Banishing the Midas Curse
Excessive Wealth Disorder and Worship of the “Richraff” Are Destroying Our True Sources Of Well-Being
Remember the myth of “the Midas touch”? He’s that ancient Greek king who in response to an invitation from the god Dionysus to choose a wish to be fulfilled asked for and was granted the magical power to create instant wealth for himself by the mere touch of a finger, transforming everything it grazed into pure gold. In most tellings of the myth, that’s both the beginning and end of the story — a life of boundless riches at one’s fingertips. Who wouldn’t wish for such a gilded gift?
Except that, well, that’s not the end of the story. The real tale is not about the Midas touch but the Midas curse. According to a legend recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, one day the courtiers of King Midas, an already fabulously wealthy man, happened upon Silenus, a satyr and favored companion of the god Dionysus who appeared to them as a drunken old man wandering near the king’s lavish gardens. Silenus was brought before the king. But rather than punish him, Midas offered him ten nights of hospitality in his grand palace. Grateful for Midas’ generosity towards Silenus, Dionysus offered him the fulfillment of anything he might wish for. Midas thought for a moment about the possibilities, then asked that all he might touch turn to gold, thus making him boundlessly rich. Bestowed with the power, he first he touched a twig, then a stone, both of which, to his delight, instantly turned to gold. Then an apple and a cob of corn. Voila, gold!
Poor King Midas
But when King Midas returned to his palace to eat and reached for grapes to sate his hunger, they too turned to gold, denying him the food he needed to sustain his life. And when he reached out to his beloved daughter to express his affection for her, to his horror she too turned entirely to stone, depriving him of the love that made his life worth living. Suddenly captive to his own greed, entombed in a gilded catacomb, he had nowhere to turn for nurturance and nourishment. Starving for both food and love, he returned to Dionysus and begged him to release him from bondage to the magic touch that had turned into a deadly curse. Dionysus took mercy on the foolish king and instructed him to bathe in the River Pactolus. To this day, it is said, the river runs gold with the blessing-turned-curse that Midas gratefully washed away.
The fact that all most of us know of Midas is the first half of the story says a great deal about where we’re stuck as humans — too captive to our ceaseless cravings to forgo fool’s gold in favor of the true, largely non-material sources of wealth close at hand. Our persistent worship of material wealth and those who possess it traps us in an endless cycle of envy and misplaced adulation that leaves us in perpetual craving for something that masquerades as a boon but is actually a burden. This failure to heed Midas’ bitter lesson keeps us in bondage to a tragic delusion. This is hardly a new habit of mind; greed and envy have always been with us. “They do not rejoice in what they have, no matter how much it is,” wrote St. Basil the Great in the 4th century A.D., “so much as they lament what they still lack, or think they lack. Their soul is eaten away with cares as they compete in the struggle for success.” But it has gained added force in a world where nearly every message we take in from advertising, media and pop culture holds out the false promise of personal fulfillment if only we had the riches the wealthy possess. The cultivation of ceaseless craving is the driving force behind what is defined as economic growth today, a growth that is itself cancerous.
Yet the best-kept secret among many of those with more money than they know what to do with — far ahead of their well-publicized, envy-inducing lifestyles and personas — is that not only are they less content than we imagine but they are often tormented by unappeasable yearnings for what their wealth, fame, power and prestige have never delivered and will never bring them. Joan Baez had it right back in the Sixties when she sang:
How many times have you heard someone say
“If I had his money, I could do things my way?”
Little they know that it’s so hard to find
One rich man in a hundred with a satisfied mind.
Money can’t buy back your youth when you’re old
Or a friend when you’re lonely, or a love that’s grown cold
The wealthiest person is a pauper at times
Compared to the man with a satisfied mind
Most of us know this truth in principle, having grown up with bromides like “The best things in life are free.” John Lennon gave us the updated version of the old chestnut with “Money can’t buy me love.” The Bible cites greed as the most grievous of the Ten Deadly Sins, with envy close behind. Given that every religious tradition warns us against hoarding wealth, you’d think that by now we’d be well inoculated against its temptations and wary of envying those with a vast surplus. Why, then, do so many of us eat our hearts out in our hunger for what has been proven by bitter experience and the wisdom of the ages to be lethal to our well-being?
Maybe it’s a bit like sugar: we know it’s not good for us but its high momentarily eases the pain of unappeasable longings for life’s true treasures. The sweetness of love and friendship, two genuine blessings, are so much harder to find and sustain through life’s vicissitudes, and never more so than today, when social media prompt us to pretend we have more friends and better lives than we really do. Yet happiness is so elusive and so hard to measure. Our natural yearning for recognition and appreciation is seldom rewarded in ways that give us an enduring sense that we matter. A global commercial culture stokes envy and craving as our default settings in order to get us to part with what little money we have, then addicts us to wanting still more when the last fix wears off. Those exposed to Sunday sermons excoriating greed and celebrating charity for an hour a week emerge into the harsh glare of a world ceaselessly extolling greed and denigrating generosity as a fool’s errand. No contest.
“Richraff” vs. The Worthy Wealthy
But for those who have more than they know what to do with, what are their inner lives like? This is necessarily a speculative question. We have so little direct testimony from the very rich about how they feel inside that we must make what amounts to an educated guess, consulting the few studies that exist, then examining the evidence from what little we can see of their actual behavior. What leads some to behave egregiously with their wealth while others are quite generous? Like every other category of human beings, there is immense variety within the category of individuals who can be objectively measured as the fabled and reviled “one percent.” It’s a broad spectrum that includes a wide range of personalities. I make a rough distinction between what I call the “worthy wealthy” and the “richraff.” Though they may be equally wealthy, they make very different use of their resources. Think of Bill Gates as a prominent example of a “worthy wealthy” man. At the peak of his career, he handed the reins of Microsoft over to his successor in order to devote his remaining decades to giving rather than making money — though with his still hefty stake in the company he continues to reap a handsome harvest. With his wife Melinda he founded the Gates Foundation, which has since become the largest foundation in the world, focusing on issues like malaria eradication, public health, sanitation and agricultural development. Warren Buffett, who holds a vast fortune of his own, was so impressed with the Gates’ priorities that some years ago he decided to funnel the greater portion of his estate while still alive to their foundation.
Numerous other notables and celebrities, ranging from George Soros, U2 lead singer Bono and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, have also committed substantial sums of money and personal energy to addressing urgent societal challenges. The Giving Pledge, a movement of billionaires who have committed at least 50% of their fortunes to urgent global challenges, was launched in 2014 by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and has attracted 204 pledges from 23 countries as of mid-2019. That sounds impressive till you realize that there are some 2,153 billionaires worldwide today and just a tenth of them have signed the pledge. What are the other 1,949 doing with their money?
What motivates these “worthy wealthy” individuals to commit to causes other than feathering the family nest? What many say publicly when signing the Giving Pledge is that their good fortune was as much a result of luck and timing as of hard work and is not an indication of superior merit or intelligence. Some years ago I interviewed Bill Gates Sr., Bill Gates’ father, who at the time was chairman of the Gates Foundation. He was campaigning to preserve the inheritance tax that Republicans have since eviscerated after condemning it as a “death tax.” Gates’ name for it is “the gratitude tax” — a passing on (or “paying forward,” to use the current expression) of just a little of the vast range of resources one received from the accumulated knowledge, services, institutions and values that made one’s success possible.
Striking It Rich: We Never Get There Alone
“You know that Horatio Alger story that we raise ourselves entirely by our own bootstraps?” Gates Sr. asked me. “That’s pure fiction. It altogether fails to acknowledge the role so many others play in any achievement you think of as yours alone, not only within in your own company or your own generation but in the previous generations when our collective efforts created the language, knowledge, and institutions on which you could then build. If you fail to contribute to the public infrastructure that made your success possible, you’re essentially kicking the ladder away so others won’t be able to climb it to harvest the fruits of our collective creation.”
Contrast this perspective with that of an entire generation of hyper-rich individuals I call richraff, people who use their wealth not only to further enrich themselves and to twist public policies to further reduce their tax obligations at the direct expense of those less advantaged but increasingly to taunt them and flaunt their wealth as an emblem of their self-imagined superiority. This is something rather new in the annals of human history. I call them richraff because by their contemptuous behavior they demonstrate their altogether disreputable attitudes— altogether unworthy of our envy or adulation, let alone our admiration or respect.
What distinguishes our current crop of richraff from previous generations of wealthy dynasties is that while royalty have long lived in coddled worlds altogether apart from their subjects, they have generally done so somewhat discreetly. Royal families have usually ruled with at least a pretense of noblesse oblige, an ancestral commitment to using one’s position and privileges to govern the realm in ways that benefit those without such advantages. Even in Hindu India’s still remnant caste system, in traditional rural villages Brahmins at the pinnacle of the hierarchy are expected to give assistance to those at or near the bottom. If the crop of a Dalit (untouchable) family in a rural village fails, the Brahmin village head provides staples from the village larder. Or so it used to be.
But in the barbaric form of capitalism that now infects not only the United States but even the nominally communist regime in China and the corruption-riddled Indian economy, all such constraints and obligations have been replaced by an ethos of “greed is good” and a self-congratulatory flaunting of personal wealth flying under the banner of libertarianism. “I’ve got mine and tough luck for you, buddy,” this era’s richraff seem to be telling us. In fact, for some of the most egregious of the hyper-wealthy, it’s not enough to be declared a winner; one apparently takes a certain sadistic pleasure in watching the suffering of those who’ve been cut out of the binary win-or-lose economy and forcing them to cry out, “You win!” in pain and defeat.
The unprecedented speed and ease with which unimaginable fortunes have been made in Silicon Valley and tech industries worldwide has given clever but callow young, mostly white men the mistaken impression that they earned their outsize fortunes entirely on their own and owe nothing to their employees or the society that helped them get there. What is it in the inner lives of the “richraff” that prompts them to hoard their fortunes while the worthy wealthy more readily share theirs? For someone like Bill Gates his charitable impulse appears to come in part from his upbringing. Raised by a father who taught him that whatever he accomplished in his life he did so only with the crucial assistance of many others, he had a natural inclination to give back. But for those who hoard their wealth the inner psychology that drives them to greed and self-isolation is more complex.
The Torments of Excessive Wealth Disorder
At the heart of sociopathic behavior is an inability to feel empathy for others and a consequent compulsion to blame, bully and brutalize them as a means of avoiding having to confront the insatiable rage, wounding and worthlessness one feels inside oneself. Many of today’s
billionaires behaving badly exemplify the symptoms of what some have begun to call “excessive wealth disorder.” Their success in using their often brutally earned riches to muscle policy changes further enriching themselves is testimony to how potent such sociopathy has become not just among the wealthy but among millions of wannabes with virtually no chance of ever joining the club. It turns out that while happy people generally feel moved to share their happiness with others, unhappy people are more likely to hoard what they have — and to never feel they have enough. A college acquaintance — something of a braggart — once told me, “You see, each of us is born with a vessel to hold love. For some who receive it at that early age the vessel fills as your parents, friends and loved ones pour love into it. But for people like me, that vessel was cracked from birth and no matter how much we get now it always leaks away. I never quite believe it.”
Seeking to satisfy their hunger with money, fame, power and prestige, those suffering from excessive wealth disorder seize all the quantifiable forms of self-worth they can earn or steal but ultimately fail to find fulfillment there, since all such possessions are by their very nature fool’s gold. In their frustration and desperation at their failure to achieve fulfillment, they then exact retribution from any and all who come within range of their rage — anyone other than themselves. Misers, those who hoard what they have and crave still more, are usually miserable inside themselves, never reaching a place of “enoughness” where they spontaneously feel moved to share with others from their own generosity of spirit.
In 2007, a rare study of the inner lives of the very wealthy was undertaken with support from the Gates Foundation at Boston College’s Center on Wealth and Philanthropy. Its primary purpose was to help foundations determine what moves wealthy individuals to engage in philanthropy. But in the process of gathering open-ended responses to questions about the impacts of wealth on their sense of self-worth and their relationships with family, friends and recipients of their largesse they gave researchers a glimpse into the closely guarded anxieties and self-doubts of a class of humanity many of whom would much rather be known for its lavish lifestyles than for its inner torments. Tellingly, the study, entitled “The Joys and Dilemmas of Wealth,” was never published and the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy closed its doors a few years later without leaving any trace of its research on the topic. It was as if its study had touched such a raw nerve among those surveyed that it was prematurely aborted to avoid exposing a less than sanguine view of the impacts of great wealth on some individuals. The sole account of the results of the study, and this one written on the basis of only preliminary findings, appeared in the April 2011 issue of The Atlantic under the tantalizing title, “Secret Fears of the Super-Rich.”
The sample was small and, as researchers cautioned, not statistically representative. Some 165 households responded, 120 of which had at least $25 million in assets. The respondents’ average net worth was $78 million and two were billionaires. By the standards of just a decade later, this places them mostly in the 1% but not breathing the rare air of the hyper-rich. Nonetheless, as article author Graeme Wood quips, “Most of the survey’s respondents are wealthy enough to ensure that in any catastrophe short of Armageddon, they will still be dining on Chateaubriand while the rest of us are spit-roasting rats over trash-can fires.” The composite portrait of the group reveals a surprising degree of emotional insecurity around whether what they possessed was enough for every contingency they feared they might face. While they varied greatly in net worth, virtually all felt that it was inadequate and that it would take at least a quarter more than they currently held to attain true financial security. One respondent, heir to an enormous fortune, told the researchers he wouldn’t feel financially secure till he reached $1 billion. And would he then “need” another billion?
At the heart of this insecurity and dissatisfaction, says Michael Norton, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied the relationship between wealth and happiness, is a comparison trap, the obsessive preoccupation with where one stands in an ever-shifting hierarchy of status and prestige. And there is simply no end to its torments since even when one reaches the top, he who is bedeviled by such status anxieties fears above all being displaced from his precarious perch. Many of this generation’s nouveau riche seem most driven to accumulate still more than they already have by a compulsive competitiveness, the gnawing sense that if they’re not number one they’re nobody — and that they are ever in danger of falling from their precarious perch. Bill Gates, by contrast, seems less concerned about his current financial net worth than how he could use it to make the most enduring contribution to the well-being of others. “I can understand wanting to have a million dollars,” he said, “But once you get beyond that, I have to tell you, it’s the same hamburger.”
Michael Norton says wealthy people ask themselves “two central questions …when determining whether they’re satisfied with something in their life: Am I doing better than I was before? and Am I doing better than other people?….But the problem is, a lot of the things that really matter in life are hard to measure…So people turn to dimensions of comparison that can be quantified… Am I making more money?…Hence the ever-shifting goalposts of wealth and satisfaction.” Some of us seem to be hard-wired for such comparisons. These days, many of the top 1% or 0.1% compete in a race to the bottom rungs of human behavior and morality, where lifestyles of ever more flagrant excess appear designed not necessarily to earn admiration but to intimidate their rivals and torment the rest of a struggling humanity.
This deliberate flaunting of one’s fortune has few parallels in history other than when societies have entered their final phase, the “end times,” as in the fall of the Roman Empire or the collapse of France’s ancien regime (when Marie Antoinette famously suggested that her starving subjects “eat cake” instead of the bread they could no longer afford). Sure enough, some among the hyper-rich are already making plans to escape the imminent civilizational collapse they see coming— and helped create — by constructing offshore islands, building rockets to reach alternative planets or buying condos in abandoned underground missile silos, an exquisitely ironic choice banking on the profit-making possibilities of apocalypse.
Isolation and Insecurity Among the Hyper-Rich
At the heart of this heartless path among those who’ve sacrificed the non-material sources of fulfillment for the sake of the single bottom line is an excruciating loneliness few of them are willing to admit even to themselves. Wealth is a great separator, building invisible walls of mutual suspicion both between and within classes, attracting envy from wannabes, resentment in others of lesser net worth, and relentless rivalry among peers with similar means. While many among the hyper-wealthy cooperate (or conspire) with remarkable success to block policies that would adversely affect their bottom lines, in most every other interaction those who are captive to the comparison trap are ferocious competitors, viewing their fellow one-percenters as existential threats to both their net worth and self-worth.
In building walls around their compounds the hyper-rich are not only shutting others out but walling themselves in, isolating themselves even from those whose positions of stratospheric wealth they share. Chuck Collins, director of the Project on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, and himself heir to a meatpacking fortune he gave away at an early age, likens the lives of some wealthy individuals to someone walking alone at night through an empty street in a quiet, ordinary neighborhood. He passes a cheerfully lit house and pauses to peer in the picture window. There he sees a living room filled with people laughing together in convivial conversation. He stands alone in the dark, acutely aware of being on the outside looking in at people who undoubtedly possess far less than he in material terms but who have nonetheless built wealth of an altogether different kind in their close connections with friends and family. Whatever he’s earned or inherited in financial wealth he’s more than lost in the excruciating loneliness and isolation to which his privilege has consigned him. Even among generous benefactors, there can be a nagging suspicion of the motives of those who claim to be their friends. An early supporter of my work, famous for giving mini-grants to aspiring activists and authors at the outset of their careers, once told me, “I never know whether those who come to me for my advice and counsel genuinely care what I think or just see me as a cash register.”
“Privilege is a disconnection drug,” says Chuck Collins. “The more wealth and privilege you have the more you’re disconnected from the rest of your fellow humans. My message to my fellow one-percenters is to come home. Stake yourself in a community. And bring your wealth home, into that community.”
The emergence of an entire category of “richraff” whom excessive wealth has driven crazy with greed and avarice now imperils the very future of life on earth . Buddhists have a term for such people. Chinese and Vietnamese Buddhists and Taoists call them “hungry ghosts,” haunted creatures with bilious but chronically empty stomachs, pinhole mouths, and necks so thin they can’t swallow food. Wracked by greed, envy and jealousy, their suffering takes the forms of addiction, obsession, and unappeasable hunger.
Never Enough: The Ravages of Wealth Addiction and Wealth Worship
The term “wealth addiction” has now joined the ever-growing list of obsessive personal and societal behaviors that now bedevil American and to a great extent global culture. Riding like a parasite on the first modern wave of globalization that swept the planet starting in the 1980’s, the glorification of greed has entered into the cultural bloodstream and produced the kind of compulsive dynamic that drives all addictions — trying desperately to fill the chasm created by lives that have lost their moorings in humane values and plunging ever more rapidly into vortices of self-destruction. In a seminal confession published in The New York Times in 2014, one-time Wall Street bond and credit default trader Sam Polk recounted his initial magnetic attraction to the sugar high of receiving his first hefty bonus. But his sense of achievement was soon eclipsed by his realization that another trader on his floor had scooped up far more. He had fallen into a lethal cycle of perpetual envy, like a drug addict who needed a bigger fix each time to feel, and then only fleetingly, that irresistibly tantalizing lift-off. “When the guy next to you makes $10 million,” he wrote, “$1 million or $2 million doesn’t look so sweet.”
The counselor Polk had first hired to help him with addictions to alcohol and drugs told him his irresistible compulsion to make ever more money was producing the same self-destructive dynamic. He advised Polk to turn instead to healing his “inner wound.” But in the end, it was the behavior of his far wealthier bosses that revealed to him where this was all leading. “Ever see what a drug addict is like when he’s used up his junk?” he asks. “He’ll do anything — walk 20 miles in the snow, rob a grandma — to get a fix. Wall Street was like that…Not only was I not helping to fix any problems in the world, but I was profiting from them. As the world crumbled, I profited…Wall Street is a toxic culture that encourages the grandiosity of people who are desperately trying to feel powerful.”
Almost equally self-destructive is the chronic envy of the hyper-rich among those who haven’t the remotest chance of ever striking it rich themselves. You might call it “wealth worship,” an addiction in its own right. It’s precisely those luckless and often desperate individuals with the least chance of winning who buy lottery tickets they can ill afford. It’s essentially a self-taxing syndrome by those who already pay more than their share of taxes while the wealthy work the loopholes. Both the private gambling industry and state lotteries prey on the vulnerability of lottery and slot machine players who keep hoping against overwhelming odds that theirs will be the lucky number. While they keep coming up short, most still refuse to believe the game is fixed and thus continue to fall for the casino’s pre-programmed variable outcomes that trick them into believing they’re actually winning.
Win or lose, many who gamble deflect their desperation, shame and self-impoverishment by worshipping and identifying with those who’ve successfully managed to game the system. In their uncritical support of purchased politicians who claim to represent their interests while simultaneously fleecing them, millions empower their oppressors to sabotage all efforts to even the odds that perpetually fix the system against them. Today’s crop of richraff likely wouldn’t behave nearly as badly if their legions of fans didn’t enable and even applaud their transparently criminal behavior. Yet some of those who have been most frightfully abused, be it in life’s casino or under oppressive regimes, blame themselves rather than their abusers for their misfortune. Many who were consigned to the Soviet gulags from the twenties to the fifties believed themselves to be innocent of the crimes of which they were accused but still defended Stalin and the brutal system that put them there. A recent survey of Russians found that 70 percent now believe Stalin was a great leader who took a backward country and transformed it into a nuclear superpower. Generations away from the horror, younger Russians have no memories of the monstrous suffering he inflicted on his people.
At the core of such attitudes is internalized oppression. When societal or religious norms reinforce the notion that whatever fate individuals suffer is entirely due to their own mistakes or misbehavior, it becomes surpassingly difficult to free oneself of a crippling sense of personal shame and unworthiness. If one is then told that salvation is only possible by giving one’s absolute devotion to a supreme leader, however outrageous his behavior, the trap has been set and captivity is complete. It’s as if we lock ourselves in jail, then hand our jailers the key.
So what if many among the hyper-wealthy are not as happy as we imagine nor as satisfied as advertised? Who cares about their unhappiness? What matters is what in their misery they do to the rest of us. It’s absolutely true that policies and practices at ground level need to change radically to close or at least greatly narrow the yawning abyss between the extremes of undeserved wealth and undeserved misfortune. A whole new generation of economists, social and economic justice advocates and organizations is emerging today with highly practical alternatives to the rogue capitalism that is ravaging the remains of our tattered social contract. Proposals for wealth taxes on the “excessive wealth disorder” that so afflicts American and global society are making headway into mainstream discourse and becoming staples in the agendas of some presidential candidates.
These and many other policies are essential to the revival of an economy that is currently both unsustainable and inhumane. At the same time we need to disenthrall ourselves from the Midas myth that has trapped so many in the mass delusion that conflates material wealth with happiness and fulfillment. It distracts us from the many forms of non-material wealth — love and friendship, curiosity and wonder, kindness and generosity of spirit, gratitude and life balance, a sense of belonging — that don’t require money so much as appreciative attention. It also gives license to abuse on the part of those among the hyper-rich who in their wealth addiction inflict so much misery on others. I use the term “disenthrall” because wealth worship is a self-induced spell to which all too many — especially those least able to afford it — fall prey.
True Wealth: “We Don’t Have Much, But We Have Each Other”
So much of what is truly fulfilling in life requires relatively little money and is accessible to individuals of quite modest means. In travels around the world I’ve observed a wide variety of circumstances where individuals and even whole communities that by all objective measures are poverty-stricken. Yet there I often witness more connection and contentment than in affluent enclaves. Guatemala is one of the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere — and Guatemala City is one of the most violent capitals on earth. Yet surveys reveal that Guatemalans are among the self-described happiest peoples on earth. How could this be? As an indigenous Mayan gardener told me, “We don’t have much, but we have each other.” The tragic reverse is true of all too many affluent gated communities in the developed world: we have so much more, and often far more than we need, but we don’t have each other. In the crunch we have little confidence that we’ll be here for one another.
In order to overcome crippling effects of envy and wealth worship we need first to nourish our spirits and enrich our lives with a multitude of nonmaterial sources of nurturance. “Above all,” says a wise woman friend, “don’t let them steal our joy.” With open hearts and satisfied minds we can approach the daunting task of changing the system from a place of strength, confidence and inner peace rather than resentment, rage and despair. We’ll be sustained in the struggle by a love of life even with all its shortcomings rather than being diminished by a gnawing sense of personal failure. And our appeals for changing the system will be fundamentally more attractive to a broader range of people than if in our desperation we become strident and shrill. During the late Sixties many of us movement activists became so angry and distressed by the slow pace of change that some dropped away as casualties of burnout while others turned to violence in the form of the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army and other dead ends. By the end of the decade the hopeful if ungrounded spirit of optimism that had infused the earlier years of progressive activism was replaced by the 1969 “Days of Rage” and other expressions of collective despair.
Moving To A More Attractive Place and Inviting Others Over
Many years ago it became clear to me that if we wanted to change the way people think and feel about social change, our strategies would be more effective if we don’t condemn where they stand, which only entrenches them in their destructive ways, but move to a more attractive place and invite them over. That more attractive place turns out to be our own open hearts and inner fulfillment, gifts that we’re in an ideal position to share. Cultivating compassion, balance and peace of mind in ourselves is a formidable challenge in itself, but everything we do towards that end sustains our ability to carry on with lifelong commitments to progressive principles and policies without losing our minds and hearts in the struggle. This emphatically doesn’t mean that we accept the rank injustices of our economic and social systems but that we express by our very presence a deeply attractive vitality and vibrant appreciation for life that is a persuasive testament in itself to the redemptive value of practicing generosity of spirit towards others.
Wealthy individuals (and families) are no more alike than are any other category of humans and it’s vitally important to distinguish those who are making responsible use of their resources from those who are either hoarding it for themselves and their kin or using it to undermine the democratic process and dispossess others of their most essential rights and needs. There’s a broad spectrum of behaviors among wealthy individuals and only at the extremes are their roles unambiguously clear. In response to increasing public support, even among a few Republicans, for raising taxes on the very top tiers of wealth and income, a handful of billionaires have begun asking that they and their financial kin be taxed at higher rates to help address urgent societal needs and reduce the destabilizing effects of economic inequality. In June 2019 an open letter signed by eleven billionaires, including Abigail Disney, granddaughter of Disney co-founder Roy Disney, called for higher taxes on themselves and others of equally ample means. “Nothing in history ever moved forward just because people advocated for their own interests,” she told NPR’s All Things Considered. “Things really change when people are traitors to their class, and my class needs some really good traitors these days.”
The following day Eli Broad, the L.A. arts, education and homelessness philanthropist, also called for a wealth tax. “I simply believe it’s time for those of us with great wealth to commit to reducing income inequality, starting with the demand to be taxed at a higher rate than everyone else.” That’s just twelve of the 2,153 billionaires in the United States today (a figure rising rapidly thanks in part to the 2017 tax cut), but it’s a start, and it sets an example that with enough public pressure could persuade others to join as well.
Walking Away From The Burdens of Excessive Wealth
While the richraff’s acts of callous behavior towards those most vulnerable and least fortunate are altogether worthy of censure, it’s vital to separate their cruel acts from their still latent positive potential. We must them fully responsible for their destructive actions but leave room for them to change, unlikely as that transformation may appear to be. It’s actually more common than we assume, though these transformative stories are seldom told. One-time real estate titan Dariel Garner once calculated that his bank account was larger than his weight in gold — and at the time he weighed 365 pounds. He was, in his words, “committing suicide by eating.” He had made a fortune as a real estate developer, starting and running over 40 businesses on four continents with thousands of employees. His enterprises included the second largest agribusiness exporter in Mexico, golf courses, ski parks and the largest private resort in California. His doctor told him one day that he envied Dariel’s success — except for the fact that he wouldn’t live to enjoy its fruits.
Burdened by an unacknowledged crisis of confidence in the path his life had taken, Dariel began to question his disconnection from others. “I remember sitting at my desk and signing paychecks for people who would make in a year what I made in an hour. And these were people making $20,000 a year. I began to recognize the vast difference of income and wealth. I felt there was something wrong with one person having so much more than others. At a certain point I felt the money was ill-gotten, taken from someone else.”
On Thanksgiving Day, Dariel accompanied his wife to a specially prepared dinner at their prized resort. As they were being escorted to their seats in the dining room, the hostess gently touched his arm to guide him. “I hadn’t been touched by anyone other than my wife for years, because people don’t touch rich people,” he later recalled. “It was like the touch of God. I realized that I could love and be loved. I was floored.” He began a lemon juice fast and eventually shed half his weight. At the same time, he began to shed the burdens of excessive wealth. “I turned my back on the money.” Through philanthropy, spending, divorce, and loss, he eventually landed in penury, a homeless pilgrim finding his way towards the light. Meeting his new partner in her tiny tea house, he settled into a new life of radical simplicity, living on his $900 monthly Social Security check. Yet he says he has no regrets. “I’ve never been happier,” he smiles in amazement and delight. “Today I am penniless and have far more than I could ever imagine existed. Each day I am awakened to the joy of being connected and part of all of life around me. I am able to be with other people and with nature in a way that was impossible for me when I was wealthy.”
The Greatest Gift Is In The Giving
Most hungry ghosts are probably not redeemable, but many wealthy individuals are not so self-absorbed. Some may even realize the core truth about wealth — that it is only fulfilling to its beneficiaries insofar as they share it with others. The greatest gift of all turns out to be the act of giving itself, and hoarding one’s riches the bitterest curse. The only real gift is not the one given in anticipation of being given a gift in return — a mere transactional exchange — but a gift freely given with no expectations and no strings attached. The greatest pleasure derives from the surprising ways giving opens the long-choked channels between oneself and others. Giving bestows the gift of belonging.
It would be easy to be consumed with resentment at the egregious behavior of those who use their wealth either for extreme self-indulgence or punitive policies against the most vulnerable among us. I’ve done my share of fuming about it. Witnessing such injustices without being able to prevent them can be excruciatingly painful. Yet anger and resentment turn out to be both exhausting and ineffective. Besides, treating the wealthy as an undifferentiated class apart from the rest of us, a unitary “one percent” all of whom are selfish and cruel, would send many of them into a defensive crouch when if they’re treated as the unique individuals they are, they have room to move and change. When shared with the society that helped create it, their wealth offers an opportunity for them to liberate themselves from the agonies of isolation, loneliness, envy and resentment that are the curse of hoarded riches. It also offers them the chance to make common cause with the rest of us and forge a more mutually fulfilling relationship. We bring a wealth of non-material resources of our own to the table, in the form of the warm hearts, open minds and a commitment to one another we consciously choose to cultivate. And the worthy wealthy bring urgently needed financial resources without which much of what we require to address the vast casualties of extreme inequality would simply be impossible.
For their part, those who have long envied the rich can help themselves and the rest of us enormously by disabusing themselves of the false assumption that more material wealth brings more happiness and invest their time and attention instead in those intimate, low-cost pleasures closest at hand — love and friendship, playfulness, meaningful work and life purpose, connection with the rest of nature and a sense of belonging — from all of which we humans draw our most heartfelt nourishment. From that foundation of personal fulfillment and social connection, we’re in a position to invite those with greater material wealth to join us in rebuilding the threadbare public realm that by all rights we share but that has been privatized and stolen from us all. Let’s invite those who in their extreme riches have walled themselves off from the rest of us to return home from their self-imposed exile in their gated enclaves, roll up their sleeves, and join us in the bucket brigades and barn raisings of our time to reconstruct our beloved but impoverished commonwealth.
