rant rant rant.

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.