Some say, everything in moderation, but does this really apply to everything?
Does it apply to money?
Are there downsides to being a billionaire as opposed to just a millionaire or poor?
I suppose the more money you have, the more people want from you.
If you become a millionaire, your friends and family may turn against you, try to cheat or steal from you.
If you become a billionaire, other billionaires may start taking an interest in you and what you do with your money.
If you invest it in the wrong things, or don’t invest it in the right ones, they could take issue with you, perhaps even try to usurp your money or kill you.
Money is power to do great things for humanity, and great evil as well, depending on what you invest it in.
You could be charitable with it, on the other hand you could invest it in war, in goods and services that benefit or detriment people.
You may have acquired your fortune in the first place by helping or swindling people.
Researchers have looked into whether money helps or harms people, and they’ve found while the middle class tend to be somewhat happier and healthier than the working class, and the working class tend to be somewhat happier and healthier than the underclass, the upperclass tend not to be healthier and happier than the middle class, but perhaps for some, money is intrinsically good, you can never have enough of it.
For the 79th time: My own subjective understanding of dasein revolves around those aspects of our lives not able to be demonstrated as true objectively for all of us. “I” in the is/ought world by and large.
For example, is Bill Gates rich? Or is that just a subjective personal opinion embedded in “I” embedded in an existential contraption? But, who knows, someday there may well be a visitor from another planet who would construe Bill Gates to be poor based on his or her or its experience on the home planet.
Now, let’s switch the focus to, “is Bill Gates too rich?”
How would one go about demonstrating that?
And then a socialist comes along and argues that no citizens should be allowed to get rich.
How would that be demonstrated?
These distinctions are really not at all difficult to grasp.
Probably there is a downside to being born in a millionaire family, like Hunter Biden shows.
But I don’t think there is a downside to making millions of dollars by ones own efforts, not in terms of the money anyways - of course if one robs people for it, one reaps wrath. But that goes for a poor junkie who steals ten dollars from another poor junkie as well.
That was the case in older times, the French Revolution is an example, but I think with current technology, it is simply too easy to buy efficient protection and establish untraceable hideouts.
What this statistic would point to is that enough money is simply enough. The American Dream, which is a Middle Class dream (everyone a two-car garage and a chicken in the pot, as a homeless man in LA once described it to me), is probably a pretty happy dream.
heres a video of that guy living the actual reality. I don’t know what happened with that music… youtube.com/watch?v=yCbJRUDzjh0
At one point in the technocratic evolution of power structures (technocracy is in a sense merely a form to maximally contain power) wealth becomes not a means merely for enjoyment of life but for keeping wealth away from others, so that the current technocracy isn’t disrupted and the vessels in which power has accumulated don’t break.
Thus, most revolutions end up with a situation worse than where they started out from - they had no greater vessel prepared into which to pour the stolen power. Soviet Communism was an exception to this rule, not because of Marx, who offers no structure but only insanity (dictatorship of the poor, meaning that the poor must be rich and yet still poor), but rather because of Russia.
In a related way Napoleon held together France after the disruptive non-entity of the Revolution (Robespierre is perhaps histories most blatant anti-human, un-being) had set it on the brink of crumbling into dust particles.
After the War, Stalin was actually no Communist at all but simply a Nationalist. Ultimately Gorbachev was justified, as it led to the present situation where Russia has survived Marxism a hell of a lot better than most other nations have.
I don’t think we’re all the same. So, just being focused on money is the best some people can come up with. They’re partial people, so we can’t just them in terms of the self-harm some other person might be causing themselves if they restricted their focus like this. I think it’s better to frame the issue around what the person does, what their focus is, what possible activities they could engage in but do X instead. It’s not so much the money in the bank, though this may cause some kinds of problems, but what they spend their time and affection on.
I don’t know, but if someone wants to give me the opportunity to gain empirical knowledge of the matter, I’ll be more than happy to report back with my results.
I was answering the title question. Geez. There is no need for you (meno_) to respond. I wasn’t answering a question you did not present. What gave you the impression my answer what directed at you? Chronology, sequence? You make it far more complicated than intended.
No. The notion of “rich” is far too non specific. Some times I think I can be smart, I can always be a lot smarter. One man’s riches?
It’s a covetous question. What does one truly possess? Can you be too secure, too safe, too comfortable? Yes, If it comes from the denial of an other’s capacity.
If I were denying an other smarts, yeah. Put that in your pipe and pass it around.
Puff, puff.
I did not consider my phrasing wisely to qualify the question as dumb. That’s on me, sorry. I’ll try some more not to do that again.
If the elite, as individuals and a collective, were content with what they had, they wouldn’t’ve had to impoverish the masses to have more, more of what won’t help them increase their health, happiness, safety or security.
Impoverishing the masses will eventually come back to bite them in the ass, it always has and in all likelihood, always will, sooner or later.
Because of their greed, eventually there’ll be regime change, at least a change of elite, and then the dance will begin again anew.
But if they made it so there was little-nothing to fear from becoming working-middleclass, by giving up some of their obscene, inordinate wealth, they wouldn’t have to fear losing all of their wealth, and the masses wouldn’t one day yearn for their heads.
You can only make so much money, so quickly, fairly, before you must resort to unjust means to make more.
Is it really worth it?
What are they getting out of it in the end?
You may have 1000 times more money, but you’re still going to die at 80 or 85, give or take, perhaps much sooner.
For the nouveau riche, particularly those who worked hard for it, wealth can be wonderful, if they haven’t forgotten how to enjoy life in the process of acquiring the means to enjoy it, but for those who inherit their wealth, it means little, they don’t appreciate it because that’s all they know.
Sometimes it leads to, affluenza, they become reckless, demented.
And I am equally at fault here and I can ascribe it to a very painful holiday through which I lost whatever perspective I had prior.
Can not detail here, and I too took it out of context.
I certainly counter apologise.
Wealth is tantamount to power, and like power it corrupts. Absolute wealth can degrade and corrupt the soul absolutely.
The question of the soul, weather it exists or not is am echo of.a forgotten god, and because god is forgotten. He has forgotten us.
We need God now more then ever, if we to believe in life, for life is a miracle, we as men can not create our selves, we can not buy our souls. The rich at times forget that.
