Greed Is Good..?
"If you ever thought that the guy driving a late-model Mercedes is more of a jerk than the one behind the wheel of a battered Honda, you’d be right." This sentence is from a Time Magazine article from 2012, and in it we find an explanation of why rich people are less ethical.
Image by City Caucus - source: Flickr
This old article has gained renewed relevance since it was reported last month that rich people have been accused of the largest college admission scam ever. Wealthy parents, Hollywood actresses and coaches among others have payed up to 6.2 million dollar to get their kids into prestigious universities. Fifty people in total were charged, 33 of which were parents:
The parents, Lelling said, were a "catalog of wealth and privilege," including actors, CEOs, a fashion designer and the co-chairman of a global law firm.
source: CNN
To get a nice and easy introduction to this college-admissions scandal (if you've missed it), please go to this Vanity Fair article and watch the Seth Meyer clip there.
Really, it's the insanity of the privileged; somehow these people feel some form of entitlement, they feel that their position on the social ladder, which they and many others perceive to be "upper class", gives them the right to claim even more privileges. It's remarkable how these same people often rage against paying more taxes, especially against the "free hand-outs" financed by those taxes, for the lower classes with the argument of this being a meritocracy. That would be funny indeed if it wasn't so devious; "meritocracy" is, as this case clearly indicates, something that was made up to justify the existing social hierarchy. They have a strange interpretation of the term "meritocracy," unless you want to go by the values expressed in the saying "if you're not cheating, you're not trying"...
Several studies have shown that this feeling of entitlement is closely connected to rich people's views about greed, which they think is good. For them society is just another well for them to extract value from:
While stereotypes suggest that poor people are more likely to lie and steal, new research finds that it’s actually the wealthy who tend to behave unethically.
source: Time
Rich people are more likely to lie, cheat, steal or otherwise bend the laws to their advantage, because their entitled position has made them feel the law must be wrong if it goes against what's rightfully theirs, in their own minds of course. Not all our natural tendencies are good, and the hierarchical structure that results from the mechanisms of capitalism aren't natural to begin with, and "greed" is not what's implied by Darwin's theory of evolution when he talks about "survival of the fittest." Greed is not good. Greedy people are not good people. A society based on greed, one that has normalized greed to the extent that not only the rich, but also many others truly believe in greed's beneficial attributes, is not a good society. If a society chooses its role models from the ranks of their most successful members... I'll let you finish that sentence. I just hope you don't believe a word of Gordon Gecko's immortal words:
Gordon Gekko 'Greed is Good' Trade like a Pro
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