Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos – and for that matter most of the other billionaires in every country around the world – are busy right now doing what they have been striving to do for a long time.
They’re tearing up the rules of public governance in their respective communities and reshaping them to suit their own particular whims and prejudices. And they’re aided and abetted by structures that we’ve set up over centuries, but which are now outdated and harmful.
Great wealth is no guarantor of maturity, wisdom or insight. It can pose a huge risk to the rest of us, if we the people overvalue it, and if there are no rules that limit its impact on our lives.
A single wealthy person can do a great deal of harm to others – unless the society around him or her imposes significant, thoughtful legal, ethical and moral limits on what he or she can do. Without such constraints, the moneyed person can act either wisely and peacefully, or foolishly, dangerously and violently.
Acquiring great wealth, in itself, routinely warps a person’s mind – at least in the US. Research by American psychologist Paul Piff and others has shown this; even simply playing a openly rigged game of Monopoly, where one player receives an initial financial advantage, can quickly bring out feelings, in the advantaged person, of superiority, disrespect and disdain towards the others.
In today’s world, we have created a network of rules and legal structures – banking systems, tax havens, corporations, patents – that often makes wealth, as opposed to honesty, compassion, or concern for others, an accepted indication of virtue.
We have placed an often stiff price tag on many basic things – from learning a trade or acquiring an education beyond high school to obtaining quality food and accessing many treatments that improve our health.
We’ve ignored Oscar Wilde’s famous observation: “a fool is someone who knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing."
All spiritual traditions – Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Confucianism, Indigenous and even atheism – consider gaining material wealth to be an acceptable goal in life – up to a point. After assuring basic material security for oneself, one’s family and one’s close friends, the gift of wealth, says every tradition, must be used to help others. No traditions say this more forcefully than Indigenous teachings, which also firmly instruct each person to share hardships with one another as well.
The United States is struggling, more visibly and awkwardly than any other nation, with the after-effects of celebrating the pursuit and accumulation of riches for oneself as a dominant goal in life. But that country is not alone. Everywhere there are wealthy persons selfishly flouting the rules, harming others and the environment.
Vladimir Putin, like his current U.C. political counterparts, is very, very rich.
We must all stop worshipping at the flimsy altar of wealth, and return to respecting character, honesty, compassion and creativity and the innumerable extraordinary persons among us who quietly manifest these qualities.
Warren Bell is a long-time family physician in Salmon Arm with a consuming interest and involvement in community and global affairs.
