cross-posted from: https://wolfballs.com/post/10420
cross-posted from: https://wolfballs.com/post/10419
In St. Robert Bellarmine's "The Art of Dying Well" he reiterates the ancient Christian view that superfluous wealth, that is, wealth beyond one's reasonable needs, morally belongs to the poor: https://archive.org/details/TheArtOfDyingWell
It is thus a sin of theft to retain such wealth. It is admitted however that what is defined as being "excessive", is subjective, although some practical examples are given, which suggest that what is to be considered sufficient wealth is relatively modest. Certainly it would be reasonable for example for the father of a large family to have a certain amount of money above that of the unmarried, in order to provide for the family.
The political left frequently complains about "exploitation" of the poor and accuses the wealthy of only being wealthy due to "exploiting" the poor, or extracting value from workers that the workers ought to in justice be paid themselves. Personally, I believe this critique may be justified at times, but the teaching seems to exceed this issue and even argues that voluntarily acquired "excessive" wealth is wrong to retain, even otherwise "justly" acquired. A wealthy person has been given such wealth by God in order that they may aid the poor, is the reasoning.
We know also the Bible warns that it is more difficult for a camel to go through the eye of a needle rather than for a rich man to enter heaven (Mark 10:25). This does not exclude the rich absolutely from being able to be saved, but does indicate that superfluous wealth seems to make it much more difficult to be saved.
Thus given the preceding teachings, are not the rich ignorant of how their wealth is a danger to their soul? Ought they not to be pitied, for the difficulty they are exposed to, rather than envied? Who wishes for a more difficult life, which spiritually the rich must have?
Therefore, instead of, as the left says, that we ought to "eat the rich", perhaps we ought to pray for the rich and to inform them of the moral teaching on superfluous wealth.
How do you think this teaching applies today?
Do you think the rich ought to be pitied, rather than envied, spiritually speaking?
sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 3 years ago
I think even from a secular viewpoint there is allegorical value in this viewpoint.
The thing is, what do you need to do in order to attain excessive wealth? People envy the CEO, but that person spends decades as the Avatar of their company, watching every word and deed, even at parties or amont friends. It's giving up your life as a human to be the top manager.
It all sounds well and good, but when you are doing so much for wealth and power you're missing out on the essential human experience. You're a slave to it, you'll miss key moments with your friends and family and community. The same can happen to the poor, but they don't have a choice to stop, while the rich don't need to get always richer.
There's another worry, and that's that when you get to that point that you're making enough money to just live and do whatever you want that people lose their meaning for life. If on a day-to-day basis you have to fight someone to live, then you're going to go out and you're going to achieve and that achievement is going to give you meaning. For a lot of people, and we see this, if you get everything that you ever wanted it actually puts you into a state of despair. What do you think the biggest rock bands in the world end up with massive drug problems? Part of it you can blame on the culture of drugs in rock and roll, but I would argue if there was something better to look forward to people would and people do decide to focus on that better thing. The rock band legends, the people who inherit massive sums, even some of the Wall Street moguls, a lot of them don't have any idea about what to do with their lives. You can only do so many drugs, you can only bang so many easy women, you can only go on so many trips to the most amazing places on Earth before they are not that amazing anymore. This is called the hedonic treadmill. No matter how good your life is, eventually your happiness is going to return to a baseline.
So what you see is often three sorts of people:
The first sort of person gathers everything that they need in the world and without anything better to do they continue gathering everything in the world and then you get a Jeff Bezos.
The second person ends up getting caught in rampant hedonism, trying to find the bigger high because what's in front of him right now just isn't good enough. That's all of the people that you thought should have their lives basically taking care of for the rest of their lives and you find out that they died of a cocaine overdose.
The third sort of person is someone who realizes the folly of the first and the second, and desperately tries to find some meaning in their life besides just being rich. I think that's what we see with someone like Bill Gates, going off and trying to rid the world of polio.
It isn't necessarily so easy though.
First of all, there are people all around you all the time trying to sell you on some new religion. In the '80s a lot of these actors and actresses who had struck it big went off to become Crystal woo woo people chasing gurus and trying to align their chakras. Today, a lot of the same people have tried to cling desperately to the woke religion. These people are not philosophers, the idea of building a personal worldview in living by it I think is outside of their scope of competence.
Second of all, when you are Bill gates, or you are Steve jobs, or you are Jeff bezos, you end up putting up a force field. You have to, to survive. If you want to see why, look at the fates of a lot of lottery winners who win the lottery, have all the money in the world, and suddenly have everyone in the world coming out of the woodwork asking for a buck and within a few years they're flat broke, far worse off than they were before they'd won the lottery.
So you try to help from behind your force field. You commit a bunch of your wealth to some big organization or another. Every time you step to a podium you preach your new religion. On Twitter you proselytize and call people out and "use your platform".
Unfortunately, these new religions are perhaps very intelligent, but they're not very wise. From a secular standpoint, Christianity has had 2,000 years to sand off all the hard edges and come up with answers to the hard questions. Had 2,000 years of some of the smartest people in history devoting their lives to trying to come up with answers to questions that a 40-year-old woke religion simply can't answer.
Even then, Christianity is no panacea. We do see people who are filthy rich, incredibly successful, and practice humility at home, and it sure seems to me like those people stay under the papers and seem to be a lot happier.
Problem is eventually you forget that you can't pay someone else to hold your firstborn son for you and get any personal satisfaction out of that. You've got to get out there and do the work with your own two hands, and a lot of people who have made it big don't remember what that looks like. It is a bit of a curse.