No mentally healthy person wants to rule the world.
Nobody with a functioning conscience and a working empathy center in their brain is interested in becoming a billionaire.
We are ruled by the most dysfunctional members of our species. The most wounded, neurotic and sociopathic among us. The least wise, caring and insightful.
What drives a person to claw their way to the top of a wildly sick society and become a lord of the dystopia?
What compels someone to amass obscene amounts of wealth in a world where so many have far too little?
What causes someone to ascend to political leadership of a power structure that’s built for the purpose of robbing and oppressing the most underprivileged populations on earth?
Nothing wholesome, to be sure. That impulse is never coming from anywhere good.
The worst among us are striving to prevail in this dystopia by riding the tides of its ugliest inclinations, while the best among us are striving to dismantle the dystopia and replace it with something kind and equitable. This causes the worst of us to be elevated to the top and the best of us to be smacked down to the bottom.
Under our current system the easiest way to set yourself on a trajectory from millionaire to billionaire to trillionaire is to exploit workers, crush your competition, plunder the available resources of the global south, externalize the costs of industry onto society and the ecosystem, bribe the government to advance your corporate interests via lobbying and campaign donations, contract with the most murderous military and intelligence agencies in the world, and psychologically manipulate the public into consuming products and services they don’t need.
Who is going to be most successful in this endeavor? The very worst people alive. People whose hearts and minds are so stunted and dysfunctional that they see other human beings as tools for their own personal enrichment, to be used up and discarded like juice boxes or condoms.
These are the people who are touching the most lives on this planet. These are the people whose decisions affect the most of us.
Michael Parenti has passed away after a luminous life advancing powerful ideas and insights about the abusive dynamics of human civilization and how best to address them. He did not die a wealthy man. The mainstream papers did not report on his departure from our world. Only a relatively small percentage of the population is aware he ever lived.
But everyone knows who Elon Musk is. Everyone knows who Jeff Bezos is. Who Bill Gates is.
The best of us live and die in relative obscurity, generally being subjected to scorn and derision from the ruling establishment the entire time. The worst of us become plutocratic demigods.
It’s an uphill battle. You spend your life swimming against the current of dystopia, and you are not handsomely rewarded for your efforts. You’ll get deplatformed, censored and smeared. You might even get shot by government agents for standing up for the disempowered. And you’ll definitely never be a billionaire.
But it’s absolutely worth it, and you should do it. Fighting for truth and justice in a civilization made of injustice and deceit is the only way to live. It’s the only way to feel satisfied with your efforts during this life. The only way to be sure that when you are on your deathbed you can look back and know you spent your time here in a right and admirable way.
It costs a lot to fight for a healthy world. But it costs a lot more not to.
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Caitlin Johnstone 