Toxic Behaviour (Part I)

 For some reason, I looked at the picture and the headline from CommonDreams:

"In 'Brazen Wealth Transfer' , Exxon and Chevron Pay Out Record Sums to Shareholders"

... and I thought about the narcissism and entitlement of Israelis (as well a few Jewish individuals I've encountered here in Canada) who seem to think that they're justified in slaughtering Palestinians due to the fact that the Palestinians hate them for no reason other than crazed antisemitism.  It seems to me that they both share the same gross sense of entitlement and the same contempt for "others" and this is what allows these people (and others who possess their psychosis) to do what they do.

You remember Chevron don't you?  Recently they lost a lawsuit in Ecuador and were found liable for having poisoned enormous swaths of Amazon rainforest that rendered the territories of many tribes unliveable.  They haven't paid a dime of that settlement but the lawyer who won the lawsuit for the Amazonians, Stephen Donzinger, lost his license, spent over two years under house arrest, and was eventually sentenced to six months in prison.  [Here's a second story about this travesty because it's so disgusting.]

Look at that guy's face.  Michael Wirth.  Sells a product that's killing the planet.  Knowingly poisons communities and eco-systems.  Complete fucking asshole.  Profit-gouger.  It was these oil company thieves who helped contribute to the inflationary surge since 2020.  And they take their billions of dollars in profits that they've taken out of our wallets (either through oil prices or from the subsidies our governments give them or from the natural disasters that our governments have to clean up) and they distribute it to their oligarch shareholders.  $26.3 BILLION is a LOT of money.  (Together with Exxon's $32.4 BILLION the total return to the oligarchs is close to SIXTY BILLION DOLLARS.)

How can they do this to us?  And by "us" I mean "the rest of humanity."  How can they be so insanely selfish?  How can they be so arrogant and callous?

To start: These are horrible people.  Narcissists with shrivelled souls.  People capable of exonerating themselves with the most embarrassingly shallow of rationalizations.  People capable of insanity-level abilities of compartmentalization.  But given the proper training and environment, most human beings are quite capable of at least approaching such behaviour.  I will be talking about the significant number of Israeli citizens cheering the genocide in Gaza later.  But for now, jut ponder how we North Americans compartmentalize that same tragedy, going about our business Christmas shopping, watching the Oscars and the Super-Bowl.

So someone like Michael Wirth.  Tail-end of the Baby-Boom Generation.  He's had access to pretty much the same information about global warming as I've had.  Perhaps his allegiance to the oil economy was concretized by reaching "maturity" six years earlier, before the "debate" about global warming turned irrevocably to the realists' (ie., those who espouse anthropogenic global warming) side.  But even still: Poisoning huge areas of the Amazon?  Abusing the legal system to avoid the consequences of this activity?  Profit-gouging his entire nation and thereby risking an economic recession for hundreds of millions of people?  Being involved with all the nasty business Chevron is up to all over the world?

It's my belief that somehow or other, Wirth and his fellow Chevron senior executives (all the people like them in the corporate world everywhere) have formed themselves a "community" from which everyone opposed to them is a dark, malevolent "other."  An enemy to their well-being.  Opponents to be bested.  From there it can become a game perhaps.  What are the things that need to be done, that can be done, to defeat these opponents?  What is the most that can be extracted from these "others" to pad Chevron's, and their own, bottom lines?

Of course, being narcissists, these Chevron executives see everyone as a rival and a threat.  Their own workers are an expense to be minimized.  If US-American Chevron workers have unavoidable wage levels and safety levels to be paid, these are to be avoided as much as possible.  And Chevron workers in countries with weaker worker protections are to be exploited to the maximum possible as well.  These fellow executives are likewise rivals.  The long and the short of it is that people like Michael Wirth at Chevron are insane.  I know that I'd already said as much, but it beared repeating.  They're INSANE.  They do horrible, horrible things.  The harm BILLIONS of people.  They're monsters.

I feel compelled to stop for a second.  Am I guilty of what I'm accusing Wirth and his ilk of doing?  Haven't I just "othered" these oil executives?  Haven't I made them my enemies to justify my attacks upon them?  Obviously I'm going to say that I don't think so.  You can judge my reasong: I am doing comparatively very little to make the atmosphere warm up to where sea levels will rise and flood coastal cities and temperatures will rise to make deserts hotter and ocean currents will change and plunge Europe into a deep-freeze and Greenland and Antartica will melt and croplands will fail and civilization will collapse into famine and war and ruin.  I'm just not.  And I am not raising the price of any good that I have for sale for no reason, to take advantage of supply-chain disruptions that had previously lowered the demand for my product.  I am not selling a good that is essential for the current functioning of the economy so that when I raise the price for it higher than the inflation rate I am risking the health of that economy and thereby the well-being of billions of people.

To the extent that I am being directly harmed by people like Wirth (and, let's not forget the bad people at Exxon who also raised the price of their product to enrich themselves and their fellow oligarchs at our expense) while, at the same time, I am doing nothing to actually harm such people, to that extent am I justified in seeing them as my enemies.  For the time being civilization is going to require the use of fossil fuels.  We should rapidly diminish our consumption of these fuels, but that need not mean reducing people like Wirth to homelessness and penury.  The society that I envision is based on the moral of "Do unto others as you would have done unto you."  A society where nobody is homeless or goes hungry because of deliberate policy.

I suppose that should have gone without saying.  The root of the conflict between murderers and their victims, rapists and their victims, all abusers and their victims, involves the "othering" of each party.  But one party did not invite this relationship.  The victimized party has no obligation to consider the whole humanity of the oppressor and agonize about whether they're being "fair" to them.  It's just that I must have some sort of what has become known as "Stockholm Syndrome" (a long misunderstood term actually) where I have apparently internalized the mindset of my oppressors.  I have to justify my opposition to being abused.  I have to justify making enemies of the people who don't care if their self-centered pursuits harm literally billions of people.  Because I'm terrified of being portrayed as an example of "the angry, angry left."  I have to defend my desire for collective goods like public healthcare and cooperative housing as not being the first step on the road to Stalinism or Hitlerism.  I must assure people that my opposition to Israel's genocide of the people of Gaza is not "antisemitism."  And my wish that Muslims not be forcibly converted to Christianity, or harassed as a terrorist population or deported is not a "libtard" desire to be subjected to "Sharia Law."

It's going to take more time to explain the connection between psychopathic oil executives and murderously racist Israelis than I have time for today.  I think I'll post this now and finish it in a subsequent post.