The Plutocrats Who Rule Our World Aren't Even Enjoying Themselves

Reading by Tim Foley:

I saw a tweet by Elon Musk the other day, “Whoever said ‘money can’t buy happiness’ really knew what they were talking about.”

He put a sadface emoji at the end.

I personally do not feel the slightest bit sorry for Elon Musk and his feelings. But the fact that these billionaires aren’t even enjoying themselves as they poison our planet and rob us all says so much about the madness of the civilization we are living in.

I mean, think about it.

It’s not even making them happy. All that exploitation and extraction, all the parasiting and hoarding and manipulating politics and inserting themselves into governments, and it’s not even making them happy.

It would be terrible if these obscenely wealthy oligarchs were robbing everyone else of happiness in order to make themselves exponentially happier than all of us. But they’re not even making themselves happy. They’re fucking miserable. Everyone involved in this abusive dynamic is suffering from it — even the abusers.

And really, how could they not be?

Can you think of anyone less likely to be happy than someone who can’t be content simply retiring with a house and maybe twenty million dollars in the bank, ensuring that all their material needs will be cared for for the rest of their lives? Someone who must instead press on until they have obtained more money than they could reasonably spend in a thousand lifetimes?

Can you think of anything less conducive to happiness than becoming so much wealthier than everyone else that you have to isolate yourself from normal society, eventually surrounded only by people who are in your life because of your wealth? Never knowing how they truly feel about you or what they’d be doing with their lives if not for your vast fortune?

Can you think of a more surefire path to a lifetime of dissatisfaction than spending your years storing away wealth like some kind of fantasy dragon creature hoarding gold in a mountain, while people panicking over paying their bills look upon you with disdain?

Can you imagine a more miserable way to spend your days on this planet than becoming an oligarch and manipulating state power to ensure that your unfathomable wealth will never be redistributed to the needful and the struggling, and that ordinary people will forever remain trapped as powerless gear-turners whose labor exists solely to turn billionaires into trillionaires?

I know I can’t.

The plutocrats who control our society are not sincerely dedicated to the pursuit of happiness; if they were, they wouldn’t be plutocrats, and they wouldn’t be controlling our society. Happiness comes from contentment with one’s present experience, and those who keep compulsively amassing wealth for its own sake can never experience that contentment.

As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in his poem “Joe Heller”:

True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.

I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!

The Elon Musks of our world can never have the experience of having enough. They exist in a permanent state of lack. They’ve got a giant hole inside themselves that can never be filled, no matter how much money they throw into it, no matter how many private jets and private islands and media outlets and bought politicians they try to fill it with.

We are ruled by deeply wounded and dysfunctional emotional infants. The people who control our society are whipped about by primitive forces within themselves that they don’t understand. Their actions are motivated not by the pursuit of the common good, nor even their own good, but by psychological disorder and unconscious compulsion.

And yet we are assured this is the best possible way to run a society.

I kind of doubt that. I really don’t think that’s true.

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