Today, it is a truth universally acknowledged that anyone in possession of a great fortune must be despicable in one way or another. At least, that’s how the fictional rich are portrayed in movies, television, and novels. As for the actual rich, there are enough bad actors among them to provide an endless stream of media stories demonstrating human nature at its worst. While I see no conspiracy, I do suspect an implicit “deal.” Great inequality can be allowed to persist as long as popular envy is blunted by the idea that being rich is no guarantee against failed lives.
Most of our problems can be fixed by fixing the corruption in the systems that govern over our lives.
How do we organize against all of this rampant corruption in our systems?
A Network State - a new decentralized 4th branch of government that isn't part of the government at all, but rather 100% built and run by the people. A whole new ecosystem. This includes a decentralized news network, decentralized science, a safe have for whistleblowers, a decentralized monetary system we all agree to in case the current one collapses, decentralized debates, a parallel transparent voting system, decentralized education , ballot initiatives and more. Consider this: https://joshketry.substack.com/p/lets-build-a-4th-branch-of-government
What about the movie "Parasite"? The rich family there is portrayed as quite nice I think. You could argue it wasn't a cultural influence but it did at least won several awards and like four Oscars.
I can see why you'd feel that all wealthy people have been lumped into a general punching bag labeled "Rich & Evil." But I think throughout literary history, we've seen just as many examples of poor criminals and middle-class criminals as rich; and we do see the philanthropic rich person who, upon discovering the corruption or evil act of their family member/friend, immediately rectifies the injustice. I think there are people who choose to do bad things at every level of society, though the rich have always been able to buy their way out of repercussions. For my two cents, it's not the media that portrays the wealthy unjustly, but the fact that the corruption and lack of accountability that currently draws the public's eye in real life also draws the public eye to its fictional mirror. With shows like the limited series, Dopesick, which sheds light on the willfully widespread degradation of health that the Sackler Family caused--and continues to cause while the Sacklers in real life are legally protected from bankruptcy, (not to mention the Clarence Thomases of the world) I'm not surprised if there has been an increase in their fictional counterparts.
Jun 9, 2023·edited Jun 9, 2023Liked by david roberts
Apologies for over sharing, which I tend to do on Substack more and more. I’m more privileged than most, but no one would call me rich. The richest families I think I’ve ever met have a family life that I certainly don’t envy, they have revealed themselves to be either pits of vipers. But probably the best man I’ve known in my life was also one of the richest. My dad’s family were warm and kind people who came from pretty much nothing in the South and raised their 5 kids in a 900 sf house with 1 bathroom for about 30 years. Their firstborn became an accountant that had a reputation of being honest and trustworthy, and the blueblood executives he would encounter recognized this lifted him up to their level (as Vonnegut would say, they gave him a straw on the Money River) and he became the CFO of a major regional bank. He was like my surrogate dad bc they both had the same terminal illness, both had double lung transplants but my uncle’s gave him 15 more years. Not only was he a big philanthropist, funding transplants for those who couldn’t afford it, but he would do shit like go volunteer at the lowest performing schools in the most impoverished parts of Memphis to tutor poor black kids in reading after school. He was the only Democrat among his brothers and sisters and thought billionaires shouldn’t exist, as I don’t. He didn’t think folks should be allowed to have large fortunes. While I thought I might get enough to pay off my $200K student loans when he died as I knew he had been an executive, but expected little as there were something like 4 siblings, his new wife, his late wife’s many siblings, and at least 10 other nieces and nephews and a few of their children. It turned out we all were surprised, relatively late in life (I had a doctorate and 2 masters degrees at 36, he passed afterward) enough in trust that none of us will ever be homeless if we are careful and we have yo work at something to have a nice life, which divided among that many heirs meant the total sum was a pretty decent chunk of change though not billions. Imagine finding out you’re a trust fund baby at 38 after ridiculing them most of your life! It’s a weird, but healthy, sense of guilt. As a banker he was one of the ones warning against getting too involved with subprime in 08 (he had stepped back to be demoted to risk mgt VP.) he was a very small ‘c’ conservative and moral man. I would trade every asset I have to have him back in the world. He was a devout Southern Christian that loved my husband as his own and never judged me, or at least never made me feel judged, when I fucked my life up pretty bad at one point and had to go to rehab. Half of my serious relationships have been with black people, women before I came out and then my first boyfriend, and he was genuinely warm and kind to them, taking us to dinner as couples and stuff.
I will say that those who are blessed enough to leave anything significant to multiple heirs is something that can foster weird resentments if they aren’t careful to be fair, I’m glad to have worked through mine. Its a weird curse that comes with a blessing, but you can’t help but feel that the way it gets dished out is the measure of their love for you, and I realize some things are impossible to make fair. I wish that we had talked about it as a whole family before he was in a lot of pain but when he knew the end was close, because we all get along as a family, and some things that I’m sure he wasn’t thinking about turn out to be deeply unfair. Like surviving widows getting something and surviving widowers being SOL bc of old beliefs that men should work means my brother-in-law would lose the cushion he has raising their 3 children if my sister were to die, and then they would inherit less than other cousins. It’s so stupid to look at a blessing like that as something that fosters resentment, never at him but other relatives who by chance fall differently in the contracts. (I’ve encouraged my masculine as hell mechanic BIL to move to WA long enough to get declared a trans woman on his official docs just to protect him and the kids in case something were to happen to my sister.
Things like this are why rich families are often toxic, I think. Money and legal contracts are poor stand-ins for love. he loved us equally but it’s impossible to be fair in the end. God, the love I’ve been given by that side of the family. My dad died in 97 and there was never a drifting apart, our entire extended family celebrated holidays together til just a few years ago, and I won’t lie that a couple of those years I didn’t go was because some aunts and cousins who are wonderful people and always shown me love for 40 years were people that brought out unfair resentments after we had all been blessed with a windfall none of us “deserved.” We are dumb primates, the best and worst of us.
SN: that’s the opposite of how it is in academia at second-tier state schools, where the petty fights between the professors are vicious bc the spoils of winning are so small, like 10 cats fighting over a dead baby gerbil. LOL
I’m probably the only guy on Earth that doesn’t hate Bezos and thinks he’s a good guy, which this comes from having done my MBA thesis on Amazon’s corporate strategy. He was a genius, he came by it honestly, he was privileged and well to do, but Miguel Bezos was no Fred Trump. He was very lucky to have had the nature and nurture he was gifted with (an iconoclast entrepreneur but poor bio dad, parents that nurtured his education and believed in his business - but not rich enough to put many millions into it - and a maternal grandpa that was high up at Los Alamos ) and he had to cultivate the persona of acting like a frugal dick to get the shareholders to indulge him so many years of reinvesting profits in new ventures - now the cheapest way to build a business website and scale it up is AWS instead of something like Oracle. Someone could have developed Amazon e-commerce first; I’m glad it wasn’t Musk or one of the Waltons or some awful Republican that would be paying $7.25/hour in the warehouses in the South. While minimum wage should surely be double that, you can make $15 in fast food in Memphis despite the min wage of half that bc of competition for labor from the Amazon warehouse. A man who earned the love of someone for years as decent as Mackenzie is not an evil man. He took the long view, knowing Icahn would start demanding dividends were the day 1 philosophy to be abandoned. Folks accuse him of building Blue Origin so he can escape the earth he destroyed, which is not only absurd but he literally talked about his passion for space in his hs valedictory address. He comes by his wonder of space from his childhood and deserves to indulge his dream within reason. Billionaires as a group are the problem, the fact of their existence, most of the actual people are just victims of a series of accidents like the rest of us, they just happen to be lucky accidents.
That said, I think huge amounts of inequality is corrosive to a people, and we need lots more e pluribus unum in this world. It wouldn’t be workable unless folks actually came to agreement on it, but my political philosophy entails no individual owning $1,000,000,001 in any form of wealth, and all US tax returns should be public record. Either it’s seized by the government or ideally freely given out of patriotism and burned on the Fourth of July or those folks pay their workers or donate to charity to rid themselves of it. And priceless art that folks shelter their wealth in should just be considered rented. It’s hard but not undosble if we could get unity again, it’s necessary for it. Note I don’t say it should be taxed. We should print the money necessary for everyone to have a decent standard of living as a UBI (ideally fully automated luxury communism) completely separately and unrelated to the bonfires of billionaire cash on 7/4. So many feel taxes are theft from their hard work to give to an “undeserving other.” decouple the 2, start the ubi stuff first and unrelatedly. The levels of inequality or toxic to us as a people, they divide is, and burning that cash should be a point of pride rather than resentment. It’s patriotism. We are Americans. Perhaps we could sweeten the deal by giving special honors to those who have to engage in such sacrifice - for example make Bezos the Duke of Amazon and Gates the Count of Microsoft and giving them permanent seats in the WA state legislature as an honor to recognize them for their accomplishments, service to the state, and patriotism in their sacrifice. I think it’s not the end of the world when one’s civic leaders and major employers are often aligned.
Schitt's Creek maybe? Also I think you need to qualify this as the "ultra rich" - I'm pretty sure we see the "rich" all the time in TV shows enjoying their very comfortable multi-million dollar lives ;) The show Suits comes to mind...
Most of our problems can be fixed by fixing the corruption in the systems that govern over our lives.
How do we organize against all of this rampant corruption in our systems?
A Network State - a new decentralized 4th branch of government that isn't part of the government at all, but rather 100% built and run by the people. A whole new ecosystem. This includes a decentralized news network, decentralized science, a safe have for whistleblowers, a decentralized monetary system we all agree to in case the current one collapses, decentralized debates, a parallel transparent voting system, decentralized education , ballot initiatives and more. Consider this: https://joshketry.substack.com/p/lets-build-a-4th-branch-of-government
What about the movie "Parasite"? The rich family there is portrayed as quite nice I think. You could argue it wasn't a cultural influence but it did at least won several awards and like four Oscars.
Good point. I was being Anglo-centric.
We lost a lot when people stopped viewing jealousy as a sin.
I can see why you'd feel that all wealthy people have been lumped into a general punching bag labeled "Rich & Evil." But I think throughout literary history, we've seen just as many examples of poor criminals and middle-class criminals as rich; and we do see the philanthropic rich person who, upon discovering the corruption or evil act of their family member/friend, immediately rectifies the injustice. I think there are people who choose to do bad things at every level of society, though the rich have always been able to buy their way out of repercussions. For my two cents, it's not the media that portrays the wealthy unjustly, but the fact that the corruption and lack of accountability that currently draws the public's eye in real life also draws the public eye to its fictional mirror. With shows like the limited series, Dopesick, which sheds light on the willfully widespread degradation of health that the Sackler Family caused--and continues to cause while the Sacklers in real life are legally protected from bankruptcy, (not to mention the Clarence Thomases of the world) I'm not surprised if there has been an increase in their fictional counterparts.
Apologies for over sharing, which I tend to do on Substack more and more. I’m more privileged than most, but no one would call me rich. The richest families I think I’ve ever met have a family life that I certainly don’t envy, they have revealed themselves to be either pits of vipers. But probably the best man I’ve known in my life was also one of the richest. My dad’s family were warm and kind people who came from pretty much nothing in the South and raised their 5 kids in a 900 sf house with 1 bathroom for about 30 years. Their firstborn became an accountant that had a reputation of being honest and trustworthy, and the blueblood executives he would encounter recognized this lifted him up to their level (as Vonnegut would say, they gave him a straw on the Money River) and he became the CFO of a major regional bank. He was like my surrogate dad bc they both had the same terminal illness, both had double lung transplants but my uncle’s gave him 15 more years. Not only was he a big philanthropist, funding transplants for those who couldn’t afford it, but he would do shit like go volunteer at the lowest performing schools in the most impoverished parts of Memphis to tutor poor black kids in reading after school. He was the only Democrat among his brothers and sisters and thought billionaires shouldn’t exist, as I don’t. He didn’t think folks should be allowed to have large fortunes. While I thought I might get enough to pay off my $200K student loans when he died as I knew he had been an executive, but expected little as there were something like 4 siblings, his new wife, his late wife’s many siblings, and at least 10 other nieces and nephews and a few of their children. It turned out we all were surprised, relatively late in life (I had a doctorate and 2 masters degrees at 36, he passed afterward) enough in trust that none of us will ever be homeless if we are careful and we have yo work at something to have a nice life, which divided among that many heirs meant the total sum was a pretty decent chunk of change though not billions. Imagine finding out you’re a trust fund baby at 38 after ridiculing them most of your life! It’s a weird, but healthy, sense of guilt. As a banker he was one of the ones warning against getting too involved with subprime in 08 (he had stepped back to be demoted to risk mgt VP.) he was a very small ‘c’ conservative and moral man. I would trade every asset I have to have him back in the world. He was a devout Southern Christian that loved my husband as his own and never judged me, or at least never made me feel judged, when I fucked my life up pretty bad at one point and had to go to rehab. Half of my serious relationships have been with black people, women before I came out and then my first boyfriend, and he was genuinely warm and kind to them, taking us to dinner as couples and stuff.
I will say that those who are blessed enough to leave anything significant to multiple heirs is something that can foster weird resentments if they aren’t careful to be fair, I’m glad to have worked through mine. Its a weird curse that comes with a blessing, but you can’t help but feel that the way it gets dished out is the measure of their love for you, and I realize some things are impossible to make fair. I wish that we had talked about it as a whole family before he was in a lot of pain but when he knew the end was close, because we all get along as a family, and some things that I’m sure he wasn’t thinking about turn out to be deeply unfair. Like surviving widows getting something and surviving widowers being SOL bc of old beliefs that men should work means my brother-in-law would lose the cushion he has raising their 3 children if my sister were to die, and then they would inherit less than other cousins. It’s so stupid to look at a blessing like that as something that fosters resentment, never at him but other relatives who by chance fall differently in the contracts. (I’ve encouraged my masculine as hell mechanic BIL to move to WA long enough to get declared a trans woman on his official docs just to protect him and the kids in case something were to happen to my sister.
Things like this are why rich families are often toxic, I think. Money and legal contracts are poor stand-ins for love. he loved us equally but it’s impossible to be fair in the end. God, the love I’ve been given by that side of the family. My dad died in 97 and there was never a drifting apart, our entire extended family celebrated holidays together til just a few years ago, and I won’t lie that a couple of those years I didn’t go was because some aunts and cousins who are wonderful people and always shown me love for 40 years were people that brought out unfair resentments after we had all been blessed with a windfall none of us “deserved.” We are dumb primates, the best and worst of us.
SN: that’s the opposite of how it is in academia at second-tier state schools, where the petty fights between the professors are vicious bc the spoils of winning are so small, like 10 cats fighting over a dead baby gerbil. LOL
I’m probably the only guy on Earth that doesn’t hate Bezos and thinks he’s a good guy, which this comes from having done my MBA thesis on Amazon’s corporate strategy. He was a genius, he came by it honestly, he was privileged and well to do, but Miguel Bezos was no Fred Trump. He was very lucky to have had the nature and nurture he was gifted with (an iconoclast entrepreneur but poor bio dad, parents that nurtured his education and believed in his business - but not rich enough to put many millions into it - and a maternal grandpa that was high up at Los Alamos ) and he had to cultivate the persona of acting like a frugal dick to get the shareholders to indulge him so many years of reinvesting profits in new ventures - now the cheapest way to build a business website and scale it up is AWS instead of something like Oracle. Someone could have developed Amazon e-commerce first; I’m glad it wasn’t Musk or one of the Waltons or some awful Republican that would be paying $7.25/hour in the warehouses in the South. While minimum wage should surely be double that, you can make $15 in fast food in Memphis despite the min wage of half that bc of competition for labor from the Amazon warehouse. A man who earned the love of someone for years as decent as Mackenzie is not an evil man. He took the long view, knowing Icahn would start demanding dividends were the day 1 philosophy to be abandoned. Folks accuse him of building Blue Origin so he can escape the earth he destroyed, which is not only absurd but he literally talked about his passion for space in his hs valedictory address. He comes by his wonder of space from his childhood and deserves to indulge his dream within reason. Billionaires as a group are the problem, the fact of their existence, most of the actual people are just victims of a series of accidents like the rest of us, they just happen to be lucky accidents.
That said, I think huge amounts of inequality is corrosive to a people, and we need lots more e pluribus unum in this world. It wouldn’t be workable unless folks actually came to agreement on it, but my political philosophy entails no individual owning $1,000,000,001 in any form of wealth, and all US tax returns should be public record. Either it’s seized by the government or ideally freely given out of patriotism and burned on the Fourth of July or those folks pay their workers or donate to charity to rid themselves of it. And priceless art that folks shelter their wealth in should just be considered rented. It’s hard but not undosble if we could get unity again, it’s necessary for it. Note I don’t say it should be taxed. We should print the money necessary for everyone to have a decent standard of living as a UBI (ideally fully automated luxury communism) completely separately and unrelated to the bonfires of billionaire cash on 7/4. So many feel taxes are theft from their hard work to give to an “undeserving other.” decouple the 2, start the ubi stuff first and unrelatedly. The levels of inequality or toxic to us as a people, they divide is, and burning that cash should be a point of pride rather than resentment. It’s patriotism. We are Americans. Perhaps we could sweeten the deal by giving special honors to those who have to engage in such sacrifice - for example make Bezos the Duke of Amazon and Gates the Count of Microsoft and giving them permanent seats in the WA state legislature as an honor to recognize them for their accomplishments, service to the state, and patriotism in their sacrifice. I think it’s not the end of the world when one’s civic leaders and major employers are often aligned.
Schitt's Creek maybe? Also I think you need to qualify this as the "ultra rich" - I'm pretty sure we see the "rich" all the time in TV shows enjoying their very comfortable multi-million dollar lives ;) The show Suits comes to mind...