memes

It's something that always hits me acutely. I grew up in a poor area, with a family from a different but equally poor area. The total net worth of the past three generations of my family, combined, at their peak and adjusted for inflation just for fun, from grandparents and great-uncles down to me, wouldn't break a mil. Yet I also recognize that people can own a house worth a million or even two without being absurdly wealthy, or even more than just middle-class.

On one hand, when people start wringing hands and crying about their taxes going up on their million-dollar house, I get the emotional urge to sneer and spit at their feet. Poor babies! On the other hand, I do try to recognize also that all wealth is relative, and that we, as human beings, should not and cannot be judged solely on how we try to make our own way in this miserable world, but rather on how we interact with others. Even I am extraordinarily wealthy, as a disabled man who ekes out a below-poverty line existence in the US doing clerical work, compared to someone doing back-breaking labor to provide for their family in Mali.

The condemnation should not be when we buy a nice meal for ourselves, but when we refuse a loaf of bread to a beggar, sort of thinking. And above all, most non-ultra-wealthy people are not making decisions that explicitly hurt others for their own gain, nor even that deny help to others for their own convenience, but simply buying themselves little luxuries to forget the misery of existence. That's... just how human beings work. And the solution is in structural reform, not condemnation of people for trying not to go crazy in a universe whose laws were not constructed to suit thinking beings.

Should billionaires exist? No, fuck no. But of the people who are billionaires, "I lucked out in a field I'm legitimately talented in, and it scaled to the tune of billions instead of the normal artist existence of 'barely surviving'" is probably one of the least objectionable. In Swift's place, most of us probably wouldn't be much different. One can argue, and not incorrectly, that the activities of billionaires is disproportionately more damaging than us lowly thousandaires with a PC and a bicycle, but the fundamental principle of selfishness behind taking an uber for non-essential round-town travel and taking a private plane when a few well-planned train tickets would've done just fine is the same. We differ from THOSE billionaires not in nature, but in scale. It's a scale that MUST be reduced for the survival of both the planet and the polity, but it doesn't spring from some essential evil in the individual - unlike, say, some cunt jacking up the price of life-saving medication so they can buy a third yacht.

Ultimately, a billionaire like Swift is the rare creature who DOES perform legitimate labor, whose actions do not fundamentally come at an increased cost to people just trying to survive, and largely no more exploitative than any other musician or participant in the industry or wider economy (which is a condemnation of the industry and our economy, arguably, but neither here nor there), just one who has managed success on a more massive scale than her peers. She SHOULD be brought down to a reasonable level of wealth - but she's not some demon who deserves the guillotine. Just massive asset seizure. She's probably a pretty ordinary human being, as far as human beings go.