07.01.2002 - St. Petersburg, Russia

Dawn over the North Atlantic somewhere south of Greenland, following a 3-hour night flying at what the screen in front of me says is 654 mph.

I’m en route to the Second International Conference on Hierarchy and Power in World Civilizations at St. Petersburg, Russia. I’ll be presenting a paper there on “Sex as the Model for Hierarchy and Power in History.”

This is the beginning of an adventure for me. I’ve never been to Russia before and I’ve increased my Russian vocabulary in the past few days to all of five words—a few more if you count words like babushka, Sputnik, and mir. I’m not sure what to expect traveling by myself in a country where I not only don’t speak the language, but can’t even read the letters on street signs.

What I’ve been thinking about a good deal in the last few days is the corruption in the highest ranks of some major corporations, in including, in extraordinary fashion, WorldCom, our hometown company in Clinton, Mississippi.

The cause of the misdeeds is, of course, greed. I believe that a big part of the reason for greed is, as I explain in Eve’s Seed, the hypertrophying of the useful trait of acquisitiveness as humans moved, after the development of agriculture, into environments where accumulation was possible.

But I think there’s something else involved, also very much related to the arguments I make in Eve’s Seed. Men such as WorldCom founder and until recently CEO Bernie Ebbers try to get more, more, more, after they already have much more than they could ever use because they are competing with other men to win, to be Number 1, to show that they are the “real man.”

RSM