Fever: Why the World Is Ill
How organized psychopathy is destroying civilization—and the planet.
“When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
—Martin Luther King Jr., Beyond Vietnam, 1967
The world is very ill. The planet is rejecting a pathogen.
The virus is not people—at least not most of them. Humans have lived on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years without destabilizing our own planet.
The virus is psychopathy. It is the absence of empathy and the systems that reward antisocial psychopathologies. It is the entire process that enabled scenes like below to take place in America.
An unarmed 26-year-old man was shot and killed by ICE agents in his car in Biddeford, Maine. After the shooting, they yanked him out of the driver’s seat like meat, threw him to the ground, handcuffed him, and searched his pockets while he bled out in front of his family—without a single sign of concern over the life they took.
This is the same psychological deviance that called Renee Good a “fuckin’ bitch” and shot Alex Pretti in the back ten times for helping a woman who was being beaten.
At the same time, the President of the United States appears to have consciously decided that plunging the world into an economic winter is preferable to feeling like a loser. Both the U.S. and Iran are now busily destroying petroleum supply infrastructure for much of the world in a tit-for-tat that could lead to calamity.
The Strait is not “open.” It is controlled by Iran. What Trump said he wants to do by taxing cargo is illegal—and by Tuesday he had already backed down. Becoming the “GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT” was not one of the military objectives America was sold. But none of that matters because Trump lives in a totalizing alternate reality which allows no competing information to penetrate.
This was his only public appearance Monday—bragging about his NASCAR race in D.C. He’s not just out of touch; he’s in a different dimension.
But looming behind this propaganda and domestic violence is the biggest threat of all. The Earth is heating faster than even most doomers predicted. We have already passed the point of no return in many respects. The current “Godzilla” El Niño has only just begun—and it is already quite literally off the charts.
This event may kill millions of people regardless of Trump. But cutting off fertilizer from the Strait of Hormuz will make the impacts far worse. And the longer it goes, the more people die. It’s really that simple. Trump’s decision to relaunch his war could turn a disaster into civilization-scale mass death.
Of course, Trump’s reaction to climate change has been to not just deny it, but to actively stop new government subsidies for wind and solar—and to gut the Endangered Species Act—while America bakes under a record-breaking heat dome. It is a kind of murder-suicide theater.
But what ties all these things together—from Gestapo-like ICE officers, to Trump’s malignancy, to a hypercapitalist system that deliberately ignored climate change until it was too late?
Organized psychopathy.
A psychopath has one primary interest—themselves. To the psychopath, other people may only enter the calculus when they can be of benefit. Otherwise, humans have no inherent value and can be freely manipulated or destroyed. This gives the psychopath an extreme advantage over others—unless the system in which they operate recognizes them as a danger before they can cause serious damage.
This is a phenomenon seen in a number of primate species including bonobos where physically weaker females form coalitions to wield power over aggressive males.
We found that females target males in 85% of their coalitions and that females occupy higher ranks compared to males when they form more frequent coalitions. This result indicates that female coalition formation is a behavioral tool for females to gain power over males
—Drivers of Female Power in Bonobos, Nature, April 2025
On the other hand, chimpanzees in Uganda have been engaged in a constant “civil war” since 2015—which has escalated to brutal tactics like widespread infanticide.
Humans are built from over 98% of the same matched-pair DNA as these animals. We inherit both of these patterns: forming coalitions to equalize power with dominant individuals; and breaking down into senseless violence over control.
The American government itself can be seen as an attempt to mitigate the danger of psychopathologies. The founders were clear from the beginning about what they saw as the greatest threat—aggressive individuals wresting control from the people.
“It is in the Interest of Tyrants to reduce the People to Ignorance and Vice.”
—Samuel Adams, writing in the Boston Gazette, 1772
George Washington, who likely could have remained president indefinitely, voluntarily stepped down from power after two terms and gave the following warning.
“Cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp … the reins of government.”
—George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796
65 years later, the United States entered a Civil War in which the original sin of slavery—psychopathy writ large protected within the American system by the founders—finally engaged in an existential battle with the principles of representative democracy where everyone is “created equal.“
The world is now in danger of devolving into total war because the systems for containing aggressive individuals who value power over human life have failed.
We are being reduced to Adams’ “Ignorance and Vice” because tyrants banded together to destroy the ability for much of the population to receive, as Madison called it, “popular information.”
“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy.”
—James Madison, 1822
The United States is currently both a “Farce” and a “Tragedy” because much of “popular information” has been taken over by amoral, psychopathic people. This failure allowed aggressive individuals with dangerous psychopathologies to recruit, reward, and multiply themselves.
Arguably, the beginning of the end was Reagan canceling the Fairness Doctrine—and vetoing an attempt to codify it into law. This allowed people like Rush Limbaugh to proliferate and set the precedent for entire networks like FOX to dedicate themselves to building a vision of America as a jungle civil war—ignoring truth and empathy in favor of profiting from a cult of anger.
Four decades later, a tyrant has taken the White House for a second time, after poisoning popular information through the same channels.
No serious, permanent solution to our descent into cruelty and violence can fail to address the psychological and epistemological root of the problem. It is impossible to inform people who live in a self-contained alternate reality where their own neighbors are the enemy.
America and the world are ill because we allowed psychopathy to organize itself through new forms of technology, starting over the airwaves, and now through the internet and social media. This pathology has now spread to the government and to an oligarchy that seeks total power.
“An elective despotism was not the government we fought for.”
—Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1784
While America’s founders were imperfect men who allowed slavery and misogyny to persist within the system, those pathologies have been slowly dissolved by centuries of tears and blood. But now those 250 years of progress are in danger because the safeguards against a return to those barbaric practices have been deliberately broken down.
The temperature of the planet is just a symptom of humanity suffering a relapse. The disease is a civilization which selects for individuals who don’t care about the damage they create.
“The plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good.”
Albert Camus, The Plague
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