I was once seated next to the CEO of an aircraft leasing company who was on her way to London to scold her daughter who had maxxed her credit cards. We had a lovely conversation through the journey of about 8 hours during which I learned that her father had made her take a loan out for her education at Georgetown in order to understand what it was like to live with debt. She was baffled by her daughter's lack of control. Her own EQ, and not just her sense of economy (we were flying Economy too), seemed to have been earned by having lived with less.
However, I agree that systems are more to blame. Brazen blindness is seen as a virtue often. At the World Bank where I worked for nine years in the 90s and early 2000s, this was on ample display. Imagine a conference called, "Breakfast with the Poor". Yes, it actually took place. Or a baffled staffer from India asking, "Who are the poor?" I can't make this stuff up, leaving was the only thing to do. My point is that the bias towards developing technically brilliant, emotionally unconnected people is continuously reinforced at all stages of our lives - young, school-going, rich, poor, etc. And those at the top have long stopped listening to the rest, their echo chamber suffices. As for the powerful and wealthy men on "the list", I'm always amazed at how rich men have no imagination when it comes to what to do with their time. I suspect it is because they would never take the risk of being mediocre, they have to win all the time. That's how, I can learn to play Ripple and Ventura Highway (oh, joy!)on my ukulele, knowing full well that I'm not good enough to be a musician ever. Or write poems because I just have to. They can only screw people over. On Wed, Feb 4, 2026 at 10:49 PM Udhay Shankar N via Silklist < [email protected]> wrote: > The state of the world, and especially the Esptein files cesspool, has me > thinking of _Altered carbon_ (the book, not the TV show). In my reading, > the core point of the book is "past a certain level of wealth, you're not > really human any more". > > The key reasons: > > * Access to wealth, opportunities, networks and bodily modifications far > beyond what anyone at a lower socio-economic stratum can access. So much so > that you're not really comparable any more. > * Inability to perceive other people as even being of the same species, > but only as exploitable resources. > > To be clear, this is not the only artistic work to advance this thesis - > but it is the one that has made the core point in the most memorable way > for me. > > At an even higher level of abstraction, one might argue that the point of > all art is to examine the question of what it means to be human. Which > could easily be also interpreted as what it means to be inhuman. > > Thoughts? > > Udhay > -- > Silklist mailing list > [email protected] > https://mailman.panix.com/listinfo.cgi/silklist > -- *Translator/Owner* *AzulIndica Translations* *North Vancouver BC, Canada*
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