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I've become convinced that the billionaire (and adjacent) class globally and especially in America suffers under a delusion I'm calling "oligarchical utopianism."
History indicates that utopia for the masses is likely unachievable. I don't mean a particular utopia, I mean smthg like the best use of resources to maximize happiness & security for the population.
Even small utopian experiments have been disasters. pcmag.com/news/11-failed…
But I think today's plutocrats believe they can buck this trend.
Don't get me wrong, their lives are pretty sweet as it is!
But if they're truly content, then why are they paying their Republican catch-farts to tear down the system?
We can be pretty confident it's not because they earnestly believe their fascist game plan will benefit Joe Lunchpail and Suzy Housecoat.
No, these are some self-interested mofos.
Studies show sociopathy increases proportionally as 💰 increases. huffpost.com/entry/upper-cl…
I read somewhere, and I'm too lazy to look it up, that if you ask a rich person, from millionaires to Bezos, how much more money they'd need to feel secure and happy, they almost all say the same thing: about three times more than they have. theatlantic.com/family/archive…
Thus very few people feel adequately rich.
Imagine the anguish the twin prospects of higher taxes on their often brutally acquired wealth or lower profits from regulation of their often environmentally villainous companies must inflict on them.
What's a billionaire to do?!
The last period of such vertiginous differences between the wealth of the working class and the wealth of the owner/executive class, the 20s & Great Depression, coincided with the rise of communist revolution as one solution to such conditions.
American unions were very powerful, and communist organizers were given a hearing by the working class.
Having seen what happened in Russia, the American plutocrats realized they needed to do something big to avoid catastrophe (for them) and guillotines.
And so America created The New Deal.
Today's right-wing propagandists like to paint it as a bleeding-heart liberal handout, but it was more like a proactive extortion payment to avoid a mass revolt by the poor.
Today's rich either have not learned the lesson that poor and working-class people have a breaking point, or, and this is the correct answer, they feel that media manipulation, especially social media manipulation, will allow them to get away with their excesses indefinitely.
The power of propaganda to quell uprisings in even the most obscenely unequal societies has an avatar: North Korea.
Kim Jong Un's army, while impressive, would be no match for a huge popular revolution to improve living conditions for the masses there.
But it never happens. 😳
It never happens because the god-king's boot is on the necks of the people through surveillance, and because many of them are actually in thrall to his cheezy cult of personality.
Even mass starvation, traditionally a revolution clutch popper, hasn't done it.
(accidentally published the thread before I was done, so please forgive typos)
Circling back, I think oligarchs see North Korea as a model for their utopia.
- A totally cowed lower class, slaves in all but name, on the brink of starvation.
- An almost omnipotent upper class.
Think about Kim Jong Un. This rotund little dude is so powerful he has his fav movie stars kidnapped from other countries and brought to him.
(Sounds good, right? I mean, if I had a billion dollars and some nukes I'd treat awards shows as more like the Home Shopping Network.)
The main difference between North Korea and the US is that we still have free speech and a free press. This means the oligarchs can only propagandize the 30%-40% of people naturally susceptible to such messages.
So they needed to pit the masses against each other.
That solution is not new, but the technologies used to implement it are.
But will it work?
In America, at least, I think they will achieve many of their goals in the short run.
It's likely Repubs will win or steal one or both houses of Congress in 2022 and steal the White House in 2024. It's clearly their goal.
They will then accelerate their program of destroying/subverting American democracy and going with full frontal fascism.
But I think they underestimate how much societal chaos and the breakdown of fundamental institutions will get in the way of their fun-having.
It's no secret that a lot of these right-wing billionaires are shockingly ignorant and stupid.
"Duped again!"
reuters.com/legal/governme…
So if they manage to tear it all down, they or their descendants will suffer, even if that suffering is simply that climate chaos is coming for all of us, no matter how much we spend on our luxury apocalypse bunkers. msn.com/en-us/money/re…
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