I think it's important to remember a few things out of this:
1. Yes, "othering" the Rich is just as wrong as "othering" the Poor or an other group. As soon as you start demonizing and dehumanizing any group, you lose the moral high ground.
2. But not demonizing heroin addicts doesn't mean I shouldn't beware of the risks of turning my back on one. Having sympathy for a wealth addict and seeing one as someone deserving such sympathy (how many people don't feel some twinge of envy and avarice in their lives) doesn't mean we shouldn't make ourselves safe before trying to help him.
3. Wealth and power aren't necessarily evil per se — you can have a drink of Scotch and not become an alcoholic knifing someone for the price of a bottle of rotgut. What's important is what you do with that wealth and power — do you use it to leverage still more, no matter who gets in the way or gets hurt, or do you use it to help others? "For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required." If money and power are the goal themselves, that's a sign of sickness.
(h/t +Yonatan Zunger)
Reshared post from +Matthew J Price
I actually had a paradigm shift while reading this; a small epiphany.
I have been thinking of people in power as experiencing motivations that were somewhat unique, or at least unfathomable to me. Like the 1% were somehow alien, not to be confused with actual people.
I've been dehumanizing people addicted to wealth
If I can have empathy for people in the throes of human weakness in every other area of addiction and malfunction, why would being wealthy make one more or less culpable?
I can now see how, like everyone else, the broken reward system of their human brain is not equipped to moderate behavior even in the face of grave moral violation and injustice. I feel pity for a heroin addict driven to violence for a fix, and I feel pity for the stock broker who would profit from the suffering of millions.
I didn't, yesterday.
For the Love of Money
We are letting money addiction drive too much of our society.
Well-said.
For me, I see wealth as a threshold thing. There's a threshold for my survival, a threshold for accumulating wealth for myself, a threshold for comfort…
… then expand that to "my family" and again to "future generations".
I'm at a point in my life where I'm wondering which I should be aiming for. I'm looking at distant career opportunities on the 4-10 year scale that could pay obscenely well, but would deny me much of a life, particularly much of a love/family life.
+Patrick Bick It's obviously a decision that a person has to face. As described, my immediate reaction is that you work to live, not live to work, and that "denying much of a life" sounds like not a good trade-off — but depending on the end to which you saw the "obscenely well paid" leading, it might be worth it.
I am pretty confident that I could push pretty hard and get at least another major rung up the ladder, if not two — or move to a different company with what I have to a better job and more responsibility and higher pay. As it stands, though, I travel about as much as I want to, and have late night calls as much as I care to, and have enough to keep my family secure and give to some charities I choose. My decision is to do what I'm doing, enjoy it, and enjoy the rest of life that it gives me. I'm not sure I could condemn or criticize someone who chose differently — depending on why they did so.
A difficulty with sympathy for, ah, victims of wealth addiction is that successful sufferers gain political power. Oh the poor 500 lb gorilla… poor T Rex… poor Godzilla…
@Randy – I can pity them for being so driven and so damaging to relationships around them, as I would pity any addict.
And, for that matter, both King Kong and Godzilla have been objects of pity.
“Its not my fault, I’m an addict…”
There is a compelling argument that people like this are actually psychopaths – they do not relate to ordinary people, and can not care about their suffering.
@LH – Being an addict doesn’t mean you get excused from your behavior. It means you still get seen as a human being and, amidst taking responsibility, we try to remove you from the cause of your addition (or at least make sure you can’t hurt anyone by it).
It would not surprise me to find psychopaths amongst the hyper-rich. But I don’t think we have to go so far as to generally attribute mental illness (beyond addiction and all the things an addict will do and disregard in order to get their fix).
I’m not saying it is an excuse. Just people try to use it as such. Watching US chat shows, when a guest says “I’ve been free of x for y years” lots of whooping and cheering. Howcome no-one ever goes on and says “I’ve never done x, because it is a foolish thing to do, so I exercised self control.”
May I recommend “The Psycopath Test” by Jon Ronson (who wrote the book “The men who stare at goats”, which is a journalistic piece, not the semi fictional film.)
@LH – I applaud people who never got addicted to something (or never put themselves at risk of it), but I can also applaud people who manage to break out of it. Of course, as I said, it’s not a justification or excuse for misbehavior while addicted — one of the Twelve Steps is making amends for wrongdoing.