Human evil plain and simple

The division of mankind into rich and poor, in its most cruel form, as slavery, appeared almost as soon as civilization began. Since then the rich were often challenged by their victims, and sometimes vanquished, but never completely and never for long. They always managed to revive their fortunes and steadily impoverish the others again.

It is patently obvious that excessive wealth can only be achieved at the expense of others. Someone somewhere has to pay for all the excess. In the heyday of slavery the link was perfectly clear. The slaves worked, their masters reaped the rewards. Nowadays, in our extremely complicated and convoluted society, it might be less visible but the principle is the same. Underpay the suppliers (of work, products, services or resources) and overcharge the buyers.

Excessive wealth is wrong in so many ways that it is impossible to discuss them all.

The greatest wrong is, of course, its blatant immorality. The very fact that so many people cannot see the perverse cruelty of denying others the basic means of life while hoarding immense fortunes, says a lot about the depths of human depravity at this point in time.

Practically, one of its most harmful effects is the loss of human resources caused by income inequality. It condemns huge numbers of people (also in the middle classes) to a life of want and toil, forcing them to spend all their time and energy on simply surviving, without any hope of developing their potential, to the detriment of us all.

Another grave danger is the power that comes with wealth, enabling the rich to influence the policies of countries, a power that they are eminently unfit to wield. Studies have shown that wealthy people are not particularly nice. They are less compassionate, less ethical, less generous and much more selfish than people with ordinary incomes. One prominent researcher even said that "they are more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”

In other words, they lack all the qualities that one would want to see in a good leader.

And yet these disreputable characters control many human activities.

No wonder they will invest in any venture that makes them money, no matter how detrimental for the environment or in violation of human rights. We won't go into all the conspiracy theories surrounding them, but it seems pretty naive to assume that these kind of people would stop at anything.

And yet the rich wield such power over governments that they can easily get them to pass laws enriching the rich even more, which of course, gives them more power again, to demand yet more wealth, and so on. If this is allowed to continue, it can only end in a nightmarish oligarchy.

The rich themselves (and their many cronies) like to argue that they are actually benefactors and that, in some mysterious and inexplicable way, there is no connection between their wealth and the poverty of others. They claim to be driving the economy, creating jobs and making their wealth trickle down to the poor. This is, of course, largely nonsense. The economy is best served by a generally thriving population. The creation of jobs may be a fact, but it is only a side effect, deeply regretted by the rich, who do their utmost to limit the damage by keeping the wages as low as possible and seeking ways to get rid of jobs completely through automation and robotics. The trickle-down effect is simply a myth, disproven many times.

The rich do, however, like to put on big spectacular media shows of their gifts to charity. Sadly their idea of charity is slightly out of touch with the real suffering of the people, spent mostly to support colleges, universities, arts organizations and museums, in other words: to increase their own status and benefit their own kind.