Good God these billionaires are twisted
by digby
Jonathan Schwartz flags an article in GQ which features interviews with a number of different people on the economic scale, one of whom is a major GOP billionaire donor named B. Wayne Hughes. Read what this privileged psycho has to say about his fellow Americans:
Wayne talked to me about "derelicts on welfare" who check themselves into the hospital because they're "bored" and "want feeding," and "we're paying for all that activity." He said too much tax money is spent on "guys going to chiropractors, guys getting massages! On us! Give me a break. Guys getting Viagra!" He talked about "Los Angeles bus drivers who are on permanent stress leave because someone spat on them when they got on the bus, and now they're emotionally upside down. More than half the bus drivers are out on stress leave! Systems like that cannot work!" It seemed as if, for Wayne's philosophy to work, he needed to believe that those who don't make it deserve their ill fortune.
It's hard to believe that jerk is real, he seems more like a caricature of a misanthropic asshole from a Victorian novel --- Ebenezer Scrooge -- that a real person. But he is real, as are many other of these billionaires just like him. Why do so many people who have so much become such miserly egomaniacs?
I think Jonathan gets this right:
the Prime Directive of everyone's psyche is to believe they're morally good. (As Hughes says in the GQ article, "I've lived my whole life doing what I thought was right.") But there's no rational way for any human being in history to believe it's morally justified for them to have as much money and power as Hughes, Murdoch, etc. So people at the top must become crazy in this particular way. As my grandfather, a historian who focused on the Spanish conquest of the Western Hemisphere, always said:
The hostility of those who have power toward those who can be called inferior because they are different – because they are others, the strangers – has been a historical constant. Indeed, at times it seems to be the dominant theme in human history.
And it goes all the way down the scale to the absurd point at which lower middle class white people who should by all rights hate that hideous billionaire, turn their attention instead to the same "derelicts on welfare" and blame them for the fact that they aren't billionaires themselves. It's the only little bit of privilege they think they have.
Read the whole post. It's got a lot more good stuff in it.
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