power - money - greed
In the last couple of weeks, I have read
- Empire of Ai by Karen Hao
- Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams
- as well as several articles
dealing with tech companies.
One of the themes that runs through all of these accounts is how much money, power, and ego are involved. Technological advances are essentially ways for men, and it is almost always, although not exclusively, men [there are enough instances of women who are just as driven by the desire for power] who are driving this, to get their egos stroked.
I won't talk about the power - money - greed that drives many politicians!
It's all about control... and the way to control is with money and power. And the more money and power one has the more one wants... that's greed. There may have been some sense of altruism or helping others at the beginning, but that some is put aside for the bigger goal of money and power... and control.
We see this with people like Sam Altman, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and others. They want to remake the world into their image. Often, their world is essentially the USA... the only purpose of people elsewhere is to buy their product so they can make more money and control more people.
Sadly, I hear too many people within the Christian world who long for political power and often that is defined in terms of money and control.
- Money, often in terms of personal money, being able to afford things. Their definition of money is not in terms of caring for others. I am a little tired of Christians constantly complaining about taxes. Taxes are one of the ways that we do things as a society that we can't do otherwise.
- Control, often in terms of personal preference. I want things the way I like them, with little sense that we live in a very diverse culture. When Christians long for a uniform culture, I have to wonder if they really know the heart of God.
Yes, the funds available for any good cause are scarce, but that’s not because of some natural law, some truth about human society. It’s because oligarchic power has waged war on benign state spending, leading to the destruction of USAID and drastic cuts to the aid budgets of other countries, including Canada. At the same time funds are added to the defense / war budgets.
Austerity is a political choice. The decision to impose it is driven by governments bowing to the wishes of the ultra-rich.
There are truckloads of money available. Oxfam revealed that the net worth of the 10 richest US billionaires grew by $698B in the past year. That money alone, the increment in the wealth of 10 people, is almost 10 times the annual amount required to end extreme poverty worldwide.
How have they managed to transfer so much of the world’s money into their pockets? Why can’t we get it back through effective taxation?
The answer is their translation of economic power into political power. The richer they become, the more they can bend the state and economic system to their will, ensuring that they become richer still.
The ultra-rich are far more likely to insist that social security and healthcare should be cut, and far less likely to believe that people should be paid a living wage. or that the unemployed should have a decent standard of living, or that there should be more regulation of oil companies, banks and health insurers, or that there be environmental protection.
May I suggest there is something called “billionaire brain” - a profound inability to see the world from other people’s point of view. Acquiring huge amounts of money is like taking a blow to the head. Wealth seems to scramble certain cognitive functions, particularly those related to empathy and perspective. Elon Musk has come right and said that "empathy is a fundamental weakness of western civilization.”
And yet, we do not stand up against the lies and manipulation of the oligarchy. We do not stand up for those who have little or no voice.
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