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"Eat the rich!"
It's been a book (P.J. O'Rourke,) a film (1987, Peter Richardson,) a song twice (once by Motorhead for the film, once by Aerosmith, proving that no, you can't copyright titles,) and a slogan on everything from t-shirts to brick walls to treatises on Rousseau, who may or may not have started the whole concept.
Rich-bashing. It's fun, it's easy, and, best of all, it's DESERVED!
It scratches an itch.
It reaches a sore spot we all share, the conviction that someone, somewhere, is getting more than her/his share, undeservedly. Maybe even part of MY share, since I'm clearly not getting all of my share.
There is much to be said for a good old-fashioned righteous economic class-warfare rant, and heaven knows I enjoy it as much as the next populist, progressive, professional(?) leftie.
Because, let's face it, the rich ARE the problem. It's undeniable. Parsed out carefully, the empirical case is conclusive. Wealth, real, honest-to-gawd, jaw-dropping, cake-eating, king-making, economy-skewing, mind-boggling wealth, concentrated in the hands of the few, is the kiss of death for any society or culture striving to evolve humanity beyond the social-darwinism phase.
The lessons of history are clear: When societies band together to create political, economic, and social structures that decrease the concentration of wealth at the top, good stuff happens. People become more creative and inventive, society allows outliers to live and thrive and contribute, ethical philosophies advance, equity and the common good increase.
When societies give in to greed and pessimism and laziness and let nature take its course and wealth once again starts first to drift, then to stream, then to flood to one end of the table, life returns to the poor, nasty, brutish and short default mode. I've studied history for decades and I can come to no other conclusion.
It's tempting to think of "the rich" as a self-aware, smug, vicious little oligarchy of parasites sucking the lifeblood from the rest of us while crooking their pinkies daintily and smirking with sadistic pleasure at our feeble attempts to ape their prosperity with our designer clothes and Escalades and vacations to the latest Conde Nast featured resort. Doubtless there are a few among them who are robustly self-aware enough to have allowed their Inner Sociopath free rein and live up to the stereotype, too. ("Paging Mr. Cheney... paging Mr. Cheney...")
But there is a problem with the indulgence of this pleasurable and manifestly justified detestation. Two problems, in fact.
Problem One: The kind of "rich" who control enough wealth to have a genuine, measurable impact on the economic structure of our society--the "real rich"--are invisible. We do not see them, we do not know them. They do not get their pictures in "Town & Country" magazine, they do not hang out at Conde Nast featured resorts, they do not play in the "whales" game rooms in Monaco or Vegas, they are not depicted on reality TV. We do not see their opulent gated communities, because they do not live in opulent gated communities. They live in unobtrusively gated and guarded places where paparazzi are not welcomed and the buildings are so far back from the road, no one else except invited guests and paid staff know what they look like. I have met one or two. They do not wear obviously luxurious designer high fashion clothing. They do not drip with jewelry. You wouldn't necessarily pick them out in a crowd of ordinary well-off people. They blend. They are unobtrusive. They have no need to impress anyone except, possibly, their peers, who are similarly invisible to us. And their one-upmanship games do not revolve around high-end consumable commodities. They range from the inconceivable to the eccentric, but they are rarely profiled in glossy magazines or commented upon by pundits.
And since we don't see them, we are barely aware of their existence and the catastrophic effect their wealth has on our society and our economy. They stay out of our sights. Instead, we see the "merely rich," the Trumps and the posturing casino whales and the strutting socialites and the dwellers in opulent mansions in Aspen and Martha's Vineyard, and the inner-ring lackeys on Wall Street and K Street in twelve thousand dollar bespoke suits with suites of lackeys of their own. And we focus our anger on them.
And we focus our anger on anyone we deem "rich." And the poorer we feel ourselves to be, the larger the cadre of "rich" we feel justified in expressing our legitimate resentment towards. It's hard to argue against the notion that someone who makes $100,000 a year, has two cars, a four-bedroom house, and a time share in Florida is "rich" compared to someone who is scraping by on two or three part-time minimum-wage jobs, living out of their car and barely staving off the repo guy who wants that.
But they're not.
Even a self-aggrandizing, derpulous tool like Donald Trump, or a sleazy high-end con artist like Ken Lay is not actually "rich" in the sense of the "real rich." Yes, they have vaultloads of money, yes, they have stuff, stuff, stuff. Yes, they play the game and destroy the lives of others and scheme and acquire and flaunt. But they are, truly, a pimple on the butt of our suffering economy. An infected pimple, maybe. Even a potentially dangerous pimple. But barely a pimple, by the standards of the small, quiet, multi-generational coterie of "real rich" who make up the cancer that will kill the noble experiment of our Constitutional democratic republic. They are, at best, wannabes. Their children or grandchildren might make it someday.
The problem with focusing on the inner-ring lackeys and "merely rich" powerbrokers and "plebe-rich" entertainment and sports moguls is this: It makes it too easy, then, for those same inner-ring lackeys and others who know damn' well how the system really works and are mindfully facilitating the devolution of our society to set us against one another. Once you have the person who lives in their car scraping by on two minimum wage jobs focused on a deep and rancorous resentment of the person making $100,000 a year and spending a couple of weeks at their Miami time-share every winter, they win.
That's problem one.
Problem two is more subtle, and, to me, more troubling. It's too easy to equate "rich" with "evil." To assume that someone who is rich, even "really rich," is a bad person, or even just a morally inferior person, by the simple fact of their wealth. It's rarely true.
No one is a villain in their own mind. Well, at least no one who's not a bugfuck psychopath. Even sociopaths, vile as they can be, believe themselves to be rational individuals who are fully morally justified in pursuing their own self-interests at the expense of others' well-being. And most "real rich" people are not even sociopathic. Indeed, many are philanthropic, even altruistic people who espouse the same ethical principles most of us non-rich folks believe in. Even the inner lackeys, the "merely rich" and "plebe-rich," have human instincts of kindness and compassion and believe their actions are justified under the basic primate 'natural law' of promoting individual and family survival, well-being. As well as being legally and ethically justified under the system of Horatio Alger capitalist self-determination that has shaped our polity.
If we equate "rich" with "bad," therefore, we automatically create cognitive dissonance among those who look past simple (and admittedly satisfying) dualistic morality and who prefer to judge individuals based on their individual qualities, rather than their membership in a class that has harmed us.
That's problem two.
The problem is to focus the energy of righteous, justified rage, the power of shared indignation and anger, not on the easy but deceptive targets (people,) but on the unsatisfying and rather nebulous real target: The systems, attitudes, and assumptions that have allowed our society to come unglued. The concrete manifestations of those systems, attitudes and assumptions, and the beneficiaries who perpetuate them, may lose by the change, and will certainly vigorously resist that change. But in the long run I believe we'll be more effective by taking on the system rather than the people, no matter how obnoxious, annoying, and repugnant those people may be.
Besides, I get indigestion from eating gassy food.
So, I'll pass on eating the rich.
equably,
Bright
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