You might feel powerful cruising around in your luxury car, but you’ll quickly defer to the first guy in an old beater that decides to run you off the road.
Wealth and power certainly bring with them lots of advantages. In fact great wealth and power bring so many advantages that it’s hard to grasp, let alone sympathize with, the incredible vulnerability and weakness they bring with them.
We have always understood that the greater your wealth, the more you have to lose. What we don’t understand as clearly is that the more you have to lose, the more timid and compliant you become. In ways even the compulsive greed of the wealthy can be understood in part as needing ever more buffer to alleviate their anxiety over losing what they have already acquired. The more they acquire the greater that anxiety becomes and the more they need to feel secure – a self-perpetuating cycle.
As that wealth grows, so does vulnerability and risk aversion. The phrase “I’ve got nothing to lose” is a very scary one. But in the greater society “I’ve got too much to lose” is even scarier.
Rich people are paradoxically more controllable and manageable then poorer ones. They just have too much to lose to make any waves or stand up to more powerful forces, no matter how corrupt. If you want to control someone entirely, enrich them with enough money and power to make them easy to bring to heel.
This applies not only to individuals but to corporations any other entities that amass wealth and influence. Donald Trump has demonstrated clearly that powerful interests are both the strongest weapons for a dictator to control and the easiest to force into compliance. The rich and powerful who should be most capable of protecting democracy and standing up to corruption are the first to abandon democracy and become thoroughly corrupted.
It’s probably futile to expect the rich and powerful to risk anything at all for the greater good. Ultimately the only answer to this and a host of other social problems stemming from great wealth inequality is a wealth cap that prevents anyone, individual or corporation, from becoming both dangerously powerful and easily corruptible by Trump or any other despot.
I’m sure you have heard the term “tin pot dictator.” It refers to “an autocratic ruler with little political credibility, but with self-delusions of grandeur.” This pejorative was coined in the early days of the British Empire and it associates certain rulers with the cheap, disposable containers used before the creation of the modern tin can. Like the one on the right, these cheap cans boasted labels that portrayed the contents in a highly overblown and pretentious manner. But the common people were not all fooled. They knew full well that Dinner Time Brand coffee was not exactly the Royal experience promised on the label. Thus the term “tin pot dictator” spoke volumes to them.
figmentums 