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An insightful review, worth your time.
It's crystalized something I've been thinking about for a while: that rich people are effectively insulated from the consequences of their actions, often to the point of having no sense of cause/effect.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/mary-trump-book-psychoanalysis-enablers.html via @slate
It's crystalized something I've been thinking about for a while: that rich people are effectively insulated from the consequences of their actions, often to the point of having no sense of cause/effect.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/mary-trump-book-psychoanalysis-enablers.html via @slate
NB. I suspect this is true to at least some extent cross culturally, but it's certainly very true in the US, where our cultural myth portrays wealth as proof of goodness.
Let's take stock of all the ways rich people, especially the very rich, are insulated from consequence:
Money solves most problems, and the prestige money provides solves most of the ones money won't.
Money solves most problems, and the prestige money provides solves most of the ones money won't.
This has limits, especially where it comes to the intersection of class and race, disability, etc.
But fundamentally, wealth means you can solve most problems. (The cops LOVED O.J.; a good lawyer can get you out of most problems, even if you fuck up, you'll secure loans, etc)
But fundamentally, wealth means you can solve most problems. (The cops LOVED O.J.; a good lawyer can get you out of most problems, even if you fuck up, you'll secure loans, etc)
But even if your actions do end up with real consequences, and even if they apply to you (and not, say, the way that your mining operation poisons other people's water, people you'll never have to answer to at a cocktail party), money and prestige buy something else:
They buy people. People who, for economic reasons, or just the glow of your reflected status, or a tendency towards authoritarianism, will make every effort to tell you it isn't your fault.
There's a reason why rich folks with ostensibly left politics will defend, say, Ellen chilling with a war criminal, and its because the only people they are anything close to accountable to are other rich folks.
That's how we got a raft of stories about Dershowitz not being welcome at Martha's Vineyard parties as a result of enabling a monstrous President. It's literally the worst fate that these people can imagine.
The rich (correctly) tend to see their interests as aligned more fundamentally with other rich people than with any other group.
The rich will never save you. No, not even the one with the politics you kind of like. They're incapable of it. It would be a full-time job as a rich person to even be able to parse when you have erred. There is no feedback loop, no consequences.
Trump is just an extreme example of an already-existing phenomenon.
Any solution for the future that doesn't involve prying huge amounts of extreme wealth away from the .01% is a complete non-starter.
Any solution for the future that doesn't involve prying huge amounts of extreme wealth away from the .01% is a complete non-starter.
FFS, these people think that when climate change destroys the planet, they'll be able to buy their way out with cash or stocks or gold or bitcoin or whatever.
They think they'll be fine, when they'll just die slightly slower than the rest of us.
They think they'll be fine, when they'll just die slightly slower than the rest of us.
We can't solve the problems of the future without reclaiming wealth from the ones who are holding it. This is true for many reasons, but one key one is that there is no other mechanism for the rich, as a class, to act responsibly.
~Fin
~Fin
