Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he has told the United States that he opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state once the conflict in Gaza comes to an end.
In a news conference, a defiant Mr Netanyahu vowed to press on with the offensive in Gaza “until complete victory”: the destruction of Hamas and return of the remaining Israeli hostages, adding that it could take “many more months”.
With almost 25,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, and 85% of the strip’s population displaced, Israel is under intense pressure to rein in its offensive and engage in meaningful talks over a sustainable end to the war.
I grow more convinced every day that I’ve somehow been stranded among a bizarre race of insane savages.
That’s really the only feasible explanation I can come up with. There’s no way that a race of even reasonably intelligent and rational beings could fail to recognize that Netanyahu, for example, is profoundly and dangerously mentally ill - a clear psychopath - and shouldn’t even be allowed out in public unaccompanied, much less granted power over others. So it can only be the case that human beings by and large - at least the not inconsiderable portion of them that support Netanyahu (or Trump or Putin or any of the other vividly insane people in power) - are both stupid and insane.
And somehow, I, with a working brain and an actual set of functioning moral principles, have ended up trapped among them.
It’s important to not look down on them as inferior beings. For they are not. We virtually all share the same DNA. Of course there are psychopaths out there and they truly are a different breed, but that is not a significant factor at a nation state, ethnic, or theological level.
Rather, they are the victims of manipulation, fear, propaganda, psychological warfare. We probably are too.
The only sane people left are the ones with empathy, those who have remembered that listening, understanding, and compromising is the only path to peace and prosperity.
Those who seek revenge and blind justice, especially in the guise of “self defence” will destroy us all.
I don’t think that’s true.
The thing is that, all other things being more or less equal, psychopaths have an inherent advantage in competitions for position in hierarchical systems, since people with empathy and morality will have choices they will be unwilling to make in pursuit of power, wealth and status, while psychopaths will not be so constrained - they will be willing to do absolutely whatever it takes to succeed, guided only by their desire, with no concern for any moral or ethical questions or for the well-being of others.
That means that psychopaths are over-represented among the wealthy and powerful.
And in fact, one need not look far at all to find wealthy, powerful and influential people who are rather obviously psychopaths, including but by no means limited to Netanyahu, Putin and Trump.
That’s what initially set me on this line of thought - the observation that Trump and Putin, and later Netanyahu, are bludgeoningly obviously profoundly mentally ill, and mentally ill in very similar ways - all defined by their complete disregard for the suffering and deaths of those against whom they very obviously very deliberately direct the hatred, violence and murderous tendencies of their followers. They very obviously sow hatred and violence - feeding it and directing it in ways designed solely to further their own ambitions - their own lusts for power and wealth. So by any reasonable standard, they are each and all very obviously profoundly mentally ill, and specifically psychopathic - completely devoid of moral constraint or concern for others.
And they’re not even notably anomalous - they’re exceptional really only by the relative degree of their psychopathy and the notable positions they’ve attained, but the basic dynamic of willingly bringing harm and death to others in pursuit of their own ambitions is a thing one can see over and over in hierarchical systems - governments, corporations, religions… It’s arguably even more the rule than the exception, with those who are highly ranked in such organizations who display actual empathy and moral constraint being very much the exception.
Man is a savage brutal creature. It’s gonna get worse before it gets better.