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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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