I was talking with my oldest tonight about the ancient Greeks, and how they were always fighting one another. One city-state would take another, then the next generation it would reverse. Some peoples stayed enslaved; some people were always strangers in that strange land.
Further: this is the history of humankind: stupid, counterproductive theft. You can’t live on what you have, so you go take the stuff someone else created. You don’t want to work, so you take their people, because you can. You kill because you enjoy it, and it’s just the fighters bill come due when you finally fall. The Chinese, the Japanese, the Italians, the Germans, the English, the French: anywhere you look in history you see this pattern. Who killed Ali, the third (if I’m not mistaken) Caliph? Other Muslims. Who killed Caesar? His rivals.
I saw today where the Dalai Lama supposedly reduced his creed to kindness. If this is true, I disagree strongly. The strong have to protect the weak, and that requires being very UNkind at times. To attempt to be nice all the time is to need to live alone in the jungles or a mountain cave. For those trying to accomplish actual, sloppy, useful Good in this world, your hands will get dirty.
It occurred to me too that the Greeks are still at it. They are still waging internecine warfare with one another. Rather than identifying themselves with polei (polises? Something else?) they identify with their group, normally a union, and the Socialists more generally. They then wage literal, violent warfare against all who would stand in the way of their vision of more for them and theirs, and less for everyone else. Screw the long term. Screw everyone else: if they win their battle, they are so stupid they fail to understand the war is not over, and never will be as long as, in aggregate, they are pursuing economically ruinous policies.
While they squabble among themselves, the IMF is carving them up. That is what it was designed to do, and it has been effective. Keynes was very certainly a brilliant man; he simply put his intellect to the service of evil.
Selfishness leads to vanity. and vanity leads to folly. It is not too hard to tempt stupid, morally weak people into self destruction.