It was the 3rd of February 1959 and the sun had just set on Patagonia. An exhausted, delirious climber descended the final few feet to the bottom of the immense granite needle called Cerro Torre (pictured above), having just climbed its northeast ridge. He had scaled a 2,000-meter wall in three days, including the mushroom-like, overhanging cornice at the very top, and come back alive.
It was the the best climbing feat ever produced, decades ahead of its time. The first ascents of Everest and K2, which had happened a few years prior, were walks in the park in comparison.
His partner had died on the descent, and the camera was lost with him, so there were no photos to document the success. Still, our climber received a hero’s welcome back home in Italy. The absence of photographic proof wasn’t a big deal. The climber had already proven himself by free-soloing some of the most difficult walls in the Alps and the Dolomites. Back in those days, when a person said that he did something – especially such an accomplished person – you believed them.
It was only a few years later, after many failed attempts on Cerro Torre, that suspicion started to build. The climb was just so difficult. Nobody else managed not only to repeat the climb but even to make it a quarter of the way up the wall. The ferocious technical difficulty was compounded by wild, hurricane-strength winds that pummeled the mountain around the clock. One of the many climbers who failed, an equally accomplished one, went on the record calling the mountain unclimbed.
Our hero had had enough. In 1970, he went back. This time he had a crew with him, and a petrol-powered compressor (part of a sponsorship deal). They forced their way up the mountain creating a “ladder” of bolts, via a new, easier route. This was a stark contrast to the lightweight, alpine-style ascent of 1959. It took them several months to reach the top. They stopped below the tricky ice mushroom at the summit. “The wind will blow that away one of these days anyway, so why bother?” the climber tried to explain.
When he came back to the civilization, few people believed anymore that he had indeed climbed Cerro Torre in 1959. The first “actual” climb, all the way to the top, happened in 1974, by someone else. The 1970 route was appropriately named the Compressor route. The approach inspired Reinhold Messner, the most famous climber of all time, to pen an essay titled The Murder of the Impossible, credited with beginning the debate on climbing ethics.
Over the years, Maestri had become a bitter, haunted man, appearing unexpectedly at climbing conventions and going into self-contradictory rants to justify himself, an embarrassing display for the man who was once one of the best and bravest climbers of a generation. More disturbingly, in passing away, he took the full truth about what happened to his climbing partner, a gifted Austrian by the name of Toni Egger, to his grave.
Ever before the Cerro Torre fiasco, he was an opinionated, self-absorbed man. Many climbers are, but he more so than anyone else. A Patagonian episode best depicts this: When a group of climbers named one of the saddles on the mountain, “the Col of Hope,” he named another one (which he claimed to have reached during the purported climb) the Col of Victory. He explained, “On the mountain, there is no hope, just a yearning for victory. Hope is a weapon of the weak; the yearning for victory of the strong.”
For his perceived strength, he was admired. When he was defended, he was defended by friends, which is understandable, but also by most in the climbing community. People liked the idea of the lone, steadfast genius, so gifted that he can afford to be contemptful, clinging on to what is his, against the evil mediocrity / establishment trying to take it away.
Even if this is the first time you’re hearing about Maestri, you already understand that you’ve met him as the hero archetype of Ayn Rand’s books, and as many people you see daily in the public life. This is the age of those with inflated egos who have bold opinions, take what is theirs and yield nothing.
Believing in yourself is important, of course. But there’s a difference between that and having no integrity, and especially admiring such people. This is how we elect near-sociopaths. It is also why we respect achievement (= money) at any cost and by any means. This is why it is reasonable to think in our time that we’ve earned our millions singlehandedly and in a vacuum, and that the community should keep its filthy hands off. This is how Elizabeth Holmes gets to raise $700 million and have a company worth $10 billion without skill or product.
The most difficult achievement of Maestri’s life, one deserving of full and total absolution, would have been to tell the truth. To face Toni Egger’s family and tell them what happened to him, and to tell the rest of the world, “I’m sorry.” He would have become a climbing icon, gone down in history as a strong, moral man. His remarkable climbs, completely overshadowed by the Cerro Torre tragedy, would have been reappraised, and given their due appreciation – they were remarkable feats for their time.
But Maestri proved a coward. Just like Holmes was a coward. Just like Ayn Rand, the godmother of the selfishness cult, was a coward – she used Social Security and Medicare after decades of treating those who did that as freeloading vermin; the experience made her no humbler. Just like the casino bankers proved cowards during the financial crisis, running back to the government like good socialists to have their losses covered. Just like token philanthropists can be cowards, giving away less than 1% of their wealth so that the world doesn’t change and so that they don’t end up paying their fair share of taxes. And just like social movements can be cowards, allowing themselves to be co-opted by corporate interests the moment the money starts coming in.
Having integrity is hard. Telling the truth is hard. Working on yourself is hard. Compassion is hard. Improving the world is hard. Sharing power and working for the long run is hard. Giving credit to someone else is hard. Having an open mind for a different view is hard, and doesn’t get you booked on a pundit show.
It is possible that we have almost forgotten what strength looks like because where we tend to look – among the public figures – it is so rare: greed and power at all cost is incompatible with integrity. And yet people all around us possess it – in our family, in our community. We desperately need new role models in the public sphere, and philanthropists are in a good starting positions to become those.
The idea of a god evolved throughout the ages from a thunder-wielding tyrant to a compassionate, love-filled entity. This is probably because people understood with time that the latter is more difficult. To an omnipotent being demonstrating strength and power is embarrassing.
The new philanthropists are no gods, but have come to intuit this shift in their own minds. As they negotiate their relationship with creativity, death, legacy and symbolic immortality, crude attempts to keep and demonstrate privilege become perceived for what they are – a lack of knowledge, courage or vision. Narcissism, ultimately, is mortal fear of inadequacy.
Even corporate America has understood that a “brilliant jerk” is a myth. So is a “genius” without compassion. So is a “hero” who evades taxes. We can admire either greed or integrity, but not both.
A realization of this reveals a fact that lazy critics of neoliberalism overlook: in a frantic scramble to satisfy greed there is no method, and no mastermind. This can be both good and bad, depending on how one chooses to look at it. Our upcoming book will discuss this matter in detail.
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