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Being a billionaire (aka wealth hoarder) is a mental illness.
If they were hoarding anything else to this extent, going way beyond their rational needs, e.g. billions of tables, pokemon cards or toilet papers, everybody would know they are insane. But as it’s money, somehow they are supposed to be the smartest people in the world, and we should worship them.
If there are 10 monkeys in a zoo and they give them 10 oranges a day as a treat and one of the monkeys would hoard 6 oranges every day and left them to rot. Do you think that the zookeepers would keep an eye on it because it's clearly mentally ill or an asshole, or would they point at it and go: damn, that's one cool and smart monkey.
Great example, makes the contrast even more obvious. Insane people are controlling the world, and we are wondering why it’s going to shit
It's a bad example, because we are not monkeys, we lack zookeepers and money normally rots only at a much, much slower rate than oranges and increases itself over a certain threshold
If the monkey traded the oranges to other monkeys for other treats, or for something intangible like status or privacy, the zookeepers would think it was a cool and smart monkey, but they would think the other monkeys who took the extra oranges in trade and let them rot were less intelligent.
This. It's literally no different, and the fact that so many people idolise this kind of hoarding shows how powerful the processes of hegemony are.
You can’t really do anything useful with a billion Pokémon cards, there’s always something you can do with a billion dollars
But you could do lots of useful things with a billion pokemon cards - either bartering them for goods and services or converting them to money first, effectively "spending" the cards on useful things.
But practicality isn't the issue when people see someone hoarding incredible amounts of something - it's the abnormality of devoting yourself to accumulating vastly more than what we interpret as anywhere near normal. We treat hobby objects that way but not money.
In the Post-Scarcity Era every guy will get a trophy wife!
Mountainhead [2025].
Crazy flick
If only it were that easy to cut down billionaires...
it only takes about an ounce at 300ft/s
You're talking about shooting, not cutting
Or a pointy stick at, uh, 15m/s?
unpopular opinion: if most of the current billionaires werent this rich or lucky they would just act like normal people
As in, they're power tripping? Absolutely. When you get a false sense of importance, especially when you have sycophants reinforcing this image, narcissists in particular tend to act poorly toward their fellow human beings.
This is one of the best reasons to socially stigmatize wealth hoarding, even if you can't change the fundamentals of the capitalist system that causes it in the first place.
If enough people make people who hoard money feel lesser than, to the point that having less is a preferable alternative, then they're more likely to give away their wealth and become at least a little bit less shitty people.
This is also, coincidentally, why rich people isolate themselves within bubbles of similarly rich individuals, who won't look down on them for being so greedy and narcissistic.
This is why we should have mandatory testing for NPD and be institutionalising anyone who tests positive. Narcissists cannot be allowed to walk the streets freely, their mental illness is too dangerous.
And if normal people suddenly became billionaires, they’d act just as awful as the current billionaires
Power doesn’t corrupt. It just exposes who leaders really are.
Non-paywalled link: archive.ph
When we claim that power corrupts, we let powerful people off the hook. How you use authority reveals your character: Selfish leaders hoard power for personal gain. Servant leaders share power for social good.
And the inverse statement too: If normal people became billionaires, they would act stupidly too
This is almost wholesome, imagine if it were that easy to regulate greed
The solution might not be easy but it is simple: tax. Good on the cuurent Australian governments increased taxation of superannuation over 3 million $.
There should be an income maximum. It should be a little above the maximum happiness threshold. Any income above that should be taxed at 95%
Not disagreeing with you but this particular tax is on wealth. Imo there is a place for both.
Imagine if people who really should go to therapy (like melon usk in this one) actually went to therapy.
Yeah, that too. And not just about greed
