A friend of mine once said he wanted to be rich enough to “do good.” I said that to have that much money would require that you “do bad.” What I meant was that we create ourselves as we live our lives. Like the untenured teachers who used to say that they would become more radical once they got tenure. But six years of sucking up to authority almost always meant that they became incapable of challenging it. The rich may be happy, but that happiness comes at the expense of others. And not just some minor expense but life-taking expense. My grandmother took care of the children of the rich on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Newport, RI, Grosse Point, MI, and Sewickley Heights, PA. What the rich took from her far outweighed what they gave her, and their happiness came directly at her expense.
The idea that we can use the lives of the rich as a guide for the society we want to see and the society we will have to have to survive (given the train wreck of environmental catastrophe that capitalism is leading us) is preposterous. If Mills meant that we could use the lives of the rich as any kind of guide of what we should aspire too, then he should be ignored. If he meant that we shouldn’t try to make ourselves feel better by supposing that the wealthy are unhappy, then he is correct. Some on the left posit a false dichotomy between environmentalists, who,they say, glory in wearing hair shirts, and those, more sophisticated radicals, who believe that the world we want must be one of individual abundance and “excess.” The first view is false, and the second is ridiculous. We simply cannot have a world in which very high individual consumption is the norm. Nor if we are revolutionaries would we want such a world.At the same time, we will want a world with maximum enjoyment and minimal meaningless labor. As we create such world, surely our “wants” will change radically. Just speaking for myself, if I aspired to be rich, to do good or otherwise,what I would really be aspiring to is a life where I would be shitting on my own grandmother and every other wage laborer in my extended family.And on my own son, who cooks the food that all of those who love their high-priced “foodie” meals glory in eating. Finally, bourgeois values, both the good ones and the bad ones, run deep, among all of us. While we preserve those like freedom of speech, surely we will have to work to get rid of, root and branch, all of the destructive self-seeking, egotism, narcissism, individualism that constitute the heart of the bourgeois personality. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
