Having spent most of the day recovering from a borderline migraine, this one is going to be short, even though much more could be said about it, and it will indeed be expanded upon in the future.

Money and ownership. If we were able to divorce the two, I think society could make progress. “Make progress” is a vague and trite phrase that makes me sound like Miss America, to be sure, but I was rethinking a point I’d made in an op-ed I’d written about coronavirus, a point that brought up the idea of a society without money. And in another of my blog posts I wrote about wondering how it would be to live in a society where money wasn’t the sole determinant of our access to the things we want & need. Because the idea of a neutral universal currency is good in theory, but then, doesn’t too much rest on it? How can basic things like food, healthcare, and housing be relegated to the realm of money, when the current system has so many measures in place that prevent some from getting money and enable others, through such arbitrary factors as the family one was born into, the opportunities one had growing up, and the like?

I was thinking, for those of us who aren’t rich, we have to work like hell to get money, and non-negotiably at that. Naturally we feel defensive and protective over our money, and like we own it. I’m not criticizing that attitude; I think it’s a logical result. But, I do think this is what entraps us in the cycle too, because again it’s something that benefits the rich at the expense of everyone else. In the sense of: ‘If we make money scarce and obligatory for most of society, then most of society will have to become money-chasing just to survive, and very reluctant to give up their money once they get it – much more possessive of money. In this way we can reinforce the system of money, because people being protective and defensive about it implicitly defends the system too; it makes it not open to being changed.’

I had posted a reflection to Instagram recently, occasioned by this Tweet that said, “Jeff Bezos is worth 156 billion dollars. The UN requires just 4 billion to rectify famine in Yemen. He has enough money to pay this many times over and still be the richest person in the world. The existence of billionaires is a stain on humanity.” It got me thinking. In a system where the amount of money is fixed, all wealth is wealth redistribution. As in, we don’t “earn” money, we receive it from the system, via whatever steps we take (working). The way people talk about “making” money, you’d think it was being generated out of thin air, but it’s really being recycled. Remember that website that allows you to register a U.S. dollar and to track how far it travels? The dollar is stamped with the website URL, and every time it falls into the hands of someone new, they read that and have the option of looking up the dollar and registering where it is now, to add to the timeline.

Words are important, so when we say “making money” to mean ‘earning or receiving money’, it perpetuates that idea, that we make money of our own accord, obfuscating the true nature of the movement of money through our system.

It also reminds me of this lyric from a song, Paid in Full, by the renowned lyricist Rakim, a rapper:

I used to roll up, this is a hold up, ain’t nothing funny

Stop smiling, be still, don’t nothing move but the money

Context is that he’s reminiscing on his past as a “stick-up kid”, someone who would rob folks, and this is describing one such situation. “Don’t nothing move” is a double entendre, according to Genius (the website where the lyrics are posted and people leave annotations). It means for the person he’s holding up to not move, but also:

“Rakim is referring to the fact that he has zero chance for social mobility in this situation. While the money will ‘move’ (change hands), and he will become nominally richer, he will not acquire any of the social benefits of having it because it has been acquired illegitimately.”

I thought that was super interesting when I read it. Even when I heard the line. Nothing moves but the money. There’s a lot to be said there for money, the movement of it, the transfer of it.

Anyway, back to my reflections on Bezos. I had then gone on to post this tidbit I’d hastily written a while back:

“Status depends on salary (song lyric) = the pursuit of status is the pursuit of money = money corrupts = any pursuit of status is tied in with the desire to ascend to the upper tiers of society and maintain self-congratulatory affectations, spout platitudes about hard work and benevolence while benefiting off power structures that oppress poor people.

I pursue money insofar that I want to make enough money to get by and satisfy what I consider my needs (including luxuries). But I don’t pursue money because I believe a millionaire status or something such would make me happy etc.

If money wasn’t the sole determinant of access to the things we both want & need, also, it would be easier for us to be less guarded about it, and harder to be so resentful of government programs that require our money.”

Now that, though a bit redundant with some of the points I’ve made prior in this post, says most of what I wanted to say. Billionaires and such didn’t make all their own money; that money isn’t theirs. It’s the system’s. They accrued it from other people. For example, Bezos getting his money through people who buy things off his website Amazon. So they don’t have some intrinsic, natural right to it. They don’t have an innate ownership over it. It’s only considered theirs for so long as it’s in their possession, and then someone else’s once it’s transferred over. His workers who get paid (badly) are probably paid from that pool of money of his.

So then how can it be considered immoral to take that wealth and redistribute it in the interest of society? It’s not really his. And surely an objective third party might have a better way of handling the money than someone who’s determined to keep it at all costs, to the detriment of everyone else.

Isn’t that sad? When you really think about it? That someone can hoard all this wealth under the illusion that they earned it and they deserve it, while people suffer from lack of money? What kind of person is he, do you think? Because he probably sincerely has fooled himself into believing this—believing that people deserve to go without food, housing, and healthcare, and that he deserves to hoard so much of the system’s money, preventing it from mobility that it could one day reach those people or at least revitalize the economy (by having money flowing through it), for no other reason than that he wants to.

No matter what anyone says, those who are ludicrously wealthy—and choose to remain so—lack a basic form of empathy. I don’t know where it gets extinguished somewhere down the line, because surely we were all children once, happy and sweet and not fixated on making money by taking it from others. By which I mean, by whatever clever steps Bezos took, he got all that money, and he probably considers it sufficient reward for his cleverness, for having figured out how to milk the system. And you will see no shortage of people defending that, the myth of the self-made man, the hard worker, etc. But why should that be the metric for your survival? Why should you need to learn how to milk the system in order to deserve to live?

The only consolation I can offer is that if the empathy was extinguished, then perhaps there is a way in which it can be incited again. But I don’t know. I’ve never met someone so wealthy.