The Rise To Power Of A Thoroughly Unlikeable Woman - Reprising Darwin In The Free Market

Lucretia Evans had been brought up in style - Park Avenue penthouse, summer home in Southampton, skiing in Gstaad, and a Paris pied a terre - she was a child of privilege, purpose, and position. She was raised by an English nanny and attended to by a phalanx of liveried servants. 

 

She went to the best private schools in New York, and when old enough boarded at Andover, then at seventeen entered Harvard where her record was impeccable - Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and captain of the squash team. 

All was in order for a storied career, especially now that the glass ceiling had finally been broken and women had acceded to top positions in politics, business, law, and medicine. Her career choices were limitless, all doors open for this talented, well-educated woman from one of America's finest families. 

The only problem was that she was one of the most unlikeable women ever - a bitch, a harassing, intemperate succubus who laid waste to classmates, colleagues, family and friends.  

How she got this way was a mystery.  Her father was an old-school gentleman of impeccable manners, and her mother was the gem of Fifth Avenue society. She had not been spoiled no more than any child of wealth would have been.  Despite servants, summers, and Cartier most girls of her social class emerged with charm and a particularly attractive worldliness.  They were confident, determined, ambitious in their own way but never bullying or untoward. 

Lucretia had been born with a nasty streak - a 'bad seed', bits of DNA from the more disreputable side of the family, the robber baron side, the merciless capitalist side.  Her great-grandfather was more ruthless than J.D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie combined and made a fortune through canny predation, exploitation, and downright meanness.  He was feared and avoided.  Accommodation and compromise were not words in his vocabulary.  He was the Genghis Khan of early Twentieth Century America, took no prisoners and impaled the heads of his enemies on stakes that lined Wall Street. 

Of course genetic assignment being what it is, no one in the Evans family could pin down the association.  It could simply have been faulty wiring or some random, stray bit of DNA that came in with the genetic tide; but whatever it was, the woman was insufferable.  Yet one investment bank after another sought her services, for she was made for the Street.  America was not made by sissies, and what was a bit of nastiness on the floor compared to the bodies of financial enemies littering lower Manhattan?

 

Yet despite the millions she made - she was a wizard at ingenious credit swaps and innovative financial instruments - she poisoned the atmosphere of any office where she worked.  She was a snarling, barely restrained attack dog.  She seethed anger and impatience.  Associates moved out of her way when they saw her coming, avoided her in the halls, and patched her in to virtual meetings rather than have to be in the same room with her. 

It was all worth it, said the admiring Chief Executive of her firm.  She was an example of pure Darwinian evolution - she swallowed up the weak and the uncertain, castrated the comers, and neutered the bitches who thought they could take her on.  She was at the very top of the food chain; and while she would never have a management or executive position - jobs that take ambition but a modicum of collegial leadership - she would eat everyone alive and profit from it. 

Genghis Khan was a brilliant strategist, canny politician who through tact, intimidation, and offers of great spoils, enticed the warlike Turkic tribes to join his armies, nearly doubling their strength.  However, it was not only the might of his imposing armies, nor his ability to manage, discipline, and control such a large and diverse military force; nor even his tactical acumen and understanding of calculated risk which assured victory.  It was his indomitable, absolute, unalloyed will.  

Khan had no qualms, moral reservations, or ethical hesitancy.  Wars were for winning, civilians were complicit enemies, and total annihilation of any opposition was his modus belli. Not only would defeated populations be without the wherewithal to mount a resistance or counterattack, they would never dare to incite the bloody, murderous, savage wrath of the conqueror.

In all human history violence, brutality, conquest, and bloody empire have been the rule; and the acquisition, maintenance, and extension of power at all levels of human society is still our modus operandi.  It is only vanity, historical ignorance, and incredible idealism which closes the blinds on the Twentieth Century.  

'On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life' was Charles Darwin's seminal work in which he expounded his theory of evolution - the progressive emergence of dominance in all living species.  The subtext of the work was that the stronger, more evolved organisms would destroy the weaker, thus ensuring the survival and preeminence of 'The Favored Races'. 

 

While Darwin based his theories on observations from the animal kingdom (especially those made during the voyage of the Beagle in the South Atlantic), the conclusion that man was no different from the animals he studied was inescapable, and that the social implications of his work were clear,  Every parcel of human society, from families to nations, was based on competition to achieve dominance; and only the strongest and most able would survive and prosper. 

History has repeatedly and eminently shown the correctness of this assumption; so why has moralism and its rejection of competition in favor of cooperation and collaboration had any currency whatsoever? What in history has ever disproved Darwin?  The Pax Romana was short-lived in historical time, bookended by thousands of years of violent territorialism.  

Margaret Mead who claimed she had found true cooperative living among the Trobriand Islanders was recently criticized and her theories debunked.  Faulty reasoning, a priori judgements, and an error-ridden methodology led to her happy, but fictionally hopeful conclusion that peace and harmony are possible. 

Lucretia Evans' Chief Executive hung a portrait of her on the wall of his office after she left, not because of the millions in profits she had brought to the firm, but the most pure, unalloyed, unmitigated example of Darwinism that he could imagine.  The nastiness, arrogance, and obvious misanthropy went with the territory.  Nietzsche's Superman - the epitome of Darwinian principle, who rode above the herd was not a nice guy. 

'Wasn't she great?', said the Chief Executive.