Is Getting Rich Worth Devoting Your Life To?
It’s often said these days, that if you think America has problems, of capitalism, of decline, of blindness and folly and self-inflicted ruin, that you must hate the rich. No, I don’t hate the rich. I think that I pity them.
Here’s a little secret. I grew up among the super rich. Not the American super rich — pfff, that’s the minor league. I mean the genuinely global mega-rich. People so bizarrely, gruesomely rich they’d have towering Italian palazzos shipped over tile by tile, painstakingly rebuilt by hand, put behind gleaming gates, surrounded by opulent gardens, and guarded by little armies. I don’t say that to boast, becauseit didn’t happen by my design — but only through a quirk of fate. My grandfather and father, politicians both, were courted by them, who grew that wealthy by siphoning off the wealth of the countries my forefathers were trying to protect.
And so as I grew up, many of their kids became my friends. We’d play, innocently, as kids do, unbothered by the fact that I was just a relative pauper, and they were ulta rich. But as we grew up, I observed something strange. Which seemed to happen so predictably, I started to put a countdown timer on it. These kids hated themselves — deeply and badly. Their parents treated them like little objects, trophies, prizes. The families were like corporations, not human tribes, full of warmth and laughter. Mom and dad couldn’t bear each other. Nobody had a job — but everyone was busy, every day, forever, battling everyone else over that pile of money. Nobody seemed to have any inner sense of meaning, worth, or purpose.
That can true of everyone, of rich and poor — but this was different. Predictable, chronic, systemic, implosive, soul-destroying. I could set my watch to it. Families would blow up. Kids would turn into despairing addicts. Marriages would blow up after months. Grandkids would be disowned. Sibling would be pitted against sibling. Entire families, and lives, would come apart at the seams. In the middle of all this — throbbing, pulsing wounds of grief, rage, anxiety, depression, loneliness, and emptiness. And still, despite all that, that they’d cling to their money like a security blanket, even as it cost them everything that should have mattered more. It was the only thing they seemed to know, understand, or appreciate.
Getting seriously rich, I soon learned, had a very, very steep price. All the things which really mattered in life: human bonds, a sense of meaning, a higher purpose, and even a sense of inherent self-worth. Which is why I never bothered to worry about it. Now, I don’t mean to give you a preachers’ homily. But I do want to point out that in this life, from what I’ve seen, you can’t have it all. You have wealth, or you can have worthiness — but can you have both? To answer that is also to answer the question: should we hate, vilify, or scorn the rich?
Now, it’s obvious to say that a poor person probably isn’t going to be very happy. Let’s dispense therefore with the idea that I’m saying “wealth bad so poverty good!” Grow up, Tucker. Far from it. I’m suggesting that maybe there’s an optimal point of wealth for human beings to have — and beyond that, the moral, social, and emotional costs of riches far outweigh the benefits, which are nonexistent to begin with, because you can’t spend that much anyways, nor can you take it with you. But we don’t think about this in America, do we? We lionize wealth — it symbolizes all our deepest value: selfishness, greed, individualism, superiority. And yet that can only be because we are fragile, feeling little and inferior, deep inside. I’ll come back to all that.
You need science, probably. Very well. As people get richer, they lose their empathy, wisdom, compassion, and so forth. Whatever positive attribute it is that you want to study, it seems that the more wealth you amass, the less of it you will have. But we shouldn’t need science to tell us this. Aeschylus told us this story millennia ago — and so did Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and Sartre.
One of the truest differences between Europe and America is also an almost invisible one. In America, the rich are lionized, adulated, and worshipped. There’s something like a bizarro aristocracy of the oligarchs, and Americans curtsy and bow politely, like servile things, before a rich person. Before Donald Trump was President, a nation admired him — weirdly — as a kind of modern-day hero. Americans, weirdly, unique among nations, equate wealth with all the great virtues: intelligence, courage, sophistication, wisdom, creativity, compassion. If you’re rich, you must be as smart as Stephen Hawking, as spiritually advanced as the Dalai Lama, and as wise as Aristotle. They have really bought into the myth that a wealthy person is a better person. Is that true?
But in Europe, to be rich carries with it a faint whiff of distaste, of derision, of scorn. Americans think they prize humility — but it’s European prime ministers who cycle to work. Which is better for a society? Let me answer that backwards.
Imagine I gave you ten million dollars. If you were smart, you’d buy a little villa in France, retire, never check the internet again, and tend to your puppies, grandkids, and garden. But — and here’s the problem and the key — this never seems to happen. I’ve known many, many rich people. And the moment that they have ten million, something odd seems to happen. It needs to turn into a hundred. And the moment it turns into a hundred, it needs to turn into a billion.
In other words, as we get rich, a great and fatal moral perversion seems to occur. virtue seems to become vice. Something snaps deep down in the human soul. Greed, avarice, covetousness, pride, cruelty — all of these seem to replace humility, gentleness, kindness, wisdom, and truth. You don’t have to look very far to see it. Why is Jeff Bezos shooting rockets into space instead of funding college for every kid in America? Why are the American mega-rich building something like a theofascist kleptocracy instead of funding school and healthcare for every child on the planet? Why did Manafort spend his money on, LOL, expensive clothes?
“Why should the rich help anyone else?!”, you cry. The answer is very simple. What we really are after through riches — through anything at all — is moral sentiments. Happiness is the experience of one’s own moral goodness. Meaning is the experience that one is a moral significance to others. Fulfillment is the realization of one’s moral possibilities. Do you see how that works? Can money buy you these things?
You need a sense that your life has really counted. “This person has given me something! They educated me, they taught me, they encouraged me, they lifted me up when I had fallen!” Now you have a sense of meaning. But it has come only through moral significance — that you have really cultivated a life that is not your own, and thus, what you have done has mattered.
You need a sense of happiness. When are you happy? It’s very simple — when you feel that you are a good person. Then you literally “feel good.” But when you don’t feel that you’re a good person, then you “feel bad”, don’t you? You grow depressed, angry, you brood, you recriminate. “I’m bad! I’m no good! Nothing I do ever seems to make a difference!!” You don’t feel good — but feeling good isn’t about winning stuff, it’s about the experience of your own moral goodness.
Now we can answer the question, can’t we? Indeed, the mega-rich should be doing things with their lives that carry great and enduring moral weight. But they are not. That’s because getting rich has cost them something priceless: their moral consciences. Hence, happiness, meaning, and fulfillment seem to elude them. That’s why the ten million has to turn into a hundred, and then a billion. It’s why you never see someone living out the fantasy of retiring to that villa in France when they’ve made a few million.
What happens instead? Because they’ve lost their moral bearings, virtue has become vice. Avarice, greed, cruelty, selfishness. All these things are soon turned on the very people that they love. Wives are discarded, husbands thrown away. Kids are treated like either little princes or paupers. And worst of all, no inherent sense of self-worth, has ever developed, because the illusion has been created that money can gave it to you.
A person with a sense of inherent self worth knows this much. Money cannot give you what only morality can. You cannot buy happiness, meaning, and fulfillment. You must earn them, with actions which carry human weight. Those which lift up lives. The reward for the actor is the experience of moral goodness, moral significance, and moral growth, which we call happiness, meaning, and fulfillment.
But if you have been living all along under the delusion that the hole in your soul, that inherent lack of self-worth, self-coherence, selfhood, can be filled up with money and objects — and you make ten million — that ten will have to grow, grow, grow — and still you will never be filled up inside. You need to feel big because you feel little. But the little part of you needs only to grow into something beautiful and true, all the more so because it is delicate — not something all-powerful and possessing.
Remember Americans and Europeans? Americans have internalized the values of capitalism — greed, selfishness, and so on. But they are not rich, and they will never be rich. These values serve only as kind of false self, where a true one should be. So they’re left in a haze: is greed good? Or is it bad? Is using people OK? Or is it wrong? Capitalism has cheated them of a sense of intrinsic self-worth —which also means you can answer the questions above. They thin that you’re not a worthy person unless you’re wealthy. But they don’t really know that the opposite isn’t true. You can be as wealthy as Croesus, and still never think of yourself as worthy.
Europe is more successful precisely because by scorning the rich, it has made getting rich something not to proud of, to be a little ashamed of. It is not a substitute for living a genuinely worthy life, whether one of action, of letters, of ideas, or of discovery. It is barely a life at all, many Europeans would probably tell you, to get rich. Hence, wealth itself is something which is met with derision and scorn. Very different norms emerged — Americans idolize riches, and Europeans disdain them.
But that norm made Europe a much healthier and happier place, too. It meant that Europeans invested in each other, with great public goods, instead of devoted their lives to the futile goal of individual riches. It made Europe a place with less distance between the rich and the middle, so that distrust never grew as sharply as in America. And it made Europe a more humane and fulfilling place, too — because the capitalist values of greed, cruelty, domination, and selfishness were never accepted as decent and sensible things to devote a life to.
So. I don’t hate the rich. But I don’t worship them, like Americans do, either. “What book is Bill Gates recommending?! LOL, are you a fool, my son? A rich man who is only a rich man is no smarter than a poor man — in the ways that count, he is all the more a fool. Because he doesn’t seem to know that wealth has its own price — one’s moral conscience. No one escapes the price they must pay time and death, and great wealth, which is only ever an expression of greed and egotism, is a futile search for grandiosity and omnipotence where life, in all its fragility and delicacy should be. It corrodes the character of the bearer, and leaves a hole where a self might have been. A poor man might be a wretch — but a rich man who has never become anything more is a moral fool.
I pity the rich — because I’ve seen happy people, and I’ve seen rich people, but I’ve never seen both. But the same is true for societies, too. Rich societies who don’t set norms and values to laugh at, belittle, devalue, and scorn the very pursuit of wealth, so they can aspire to higher and better things, soon become just like those rich families I grew up among. Places destroyed from the inside, by their egotism and appetites.
And should you doubt me, take a good, long, hard look at America — the richest nation history ever saw, by a very long way. But also something like the most inhumane, unhappy, lonely, desperate, meaningless, empty, atomized, and nihilistic. And yet also the most greedy, proud, avaricious, selfish, usurious, gluttonous, and wrathful. Do you see the link that I do? Wealth costs you, my friends. It costs you your better self. And America is history’s truest example yet.
Umair
August 2018