Hypocrisy and Your Sense of Entitlement

Wealth provides distance. That’s one of the more obvious differences between a life of wealth and a life in poverty. If you have money you get to live in a nice, silent gated community with empty streets. You get chauffeured so that you don’t have to interact with other drivers, or you are at least able to afford a car that is sound-proof, where you don’t even feel the road. You get to be insulated from the rest of us. Yours is, relatively speaking, a safe, sequestered existence free from noise and turmoil. Poverty forces you to live in the midst of the worst element. The neighborhoods full of paroled child-molesters and crack-dealers, where the quietest people are the 20 Mexican illegals next-door who are quiet because they don’t want to piss anybody off, but still spend their evenings staring into your living from theirs.

Wealth means that there is somebody to call to make sure that your kids never have to serve in a war, or go to prison because they felt up an underage girl whom they got drunk. It means that you can afford the lawyers that can get you off even if your fingerprints were on the gun, your DNA was on the victim, and you were video-taped committing the crime. It means that even when everybody knows what a scumbag you are they still have to suck up tp you out of pure fear of what you can do, the influence you have. You live a life safe from all consequences, or, if not all consequences, then, the ones that you deserve.

Can somebody like that understand life for the rest of us? Of course not. If all you have known is privilege, then that is the sum of your reality. You cannot conceive anything different. You can try, you might feel pity, or sadness, or revulsion, but you won’t be able to see what it’s like. Even if you were to lose all your money, you still wouldn’t understand what it was like to have known only grinding poverty all your life.

Now it’s easy to see the sense of entitlement and the pure arrogance when we are talking about the very wealthy. We can see how the distribution of wealth makes for inequalities in society, and many people are (justly) outraged that the definition of “justice” changes based on your family-name and net-worth. What if we apply that same system of values to the relatively wealthy, compared to everybody else, say the average American compared to the poor person in Haiti or Mexico? Are Americans all snotty rich kids taking every opportunity to oppress and humiliate the little man? Note that every argument that I have heard to reject this notion, is similar to the ones used by the privileged to defend the benefits of “old money” and “ inherited wealth”. You have the “we have it hard, too” arguments and the “we work hard for our money”, or, “our father/grandfather/great-grandfather worked hard for his money” arguments.

You cannot sincerely argue about the evil rich while simultaneously try to wreak that same evil on people poorer than you. Well, you can, it’s just hypocritical. Those Wall Street charlatans that everybody is so fond of hating these days, they did what they they had to do to make themselves and their families richer, just like the people in favor of sending home illegal immigrants (to protect their jobs), and just like the immigrants themselves. Everybody is condemning selfishness while exercising it and nobody sees what’s wrong with their position.