The Good, The Rich, and The Virus

“A billionaire is a policy failure” says a politician, I guess because it’s politicians who wrote the tax code that exempts hyper-capitalism... but okay.

Billionaires are the reason people can drive automobiles, not have to pay up front for homes, that smartphones exist, and you can get delivery of vital supplies to your home during a pandemic. Billionaires are the reason MRI machines are widespread, you can fly to another part of the world for vacation instead of driving to roadside attractions, and why you have a 65’ flat screen TV in your house to watch presidential debates. In reality, billionaires are the reason you have running water, electricity, refrigeration, and don’t have to use an outhouse. You just have to adjust for inflation and look across history to find them.

In Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry wanted to portray a human species that developed ethical sensibilities beyond personal motivation. But what Roddenberry, like many idealists, forgets is that we don’t have a collective stomach. We aren’t wired to experience the happy sensations of our neighbors. We are driven not by collective accomplishments but by our own niche goals and interests. That’s the nature of humans and Roddenberry could not even keep his lofty idea of the Federation in his own fictional universe because it made the voyages of the Starship Enterprise dull and uninteresting. Sure, some episodes were think pieces, but overall the series is still sci-fi with lots of internal conflicts and straight-up action against enemies with conflicting values.

What if somebody told you you were only allowed to work for what paid for your basic expenses, forever? Somebody who doesn’t know you dictated your needs and interests from a far away city? That’s not what will ever happen because you have to keep people relatively happy in order to rule over them and we are both an ambitious and a spoiled people. Only both these qualities have been dumbed down from the ingenuity of our ancestors, who built homes and farmed and hunted and sang and played instruments on the front porch for entertainment to conspicuous consumption and media addiction. Even many of the best and brightest of us consume far more calories than we need.

And yes, there are billionaires who take advantage of that just as they’re are penniless waifs who get a gun and, for no comprehensible reason, shoot their peers to death. Both have internal, materialistic motivations out of balance with a more ascetic or perhaps even spiritual approach to being human abandoned. It’s not having money or not having money that’s the sickness of our age. It’s not even greed or egoism. It’s an inability to see the larger picture that pleasure isn’t always good and deprivation isn’t always bad. And you can flip that. It’s moderation that tends to create the happiest, most stable humans. And as a very a wise person who also happened to be a woman once told me, it’s consistency. It’s why the rich stay rich, the poor stay poor, and why lottery winners end up broke. It’s a wisdom problem, not one of intelligence or even power.

When you try to solve problems with policy, however well intentioned you may be, the result is invariably the same. It’s just another effort to force your morality onto everybody else. It doesn’t matter if it’s regulation or the Bible. It’s all trying to make other people live by what you feel is right for you. If you don’t like abortion, don’t get one. If you don’t like billionaires, don’t become one. But don’t tell people what they can’t do. That’s where your liberty ends and theirs begins.

Likewise if you feel the need to tell people what they can and can’t say. I never said “you can’t go around saying ‘billionaires are bad’,” I simply showed why that reasoning is, ironically, inconsistent to the goal of collective advancement. Remember, the biggest concentration of wealth in the world is controlled by your Representatives and Senators, who spend four times the wealth of Apple a year. But I also reckoned with the pitfalls of thinking billionaires, or for that matter, the poor, are bad. There’s good and bad at every economic strata and there are as many variations on those as there are points on a chart.

Try not to see people as rich or poor, ethical or unethical. When we do that we just end up sounding dogmatic. Religious even.

And we have a virus to fight that doesn’t care about any of that stuff. Maybe it’s time we see the lesson in that.