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Apr. 1st, 2013 09:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickA while back, I watched the more-or-less documentary "Born Rich" by one of the heirs to the Johnson & Johnson money. It was interesting enough that I wanted to write a letter to the person who made the film, so I wrote a letter.
Sunshine, you are in contention for Upperclass Twit of the Year. I understand that yes, wealth aggregates unfairly. Got you there. I also understand that there's sort of a tipping point where the very rich do nothing but still get richer, living in enclaves and marrying others like themselves, concentrating their wealth more and more. I don't particularly have a problem with that, as it happens. Go. Live the dream.
As one of the 99% (We are not fabulously wealthy, but we are richer than many "middle class" Americans -- our family is worth about four or five million, some of it more liquid than others. Yes, you could buy and sell us, all the damn time... but we don't want to sell and we're not in debt or anything. We live very modest lives because we have respect for the idea that THINGS do not make people HAPPY.), I'm ok with the rich and their money. I'm more concerned with the government's devaluation of my currency... its spendthrift behavior is putting my brother's kids and grandkids into debt for things we don't need (useless wars on terror, wars on drugs), claiming that investment banks are "too big to fail". Fix those things, say I, and the rich can go hang.
You have an interesting point and a bully pulpit from which to speak. But you're talking about things that are (A) boring as hell and (B) way outside your area of expertise. You know absolutely shit-all about the problems of normal people. You are not normal people. You aren't even close to normal people. Why the hell you all up in our bidness like dat? Sorry, that's my redneck coming out again. *sigh* I live in Fulton County, PA (about 15K people live here, a density of 33.9 people per square mile. Around 11% of them live below the poverty line, per capita income for the county is around 21K per year), which is so damn far outside your experience that it might as well be Mars.
Why don't you consider the issues of the very wealthy in some way OTHER than "Wah, we have too much money and it's unfair!" Your parents (and the parents of other People Like You) have some challenges that are particularly unique to their status in life. Why not look at that? Everyone wants his or her kids to grow up healthy, happy, responsible, yadda yadda yadda. What do parents do when gainful employment is not an overriding concern? I mean, shit, that's what the rest of the world has to squish the stupid out of their kids. They gotta work to live. People go to school (if lucky) and graduate and then have to root hog, or die. All ya'll do not ever have to do that. Probably you go to schools and piss around and may even get a degree -- but then what? You get a surfeit of money and a lack of having-to-work. Great, sounds like awesome fun, but what things can they do to keep you from drugs, from partying, from shopping, from spending for flash, from being a complete dipshit and/or destroying yourself in a terminal sort of way?
I don't live in a world where people toady up to me because of my money. What's that like? When did you learn people did it? When did you learn to see it for what it was? How was that?
I don't live in a world where I got good grades in college because my family's name was on the library or funded the endowment for the Professor of Unusual Geography. I got good grades in college because I was annoyingly intelligent if something of a Socially Awkward Penguin. What does it feel like to never know if you earned something on your own merits or if you got it because your people have metric shittons (an actual unit) of money? (And you're one of the luckier ones -- there are a lot of people named "Johnson" who have no money at all. You could pass as a regular person if you wanted to. And there's a damn idea for a documentary.)
I don't live in a world where buying my way to success is a possibility. I'd like to think I was above that but it's never going to be an issue for me, ever, so y'know. Real easy for me to have clean hands. How about you?
I don't live in a world where everyone is exactly like me. That sounds kind of insular and weird. On the other hand, I live in a county of 14K souls, which is also kind of insular and weird.
Prenup, yeah. Okay. But how to find and evaluate potential mates that aren't Into You For The Money? Even in your very shallow and cloistered gene pool, there's them's as have and them's as have not -- best to remember that for some people, money can never be *enough*. (Breaking Bad, on the TV, is an excellent extended exploration of a man trading his honor, his morality, his worth as a decent human being for money (which he thinks is the same as security, safety, stability) -- and you kind of get the feeling that Mr. White is going to wind up with a handful of sand for his troubles.)
How to occupy yourself in a way that creates worth, self-esteem, things of actual value? If you don't work, what the hell should you do all day? What *can* you do all day? What should you be doing all day? (Hint: cinema isn't it. Cinema as a tool for expatiation of the sin of your extraordinary choice of parents is even less so "it".) You could actively manage your wealth, but probably the people whom you have hired to do that are better at it than you are. Also, managing the money is really only fun for the person who *made* the money in the first place.
Tell me what that stuff is like in your world. Tell me about the search for meaning, the challenges of discussing wealth with your young people (will you do a better job than your dad did with you? What is a good approach? Has anyone in your circle done a decent job of it?), the things that your adults do with their time when they don't have to work. What is it *like*? These are the things that are actually interesting to those of us who aren't permanently wealthy.
Anyway, I kind of enjoyed your documentary insofar as it showed people-like-me what we probably wanted to see about those who are Born Rich. It was likely predictably irritating to the people who had the poor taste to conceive you, a little bump of bad-boy behavior bringing mild shame upon the family for being gauche enough to talk about money... but not so irritating as to get you uninherited or anything. Too bad you didn't take the opportunity to do anything more substantive or informative about the subject.
Sunshine, you are in contention for Upperclass Twit of the Year. I understand that yes, wealth aggregates unfairly. Got you there. I also understand that there's sort of a tipping point where the very rich do nothing but still get richer, living in enclaves and marrying others like themselves, concentrating their wealth more and more. I don't particularly have a problem with that, as it happens. Go. Live the dream.
As one of the 99% (We are not fabulously wealthy, but we are richer than many "middle class" Americans -- our family is worth about four or five million, some of it more liquid than others. Yes, you could buy and sell us, all the damn time... but we don't want to sell and we're not in debt or anything. We live very modest lives because we have respect for the idea that THINGS do not make people HAPPY.), I'm ok with the rich and their money. I'm more concerned with the government's devaluation of my currency... its spendthrift behavior is putting my brother's kids and grandkids into debt for things we don't need (useless wars on terror, wars on drugs), claiming that investment banks are "too big to fail". Fix those things, say I, and the rich can go hang.
You have an interesting point and a bully pulpit from which to speak. But you're talking about things that are (A) boring as hell and (B) way outside your area of expertise. You know absolutely shit-all about the problems of normal people. You are not normal people. You aren't even close to normal people. Why the hell you all up in our bidness like dat? Sorry, that's my redneck coming out again. *sigh* I live in Fulton County, PA (about 15K people live here, a density of 33.9 people per square mile. Around 11% of them live below the poverty line, per capita income for the county is around 21K per year), which is so damn far outside your experience that it might as well be Mars.
Why don't you consider the issues of the very wealthy in some way OTHER than "Wah, we have too much money and it's unfair!" Your parents (and the parents of other People Like You) have some challenges that are particularly unique to their status in life. Why not look at that? Everyone wants his or her kids to grow up healthy, happy, responsible, yadda yadda yadda. What do parents do when gainful employment is not an overriding concern? I mean, shit, that's what the rest of the world has to squish the stupid out of their kids. They gotta work to live. People go to school (if lucky) and graduate and then have to root hog, or die. All ya'll do not ever have to do that. Probably you go to schools and piss around and may even get a degree -- but then what? You get a surfeit of money and a lack of having-to-work. Great, sounds like awesome fun, but what things can they do to keep you from drugs, from partying, from shopping, from spending for flash, from being a complete dipshit and/or destroying yourself in a terminal sort of way?
I don't live in a world where people toady up to me because of my money. What's that like? When did you learn people did it? When did you learn to see it for what it was? How was that?
I don't live in a world where I got good grades in college because my family's name was on the library or funded the endowment for the Professor of Unusual Geography. I got good grades in college because I was annoyingly intelligent if something of a Socially Awkward Penguin. What does it feel like to never know if you earned something on your own merits or if you got it because your people have metric shittons (an actual unit) of money? (And you're one of the luckier ones -- there are a lot of people named "Johnson" who have no money at all. You could pass as a regular person if you wanted to. And there's a damn idea for a documentary.)
I don't live in a world where buying my way to success is a possibility. I'd like to think I was above that but it's never going to be an issue for me, ever, so y'know. Real easy for me to have clean hands. How about you?
I don't live in a world where everyone is exactly like me. That sounds kind of insular and weird. On the other hand, I live in a county of 14K souls, which is also kind of insular and weird.
Prenup, yeah. Okay. But how to find and evaluate potential mates that aren't Into You For The Money? Even in your very shallow and cloistered gene pool, there's them's as have and them's as have not -- best to remember that for some people, money can never be *enough*. (Breaking Bad, on the TV, is an excellent extended exploration of a man trading his honor, his morality, his worth as a decent human being for money (which he thinks is the same as security, safety, stability) -- and you kind of get the feeling that Mr. White is going to wind up with a handful of sand for his troubles.)
How to occupy yourself in a way that creates worth, self-esteem, things of actual value? If you don't work, what the hell should you do all day? What *can* you do all day? What should you be doing all day? (Hint: cinema isn't it. Cinema as a tool for expatiation of the sin of your extraordinary choice of parents is even less so "it".) You could actively manage your wealth, but probably the people whom you have hired to do that are better at it than you are. Also, managing the money is really only fun for the person who *made* the money in the first place.
Tell me what that stuff is like in your world. Tell me about the search for meaning, the challenges of discussing wealth with your young people (will you do a better job than your dad did with you? What is a good approach? Has anyone in your circle done a decent job of it?), the things that your adults do with their time when they don't have to work. What is it *like*? These are the things that are actually interesting to those of us who aren't permanently wealthy.
Anyway, I kind of enjoyed your documentary insofar as it showed people-like-me what we probably wanted to see about those who are Born Rich. It was likely predictably irritating to the people who had the poor taste to conceive you, a little bump of bad-boy behavior bringing mild shame upon the family for being gauche enough to talk about money... but not so irritating as to get you uninherited or anything. Too bad you didn't take the opportunity to do anything more substantive or informative about the subject.
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no subject
Date: 2013-04-01 02:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-03 03:04 am (UTC)I was thinking about what you said, and I see that the non-exceptional classes exist within a system of rewards and punishments, which makes them much more controllable. Actually, rewards are largely irrelevant to the extreme rich, aren't they? Which leaves just those last-ditch levels of punishment that can't be bought off. Really not an incentive.