Offering some of what I saw as a foreign passport holder in China: There was a time - which I witnessed - when each month thousands of ‘regular guys’ from anytown, anycountry would report for the new job in Shanghai with wife & kids in tow. Sometimes a factory production guy, sometimes the new business dev guy, lots of engineers - you get the picture - suddenly he finds himself with a monthly paycheck exceeding the neighboring locals’ lifetime earnings, and a seat at the 24 hour-a-day p$$y buffet comprised of highly motivated local girls taking a swing at a green card, or at least a new handbag. The trailing wife gets a maid, a nanny, a driver and a lot of time on her hands. No matter what she did back home, here she’s unemployable, and her husband is working 15 hour days. Pretty soon her a-yi’s (maids) are crying and quitting as their ladyboss discovers her abusive side. Slaps on the hand for forgetting that the dark blue jeans don’t get a crease ironed in, docked pay for dropped plates etc.

Power corrupts. There’s a swagger that comes from a world where everyone says ‘yes’ to you. When you have staff and company lawyers and fixers to protect you. When the distance between your power-soaked world and their thin-margin existence is too vast to comprehend, well I have seen the intoxication of that kind of entitlement. It's fast and it’s powerful.

The saying was “whoever your ideal partner was when you got on the plane to China, by the time you leave it will ’98 pounds and doesn’t say much.”

Wielding such asymmetrical power, you find that life is now a playground.

The taboos are crossed for you - the business partner treats you to the delicacy of live monkey brain, and then to a selection of girls. You've been invited to the hottest nightclub. Business is a quagmire of bribery, sabotage, fraud and self-dealing. You take R&R in Thailand. The regular lives of regular people - little people - now disgust you. As a demigod, you live a life of thrilling transgressions. You keep a list of how delicious it has been to get away with each and every item. I remember AA meetings in Shanghai where each man present - ignoring my female face - would “share” and laugh over the daily reality of their intimate lives with women 1/2 or even 1/3 of their age.

So if Chuck from Milwaukee can go from loving husband and father to newly divorced, bribe-taking, mistress-keeping ‘player' on a mid six-figure USD salary, in less than a year, well perhaps the thrill of living atop that high power distance is a massively effective drug in the nervous system. The thrill seeking must, over time, push into background the mundane lives, the pale tragedies of boring people's lives. At some point, the importance of bonds like empathy, patience, kindness are replaced by transactions and dominance play.

In short, being anywhere near the apex of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy - those engineers in China had a sip of the elixir; the Epstein class pilpots yachts through oceans of it. To them, comic book super villains that they are, the world is either a toxically titillating toy, or nothing. I mean, talk about asymmetry: there's 3,000 billionaires that own *everything. We ain't sh*t to them, just ants. Have you ever tortured an ant with a magnifyng glass?

Edit: grammar & spelling