I have often enough wished I were rich – or at least wealthier than I am. But there is a wise old saying out of the Hebrew Bible that goes approximately: “Let me be neither poor nor rich. Lest, if I am poor, I steal and become a criminal. Or, if I become rich, I become arrogant and despise both God and my fellow humans [as beneath me or irrelevant].”
No one, save perhaps some extreme religious devotees who see it as a path to God through self-inflicted suffering, aspires to poverty as an aim in life. Most of us want enough to satisfy our needs and have some extra to enjoy some of the “good things” that render life more enjoyable and pleasant. A modicum of prosperity also enables us to help others without depriving our families and ourselves of necessities. We cannot avoid some degree of selfishness and self-interest; it’s how we’re built. From an evolutionary perspective, it comes from the instinct for self-preservation and preservation of the species.
It is not a moral failing to want what you and those you love really need to survive and perhaps have a small measure of security in that regard. The moral failing comes from choosing to harm others and degrade them in order to have it. Over the millennia, humans have discovered, as many social species have, that cooperation is a better way than lone-wolf aggression and pack-pillaging of others. Cooperation and mutual assistance increase the general security of the group and allow for everyone to benefit from the contributions of the others in accordance with their particular abilities and skills.
However, as we see after several thousand years of observation, “a funny thing happens to the rich on the way to the forum.”[1] Rather, several “funny” things happen on the road to inordinate wealth. Yes, yes, there is a lot to be debated as to what constitutes being “really rich” in this age. Standards change and all that. In the “First World” regular citizens are definitely “rich” in the eyes of many dwelling in much poorer countries – and even in the eyes of some in their own country. That discussion is not the object of this informal essay. Even this category of “richness” is beggarly poverty compared to the ever-burgeoning super-strata of mega-rich, the ultra-rich who inhabit their own stratosphere. It is chiefly with this category of wealth that I am dealing here.
After all, in the 2020s, having a million dollars or even several million dollars in assets, or even in after-tax income, is not nearly as unusual as it was when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1950s, I personally knew but one bona-fide millionaire – or rather his son was a good friend of mine from age 5 to about age twelve. Then he moved away to live with his Dad following the final decree of divorce between his parents.
Do extravagantly rich people actually see themselves even in the same class as the rest of the human race? Do they care/want to be seen that way? If we go by the evidence, anecdotal as it may be, it suggests that they certainly do not. Once upon a time in their earlier lifetime they may have – in some early phase before Dame Fortune smiled on them and acquisitiveness took hold with the insatiable lust to accumulate more and more just because they can.
What defines this kind of wealth — $10 Million? $100 Million? A Billion? Ten million seems to set the bar too low, although, depending on the person(s), the attitude might even have set in at that benchmark.
We are speaking of the point at which wealth engenders snobbish class consciousness whereby the power that money delivers to its possessors genuinely sets them apart from the rest of the plodding and toiling masses. The wealthy are independent of the mundane concerns of the unwashed masses with paying the mortgage, paying rent, making car payments, credit card payments, insurance payments, etc., and striving to keep their families (and selves) under a reasonable roof, fed with decent food, provided with suitable clothing, keeping a job that will pay the bills – let alone saving anything for the future of their children or their retirement. They float above all such concerns and can whisk away to their preferred getaways, private estates, glitzy resorts, cool clubs and exclusive coteries to hobnob with others like themselves while they congratulate one another on their latest coups and exploits and pet projects to project their status and demonstrate their influence and make virtue gestures to allay any sense of uneasiness about their right to do as they please, how they please, whenever they please. In fact, many of them deign to display some sort of superior concern for the poor shmoes who are doing such harm to the planet by their ignorant and wasteful use of resources and stubborn old-fashioned clinging to retrograde ideologies and technologies. They then develop a sort of Platonic sense of duty to manipulate government and corporate policies to control the negative effects of populist sentiment coming from the masses which challenge their hold over and oligarchic puppetry of the world’s economic, social, and ideological development.
The most forthright of this plutarchy will flaunt their complete freedom to ignore the plight of the rest; after all, they reason that they deserve the fullness of the reward of having climbed to the top by the merit of their ability, astuteness and understanding of human psychology and the laws of survival of the fittest. The others seem obliged to appease their flickering consciences by gesturing towards charitable foundations and pet-causes which reflect their worldview. In noblessse-oblige fashion, they offer some sort of patronizing “hand-out”, often disguised as a “hand-up”, while changing nothing structural or essential in the underlying system which benefits them and their class and maintains their power to control and manipulate.
How does all this relate to their irrelevance? Do they not run the world? Do they not machinate the course of the global economy and most national economies? Do they not win almost all the lobbying battles to mould and shape national and international policies? Do they not, thereby, determine what benefits and perks and earnings the lesser classes may enjoy so that they have the appearance of some degree of provision and security? Do they not have the levers to have the UN and its adjuncts steer the global community towards their desired outcomes? Do they not the power to sway elections and cajole elected and bureaucratic office-holders to manoeuvre the security and armed forces of nations to control dissidents and put the brakes on rogue states and para-state organizations and institutions? (These are largely rhetorical questions.)
Yet, despite all of this, they are irrelevant to the innate and inherent worth of the people “below” them whom they condescend to behold from on high. For all their pomp and circumstance, they cannot add one iota of true worth and meaning to their own ultimate value and personhood. In fact, they are more often than not diminishing the very thing they covet most – to be held as the highest model of self-actualization and human evolutionary merit. Envy for the wealth and power they obtain, but to become paragons of true selfless virtue and benevolence they do not aspire. Signalling virtue, perhaps, but being virtuous? The Creator sees the heart and does not regard the fancy tassels and garments and trumpet-blasts announcing their showy forms of quasi-concern for the poor beggars they offer pittances to from their over-abundance.
The greatest Sage and Teacher and paragon of truth and love and mercy of all history asked his hearers two thousand years ago, “What does it profit a person to gain the whole world but lose his/her soul?”. Another of his statements to the vaunted elite of his time could be paraphrased for our time thus: “Woe to you, administrators, lawmakers, power-brokers, when everyone speaks highly of you. You exalt yourselves above everyone up to the very heavens, but I tell you, you will humbled to the very ground. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted. The truly greatest among humans are the servants of all.”
One of the Master’s leading followers wrote a little later, “Hasn’t God chosen the poor of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the Kingdom He promised those who love him? But you have insulted the poor. Is it not the rich who are exploiting you? …. Listen up, you [the rich to whom he was addressing this] who say, ‘Let’s go up to this or that city [or country], spend a year there, carry on business and make [lots of] money.’ Why, you don’t even know what will happen tomorrow. What is you life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.”
The irrelevance of the wealthy, and especially those who adopt the homo superbus stance setting themselves on the pinnacle to play the supreme arbiters of human polity in their time, is in supposing themselves somehow immune to the common fate of all – suffering, pain, misfortune, and, finally death and ultimate accountability in the court of the Maker. One of their greatest acts of hubris over the centuries has been to seek to alienate and often succeed in alienating humanity from the innate knowledge that we are born from the Creator’s will, and for a clear purpose – to care for the wonderful world He/She made for us to enjoy, to love Him/Her and one another, and to care for one another and all He/She has made.
One of the great deceptions of history is to declare that faith in God is but an opiate to plaster over the pain of the ordinary people oppressed by the elites, and that erasing the elites would obviate the need for any faith in a Maker, and set the people free. What we see in the record is that the “setting free” from one sort of exploitation by one elite results in a new elite bringing in a new tyranny to control and manipulate and exploit after their own pattern of gaining power and control.
The irrelevance of all self-serving elites is that their respective versions of Utopia all breed the same end – oppression, persecution, slavery, and death. True relevance is only found in being aligned with the heart of the Creator, and serving the One and one another while resigning the lusting after the glamour, glitz, and illusion of self-sufficiency.
This vision and understanding can only take root in a life and heart surrendered to the One who made us. That is what the story of Lent, or Jesus/Yeshua, and his life, death, and resurrection, is all about. In the end, all the greatness to be found in this world and in its conceptions of worth as apart from the One who made us for Himself/Herself are irrelevant.
[1] Forum – in Roman society this was the public place of business and commerce and political life of the city. This was where trade and negotiation and mutual exchange were conducted, contracts were signed and witnessed, legal affairs settled, public religious functions were carried out.
World.V.You 
A good reminder th
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