Reply #18: Heavy Is The Head That Wears The Crown [View All]

[TahitiNut]

I've watched people as they become more and more materially wealthy ... and have seen them increasingly obsess about 'protecting' that wealth, There's a LOT of Truth in the notion of being enslaved by our possessions. There's a pathology of material narcissism in a materialistic society - the fundamental presumption that EVERYONE covets what the rich possess. The wealthy don't see others as deprived of the means to survive ... they see impoverished people as a THREAT to their own wealth. It's zero-sum thinking - an abdication of "win-win" and a total immersion in adversarial paradigms. What's appalling is that, in thinking in such terms, they create the very conflict they blame on others.

Thus, while the wealthy owe absolutely everything to people whose labors perpetuate their wealth and privilege, they persist in seeing them as "the enemy." Those poor people who accept the projection of blame tend to devote their time to ingratiating themselves and pointing to their neighbor as a way of deflecting the animosity of the wealthy they support. (It's almost like battered wife syndrome.)