There is currently a race to become the world’s first trillionaire. It’s mostly press talk right now, since no one’s even hit half a trillion dollars yet, but it definitely exists. You know it exists because no one ever became a billionaire and said, “I have enough money now, time to stop.” We all inherently understand that the goal is only to accumulate more. It is not to have enough. There is no “enough”. Once someone has a trillion, they immediately start on the journey to whatever the hell is past a trillion. I’m not going to look it up, I shouldn’t have to know unless I’m a mathematician.
This is a function of modern capitalism. I specify modern capitalism because traditional capitalism should avoid this problem through the existence of competition, government regulation, and labor power. Of course, the terms modern and traditional are misnomers. We’ve been at this point before, see the Gilded Age, Robber Barons, and Great Depression to see how that went; so modern capitalism is only modern in the sense that it uses computers and learned from the mistakes of the previous generation of unrestrained capitalists. Don’t take any hope from that statement, the mistakes I’m referring to are not the mistakes you would think they are.
What I’ve referred to as “traditional” capitalism could also be thought of as sane or structured capitalism. It’s traditional only in the sense that it is the form capitalism took after the Great Depression through the New Deal and consolidation of union power. The form of capitalism where a common family could live off one parent’s income at a blue collar job. It’s traditional because to our modern minds it’s what capitalism is supposed to look like if you’re not a Capitalist with the capital “C”.
To a sane mind, capitalism is merely an economic model to structure the flow of resources through a form of regulated greed. If everyone naturally pursues their own best interests, then those with the resources, ie the capital, will seek to exploit the needs of the people to their own gain, and those with the needs will enforce competition by seeking the best deal for themselves and their limited resources, so long as the government prevents the capitalists from eating each other by buying out their competition and forming pesky monopolies.
To a big C capitalist, that’s tyranny!
For the modern capitalist, the use of his wealth is the execution of his agency, and it shall not be restricted by the likes of you or I. You vote with your wallet, he votes with his wealth. “Isn’t that the same thing,” you say. No, you have money. He has wealth. If you wonder when you cross the line from just having money to having wealth, it’s about the time people start listening to everything you have to say very intently.
And of course, the best thing for the modern capitalist to do with his wealth is use it to accumulate more wealth unrestricted by ethical or legal concerns. You may have heard the phrase, “There are no good billionaires.” It’s a good phrase; I agree with it. No one who has accumulated that much wealth could have done so without crossing an ethical line at some point.
“How does this happen?” you might wonder. I said before that the sane mind sees capitalism as purely an economic model. Big C capitalists see it as full societal paradigm, like a religion. Capitalism isn’t merely a way to control the flow of resources, it is a way to control the flow of life. It isn’t a matter of them thinking this is the best way for society to function, they think this is the way the world functions regardless of human society. All organisms seek to maximize their portion of personal resources and all interactions between organisms are some form of transaction—an expense for a gain. A predator stalking prey expends their personal energy for more food; the prey expends energy for more time being alive. Pack animals work together for mutual gain in enlightened self interest—less food per individual, but increasing the odds of having any food at all.
With humans, it’s just more complex. We have mental energy and social needs, creating a whole new dynamic level of exchanges, but to the Big C capitalist, it’s all fundamentally the same. The winners are the ones expending the least for the largest gain. And because their paradigm of the world is built around this concept, this is the core tenant of their morality: Each individual should seek to accumulate the most of what they want with the least amount of expense on their part. And what you should want is wealth, because it can provide you with everything else.
Wealth is power and the key to every door. When you have wealth, you can accommodate any personal shortcoming. Want to make movies but can’t write, direct, or act? Buy a studio and be a producer, hiring others to bring your ideas to life while still feeling directly responsible for them. Lack an engaging personality? Once you start spending money on people, you’ll find you have a lot of friends. Find that there are rules between you and getting more of the wealth you crave? Start donating to the campaigns of every politician and get the rules changed.
If the accumulation of wealth is the core tenant of your life, then it becomes “the good”. Now your morality is centered around wealth. Those who amass fortunes are virtuous for doing what is right, and are to be looked up to as role models, while those that struggle or have nothing are deplorable and leeches, inherently villainous. If they were good, they would have wealth. Those that would take your wealth are the worst—especially if they would take it and give it to the deplorables. Wealth is meant to flow to those that deserve it, and those who deserve it are the ones with the capability to procure it, most easily seen by showing how much you already have.
It is a strange allusion to Calvinism, which is already kind of strange. God already chose the winners, and they will show themselves by being winners. Never mind the ways in which they restructure our society to further benefit themselves at the expense of all others—that’s a feature, not a bug. Elon, Jeff, Bill—they’re all the best of us, because they are rich. Don’t think about how they became rich, or how much we all might have to suffer for them to stay rich. That’s bad think. You should focus on good think—how can you become rich?
When enough people realize they can’t, that even everyday expenses are becoming too much because of what these Big C capitalists are doing to world, there will be change. I don’t know what form it will take. There were some positive moves among unions last year, which makes me hopeful that we won’t get the violent revolution version of change. But the modern capitalists are a lot more powerful than their early twentieth century brethren, and it took a great depression to finally make the government reign those assholes in.
Right now, the system keeps trying to collapse, but the highest levels of our society have bought into this Big C paradigm, so they keep saving it and propping it up. That means when the collapse does come, it will have to be so big that the government, currently the most powerful and wealthy in the world, cannot hold the weight of it. That’s going to be a bad time.
The part of me that doesn’t want to live through the greatest economic catastrophe in history really hopes that the transition of power form Boomers to Millennials will ease some of the burden. Us Millennials have lived through the bullshit and most of us are fully aware of how badly we’ve been screwed… but, power does corrupt, and I know plenty of people in my generation that fully buy into the Big C paradigm. So I really have no idea.
I just know that if someone does finally make it to one trillion dollars, give them the Pope’s hat, because at that point, they’re the head of the new church of wealth because enough of us bought into this bullshit to let it happen.
The Estesian Language 