Do you have be crazy to be rich, or is it the other way around?
I just read this article on the homes of the rich. The writer graciously forbores the obvious conclusion — “the rich are generally really fucked up”. If you’ve met enough people in general, you conclude that most people are pretty regular, but the rich are often fucked up in spectacular ways. (Let me clarify here that I’m talking about people whose goal in life is to get rich. I’ve met plenty of rich professionals who are perfectly decently humans.)
And it raises an obvious question: “Do you have to be a certain sort of crazy to get rich, or does being rich drive you crazy in a particular way?”
I think it’s both.
I think that some unpleasant mental illnesses like sociopathy and borderline personality disorder are definitely an advantage in the business world. It should be no surprise that there’s a certain financial cost to being a decent human being, and conversely, that you can often make an extremely large amount of money by cheating other individuals, the government or other social organizations, or society, or the biosphere.
Conversely, a lot of people who make a lot of money do go crazy — by which I mean they consume obsessively.
We have pejorative names for people with mental illnesses who consume too much food, alcohol, drugs or sex, but they mostly hurt themselves — yet there is only admiration for people who obsessively consume the world’s resources. It sticks in my craw that John Travolta, for example, commutes with his own 747 jet.
Wanting to acquire ever more money just for its own sake and then wasting it in obsessive consumption just because you can — this is a disease, and a disease that will destroy our ecosystem as collateral damage.
And it’s an infectious disease.
A hundred million Americans identify with these rich sociopaths, and thus they aspire to sociopathy by contagion. A considerable portion of American believes that “nice guys finish last” is a moral imperative, and that compassion and fairness are personal weaknesses — and they believe this even though a little compassion and fairness from corporations and the government towards them would go a long way to making their lives actually livable.
Trump was always an “out” sociopath. The whole “gold everything” lifestyle was always his thing. A big chunk of America loved it before he was President.
The only reason that Trump is so deservedly unpopular in the world, and to some extent in America, is that he unleashed a tirade of hostility, mendacity and derision, a constant affront to common decency that no non-sociopath can tolerate.
If he did much the same things except was genuinely warm on occasions and occasionally conceded a point and had some interest in art, science, literature, film, religion, craft, fucking sports even!, or had some possible feature that made him human instead of the ravening force of hatred, short-sightedness and mockery that he is at all times, then it is my prediction that most people would love him because he is rich even if he did almost exactly the same things he is doing right now.
I would hope that the family separations would be so terrible that most people would care, but when I think, “Surely they will care about this new terrible thing,” I am nearly always disappointed.
I think that if Trump did the same thing with just a tiny bit nicer face on it, a few real teddy bears and a few acts of compassion conveniently captured for the Tube, maybe hire Obama’s photographers, then most people wouldn’t care at all. Heck, Obama did much the same thing in a more orderly way without the expensive unnecessary brutality.
Perhaps it’s for the best that the mask is finally off with the Trump administration. I hope that the blatant insult to the body politic will rouse its immune system, even if right now it appears slow to act, and Americans will understand that a tiny number of sociopaths have subverted their society and their government.
