{"id":1608842,"date":"2024-04-13T21:39:08","date_gmt":"2024-04-13T21:39:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/?p=149731"},"modified":"2024-04-13T21:39:08","modified_gmt":"2024-04-13T21:39:08","slug":"the-irrational-greed-of-geriatric-plutocrats-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/04\/13\/the-irrational-greed-of-geriatric-plutocrats-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Irrational \u201cGreed\u201d of Geriatric Plutocrats"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nIn his book Totem and Taboo, <\/em>Sigmund Freud indulged in a speculative scenario for the origins of society.\u00a0 Everyone, young and old alike, once lived together in a \u201cprimal horde\u201d– ruled by an aging, domineering father-figure, who selfishly monopolized the women for his own satisfaction.\u00a0 But one day (so to speak), the deprived \u201csons\u201d defiantly rose up, challenged his control–and slew him.\u00a0 In the aftermath, separate nuclear families now became possible, along with the sanctions and taboos which would facilitate orderly social relations.<\/p>\n

Notwithstanding the fanciful quality of Freud\u2019s origin-myth, world mythology does exhibit countless fables of aged tyrants ruling and depriving youth–who, in the end, overthrow them.\u00a0 (Freud, of course, in a perhaps dubious fashion, claimed the age-old Greek myth of Oedipus as a confirmation for this theory.)\u00a0 In his book The Denial of Death <\/em>(1973), anthropologist Ernest Becker historically analyzed how enormous wealth\u2013and the dominance it brings\u2013conferred an illusory \u201cimmortality\u201d on aged tyrants desperately clinging to their (waning) power.<\/p>\n

The inevitable life-cycle, the replacement of one generation by another: the very existence of sexual reproduction means that the old, who die<\/em>, are superseded by the young.\u00a0 But some, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, \u201cdo not go gently\u201d!\u00a0 (As a startling example, David Rockefeller had an endless succession of heart transplants\u2013before dying finally, at age 102.)\u00a0 What I\u2019m suggesting is that the aged plutocrats\u2019 pathological \u201cgreed\u201d–especially aberrant since they will soon have no<\/em> use at all for wealth–is ultimately a graceless, petulant, denial of (inevitable and approaching) death<\/em>.\u00a0 And, as well–a power-fantasy of continuing dominance over the rising younger generations.<\/p>\n

I think that we can agree that this monomaniacal obsession with ever-more wealth–on the part of many aged, almost infirm, billionaires–cannot be explained simply as human nature (\u201cgreed\u201d).\u00a0 Certainly it is grotesquely unjust, domineering, selfish–and responsible, directly or indirectly, for the suffering\u2013even despair and death\u2013of millions of young people.\u00a0 These consequences, in fact, may be a key motivation: the vindictive satisfaction in continuing to dominate and discomfort those younger generations who possess the one priceless thing they don\u2019t <\/em>have: youth<\/em>–and with it, decades of living ahead<\/em> of them.<\/p>\n

To be sure, many affluent old people, recognizing and accepting the inevitability of their imminent decline and death, graciously make way for the young, helping them–and even heavily financially contributing toward a more humane future they will never see.\u00a0 But others\u00a0 (most notably the aging billionaires we are examining), try for \u201cimmortal fame\u201d by endowing orchestra pits or museum wings (most notoriously, the Sacklers–of oxycontin infamy).\u00a0 While others, still profiteering on fossil-fuel stocks as the planet itself dangerously heats up, spitefully offer their own, infamous epitaph: \u201cApres moi?\u00a0 Le deluge!\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

In many cultures, the old males explicitly act out their envy <\/em>of the young males.\u00a0 Indeed, anthropologists have often suggested that the circumcision characterizing puberty rites, commonly found throughout the tribal world, was among other things a kind of \u201cpartial castration.\u201d\u00a0 In our own plutocratic world today–with its astoundingly obscene concentration-of-wealth–we see aging tyrants trying to hold on and dictate the conditions under which younger people are forced to \u201clive.\u201d\u00a0 Such geriatric billionaires–and I am, admittedly, focusing primarily on males in this essay–have \u201cspent\u201d their lifetimes focusing single-mindedly on pursuing more-and-more wealth.\u00a0 The ostensible rewards?: not only ostentatious status-displays (as classically described by Thorstein Veblen), but more significantly, the consequent power<\/em> to impose submission and deference, and to demand various services (many humiliating to the providers).\u00a0 Still, the exercise of this power is only partially satisfying (in a sadistic-vindictive fashion)–the envy remains<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Since these billionaires, in their rather crude equation of money=satisfaction<\/em>, never developed genuine moral and aesthetic sensibility–let alone empathic solidarity with humanity–they have, toward the end, nothing enduring to compensate for their loss of vitality, sexual pleasure (virility), physical attractiveness, and so forth.\u00a0 They still do<\/em> have, rather than the developed human qualities of compassion and magnanimity, the stunted passions of pride, vanity–and vengeance.<\/p>\n

It is the age-old question of two, diverging paths: \u201cto have\u201d–or, \u201cto be.\u201d<\/p>The post The Irrational \u201cGreed\u201d of Geriatric Plutocrats<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.\n

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his book Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud indulged in a speculative scenario for the origins of society.\u00a0 Everyone, young and old alike, once lived together in a \u201cprimal horde\u201d\u2013 ruled by an aging, domineering father-figure, who selfishly monopolized the women for his own satisfaction.\u00a0 But one day (so to speak), the deprived \u201csons\u201d defiantly [\u2026]<\/p>\n

The post The Irrational \u201cGreed\u201d of Geriatric Plutocrats<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78366,459,58615,4740,36691,78369,78370],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608842"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/281"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1608842"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1610685,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608842\/revisions\/1610685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1608842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1608842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1608842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}