Being good at something is not necessarily a reason to be
revered. For example, a person might be
an extremely talented serial killer, or pedophile, or some such thing, but this
does not mean that this person deserves our respect. It is possible, I mean, to become proficient
in things that are amoral and also detrimental to human society.
I mention this because I want to speak out again the
reverence for wealth-culture that pervades our world today. There are certainly some people who are very
good at making money. There are business
schools dedicated to teaching people how to make money, and the media is
saturated with images of people making and enjoying their wealth.
Being good at making money isn’t something to admire any
more than being a good serial killer is something to admire. People who get rich generally do so by
exploiting and hurting people. The
wealth that they keep to themselves creates terrible social imbalances and
suffering in the world. Rather than
looking up to the rich, we should be identifying people who want to make
unusually large amounts of money and treating their condition as a pathological
disorder.
Certainly being rich creates a life that is easier and more
pleasurable for the people who have the money.
Being a serial killer or a pedophile also makes life more pleasurable
for the people who commit those acts, but this doesn’t mean we need to enable
them in their quest for fulfilment.
Their happiness makes other people suffer.
I recognized that a lot of people have been seduced by the
desire for more money and more things and that this is what the rhetoric is all
about these days. I consider this
position to be anti-human. It is a
wilful decision to let others suffer for one’s own pleasure. I wish that people would get excited about
collective projects that would add to the comfort of everyone. Instead of wanting a bigger pool and a fancy
Ferrari car that one could use to speed noisily between stoplights all over the
city, one could take pride in the betterment of education and health and other
things like that. One could take pride
in the continuance of the human project; science, space exploration, medicine,
etc., etc., how great would it be if we just funnelled all our resources into
making everything better for everyone, as opposed to trying to fuck each other
up?
The problems with what I say, of course, are
multitudinous. Every person’s vision of
what is a worthwhile collective project is different. There are factions. Also, people who are power and wealth hungry,
despite their degenerate mental state, are often highly charismatic and can
easily convince others to abandon the collective good and embark on crusades of
unbridled greed and butchery. It happens
all the time.
Jurgen Habermas writes about this kind of thing all the
time. I don’t believe he’s reached any
conclusions yet, though.
