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Wealth Therapy Tackles Woes of the Rich
HughPickens.com writes: Jana Kasperkevic writes in The Guardian that it can be very stressful to be rich. "It's really isolating to have a lot of money. It can be scary – people's reaction to you," says Barbara Nusbaum, an expert in money psychology. "There is a fair amount of isolation if you are wealthy." According to Clay Cockrell, who provides therapy for rich, this means the rich tend to hang out with other rich Americans, not out of snobbery, but in order to be around those who understand them and their problems. One big problem is not knowing if your friends are friends with you or your money. "Someone else who is also a billionaire – they don't want anything from you! Never being able to trust your friendships with people of different means, I think that is difficult," says Cockrell. "As the gap has widened, they [the rich] have become more and more isolated."
Sci-fi author John Scalzi has published an entertaining take-down of the cluelessness in this article.
If the simplest solution is to donate all your wealth?
Someone else who is also a billionaire – they don't want anything from you!
Anyone who claims that has no understanding of the psychology of the majority of billionaires. See Carly Fiorina and her 'good friend' Steve Jobs for an example. If you're a billionaire, then other billionaires are the ones that have the most of what you value and therefore the best targets. Stealing from the poor is far more effort - you need to steal from loads of them.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Most societies would be more than willing to help ease the terrible burden of an abundance of assets. Raising the taxes on high incomes and capital gains would help reverse the Reagan-era onwards trend of wealth redistribution towards the higher income and wealth segments of society. We now know that wealth did not start trickling downwards, and grownups need to step in to correct the mistakes.
-- That grumpy BSD guy - http://bsdly.blogspot.com/
If the rich feel that being wealthy is too stressful, maybe they should try being poor instead.
Another problem is that if you ever lose your wealth, you tend to lose your rich friends too. Other rich people might not be your friends because of the money, but because they're essentially just networking in order to get business opportunities. When you lose your wealth you become useless to them. I've personally noticed that the only real friends you have tend to be the ones you found in college. You might find a few from high school too.
So, other people have their own problems. I bet you still complain when you stub your toe even though there are people with no feet.
Giving away money isn't the solution, any more than chopping your foot off solves the foot issue. You can't buy yourself out of the feeling people are judging you.
Don't drive around in Bentleys, Lambos, or those ugly as sin Mercedes SUVs. You don't need a 10,000 sq ft, 6 bedroom house when you have no kids. Live comfortably but not showy and don't advertise the fact that you are loaded and you won't have the problem of wondering whether people are only interested in your for your money because no one will realize you have money. But therein lies the problem: most of these people WANT others to know they have money.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
This is true all over. How often do posters on this site kick back and have a beer after their friends come home from their job on the lawn service crew, or as an auto mechanic? Are most of your friends in technical positions? Do most of your friends have interests that align with your own? Same sort of thing.
People responding to this article act like they are fonts of egalitarianism when if you look at it they are probably just as judgmental (up and down, the responses being a case in point) as the purported billionaires in TFA.
Sci-fi author John Scalzi has published an entertaining take-down of the cluelessness in this article.
One thing Scalzi has missed in his screed is this:
Noblesse oblige is a French phrase literally meaning "nobility obliges". It is the concept that nobility extends beyond mere entitlements and requires the person with such status to fulfill social responsibilities, particularly in leadership roles.
And it's one of the things that's missing from a lot of the 1%ers. This society made it possible for them to be 1%ers. They have a debt to society. And like the Lanisters – who always pay their debts – so should they.
"she directly makes a comparison by encouraging people to replace the word "rich" with "black" to see the problem with how she says people speak of the rich."
Sorry, John, but if you don't "like" the implications of replacing group X with group Y in a sentence, the problem exists in your own wetware, not with the underlying premise. You don't get to discriminate against "the right" groups with impunity just because it happens to better fit your world-view. Nor does the whiteness of that cohort have any relevance to the analogy (and in fact, your mentioning it actually commits the offense you accuse Kasperkevic of) - If you describe someone as "hung like a bull", their lack of actual bull-ness simply doesn't matter in the least; not even if that person makes their living as a professional butcher.
Kasperkevic didn't intend to literally equate the struggles of the rich with those of blacks (something you, as a professional author, should have grasped); rather, she used it as a literary device to highlight the fact that calling for lynching any group, whether black or Jewish or rich, should offend us as a violation of basic human dignity.
A couple of others have referred to this idea, which I have myself suggested to individuals who were troubled by "privilege." Give away all your money, get a job at Walmart and join the fight for $15 and hour and a union. All your (previous) troubles will seem so far away, you will make new and interesting and sincere friends and you will be contributing to making a better world. What more could you ask for?
> This is like the class warfare version of race-baiting.
Class warfare *is* taking place, mind you.
The rich are winning.
Stated problem: People don't like me because I'm rich
Actual problem: I choose to be a complete asshole and fuck people over to become disgustingly rich.
Rich people therapist: Will say absolutely anything to make disgustingly rich person feel better about themselves so long as they get paid
Solutions:
- take away the tax dodges that let the super-rich get or stay super-rich
- raise taxes on those same super-rich and lower the tax burden on the middle class
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
As opposed to the Democrat party where they allow the super rich to rule them and call them "fools" and "stupid" and they smile and repeat whatever they are told to.
So you are rich. You got there either because you were a greedy little piglet or a parent left you a pile of money. And being a wealth addict you know you want more. So where is the best place to get a big pile of money to add to your stash. Mining the poor and wretched is too slow. You just have to manipulate way too many poor people to steal one penny at a time. But hanging out with rich people gets your leads as to where big money might be had. And if you need an investor only a rich guy is any good to you at all. One way to think about it is Donald trump. He is a living proof that a man can be a liar and an idiot and still have a pile of wealth. The wealthy are not smarter or more able they are simply greed bags with feet.