunken evening of clownish, karaoke antics.  I’ve always wondered about that.  One idea I had is that the Western businessmen who went over to train the Japanese and Koreans thought of their jobs as being easy and since they were away from family and in a different culture overseas, they probably went out after work to party and indulge.  They could easily still teach and instruct their hosts while hungover.  The Japanese and then Koreans must have then thought that this was normal business behavior in America and Europe when in fact, it wasn’t. 

But my other theory, and it could be a combination of both, is that the Western instructors weren’t training the Japanese and Koreans to be moderate, wise, balanced, well-rounded businessmen but rather more cultish, aggressive, authoritarian businessmen who could demand huge sacrifices.  Japan and Korea got the cult, and in a sense, they needed it to grow so fast, and as it turned out, their super-growth helped them become an important economic and political counterbalance to Communist China in East Asia.

* * *

It seems that Naqvi may well have started out as a legitimate dealmaker and may well have stayed out of trouble had his investments worked out.  Unfortunately, when Abraaj’s investments started to fail, it forced his hand, and lacking any real oversight over Abraaj’s finances, he was free to move money around as he liked to make it appear as if the company was not actually failing.  This reminds me of what happened to the Japanese when the US cut off their oil before World War II.  A logical person would make them retreat from China and even cut back their Pacific reach.  They would be a smaller empire, but it would be defensible.  However, any general or admiral suggesting this would be considered a coward to retreat after having gained so much.  The generals and admirals knew well that they were in an impossible situation.  In a sense, they had no better option (for themselves) but to attack the US and forestall a US invasion of the Japanese empire with the smallest, yet plausible possibility that the US would sue for peace to avoid a two theater war.  Of course, this would be a horrific choice for the people of Japan.  With the US in the war, they would eventually face obliteration either by the US or Russia or both.  Incapable of surrender, they would all have to make the ultimate sacrifice of dying by the millions in a Japanese land invasion. 

This also reminds me of almost every large corporation that finds itself losing customers because its products are continuously watered down and toxified to squeeze every last cent of profit out of them.  There is no option to reverse course.  They can’t start making a more expensive product by replacing cheap ingredients with better, safer, quality ingredients.  They’ve already lost the trust of many customers who will never return.  They can’t even gain new customers willing to pay a higher price, because their brand has also been denigrated by their continual cost-cutting.  They really have no other option but to keep cutting costs and watering down the product until the corporation goes bankrupt.  Budweiser seems oblivious to this as it continues to push out quality, craft beers under its label every several years to utter and complete failure.

Finally, this reminds me of serial killers.  Perhaps after their first murder, they were so racked with guilt they couldn’t sleep and their health was fading.  In order to keep their minds off the guilt, they simply plotted and then committed a second murder.  The second murder would take their minds off the first murder.  But then they would need a third murder to take their minds off the second murder.  There is no stopping.  They can’t just quit, because now they have several murders to overwhelm their conscience.  So they just keep going until they get caught or die of old age. 

Actually, finally, we come to the US federal government and the Federal Reserve.  For years, both the US federal government and Federal Reserve have been relatively conservative.  They mitigated recessions through expanding the money supply through lowering interest rates.  However, every politician that came along would want to play out the same trick, even at the slightest hint of a recession, they would have the Feds lower interest rates and expand the money supply.  Even during great economic growth periods, they would be afraid of increasing interest rates and causing an economic slowdown and be blamed for it.  So the Feds just kept lowering interest rates and expanding the money supply, and they knew, at least the smart ones knew that this was actually causing bigger bubbles that would lead to bigger recessions.  The last three busts, the dot-com, the Financial Crisis, and then the COVID drop were all exacerbated by previous Fed attempts to mitigate recessions and keep bubbles well fueled.  We are coming to a point where the trick will no longer work.  The federal government is in debt $30 trillion.  As Elon Musk perceptively tweets, “True national debt, including unfunded entitlements, is at least $60 trillion – roughly three times the size of the entire US economy.”  The only thing keeping the dollar from crashing in the world market is the fact that most of the rest of the world is forced to trade in dollars, and should they refuse, they risk regime change.  They are in essence absorbing the inflation of the US dollar.

Like the cocky financier who suffers a series of bad investments, like the Japanese who faced the face-losing option of forfeiting gained territory, like the large corporation that can’t replace any more ingredients with cheaper and inferior ingredients, like Elizabeth Holmes who can’t bring herself to admit that her invention is an untenable concept, like the serial killer who can’t stop killing and face the guilt of dozens of murders, the US government and Federal Reserve have no option but to keep printing more money and keep going into debt until we are so weakened that our military cannot effect regime change, the world will rebel against us.  Then the US will suffer hyper-inflation instead of spreading around the pain to the rest of the world.  Then the US will have no option but to default on its debt or undergo extreme austerity measures including the end to most all social entitlement programs.  Then the elite in the US will simply move out of the US and take their money with them to invest elsewhere. 

The US will collapse just like Russia collapsed in the 90s as vulture Capitalists buy up cheap companies and sell off their assets turning the US into a barren economic wasteland the likes of Russia under Yeltsin.  The US will have to accept some authoritarian dictator like Putin to nationalize its assets at the displeasure of whatever superpower arises and face global isolation and exploitation, or it will simply turn into a third world feeding ground for overseas Capitalist vultures.  This isn’t just a story about Naqvi; this is also the story of the modern US economic and banking system.  A hundred years from now, people will ask, how could they not see this coming?  Of course, we saw it coming, but the voices of those who saw it coming were drowned out and called conspiracy theorists by the con-artists who took down our system.  Perceptive people will recall Elon Musk’s prescient tweet.

No politician in their right mind today (except perhaps Rand Paul) would suggest cutting social entitlement spending, cutting defense spending, eliminating deficit spending, and starting to reduce the national debt.  This is like a Japanese general or admiral suggesting that they retreat in China and surrender a few islands in order to save oil and create a defensible imperial perimeter.  You just can’t.  People will look at you as the cause for all their suffering and shame instead of looking at the long run and seeing you as the only intelligent voice in the room to avert catastrophe.  You’re like the doctor who tells his obese patient to eat better, eat less, and exercise more versus the doctor who tells his obese patient to take cholesterol medication, anxiety medication, and depression medication and then continue his horrible, self-indulgent lifestyle. 

The problem here is that the patient thinks the doctor truly cares about him.  What good is a dead patient to a doctor, the patient rationalizes?  However, the doctor is making so much money off his prescriptions that he really doesn’t care if the patient dies, he’ll just get another morbidly obese patient to prescribe a cornucopia of mitigating drugs.  The requirements to become a US doctor also keep the supply artificially low. 

Likewise, the ruling elite don’t care about America.  Many aren’t even American, and Americans themselves are an amalgam of different European blood.  If anything, there is no reason to be loyal to the US, a scattered mixed-blood mess of questionable ancestry.  It’s actually a perfect breeding ground for con-artists who have nothing to lose from exploiting the population.  Take Korea or Japan.  A politician or conglomerate owner can’t screw over their own people, because they are their own people.  For a Japanese politician or Korean chaebol owner to screw over their own people would be beyond shameful.  Their people would call for them to kill themselves.  Not so in the good old USA.  A WASP has no obligation to protect let along lift up the oddball coterie of Jews, Catholics, blacks, Latinos, East Asians, and Native Americans that is the US of A.  They will allow the US to collapse, and they will simply move back to Europe or find some other host to parasitically infect.  You can wave that American flag all you want, the people who control your destiny have never pledged allegiance to it or any other flag for that matter except if we had some sort of flag for global wealth and power (or perhaps a dark triad flag which would be cool). 

The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale by Simon Clark

Part 1

Key Man is a story about Arif Naqvi, a Pakistani, who defrauded the wealthiest people and countries in the world.  The two key takeaways from this is that first, when you make the right connections and get people to believe that you are part of the world’s wealthy elite, you get even more money to make more money.  The rich aren’t going to give their money to poor people to invest or even middle-class people.  They give it to one another, because they assume if you’re rich, you know how to make money.  Second, the fact that it’s so easy to dupe billionaires indicates that there is very little difference between criminals, con-artists, and the wealthy elite.  Why do they get so mixed up?  The wealthy elite are in fact criminals.  They hide their wealth in overseas accounts or domestic trusts.  By nature, they are criminals. They look for any which way to break or bend the law to amass their wealth. 

They screw over investors and employees.  They squeeze as much money out of their employees by lowering wages and minimizing benefits.  There is only so much money you can save by replacing quality parts and ingredients with junk before you start losing customers.  The best way to cut costs is to simply cut jobs or wages, and you’re often surprised by how many people don’t quit after their wages are cut.  Those who quit are easily replaced by less qualified workers willing to take lower wages.  They don’t contribute as much, but so long as they do a passable job, that’s all that matters.  Long-term employees know how to retain long-term customers through a history of experience and wealth of knowledge about the product, service, and customer needs.  Short-term employees could care less about customers, and much like their executives, they don’t care if customers leave because they’re not doing a great job or the product stinks.

The wealthy elite are used to dealing with criminals and con-artists.  They’re used to dealing with sophisticated, savvy, charmers and seducers.  This is how the rich have amassed their wealth, by getting people to invest in their ideas.  For many of them, their ideas work, and they become super wealthy.  For many, their ideas don’t work, and all their investors lose money.  They’re also used to taking huge losses, because it comes with the territory.  The superrich are innate gamblers who love to borrow money to risk it all.  It’s hard for them to distinguish between a con-artist with a good idea that actually turns profitable and a con-artist who will just take their money and spend it on themselves while using their front company to borrow money to cover the money they embezzle. 

You would think the wealthy elite, the 1 percent of the 1 percent would simply put their money in a stock market index fund.  The average S&P 500 return was 14% from 2011 to 2020.  This means if you put $1 million in an S&P index fund in 2011, it would be worth $2.85 million in 2020.  This is how some rich people simply get richer.  You actually have to be stupid to lose money if you’re rich.  However, the 1 percent of the 1 percent don’t want to make $1.85 million off $1 million.  They want to make $100 million, and they’ll take the necessary risks to do so.  Many fail, but some actually can turn $1 million into $100 million or $100 million into a billion.  They’re high-risk investors. 

Of course, this means that a lot of them have failed astronomically.  Instead of making $100 million they lose $1 million, but credit for us is different from credit for the rich.  When Michael Jackson died, he was in debt between $400 and $500 million.  Why?  Because even though he would lose tens of millions of dollars, people were willing to keep lending him money, because he also had the ability to make tens of millions of dollars.  I guarantee you that if a blue-collar person was in debt $400,000, no bank would lend him any more money.  Our system is rigged in such a way that financial losses for the poor and middle class are not accepted whereas losses for the rich are forgiven and in the case of the 2008 Financial Crisis, all taxpayers wind up paying for the losses of the rich who lost their shirts speculating on CDOs. 

There are three legal systems, one for the poor who must use public defenders who work for the same state that is usually accusing them of a crime and trying to extort money from them.  Obviously, a public defender can’t be so good that he keeps his clients from losing and giving their money over to the state.  There is one for those who can afford a basic attorney that can protect their rights and often keep the state from walking all over them in the courtroom.  Sometimes they get off, sometimes the state simply offers a deal they wouldn’t if they had a public defender.  Then there is one for the rich who hire the best lawyers who know how to use every trick in the book to keep their clients from going to prison, in many cases these lawyers know the judges, play golf with them, donate generously to their election campaigns, etc.  Not only can the rich lose huge sums of money without significant harm to their ability to borrow more, but they can kill people, as evidenced by OJ Simpson, rape people by hiring people to go after their accusers or any witnesses, and steal from the little guys.  The only exception is when they steal from other rich people.  This is the only time the rich will turn on the rich for obvious reasons. 

* * *

There is a common story that in America everyone can go from rags to riches.  This is certainly true, perhaps more so than in any other country.  However, this overshadows the more common story of how rich people stay rich from inheritances, taking over their parent’s businesses, and getting vital and crucial networking exposure by attending elite high schools and colleges.  The Ivy League isn’t so much a depository for the brightest kids in the world but rather it serves as a crucial networking place for up-and-coming financial, business, and political leaders of America.  Fraternities play an especially important role for networking.  Often times rich people trust other rich people they’ve gone to school with to help them run companies, make deals, or buy and sell companies. 

The same story applies to every town in America.  Every town has a coterie of the same local businesses: plumbers, car dealerships, auto repair shops, but what many people forget are the business-to-business companies that supply the retail shops, restaurants, bars, etc.  They often all get passed on to their children including their lucrative, loyal customer base.  Yes, you can certainly get rich by studying hard, being smart, working hard, and taking risks, but it’s a much easier route to start off with rich parents who can send you to private school and then elite universities.  One of the advantages Naqvi had was getting into an elite school in Pakistan, formerly used for white colonists. 

There are also a number of networking groups after college including the Rotary Club, Freemasons, Shriners, Kiwanis, Lions Club, country clubs, and for the superrich, Davos, the Bilderberg Group, and charitable organizations.  It just happens to be a convenient way of meeting people who have their membership to worry about if they screw over another member.  By being in these groups, you’re expected to be trustworthy at least to one another.  They can also act as an arbitrator if conflict or deal problems arise between two members.  In the past, to a certain extent in the present, they discriminated and not just against people of color but Jews, Catholics, Russians, and immigrants.  The term WASP, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant was famous for a reason.  Sure Jews, Catholics, black people, and immigrants could become self-made millionaires, but they often took the hard route by not having the benefit of networking amongst the existing rich elite in their private clubs and societies.  The Ivy League actually discriminated against women, Jews, and Catholics. 

While discrimination is on the decline, many elite groups are still heavily dominated by white men.  Consider the fact that 90% of the Fortune 500 CEOs are white men and 89% of US Senators are white.  Unfortunately, the most successful and wealthy people of color tend to be in super competitive industries which most rich white people avoid.  Since successful actors, athletes, musicians, performers, writers, and artists also tend to be famous, people of color have the wrong impression that their best shot of wealth is to enter these super competitive fields which is more like a lottery.  If they were smart, they would rather enter high-demand, high-paying fields like medicine, healthcare, finance, banking, business, technology, programming, law, sales, and engineering.  They would also join networking groups and their local country club. 

Many people believe that Jews control the world, because they’re overrepresented in media and banking.  Fact is, these used to be two professions with huge risks and low returns.  Before banking regulation, credit scores, and government identification systems, many borrowers simply didn’t pay back loans.  They disappeared.  Banking was not lucrative, and acting in theater and putting on plays was a huge financial risk with much less payoffs than today’s multi-million-dollar box office wins.

The unpaid internship is one the biggest barriers to wealth.  Who can afford to work for free except the child of rich parents with a trust fund?  The company is literally screening candidates for pre-existing wealth.  And if some highly motivated kid can work two jobs, one paid in addition to the unpaid internship, then they’re an asset too.  Perhaps they don’t have the pedigree and family wealth and networks to bring to the company, but this is someone who will compensate by putting in the hours and working harder than everyone else once they do get paid and can quit their second job. 

* * *

In an interestingly parallel book I just read, The Lost Tribe of Coney Island, the promoter of a traveling circus of Filipino tribal headhunters used the media to spread scandalous stories of the dog-eating savages to promote his shows.  The newspapers ate it up, often at the expense of the truth.  Mark Twain’s old adage is appropriate, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”  For the media, the ridiculous stories sold copies.  Likewise, for Naqvi, the press helped promote him in return for favors, “His growing fame in business circles was spurred on by editors of business magazines who awarded him prizes and flattering coverage, and received advertising and conference sponsorship fees from Abraaj.”  Similarly, the US media is in bed with the Democrats and Republicans, and each year, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is a shameless admission of this fact.  Further evidence is how the daughters of politicians get to star as major media talk show personalities, e.g., Meghan McCain daughter of John McCain and Jenna Bush daughter of George W. Bush. 

The funny thing about a lot of big time con-artists and criminals is the fact that many could have become very successful legitimately.  They had the charisma, confidence, selling ability, networking ability, promotional ability, and connections to build successful businesses merely by acquiring elite investors with the right credentials to attract more legitimate investors and more talented executives.  Elizabeth Holmes is a great example of this.  Through her boyfriend and business partner Ramesh Balwani, she was able to bring in Henry Kissinger and former General Jim Mattis to her board of directors and had Rupert Murdoch investing in her.  Unfortunately for Holmes, she had an untenable product.  Like many other successful business people, she could have simply cut her losses, admitted the failure, seen Theranos crash anyway, but salvaged her reputation and opened another medical company.  Trump led a series of businesses into failure but since his businesses were legitimate, he could keep getting new investors and new excitement for his projects. 

Why do con-artists cross over the line to commit fraud and break the law?  The answer is that they don’t listen to anyone, and their initial successes make them believe that they can do no wrong, including breaking the law.  At least Trump is wise enough to know not to outright break the law or at least get caught doing.  Criminal con-artists just don’t have the patience and self-discipline to play the long con, a career of exploiting investors, creating failed businesses, but always staying one step ahead of insolvency with new deals, new loans, new companies, new projects, and new investments. 

* * *

I like the way the author describes Davos, the renown conference for the world’s elite.  “Duplicity was baked into the very fabric of the forum.”  “Executives delivered noble-sounding statements made for public consumption from the main stage.  Then, inside hotel suites rented out for thousands of dollars, they bargained with politicians and struck secretive deals that generated profits for them and consequences that would shape the future of humanity.”  In other words, it was a publicity stunt for the world’s elite, enabling them to put on the Janus face with one facing the public, the noble, compassionate patriarch trying their best to solve global warming, hunger, poverty, and injustice, while behind the scenes, directing the other face to cohorts figuring out ways to further consolidate their wealth and power which is the root cause of all the pollution, hunger, poverty, wealth inequity, political conflict, and injustice in the world. 

Naqvi was lucky in addition to having the right connections.  He raised half a billion to buy a quarter of EFG Hermes in 2006 when its shares had just collapsed after Israel invaded Lebanon.  In 2007, EFG Hermes shares doubled in value and Naqvi walked away with half a billion.  It takes money and connections to make money along with simple luck.  While middle class investors spread their money around the stock market in index funds where they can make around 14% a year, the rich have so many eggs to begin with, they can put many eggs in one basket and outright buy companies or a quarter of a $2 billion company and double their return or more.  Of course, this means there are a lot of rich people who have lost ridiculous amounts of money to the tune of hundreds of millions or billions, but it also means, when the market is generally up, they walk away with hundreds of millions or billions. 

* * *

Naqvi’s most audacious move was buying Karachi Electric.  The monopoly that supplies electricity to Karachi, Pakistan.  It was such a bad company that at one time it was offered to his private equity company, Abraaj for a dollar.  Who in their right mind would buy such a stinker with so much corruption and political chaos with potential mobs and rioting by electricity customers.  The company represents the lesser of two evils in third world and developing countries.  Many of these countries are former colonies where colonial powers set up monopolies to control all the markets.  When the monopolies are taken over by the country, they retain all the corruption, inefficiencies, and lack of competition from the monopolies.  If they are privatized, once again, the foreign countries usually retain the monopoly and all the profits go overseas once again.  The best option is the take down the monopoly, but the governments in power after the colonialists leave are so corrupt that they profit from the monopolies and have no reason whatsoever to privatize them.  And in the cases where they are privatized, Western companies often jump in to once again exploit the country and send profits overseas.  In the case of Russia, they were privatized and many were then dismantled and then sold off in parts with Russian oligarchs hiding all their profits in overseas banks.

The New Science of Narcissism: Understanding One of the Greatest Psychological Challenges of Our Time – and What You can Do About It by W. Keith Campbell

‘Narcissism’ is the newest, biggest buzzword, and there’s a reason for that.  At the same time, ‘empath’ is also becoming the diametrically opposed buzzword gaining traction.  With the pandemic, the world has been isolated, but unlike the Spanish Flu of 1918, we’ve been able to connect through online meetings and social media.  What we are quickly learning is that online interaction is nowhere near the real thing, and in the case of social media, it is actually even more damaging and isolating.  How can this be?  If we strictly used the Internet to face-time with our friends and loved ones and meet with our coworkers, we would probably be fine, but social media offers something entirely different.  It offers an incessant stream of attention-seeking clips that use an intermittent reinforcement system to get us addicted to it.  The content is mostly produced by isolated, lonely people like ourselves who are desperate for attention, validation, and recognition through ‘like’, ‘thumbs up’, and ‘love’ emojis.  Those who produce the most content tend to be the most lonely and isolated.  In addition to this, the comment sections are flooded with mostly anonymous, lonely people.  When they can’t get positive attention, they seek negative attention through baiting, bullying, and trolling.  Dealing with them is exhausting and infuriating. 

Physical isolation and our heightened reliance on social media for social interaction has only highlighted an ongoing cultural shift.  We are increasingly becoming less social and even more anti-social.  Far from simply minding our own businesses and ignoring others, we seek negative attention and create problems and drama to fulfill our unfulfilled need for attention, affection, and affirmation.  While certainly public outbursts are not new, and we now have a way to capture them on video instantaneously, I believe public outbursts are increasing.  Fueled by both prescription psychotropic drugs which alter our moods and decrease our inhibitions and increased isolation, people are desperate to draw attention to themselves.  A minor inconvenience or injustice is reason enough to make a scene and get a reaction from others.  They may think that they want a resolution to their inconvenience or perceived injustice, but in reality, they are simply crying out for attention, demanding that their otherwise lonely, invisible self is recognized and acknowledged, even if it is in a bad way. 

But there are other ways to get attention than the nuclear option of going nuts in public.  People will simply create problems and drama within their own circle of friends, family, coworkers, colleagues, and acquaintances.  We view them as difficult, dramatic, exhausting, and annoying.  But the fact that we think about them validates their behavior.  They don’t want to be ignored, forgotten, and invisible.  Unless you receive regular attention, affection, and affirmation, you get the sneaking suspicion that you’ll disappear down a bottomless hole of irrelevance, insignificance, meaninglessness, and nullification.  It is a scary thing to be ignored and forgotten as social beings that derive most of our fulfillment and meaning in life through the attention, affection, and validation of others. 

But why have we become such an alienated, isolated, and antisocial culture?  The simple reason is that our traditional forms of social interaction and support have been eroded and dismantled.  Our traditional societies were the most social of all and allowed humans to triumph over all other primates and large mammal predators.  What we could do that they could not was gather and live in large numbers.  This required a much larger brain; an enhanced ability to remember over a hundred different faces, personalities, and histories; language; and a greater level of empathy.  It also meant we received most of our chemical rewards from social bonding and most of our stress chemicals from feeling isolated, ostracized, or humiliated. 

This all changed when we started farming and specializing.  Instead of spending most of our time in group settings reaffirming bonds, sharing stories, hunting together, gathering together, or dining together, we were separated into smaller social units.  We spent more and more time cultivating the fields and tending to livestock animals not humans.  The Industrial Age made things all the worse when they created longer work hours all year round, enabled by gas and then electrical lighting.  Parents were separated more from their children, especially with the implementation of universal public education.  In frontier lands like America, families were separated from one another and their communities as they expanded out west.  In the 1950’s, they were separated within cities with the creation of suburbs.  Workers commuted more and more further separating them from their families.  The ‘nuclear’ family was created and promoted.  Grandparents no longer were needed as government programs were created to take care of them in old age.  Fathers, unencumbered by in-laws, their parents, or brothers and sisters were free to rule as dictators in their own families often resorting to unrestrained abuse of their spouses and children.  Living in isolated nuclear families in the suburbs was also alienating and cause for increased neuroticism, depression, and anxiety.

The Information Age promised to reform society to make everything nice and good again, but it did nothing of the sort.  It simply made things worse by replacing person-to-person interaction with remote digital interaction often bypassing humans altogether.  We now spend more time interacting with a computer than other humans.  Social media then turned social interaction into a bizarre lottery filled with antisocial runts calling us every kind of slur under the sun.  It was the revenge of the nerds indeed as they accumulated billions of dollars at our expense and were able to date movie stars and travel to outer space.

* * *

What happens when we find ourselves isolated more and more is that we gradually become more and more anti-social.  But a rather insidious and strange phenomenon happens too.  We start to fall in love with ourselves and alternatingly, we also loathe and despise ourselves as we cannot properly enjoy the rewards of our self-love, self-adoration, and self-admiration.  We are genetically engineered to only feel good when others give us attention, affection, adoration, admiration, and love.  When we give ourselves these things, we feel empty.  Not to be crass, but it is the same thing comparing masturbation to sex with someone else.  When we feel empty and unfulfilled after showering ourselves with affection, adoration, and admiration, we swing to the other end and start to loathe, despise, and hate ourselves. 

Another odd phenomenon occurs too.  We no longer feel empathy.  We no longer identify with others.  We become increasingly convinced that we are alone in the world, and in some cases, we may even posit that the world itself is nothing but our imagination and other people are not even real, just ‘NPCs’ or Non-Player Characters, a video game term used to describe computer-generated people.  Since we acquire most of our sense of meaning, value, and belonging from others, we find the world devoid of meaning and value.  It becomes a grayscale void of existential dread.  We fill the void with chemicals that replace those we receive from social interaction.  We try to get high from manufactured drugs, alcohol, thrill-seeking, gambling, eating, shopping, or working long hours to accrue wealth which we believe will give us the attention, admiration, and respect that we crave.  This is perfectly fine for a world which profits from selling us drugs, alcohol, food, and consumer goods and needs hard workers to sell the merchandise and collect the revenue to funnel to those at the top of the social ladder.  In other words, at least for now, it is profitable to do business in a world of loners and antisocial losers.

* * *

Another phenomenon that happens when you spend more and more time alone is that you stop believing in freewill.  It is arguable that freewill was created  when we became highly social beings.  We learned to hold our tongues and actions.  Saying or doing whatever came across our minds could be harmful in a social setting.  You could insult someone if you simply thought they were ugly or stupid.  You could strike someone who annoyed you or say something insulting to them.  When humans learned to hold their tongue and withhold their actions, they learned to weigh multiple options in their minds including doing nothing.  This was the foundation of our freewill. 

When we don’t have to worry about offending someone or harming others in a moment of anger or frustration, we no longer need our freewill.  We just say or do whatever we are thinking.  It is unfortunate that today, we live in such a world, especially online, where people actually just say whatever is on their mind regardless of how it may insult or offend others.  There is no immediate feedback or punishment for spewing whatever insulting and offensive things come to mind.  There is only the immediate dopamine hit of feeling someone may read your comment and acknowledge your contributions albeit in a bad way.

In fact, many people believe that it is actually annoying that some people would demand that they consider their words carefully first in case it may offend or annoy someone.  They argue that people should have thicker skin and not be ‘snowflakes’ and so easily offended.  In reality, they get offended and insulted all the time when others say things that annoy them.  In reality, they just don’t want to exercise freewill and be free to say and do whatever they want, whenever they want, without any regard to the perception of others.  We are then going backwards in time to when we lacked any freewill or conscience, a time when we were not as social and less capable of cooperation, empathy, and morals. 

Antisocial people lack freewill, and they lack the ability to be responsible and take accountability for their actions.  In their minds, they are the victims of everything.  They are the victims of whatever their mind thinks.  If their mind tells them to eat, they eat.  If their mind tells them not to exercise, they don’t exercise.  If their mind tells them to call someone a racist slur, they call the person a racist slur.  They have no self-control or filter. 

Likewise, things happen to them, not the other way around.  They use the passive, as opposed to the active voice.   “The report was written and criticized by my boss.” instead of, “I wrote the report, and my boss criticized it.”  “My request for time off was given to my boss and rejected.” instead of, “I requested time off, and my boss rejected it.”  This passive voice turns the person into a victim of circumstance with no power to change anything in their life.  If they offend their coworkers and thereby create friction between them, they then accuse their coworkers of being hostile and unfriendly for no good reason.  They are also the ultimate hypocrites.  When they insult someone, they expect that person to have thick skin and accept it.  If they are insulted, they are victims of persecution and spiteful, flawed friends or coworkers.  Everyone is against them.  They are actually right, because they’re such annoying, hypocritical, dramatic people.

* * *

So how are you supposed to deal with a narcissist who alternates between loving and hating themselves and wants negative attention?  You don’t.  Of course, today, you’re surrounded by them, and don’t be surprised if you realized you are one.  The answer is, do no further harm.  The best thing I use is the realization that nothing they say to you is personal.  Narcissists don’t really care about you.  They only think in huge generalizations that are meaningless.  They don’t know you.  Whatever they accuse you of, it’s either based on that ridiculous generalization or most oddly, they project. 

In a world where they only exist, what you think or do to them should be the same as what they think and do to you.  They love to accuse people of being selfish, rude, overly sensitive, unfriendly, unkind, cowardly, antisocial, narcissistic, and dramatic, because they are.  Interestingly, they often start out projecting great affection, admiration, attention, and adoration on others.  This is the love cycle.  People with low self-esteem and other narcissists are easy prey for them, because they crave affection, admiration, and attention.  A narcissist will shower you with compliments, “You’re so thoughtful, beautiful, intelligent, talented, amazing, wonderful, trustworthy, loyal, etc.”  If you want to avoid falling for their insults, you need to also avoid falling for their praise.  You don’t have to be totally cynical, but you also have to understand the simple fact that they don’t really know you.  They’re just making gross assumptions, wishful thinking, and self-projecting.  And also keep in mind, they will inevitably turn on you and shower you with as much scorn, contempt, antipathy, disdain, and mockery.  It really is your fault if you fell for their praise and considered them a credible source of information.

* * *

The author mentioned the first ever psychological test, the Woodworth Psychoneurotic Inventory used on soldiers.  Apparently, in 1930 the mean score was 19.3 out of 116 questions for males and 19.9 for females.  Today, it’s 32.8 for males and 39.2 for females.  My score was 34 BTW.  82% of the modern sample is psychologically unstable according to the website where I took the test.  They also said that the change is not believable, because it’s so extreme.  One possible explanation is that people were less honest back then.  If you’re in the military, you don’t want to admit to things that make you look bad.  Perhaps the test wasn’t anonymous back then and is anonymous today. 

But even then, it’s a huge gap, and I think it’s believable.  I think modern society makes you neurotic with the increased pace of everyday life.  Everything moves faster from traffic to information to correspondences.  In 1930 there weren’t many televisions.  I think if you sit in front of a television or use social media, you’re inundated with countless images flickering before your eyes trying to capture your attention.  You’re overstimulated by it and become neurotic.  Before television, there was no such hyper-stimulation.  Relatively, everything happened slowly and methodically.  Because news from around the world, even around the city came to you very slowly, there was lag, this buffer of time and space.  If there was a catastrophic tsunami in East Asia, you got the news perhaps a few weeks later.  Today, when you see the tsunami event unfold live, your mind unconsciously believes it’s a real threat happening close to you and causes you much greater stress and anxiety.  Now multiply that by all the local, national, and world news on murders, riots, rapes, conflicts, wars, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters.  No wonder we’re more neurotic today.

The beginning of the book covers a lot of modern psychology and personality psychology.  It reads like a textbook.  The social “sciences” have copied a lot from the natural sciences, and one thing the natural sciences love to do is categorize and clump things together and give everything cool names.  There’s a lot of that going on with modern Psychology.  Fortunately, the author spares us the fake math and statistics that are poured into psychological studies to make them look more like natural/real science studies. 

The author mentions the problem with modern psychological research’s overreliance on undergraduate students.  Earlier on, the vast majority of them were white from middle-class to upper-class backgrounds.  Another bias that is not mentioned is the simple fact that university researchers, in general, tend to be less social and more introverted.  Is this why Psychology keeps ignoring the importance of social skills, interactions, and just how incredibly social we are?  Is this why they keep missing the gigantic elephant in the room regarding most psychological disorders, the simple fact that many victims are raised in antisocial environments and adopt antisocial personality traits? 

While the author does mention that some therapy involves retooling people’s psychobiology through a combination of dietary, physical, social, cognitive, and pharmaceutical interventions, it seems the pharmaceutical is overemphasized while the social is deemphasized.  This is likely caused both by the financial greed and influence of Big Pharma, and Psychology’s obsession with appearing more scientific and medical than social or philosophical. 

Wouldn’t it help people with antisocial personality disorders to practice social skills, role-play, develop conversational aptitude, practice expressing empathy, practice active listening, practice conflict-resolution, etc.?  In fact, why isn’t this even taught in our schools, if we know that it could avert an entire adulthood of costly social dysfunction?  In fact, if anything, we are basically trained to be anti-social in school, taught to not speak unless spoken to, taught to passively listen to a blowhard, taught to be obedient and not stand up for ourselves or anybody else, taught to squash or avoid conflicts instead of talking them out, etc.  If anything, most teachers are horrible examples of social role-models but rather excellent examples of anti-social role-models. 

* * *

I could barely get through the first part of this book.  The author takes what would otherwise be a fascinating subject and turns it into some pseudoscientific discourse that supposedly gives psychology the same dry, boring mechanical patois as studying hydraulics.  If I had read this book as a kid, I would never have taken psychology courses in college.