Pay even a little attention to any left-liberal protest, and you will hear diatribes against the 1% and against big corporations. These twin and overlapping pillars of malevolence are, we are told, the source of all that’s wrong in our society. They’re the ones who exploit the working classes, that impose their will on the rest of us, that keep us down, that control what we see, hear, eat, drink and breathe, and that work only to our detriment. In short, they’re evil.
I’ve long wondered how those who proclaim the wealthy as evil think they got that way. After all, these are the same folks who talk about how they’re champions of the working man, who claim they support small businesses, who say all the right things about buying local (never mind the Starbucks double venti latte). Isn’t part of supporting someone wishing them success? Isn’t part of success becoming wealthier or growing your company? Or, must it be the “right sort” of success? Or, must the success be bound by an upper limit that they decide?
Or, do they believe that something happens when the successful reach that 1%, or cross some invisible line and become “corporate?” Do they think that there’s a secret meeting, some sort of Skull and Bones gathering of cigar-chomping old white men who bring the newly-1% into a special room and give them a hot mug of maleficent juice to turn them sinister? Is there some black magic that manifests when people or companies cross a particular line? Does Lawrence Fishburne show up at board meetings and give everyone red pills?
That’s silly, of course, but it’s no sillier than presuming a corporation is evil simply because it’s big or an individual is scum simply because he’s wealthy. But, the part about magic is in keeping with leftism. After all, theirs is the political realm where inequality, want, unfairness, hardship, and rigor (along with basic laws of economics) can simply be written out of the national narrative if only the Best and Brightest are given free rein (or reign). But, after a century of progressivism in the USA, shouldn’t all the evil have been washed away by multiple generations of the best and brightest at the helm of government? Shouldn’t Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson, Clinton, Obama et al have made the evil go away? Shouldn’t they have found an antidote for the red pill? Obviously, they haven’t, and, certainly, the past century’s efforts at statism (communism, socialism, fascism, etc) have made it clear that some special sort of magic will be needed to realize the dream.
Obviously, there are “bad” people in the world, people who are willing to do harm to others in order to benefit themselves, but these people exist in all social, economic and demographic strata. And no, there’s no special kind of evil that materializes and insinuates into the minds and souls of people when they reach a certain level of financial and material success. There’s no depravity that infiltrates corporations once they grow out of “mom and pop” status. Wealth is not poison. Success is not venomous. Affluence is not toxic. There is no red pill.
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