My last post was running pretty long, and I considered splitting it into two parts, but instead I abruptly ended it with what I described as a copout: in this case, a lazy redirect to billionaires.
It’s true that I despise the fact of billionaire plutocrats. I believe that their gains are mostly ill-gotten and far removed from anything we would describe as work. Their wealth mostly accumulates through a kind of gravitational pull, as rent in various forms, or interest, or arbitrage, inheritance maybe. Let’s not forget the fingerprints they’ve left all over the tax code and finance laws that release them from all obligations to give back.
It’s also true that as one of the affluent—however modestly so—I benefit from a lot of the same structures as the plutocrats do, just to a lesser degree. And despite the mythology of trickle-down economics, these benefits do permeate on down through wealth gradients, to lesser and lesser degrees as you descend. Anyone who owns a flat-screen television or a cellphone, or any clothing for that matter, benefits by definition from what can only be called exploitation, possibly verging on slave labor (maybe not just verging).
But we don’t need to look overseas or at the supply chain. We can return to the zero-sum conundrum of fearful, stingy affluence relative to the poverty that exists around us. There are people here in my city who don’t have enough food, while my wife and I own a vacation property in Tahoe. I hand-waved towards billionaire plutocrats as an escape hatch from my own guilt, by which I mean feelings of guilt but also the real truth of my complicity.
gave a now-famous talk at the Aspen Institute, where he congratulated his hosts and benefactors—including Goldman Sachs, Pepsico, and others—for the good they do in the world, for their philanthropy and their foundations. But then, almost in the next breath, he calls them out for the harm they also do. Watch it here:His central message is about that distinction, doing more good versus less harm. He points to the fundamental hypocrisy in how these corporations celebrate and tabulate each good deed they do—number of trees planted, women educated, children vaccinated—while simultaneously destroying ecosystems, gutting communities, and lobbying to lower their taxes and kill regulations. They privatize gains and socialize losses, as the saying goes, and the losses are not just financial. He highlights the fact that their good deeds are side projects, while harm is embedded in their core strategies, costs of doing business. He notes how how loud and proud they are about one and how secretive about the other.
I think about my own impact in these terms now. In what ways am I doing harm, and could I do less? To what extent am I doing good, and could I do more? I can answer the second half of each of those questions: of course, and of course. I concluded as much in my last piece.
Handwaving in the direction of the billionaire class, then, is an escape hatch from these thoughts about my own responsibility and culpability. Comparing myself to the plutocrat class is much nicer than comparing myself to the genuinely heroic individuals who exist in the world. The sorts of true heroes I’m thinking of are few enough in number that we can name some of them. Shout out to Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thünberg, Maria Ressa, and R.I.P. Alexei Navalny. Others we know not by name but through their deeds—delivering food or healthcare in war zones, giving shelter to refugees and the needy, forming blockades with their bodies. They are few, just as the billionaires are few. I wonder which group is larger? Between them, do they somehow balance the scales of karma or morality?
Anyway yes, invoking the plutocrat class is a way of saying that while yes, I could do much better, could do less harm and more good, why not them? It is true and defensible to expect billionaires to do a lot more good and especially a lot less harm, but this is also a copout for my own lack of conviction. I have done volunteer work, and we donate to worthy causes, but I have drawn the line somewhere above the place where I would feel actual discomfort. Pretty far above, if I’m being honest and if I reflect on my own era of discomfort.
So again, I don’t really have a good resolution for these thoughts, and these swirling questions will have to suffice.
Good to ask these questions, acknowledge these inequities, but at the end of the day do remember that God or whatever you call the Eternal, is good. Your attempt to do what is right is good. As you pointed out, there is good in the world. Pay attention.