Thought Shrapnel

This is a long-ish post, the second half of which discusses Bluesky. However, I’m more interested in the first half which talks about the ‘billionarism’ ideology which seems to have infected the world. It’s an anti-civic attitude which captures human value as financial value, and sees contributing to society as a ‘cost’.

Well kids, we live in a world built for billionaires and narcissists, and we pretty much have our whole lives. I know this isn’t news to people of awareness such as yourselves, but the proof is in the pudding now, and the pudding is on fire.

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A “billionaire” is somebody who infects themselves daily with the sick need to amass so much money that they no longer are constrained by societal demands and expectations, but rather are able to impose their own demands and expectations upon society. A billionaire utilizes this power in order to modify society so that even more money comes to them, leaving them even further above the demands and expectations of society, allowing them to impose their will over society to an even greater extent, and so on and so forth. It’s a grave sickness, billionairism—a self-inflicted one, I think I mentioned—and what’s worse is that it’s a sickness whose worst symptoms billionaires force the rest of us to suffer. That’s the first way that billionairism resembles narcissism.

And we should talk about what billionaires do. What they do is get themselves in proximity to the natural value generated by our natural human system—value created by humans simply by being human and living together in proximity to one another, the structure known as “society,” in other words, from which all possible value springs—and then steal it for themselves and only themselves. They capture certain parts of natural generative human value—some human enterprise or process or concept, something other that has been made possible only through the existence of human society, and has only become successful within that context by generating value for other humans—and use their unnaturally stolen value to own it, and then pervert it so that it increasingly stops providing value to others but only sends value to themselves. They then use the stolen value that they have hoarded all for themselves as proof that they are exceptionally valuable people. Meanwhile, there is a certain amount of that stolen value that they still have to give back in order to keep the mechanism of their theft going—an amount that they call “cost,” which they greatly resent—which they use as proof that they are the beneficent source of all value anyone receives.

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It occurs to me that nothing damages billionaires and other narcissists like human community, which is probably why they work so hard to destroy it.

Source: The Reframe

Image: Jp Valery