When it has been demonstrated over and over again, how little they think of anyone beneath them.
People are brainwashed. They have been for generations. And only very few even like to admit that they are brainwashed. I was too… Luckily I woke up, and became both woke and able to think critically…
We cannot understand class behavior by examining individual morality. Viewing the capital owning class as a collection of mustache twirling villains is not a useful framing. Rather, we should look at them as the human personification of capital itself. Their social being, their entire material condition, is defined by the accumulation of private profit and the protection of property relations that enforce their dominance.
Their inability to relate is not a personal failing but a direct result of their objective position in the capitalist mode of production. They live in a world insulated from the precarity of rent, medical debt, and wage slavery that defines life for the working majority. Their consciousness is shaped by them being insulated from the problems regular people experience. Therefore, critique of their lack of empathy is a liberal dead end because it mistakes a systemic outcome for a personal choice.
The focus must be the capitalist system itself, which necessarily produces the inequality and the divide between the capitalists and the workers. The fundamental contradiction between the socialized nature of production and the private appropriation of wealth is the core issue. The solution is to dismantle the economic base that creates them as a class and move towards a system where the means of production are socially owned, abolishing the very material conditions that breed alienation and disparity.
At what point is someone wealthy using gapminder levels of income where level 1 is earning $2 a day, level 2 is $8, level 3 $32, etcetera?
And at what point is a person in power?
Is Zelensky in power? Xi Jinping?
Greta Thunberg? John Oliver? JT Chapman? Karl Marx? The admin of this site?What the fuck does any of that rambling have to do with the question?
The OP made a distinction between wealth and power. Your question salad conflating the two, even if wealth does grant power, and muddying the original question with “What is the definition of ‘is’?” isn’t meaningful.
It’s important to remember that the actions of the working class are primarily derived from their class interests, not because individuals are dicks. Humanizing even shitty individuals is an important part of persuading people away from thinking in terms of individual people and more about the dialectics of class.
Numerous reasons.
Lots of people don’t want anyone to disturb the system…”upend the apple cart” as it were. A known, even if shitty, is still better than the unknown. Like people pining for lives under the rule of some harsh autocrat. Even if your neighbor disappeared one night thanks to the State Police, it was better than worrying about the less-harsh policing that lets kids get away with graffiti-ing everything or the petty theft you’re always hearing about.
Also, if they come for the rich people, they’ll come for you. If they tax the rich, they’ll tax you. If you support the rich, people will remember that, and they’ll come for you.
Maybe a little of the “I could be rich someday” idea too, so they support obscene wealth with the idea they could somehow also be rich no matter how minuscule the chance. The irony being the wealthy are the ones supporting barriers preventing you from even achieving financial security, forget ever being wealthy.
Because they get paid to do so.
They are as human as anyone else. We should be cognizant of that. They are human beings within a human system. Move beyond anger and hate, and ask what must be done to end suffering and injustice.
For all the quips about guillotines, the first fix needs to be removing their excess wealth, not their heads.
But how to do that without removing their head?
ask what must be done to end suffering and injustice.
kill them to stop them killing us
If given a chance they will kill. To obtain that level of wealth one generally has to have a sociopathic level of lack of empathy. Maybe not all are like Trump and itching to blow people up and put people to death. A lot are probably less actively bloodthirsty (thankfully) but at the same time have no issue taking away your health insurance, your income, your housing, etc if it impacts their bottom line even though they already have enough resources to last 100,000,000 lifetimes in extreme excess.
“Oh but if they let these things change they would lose their wealth” exactly - when it comes down to it, they would rather leave you to die than risk losing their obscene wealth. So this is violence, and therefore violence is an appropriate response, especially when the state continually and repeatedly fails over decades (arguably from its inception) to rein them in.
Because we are surrounded by the media that the rich owns that propagandizes us to put the rich on a pedestal.
I think most people are incapable of understanding just how much damage the rich do to the working class on a regular basis.
The rich kill more people every year, through business and political decisions, than any terrorist group or military. Often by being the puppet masters of those terrorist groups and militaries.
The rich are humans, that’s just fact. However, people need to wake the fuck up and see the richest and most powerful in the world fundamentally lack humanity. They are fundamentally isolated from human beings through their wealth and influence.
They are human.
Humans are just like that.
What matters is how much damage they cause.
yep. pretty much everyone who screams about how much they hate the rich… would act exactly the same way if they were rich.
human beings act in their own self interest and that of their tribe.
Money Identity Coercion Ego. Those are the primary motivators.
Being rich means you’ve solved money and probably coercion. You can either rest on your laurels or chase the other two, for good or for evil. There’s rich philanthropists - some who give almost everything away - and then whatever Elon Musk is, but most go for the rest on their laurels thing, and so you probably haven’t heard of them.
Dehumanising someone also serves our identity and ego, FYI, which is where this thread came from.
No they wouldn’t.
Even the capitalists are behaving differently and more humane compared the fuedalists of the middle ages.
That’s actually the main reason why communism and socialism even exists, as a prediction to say what will come after capitalism to the naysayers saying that there’s no such thing as social progress.
Even the capitalists are behaving differently and more humane compared the fuedalists of the middle ages.
Yes, because their source of wealth is fundamentally different. Lords had to project violence and play court politics to keep their position. Still do, in some places. The rich in developed countries on the other hand can rely on strong rule of law to protect their property with very little personal input.
Also why if the apocalypse ever happened, they’d get owned and somebody else would take their bunker.
Also, kinda hard for me to imagine eating a god. Just…ew.
Depends on your religion, I guess. The Flying Spaghetti Monster seems pretty edible.
The rich people are almost all psychopaths and probably got that way because of the way wealth warps people’s minds.
Because they’re cucks
Maybe bc they are human?
I personally am skeptical
To try to understand someone is not the same as respecting them. One can try to understand one’s enemy to better fight them.
In every era, the ideas that rule are the ideas of the rulers.
This point is expansively detail in capital and ideology by Piketty
