The richest people in the world are morally bankrupt

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨BoycottTwitter@lemmy.zip⁩ to ⁨showerthoughts@lemmy.world⁩

And I might add maybe not the happiest people either. They could have everything they want yet they don’t always seem all that happy. Elon Musk for example doesn’t seem much happier than the average person for an example. Maybe even less so (depends on who you’re comparing against of course).

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SantasMagicalComfort@piefed.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
No shit that’s why they’re rich.

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- Akasazh@feddit.nl ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Great username
  
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RBWells@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I don’t think you can get THAT rich without ripping off someone. Like, if I started a business and it was raking in the cash in some actual not harmful way, I would pay myself a healthy salary but raise everyone’s pay, why would I need more than I need? Nobody needs a billion dollars. Nobody.

The guy who said he doesn’t fear the cops anymore, I don’t feel that. But I do agree money insulates you from a lot of stresses.

I still think it’s akin to hoarding. Billionaires are like those people in the houses they can’t move around in because they can’t stop accumulating.

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- IronBird@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  i recently escaped the labor trap myself (that is what rich people call working btw), until that moment i had always been in survival mode…stressed about basic needs which all required $, something i didn’t have enough of. figured out how the stock market works, how it’s basically just one big casino a bunch of rich cunts with more $ than sense dump their ratfucked funds into…once you know how it works in incredibly easy to 10x your working capital (to a point, there’s scaling problems eventually…but by that point any normal person has more $ than they can spend)
  
  first thing that happened after this was a mental breakdown as my mind apparently felt comfortable enough then to process a bunch childhood trauma i had mostly (consciously atleast) forgotten.
  
  this trauma processing/breakdown eventually lead to my mom being concerned enough to reveal to me that i had been diagnosed with autism back as a kid when i was originally diagnosed with adhd, had kept it from me so i could “grow up normal” apparently…probably should have told me after highschool atleast…had these breakdowns atleast 2-3 times prior just not as bad.
  
  after this i had the horrible realization of just how fucked our country/world is, that the reason nobody seemed to be doing anything about all this horrible shit (especially the blatant corruption of trump admin…) wasn’t that noone knew…it was that everyone knew, they’re just waiting for things to “return to normal”. they’ve all just either given up or don’t care to begin with because the system benefits them. the realization that now even with effectively infinite (personal) $, i’m still pretty much powerless to change/fix any of this…
  
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  - kinship@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Can you tell me more about how easy is to beat the bank? (In your Casino analogy). I wan’t to learn such power.
    And let me ask you as well… are you sure that you are not presenting survivorship bias? (The same as the billionares we are talking?). Ex: “I am a billionare because I worked hard and am way smarter”, etc.
    I am genuinely asking, it sounds passive agressive but I guarantee you it’s not.
    
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- queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I think it’s a structural effect. Let’s play moral relativism for a second and assume that everyone has their own definition of what is ethical and what isn’t, and that people generally choose not to do things they would consider unethical even if doing them would benefit themselves in some way. So, the people with the widest array of options for benefiting themselves are those with the least restrictive ethical framework. This doesn’t always mean that they will be successful or powerful, as humans are generally pretty bad at predicting what is good for them, and even worse at consistently acting on those beliefs, especially over the long term. However, the hoarding of wealth has a few characteristics that make it different from other forms of self-benefit:
  
  It’s easy to measure progress, and therefore easy to optimize for. This means that once you find a successful means of making money, you can fine-tune the process and reproduce it more easily than, say, a critically acclaimed novelist can write a critically acclaimed sequel.
  (n.b. I’m not saying that getting rich is easy. In fact I think a lot of rich people, especially those at the very top, do genuinely put a lot of hard work and long hours into being rich. I think they’re genuinely passionate about being rich. I think it’s a selfish and self-defeating and catastrophically harmful goal to pursue, but I think they enjoy it and pursue it with the same vigor that any world-class athlete has for their sport.)
  
  Money makes money. This one I think has been discussed enough, but it’s an established fact that they easiest way to make money is by having money, which means that people with the most money tend (assuming they don’t wildly fuck up, which does sometimes happen) to become even more insanely wealthy. You can even pay people to help your money make money more efficiently, which strikes me as very funny though I can’t really articulate why.
  
  Having money influences the behavior of everyone around you, whether you want it to or not. The very rich, especially (but by no means exclusively) the famously rich, have their relationships with other people skewed in a very systematic way. This is conjecture on my part, having never been famously rich, but I would imagine that this systematic alteration of relationships is very hard to account for, especially if you get famous before you have a chance to form deep adult relationships. And by account for, I think there are just things rich people do that they simply do not, or cannot, see. Relatedly, I think this is why dictators tend to overreact to political comedians, because that public discussion of their obvious foibles is really the only time they ever hear about it, and it’s intolerable because their tolerance for criticism is so low.
  
  I think these traits mean that once you find a way to make enough money to become wealthy, you tend to stay wealthy as long as you can repeat the trick. And since there are tons of ways to make money in unethical ways, loosening or ignoring one’s moral compass can greatly increase the odds of finding a repeatable money-making tactic. And once you have a way to make money, the looser restrictions make it easier to grow your hoard faster. Which is why the richest person on earth is invariably some self-obsessed abusive criminal jackass.
  
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BurgerBaron@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Same as it ever was.

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spittingimage@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I don’t need the problem described any more. I need ideas for fixing it.

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- BoycottTwitter@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  You got to vote and be active in politics and encourage as many people to do likewise. If more people did that the sum of our power would be far greater than the power of billionaires. We can then have reforms like regulating campaign contributions and lobbying and passing more regulations that protect the people.
  
  For some countries there are things working against us. For example in the US billionaires have a lot of power and contribute heavily to politics in part due to the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC which opened the floodgates for unlimited political spending and has really harmed our country. My solution to this is to encourage people to boycott companies that donate heavily to Republicans and most importantly encourage people to vote for people who will help stop all the corruption.
  
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  - Azal@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Another thing that gets me is how many people will say voting doesn’t matter when they maybe only vote on presidential elections.
    
    Voting is not a 4 year thing, it’s an absolute grind and locally can affect more of your day to day life, as well as keep building its way. higher up. I live in a state that so many people showed up and voted for bills that went against the state legislature, but they actually voted less for the people… now of course the state is overthrowing the things voted in.
    
    So yes, SO VERY MUCH vote and be active in politics.
    
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  - aubeynarf@lemmynsfw.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    right on brother
    
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shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
And you would be morally bankrupt were you rich. I forget the psychological term, but the idea is well documented. When people attain wealth and power, they suddenly don’t feel the rules apply to them. And it happens to all of us. “I would be better!*” Nah, probably not so much.

Saw a great case of this with Hillary Clinton, though I forget the particulars. She’s stumping for some law or policy that she blatantly violated and a journalist (we used to have those) called her on the hypocrisy. “But… that doesn’t apply to me.”

Not like she stared out rich and powerful. Sure, she had some privilege, but not First Lady of the United Fucking States and Secretary of State kinda privilege.

The whole concept is kinda horrifying. When I hit the middle-aged white-guy with a decent income zone, I started not giving a fuck about breaking simple laws. Fuck they gonna do? I’m driving without a legal license ATM. When I was young and broke, jail. Now? Slap on the wrist, at worst.

Now think on that kinda thought process as one get’s truly rich and powerful. Morals, out the window. You still think you’re doing the right thing, but you’re badly misaligned with the lowly common people.

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- melfie@lemy.lol ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  And *you* would be morally bankrupt were you rich
  
  Which is why capitalism begins with the word “cap”. There needs to be a cap on the maximum wealth any one individual can accrue, because absolute power corrupts absolutely.
  
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- DrFistington@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Keep on justifying parasites, maybe you’ll become one!
  
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  - Artisian@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Many parasites require special conditions to grow. We can manage their populations by managing the environment.
    
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DrBob@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
At a party hosted by a billionaire hedge fund manager, Kurt Vonnegut turns to Joseph Heller and says, “Our host made more money yesterday than you’ve made from Catch-22 over your whole life.”

Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he’ll never have—enough.”

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bstix@feddit.dk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It’s impossible to earn that much money, but at some point it’s also impossible to hold or spend. Banks can only take so much safely, so it needs to be placed in companies and investments that require some management and all the consequences and responsibility of running those. Spending it is problematic because it will disrupt whatever market it is injected to, potentially harming a lot of people.

The only real solution is to avoid billionaires in the first place by taxing corporations much much harder.

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- the_ultimate_joy@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I’ve never seen it from this perspective before. From this perspective, it makes even more sense to place regulations in order to avoid such circumstances.
  
  It gets me thinking of what methods (on top of taxing megacorps appropriately) we could implement to achieve a narrower wage gap while avoiding the corrupt type of communism.
  
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tomiant@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
They’re gamblers. Capitalism is gambling. I’ve seen people die from it, I lost a good friend to gambling. These are gambling addicts, they will never get enough, it will never be enough. They will keep going and drag everyone else down with them in the process, at any and all cost, and with absolute certainty.

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nonentity@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Financial obesity is neurotoxic.

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favoredponcho@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
CEOs have a higher rate of psychopathic traits than average. In order to get into a role like that, you are by definition, morally bankrupt.

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SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Dude has a tiny broken penis and is cucked by everybody.

He’s either secretly estatic or a very, very sad little manchild.

Going off how childhood fame messes up people pretty much always, I’m gonna go with the second one.

But yeah, good job getting there in the shower 👍 it’s not everyday that people do that on their own. You should be proud of yourself.

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1984@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
What do you really need to be happy? Somewhere to live where you feel calm and safe, money for food and bills.

The reason a lot of people want more and more is because they compare themselves to others, and then they need a life style to support that luxary house or whatever it is. Meaning they are probably not happy.

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Professorozone@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Think about it. He can never really know if someone likes him or is just sucking up because he’s rich and famous. Gotta be rough not having any friends. I think that’s why some rich people get caught with prostitutes. They KNOW where they stand.

Don’t mistake this as sympathy for him, just an explanation as to one of the reasons he may be unhappy.

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sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
That’s kind of required to become that rich

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FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Yet a lot of people think wealth is a virtue

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vatlark@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
This was reported for not being a shower thought. It’s certainly not hard to get a bunch of up votes on Lemmy by saying “ultra rich people bad”.

I error on the side of leaving posts up. If there is an objective way to enforce what is or isn’t a shower thought, I’m open to ideas.

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Hoohoo@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Elon Musk has always lived in privilege of some variety, and generally sees his wealth as his due. Morals come from everyone's pain I guess. I can't be rich without other people being elevated too. I couldn't do that to people in the same boat (or lack thereof) as me.

Some rich people get that. Like Bezos's ex. She kinda hates the rich.

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MyBrainHurts@piefed.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Ehhhhhh, some, sure.

But on the flip side, you have folks like Bill Gates who has more or less devoted his life to saving as many lives as possible.

Or Buffett who last I heard had donated some 50 or 60 billion to different foundations.

Even Musk, for all his recent evil got rich trying to reduce our dependence on gas cars. As much as I dislike the man, I imagine the electric car industry would be pretty far back in his absence.

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- pizza_the_hutt@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Bill Gates is a pedo who spent a ton of time with Epstein, which is likely why his wife divorced him.
  
  Musk didn’t create Tesla. He bought it, and is currently running it into the ground. Employees have compared him to a pidgeon who flies in, shits on everything, and then leaves again. If anything, Tesla’s relative success is in spite of Musk, not because of him. Tesla is already starting to lose value due to Musk’s antics and the fact that all other manufacturers are making electric cars now, too.
  
  Warren Buffet may be one of the better billionaires, but that’s not saying much. He still invests in fossil fuel companies and could give away more of his wealth to charity. And then there’s the underlying problem with an economic system that steals living wages from employees to enrich investors like Buffet, but that’s a story for another time.
  
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- MotoAsh@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  You mean the guy that suggested privatizing publicly invested vaccines? That guy is invested in saving as many lives as possible? … rofl!
  
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  - tomiant@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Dude is missing the fucking point anyway. So what if there actually is a generous philanthropist billionaire? Does that prove that the system is working, because it enables private citizens to accumulate enough power to change the world any way they see fit? Because then we have a system where we are at the mercy as a society of the personal idiosyncrasies of the ultra wealthy, instead of elected officials.
    
    If money is supposed to be a metric of success, then morality is nothing but the accumulation of money, and he who gets the most gets to tell everyone else how the world is to be run.
    
    Societies cannot successfully and equitably and fairly be run by private individuals with extreme wealth. It is, in fact, the polar opposite of what we have tried to achieve with democratic societies. That’s the whole point of paying taxes, of having laws and regulations that diminish the influence of money, because let run wild, we get countries and populations run by modern warlords and chieftains bent on getting ever more for themselves and less for everyone else.
    
    Capitalism is a fucking CANCER on humanity.
    
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  - aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    yes, the cybertruck that only sold half of what he predicted and they had a shitload of cybertrucks left over because no one wanted them.
    
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- BoycottTwitter@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Bill Gates was ruthless during the 90s. Just as a random example he tried to make ACPI only work with Windows saying “It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work” just as a random example.
  
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- theparadox@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  Bill Gates who has more or less devoted his life to saving as many lives as possible.
  
  …
  
  Buffett who last I heard had donated some 50 or 60 billion to different foundations.
  
  …
  
  Even Musk, for all his recent evil got rich trying to reduce our dependence on gas cars
  
  Maybe they are happier than OP suspects - I’m not them so I can’t really comment on that. As far as your framing of their motives and achievements though… Hard disagree, especially Musk and Gates. All three fucked over tons of people to get their obscene wealth.
  
  I’d go into great depth as to why, but it usually ends in nothing being learned and a lot of my time wasted so I’ll just hard disagree and bow out.
  
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- DrFistington@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Fuck ‘foundations’ their just methods of money laundering and trafficking funds.
  
  They would have helped far more people by paying their fair share in taxes. Oh, Bill Gates paid billions to try and help people in Africa? Great plan asshole, those people died from climate change related conflict, or they’ll die in the upcoming ww3. Oh, and Americans are now essentially slaves in a fascist Dictatorship, but go on about your fucking mosquito nets.
  
  95% tax rate on anything over $250 million for an individual. Period, regardless of source, and put a 5 million dollar surcharge on every private jet fight.
  
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- pivot_root@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  Even Musk, for all his recent evil got rich trying to reduce our dependence on gas cars.
  
  Everybody else already covered his role in Tesla, so let’s look at something else that demonstrates his concern for the environment and his fellow species:
  
  He has a datacenter in Memphis running 35 “temporary” methane generators to power Grok, the self-described “Mecha Hitler” AI. All but a dozen of them are being used without permits for permanent generators, and none of them have air pollution filtration systems installed. Oh, and it’s near a low-income community that was already plagued by air pollution.
  
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- tomiant@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  But on the flip side, you have folks like Bill Gates who has more or less devoted his life to saving as many lives as possible.
  
  Can you fucking imagine thinking that Bill Gates foundation is anything but a massive tax evasion scam set to funnel funds through intermediaries to enrich his family even more? Remember when Zuckerberg said he was going to “donate” like 90% of his wealth? Well, seems that was a fraud too.
  
  BUT THAT IS NOT THE POINT.
  
  We have societies and governments so that we all have equal say in how resources should be distributed, so that we can all be free and all live fair. If we have a society where we accept that someone has the capacity to end world hunger but it’s up to them personally to make that choice, then we are back to some feudal bullshit.
  
  People should not have that much money, because money is power, and if they have a trillion dollars and vote with their wallets (like you do), then suddenly they have a trillion votes and you have one. That’s the end of democracy, period. No system can survive that.
  
  As a counterpoint, imagine if Bill Gates instead chose, personally, to spend his wealth on propping up an armed resistance force and a private army and into destabilizing governments so that he can seize control like some global warlord, would that also be an example of how capitalism works precisely as expected? I’d say so.
  
  The whole point is that we cannot give private citizens the power to control societies. That’s how you get barbarism and dynastic rule and slavery and human misery. Democracy is the only light in the world, and capitalism is a direct challenger to rule of democracy and law. If money is power, then capitalism is a form of government, and a fucking horrific one that will push us way back into the dark ages if we allow it.
  
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minorkeys@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Morals are restrictions on behavior that impede efficacy and getting rich requires successfully getting away with breaking the rules, leaving the moral people poor and paperless.

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RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
But one thing they don’t seem to have is enough.

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MehBlah@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
There is a hole in their soul that can only be filled by more money. At least that is what they think.

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IWW4@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
So they are super rich, have everything they want and you think they are not happy.

Wow keep telling yourself that.

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- remon@ani.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  But that’s pretty much the case..
  
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  - IWW4@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Keep telling yourself that you would not be happy if you were super rich…
    
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