Thread: I know this article is a couple of days old, but it's been an open tab since I first saw it, and I've going back to look at it and fume and seethe and marvel (I'm sure there's a work in german for this particular blend of emotions) because it... 1/ wsj.com/articles/for-t…
Contains everything that has been wrong with our economy, and as a result of that our social structures, that's been laid bare by this pandemic. Now I'm not exactly perfect, and I think anyone who can get help with household humdrummery would do it if they could. Having help 2/
Has liberated me to do so much else with my time, and it's also enabled me to employ someone at a living plus wage that might not have been able to get that wage elsewhere. I also know in my heart that some things are too personal, too risky, too humiliating to ask another...3/
Person to do for you. And of course, it is the stuff of great sitcoms to imagine wealthy folks deigning to do house chores they haven't done in years. I confess the vacuum and I had not made an intimate connection in quite some time and the first pass was a bit of struggle...4/
BUT...holy cow the horrors of this piece. The real estate baron "allows" his chef and housekeeper to cook for him in the kitchen of the pool house??? He says he hates to lay someone off at a time like this as though he couldn't afford to pay the chef for a while to stay safe5/
At home and NOT cook for him. That IS an option you know. The heart of this problem is in what rich people see when they look at a working person, especially one who works at menial labor for them. They don't see a human being. They just don't. The see someone..6/
Who looks and sounds like a human but has a different make-up that makes it easier for them to work harder, longer and at more brutally undignified work than their own refined souls can handle. That might sound histrionic, and if you ask a wealthy person they will deny it.... 7/
But spend some time around wealthy people and watch what they ask the people around them to do, and how much they expect them to get for it, and that's the only rational explanation....8/
The problem with extreme wealth inequality was never just about how bad life had become for those at the bottom of the pyramid, although that is the problem of priority for sure. But the shadow problem is the moral hazard that wealth represents to the people who have it..9/
And the moral hazard those people, with all their access to power and limited ability to see other human beings with less as their own equals, present in a democratic society. Because if you really are incapable of understanding why no one is too good to scrub a toilet,...10/
How can you possibly not, as Steve Mnuchin did last week, sit on live television and talk about how families can subsist on 1,200 dollars for ten weeks no problem. He clearly hasn't asked someone in that position what their reality is. Because why would he? 11/
He lives in the clouds with the other gods, and he and the other gods know what is best for the little people below them. A sane, humble, rational person who had been raised by a Goldman Sacks partner in Manhattan, attended nothing but elite schools and whose first job was at 12/
Salomon Bros might be open to the idea that nothing in their personal experience has led them to be in any position to tell a working class person how much money they need to get through ten weeks with. But nothing about his life experience, or mine for that matter, 13/
Would make it easy for him to be sane and humble and rational. In a climate of privilege like the one he and I were raised in, they tell you you are brilliant and funny and charming and that there is nothing you can't doAnd once you ascend to a certain amount of wealth 14/
No one in their right mind would have the guts to tell you you are not all of that. And the higher you ascend the fewer truth tellers surround you, because you know in your heart something is not right, so you cannot take the risk of having a truth teller around you...15/
This is all the long way around to saying that our inequality is socially, spiritually and morally corrosive to everyone involved. Obviously it is difficult for those not blessed with ample resources and even if not resources, head starts 16/
like education and race and geography that will all eventually add up to resources unless you are too stupid and self destructive to play your cards right. More, it is morally corrosive to the people that seem to be the lucky ones. Because at a certain point money makes you 17/
Stupid and it makes you mean and it disables your capacity to fully and completely empathize with people who are dealing with less than you are. It just does. And that is the real reason that wealthy people are so often politically conservative. Yes they intend to protect 18/
Advantages, that's part of it for sure. But deep down they don't believe the people with less can really be trusted with the important decisions. Even the ones who call themselves liberals will turn harshly conservative if you verge a little too far into community organizing 19/
Or political advocacy. You can't rock the boat they are in, because they've convinced themselves that they are in the right boat for the right reasons and they deserve their advantages. The corollary to believing you deserve advantages you have not earned or have 20/
Only partially earned is believing that those who do not share your advantages somehow deserve the worse fate. Only with the a radical practice of solidarity can any of this change. People who are raised in wealth need to break this hypnotic cycle. They need to ask hard 21/
questions about their resources, not just slouch into them like big comfy couches. The more you have the more you better work. The more you are flattered the harder you must resist. The more you see a gulf between you and others, the more adamantly you must defy it. 22/
The world will not change until America lives up to its egalitarian promise that everyone should have a fair start, that no one should be left behind, that we are all connected in our fates, and that we left dynasties behind when we got on the Mayflower and must fight 23/
Them wherever they sneak back into this lovely garden, with law, with attitudes, with social norms, with media, with every damn tool in our toolbox. I am a self-hating person of resources, and damn proud of it. I've said my piece. Peace out. End
