pinkfloydpsw's Blog

Liberals blame poverty on the poor as a justification for not feeling the pangs of their conscience, that’s a theory I have believed for a long time. It comes from a criticism of the liberal ideal made by various social theorists and given to me in a YouTube video by the great Rick Roderick.

I’m not so certain now that it isn’t deeper than guilt. You see, a compensation (I have everything, you have nothing, so you must have not tried as hard as I) would not remove the guilt nor the awareness of it. It would carry alongside, manage and mitigate. The person would be aware at some level of both the guilt, and the strategy employed to cope with it. I think there may be another way to look at this, one where guilt is not actually ever felt, where there is a deeply held belief in the proposition which allows the benefactor of the necessary conditions of chance and pre opened doors, to feel like it is ok to look upon others, others who have much less, and to completely discount the circumstances that delivered them to that condition as entirely a result of their own decisions.

I imagine that Mr’s Bezos and Musk and Zuckerberg are actually aware that they could, if they wanted to, alleviate the personal, physical, and financially based sufferings of most of the people of planet earth, that’s how colossally wealthy they are. I also imagine that these guys are aware that there is suffering in the world. So if we accept that there is suffering, and there are people who could do something about it, yet they do not in any way act, save for setting up institutions that try to solve the poverty that is a result of unfair distribution in a liberal capitalist society by employing the strategies of a liberal capitalist society, then we must resolve that they do not wish to solve these problems.

Now I ask you, what would you do if you won the lottery tomorrow and it was billions of dollars/pounds/euros? Would you go shopping, or would you solve all the problems you could for your friends, family and the area you come from? I would like to think that I would not be purely selfish if I were to have the power to make other people’s lives better with the excess of my holdings that I would likely never find a use for other than to gain further holdings. You see that is the point, the aforementioned persons could live many lifetimes over and even if they spent at an enormous rate they could not get through a fraction of what they have now, and there’s a tipping point where no matter what you do with your enormous wealth it is impossible for it not to grow, since it makes more by simply existing at such a scale. Let’s imagine now that the persons I have mentioned are all I in the same car travelling through New Orleans in 2005 just after Katrina, they might think “oh isn’t this terrible”, but they wouldn’t act. Could that be you, could you have such means and not deploy it, could you watch such extremis on TV and not set some employees to the task of going to rebuild what is broken?

Paul S Wilson