What do you think is the mindset of the banally evil?
There was a question on reddit about whether rich people ever think about all the poor and starving people who are suffering while they live in luxury. It got me thinking about the "rich" more broadly, as many of the people like me who are on the internet are part of the global 1% if not the local.
I think a lot of rich people dont like to think about the idea that maybe the truly morally right thing to do would be to give up all their money and work a day job like everyone else.
So they try to avoid thinking about it at all to avoid having to constantly feel guilty about not doing the thing they know is right. Making a contribution to helping others just opens you up to other people or even your own conscience saying you could be doing more, and youll never be able to do enough to fully justify not doing so. Or alternatively you can embrace selfishness and give up on constantly trying to be a better person and never have to think about it again.
Maybe its easy to look at some billionaire and say they could lose 1/2 their money and not notice any change in their lifestyle, so they should be considered morally contemptable for not even offering a fraction of that when it could make such a difference for so many. But somewhere between that and living in poverty, there has got to be some line where your right to take care of yourself and your right to try and invest in your own future stops outweighing the shame of allowing the evils of the world to go unchallenged.
Then there is a fuzzy region around that line where its ambiguous whether you are doing enough good in the world or if you should feel morally compelled to change how you are living your life. And I think its probable the for a lot of people the place where they envision all their dreams coming true is somewhere on the negative end of the spectrum. So if your dream is to be a famous movie star, for example, at some point that dream might not be compatible with your moral imoerative to oppose classism.
Personally I hate having to work an office job. If I got the chance to make a fortune Id build a cabin in the woods and have food delivered to me and never have to deal with anything ever again. But doing so would be selfish. So I guess if I ever had the opportunity Id be corrupted by riches in a heartbeat. Which is kind of a downer of an ending to this line of thought.
The "banality of evil" goes beyond just class. A dirt poor person can do evil for banal purposes. Think about how many people are charged for assault on a weekend because "that dude looked at me funny," or "he looked like a fag, so I just punched him because I hate those people." So much evil is done for stupid reasons by stupid people.
I would say that the "banality of evil" when it comes to the rich is a bit more complex. Once someone is into the millions or billions of having money, they are not thinking about money in terms of how many mansions it can purchase them, but rather "how can I protect myself?" Once you get into the multi-millions amount of net worth, people will be gunning for you for both legitimate and illegitimate reasons and the only way to protect yourself more is by having more money. Once you're in the billionaire category, you have to contend with the fact that the majority of humanity despises you not necessarily for who you are as a person, but for what you have. And the only way you can protect yourself from them is to have more money. It's the same reason why once someone becomes a dictator of a country, they can never give up the reigns of power because the moment they do, everyone is out to kill them for the actions they had to take to become a dictator.
I disagree with this point. I think you're thinking of publicly disliked billionaires, the Musks, Bezos, and Zuckerbergs. People hate them, but not because of their wealth - well maybe also because of their wealth - but mostly because they are wreaking havoc on society. Have you ever gone to the Sun Valleys, Pebble Beaches, or Hamptons of the world? They are quiet oasis away from the rabble and squalor of life. People hate the "idea" of a billionaire, I'm decidedly in that camp. But I don't believe there are people "gunning" for them. I've been lucky enough to receive fellowships from groups funded by the billionaire class and have spent a good deal of time hob-knobbing with them so they can see "their money at work". Most live very, very normal lives; be it lives of extreme comfort and privilege. They don't require additional protection, they aren't quiet about the amount of money they make, they don't seem to have any different base needs that you or I might. And I don't immediately hate them, they often bring that on themselves as they explain my own field to me, wax poetic on the depth of their charity and empathy, or are just generally pricks to all that they interact with. But some are lovely.
I agree that many wealthy people aren’t driven to accumulate more by security concerns. I’d expect that there are still security concerns, even if they don’t show it. Consider that some people get harrassed a lot more than others online. Being a beautiful or outspoken woman will do that, but so will fame if you’re sufficiently interesting and have a high enough profile. And then it might happen in real life, not just online.
Most people aren’t going to do anything, but there are crazy people. There are also scammers who target the newly wealthy, just like there are scammers who prey on the elderly.
Winning the lottery is enough to be interesting. Advice for lottery winners is a whole genre. I don’t know how true it is, but the advice is to be seriously paranoid. You know all the advice about protecting your privacy? Consider that celebrities need it as much as anyone.
Being either boring or not online will certainly help, to some extent. People won’t talk about being targeted because that makes you interesting, and that might make it worse. You don’t want to look vulnerable. You can keep a low profile.
I assume people who are born to it are culturally acclimated to avoid some security risks, maybe without thinking about it along those lines? Maybe just being in a wealthy neighborhood is security enough, most of the time? People will hang out where they’re comfortable and avoid “bad” neighborhoods that seem normal to those who live there. Or maybe it’s not getting taken advantage of by people who work for you by relying on recommendations and avoiding the wrong sort of people?
Sure, I'm just replying to the lead commenter's assertion that the behavior and attitude of self preservation doesn't seem to be founded in my own experience, nor is it reflected in the data. Take this next section with a grain of salt, but I believe these beliefs are generally projection. Forgive the pop-science, but the billionaire class is filled with a spectrum morally that slants towards sociopathic and narcissistic. If that is true, people who are comfortable stealing/hurting/violating others will likely assume that your average person would do the same; and acting on that perception invest in "protecting themselves". I just think it's a crock.
Secondly, most folks don't know who is and who isn't a billionaire. There are 2,781 billionaires in the world, if you can name one that isn't constantly in the public eye I'd be surprised.
I don’t see how this matters for criminal activity. Scammers and criminals can target people of a certain type without knowing who they are, no fame required. It has nothing to do with what the “average” person would do.
Also, in general, the risks people worry about often have little to do with their actual risks in an objective sense. People worry all the time about stuff that’s very unlikely, and blithely accept risks that they probably should do something about. Perception isn’t reality.
I don't think we're too far off of each other's perspective. Perception is not reality. The original comment explained that the banality of evil is more complex for wealthy folks, and seemingly more justified, because people are purposely targeting the very very wealthy. I disagree and believe we have a system that already overly protects them. I'm not saying that the wealthy don't perceive more risk, I'm just saying that I think it's bunk and completely unfounded particularly based on the available data. I'm honestly surprised that people are defending these folks so generously.
Yeah, I don't think we're too far off. My goal isn't so much to defend the rich as to complicate some stereotypes with additional possibilities.
One argument I can make for security measures is: why do banks have more security? Because that's where the money is. Also, leaders have more security to guard against assassination attempts.
This can be intersectional, too. Many wealthy people are old and frail and maybe more easily confused. They might not leave the house much, but they're more at risk from scams targeting the elderly. Or children of rich people could be kidnapping targets. They're different, sometimes more obscure risks. Some risks might look like new friends or investment opportunities.
But I think more security (which money can buy) probably does result in less risk, after considering the security measures. There's a reason murder mysteries take place in settings with a lot of rich people around: it's more fun to think about those kinds of risks. It doesn't mean they're common.
I very much doubt the existence of 'ethical billionaires'. To me, having that extra dollar when someone else is without it goes against my morality. What gives me the right to have that extra dollar when someone else might be in desperate need of it and now would be starving.
This is sort of like believing that yours is the only true religion and all the others are fake.
In some sense it’s expected, because you do believe in your own ethics and not the others, but it’s generally a good idea to assume that other people believe in their own ethics too. They might consider themselves ethical by their own standards.
it's a belief for a reason, not fact :) I very much acknowledge other ideas existing.
I hope I'm not misunderstanding, but I'm not saying there are any ethical billionaires - just some that aren't pricks to be around. I agree that if you've aggregated that kind of wealth you're plundering it from somewhere else.
To some degree that pressure to move up exists at the lower states of financial wellbeing, too. Most obviously the low end up through the middle feel pressure to do better just to survive, but some percentage of current low-end millionaires got to where they are because even though they had been doing ok prior, they felt pressure to accumulate more to be able to better weather the various storms of life, give their kids a head start, and/or to be able to have a comfortable retirement. I’d bet that a good number of these people aren’t even particularly fond of money, but have a hard time arguing with the security that’s afforded by being in the possession of a large sum of cash.
This is where some of the fuzziness that the OP mentions comes into play. How much is too much? When does saving for the sake of avoiding hardship and/or planning for the future begin to tread into the territory of selfishness?
I'm thinking of the relatively recent admissions scandal, where wealthy people who weren't quite wealthy enough to get their kids into an elite school via donation went the fraud route instead.
In a lot of ways, those are the same thing.
Humans are very, very good at avoiding cognitive dissonance. We make rationalizations for pretty much everything, and reconcile even mutually exclusive details with relative ease. Confronting our biases is uncomfortable. Wealth buys you comfort.
And that, I think, is the crux of it. Once people are a certain sort of rich they don't have to do anything truly uncomfortable, and that includes confronting the reality of their own impact upon the world. If they want to feel good about it, there's charity. If they want people to tell them literally anything to make them feel good, there are plenty of folks who will butter their bun just how they'd prefer. A Christmas Carol had the fantasy of a rich man being confronted with the impact of his presence on the world, and the consequences of his evil; even then it took the crushing weight of suffering he had caused combined with the reality of his own mortal existence to convert him over. His continuing rationalizations are an excellent example of how people bend the world to make it more palatable to them.
The fantasy element in that story is the overwhelming external force that forbids those rationalizations, meticulously crushing them one by one with omnipotent ruthlessness. Absent that, there's not much hope for Tiny Tim.
I suspect the only 'overwhelming external force' we have at hand that would be capable of forbidding such rationalizations is one of the psychedelic drugs. But it would take a massive realignment of our society's values to make widespread use of psychedelics the norm, and there's no guarantee even then that they would find their way to the rich and powerful who 'need' these drugs the most, or that they would have any impact on those of them that are psychopaths (who in my experience seem immune to the ego-modulating effects of these drugs).
I think this whole situation is challenging because avoiding cognitive dissonance goes much deeper than simply being comfortable. Avoidance of cognitive dissonance was probably one of the biggest challenge humans had to make after evolving to be able to think about things abstractly, probably in tandem with the advent of language. Suddenly we were, as a species, able to think about ourselves from a third-person perspective, forecast future events, reason about likelihoods - and with these ingredients, were ushered into the presence of death: the idea that yes, you too will one day die, for certain.
Lower animals are also aware of death, but only when a tiger jumps out of the bushes. Their sympathetic nervous system snaps into gear, cortisol skyrockets, they run for their lives. If they manage to run to outrun the tiger, they cease to understand death - if it's not in front of them, they don't have the faculties to abstractly conjure the notion of it. So the physiological changes reverse, and they peacefully eat plants by the riverside and take a nap.
Humans, who suddenly had an avenue for 24-hours-a-day death awareness, ran into a real problem. Anything could make you think of death - any instance of illness, age, death, decay etc. that are ever-present in the world. Hell, even eating entails destroying living things! And through reason, the mind can easily convert these stimuli to the realization of one's own mortality. The sympathetic nervous system snaps into gear, cortisol skyrockets, but you can't run for your lives, there's no way to avoid a death that is coming by definition. And these physiological changes are okay for the short-term, but the organism can't withstand death's constant presence.
The quickest solution was to simply deny these thoughts somehow. Some humans could do this - inventing afterlives, spirits, living gods, magic, etc. Those who couldn't, suffered from constant death anxiety and were less likely to survive. As a result, we have inherited a capability for inventing, lying, and ignoring thoughts in order to avoid cognitive dissonance. The task of resolving cognitive dissonance isn't so simple as taking a slightly more rational approach to the facts. We're fighting the brain here, an organ with (approx.) a million years of practice at avoiding the truth.
I don’t think you (or anyone who has posted so far) has been around rich people? You’re making an assumption that they feel about it the same way you would. I’ve only been around some rich people and generally not the wealthiest, but I can say a few things:
There’s another term for someone who is rich enough to not have to work, and that’s “retired.” Retirement is something many people plan for and work towards. For someone who worked for many years to save for retirement and always thought it was good when their net worth went up, it would be an unusual change of heart to feel that they don’t deserve their retirement once they get there. They generally don’t think it’s wrong to succeed at that, even if, through a windfall, it happens sooner than they expected.
On the other hand, there are cases where it happens rather suddenly - I first encountered this during the dot-com boom where very young people lucked out due to working for the right company. Sometimes they did feel it was wrong that they suddenly had so much money when friends and family don’t. (There were some interesting articles written back then about people in that situation. Maybe try to find them?)
But, generally, though they might think it’s weird, they don’t feel personally to blame for the situation. It’s the system, right? It wasn’t up to them. You might feel that life is obviously pretty unfair. Some people are given money they didn’t earn through working longer or harder, out of luck. But they don’t feel any more guilty about having the money than a lottery winner would.
The question, then, is what to do about it. Some people do start giving away a lot of money. They might give it to family, or to charities that they like. Few people feel so guilty that they think they shouldn’t decide for themselves how to donate to charity.
Another thing to realize is that for many people, money is security. It’s pretty tough to give that up because you never know what you’ll need when you’re older and in poor health. This is especially true if you have family, because who knows what family members might need?
So, the easiest thing to do is to procrastinate, to say that you will give more money away, but later, when you’re sure it’s safe. Maybe put it in your will?
Some people might decide to keep working, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they gave away so much money that they have to work. It can go the opposite way: I know people who could retire but don’t, because they like their job well enough, and they don’t feel secure enough to leave it. If you’ve had the mindset of financial insecurity all your life, you might never feel secure no matter how much money you have. Someone in that situation might feel very stressed about the possibility of a large expense, even if they could well afford it.
So one answer to your question is that when someone thinks they should keep working, maybe they will? That’s separate from deciding what to do with their money.
Also, psychological attitudes towards money are very complicated and often seem irrational to others. They depend on your whole life history, not just your current situation.
Youre right, Ive never been around a rich person, unless I count myself and people like me rich.
Which is kind of a matter of perspective. I live in America but my parents are immigrants from a place that didnt even have electric lighting until I was like 20.
Compared to my family living in my parents native country, I am very rich.
To someone like Lebron James, not so much.
Data also shows that higher-income people actually work significantly longer hours.
I mean. Are not we in the same situation but just a smaller version? We can let go of all the middle class luxuries we have (like Internet or whatever) and live as frugally or cheaply as possible and help someone poorer than us live better. Some people feel inclined to do it and maybe make donations here or there but at the end of the day someone else is richer than us and could make a bigger difference.
This hits part of the answer.
I think a lot of lefties (including a younger version of myself) think that rich people giving away their money would improve things for everyone else. But if Bill Gates should give his money away to the lower and middle class Americans, shouldn't the lower and middle class Americans also turn around and give their money to the destitute children in Central America?
As you get older and lose that knee jerk anger at the system though, you realize it's more complex than that. Bill Gates has done more good using his money to run his foundation and build his business than he would have been able to do by simply giving it away. Look at the good his foundation has done. Think of how much technological progress has been enabled by the existence of Windows computers - the COVID vaccine alone has saved millions of lives and it would have never happened without advanced computer software. That's just one vaccine for one disease.
Clearly we need to slow inequality. We need to ensure that rising tides lift all ships. Oftentimes our rising tides sink the small ships and I do think that various forms of wealth redistribution and well-regulated capitalism will help with these things. But it's not as simple as giving all the money away. When the wealthy create good jobs and help increase our quality of life, they are probably doing the best thing they can do with their money. It's a problem when they act purely out of greed and wreck lives to get rich though.
It's the classic argument of philanthropic billionaires vs. government spending. Nominally, you could achieve the same ends by taxing billionaires to accumulate the same revenue and using government spending to fund anti-malaria programs or research into ALS treatments. However,
Note that all the above is fairly specific to research funding and not, for example, medical spending or transportation upkeep. Democratic control of those seems to put forth better outcomes compared to research.
Yes, very much so. There is a philosopher named Peter Singer who wrote about that in the context of those pop ups that ask you to donate to charity at grocery stores. His argument was that the marginal cost of that donation is not a substantial burden on you, but the good it brings to the beneficiaries is immense. So he argues that you should always do it, even if its an annoyance.
If we take that to be true, then theres no need for some external influence to prompt you to donate. You could donate $1 to charity every day. And on a marginal basis, its not much more of a burden to donate $2, or maybe $3. So it seems to me that if this line of moral reasoning holds then you should ultimately donate whatever excess you have to the point that you live a modest but survivable life.
If I were to do that though, I would never be able to retire. Id have to keep working until I was physically unable to and either qualify for some kind of financial aid or make a family to take care of me. Maybe thats whats fair and ethical, though and just the unfortunate reality is that you dont morally deserve to never work while other people in the world still have to.
Privileged people believe some myths that ensure their privileges are protected, and the oppressed people are continued to be oppressed. They are self-serving myths that ensure hierarchies (which position them at the top) are protected.
A common myth is that they got to where they are without any benefits from the way the system is structured. Broadly speaking, this is true for rich or better-off people, racial or ethnic majorities, religious majorities, cishet people, men. They attribute their success entirely to their own effort, while the hierarchies actually do play important roles.
Another myth is that, since they got to where they are without any help, it's the fault of the oppressed people, actually, that they live in awful conditions. So it's ok to continue to oppress them (you can look up just world hypothesis for further understanding).
A third myth is that this arrangement is actually beneficial for the oppressed people, because they don't know how to do shit (remember that they are too bad-charactered or stupid or something like that to be successful). Privileged people, actually, take care of them. So, the oppressed should actually be thankful. Be thankful they "created" jobs!
There are other myths, too, like stab in the back myths, but I don't think they are very relevant in this context.
An important thing is that these people in question, for the most part, don't change their beliefs when presented with better, more true narratives. Their beliefs, since birth, are structured in a way to ignore the plight of the people that are oppressed for their benefit. So they Otherize these groups and lack empathy for them, for they are the out-group.
These beliefs are all right-wing beliefs. Because I subscribe to the idea that right-wing is about protecting or enacting hierarchies, while the left is about abolishing them. This is why privileged people, like rich people, generally demonize leftists. This makes it easy to ignore criticisms coming from the left, which constitute the majority of the hard-hitting criticisms.
This.
You can't get into the billionaire territory without exploitation and generally doing evil things. That's simply not possible.
And when you have billions, it is not only the money that is the problem, it is the political power.
They get into billion territory by bending laws to their benefit. They can pay fines without any problem and it is just a dent in their net worth so they can get away with abusive working conditions and plain slavery as we see often here in Brazil cases of slave labour that gets caught and the company still exists.
These people are billionaires because they were born in the right family who have a pretty shitty past.
Now, I'm not saying a millionaire who started with a small supermarket is inherently evil. I'm talking about people who approach billions and if they stop working they will live just fine.
Billionaires are born in an environemnt that perpetuates that mindset and for them that is the truth. They won't even touch some books and ideas and just demonize them as we can see the red scare that is perpetuated daily in every media coming from the USA. Every single movie and TV show I watch has red scare built into it. It's baffling.
The system needs to be overthrown so we can end this. Billionaires shouldn't be hanged upside down (at least not all of them), but the means to be a billionaire should be extinguished.
I've probably read that a hundred times online, and it doesn't get more convincing with repetition. It seems to be an article of faith.
I doubt I'll change your mind, but I'll still ask: do you think every wealthy celebrity entertainer or athlete got where they are by doing unethical things? Or what about inherited wealth?
Some businesses scale really well, when someone was in the right place at the right time.
I think a good, recent example of someone who's struck the perfect intersection of incredibly hard worker + incredibly smart + impossibly right time, right place is Jensen Huang, net worth $105bn, who had the vision of positioning NVIDIA's GPUs for the AI boom.
I do think that, however, the US is a place where someone can become a billionaire through technical innovation (Jensen Huang) or entertainment (Taylor Swift). In many places, like Russia or Brazil, those paths aren't so available, so the primary path to billionaire status is through labor and environmental exploitation and corrupt dealings with/within the government.
A lot of this thinking seems to come from an idea that wealth and money are a zero sum game and that someone being richer than you is inherently taking away something from someone else. But that largely isn’t how economics works.
Yes trickle down economics is bunk and just an excuse to cut taxes for the rich, but it is true that innovation and technology is the way we have created developed societies that can provide unimaginable wealth for the average person of these countries beyond what even the most wealthy and powerful could even hope to have just a few hundred years ago.
Pretty much anyone reading this is so incredibly wealthy compared to the poorest people alive today or 99% of humanity that came before us, splitting hairs about who is really more wealthy than who and who is personally morally responsible for the poor is kind of moot.
A billionaire spending every last cent on feeding a poor nation might seem like a morally right and good thing to do but what happens when that money runs out? People just go back to starving? Individual action will not save the poor, they need functional systems, governments, and societies that are not magically created by dropping in a bunch of money. If anything dumping a bunch of cash into these places if done in the wrong way will prevent proper institutions from forming and prop up horrible, corrupt government and institutions on the ground.
If you think the richest have too much money, properly tax them and create systems that outlive the good will of any one person. But putting some kind of moral evil into rich people and saying they need to have the personal responsibility to end the ills of the world is, in my view, not a useful way to approach these problems.
The system creates billionaires as a side effect of producing things that people want. If Jeff Bezos gave up all his money, the system would keep creating billionaires. If that’s not what we want we should adjust the system while being very careful not to break the very thing that has made most of us unimaginably rich compared to just a few generations ago. Given how lacking a lot of us feel, we need to keep this thing running until we can actually provide for everyone’s needs in a sustainable, systemwide way. Because even though the wealthy are probably too wealthy, we won’t get the whole way there just by redistributing what currently exists. And we certainly won’t solve systems problems by abdicating our ability to actually solve problems by creating better systems and institutions rather than lazily blaming rich people and their supposed moral failings for the ills of the world.
I think you might enjoy the The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K LeGuin.
I think it's a pretty apt allegory of what your addressing. While the rich, particularly the uber rich and those who benefit from immense generational wealth, have an extremely oversized hand in the banality of evil we're all culpable. We all buy cloths/products that are likely the source of misery - from terrible working conditions to those who make the goods, to the environmental damage wrought in growing the material for them, to the excess in which we consume them. I believe these systems are tolerated because of how opaque they have been made by the producers - sending jobs overseas to areas with little voice or visibility - to obscure the impacts of what we do. In forestry and logging we have clear cuts that leave tiny 1-2 meter buffer strips to prevent people from seeing the square miles of barren earth. For food, many of the products are so detached from their origin that not only do we not know where it comes from or who grew it, in some cases we don't even know what it is. Today, that banality is sustained just because of how structural it is to our society. Unless you're wealthy enough to purchase goods locally from known producers and you have the time to figure out who those folks are and how to get it from them, it's kind of impossible to opt out of the system.
I think "voting" with your dollars is important: buying from farmers markets, doing research on fashion brand ethics before buying, research fisheries before buying, avoiding delivery apps that prey on desperate folks and erode our labor rights, or generally considering the impact of what fuels/transports/delights you. I think being kind to yourself is also important, particularly if you don't have the financial stability to make those decisions. We are not the ones who created this system, but we are the ones who sustain it. I believe if you can help move us in a different direction, and have the resources to do so, there is some moral obligation to do so. But when you can't, there is no need to feel guilty all the time about living in a fucked up system.
I don't know. Hyper-fast fashion companies like Shein and Fashion Nova are taking over America with $9 dresses and $12 jeans. It's very well-known and reported that they exploit workers, are environmentally-unfriendly (those razor thin margins can't tolerate environmental protections), and almost certainly use materials that were produced using forced prison labor somewhere in the supply chain.
Americans buy them not because they're forced to wear a $9 dress or be naked and cold in the streets. But because they like that they can buy lots of clothing for almost nothing, wear them a few times and look cute, and then throw them out for the next season, and rinse and repeat.
It takes a real idiot to believe that a dress can be made and sold for $9 (with the costs of 'free' shipping and returns built in too) without shortcuts being taken somewhere.
Every American can afford to buy $100+ dresses and jeans that are produced ethically and sustainably. It would mean, however, not being able to buy a new wardrobe every season to keep up with the new trendy 'in' color, and instead owning a small wardrobe like our grandparents did: they'd own only a few outfits and mend and maintain them.
Evil comes from not caring.
Honestly, from what I've read about the economic situation of many Americans, I actually doubt that.
Admittedly my perspective is somewhat removed from their situation, coming from a decently well of family in Germany, but considering a shockingly high percentage of Americans have no savings, I think a lot suffer from the effects of the Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
Disposable incomes for Americans, even low-income ones, are extremely high by global standards. The US is a bit weird: Americans experience high levels of education and medical debt, but Americans will also spend a lot on goods like electronics, clothing, and automobiles.
The average American household spends nearly $2,000 a year on apparel (in 2022), according to the BLS. In a 5-year period, that's $10,000. Quality clothes, with mending and care, can last 5+ years.
In 2018, the average American bought 68 pieces of clothing. That figure is likely higher now (as the number has been trending upwards for decades, and clothing is even cheaper now).
The average is a long way away from "every", and if your goal is to prove that lots of Americans can afford it, it's better to use the median. Someone buys a $10,000 wedding dress and four people buy nothing and that group has spent $2,000 on clothing on average.
Maybe? I mean, you're talking about a pretty big systemic change and then asking 300 million Americans to all agree to make it simultaneously.
I don't think you can wear the same dress to work every day for a year and keep your job. Nevermind the fact that it would get destroyed and isn't appropriate for all weather.
Fast fashion is a huge problem but a lot of Americans do genuinely struggle to afford clothing for them and their families. It's hard to affordably clothe multiple family members in a country that almost demands a certain standard for working and middle class people.
You can make it your life mission and explain to employers, your brother's wedding guests, friends, and first dates why you wear the same jeans everywhere but then you still haven't solved the issue. And eliminating these businesses from poor countries like Bangladesh has hurt their economies in the past too because you've taken jobs away from them.
I genuinely have no idea what the answer is but I wouldn't always say it's as simple as individual choices. This is more of a systemic evil.
Ironically this is more true for working class jobs that some middle class jobs. Doctors, software engineers, lots of middle class roles don't really care. Of course there's also some like lawyers and accountants where the culture is they care immensely.
I'd love to agree, but you're up against folks who are stressed about keeping a roof over their family's heads and getting enough to eat. As I said above, the last part of the Yvon Chouinard's quote - "The cure for depression is action. Every one of us has to step up and do what you can, according to what your resources are." - is key. Yes, if you have the ability to do so then getting high quality, sustainable cloths should absolutely be a priority. But I'm happy to let those who do not have the bandwidth or money to make those choices off the hook. I work in the "sustainability" space and even I have a hard time parsing quality/sustainable clothes. I did a deep dive to try and distill some of the info for r/MFA in 2020 and pretty much discovered it's near impossible for national/global scale to parse what is and what isn't kind of evil shit. Hell Raleigh from Climate Town did a video on how difficult he found it.
Sometimes caring is really hard, especially if you're poor.
Ive read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas before. I think its a good analogy.
In the context of our society though, it can feel difficult or impossible to commit to "walking away". The whole of the country, most of the human populated world, is all in one big interconnected system. Its exceedingly difficult for people to be able to survive all on their own, the larger your community the more you can tolerate difficult conditions.
Unless you are some very experienced wilderness survivalist or homesteaders, you really need to continue to be a part of society at least in some small capacity if you expect to live. And youre not going to be able to dictate exactly how that society functions.
Totally, and that's the part where you need to be kind to yourself. You can't change everything, but you can opt out of as many systems as your resources allow. We try to buy food from the farmers market and bread at the local bakery, but I also get cheese, milk, beans, rice, and other items at costco to try to balance out the high food cost at the markets. I try not to buy cloths very often, but I'm not going to go into a depression over a pair of pants made in Cambodia. I just plan to respect the effort and misery that made them and wear them for at least a decade.
It sounds like your wrestling with the concept yourself and my guess is you are a very conscious consumer and empathetic person. I think it's important to think about but not dwell upon. It's corny, but I really like Yvon Chouinard's saying "The cure for depression is action. Every one of us has to step up and do what you can, according to what your resources are." I don't agree with everything Yvon does, but I do like that ethos.
Lastly, to counteract some of the negative feelings that these thoughts and topics can leave, I suggest giving the The American Life Delight Episode a listen. It's awesome to be cognizant about the banality of evil, but that can lead to some pretty dark feelings and lack of hope. I like a mixture of delight/optimism with every dose of critique/reality I engage with. That way I can keep the hope that my little impacts make a difference - even a small one - and I don't just slip into a world hating malaise.
What I saw from your post was something like how badly should we feel, or how much should we give up, or how ashamed should we be etc. but none of that actually helps anybody, least of all ourselves. If we sour our faces and give up our comforts for ",humanity", we're going to find ourselves cold and hungry and naked, looking into the windows of someone who "doesn't deserve it", living it up from our sacrifices, wishing evil upon our neighbors.
I do not understand the allegory of Omelas. That is not the kind of universe we live in. I live in a kind of universe where young people gather and protest corruption and inequality, even if they themselves do not suffer it. My older brothers and sisters did not stop believing in their duty to fight for the child, even though they have never met the child and are told the soldiers with machine guns and tanks are coming. Today is June 8; 35 years and 4 days ago they stood up against a regime that was going to build Omela and be the most glorious empire in the he history of humanity if only they would shut up and go home and become part of the new ruling class. They bled, some died, and their mothers still mourn without bones to bury.
That child is me. I am not sitting in a dark closet because thousands and thousands did not walk away: they faught, and bled and died themselves so that I may be born outside of the closet and I can enjoy sunlight and my mother's voice.
If you accept Hitler's offer, or if you work a normal job and live in the forest.... it's probably not that different if you reject humanity and don't love a single other person. On the other hand, you could be rich and treat your housemaids kindly, you could learn your butler's name, you could take a genuine interest in their children's lives and make sure they're not malnourished in the dark. Or you could be lower middle class working a dead end job, but you could still offer a smile to your fellow car park residents, you could ask about their shitty day and you could wish them a goodnight and a better day tomorrow. No one can take away your ability to love another person. Even the child in the closet is still capable of loving its mother's memory.
That would be much better than you living on dew and yeast in a forest "not hurting" anyone.
I think I do take some sort of issue with applying the phrase "banally evil" like this. Being "banally evil" to my mind would mean fitting a specific definition, and we lose something important about it when applying it too broadly.
The mindset is pretty specific and laid out by Hannah Arendt in her work. Her study of Adolf Eichmann was an examination of a man who was incapable of understanding how his actions were being understood by other people, and of how he existed within a system/circumstance where such understanding would never come about. He could commit horrific acts because he was, in a way, protected from ever achieving an "empathic understanding" so to speak. And the guy himself, was just a person who lacked direction and found one ascending the bureaucracy of the Nazi party. He was, for all intents and purposes, a completely normal person who, because of the particular pathway he found, became a monster. He could not understand himself as that monster, because of how he got to it.
I don't think the phrase can be neatly applied broadly to people we see today. It needs to be tied to something/someone more specific to really be applicable, because the phrase refers to a specific kind of person in a specific sort of situation. I don't really think of "rich people" when I make an attempt to do it. I think more of a middle manager, someone who is pursuing promotion and just does whatever the company asks of them to make that happen. It doesn't matter, who complains, what they complain about, whether the complaints actually represent a problem, whether hearing their complaints would produce better results, the manager will just continue to follow the directives and pursue their course. They don't try to hide anything/be nicer about it/etc if it's not part of the directive to be doing that. "Pursuing their course" can be things we think of as good and worthy - supporting children, buying a home, having a retirement plan, so on. The evil they commit doesn't necessarily come from within them, it is a consequence of them being where they are, of their existence within a system that does not demand their empathy do any work (or, perhaps, deliberately pressures against using that type of reasoning). The evil of it is the lack, the unwillingness to deviate when what's called for means committing "bad" acts, because the person in question isn't capable of thinking any differently. As a practical example - They change the schedule and fuck over the single mom employee and rationalize it as "just business", something like that. A team is made to hit nonsense metrics and gets punished when it doesn't and no amount of complaint or consequence changes it because the manager doesn't think beyond "what I've been told to do". It is possible to be this kind of evil and not be particularly rich or successful, and it's "banal" because you can't really go after the person committing it - they don't understand, they're just following along. It's important to be specific so we can get clarity on what else is going on out there, and there's definitely much else because we live in a very different time and place from Arendt and Eichmann.
So to answer your question directly - it's a mindset in which empathy plays no role at all, enabled/enhanced by circumstance which prevents empathy from ever having a role to play. If what you're attempting to understand doesn't fit this mould then it is something different, in need of different words. Broad, ill-defined categories like "rich people" by their nature will not fit this mould. There's too much variation, too many pathways to being in that category and too many ways each person applies their own notions to the definition of the category, for us to speak fruitfully about how the concept applies, in my opinion. Narrow the category, apply a more strict definition to it, and then we can pick out where the "banal evil" is happening, the how and why of that. Rich people are not "banally evil" by existing with wealth while others suffer. That's not enough to earn the "banal" qualifier. It needs to be shown they are incapable of understanding for their evil to be "banal" if we're going to stick with Arendt's illustration. If they feel bad about it they're not an Eichmann. If they use charity to hide things, they're not an Eichmann. If they use charity out of a misguided sense it is in fact all the good required of them, again, they are not an Eichmann. Those situations entail a form of empathy, a mechanistic awareness that others' perspectives will be different and that difference is why the action must be taken. They need to be ignorant to others to fit the definition, and further, they need to be in a context where there isn't pressure to form that sort of reasoning. Those other things are other evils, deserving of a qualifier of their own, at least in my view, sticking with this kind of rigid application of the concept.
Appreciate the topic, Tildes is just about the only place where I can have discussions like this and get inspired to reexamine material on a regular basis. It's been a long time since I did the reading so I could be misremembering/misinterpreting. Obviously I intend no defense of anyone in particular, nor any attack directed at you. Always happy to be corrected/discuss if some aspect of what I've written doesn't seem to work.
Discussions on the "banality of evil" emanate from the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, by the philosopher Hannah Arendt, in 1963. In that book, she discusses the role of Adolf Eichmann as an officer of the SS in WWII, as well as his trial.
Thank you for bringing up the source of the term "the banality of evil". This thread seems to concentrate on the notion that wealth is the basis of this concept, but it is so much deeper than just the "haves and have nots".
To my mind, to be evil is to be banal, and vice versa. The more shallow your thoughts and understanding of the world are, the more likely you will be an evil person. I have known people that would on the surface seem to be kind, or at least blissfully unaware, that have caused deep pain and hardship on people because of their actions or inactions. And groupthink can be one of the greatest sources of evil.
There are millionaires out there that are deeply ethical and there are poor people that are shockingly evil. This discussion needs to move beyond class.
I think that the very rich are social Darwinists and probably nihilists. They are the wolves, and most other people are sheep to be used or consumed. I think they pass this on to their families. They don’t have the same kind of guilt or self doubt as the rest. In short, they are sociopaths.
We are in a prisoner’s dilemma. Most people follow the rules because they are trained to though conditioning upbringing, religion, guilt. The people who decide that the rules don’t apply to themselves have a huge advantage, as long as they just want to accumulate stuff. But I think most aren’t very happy because you can’t get much meaning from just “winning”.
This is the most uncharitable and dehumanizing take so far in this topic. And having spent a great deal of my life around rather wealthy people (some of whom are part of my extended family), it couldn't be further from the truth, IMO. None of the ultra-wealthy people I know and have spent significant time around are sociopaths, nor do they see themselves as wolves and everyone else as sheep, nor have they taught their children anything like that either. Rightly or wrongly, for the most part, all of them simply see themselves as job creators, providing a net benefit to society by founding/running/funding/advising the companies that employ thousands of other people. And most fully understand their privilege, but again, rightly or wrongly, they simply see it as being well earned through their hard work.
Have you seen this visualization of wealth, to scale that made the rounds a couple years ago? It’s eye-opening. Because big numbers are hard to conceptualize, we tend to lump “rich” people like Beyoncé into the same category as “ultra-rich” people like Jeff Bezos. But they aren’t even close at all. The magnitudes of their respective net worths aren’t even on the same planet.
I’ve known some multi-millionaires, people that I would describe as quite wealthy. Their needs are met, they live comfortable lives of luxury and they are kind to others and give charitably. Now I’m presuming a bit because I don’t know you or your social circle, but I assume the rich people you described are in the same category as those I have experience with. I suspect the traits @hobbes64 listed become more prominent as one traverses the vast gulf between “mere” millionaire and billionaire.
I understand the insane gulf between Billionaires like Bezos and everyone else, and I don't think I know any outright Billionaires, but when I say "rather wealthy" I'm still referring to people well above the multi-millionaire mark. My father was CEO of the largest database and direct marketing company in Canada, and worked as interim CEO for several acquisitions of one of the largest private equity firms in Canada for well over a decade after that. So I know quite a few obscenely wealthy people, including the founders of the private equity firm, and my Godfather who was CTO of AB Inbev.
Agreed. I never knew any super wealthy persons, but I'm now unfathomably richer than my dad's wildest dreams as a young starving refugee. Yet, i don't feel that much worse off in temperament and charity... From my projection then, the obscenely rich are probably more like me: we like time off, we probably overeat, we don't eat enough vegetables and don't exercise enough, and we probably could give more to charities than we do, and we largely forget about the miseries of those we don't interact with.
Except when they remember to give, they give more than I'd make in lifetime
I suspect they might surprise you. I think you're right about their day to day habits and overall attitude towards life being pretty much the same as everyone else, but most of the super wealthy business people I know are also on the boards of at least a few non-profits and charities. And the "retired" ones are typically on even more boards, and occasionally even filling advisory positions in government too. So they're regularly donating their rather valuable time, experience, and (most importantly) connections to those causes, on top of also donating significant amounts of money to various causes as well.
Perhaps that's driven by subconscious guilt to some extent, but regardless of their motivations they still tend to do far more for charities than most other people I know (myself included), and regularly donate proportionally more of their net worth than most too. Although I suppose it helps that they're all insane workaholics so the extra workload of being on a couple charity boards is nothing to them, and their wealth continues to grow via investments so they can easily afford to just keep donating large sums without it effecting their quality of life.
Then how come we still have so much poverty and inequality? Not judgementally asking but plain baffled, if they're regularly giving more than 10% of their earnings and even then we still have this huge shortfall of resources
I mean, I'm certainly no expert, and that broad and deep of a question is well outside my ability to definitively answer, so I can only speculate. But I suspect those particular issues are largely systemic, and also probably inherent under Capitalism, which very few (if any) charities are capable of addressing at a fundamental level. That's far more in the realm of government.
But reducing the effects of poverty and inequality actually can be addressed by charities, to a certain extent. And some of the charities I know/knew members of the board on are attempting to do just that, like Boys & Girls Club of Canada, Pathways to Education, and Tim Hortons Foundation.
p.s. Not all charities are necessarily focused on addressing the effects of poverty and inequality though. So it's not like every single dollar being donated is going towards those issues. It's being spread over a myriad of them. And a lot of the people I know/knew on various boards were actually focused on health (physical and mental) related causes, E.g. Crohn's and Colitis Canada, CAMH Foundation, etc.
There’s also the issue of money going towards some specific types of charity getting soaked up by (potentially by design) ineffective organizations.
An example of this is the vast amount of money that’s been poured into improving the situation with the unhoused in US Pacific coast cities to little effect. While the issue is complex, as far as I can tell much of it lies with the groups this money is flowing to, which seem to prioritize maintaining their reason to exist and paydays for their members than fighting houselessness.
I think of it this way: there are forces that centralize wealth and others that distribute it, and the forces that centralize are stronger than the ones that distribute.
That is, there’s a tendency to create new millionaires and billionaires. Even when the existing ones give a lot of money away, more are created.
This means that distributing wealth can do a lot of good and should be encouraged, but it’s not enough to prevent inequality.
Another issue is that centralizing wealth is how big projects are done - that’s what a government does, after all. There are projects that require many billions of dollars, and someone has to manage them. So we shouldn’t want to eliminate all very large sources of financing, but rather to get them under better control.
Control by whom? That’s a governance issue. Even for nongovernment projects, we can talk about corporate governance and nonprofit governance. Governance is a really hard problem.
One way people become powerful is by being associated with these very large projects. It doesn’t have to be their personal money. Running a government agency, a large nonprofit, or a large business is a pretty powerful position too, even if there are limits on the budget and how it can properly be spent.
Democracy is important but it’s often rather limited, for these large projects. Somewhat unusually, California citizens voted directly for high-speed rail. But we but don’t control the project. The project is controlled by Other People, they can possibly screw it up, and we get to watch it happen, good or bad.
Is it really that different from watching the Gates Foundation fund projects, good or bad? I don’t think so. Sure, the history (how they came to be) and scale are different.
I forgot to put more caveats in my post. I didn't mean to claim that all of the very rich are this way, and I don't claim that most the rich people you met are that way. But the powerful people that affect all of our lives: Musk, Zuckerberg, Trump, and many billionaires that we don't know by name are surely exactly as I described.
Fair enough. That caveat does change things, and I certainly can't speak to the mindset of people with that much wealth and influence since I've never met anyone quite that powerful.
I am definitely "blessed" in the financial area these days. I naturally wouldn't consider myself rich, but I know I have at least some privilege: my SO recently had to get the dogs' teeth cleaned, and he's a little down on money courtesy of his job now laying folks off, and a snafu with his PTO (yeah we have PTO, so there's that) with Best Buy. So he asked for some money to help with the payment, and I was able to shift $1000 for that.
That being said, I'll be foregoing some car payments, but also... this reminds me that once I was living paycheck to paycheck, and I've been in spots where I didn't even know if another paycheck would appear. I worked fast food and would "waste" food so I could eat.
So honestly, even if I don't feel financially comfortable, I make an effort to donate to local charities. I prefer food banks, but there are other options that pop up. I have a pretty crappy commute for my job that I really love (and where I live is awesome as well, so I don't want to move or change jobs...), so I don't necessarily have time to donate. But I can help with money, and I do consider to whom and what I donate. And I try to give "uncomfortably", because since I started that, someone benefits, and honestly I haven't been in dire straits since.
My SO prefers to spend his extra money on upgrading his computer or tweaking his car. And I'd like to do that sort of stuff, and I slowly set money aside for frivolities like that (because let's be honest, that's what they are), but ultimately I think folks who have a little extra cash could easily divert it to something that could help others.
I'm going to probably rehash some stuff that other people have already mentioned, but I think there are a number of psychological reasons why you don't see affluent people give up all of their money to donate to charity.
First, the concept of the hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, explains how individuals tend to return to a stable level of happiness despite changes in wealth or circumstances. As people achieve higher levels of wealth, their expectations and desires increase, leading to a constant pursuit of more without lasting happiness gains. Thus, we never feel like we have "gotten to the top." There's always more that we need to acquire and achieve for ourselves before we can start worrying about others. (This might, in some individuals, result in constantly procrastinating about making large charitable donations, once they have taken care of their more immediate needs/wants.)
On top of that, relative deprivation describes how individuals feel deprived not by absolute poverty but through comparisons with others who are better off. Even in affluent societies, people can feel lacking if they perceive their peers as having more, leading to life dissatisfaction. (I know a lot of people who have a hard time separating needs from wants.) And I don't think this is exclusive to the affluent. It would not be hard to imagine someone with an old, beat up, but otherwise reliable car, and thinking, "Why do I keep driving around this piece of crap when everyone else has a more efficient, nicer car?" This is the hedonic treadmill and relative deprivation in action.
Worse, research shows that as wealth increases, empathy tends to decrease. A study by Piff et al. found that individuals from higher social classes were less likely to help others compared to those from lower classes. This reduction in empathy is due to social distance and, presumably, perceived deservingness, where the wealthy rationalize their success and view the poor as responsible for their plight. The result is moral disengagement, the process by which individuals justify unethical behavior or inaction, disconnecting from their moral standards. A lot of people are very good at judging the morality of others but not themselves. After all, we judge others by their actions but ourselves by our intentions.
Now let's layer on the bystander effect, where occurs when individuals are less likely to help a victim when others are present, due to a diffusion of responsibility. In a global context, this effect can lead to wealthy individuals feeling less personal responsibility to address global poverty, assuming others will take action. This diffusion of responsibility contributes to inaction and the persistence of global inequalities. And, to be fair, even rich Americans can't fix global poverty, right? It's easy to be apathetic when perfect solutions aren't obvious.
You might think that rich people would be plagued with cognitive dissonance (the mental discomfort experienced when holding conflicting beliefs or values) because they're not doing enough for the global poor. Indeed, wealthy individuals may experience dissonance when confronted with the disparity between their lifestyle and global suffering (if they are introspective enough), but they can resolve it through charitable donations or the aforementioned rationalizations.
I'd also like to point out that the term "banality of evil" was coined by political theorist Hannah Arendt in her analysis of Adolf Eichmann's trial, a Nazi bureaucrat responsible for organizing the Holocaust. Arendt observed that Eichmann was an ordinary, unremarkable individual who participated in horrific crimes by conforming to the norms and directives of the Nazi regime. Applying this concept to the context of wealth, income inequality, and global in action in the face of poverty is a bit of a stretch. Personally, I don't think that a wealthy individual who does not donate enough to charity is not comparable to someone like Eichmann.
However, the principle behind Arendt's observation can be extended to understand how systemic issues are perpetuated by ordinary actions and inactions. The everyday choices of affluent individuals—such as prioritizing personal comfort over significant charitable contributions—can contribute to broader systemic inequalities and suffering. This doesn't happen out of malice but through a normalization of their privileged lifestyle and a lack of critical reflection on the global implications of their wealth.
At the end of the day, I think most people are just living out their lives, not considering how they can best apply themselves to maximize the happiness of everyone around the world. Without getting into theories of evolutionary psychology, it's not hard to imagine why, as a species, we are ill-equipped to look out for the well-being of everyone, especially people we have never met. Evolution equipped us with the tools we need to propagate our own genes by looking out for those we are closely affiliated with. Looking out for the whole tribe was hard enough. Looking out for the interests of competing tribes was undoubtedly an evolutionary dead end. And all of this happened in a prehistoric context completely and totally different from our lives in the 21st-century.
Theoretically, it's the job of governments to find ways to look out for the interests of everyone and to overcome all of those self-serving instincts. If we could create a world that all of us would prefer from the other side of John Rawls' veil of ignorance, it would go a long way towards solving these issues. But it feels like we are light years from moving in that direction. Instead of working to create an equitable, environmentally sustainable world that benefits everyone, we have a lot of affluent countries that are fighting off takeovers from the far right. But that's a whole other topic.