Many years ago I first heard the phrase, “there is nothing more dangerous than a broken man with power”. This is confirmed by the numerous books written about individual men – Hitler, Starlin, Pinochet, Pol Pot – examining the men themselves and what led to their brutal regimes.
Time-after-time books and research documented how one man (and yes, it is almost exclusively men), surrounded by a small and highly rewarded fan club, can terrorise a population into compliance as they destroy a country or a region. In the end the man is toppled but the damage has been done and trust in the leadership of the country is lost. But a loss of trust in governments doesn’t only evolve in response to those who create gas chambers, gulags, disappearances and killing fields.
The level of distrust today in USA, can to some degree be traced back to a handful of men, just one being J. Edger Hoover, who ran the FBI for almost five decades. Hoover’s crackdown on the civil rights movement, including anti-Vietnam War activists was so significant it led to eight ordinary people, calling themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, to steal thousands of files from an FBI field office. Compared to the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, the knowledge of the FBI Papers is largely lost to history.
The date of the break in was March 8, 1971, when America was being entertained by the Muhammad Ali v. Joe Frazier title fight. The distraction worked and the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI got what they wanted. They then spent hours separating the thousands of classified documents into two categories, 1) Legitimate FBI criminal investigations 2) Illegal and unconstitutional activities. What surprised them was how much of the documentation fell into category 2, what has since been called a “nationwide program of illegal surveillance and harassment”.
The group released documents to several news organisations and members of Congress. Most returned them to the FBI and did nothing. But Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger broke the story on March 24, 1971. These leaked documents triggered the exposure of Hoover’s “secret counterintelligence program”, COINTELPRO, and resulted in the first overhaul of the FBI since Hoover became its director in 1924. COINTELPRO was set up in 1956 to investigate and disrupt dissident political groups in the United States in order “to enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles” to discredit, destabilize, and demoralize groups. While some far-right groups were monitored, in the main the focus was the new left and civil rights movements.
For 15 years, from 1956 until its exposure in 1971, seeds were planted to undermine every social safety net designed to build better lives for all; these initiatives were inevitably linked to the vocabulary of “communism” when they simply called for more equality and to give all citizens a fair go. In the USA, and now many countries around the world, we have travelled so far to the right that social democracy is all but forgotten. Social democracy, defined as a capitalist economy with state economic regulation in the general interest, state provision of welfare services and state redistribution of income and wealth. After nearly 50 years of neoliberalism, focusing only on economic growth, it is clear that a rising tide of liberal democracy certainly hasn’t raised all boats.
What is for sure is that we don’t need conspiracy theories to explain the social and environmental turmoil we are in. But sadly, when people feel they have little power, it is conspiracy theories that prevail. This turmoil is the result of the unquestioned commitment to never-ending growth, which is the foundation of the neoliberal ideology. And all too often this unquestioned commitment is from (mainly) men with fragile egos, who are addicted to the status, power and influence enabled by their wealth.
History has provided conclusive proof of the devastation one man, with his small and highly rewarded fan club, can create. As we look at the existential crises we collectively face, including planetary breakdown and social inequality, we must ask ourselves why society keeps enabling these broken (mainly) men to maintain the status quo? From politicians to media moguls, tech bros to financiers and industrialists they create and reinforce an ideology with a narrow agenda, namely growth and profit at the expense of everything else.
Their unspoken strategy seems to be, keep telling people what they want to hear, as long as it keeps the money coming in. This dual profit-power strategy is helped by the right-wing media; just how long have we been groomed to watch, believe and consume?
In the limited time we have left to mitigate the worst of the planetary breakdown to come, I wonder how we get more emotionally grounded, ‘grown ups’ in positions of power. We don’t have the luxury of time for the manchild, or the handful of women who have followed their ideological lead to get a seat on the table.
So much time has been wasted by handing power to broken men. But I qualify this by saying, even with the elected officials who appear more emotionally grounded, they are equally useless if they aren’t courageous. In some ways, the emotionally grown-up man with little courage can be a bigger problem, as he first provides hope to the populace that things can change. As time drags on, and election promises are kicked down the road, it reinforces the belief that nothing can divert us from this path. It seems shocking that more people say they can envisage the end of the world rather than the end of capitalism, with the term apocalyptic optimism being discussed. There is nothing good in store on the other side of planetary collapse or, indeed, during the transition period. But is seems like some of these broken men with power, and the necessary wealth, are funding longevity research to make sure they are still alive, to live in bunkers on the broken planet that they had a hand in creating.
The media organisations of the “All the President’s Men” 1960s/70s era seem long forgotten. What remains are the empires headed by billionaires more bent at driving the current ideology for their personal benefit, with no desire to peek behind the façades and look under rocks. And, why would they when they when all they would shine a light on is the problem they to have created for the rest of us, to maintain their wealth and privilege. We need a trusted media, as opposed to what journalist Nikki Savva calls, “a media [which] manipulates our emotions rather than telling us what we need to know”.
Where do we look to find the examples of the actions we need to take? I smile as I think of the line in the 2020 movie Misbehaviour telling the story of the 1970 birth of the Women’s Liberation Movement, beautifully delivered by Jessie Buckley, “Leave it to us to make sure your daughter doesn’t have to grow up in the same shitty world we did. Just remember, right, you get the world you deserve and, if you don’t fight, you deserve the world you fucking get.”. I have been very lucky to benefit from the work done be these fearless, strong-willed, risk-taking women, who some may term “childless, cat ladies” or “witches”.
We have had ample warnings about these broken men from the many books printed since the dawn of the Gutenberg press. One of the earliest examples, Malleus Maleficarum (first printed in 1487), it was the author himself, Heinrich Kramer, who historians have described as a “superstitious psychopath”. The German churchman and inquisitor’s book spread through the world, along trade routes, and was instrumental to witch hunts and trials.
How will the historians of the future document the current crop of broken (mainly) men and the people making up their small and highly rewarded fan club? What will be written about how, in a few short decades, they perfected an inhuman, neoliberal ideology for their personal benefit, at the expense of global security, stability and wellbeing? While this is happening globally, no doubt many people have eyes on the US, watching how the election is playing out.
As Jonathan Freedland, Guardian columnist and the host of the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast, wrote in an opinion article of the recently, “I hesitate to give JD Vance any ideas, but if American women were denied the vote, Donald Trump would be restored to the White House in a landslide. Similarly, if men were removed from the franchise, Kamala Harris would be swept into the Oval Office in an even bigger earthquake. As it is, the two are clashing in an election marked by a gulf so wide, the phrase “gender gap” doesn’t do it justice. In ways that go deeper than mere politics, and with implications for the world beyond the US, the presidential election is increasingly looking like a war between men and women”.
It seems astonishing to read something like this in 2024, but this is the world we live in. While we keep letting these broken (mainly) men into power, we must be honest with ourselves that we deserve the world we fucking get.
Lynn Johnson is a physicist by education and has worked as an executive coach and a strategy consultant for over 20 years. In her work she pushes for systemic change, not piecemeal solutions, this includes campaigning for modernising the legal trade in endangered species, to help tackle the illegal wildlife trade.
