It’s an old canard that the richest among us come to believe they “earned” it through hard work. But most owe their wealth to inheritance, then its growth from passive investments, or disaster capitalism. The current version of disaster is the COVID-19 crisis that drove down Dow Jones stock to fire-sale low prices such that when stocks rebounded, the already rich got richer with the restored value.
Self-delusion can lead a person to believe the lie about effort-based gains. Or it can be explained by cognitive dissonance theory. Assuming the super rich person has a conscience and knows the reality that the wealth is unconscionable given the hardships that millions of other Americans experience, that belief is incompatible with the status that wealth gives a person in our society. In other words, guilt follows. To assuage the guilt (cognitive “tension” between the competing beliefs needs to be reduced), the person drops the privately held belief trigged by the moral conscience. No one knew that private notion anyway. The abandonment of guilt allows one to comfortably conclude that one’s grander status is deserved and guilt-free.
Bezos who sits on top of the top rung “made” an additional $34.6 billion; Zuckerberg picked up a tidy sum of $25 billion. Remarkably, these gains happened in a 2-month period, mid-March to mid-May, 2020. A contemporaneous event, the virus lockdown, displaced approximately 40 million non-billionaire American workers (don’t hear much about them, do you?). Earned income? Actually the tax code considers it capital gains and it is taxed at a LOWER rate than income. Ain’t it great to be super rich? (Rhetorical question only.)
Here’s why the filthy rich don’t give a rat’s ass about the masses that took to the streets to demand, at first, cessation of police brutality evolving into the call for America to honor its promise of equality as enshrined in our founding documents, the U.S. “mission” statement.
There’s a difference between equity and equality.
Equity is accomplished when the ratio of inputs (effort, work, contributions) to outcomes (pay, status, recognition) is close to 1.0. That is, they match. Bullied targets who expect fairness and distributive justice focus on equity. They believe if they work really hard and competently, their work ethic and skills will be recognized. In other words, their outcomes will match their contributions in terms of effort. However, the world is not fair. Bullied targets, as the best and brightest workers, are singled out for abuse BECAUSE of their work ethic and quality productivity. Bullying is a state of inequity, unfairness.
Back to rich people. Because of the rationalizations described above, they believe that the world is fair. They sit atop the financial pyramid because of their efforts. Why are they rich? Their explanation is that it’s an equitable world rewarding “hard work” leading to unbelievable wealth. As the lyric says in “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof, “when you’re rich, they think you really know.” The rich believe they are smart. Stable geniuses?
The protestors demand equality. They want their slice of the economic pie. That is, 60% of the population should have 60% of the wealth. In reality, in the U.S. with the worst income inequality in the world, those 60% (197 million Americans) have the same wealth of only 600 rich Americans.
See the difference? The have-nots seek equality, relying on the undelivered American promises. The rich will rationalize hoarding with equity arguments. They would not be so rich if they had not “deserved” it.
That deservedness is still another American myth that must fall, along with systemic racism and disaster capitalism.
