The Rich Always Come Up With a Ridiculous Story to Justify Their Wealth
Most wealthy people share a few common traits. They’re ambitious and terribly status driven. They love to hoard the majority of capital even when their fellow citizens aren’t doing so well. And they’re also really, really good at creating justifications for why they have so much and you have so little.
To quote the American economist John Kenneth Galbraith:
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
These justifications have had to change one or two times over the years—because eventually the people catch on.
During the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe, monarchs utilized the doctrine of divine rule to placate the concerns of the commoners. Here was a doctrine which had the boldness to claim that if you wanted to depose a monarch, you were acting in defiance of God’s will. You can understand why the elite found this quite an appealing strategy to disarm the people’s qualms about the status quo.
Similarly, Southern aristocrats of the 19th century relied on a whole host of dubious theories to justify profiting off of slave labor. They used Aristotle’s natural slavery argument and picked out passages of the Holy Book to support their absurd status. When all else failed, they would also stoke fears of economic collapse and societal ruin if slavery became outlawed.
And while we might like to think our times are immune to such tactics, the wealthy today have continued this distinguished human tradition.
Elites now defend incredible levels of inequality through free market ideology. They shroud this economic theory in sacrosanct ways—noting its eternal “laws” which cannot be questioned.
https://civicskunk.works/the-rich-always-come-up-with-a-ridiculous-story-to-justify-their-wealth-687bc2f0a277
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You know, if you are truly open to wealth, it will come to you. God wants you to be properous so if you are poor it's your fault. You just need to work at it harder, sending a donation wouldn't hurt.
