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I've been thinking lately that money, in large enough quantities, functions pretty much like an anesthetic.

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Everyone has problems in their lives, but the more money you have, the more of these problems you can simply throw money at until they go away.

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So, the more money you have, the less you experience the day to day struggle of other people. People born to great wealth may not even be able to imagine what lower-income people have to deal with.

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Add to this the popular notion that poverty is the result of some personal failing of poor people and you have a potent recipe for a ruling elite that has no concept of, and no interest in, the needs of others.

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But then there's a terrorist attack. No amount of money thrown at that problem will make it go away. The haves and the haves more, suddenly face a problem that has to be dealt with directly, but they've lost the capacity to deal with problems directly.

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So we get the short-sighted, absurd "solutions" of the past 5 years. Not because the current regime is more evil than previous administrations, but because great wealth and privilege have made them moral idiots.

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Another thought I've had recently was on the subject of greed. People see it as a very aggressive, and therefore sexy/rebelious/cool aspect of our, oooooh, "dark side." People who council against greed are marginalized as goody-two-shoes types or hopeless idealists and commies; they might as well be preaching prohibition.

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But just as serial rapists and killers are really hiding their profound feelings of inadequacy as men, as sexual beings; so, I think, the mystique of greed hides a far less glamourous purpose.

More and more I'm coming to feel that our drive for comfort is a real danger to us as individuals and as a species, certainly as Americans.

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Right now in this country, raw comfort is far more important to a lot of people than any of the rarified rights of man set down by our founding fathers. We the comfortable, have no need to fear wiretaps and illegal search and detention, we the comfortable know that only "those people" will suffer when our government simply does what it must to secure and maintain our comfort.

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So greed is not so much the result of some insatiable hunger for wealth, but a greater and greater personal insecurity and need for the comfort that wealth promises. Greed is a cover for our fear of loss. Greed is the antidote to unresolved grief.

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A man buys a yacht because it represents a level of ease and affluence that promises a comfortable life. But when a man buys his first yacht, he's had to leverage his personal wealth, may well have gone into some debt, certainly taken a risk. All of that takes the comfort he saught out of the equasion. He becomes more and more aware of the possibility of losing the yacht. "To be thus is nothing. But to be safely thus."

So what does he do? He makes more money so he can buy another yacht. Now with two yachts, the risk of losing one yacht is not so omenous and the likelihood of losing both yachts is further off. Of course, if that fear discomfits him, he can seek to buy a third yacht, etc. In this model, greed is not the characteristic of a powerful, manly mover-and-shaker, but the consequence of never being able to find simple peace of mind.

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Originally posted by HKCavalier:
I've been thinking lately that money, in large enough quantities, functions pretty much like an anesthetic.

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Originally posted by rue:
I tend to see it as a fun-house mirror, distorting the nature of their perceived reality.

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And I have the impression that not only do the very rich have little empathy for the 'plight' of the average person, they don't even recognize us as human.

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From whence comes empathy? I believe it's an inborn trait in most (not all) people - there are neurological rewards for harmony, trust and cooperation.

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But people have also been shown to have very little empathy for people who do not 'look like' the people they grew up with. So empathy - relating to a person's shared humanity with yourself - is something that can be maximized, or conversely extinguished, through experience.

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But then there's a terrorist attack. No amount of money thrown at that problem will make it go away. The haves and the haves more, suddenly face a problem that has to be dealt with directly, but they've lost the capacity to deal with problems directly.

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I didn't follow this.

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So I thought about global warming, (or other commonly shared problems like environmental brain /hormone disruptors.)
Does dubya have children? You bet! Will global warming affect them? Of course! Will they be able to spend their way to a normal life? Heck no! Does that bother dubya? Of course not! (Sorry for this brief Rumsfeldian interlude.) Do they not see the problem? Do they mistake its real power over them? Or do they just not care?

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I think they ARE more evil. Bush is one of those congenitally evil people. The Cheney's don't have a background of wealth and power to explain their amoral outlook. Lynn fancies herself righteous. Dick is, well, a dick largely of his own making. The same is true of Don Rumsfeld - nothing in his background explains his lack of empathy. The ONLY thing that unites them all is they are republicans - the party of the vicious and selfish which has effectively winnowed those people out of the population.

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I think the cultivation of greed is done to make people malleable to their rulers. As long as people are being told greed is the only way to reward, but the failure to achieve those rewards is b/c they aren't "good enough", they will blame themselves for their lives. Rather than re-think their acceptance of society and realize they are actually in control of it.

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So greed is not so much the result of some insatiable hunger for wealth, but a greater and greater personal insecurity and need for the comfort that wealth promises. Greed is a cover for our fear of loss. Greed is the antidote to unresolved grief.

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This is a leap I simply didn’t follow. Greed is the single most cultivated, socially acceptable insanity after religion. But it IS insanity.

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The truly wealthy will never worry about losing their yachts. They are in puerile competitions with the other truly wealthy over levels of excess. True insecurity doesn't exist for them. IMHO.

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So in essence, we've built a social engine guaranteed to cause and perpetuate the problem, by crushing all the decency out of our kids and turning them into malicious, warped

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Signym:

DT seems to have developed an idee fixe: government bad, business good. {Repeat ad infinitum} Maybe due to the upcoming elections?

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And history solidly backs me up at every turn.

Nothing to do with the elections. I have Hillary, and no way to get rid of her. There basically is no election. My republican newcomer to replace Bohlert has also an equally zero chance of losing. I don't know why everyone hypes an "election" It's a formality on both sides.

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Signym:

DT seems to have developed an idee fixe: government bad, business good. {Repeat ad infinitum} Maybe due to the upcoming elections?

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Originally posted by rue:
HK,

I'm going to veer off slightly with this short intro to another wrinkle. This thread is partly running parallel with 'stupid, evil and corrupt'.

What I see is that people in the US have been propagandized from day one. The assumption I see underlying ALL common screeds is that privately owning more goods is the only route to happiness. It is the foundation of Adam Smith's economic theories, which assume that 'man' is only an economic being whose existence is fulfilled by striving for economic gain. From that he postulated a system of mutual advancement through independent actors each striving to maximize their own economies.

I suppose the reason why I'm saying this specifically is because it just occurred to me. What the US is is an entire culture based on a mingey, warped notion of human nature. That increasing pennies is the only rewarding action available to humans.

So you get aphorisms like social Darwinism is 'human nature', that private gain (profit) is the only human motivator, that the exercise of greed is good, that pepole who seek communion with other people are suckers. B/c NOTHING ELSE BUT PERSONAL ECONOMIC GAIN IS VALID.

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Originally posted by HKCavalier:
When "customer satisfaction" is the ruling principle, then the manipulation of the customer and the artificial control of that satisfaction become the secrets to success.

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Capitalism is fine when it's a couple shops accross the street from each other in a small town. But when corporations "live" for centuries and control areas larger than the largest countries, any resemblance to classical capitalism seems to fade.

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