elodieunderglass:

feynites:

Imagine having control of more money than you could ever spend in your lifetime, and then going out of your way to try and bleed even more money out of people who can barely make ends meet. Imagine being the kind of person who could literally just spend all your days painting or writing or playing with dogs or helping to nurse orphan baby sloths, with no worry that you will ever lack the funds for housing, entertainment, health care, vacations, etc, imagine reaching that point, and then deciding you are going to work your ass off to screw everyone else over instead. You are going to spend your days bribing politicians so that you can charge some minimum wage single working mother an extra $40 a month for her ability to use Facebook. So that you can charge some uninsured kid so much for his insulin that he can’t afford it and ends up dying while he begs strangers on the internet for help. That’s what you want to do with your life.

I do not understand billionaires.

There are psychological conditions imposed by having a lot of money; it’s quite hard to imagine how or why a billionaire acts the way they do, because you have to orient your brain in a way that probably isn’t natural to it.

People with inherited wealth have a very strange view of the world and part of that really does involve the sense of being separate from other humans. We point out that they don’t have empathy; they would not be interested because they don’t recognise that we are the same species to even begin emphasise with. We point out that they are socially irresponsible; they don’t see any reason why they should care about your society. We point out that society cannot function in this matter: this is not a concern to them. They have not been raised as humans, really, so humans telling them “you should care about humans because humans” is met with blankness. the part where “caring” and “sharing” are rewarding to the brain is supposed to be programmed in by parents, to make the baby fit in with society and be loved. If the parents don’t have that mechanism, and it isn’t important that to them that strangers love and help their baby because of its inherent worth, (because the parents can simply pay strangers to do so), then where does the kid learn better? Their caretakers are not paid to teach the child how to love. And if the baby loves the paid caretaker too much, the caretaker will be taken away. So emotional appeals to the super-wealthy are a bit like asking a snake to herd sheep for you.

Not only that, but people with inherited wealth overidentify with their money. So they perceive our attempts at reason, and our emotional appeals, to be the yammering of scary creatures – rodents, maybe – trying to steal from them. Trying to trick them. We are only interested in their money, and we are coming up with all these tricksy plans to take it away!

And further, the human brain isn’t very good at the reality of numbers (we are best with numbers that we can comfortably count to.) So humans can usually conceive of fifty minutes, fifty people, fifty dollars, fifty apples, fifty days. We can understand the concept of fifty years, or imagine a room with fifty cats, or wince at the idea of fifty people being injured; if a scientist says there are fifty things, we nod happily. We know the shape of fifty dollars and the impact its gain or loss will have on our month. We can just about picture the reality of a “thousand”. We cannot really manage a million.

Billions are fake numbers. A human will nod politely, but will never understand. You have to break the billion up – “a billion dollars is forty thousand dollars spent every day for life!” – for the human to comprehend it.

The wealthy don’t perceive their billions either. They don’t comprehend them as a billion; they count numbers the same way as everyone else . They don’t drop a fifty in a homeless guy’s cup because they don’t feel like they have that kind of money (and also, fuck the homeless guy.)

Pretty much the only positive/affectionate thing I can say about Britian’s royals (apart from 👍Meghan Markle) is that they are reared with an immense sense of duty and social responsibility. This is an expectation of the nation, and the children are brought up accordingly. So even though they are a bunch of squinting gibbering lemurs, they are trained to empathise, to look human for the cameras, to hold pleasant conversations with everybody (even if the royal gives the impression of being an early design of chatbot while doing so), and to spend their lives doing Vaguely Positive Things for the Public. Even if they don’t have the mechanism where caring for people is rewarding, they can spend their lives miming it, because the world has tremendous social expectations, and royals are raised to meet those expectations since birth. Because we’ve all decided that the rich can do literally whatever they like, but the royal are still expected to have public appeal! So one set is deliberately trained to be approximately human, and the other is not.

It would be horrifying for Prince William to be accused of colluding with the Russian government; people around the world would consider it a personal betrayal. But a president’s children, apparently, may do so with our blessing.

So is it possible to be human and rich?

Well, there is an actual quantity of money that gives comfort and happiness; people research this. Below that number, you worry about money. When you reach the number, you are okay. After that number, it causes anxiety and outrage and feelings of scarcity again. Worse, because (like a cursed hoard of dragon’s gold) when the money reaches a certain size, then you stop having it because of the things it can be traded for (comfort, security, pleasure, happiness) and start keeping it for itself. Which is a toxic and terrible thing to do to that poor money…

So I think that wealth should be capped at that number and redistributed thereafter. It’s quite a high, happy number, but not an unreasonable one. It’s generous. A generous amount of money. And we will say gently to the crying billionaires, who will perceive this as us killing them, that it is for their own mental health. They were being cruel to the money, and it was a health hazard.