He, and all the rest of them, could easily do a u-turn, be class-conscious and fair to the workers and all the hate would go away. They’d still be nowhere close to poor or struggling, just less rich. They just don’t want to.
It’s like Zuck building a bunker in Hawaii that would, at best, buy him 2 or 3 years of relative comfort in the event of a societal collapse. All because he doesn’t want to moderate his society-corroding websites.
I reckon there’s some tipping point of wealth/power/privilege that totally transforms a person, any person, into something fundamentally different at heart.
Like, they won’t part with hundreds of lifetimes worth of cash because that would feel like self destruction. To them, they are their wealth. Nothing else remains. The accumulation isn’t pointing at anything other than accumulation.
…. And that’s not a new idea. Fucking st. Basil raged about this in the 300’s.
Most of us would stop doing whatever we were doing well before we amassed a billion dollars. That sort of wealth is enough to retire on, live a life of luxury and make sure your progeny won’t even need to work either.
These guys just don’t know how to stop, they have a hole they just can’t fill. And I guess when you reach “richest man in the world” status, you look around and you notice you’re still not happy, that probably doesn’t make things better for you mentally. And yeah, you stop seeing normal people in your life. You’re just surrounded by either other billionaires or people that are on your payroll. You don’t have any clue about the struggles of the other 99.9%.
I think that extremes exist and go to both directions. I have known people who lost their mind when their wages tripled after they started working abroad (e.g. my father started having mistresses when his salary went from 800 euros to 2200 in today’s money). But I have also known millionaires who live very middle class lives, except they travel more and drive better cars.
I’ll have to look into that! My first thought was Jesus Himself also warning against it.
“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?” Mark 8:36
They serve their greed, it becomes their god, and when the billions aren’t enough, it becomes about power and influence in world events. It never stops. They basically become the paperclip apocalypse machine for shareholder profits.
Like someone else here who mentioned Tolkien: absolutely “dragon sickness.” We watched Thorin Oakenshield forsake his brethren and become a total bastard just to sit on a mountain of coins and stare at a pretty rock.
These guys are the very same, just with their stonks.
Somehow along the way, our societies evolved to serve the dragons, to elevate their madness and sociopathy to virtue. Like the wealth-hoarding, worker-eating monsters of old, they must be brought down.
Tolkien’s dragon sickness comes from the whole Nibelungen cycle, in which the dwarf Fafnir turns himself into a dragon to keep the gold hoard. Depending on the version, the gold is created by a ring that Odin and Loki tried to claim but its owner cursed it because fuck those thieving gods. Several of the Germanic variations of the cycle put a lot of focus on greed for that hoard leading to the destruction of the Burgundian kingdom, including Atli (Attila the Hun) trying to get a piece of it, until the gold is tossed into the Rhine so that no one can have it.
Large parts of the same Germanic tales are heavily inspired by the feud between two Frankish queens, Brunhilda and Fredegund, the murder of Brunhilda’s husband Siegbert, and the migrations of the Burgundian tribes that ended in the modern French region of the same name. They (or rather their predecessors) were all involved in the defeat of Attila at the battle of the Catalaunian Plains. There’s no particular record of gold greed being involved in any of it, but it’s curious how that’s what the Germans remembered of it.
He, and all the rest of them, could easily do a u-turn, be class-conscious and fair to the workers and all the hate would go away. They’d still be nowhere close to poor or struggling, just less rich. They just don’t want to.
It’s like Zuck building a bunker in Hawaii that would, at best, buy him 2 or 3 years of relative comfort in the event of a societal collapse. All because he doesn’t want to moderate his society-corroding websites.
I reckon there’s some tipping point of wealth/power/privilege that totally transforms a person, any person, into something fundamentally different at heart.
Like, they won’t part with hundreds of lifetimes worth of cash because that would feel like self destruction. To them, they are their wealth. Nothing else remains. The accumulation isn’t pointing at anything other than accumulation.
…. And that’s not a new idea. Fucking st. Basil raged about this in the 300’s.
Most of us would stop doing whatever we were doing well before we amassed a billion dollars. That sort of wealth is enough to retire on, live a life of luxury and make sure your progeny won’t even need to work either.
These guys just don’t know how to stop, they have a hole they just can’t fill. And I guess when you reach “richest man in the world” status, you look around and you notice you’re still not happy, that probably doesn’t make things better for you mentally. And yeah, you stop seeing normal people in your life. You’re just surrounded by either other billionaires or people that are on your payroll. You don’t have any clue about the struggles of the other 99.9%.
I think that extremes exist and go to both directions. I have known people who lost their mind when their wages tripled after they started working abroad (e.g. my father started having mistresses when his salary went from 800 euros to 2200 in today’s money). But I have also known millionaires who live very middle class lives, except they travel more and drive better cars.
I’ll have to look into that! My first thought was Jesus Himself also warning against it.
“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?” Mark 8:36
They serve their greed, it becomes their god, and when the billions aren’t enough, it becomes about power and influence in world events. It never stops. They basically become the paperclip apocalypse machine for shareholder profits.
Like someone else here who mentioned Tolkien: absolutely “dragon sickness.” We watched Thorin Oakenshield forsake his brethren and become a total bastard just to sit on a mountain of coins and stare at a pretty rock.
These guys are the very same, just with their stonks.
Somehow along the way, our societies evolved to serve the dragons, to elevate their madness and sociopathy to virtue. Like the wealth-hoarding, worker-eating monsters of old, they must be brought down.
Tolkien’s dragon sickness comes from the whole Nibelungen cycle, in which the dwarf Fafnir turns himself into a dragon to keep the gold hoard. Depending on the version, the gold is created by a ring that Odin and Loki tried to claim but its owner cursed it because fuck those thieving gods. Several of the Germanic variations of the cycle put a lot of focus on greed for that hoard leading to the destruction of the Burgundian kingdom, including Atli (Attila the Hun) trying to get a piece of it, until the gold is tossed into the Rhine so that no one can have it.
Large parts of the same Germanic tales are heavily inspired by the feud between two Frankish queens, Brunhilda and Fredegund, the murder of Brunhilda’s husband Siegbert, and the migrations of the Burgundian tribes that ended in the modern French region of the same name. They (or rather their predecessors) were all involved in the defeat of Attila at the battle of the Catalaunian Plains. There’s no particular record of gold greed being involved in any of it, but it’s curious how that’s what the Germans remembered of it.
Yea, power corrupts. That’s what most of the Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion was about.
A tale as old as time, a song as old as rhyme…