Will to Intellectual Supremacy

Here is an entire post of Paul Krugman, "Another Kind of Financial Fragility",
followed by my comment, which explains and amplifies what Krugman talks about. Namely, the mental fragility of the top banksters, who are revealing to be affected by the sort of madness hubris leads to:


"Recent events have a lot of economists working hard at trying to determine the causes of financial fragility — the vulnerability of some economies, ours very much included, to disruptive shocks that cause credit and spending to freeze.

But recent events have also highlighted another kind of financial fragility: the sensitive egos of powerful bankers. I’ve been calling this the Ma! He’s looking at me funny! syndrome; it’s quite something to behold.

In a way, it sort of makes sense. Any leading player in the world of finance makes so much money that he more or less literally already has everything money can buy. If he cares about making even more money, it’s purely as a way of keeping score. And once you’re motivated mainly by considerations of prestige, you start to care more about whether the president is saying nice things about you than whether his actual policies are letting you off scot-free from any consequences of your industry’s sins.

Anyway, a good read from Reuters about the fragile ego of Jamie Dimon, who is not only wealthy beyond count but has also received a lot of fawning press. But it’s apparently not good enough."
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This observation of Paul Krugman is right on the mark.

I hold that there is such a thing as the Will to Intellectual Supremacy in human beings. OK, a number of thinkers, culminating with Nietzsche talked about the Will To Power, and even the Will To Knowledge, as Nietzsche did. But this is still different. The Will to Intellectual Supremacy makes people live and die, by, and for, ideas.

The Will to Intellectual Supremacy is specifically human. (Whereas the will to Power is exhibited by plenty of other species, only human have digitalized ideas, something they are equipped to transmit into a culture. Chimps have also ideas, but they can be transmitted only visually.)

An evolutionary advantage is that this Will to Intellectual Supremacy kicks in only when there is plenty enough ideas around, hence enough people, hence a good reason to find any reason to decrease the number of said people.

More importantly, though, the Will to Intellectual Supremacy creates a highly competitive environment for ideas. It makes ideas go to war against each other, and thus allows a selection of the fittest. Thus the will to Intellectual Supremacy strongly urges forward the evolution of ideas towards superior forms (superior in the sense that the enemy gets eaten, or something akin to that).

So Dimon, the bankster, fights to death to impose his views that plutocracy knows best, and is, overall, best. He goes according to instinct. He incarnates an animal force, with intellectual supremacy pretention.

Reasoning with a deamon such as Dimon is like reasoning with an Aztec priest. It is to others to master his ideas, and put them back in the cage they belong to.

And how were the Aztec priests defeated? By rising an army of their victims, having persuaded them that it was a war worth fighting, and that they could win, if they tried hard enough. And that it was shameful to do nothing, because the Aztec horror, a form of extreme plutocracy, did not belong on this Earth.

And now, in some ways, with thermonuclear nukes looming, the situation is potentially much worse, so the fight against plutocracy has to be even more radical.
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