It’s not really about having more stuff. It’s about having power relative to other human beings. It’s the raw pleasure of dominating and subjugating others, of knowing you can bend others to your will. It’s the sickness of the mind which draws to itself kings and oligarchs and plutocrats.
Persons like you and I are human; we want to uplift our peers and vice versa. We evolved to collaborate. But not all are like this. Some, by whatever mysterious circumstances there may be, become the opposite, addicted to the feeling of power and influence and control, even when it makes their lives objectively worse.
Unfortunately, there isn’t in society the rebellious collective spirit there once was which would summon the energy to defeat them. I love modernity just as much as my neighbor, and to a degree, that’s the problem. It is 2026, and I must apologize to Marx in saying that we have too much to lose besides our chains. I don’t know how much of each other’s suffering we must share until this calculus starts to tip away from inaction. Given that the reaction to impending geoclimate and political doom is, in societal terms, quaint, I’m not very expectant.
This is what’s really crazy.
A long time ago, I was having a conversation with a workmate. Guy earned as much as me. I asked him what he’d buy with $1 billion that he couldn’t buy with $50 million.
He couldn’t name one actual experience/object that he’d need the extra money for.
Still insisted that he wanted the billion.
Power.
Not a nicer car. Not a better vacation. Not a bigger house.
The ability to buy companies, fund institutions, shape industries, influence politics, and absorb enormous losses without changing your lifestyle.
At a certain point, more money stops buying a better life. It starts buying more control.
The ability to use money as a weapon
For us that just means putting 2 to 5 lbs of loose change in a thick sock. =\
Super-yachts.
One of the main reasons these are booming is that a billionaire can spend a sum on them he might actually see on his account. Fine food, cars, even mainsons are so cheap that they earn more through passive income while they’re buying these things than they’re actually spending. At the same time people, even in tje ver same society, go hungry to bed or are incapable of getting their health condition improved… it’s just crazy.
Evil rather than crazy
Sounds like super yachts need to be sunk.
It used to be philanthropic stuff - because buying public opinion/legacy is pretty expensive. So you fund a big charity, do some speeches, and are celebrated for being so generous. Has the side effect of actually helping some poors.
Seems like the major expenses now are donating money to fascists and buying big boats.
But $1B (at today’s levels of value - the number isn’t the issue, the relative value and lost opportunity cost of distributing some of this back to the people is the issue) is an obscene amount of money. You could invest it in some safe asset making 2% per year and yearn $54k per day ($20M/year)
Have they ever done philanthropy that wasn’t for avoiding taxes or laundering money?
Melinda Gates has done a lot with the Gates Foundation. I personally have been mostly funded by them for most of my career. This includes many failed attempts in some areas, and in others lead to new vaccines for meningitis for epidemic response and routine use. There are many other amazing things the foundation has funded, but that is the success I have directly been a part of.
The reputational aspect is definitely a big part of it - they want to be seen and remembered a certain way. Bill Gates is a good example, but he blew all that up by raping children (maybe). Before the Gates Foundation, he was viewed by the public as a typical evil miserly cutthroat businessman who was also a weird nerd. Gates Foundation & making sure everyone knew about it did a lot to sway public opinion.
And the actual people at the Gates Foundation did great work - they helped to control and eradicate deadly diseases in the global South. But it isn’t like Bill was doing that work, he was just allowing someone to cut the checks.
And it allows them to avoid taxes. They choose to pay bribes to politicians instead of paying taxes & to continue to not pay taxes.
Yes
If, given the option, I would want the larger sum of money, too.
But I could also feed and educate a fuckton of people while still living it up on roughly 4%.
If you gave me the choice between 50 million and a billion I’d take a billion too; but if you gave me 50 million no one would hear from me again as I would quit my job, move somewhere quiet, and keep to myself.
Just for clarity’s sake.
The question was ‘What can you buy with a billion that you couldn’t get with $50 million?’
Right, but you said they insisted they wanted the billion. I’d want the billion too, but if I had 50 million I wouldn’t be complaining that I didn’t have a billion.
I wouldn’t quit my work with 50 million. I’d turn it into a big corp then invest in more. I’d likely work just as much but it would be to make more cash to invest into more companies so I can see my own agenda play out in ways I want.
Someone that would fuck off with 50 million would fuck off with 5 million and that’s exactly why you won’t ever have that opportunity.
That’s not me saying it’s a bad thing that you’re like that, just the reality of how some people think.
“If I had a horde of money I’d try to make it an ever bigger horde so I could tell people what to do.”
Yes, that exact attitude is the problem with billionaires and why simply being a billionaire is a sign of mental illness, because people without a hording disorder will fuck off long before they get to a billion.
You’re part of the problem.
Rebuild all the schools in my local district? Set up a permanent endowment for the Freedom from Religion Foundation? Turn as much land into nature preserves as I can possibly afford?
Maybe these aren’t “things” you “buy” but it doesn’t take much creativity to blow a billion. I think I just blew a whole bunch of them.
You’d never make it to a billion with that kind of attitude
At my last count there were about 30 schools in my county. That puts them at less than 34 million each. A quick google search places the cost of building a new middle school at between 30 and 125 million dollars. So…yeah. Rebuilding a school district would be a straightforward way to spend a billion dollars.
Still insisted that he wanted the billion.
That demonstrates the underlying problem. When you can quantify something, people can compete over it. To most people money is THE quantifiable thing about humans. We literally call a person’s money number their “net worth.” It’s not “oh that guy with all these relationships and virtues and vices has just seen his net assets exceed one billion.” It is “he is now worth one billion.”
So with it carrying such cultural weight and such quantifiability… I guess what I am trying to say is that sometimes the problem really as is simple as “number go up.” Unfortunately, simple problems can still have impossibly complex solutions. How do you change the nature of a person, and then do it en masse? How do you break one feedback loop and get into another? (the people in control would make society more decent if they themselves grew up in a more decent society)
Easy, 1000x more LEGOs.
You could step on a LEGO for every step the rest of your life.
Woah op said billions, not trillions
I’d buy a few of your countries, a space company/rocket ships. A few nukes or the facility to make them…
Oh wait that’s exactly what they did with that money.
It’s what you would do, too.
Which is why no one should be allowed to have that much. Not even nation states as we’ve seen.
It’s what you would do, too.
The fuck it is. Speak for yourself.
It’s a fight for survival and they will CHOOSE CONCENTRATION CAMPS OVER A SMALL TAX.
No one is going to save us and no one is going to stop them. They need to go away NOW
If no one is going to save us or stop them, why would they go away?
Exactly
No one?! It’s YOU AND ME THAT NEED TO DO THIS.
Not superman ffs.
Look at the others who have tried?! They need more than a meme to be successful!
That’s my point
We’re not no oneIf no one does it, that would necessarily include you and me not doing it either.
He should be beaten to a pulp with a sign that reads “Don’t be evil”
These people are a danger to the world
It’s power.
Not wealth.
He’d rather kids not get healthcare than be told he is a plebe that has to follow rules like the rest of us.
It’s hoarding. It’s never enough to have a lot of money, they need to have all the money. Being a billionaire is a significant sign of mental illness.
There are a few discussions and even some studies about the rapid effects of wealth and political power, because they change how other people interact with you, it essentially gaslights you into thinking you’re less fallible than the rest of us.
We can kind of see it between the original Star Wars trilogy (when Lucas still had people able to critique him) and the prequel series (now that ILM was huge and he was ultra-wealthy).
Twenty-first century billionaires become two degrees of separation removed from commoners at all (except the help they hire themselves), and as Paul Krugman notes, lobbyists are better dressed and more well spoken than nerdy economists. It becomes very easy for a rich due to create a self-aggrandizing information silo, in which every rich-dude intuition and conspiracy theory is affirmed.
And the one thing that consistently feels good is seeing their assets and selves getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
So yeah, it really is an illness.
You have to cut out such sickness.
Guillotine is the gracious choice to traitors.
Hey look, it’s another fucking foreigner who came over and stole from Americans and now refuses to pay his fair share
So… If he were a domestic born sociopath, his greed would be acceptable? Or if he spread the wealth with Americans, his foreign crimes and wealth extraction would be fine?
Don’t bring nationalism into the class war. If you haven’t noticed, Americas most destructive enemies are domestic born and bred. The entire overarching goal should be to improve the lives of everyone, everywhere — “a rising tide lifts all boats” — instead of letting some nations to extract and hoard wealth from “others”, or allow “others” to be exploited for their benefit. If you believe otherwise, then the main difference between you and the sociopathic parasites of the Epstein class is who you perceive to be the “others”…
No, there is no excuse for trash like him. But if you can weaponize the hatred of the ignorant to help your cause, you should.
At the expense of immigrants that aren’t obscenely wealthy? How does that make anything better? There are endless other ways to call out this garbage. Pick one that doesn’t needlessly harm those that are already hurting.
Yeah… you just proved you’re closer to an authoritarian tankie sociopath than you are to giving a shit about the working class.
The goal should be to enlighten the ignorant. Not fucking “weaponise” them, you donut. The whole problem is that they’ve been “weaponised” by capital. You aren’t gonna be able to control mental illness and indoctrination, wannabe Murdoch.
You’re being downvoted, and I just wanted to let you know I agree with you completely. It’s the billionaire class that’s the problem, not their nationality. It’s a worldwide problem, not just an American one, because they export their bullshit to whatever country they choose (e.g. Musk in Germany). Borders no longer matter for these people, they can move wherever they want, buy politicians in every country they want.
It’s a global class war.
Eat the Rich
He’s wrong, greed isn’t a sickness, it’s a mental handicap. It inhibits the brain from experiencing empathy in people who amass great wealth and power.
It begs the question, why are we letting a bunch of evil, mentally handicapped people steer the course of humanity?
You’d think that if you were a doctor, and had a patient that was amassing a collection of any other thing, and that collection destroyed a part of their patients brain… You’d think the doctor (and society et. large) would want to limit the amount of that thing they were allowed to collect?
Especially if that thing they’re collecting could be used to, oh I dunno, I’m just spit-balling here, give everyone universal healthcare, increase public education to include 4 year university, give everyone free childcare, invest massively in green energy and public transportation… you know, instead of just sitting in a Panamanian bank being hoarded by evil, mentally handicapped billionaires?
Greed is not a sickness. It’s a choice. The failure to hold greedy people accountable by any means necessary is also a choice. The real sickness is looking at the state of the world and not being radicalized enough to commit to that any means necessary to hold the greedy bastards accountable.
Two things can suck at the same time.
Financial obesity is neurotoxic, an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
But where would the money come from to pay the taxes on that wealth?
This type of k shape economy is what ends world Powers. Not just that but the sheer decay from the ground up of our economy. Cut education, less educated population. Out source jobs, people can’t afford to live and are now dependent on government assistance. The loss of the middle class, can keep going
I hope that before it gets that far the guillotine gets reintroduced
We need to bring back tar and feathers
The guillotine
