Too Much is Never Enough

They Want it All

The Assemblyman is Perplexed, Charles Saalburg The Wasp (San Franciso) Vol. 26, 1891 Public Doman, Wikimedia Commons

Hello, Friend,

I grew up on the Main Line outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Main Line is named thusly because it is a series of small towns located along the train route traveling west from Center City. The Main Line is also where some of the oldest of olde money in the northeast corridor reside, having moved out of the city to build their stately mansions and, as one travels further along the route, their summer homes. As you might imagine, it is a beautiful area with incredible architecture and some of the best schools in the country. Growing up in this area, among these children, was challenging for a not olde money child. I have many stories of the struggles and humiliations I endured due to our financial and social status and (if I’m being fair here) my decidedly different personality. However, the education I received up until the age of 15 when we relocated to the Atlanta, Georgia ‘burbs was exceptional. I’m grateful to have had it while I did. The difference was shocking.

The haves have so much more than the have nots, and they always have.

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatbsy

As I grew older, being a curious human, I wanted to understand what made so many of these children so insufferably snobbish. What caused them to believe they were better than anyone else, exactly? Why did they harbor such disdain for the children who had less? After all, they didn’t do anything special, they were merely born into the monied class. They weren’t superior in any discernible way. There were smart rich kids and not so smart rich kids, pretty rich kids and not so pretty rich kids, talented rich kids and rich kids who lacked any clear talents at all. Yet, these kids had all the advantages that money and connections provide and with those advantages came the air of superiority that helped them succeed as adults. World travel, luxury leisure activities, tutors, superior medical care, private clubs, top tier public or exclusive private educations, legacy access to Ivy League colleges, connections and contacts to gain access to opportunities inaccessible to the common folk, and the sense of self-confidence that comes from being told you are special from the day you are born. And there, in that mythology, lies the key to the insatiable needs of many of the wealthiest of the wealthy. They believe themselves special by virtue of their money and lineage and social status and in turn they believe anyone who isn’t in their exclusive club to be lazy, inferior, and undeserving. Never having struggled, they cannot understand what it is to struggle.

If you look to the people who have, over the course of the past thirty years, taken control of our courts, the legislative and executive branches of our governments, our media and social media, and most of the aspects of our day-to-day lives, you will clearly see a pattern. These are obscenely wealthy and well-connected people who feel entitled to do whatever they please regardless of the consequences, mostly because they believe that they are immune from the consequences. This leads them to lose touch with the realities that most of the other people face. I believe it also robs them of the capacity for empathy or compassion. One need only look to the world’s richest man who is so miserable that he needs constant attention and adulation. No matter how much he has, it will never be enough. He’s a bottomless pit of ketamine fueled unslakable need.

People will say that money doesn’t buy happiness, and that is clear when you look at the obvious unhappiness of so many of the wealthiest of the wealthy, but I can personally attest to the fact that poverty can cause abject misery. The constant struggle to survive is exhausting and soul crushing, especially in a society that values your bank account and social status over your humanity. Poverty feels like being stuck in a rip tide that keeps pushing you under water over and over and over again while you struggle to catch your breath and make it to shore.

Many of the richest of the rich believe that they are entitled to their wealth and privilege. They rail against ‘entitlements’ and they use their influence to convince poor people that other poor people are the source of their struggles. They divide us to prevent us from rising up and holding them accountable. They are the first in line to dig their greedy little fists into the tax jar filled by the rest of us to grab their corporate welfare while shirking their tax debts through offshore accounts, clever accounting, and buying the favor of our elected officials. One look at the shift of wealth concentration from the lower and middle classes to the top 1% over the past 40 years makes it clear. The lower classes have seen some marginal gains, but they pale in comparison to the wealth of the top 1%.

Graph from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

“After-tax incomes fell sharply for households with incomes at the top of the distribution in 2008 and 2009 but began to rise again thereafter, reaching their 2007 peak level again in 2020. The upward jump in the incomes of those in the bottom fifth in 2020 and 2021 largely reflects the recovery rebates and substantially expanded unemployment compensation payments in COVID-19 relief packages. The American Rescue Plan’s fully refundable Child Tax Credit was one of the primary drivers of this trend; it boosted the incomes of families with incomes in the bottom of the distribution and contributed to historic declines in child poverty.”

CBPP.ORG

(Note that the gains made after Biden took office will likely be reversed by the incoming administration based on their stated budgetary plans.)

I would argue no one builds anything without other people being willing to do the dirty jobs for less. Don’t those people, the ones who build and maintain the roads, teach the children, police the streets, collect the garbage, entertain and enlighten us, fight the fires, work in the factories, construct the housing, clean the homes, pick the veggies, and service the myriad needs of humanity deserve to be paid fair wages in exchange for what their efforts afford the rest of us?

Yes, you built that, but you didn’t build it in a bubble.

“I want my fair share…and that’s all of it.”

Charles Koch

Yet, many of the richest of the rich feel that they are entitled to all of it. Every last penny, every last breath of fresh air, every last drop of clean water, every last tree and meadow and lake and field and ocean and natural wonder, every hope and dream and opportunity, even our art and music and writing and movies and performances are training AI to replace us, and every last morsel of what makes life worth living will be gobbled up without a care while they open their gullets wider and insist on more. While the world burns and the oceans rise and empires fall and societies crumble and the poorest of the poor die of starvation or once eradicated diseases and the public schools close and the uneducated undesirables are shoved into debtor’s prisons and labor camps to do the dirty jobs for free until they are replaced with another faceless worker, the richest of the rich will continue to gorge themselves and shift the blame to divert the attention away from their gluttony.

Yesterday, I talked about The Power of We. Today I’m suggesting that our collective power lies in our ability to stop feeding these gluttons with our attention, our data, our subscriptions, our presence on their toxic platforms, our time, and our money. We can stop lining their pockets. We can stop tuning into their crappy reality shows. We can stop consuming their media and social media propaganda. They can’t manipulate us if we’re not there to manipulate. Even if it’s simply a matter of giving them less, it will have impact. I keep wondering how they think they’ll manipulate us if we can no longer afford to pay for access to their propaganda. I think these ‘smart’ people are sometimes not very smart at all. Mars is pipe dream, and a bunker or seastead filled with sociopaths sounds like a living nightmare.

“We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.”

Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

They need us.

They know this and they’ve figured out how to keep us distracted to prevent us from calling them into account. We have allowed them to distract us. It is up to us to stop being distracted. We are the change we seek. No one is coming to save us. It’s long past time that we find a way to navigate this Brave New World without letting it destroy everything that makes it worth saving.

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