The Trouble With Wealth

[kimberlysteele]

Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, Joel Osteen’s Prosperity Gospel, and Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich bring a concrete image to my mind. In this vision, I see an aging con artist, their good looks long in the past, their waistlines expanding as old-people waistlines tend to expand. They sit in mammoth living rooms that would have made a medieval king’s castle look like a shack in comparison, watching television with a blank stare while absentmindedly planning their next stab at relevancy: a comeback, a new marriage, a new surgery to puff up what sags, a new car to pinch a last bit of dopamine from their jaded neurons.

People Who Consume Too Much

We modernites are a well-fed people. We all have at least one drawer of stuff we will never use. Some of us have entire basements, garages, and storage units full. We all need to downsize, present company included, yet the people with the most stuff are almost invariably the ones who clamor for MORE, MORE, MORE. For this reason, we have multilevel marketing companies and other sucker pyramid schemes to exploit the middle class. One of the most grotesque examples of multilevel marketier shamelessness I have seen are the companies that have sought to capitalize on the COVID scamdemic overreaction: now that every middle and lower class person is out of work and/or looking for work, the pyramidmeisters are out in full force, recruiting the credulous for their uplines.

Lack of money is cited as the number one cause of depression as well as the number one reason couples get divorced. “If only I had the money, I could do whatever I want,” is the common refrain.   Money is the perceived panacea of our time.  It is the balm that heals all wounds.

Napoleon Hill will be remembered primarily as a huckster who went bankrupt multiple times with multiple marriages, but his philosophies are essentially sound.  Unfortunately, in Hill's case, one has to weed out the good advice from a sea of rapacious greed to get at it.  In some ways, he was Donald Trump before it was cool.   Osteen never once opened the doors of his megachurches or McMansions to the homeless or the needy. When Hurricane Harvey struck Houston, Texas in 2017, Osteen closed the doors of his megachurch and tweeted that he was praying for everyone’s safety. In other words, he answered the question What Would Satan Do: Deluxe Mammon Edition. As far as Byrne, she has written multiple sequels to her original tome and has never been photographed without her signature, only slightly desperate poop-eating grin.

Paris or Bust

I once knew a young man who had a bad case of lack-of-money-itis. He was reasonably bright and articulate. When he was happy, he was delightful and witty. His more regular state was black-pill depression. “If only I were rich” he said over many bitter cups of all night diner coffee. Being rich was his ticket out of depression. If he were rich, he would move to New Zealand; Italy. If he were rich, he would have a much better house. If he were rich, he could afford a nicer piece of insert popular electronic doodad here.

Therein lies the rub: he was rich. His grandmother left him a three bedroom house with a very nice yard in the suburbs. His mother bought and prepared all his food despite the fact he was in his early thirties. His stepfather bailed out his struggling business ventures and paid for his continuing college education. He was one of those people I call a “Paris or Bust”, meaning that he is one of the many who will never be happy unless they have the work-free lifestyle of hotel money heiress Paris Hilton. Paris or Busts marry for money and regret it. They also easily end up homeless because money burns a hole in their pocket, whether it is real money or credit debt money.

I find it interesting when Paris or Busts say they would be more altruistic if only they had more wealth. This is simply not the case. Altruism is now, not later. Joel Osteen didn’t open the doors of his church or his homes to hurricane victims in 2017 because his ministry was never focused on altruism in the first place. Joel Osteen has always been more about making an empire for himself than helping his congregation be like Jesus. Joel Osteen is not like Jesus; he’s more like the opposite of Jesus. The proof is in the pudding. By their fruits ye shall know them.

A young Paris or Bust man who says “If I were rich, I would host Christmas for the orphans and give them tons of presents and a wonderful party every year” is lying. He who does not donate $10 to the local food pantry while he is middle class can become richer than Roosevelt — the embedded habits won’t change. The appetite for material wealth is like a drug addiction. If you grew up rich, you might remember being miserable and ashamed because of it, but there will always be that craving left behind of when things were easier. This is the way it was for me for a long time, and it is only my religious practices that got the monkey off my back once and for all.

A Minute on the Lips...

Material wealth is a Wendigo. Once a taste is had, the yearning to consume isn’t likely to stop without a fight. That’s why for every fantasy I have of earning a billion dollars, I counter with a fantasy of becoming penniless and homeless. I argue that people who addicted to wealth actually worry about becoming homeless all the time, but since they do not admit it in any honest way, it becomes a much greater fear for then than for a lower middle class person, who must always confront the specter of homelessness whenever a bill arrives or the car breaks down. The only people who don’t live in perpetual fear of being poor are poor people.

For many in this age, the concept that infinite independent wealth might never arrive like a rescuing knight on a shining steed is downright intolerable. Our lives of luxury have only served to whet our appetites for more. This is how you get a young man who lives on his parents dime and inherited a suburban house to think of himself as “middle class” or (if he is in a foul mood) “poor”. I’ve known a person who complained that her parents could not afford to finance her film career — her artsy, honors student upbringing gave her an inferiority/superiority complex and a hopeless, debased obsession with the type of celebrities who frequent the pages of W Magazine.

For such a person, there is no world outside the Bubble, where the prosperous must always compete for jobs, grants, mates, attention, photo opportunities, and apparent virtuousness. The longer one lives in the Bubble, the more blind one becomes to its soapy walls closing in. The Bubble in the US is often lily-white, so its residents become self-conscious when confronted by a black person. They immediately become the picture of fawning obsequiousness, their pandering training from news channels, popular movies, and sitcoms kicking in. They doth protest too much. Confronted by a white poor person, the hatred of the poor black person that has been viciously repressed rears its ugly head as bigotry towards the white poor person. Hillary Clinton’s moment of christening the poor as Deplorables did more to unite the poor and working classes of all races than Che Guevara could have ever dreamed: the class war was revealed in its naked, ugly, warty glory. Jesus said the poor are blessed and it is true in at least one sense. Though it will never be easy to be poor, it at least forces you over the hurdle of fear of being poor.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

"Or that there are quite a few wealthy individuals who dangle the prospect of a huge donation in order to be publicly recognized, while actually giving a relative pittance."

I hate that sort of person. I worked at a homeless shelter, where someone tried to micromanage us; she decided she didn't want Druids there forcing them to fire me, and she got away with her demands because she provided most of the money.