On Eating The Rich

In social media, there is this very popular idea that we should eat the rich.

Maybe not quite literally, but just look at any post featuring Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and you will see comment after bitter comment discussing how these people are horrible, they made their billions on the shoulders of hard-working individuals who threw their money away just to feed greedy ambitions, unrestrained by any measure, as high-tech, high-IQ, genius, billionaire playboys run riot and high-carnival over the universe and the dominion of man, challenging common sense, common morality, and the very ego and conscience of the common man.

To these people I say, get a life.

You’re not moral just because you’re poor.

As far as I know, poverty is largely independent of morality.

You can be rich and you can be immoral, but you can also be poor and be scum of the earth.

The rich steal, exploit, and manipulate others into buying, showing advertisements around the world at gaslight, well-meaning and earnest people into partying with their dollars. So goes the claim. Yet it is some of these tremendously moral people who are breaking into the stores and stealing the televisions that they allegedly were gaslighted into wanting.

Morality?

Haha, that’s interesting.

Is stealing morality, friends? Some might speak of Robin Hood at this point, but the last I checked, Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor, and he did not break into a hardware store because he couldn’t gaze at a 60-inch flat-screen TV.

Last I checked, being unemployed and broke was not a piece of evidence that would stand as a proof of sainthood to anybody with an IQ that is higher than that of a carrot, and last I checked, one of the many ways to become reasonably rich and successful in this world is to just be a nice and trustworthy person to the point that the people around you can stand you, and you therefore get promoted once, twice, five times, and manage to build a pleasant life for yourself.

But still it appeals, this toxic thought process, this idea that it is the wretched who should receive a happy ending, that it is these very wretched who get to distort the very meaning of the Sermon of the Mount, which enjoins that the meek shall inherit the earth, using it as an excuse to victim-blame and to continue acting as another kind of victim, even as they justify the squalid conditions that characterize their lives, typing squalid and beautiful words, every single one a ‘moral’ one, all of which is made halal just because they are in a terrible situation.

Well, here’s a newsflash for you then.

Your horrible situation is not because someone very powerful chose to victimize you. At least, it isn’t in the vast majority of all circumstances.

Were you Anwar Ibrahim? Years in jail for offending Mahathir?

If you’re not, then why are you complaining? In all likelihood, you just didn’t work hard enough to get past the minimum bar of success to stop complaining about your life. And instead decided to take the easier path, the more productive one that didn’t involve either creating a job or applying for one. No, you scream as your excuses multiply one after another. It can’t be my fault. But wake up for a brief moment, my friend. Look at yourself in the mirror. Because your face is the face to look at if you are looking for someone to blame. It is not the billionaire that you should scold. Or the entrepreneur that you should call down hatred upon yours. If you are frustrated, lost, squalid, and not navigating, the only person you can blame is the person in the mirror.

Did it stop you from studying harder to get that A in class when you chose to play Mobile Legends instead? When you got the C, did you choose to go to a vocational training institute instead of sitting down for a day and then proceeding to continue with yet another day, sitting down, telling yourself that life would change as your sentiments continued to boil without your actually taking action along the way in a meaningful sense?

Did you at that point choose to do anything productive to gain a skill that could have disposed you towards becoming successful, whether affiliate marketing or content creation or anything out there that would have redeemed you from the spiral into which you were going as each day continued to be the same and you continued in your angst to magnify that through the lens of your incapabilities taken into the form manifested by an external enemy that you created?

Was it ever anyone else’s fault except your own? You thought about the possibility that it was your own, but then you proceeded to blame the victim, and even when there was no situation whereby a victim could be meaningfully blamed, you created scenarios for yourself, imagined ones, the same way that you imagined the possibility that your actions would have done anything meaningful along the way to justify you in the halls of morality which you proceeded to ignore.

Day by day, you convinced yourself that it was never your fault that you were poor, that it was an external enemy that came up at every single moment to attack you, without realizing that you were truly the one who was attacking yourself because of your failure to take any action.

Wake up.

You know it yourself.

Your lack of responsibility shows in every single keystroke. Cease being an embarrassment to your family, your friends, and to everyone who had ever asked for you to reach your potential.

This is not the way. Simply because you cannot be a billionaire or simply because for some reason you struggle in life, that does not mean that you can go around screaming high carnival about how people who became tremendously successful earned their way into it by lying, cheating, or stealing, because all you are doing is revealing the full extent of your brokenness on high display, is revealing the full extent of your brokenness on high display, not realizing that the finger that you point at others entails three fingers pointing back in your direction.

Yet, anyone who has ever achieved any success in life is aware that success comes with some degree of fortune.

Yes, there is luck, whether in investments, whether in terms of reputation, a thing that you did, a random comma in an otherwise unpunctuated sentence that caused a slip, a turn of voice, and eventually the sale.

Yet beyond any specific success… Without the attempt, probability is of no consequence.

Because how can there be an uncertainty of outcome when there was never an experiment? When nothing was ever ventured in order to facilitate the gain. Yet we see people who blame fate every day, pretending that they have no choice available or at hand, when every single keystroke and comment is a usage of time that would have otherwise gone by in the striving towards a better future. Life makes choices for us when we simply allow time to pass. Because that time will be gone, and a decision that could have otherwise been made, will evolved into seconds and minutes gone by, with no reward, but a lifespan reduced.

But one thing is for sure though.

I do not know your fate. Perhaps you do not know your fate and that is why your response to external circumstances has been warped into what we see as you complain and you complain.

Perhaps there is a route out of the bitterness which encapsulates your soul, and perhaps there is not. Certainly, it is a matter of your own individual choice. What is for certain though, is that if you were to continue down this pathway purely of bitterness by an act of willful ego, that the days would repeat themselves. The meaningless moments spread out in front of you on a timeline where every single event will recur and recur and recur to the point where you cannot distinguish them. And the colours that made up an otherwise storied existence will fade into a bleak and enduring grey. So stop your complaining. Just because you do stop, it doesn’t mean that you’ll become rich. It doesn’t mean that you’ll become successful.

But it does mean that no longer are you enslaving yourself to something that you won’t be able to overturn… At least not with mere words.