this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
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(your comment got duplicated btw)
The thing is, much of the time they are aware, but they agree that "this is how it should be". Hence the phrase temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Like, Musk has more (money) b/c he deserves more, whereas Biden had more (votes) b/c... well, don't think about that!:-P Cognitive dissonance is a bitch, especially when fueled from religious extremism that replaces critical thinking (which the Judeo-Christian Bible itself in numerous places commands to be done, but again don't think about that either) with knowledge from authority.
People have no idea what true wealth really is like, not even close.
I remember this one time I was living in a working class area of London whilst working as a freelance software developer in Investment Banking front-office, which means making systems for actual Traders and Analysts, the kind of people who get millions in bonuses every year.
So I'm waiting in line to pay at the local supermarket and some old lady dressed in a nouveau riche style (you know the kind: old lady that thinks she's poshly dressed but instead just looks overdone) has a till openned just for her and somebody from the supermarket is helping her pack her shopping. A different old lady, behind me in the queue for another till, in manner and dress clearly working class, turns to me and says: "Look at her, she's involved in the Council and is rich".
Now, remember, I was working with people who got millions in bonuses to work or the trully rich. They weren't rich, they were the employees of the rich.
So I turned to her and told her: "Madam, if she was rich she wouldn't be shopping herself at the supermarket".
I've also seen pretty similar things amongst the older members of my extended family in my homeland, all of which come from poor origins: one of my uncles saved maybe half a million euros over a lifetime of owning and working long hours at his familiy operated restaurant and he thinks he's rich.
I suspect this kind of shit is incredibly common: all but a handful of people are so distance from the ultra-wealthy that they have no clue of just how far from them they are, and the result of that is that you have old people with a bit of savings and shop keepers who make a tiny bit more money than the average working-Joe, voting for policies that benefit billionaires.
Exactly.
People think they're rich when they've won the lottery, and sure they are compared to the average person, but they're just a fly on the wall in comparison to the ultra-wealthy.
I simply don't believe one can become that wealthy by any honest means - you can't work to get that wealthy, you can't win to become that wealthy, hell there are plenty of entire countries with less money than some of the ultra-wealthy.
The fact that these people can play around with such an unimaginably absurd amount of wealth while so many more struggle, their wildest dreams but a fragment of a fragment of a fragment of what these people have, I find to be absurd.
What gets me is how those ultra-wealthy people keep telling us to raise taxes on themselves - like Warren Buffett, explaining how his cleaning lady pays more taxes than he does due to the top capital gains tax loophole. So it seems more the likes of millionaires who want to become billionaires than the latter themselves who keep pushing for lowering taxes on the wealthy. At some point, people just have enough and couldn't even want more if they tried, but then there are those for whom money isn't even the goal, and it becomes more "the game" that is played, as they work out their therapy issues using the economics of entire nations in the balance. Daddy, are you finally proud of me now?
Just deleted the duplicate, thanks for the heads up
But that's it. That cognitive dissonance is just part of the veil, same as the meme above.
The poor folks who get absorbed by the veil think they're a shoe-in to the rich, when they couldn't be further away - they'd have better chances of being picked to go to space than becoming part of the ultra-wealthy.
But I was also trying to convey: even if the poor person absolutely knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there is no possible way that they will ever in their lifetime or any alternative reality ever become rich - even then, they still would vote for the right of the wealthy to pay less taxes than they themselves do, both in relative and even in absolute terms.
They think the resulting system is more "fair" - like Bezos made Amazon, and that is "good", right?, whereas what does poor little old me offer to society at large... and anyway surely they give a lot to charity and basically it's better for me and mine to put all the money into their hands than to put it into mine own, bc they know better how it should be managed for the good of us all(TM).
Yeah, the people who flunked economics in college, or far more likely never went to college and never took an economics class in high school either, act to block literal PhD professors who have spent decades studying the thing, plus also were involved in making them in the first place, like Robert Reich the former United States Secretary of Labor under Clinton's administration and who also served under Ford and Carter, founded the Economic Policy Institute, and teaches at Berkeley. But on the one hand you have people like him, while on the other you have the disgraced Bill O'Reilly, the disgraced Tucker Carlson, who was "just asking questions", the disgraced Roger Ailes, and nowadays the likes of Joe Rogan. I forget, what degree does he have?
When brown-nosing, Don't Look Up (the movie title). You might not like what you see.:-D