A Society Governed by Whiny Rich People Throwing Tantrums
A Society Governed by Whiny Rich People Throwing Tantrums
jacobin.com
A Society Governed by Whiny Rich People Throwing Tantrums
44 comments
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"Because of capitalists’ colossal structural power, we’re required to stroke the egos and soothe the anxieties of tantrum throwing elites every time we want to improve society. If we want better education, healthcare, and childcare programs, or to fix our own crumbling infrastructure, or to make our own cities affordable to live in, we are structurally compelled to consider the interests and feelings of the ultrarich, to beg permission from the most wantonly unethical and pathologically narcissistic people on earth."
It's frankly ridiculous that despite having more wealth than they know what to do with, they're still obsessed with the fear that someone else might get a little of it.
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https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#517324be3d78
Just within the top-25 I see Jensen Huang, Mukesh Ambani, Carlos Slim, Changpeng Zhao, Zhong Shanshan.
White people are over-represented in the list, but there's plenty of non-white billionaires that are just as problematic as their white counterparts. The vast, vast majority of white people are not billionaires. Racial division is a distraction that serves the billionaires.
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Came here to say how refreshing it is to read an article about wealthy jerks that talks about reality rather than RACE OR GENDER.
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Looting is not governing.
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Any rich idiot who could stomach moving to Florida has already done so. Or maintains multiple residences in New York and Florida.
You know, like Trump and Epstein do.
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The wealthy are a cancer. If allowed to metastasize, they will inevitably kill their host civilization.
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It has been allowed to metastasize.
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They are losing control, they are scared, they will attempt to to divert the attention of the public with war. The aristocracy will be dismantled or we will be annihilated.
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I believe that's called a "boofocracy".
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The other point is that I think this article made a shitty economic argument. If rich people are staying because they're making money, and if you stop them from making money then they'll leave, what's actually happening is that they are stealing our money while they're here. It's not like that money magically showed up, right? It came from somewhere, it came from someone, right? In reality, they're getting a ton of benefits from the taxpayers. So if the claim is that the economy will suffer when they depart, that's an interesting question, and it really depends on the details.
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I think this is inherent to humans. No matter what system, this is the natural end point.
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For now
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Foreal
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You have upset your Ferengi masters!
44 comments
Capitalism is a system that rewards people for antisocial behavior. 20,000 years ago, people engaging in antisocial behavior would have been thrown out of the tribe (or executed) for their selfishness and greed, but today they rule.
We can try to use the power of the state to reign them in and keep them under control, but it's a never-ending struggle. They will try to seize state control, to remove any systems that seek to moderate them. They believe that they are superior human beings, super human even. In their minds, their wealth proves their superiority. They have even convinced large numbers of us that they must be unrestricted, free to pursue maximum profits, otherwise modern civilization will collapse.
Maybe they're right. Maybe capitalism can't survive without sociopaths pursuing profits with relatively few restrictions. All the more reason to abolish capitalism, in my opinion, even if that means returning to a more communal existence.
I think you have a pretty romanticized idea about how society was run 20.000 years ago
According to "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow, if one were in the Americas, it could have been pretty okay. Depending on the tribe, a selfish person could have been exiled and many people's competed to be generous.
Rousseau and the European Enlightenment struggling against the weight of the Catholic Church, may have presented an overly negative view on life long ago. (Source is also "The Dawn of Everything".)
How am I romanticizing the stone ages? By pointing out that members of the tribe who acted selfishly were often executed (and sometimes tortured)? Is that idea a romantic one, in your mind?
Selfishness wasn't so harshly punished back then because stone age people were noble savages, who were just more righteous than we are today. No, selfishness was so harshly and violently punished (even if the sentence was banishment, that was often a death sentence) because selfish people were a threat to the survival of the tribe, and thus a threat to the survival of every member of the tribe.