Top Billionaire
Hedge Funder Sees Himself As a Hyena Devouring Wildebeests
by Mark Ames, AlterNet
Posted on May 21, 2010
Source
Ray Dalio is a billionaire hedge fund manager who
makes more money in a single day than most Americans will earn in
their entire lifetimes.
That’s because hedge funds are the top of the Wall Street food
chain — and Dalio runs the largest hedge fund of all, Bridgewater
Associates. Life’s good at the top of this food chain: in 2008,
a bad year for most Americans, Dalio took home $780 million. That same
$780 million could have paid the salaries of about 20,000 teachers — and
those 20,000 teachers could have taught about 400,000 American students
(using author Les Leopold’s calculations). A lot of people might
find this offensive and unjust, but not Dalio—he thinks this is
all part of Nature’s Plan, and it just so happens that Nature
favors the hedge fund managers:
“I believe that self-interest and society’s
interests are generally symbiotic…That
is why how much money people have earned is a rough measure of
how much they gave
society what it wanted.”
So now we know why hedge fund managers are raking
in record pay (last year, the top 25 hedge fund managers earned on
average about $1 billion
each), while hundreds of thousands of America’s teachers are getting
fired all across the country: Nature hates teachers and other do-gooders.
Sure, Dalio’s hedge fund is flush thanks in no small part to all
the teachers retirement funds that Bridgewater managed to tap—without
those teachers pooling their money together, he’d have a lot
less to plunder, and society would never even know what a great person
he
is.
To which Dalio would answer, “Be a hyena.
Attack the wildebeest.”
Did you write that down yet? Because that’s Cruel
Reality According
to Ray Dalio, a self-described “hyperrealist” and author
of a bulky book of maxims leaked recently via the financial blog Dealbreaker.
Dalio titled his collection of maxims—some 250 in all-- “Principles” and
he makes every Bridgewater employee memorize it. A weighty title like
Principles might have you thinking he’s the Descartes of the new
millennium. Except that his philosophy comes down to something like this:
I [am too rich to] think, therefore I am [a delusional asshole].” Or
better yet, “If I’m so rich, then you ain’t smart.”
You can read Dalio’s Principles thanks to the folks at Dealbreaker
who leaked it last week. Imagine some Ayn Rand geek a few decades later
and a few billion dollars richer, and you get Dalio’s Principles,
exemplified by his “Be a hyena” maxim:
When a pack of hyenas takes down a young wildebeest,
is that good or evil? At face value, that might not be “good” because it
seems cruel, and the poor wildebeest suffers and dies. Some people might
even say that the hyenas are evil. Yet this type of apparently “cruel” behavior
exists throughout the animal kingdom. Like death itself, it is integral
to the enormously complex and efficient system that has worked for
as long as there has been life. It is good for both the hyenas who
are operating
in their self- interest and the interest of the greater system, including
those of the wildebeest, because killing and eating the wildebeest
fosters evolution (i.e., the natural process of improvement). In
fact, if you
changed anything about the way that dynamic works, the overall outcome
would be worse.
That’s right, America’s largest hedge fund manager sees
himself as a hyena, and the rest of us as his wildebeest. As awful as
it reads, coming from the mouth of one of the oligarchy’s most
powerful barons, it also reveals what an idiot Dalio is. Does he even
know anything about the hyena he compares himself to—specifically
the spotted hyena, since that’s the only hyena that regularly feasts
on wildebeest? Can he handle the truth? Because he’s not going
to like it—not unless a macho hedge fund manager like Dalio
is into being dominated by bitches.
See, spotted hyenas are matriarchal. The females rule
each clan, with male hyenas always expected to submit to even the
lowest female in the
pecking order. The females also sport enormous clitorises as large
as the male hyenas’ penises. If there’s a domestic dispute in
the hyena clan, the submissive female hyena’s clitoris grows
an erection as a sign of her submission to the alpha-queen hyena
(the male
hyenas cower and scurry around with their tails between heir legs).
Here’s a description of the female hyena’s bizarre “pseudopenis”:
The labia are fused into what looks like a scrotum,
complete with two pads of fatty tissue that resemble testes. In addition,
the clitoris
is elongated to the point that it is nearly the size of a male's
penis and is likewise fully erectile. Astonishingly, females mate
and give
birth through the long, narrow canal running down the center of this "pseudopenis." During
mating it retracts much like a shirt sleeve being pushed up, and during
birth it stretches so much that it looks like a water balloon. "From
a human perspective, the process can be thought of as giving birth through
an unusually large penis," says Frank.
Even Andrea Dworkin would cringe, but for Ray Dalio,
this is the description of the ideal Bridgewater employee. Dalio
is a major Republican donor—he
gave $2 million to the Republican convention in 2008 where Sarah
Palin made her debut—and he’s a self-described bow hunter
who kills Cape Buffalo and wart hogs. Besides the fact that spotted
hyenas live
in warthog burrows and generally get along fine with them, Ray Dalio
sees himself and his fellow hedge fund billionaires as the spotted
hyenas of the gh--and he’s just as successful, by his own boasting: “Like
the hyenas attacking the wildebeest, successful people might not
even know if or how their pursuit of self-interest helps society,
but it typically
does.”
And yet, as Robin Meadows writes in the Smithsonian
Zoogoer, hyenas are the only known species who get erections as “a submissive gesture” to
the dominant female.
Who would have guessed Ray Dalio is so dickless, and proud of it?
But there’s more about the spotted hyena for the aspiring hedge
fund maverick to admire: like the spotted hyena’s two pronounced
anal glands that squirt out a white pasty substance which produces a “powerful
soapy odor which even humans can detect”—that way, you and
I can smell if we’ve crossed into a Bridgewater partner’s
territory. And hyenas eat anything and everything. It’s true that
they chase down wildebeests. But they’re just as happy to eat someone
else’s wildebeest too—even if it’s been rotting for
days in the Serengeti. Hyenas will follow vultures all the way to some
other predator’s kill, then chase them away and devour it themselves.
You’ve heard of Wall Street Vultures? Well, hyenas are the vultures
of vultures. Nothing makes them sick. Nothing. Spotted hyenas eat every
single fucking thing on a rotting corpse, and to prove their point, hyenas
begin their meals anuswise: by chewing through the carcass’s anus
until reaching the entrails, then tearing into the belly and opening
up the whole smorgasborg of guts and ribs and flesh—and finally
chewing up and swallowing the rest: hooves, bones, skull, horns…everything
is devoured. Almost everything is digested; there’s almost nothing
left for a spotted hyena to shit, just a puff of “white powder
with a few hairs.”
So to recap: if you want to be like billionaire
Ray Dalio, you need to be a submissive vulture-chasing scavenger
with
no gag reflex whatsoever,
willing to swallow anything at all, living with warthogs, scampering
away from boner-popping females, and occasionally shitting out
plumes of chalk dust. Which is a pretty good description of the Bridgewater
Associates employee, as this ex-employee’s confession in
Dealbreaker shows:
Most management meetings and department meetings are
recorded, both the business and tech side, as are individual quarterly
reviews or any
meeting at managements discretion. Often if a manager or Ray thinks
something is worth educational value they will email out a meeting
recording company
wide, these usually involve the individual getting shredded publicly
for the greater good of the company. An example would be like when
former COO Hope Woodhouse was shredded in front of the management
committee
and the sessions were sent out to the company to learn from (she
was brought to the point of crying in the recording). Everyone is
encouraged
to given open and honest feedback so meetings often resort to public
shaming and the demolition of people. 360s end up being everyone’s
chance to totally dig on and destroy other individuals and say whatever
things all year you’ve hated about people, 90% of feedback
received in 360s is negative.
From the outside people think it’s a nice wholesome principled
place that wants to cut through the corporate BS but it’s anything
but. Ray’s hyper realism (in “Principles”) is insane.
Once you read it you’ll get the idea--it’s all about
adherence and indoctrination.
One of the secrets to Bridgewater’s success is that unlike most
hedge funds, Dalio’s avoids wealthy clients in favor of public
funds: teachers retirement funds, public and private pension funds, central
banks, endowments and the like. In other words, this hyena avoids costly
scavenging fights with other predators, in favor of easier kills—that
is, us wildebeests. Sure, it may not seem fair that the billionaire’s
hedge funds have been decimating pension funds over the past decade with
unfulfilled promises of high returns, levying shocking fees and expenses,
all tainted with accusations of bribery, kickbacks and corruption. But
you have to look at it through Ray Dalio’s eyes, you’ll see
that it’s all just cruel nature at work, and anyone who thinks
differently is just a weakling, or worse, a wildebeest.
What makes this all so goddamn humiliating is how
banal and comical this is. Ever since the early 1980s, metal heads
and computer-science
libertarians have been riffing on this same pimply-faced Social Darwinism—joined
by the Ayn Rand Trekkies and all the other misfits. Who would have thought
that the Revenge of the Nerds would look this absurd—and this awful?
It’s such a cliché that it’s become the butt of sitcom
jokes on NBC’s “The Office,” with its Ayn Rand libertarian
dweeb Dwight Schrute. Even Dwight’s boss, played by Steve Carrell,
gets in on the Social Darwinism act when he decides he’s Going
Ray Dalio on a rival family-owned paper company. Here’s how Carrell
describes the same philosophy that Dalio swears by: “In nature,
there is something called a food chain; it's where the shark eats
a little shark. And the little shark eats a littler shark. And so
on and so on.
Until you get down to the single cell shark. So now replace sharks
with paper companies and that is all you need to know about business.”
But Dalio has no idea he’s just a parody of himself. And it does
us no good at all that he’s a parody—because this parody
of a fascist is still plundering America’s wealth. So when Dalio
parrots the parody, it’s not all that funny, not to us anyway.
He doesn’t even care about the billions he’s plundering—it
just makes him feel strong, that’s all:
... people who have made a lot of money typically
never made making a lot of money their primary goal. Instead, they
typically engaged in
the game or craft of what they were doing, got very good at it and
society rewarded them because it valued what they were doing. In
other words,
I believe that the way “reality” generally works is that
it is the pursuit of self-interest that motivates people to push
themselves to do the difficult things that are required to produce
what society
wants, and society rewards those who give it what it wants. That
is why self-interest is a far more powerful force for good than mercy
and charity,
though mercy and charity are certainly natural and beneficial forces
in some cases.
And to add to the insult, Dalio wants to lecture us
as he's chewing into our anuses. Because we're crude slobs who make
the billionaires
sick. In December of 2007, a Dalio foundation ran an ad in the Wall
Street Journal denouncing Christmas consumerism--for some reason,
rich people,
especially the sons and daughters of rich people, started Going Naomi
Klein every Christmas, and Dalio wanted in on the act if that's where
the hyenas were heading. So his ad campaign, "Redefining Christmas," sneered
at the wildebeests: "No sooner does Thanksgiving end, than the
loathsome shopping season begins--a monthlong compulsion to buy something,
anything,
for anyone."
And that's it. We’re ruled over by crazies who despise us and
think of us as wildebeests and themselves as hyenas, and don’t
even care that it’s a laughable analogy because they’re too
fucking lazy and stupid and too busy devouring everything they can. And
in case you thought things were about to change, and that financial reform
was failing only because of the Republicans, I’ll leave you with
this scene from a New Yorker article published last October, titled Inside
The Crisis: Larry Summers and the White House Economic Team, recounting
last spring’s “stress tests” on the bailed-out banks.
Those tests, you’ll recall, were roundly criticized as a joke and
a fraud, but Obama’s economic team wasn’t interested in our
opinions. Guess who’s opinion they sought to please most of
all:
The results of the stress tests showed that the banks
were not in as dire shape as commonly believed. Most of the nineteen
banks were able
to raise money privately. “It worked,” the Treasury official
said. “People had money to put into banks. The nationalization
crowd would have had the government putting all that money in.” On
the day the results of the stress tests were released, Geithner met with
the President. He smiled and handed Obama the first page of a report
from Bridgewater Associates, a private investment firm that had consistently
taken a dim view of Treasury’s plans. The report was headlined “We
Agree!”
There you have it--the entire goal of Obama's economic team was to
get a self-described hyena to take a break from his wildebeest feeding
frenzy
to give a big thumbs-up in approval and cackle, “We agree!” This
pretty much answers every question about why nothing has changed for
the better in the wake of the financial crisis—it’s a matter
of perspective. Everything’s better for the hyenas—that’s
just the way Nature wanted it, and that’s the way it’ll be
until we wake up. Remember, even wildebeests can kick a hyena to death.
Their power is in numbers—and in the real Nature, wildebeests are
winning, while hyenas are protected by conservation efforts. It’s
only in the human world—our world-- that the hyenas are winning.
Read more of Mark Ames at eXiledonline.com. He is the author of Going
Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's
Columbine and Beyond.
© 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights
reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/146964/
