I reckon there’s some tipping point of wealth/power/privilege that totally transforms a person, any person, into something fundamentally different at heart.
Like, they won’t part with hundreds of lifetimes worth of cash because that would feel like self destruction. To them, they are their wealth. Nothing else remains. The accumulation isn’t pointing at anything other than accumulation.
…. And that’s not a new idea. Fucking st. Basil raged about this in the 300’s.
I think that extremes exist and go to both directions. I have known people who lost their mind when their wages tripled after they started working abroad (e.g. my father started having mistresses when his salary went from 800 euros to 2200 in today’s money). But I have also known millionaires who live very middle class lives, except they travel more and drive better cars.
Most of us would stop doing whatever we were doing well before we amassed a billion dollars. That sort of wealth is enough to retire on, live a life of luxury and make sure your progeny won’t even need to work either.
These guys just don’t know how to stop, they have a hole they just can’t fill. And I guess when you reach “richest man in the world” status, you look around and you notice you’re still not happy, that probably doesn’t make things better for you mentally. And yeah, you stop seeing normal people in your life. You’re just surrounded by either other billionaires or people that are on your payroll. You don’t have any clue about the struggles of the other 99.9%.
I’ll have to look into that! My first thought was Jesus Himself also warning against it.
“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?” Mark 8:36
They serve their greed, it becomes their god, and when the billions aren’t enough, it becomes about power and influence in world events. It never stops. They basically become the paperclip apocalypse machine for shareholder profits.
Like someone else here who mentioned Tolkien: absolutely “dragon sickness.” We watched Thorin Oakenshield forsake his brethren and become a total bastard just to sit on a mountain of coins and stare at a pretty rock.
These guys are the very same, just with their stonks.
Somehow along the way, our societies evolved to serve the dragons, to elevate their madness and sociopathy to virtue. Like the wealth-hoarding, worker-eating monsters of old, they must be brought down.
I reckon there’s some tipping point of wealth/power/privilege that totally transforms a person, any person, into something fundamentally different at heart.
Like, they won’t part with hundreds of lifetimes worth of cash because that would feel like self destruction. To them, they are their wealth. Nothing else remains. The accumulation isn’t pointing at anything other than accumulation.
…. And that’s not a new idea. Fucking st. Basil raged about this in the 300’s.
I think that extremes exist and go to both directions. I have known people who lost their mind when their wages tripled after they started working abroad (e.g. my father started having mistresses when his salary went from 800 euros to 2200 in today’s money). But I have also known millionaires who live very middle class lives, except they travel more and drive better cars.
Most of us would stop doing whatever we were doing well before we amassed a billion dollars. That sort of wealth is enough to retire on, live a life of luxury and make sure your progeny won’t even need to work either.
These guys just don’t know how to stop, they have a hole they just can’t fill. And I guess when you reach “richest man in the world” status, you look around and you notice you’re still not happy, that probably doesn’t make things better for you mentally. And yeah, you stop seeing normal people in your life. You’re just surrounded by either other billionaires or people that are on your payroll. You don’t have any clue about the struggles of the other 99.9%.
I’ll have to look into that! My first thought was Jesus Himself also warning against it.
“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?” Mark 8:36
They serve their greed, it becomes their god, and when the billions aren’t enough, it becomes about power and influence in world events. It never stops. They basically become the paperclip apocalypse machine for shareholder profits.
Like someone else here who mentioned Tolkien: absolutely “dragon sickness.” We watched Thorin Oakenshield forsake his brethren and become a total bastard just to sit on a mountain of coins and stare at a pretty rock.
These guys are the very same, just with their stonks.
Somehow along the way, our societies evolved to serve the dragons, to elevate their madness and sociopathy to virtue. Like the wealth-hoarding, worker-eating monsters of old, they must be brought down.
Yea, power corrupts. That’s what most of the Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion was about.
A tale as old as time, a song as old as rhyme…