Are You an Apex Predator? Violent Thoughts and Human Madness

In the brutal pageant of life on Earth, the term apex predator carries a kind of mythic resonance. It conjures images of lions stalking savannahs, orcas corralling schools of fish, and hawks slicing through sky in pursuit of prey. These are creatures that sit at the summit of their food chains—unhunted, dominant, refined by eons of evolutionary trial into lethal masterpieces of ecological balance.

But what about us?

Humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, are often declared the ultimate apex predator. With our tools, cities, satellites, and nukes, we’ve subdued landscapes, reshaped climates, driven species to extinction, and split the atom. No lion, shark, or eagle commands the globe like we do. Yet there’s a growing sense—haunting, dissonant—that something is off with this narrative.

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Gerald B. Lorentz, in his grimly satirical work HOMO, 99 and 44/100% NONSAPIENS, casts an unflinching gaze at the human species not as civilized rationalists, but as apex predators in deep psychological denial. He invites us to question not whether we’re on top of the food chain, but whether we deserve to be there.

Are we truly apex predators? Or are we something worse—an evolutionary fluke with predatory power unmatched by self-awareness?

Apex Defined: Predator and Paradox

To be an apex predator is not simply to kill—it is to live in such a way that your existence defines the flow of energy in your ecosystem. Apex predators keep populations in check, cull the weak, and ensure balance in complex ecological systems. Wolves regulate deer herds; sharks cull diseased fish; eagles prune rodent populations.

In this light, the apex predator is not a villain but a vital organ in the body of life. Predation can be cruel, but in nature, it is also purposeful.

But when we apply this lens to humans, a paradox erupts.

Humans are not content to eat for survival. We consume to fill emotional voids, to flaunt status, to fuel insatiable economies. We don't just kill to live—we kill for profit, for pleasure, and sometimes, simply for sport. Our predation is not localized—it is planetary.

No other apex predator decimates entire ecosystems. No shark induces mass extinctions. No wolf rearranges weather patterns or drains aquifers dry to ship almonds across continents.

So the question is not can we dominate. Clearly, we can.

The question is: Should we have? And what does our mode of dominance say about us?

The Delusion of Sapiens: The Rational Ape Fantasy

Lorentz, in HOMO, 99 and 44/100% NONSAPIENS, argues that the name Homo sapiens sapiens—the wise, wise human—is a tragicomic overstatement. Wisdom, he claims, is not just in the capacity to reason, but in the ability to foresee consequences, exercise restraint, and live in balance.

Instead, we see a species that weaponized its intelligence not for harmony but for hegemony. A species that turned its own fellow beings into prey through war, slavery, and genocide. A species that invented religion not as a vehicle for spiritual insight, but often as a license to kill in the name of a sky-father.

If apex predators are part of a natural web, humans act like they're above it. And in acting so, we’ve become the anti-predator—not nature’s balance-keepers, but her unhinged saboteurs.

Lorentz calls us "non-sapiens" for good reason. We build philosophies to justify our predation and hide behind them. We call meat "protein," war "defense," and environmental collapse "progress." We sanitize the blood from our hands with euphemism and abstraction.

And yet, the blood flows.

Predation, Psychopathy, and Power

One of the darker revelations of Lorentz’s book is the connection between predation and human psychopathology. Unlike other predators, we do not kill out of instinct alone—but out of ideology, greed, envy, and projection. We kill with narratives. And perhaps no other creature has created as many murderous fictions as man.

History is soaked in these stories:

• Crusades.

• Inquisitions.

• Colonial exterminations.

• Holocausts.

• Drone strikes.

All carried out not by beasts but by men in suits, robes, and uniforms—many convinced they were doing the work of God, Civilization, or Freedom.

This is not predation in the natural sense. It is something more sinister. As philosopher John Gray once wrote, “Humans are the only species that can imagine utopias—and then create hell in trying to reach them.”

We are not apex predators.

We are ideological predators.

Ecocide: The Predator That Eats the Whole World

Perhaps the strongest argument against the idea of humans as apex predators is ecological. Real apex predators preserve the viability of their environment through natural limitations. A wolf doesn’t kill more elk than it needs. A hawk does not deforest to find mice.

But humans, particularly since the Industrial Revolution, have abandoned all such restraint. We are a predator that preys not just on other species—but on the very foundations of life itself:

• The topsoil that grows our food.

• The coral reefs that sustain marine ecosystems.

• The air we breathe and the climate we evolved within.

No apex predator before us has triggered a mass extinction. We have launched the sixth.

And we do it not with fang or claw, but with spreadsheets and slogans. We call it development. We call it innovation. We call it freedom.

But nature doesn’t care what we call it. It simply collapses.

Evolutionary Detour or Divine Tragedy?

Gerald B. Lorentz suggests that our species is not merely dangerous, but unfinished. Like a toddler with a flamethrower, we’ve mastered tools far faster than we’ve mastered ourselves. We are apex predators with adolescent minds—armed, frightened, overstimulated, and spiritually starved.

In evolutionary terms, we are brilliant, but brittle.

We built rockets before we built character. We mapped genomes before we healed our traumas. We harnessed electricity before we harnessed empathy.

And now, the predator is caught in its own trap.

We’ve engineered a civilization that depends on constant extraction, destruction, and domination—and it is killing us. The apex predator has become an auto-cannibal, devouring its own future.

Toward a New Definition of Power

Is there a path forward?

If we are to reclaim the word sapiens, it will not be by doubling down on conquest. It will be by redefining power—not as the ability to destroy, but as the ability to preserve. Not as domination, but as stewardship.

True apex predators know their place in the circle of life. They take only what they need. They don’t annihilate their own kin.

To earn that title, we must evolve beyond our monstrous adolescence. We must wake from the dream of supremacy and face the truth: that we are not above nature, not outside the web, and certainly not its master.

Only then can we become something more than 99 and 44/100% non-sapiens.

Only then might we become human.

Conclusion: The Mirror and the Abyss

Are humans apex predators?

Yes—and no.

Yes, in that we dominate the food chain with almost mythical control.
No, in that we do not act like any predator nature has ever produced.

We are the anomaly. The glitch in the system. The god-animal that forgot its soul.

And yet, within that glitch is also our hope. Because if we can create madness on this scale, perhaps we can also create meaning. If we can collapse ecosystems, perhaps we can also restore them. If we can write genocides into law, perhaps we can also write new myths—myths of reverence, kinship, and planetary sanity.

But first we must look in the mirror.

And see not a crown-wearing king of beasts.

But a wounded predator, searching for wisdom in the wreckage of its own dominion.

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Author’s Note:
This article is inspired by HOMO, 99 and 44/100% NONSAPIENS by Gerald B. Lorentz, a piercing examination of the human species through a lens that is equal parts satirical and damning. It challenges the myth of human exceptionalism and asks us to confront the monstrous and the miraculous within our evolutionary heritage.

We may be predators. But perhaps we are also pilgrims—wandering toward the faint glimmer of sapience not yet attained.