There’s an erroneous assumption in your question that it’s common for poor people to become rich. It really, really, really isn’t common.
The American dream is long dead.
If you’re poor, rich people and corporations will pay you as little as possible, and you will five the vast majority of your money back to rich people.
I’ll tell you who gets rich. It’s rich people.
Most rich people are born rich.
People with proper morals dont become despicably rich. They use their wealth to help people before it amasses that much.
I swear when people hear eat they rich they think about their grandparents with all their equity locked in their home with maybe a few million dollars in the grandparents retirement account. But that’s not at all who people are talking about. They are talking about the people who even if they stopped working would be unable to spend all their money.
This ‐ people don’t become billionaires by being successful, they become billionaires by screwing people out of as much money as possible.
Generally most people don’t hate rich people simply because they’re rich, and they don’t even really hate all rich people. They hate very rich people that are vocal about how they think they deserve everything they have because they worked for it when they actually benefited from generational wealth, or they hate the head of the company that has shitty working conditions and busts unions, or they hate the rich person that funnels their money into politics to fuck over every day citizens.
Exactly. Although it is easy for me to generalize when I see such shitty behavior from rich people so often. I even have relatives who have 14 cars, give nothing to charity, and bitch about paying taxes. They disgust me.
I think the people who hate the rich and the people who get actually rich usually aren’t the same people 😅
Just my take/perspective
I’ve yet to meet a single person who “hates the rich” outside of the internet. It’s a loud minority - not most people.
Also, it’s a quite vague term that means different things to different people. I even consider myself somewhat rich because more money wouldn’t change how I live my daily life.
Dont mistake the people who post online with “most people.”
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What do you mean by “rich”? A fast food worker and a multi-millionaire have a lot more in common with each other than do that multi-millionaire and a billionaire. Two wildly different scales and modes of existence. So it’s good to get clarity about that. Do you hate people, like say, a skilled professional such as a surgeon or attorney, or small business owner, who works hard, invests, and manages to have a comfortable life and a few fancy toys? Or are we simply talking about a handful of specific hyper-politically-engaged billionaires such as Thiel, Musk, et al.? That’s a totally different ballgame.
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George Orwell, a Socialist, said that in his experience, there are two types of socialists: those who genuinely love the working class, and those who merely hate and resent the rich. I imagine that focusing more on what you love, vs what you hate, might lead to different actions and results.
As for me, if I were to suddenly find myself with a lot more money, I wouldn’t fundamentally change as a person. I’d just be happier and stop working like a donkey. I’d free up my most important and valuable resource, my time. I don’t hate people who are financially free, and I don’t resent them for it, if they did it honorably and without exploitation. I want that, too. I want mailbox money.
Elon Musk and Peter Thiel (to start) deserve pitchforks and guillotines. Not because they are rich, but because of what they are doing with that wealth; because they are monsters treating the real world as their playground for their hair-brained political experiments.
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Jokes on you, I hate peasants and I always have. It’ll make sense when I make my first million
What happens then depends on how rich. Under $100 million, they can hang on to some humanity. $500 million and up, they lose all empathy and become complete monsters.
Hypocrisy is irrelevant. Everyone is a hypocrite.
I really want to attach a !remindme on this to both track inflation and point out how much of a slippery slope it becomes when adding an arbitrary gradation to the matter
You can’t hate the very thing you aspire to become, only pretend to do so
That’s the thing. When we can’t have something, we start telling ourselves a story about how we don’t even want it and how the people who do have it are bad. And then we believe that story. Doesn’t get much more human than that.
I would love to have a billion dollars. But that doesn’t mean I couldnever become a billionaire in a moral way in reality.
You can be 997 millions short from being a billionaire and you’d still be rich though.
Depends where you’re getting that valuation from. I wouldn’t call farmers rich even if they could technically sell everything they own and live comfortably for the rest of their lives.
But the point is that a billionaire is a whole different animal. You can be rich by every metric and still be as far from being a billionaire as a poor person is from being rich.
The way I see it, once you can live off passive income, you’re rich. I could live comfortably for the rest of my life just on the interest from a million euros. Make it three million and I’d live like royalty.
“But I’m not really rich/not like them”
“We’re comfortable 😏”
As soon as you come into serious money, no matter how exactly, your empathy for fellow human beings goes out the window FAST. There are people who can withstand this and not succumb to it, but they’re exceedingly rare.
This has been scientifically tested and proven time and again. Mo’ money = less empathy.
Money and power, yes. Everyone thinks they would be different, but as you said, we’ve studied this for a long time and when people come into money and power, they suddenly don’t think the rules apply to them.
what if you already hate yourself and then become rich?
Then you can buy a company or two and get everyone else to hate you too!
It’s the other rich that are the problem!
