Chapter VII: The Will to Power and Unbridled Egoism
Chapter VII: The Will to Power and Unbridled Egoism A life devoted to self-aggrandizement might appear to be in accord with nature, which sanctions the will to power. But in reality, overweening individualism cannot lead to the happy outcome that Aristotle conceived as the ultimate goal of man’s life. Power serving exclusively egotistical ends is relatively short-lived and thus of a lower order of magnitude. Socially conscious criminals. Over the course of 15 years, Pablo Escobar and Carlos Lehder of Columbia together built up a vast cocaine smuggling enterprise that earned them an estimated 60 billion in assets, measured in today’s USD. Escobar is considered one of modern history’s wealthiest criminals, but the crime empire that he and Lehder created was not destined to survive for long. In 1987, Colombian National Police apprehended Lehder and extradited him to the US. A few years later, Escobar was hunted down and killed by Colombian law enforcement agents. The wealth that these two men amassed was either confiscated by government authorities or divided up between family members or appropriated by criminal associates. Although the Colombian cocaine business still flourishes, the structures that Escobar and Lehder created have been supplanted by other mechanisms run by new drug lords.
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