Just days after allegedly Forbes crowned the first official trillionaire, I feel finally compelled to break my self-selected silence. And immediately, I am reminded of the irony of it all: Substack’s own spellchecker funnily does not even recognise the word “trillionaire” and suggests “zillionaire” instead. A sign of how extraordinary things have become.
This is really the time to stop and take this in. Essentially, we have been living for decades with a situation in which a single individual can lay claim to property titles whose monetary value has no limits. Important to say that this is not a law of nature, nor does it follow from any kind of basic ethical principle. It is a societal choice.
What this reminds me of are those stories about how societies without a centralized authority deal with non-repentant, stubborn, anti-social behaviour. With people who keep insisting they can take more than they give back to the community. Usually they are shunned and given various warning signs. If that does not stop them, there are documented cases where eventually they are rounded up and clubbed to death. They have been warned, but did not want to listen. It might be an extreme case, but on a local-community level, even today, shunning and exclusion are how bullies and anti-social parasites are usually dealt with. But not so in the world of mainstream media and the “expert” and political class.
Mr. Musk is often celebrated for a few technological achievements: building Tesla into a major force in electric vehicles and expanding internet access through Starlink (both claims, however, are contested, with critics – including Post Carbon Institute – pointing to the broader impacts and contradictions behind these projects). But how about the inventors of semiconductors, or those who discovered the cause for infectious disease? Modern life would look unrecognisable to us now if those things hadn’t happened. Were they awarded uncountable riches? Why should a little bit of audacious entrepreneurship justify rewards that, expressed in monetary quantities, are essentially meaningless because anyone with more than a few billions has essentially unlimited money to spend?
To any “normal” person not under the bombardment of conventional reporting, it should be clear that something extreme is happening in our globalised society that has thoroughly gotten out of control. Let’s not forget that the value of all those assets owned by the billionaire class is backed up by real-world spending on legal systems, bureaucracies, courts, police forces, and the military. All this priceless service is being delivered free of charge to the super-wealthy, because we tax only gains, not the capital itself. It is being paid for by you and me. Paid for in terms of not only money, but more importantly labour and the daily degradation of our communities and our environment. Those who have, for all practical purposes, unlimited resources to spend also have an unlimited right to leave their dirty footprint all over this planet. They have been given the unalienable right to anti-social behaviour on a planetary scale.
The media worship given to the billionaire class is understandable, given that those media are drip-fed from those unlimited financial resources, and they surely need revenue. But this does not change the fact that what our society has been infected with is nothing else but a death cult. It makes no sense for a mortal to amass money on that scale.
The ancients knew it better and called it hubris. A cancer has spread in our global community and is spilling over to the physical environment. The phenomenon of extreme wealth and its worship is a symptom of endemic violence. To a certain degree, we might be led to believe that it is mostly vanity that makes the super-rich ever want more – but for that, the numbers are simply too extreme. It is more than that. It is a dark force. If I think that I am entitled to own more than tens of millions of my fellow humans combined, I am essentially a psychopath.
People are now regularly criminalised who do not harm anybody while engaging in civil disobedience in order to further a cause that under normal circumstances should be a no-brainer – like turning down the global thermostat and preventing thermal death of planet Earth. Of course they are criminalised, because that’s exactly what the death cult wants: destroy what protects life. And don’t ask me why those should be convicted of terrorism, who oppose supplying even more weapons to war criminals shooting small children in the head. Enough writing about things that are so gross and disgusting, putting them in words only lessens the impact. So better stay silent for a moment and take in the sickness of it all!
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Three guesses what would Karl Marx have said!
He has caused far more damage than good. Who cares about Tesla?
Gandhi would have called writing like this “truth force.” Knorr has accurately named the cancer, but misses the root cause of the disease that is ravishing the web-of-life. It is also the reason society makes possible this obscene inequality – out of control male violence. Throughout recorded history, violence – physical, verbal and otherwise – has been overwhelmingly perpetrated of by and for men. Violence, particularly when wielded collectively as in the military, has been extraordinarily effective in creating and maintaining a hierarchical social order based on male supremacy. Until the scourge of male violence can be reigned in, there is little hope that the cult of death will not end in the ongoing catastrophe for over 2 billion years of living evolution.
P.S. Solutions like heroes are hard to find, but a good start would be with those who have suffered most from pervasive male violence – women and children.
This is true but slightly misses the point. All this violence coming from males comes from a culture based on domination, of women by men, of "lower classes" and races by "their betters" and of everyone else by humans. Likely males do have more propensity for violence but it could be contained in a healthy culture, which would also encourage egalitarian, respectful relations with other groups of humans and with All Our Relations. Plenty of cultures have achieved this. But then the Palefaces arrive with their guns. This is the problem that has beset humanity for several thousand years. Yes, you can deal with one sociopath in your midst. But what do you do when an entire culture of them thousands upon thousands, arrive with superior weapons and germs? Or rather, it's not quite accurate to say "western" culture is composed of sociopaths–rather the culture itself is sociopathic, puts the most malevolent in positions of power, and the rest, while not full-on sociopaths, can be guided into sociopathic actions all too easily–often, blasphemously, in the name of Jesus.
Another 'Heroic Age' defines the barbarism we are experiencing as the West disintegrates. The billionators are idolized as today's demigods because of the primitive energies they display.