The Mischaracterization of Rich vs Poor in Douglas Rushkoff’s Survivial of the Richest

 

An Everyone is Going Conscious drawing by my friend Forest

Not easy reading for an empathic person, but I decided to have a gander at Rushkoff’s book, Survivial of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. 

Firstly, the title makes it out to be fantasies of all tech billionaires, which it is not. Secondly, the title makes it look like apocalyptic prepping is a tech billionaire niche, even though his own interviews are with politicians and hedge fund investors. 

Also, the book does not recognize that the prepping is happening within individual families all around the world and in the US. This idea that there can be a self-created Shangri-La where one can escape the turmoil and collapse of global and local systems is not particular to the super rich. 

I mention this because his premise is that the tech billionaires are the ones destroying the world, leading to the destabilization of the ecosystem, etc. 

This is a notion held by the majority of folks who espouse the idea of eating or killing or beheading the rich. 

What we are dealing with is not an us vs them scenario. And we are not facing an innately human flaw of greed that perpetuates generation after generation and culture after culture. 

What we are dealing with is an economic system and human nature, and what the environment of the system in place allows and inspires humans to become. 

There is absolutely no difference between the billionaire prepping for apocalypse and building a bunker isolated from the world’s woes, and a person in the poor south of the United States building their own underground shelter, stocked with guns and ammo and lots of dried beans. 

In fact, there are far more of these non-billionaires doing this type of prepping than there are billionaires in existence, by far. 

What should be focused on is not the rich, or the people, or the prepping. The focus should be on sustainability and ensuring local access to locally grown agriculture, which should include a culture that is moving steadily toward home gardens and community grown agriculture on plots of land within cities and towns and surrounding cities and towns. 

What bothers me about seeing the constant calls for killing rich people as a means of coping with the rich and poor divide, is that I’m acutely aware that environments create people. If any person were born into privilege or found themselves in opportunity where thriving was possible, they would thrive and rise to the top economically. 

This means that each of us is susceptible to taking advantage of economic advantage. 

So the answer isn’t to kill those of us who find themselves born into this position, but to create a world where that position doesn’t exist. Otherwise, we just simply repeat this same chapter again and again, from the French Revolution, to the Russian Revolution, to whatever revolution is next. 

It will always be a world of rich and poor divide until we create a world that does not allow for rich and poor divides. And the answer to this is not communism or socialism or any of the isms already created. 

There are many fore-thinkers bringing up new ideas of ways to create an equal and equitable world, where poverty simply does not exist, and everyone thrives. Alternatives to Capitalism: Proposals for a Democratic Economy, by Erik Olin and Robin Hahnel is a book that explores these ideas. 

It’s far more beneficial to explore ideas and potential systems that benefit everyone rather than blaming and threatening the lives of the few who are rich because they’ve followed the dictates of the system they were born into. 

Everyone is guided by the need to survive. And we can all survive and thrive together in an evolved world with evolved and novel systems that relinquish the age old and repeated us vs them, rich vs poor ideologies. 

Could it be possible to be rid of rich people and poor people without falling into the traps of dystopian society? I think so. And so do many others. 

Perhaps a good place to start is to look into these matters with a simple Google search and see what you find. Or you can simply ponder what a perfect world would look like, and see if you can imagine and envision how such a world would operate, sustain, and be. 

The Mischaracterization of Reality Killing the World

 March 19th, 2022

What people forget is that they do not have to look at things the way “the world” agrees to look at things. Consensus reality is simply an amalgam of a cultural subjectivity (a particular and relative way one culture sees and perceives and interprets things) and is therefore not “True” in the ultimate sense. 

I preface this writing with the former paragraph in order to illustrate that the shaping of our individual view on society and humanity and life and existence is not truly our own, so long as we haven’t stepped back to see the mechanisms that amplify any particular viewpoint on a large scale of influence, that influence being relatively large in so far as it influences us particularly, which therefore includes our parents, our church, our school teachers and friends, and the media. 

The media particularly is almost 100% comprised of articles and information that focus primarily on dramatic content that will keep asses in the seats in order to captivate audiences so that viewership numbers remain as high as possible in order for these companies to charge as high a price as possible for the advertisements companies will pay in order to reach these large audiences. 

What I’m saying is this: the media is not focused on bringing us the Truth. They are focused primarily on dramatic captivation by any means possible in order to sell ads at the highest price. And the means used are almost entirely fear-based, the opposite of love-based, if love were to have an opposite. 

Looking at the world through the eyes of the media is like looking at the night sky through a cardboard toilet-paper roll and saying the thirteen stars viewed through this device are the only stars that exist in all the cosmos—a serious mischaracterization of reality. Not only are there more than thirteen stars in the Universe, there are over 200 billion of them in just our galaxy alone, one of at least hundreds of billions of galaxies each composed of their own hundreds of billions of stars. 

        Allowing ourselves as individuals to operate in the world amongst each other and amongst our fellow life forms the world over from a position of illusion and incorrect understanding about the nature of things is dangerous and unnecessarily destructive. 

The truth about our species is that we are a glorious species. Our intelligence and capabilities are unmatched by any other species on the planet. We are the most intelligent and technologically advanced. We are able to think and speak symbolically and propose hypotheses and do the math or experimentation to prove the validity or falseness of these propositions. We are able to build intricate portable environments to travel to other massive bodies in the infinite space beyond our own atmosphere. We are able to collectively empathize with the plight of others thousands of miles away in completely different cultures and to send aid in order to feed millions of starving women, children and men in hardship. We are able to see the suffering of those facing diseases and spend our lives searching for the cure in labs where the creative leaps of imaginative insight open doors that logic alone could never have achieved. 

We are living in a time with far less wars happening in the world than any time in a thousand years, and this decline has been occurring for a very long time. More people of all genders getting an education than ever before in history. More people not dying of starvation than ever in history. How can all this be true when the news never mentions these truths at all? 

It’s time to turn off the televisions. Most already have. They call it cord-cutting. People are moving onto platforms that do not rely on advertising for their profits, and thus do not compete for attention via the lowest common cultural denominator, namely trashy drama and mischaracterization of the greatness of ourselves as a species. 

In my opinion, the very best thing that anyone can do for the world is to become a true individual. One who thinks and feels deeply and has one’s own opinions that do not simply parrot the views of others or groups of others. And the best way for this to occur, again, in my opinion, is to stop watching television, to pick up an art of some sort, and to focus on creation and reading and writing and to cut off all of the media altogether. To hang out with diverse and highly individualistic creative people who think in revolutionary and unique ways. This is a path toward becoming a better person, and thus creating a better world.