We Live in an Unnecessary Nightmare Created By Human Predators

And there is no reason why we cannot change it without hurting anyone

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‘Unexpected Power’. Licensed Image: Adobe Stock | #134408259

A nightmarish, pointless vision

Human predators have no vision for the world, other than as an arena for perpetual predation, and a competition for survival. It is their vision, or rather nightmare, that humanity has lived with since we became self-aware.

The same thing that gives us self-awareness, also gives us the capacity for empathy. Real empathy is more than just knowing what someone else feels. It is also caring about it altruistically, in a non self-centred way. Those two qualities together, empathy and self-awareness, make us harmless. A human being with empathy, and self-awareness is incapable of inflicting harm.

Human predators have no empathy, and no self-awareness, which is what makes them so dangerous. There is nothing to stop them from doing to others whatever they want, because they do not see other people as anything other than a resource. They do not have self-awareness to enable them to learn from mistakes, and change. It is not that they do not want to be empathetic or self-aware. They genuinely do not have the neurological ‘equipment’ that enables these human capacities. It is either impaired, or completely absent.

Collaboration is an alien concept to human predators, and they view it with a mixture of incomprehension and contempt. When people are generous, or help others without expecting or asking for anything in return, predators interpret this as weakness, naivety, or stupidity. When people empathise with the suffering of others, predators see it as equally stupid, or weak.

In my youth in Israel, such messages were reguarly offered as sage advice by older people. One message I remember particularly well is, ‘In life you either eat, or you get eaten’. The implication was that if you do not ‘have what it takes’ to be, or behave like a predator, you are doomed to be exploited, or killed. I know this is not unique to Israeli society. Primitive predatory philosophy exists everywhere, and it is as old as humanity. But this view is at the heart of Israeli soceity and it is what drives it to commit genocide against the Palestinians, and harm millions of people elsewhere.

To predators, everything is transactional. Our current economic system is based entirely on the predators’ rule-book. Principle number one in modern economics is that people always act to ‘maximise their own utility’. It is what we were taught in my first ever lecture in economics. My economics lecturers were decent people. Even as they taught us this principle, they warned us in no uncetain terms that this does not describe everything about humans. However, the idea that human beings can be generous, to the point of self-sacrifice; that we value and need community, connection, kindness, and collaboration for everyone’s benefit not just our own, ‘does not compute’ in the minds of predators.

Survival of the species — not the ethics or morality of the species — has been the ruling principle in the tooth-and-claw natural world, from which we have emerged. Predators embody this, and this is the world they know, and that they wish to maintain.

The vision predators have for all of us is ‘Sisyphean’. It is as pointless as the punishment that Hades, the king of the underworld, inflicted on Sisyphus. Hades condemened Sisyphus (himself a predatory, psychopathic king) to the task of rolling a boulder up a mountain. Hades enchanted the boulder so that just as Sisyphus would reach the top, the boulder would slip away from him, and roll back down the mountain. Sisyphus would then have to start all over again, ad infinitum.

A Sisyphean vision of life is the only one predators are able to offer us. One of the most harmful things predators can inflict on healthy humans is to make them believe that life is pointless, and that their particular life has no purpose. Trapping people in a concentration, turned-death-camp like Gaza, controlling every aspect of their life, destroying everything that gave their life structure, and purpose, workplaces, schools, homes, places they loved, is intended to do more than kill. It is meant to break their human spirit. The Nazis did the same in Auschwitz, and other concentration, and death camps. (Israeli schools teach this). Just like the Nazis, Israel’s intent is to make its victims feel that their life is pointless.

One of the most efficient, and effective ways to break a person is to take away their sense of purpose, to make them feel that they are nothing but an animated husk. This is the predators’ attempt to shape everyone in their own image. Just like the Nazis did in their time, Israeli society is reducing the lives of their victims to moment-to-moment existence, which in itself can be snuffed out at Israel’s whim. Yes, I did say ‘Israeli society’. Israeli society and its military are one entity. Israel’s miltiary is not an army of the people. The army is the people.

A friend told me yesterday about a nurse in Gaza who is running an informal kindergarten for children whose families, and life Israel has destroyed, and who have nowhere to go. A few of the children have already been murdered by Israel and if Israel has its way, they will all die. This story reminded me of the stories we learned about people in Nazi ghettos who organised informal schools, and kindergartens, music lessons or conerts, with whatever was available to them. Even as the nurse in Gaza knows he cannot keep those children physically safe, he nurtures their spirit, and makes them feel that they matter all the way to the end. Resistance takes many forms, and there is no greater resistance than to insist on remaining human and finding a purpose in life, no matter what. Predators would do anything to take this away from their victims.

I am not surprised that so many people suffer from depression in our supposedly comfortable, and affluent ‘Western’ societies. Depression is what happens to healthy mammals when they are in a bad situation for a prolonged period of time, and are, or are made to feel, powerless to change their situation. Depression is an accurate internal, psychological representation of the reality that the predators have been progressively crafting for all of us.

Human predators count on the fact that we all want to survive. Once born, every creature wants to continue to live. It is natural. Predators, however, do not grasp the fact that survival is only a means to an end, not the end in itself. The real end is to grow and dvelop towards our innate potential. Predators do not grasp this not because they are being deliberately difficult, but because they cannot. Predators’ life is all about survival, nothing else. But healthy humans cannot be well when all that life has to offer them is basic survival. When all we do is shuffle along from day to day, keep our heads above water, live from one pay-cheque to the next, or from one meal to the next, our psychology pays a heavy price. It is the predators’ way of shaping our world that keeps me in my job as a psychotherapist.

The nightmarish vision we are living is empty, boring, repetitious, miserable, and deadly to our minds and bodies. It leads nowhere. I grew up under the control of a psychopathic, predatory mother, her violence, constant and toxic criticism, and mind games. I tried for years to be what I thought she wanted me to be, based on what she told me I should be. There was always an elusive carrot dangled in front of me. If I could only be what she wanted me to be, she would be more interested in me, ‘love me’, and I would enjoy some material benefits.

I failed, repeatedly, because her ‘vision’ for me had nothing to do with who I was. When I tried to be, or behave the way she wanted me to, it made me ill. In my early twenties, I finally began to realise that my mother never had a vision for me. It was an illusion. Her criticisms, and ‘advice’, her attempts to control, and ‘shape’ me had no purpose other than to keep me in the role of a compliant prey, available to her whenever she wished. Her predatory instinct told her she had to stop me from becoming who I was meant to become. Whole, healthy human beings, are not reliable prey. Apart from standing up to the predator, they also try to protect others. Predators do not like this.

The vision that human predators offer for our world has no purpose, other than to preserve and perpetuate the environment in which they, a small minority, can thrive.

The environment predators create is harmful, and painful. It necessiates plenty of death and suffering, human desperation, and recurring cycles of destruction. It also needs people to be anxious and unwell. This is catastrophic to our psychology, and our physical health. The way of life we are accepting is the opposite of what healthy humans need in order to thrive. We need kindness, safety, trust, cooperation, friendship, support, encouragement, and validation. We need safe and healthy communities, where each and every individual matters, and has a place, and a purpose. And we need peace as a pre-requisite for health and growth. Predators do not do peace.

Predators are not happy, or fulfilled people, but they do not seek happiness or fulfilment. All they want is to survive, and for their larders to always be full. They are mindless survivalists, whose life flows from one experience of predation to the next, until they die. Look at people like Al-Fayed, or Jimmy Saville, for example, or my own mother and father. They were real people, not fictional characters in a novel, or a film. Generations of predators live and die, having left scorched Earth behind them. They rarely pay the price. We do.

I have just read that FEMA, the US’s Federal Emergency Management Agency does not help homeless people in the aftermath of hurricanes or other natural disasters. Who else, but predators, would come up with such insane devilry?

Are predators made by nature or nurture?

Most of us, the non-predators, are not determined by our genes. The collection of genes we are each born with is a blueprint. How ‘we turn out’ depends on our environment. It is the same for every plant, or creature on Earth. Genes only give us the potential to develop certain abilities, interests, even illnesses. It is the environment, or rather the way the environment interacts with our genes that determines what abilities we would go on to develop, and what we become.

People with a fully functional brain, the majoirty of us, can change the ‘architecture’, or connectivity of our brain throughout life. Thanks to our superb neuroplasticity, we can recover from past hurts, and traumas, and can become the people we instinctively know we have the potential to become.

When it comes to human predators, nature might play a bigger role than nurture. Most predators are born the way they are. Their genetic make-up predisposes their executive brains to not develop properly. Even if their childhood environment was loving, they would still not develop properly. It happens. We accept neurodiversity such as autism, or dyslexia. Sometimes physical organs do not develop as they should, or children are born with an impaired sense, or with a rare illness. We do not blame parents for the genes they pass on. How can we? We accept that there are genetic variations in nature. It is not a matter of blaming, but of understanding that predators have a type of neurodiversity that makes them dangerous.

It is a myth that everyone with a personality disorder was abused in childhood. It is completely untrue, but talking about it is something of a taboo. My profession misleads the pubic, maybe because it does not like to admit that there are things it cannot do. If predators, people with personality disorders, are born this way, there is not much psychology can do. It requires maturity, courage, and honesty to admit that we are powerless over something.

Most psychological research on personality disorders, on human predators, focuses on them. There is endless fascination with their symptoms. But no one is studying the harm that they do to others, and what we might need to do to help their victims. I have found only two papers that lightly touch on this topic in the past ten years. Victims’ traumas and symptoms are studied in isolation of their real causes. In other words, there is no open scientific acknowledgement of the harm that predators do to their victims. That information is mostly relegated to the self-help genre. It can be that predators, or predatory instincts, impact on the allocation of funding for research. It can also be that researchers are afraid of the predators, so they avoid exposing the harm they cause. While the truth is subverted and ignored, the victims are abandoned by the scientific community. We avoid the topic in individual psychology to the detriment of victims. Our failure to acknowledge it in the wider context of society is to everyone’s detriment.

If there was no genetic factor at play, then anyone who was abused or neglected in childhood should become a psychopathic predator. However, the majority of people who were mistreated in childhood go on to develop a fully functional human brain. They might carry trauma, but everything in their head works, which means that they can change and heal. Many people who grew up with horrific abuse, or neglect inflicted by predatory adults, turn out to be excellent, moral human beings, who do good in the world.

Unfortunately, predators not only lack the special executive abilities that make us human, they also seem to lack the neurological ability to change. Anyone who has been in close contact with, or has been affected by a psychopath, or someone with a personality disorder, knows they do not change. It is not because they do not ‘want’ to change. They genuinely cannot, and this is heartbreaking. Equally tragic is the fact that we allow those misshapen, often nasty, predatory people to shape our world in their image.

How healthy humans can be broken

Something happens to a lot of people during their childhood, and school years that can cause otherwise healthy people to succumb to the predators’ world. They might collude with the world, albeit with great internal discomfort, or they might become ineffective, hide, keep quiet, and make themselves small. Members of both groups come to therapy, because healthy people cannot live like this without paying a heavy price.

In therapy we do not ‘fix’. People are not objects, and most people have healthy brains, that are not ‘broken’. In psychotherapy we help people get back on the path to optimal development. It is the path they would have been on, if all the ingredients for healthy development were provided to them from the start of life.

I am convinced that our education system needs to change. We need to think about what we mean by ‘education’. Education for what? Do we educate children to be better survivors in the tooth-and-claw world crafted by the predators in charge? Or do we educate our children to grow, and develop to their full humanness? Our education systems reflect, and work in the service of the soul-destroying reality we live in. Schools, or teachers with a different vision or ethos, that nurture children’s spirit, and show them a different way to be, are the exception, not the rule.

We urgently need a new vision and a new plan

Real progress will see us use our ingenuity, and our technology to make survival a given, for everyone on the planet. It goes without saying that we have to agree to ban all forms of killing, all wars, and all weapons manufacturing. No one can be permitted to try to solve problems with violence. In addition to all the other harm they cause, wars and weapons manufacturing are deterimental to the environment. The media constantly preach about climate change. Why is there nothing in the media about how much greenhouse gas Israel is emitting with its bombs, not to mention the harm it is doing to nature, and animals? Settler-colonialism must also be criminalised and banned, in the same way that inside our societies, theft and home invasions are criminal offences.

Resources currently invested in wars, and in making weapons can be used to make sure everyone has a good quality, and safe home. No one should be homeless. How is it even possible that in a ‘progressive’ society there are people who have nowhere to live, and no life? Once basic human needs are met, we can concentrate our efforts and technology on helping everyone develop to their potential. I know it can be done, and, no, I am not thinking of communism. Communism never existed, except in the Kibbutz movement, where it failed, because predatory instincts took over¹. Communism focused too much on tweaking with the capitalist economic system. I am proposing a completely new focus, or paradigm. Our economic practices should be in the service of our universal ethos of growth and development. The ‘economy’ is not an end in itself. It is only a means to an end.

If we start now, those of us alive today, might be able to see a different world beginning to emerge in our lifetime. I am curious to see who could possibly object to world peace, and to making everyone’s life better, and what reasons they might offer for their objections. It should be easy to smoke out the predators. They are the ones who would start screaming the moment we abandon their tooth-and-claw vision, and begin to live by a new ethos.

As for the predators, maybe we can find something useful for them to do. Many predators are intelligent people, and have useful skills. But we can never underestimate how dangerous they are, and how much harm their mindless instincts can cause, given the opportunity. We must therefore never allow predatory people to have power over other people.

Schools and parents can help children grow up with the right neural architecture or connectivity already there. But to accomplish this, adults need to develop the same thing in themselves. The brain architecture I refer to is what enables us to focus on growth naturally, and not just on survival. It leads to a robust, and healthy psychology, and has the potential to make my profession obsolete. It is amazingly simple to achieve this, albeit not necessarily easy initially. This is not a fantasy. I work with this framework all the time, and have the enormous pleasure of witnessing what it does to people, and how it changes them. As people change, they go on to change their life, and the lives of those around them.

We need to change our relaionship with fear

The predators among us thrive on fear. In fact, the predators in charge, especially those in the media, have turned all of us into fear addicts. It is not a difficult thing to accomplish, given that most people are led by our fear-based limbic system that is not naturally well-connected to our executive brain. Fear sells even better than sex.

As I explain in other essays, as soon as the limbic brain is triggered into threat and fear, it shuts down the very faculties that make us truly human. We lose our empathy, our ability to think clearly, to regulate our emotions and our behaviour, and more. While we do not suddenly become predators (we still have a fully functional brain), we can behave like predators, or go along with their vision.

But imagine not ‘losing yourself’, even when you are feeling threatened. Imagine that even when you feel fear, you can still think clearly, remain empathetic, ethical, and compassionate, and capable of making good decisions. It is normal to feel fear, but we need to regulate it better by validating it when we feel it. We have to ensure the human in us remains present at all times, no matter what we feel.

Choosing a new path

As I suggested in other essays, the rest of us are not helpless, hapless victims in this world. We might not be predatory ourselves. We cannot, and will not do what predators do, and nor should we. But we put predators in power, and we enable them. Some of us enable them directly and actively. (Do you or someone you know work for a person, or an organisation that does harm? Do you or someone you know use justifications and rationalisations to cope with what you do?) Others enable predators by expecting too little out of life, by putting up with the nightmare, by medicating their own feelings, and by keeping their heads down and their mouths shut, just to survive. (Do you or someone you know try to numb uncomfortable feelings, and stay silent in the face of corruption and injustice that hurt people, because it is too scary to upset the apple cart?)

We have to walk away from the way of life we have allowed predators to create for us, and we need to create something new. We do not have to like everyone. We do not have to understand other people, or agree with them. Take it from an experienced relationship therapist. What we need is a global human agreement to cooperate, a willingness to listen, and to validate other people’s experience. We have to agree that all human beings have equal value, and act on it. Predators cannot do this, but most of us can. It starts at home with those closest to us, and then it spreads to all our relationships.

If we want to create a world that is no longer run by predators and their vision, we have to change. Humans who are well developed, and whose humanity does not disappear the moment they feel fear, can create a different environment for themselves and for everyone. We do not need revolutions, or guillotines. Violence belongs in the predators’ reality, and we cannot change our reality if we use their methods. We just need to stop buying what the predators sell. I know this cannot happen overnight, but I believe it can happen much faster than most people imagine. There are already many people who do good, all over the world and in our own communities. We need to join them.

If we do not turn away from the path we are on, from our present, destructive, self-defeating, pointless vision, our time will be remembered as an ignorant and brutal dark age. It will be remembered as a time when humanity allowed our most primitive, vile and destructive instincts to rule us, and dictate the shape of our reality.

Or, it could be remembered as the time in history when everything changed. Ours can be the first generation in human history where a majority (or a sizeable minority) decided to say ‘no’, and ‘enough’ to the predators, and their self-serving, nightmarish vision. Ours can be the moment when all of humanity decides together to try a new path.

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An Afterword (If you are not that keen on StarTrek, please ignore)

In the episode, ‘The Siege of AR-558’, StarTrek: Deep Space-9 (S7:E8 ), a group of soldiers have been left to guard a dangerous outpost for a lot longer than they were meant to. The bloody war with the Dominion is going badly for the Federation. The troops and resources are spread thin, and Starfeet Command has not been able to send a replacement crew for five months.

Captain Sisko and his team arrive at the outpost for what is meant to be a brief task to drop off supplies for the outpost team, after which they go back to the safety of their ship. They find everyone at the outpost exhausted, and traumatised. There are just over fifty still guarding the outpost, survivors from a crew about three times that size. The team’s Captain was killed, and everyone has lost close friends, and colleagues, and witnessed horrible deaths, and injuries. They are irritable, bitter, disillusioned. They are at the end of their tether. They know that any one of them could be killed at any moment.

For plot reasons, Quark, the Ferengi bar owner on DS9 is on this mission too. He tries to keep an eye on his nephew Nog, who is the first Ferengi to ever become a StarFleet officer. The Ferengi philosophy of life, especially their famous ‘Rules of Aquisition’ are the DS9 writers’ way of showing up our own economics, which increasingly determines our social order. Alongside the subjugation of their females, greed is the most important principle in Ferengi society. There is always great tension between the Ferengi philosophy of life, and 24th Century human values. It makes for thoughtful, sometimes humorous, storylines.

Nog, Quark’s nephew, is dedicated to his role in Starfleet. He believes in human, and Federation values, which regularly puts him at odds with his uncle. Quark realises that Nog is determined to do anything, including sacrifice his own life, for the sake of his crew mates. At some point he says to Nog:

“Let me tell you something about hu-mans, nephew. They’re wonderful, friendly people as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working… but take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers… put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those same, friendly, intelligent, wonderful people will become as nasty and as violent as the most bloodthirsty Klingon.”

What the writers put in Quark’s character’s mouth is precisely what the predators among us believe, say, and teach. They believe that their perception of reality applies to everyone, because they cannot imagine a reality other than their own.

The way the episode unfolds, proves Quark wrong. Sisko’s team remain on the outpost to help the exhausted crew, at a great risk to their own life. There is a happy ending, albeit a bittersweet one, because a lot more people are killed before a replacement team finally arrives.

It is a dark episode that not only makes us question ourselves, but shows us the horrible, grim reality of war. It also shows that human compassion, courage, and self-sacrifice can overcome fear and adversity.

The message from all of StarTrek is that we are choosing our destiny. We decide what principles to follow, and how we wish to be. And even if we have chosen a bad path, we always have the option to choose something different.

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1. All the Kibbutzim in Israel are built on the ruins of Palestinian society. I have no great love for them. Quite the opposite. The Kibbutz movement has always been at the forefront of Israel’s settler-colonialism. The Kibbutz movement has always been over-represented in Israel’s so-called ‘elite’ units, and many Israeli pilots were raise in a Kibbutz. The Kibbutz movement’s idealistic way of of life, that so many young Westerners fell in love with a few decades ago, can be seen as an attempt at whitewashing settler-colonialism and ethinc cleansing. But nothing that is built on a crime against humanity, can succeed or survive.