Somewhere around 1760, Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.” Ever since then, Eat the Rich has been a rallying cry for inequality.
Modern society is based on what we call the social contract, being an understanding that ALL of us are better off if we ALL follow the rules. And the social contract works beautifully. Preppers and libertarians will tell you that you can do it alone, but that’s a lie. Ever since we first formed tribes, well over a hundred thousand years ago, we’ve learned that there is strength in numbers. If someone wants to go and live in the woods by themselves, wonderful, but if you’re using solar power or gas or a knife made in China or a gun, you are NOT living off the grid. You are very much still dependent on the grid, as that’s where all that stuff is made—you’re only fooling yourself.
So what’s for dinner? What are we going to eat? The reality is, if we all work together with fairness and equity, there is plenty to go around, but at a certain point, the ultra-wealthy violate the social contract by squandering resources like Smaug and his pile of gold.
Violating the social contract, though, is deceptive. It may look like Elon and Jeff have billions, but they’re short-sighted. Ultimately, they’re like the mythical snake Oroborus, which ate its own tail.
That absurd, crazy dollar value that indicates their wealth is calculated by multiplying the stock price by the sheer number of shares they hold—and it continues to grow over time, but at what cost? It’s easy for billionaires to think they really are sitting on a pile of gold, but they’re actually eating their own tails. They’re undermining the very system that has allowed them to succeed. Nowhere is this more obvious than when it comes to climate change.
The fossil fuel industry has made TRILLIONS since the 1970s when it first realized human emissions were causing the atmosphere to warm. If you earned ten thousand dollars a day, it would take you 275,000 years to earn a trillion dollars—that’s roughly the amount of time Homo sapiens has existed as a distinct species! It’s an absurd amount of money, and the fossil fuel industry has done it in just a few decades!
Wait, did I say they made a trillion dollars since 1970? I meant to say they’ve made a trillion dollars a year in pure, unadulterated PROFIT since 1970. That’s more than 50 trillion dollars! If you earned ten thousand dollars a day, it would take you almost 14 million years to earn 50 trillion dollars. For context, 14 million years ago, to put this in context, back then, our ancestors were diverging into the Great Apes! And they’ve accomplished this in just a few decades!
All this is to say, the excesses of the fossil fuel industry and its Smaug-like greed are clearly NOT sustainable and a breach of the social contract. Destroying the planet and the environment for insane corporate profits will go down as well as Oroborus eating its own tail. No one will be spared. Already, we’re seeing insane changes in the climate, from the increase in frequency of cyclones and hurricanes, to the warming of the ocean, to rampant flooding. We—as a society—are eating our own tail. Well, the fossil fuel industry is because governments want eternal economic growth.
To say we’re shortsighted is an understatement.
We’ve been sold a lie.
I know… I know… capitalism is the best. It’s lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system, but unrestrained capitalism is madness. It’s like handing the keys of a Ferrari to your 16-year-old son and saying, “This is the best car on the road.” It sure is… until it’s the best car wrapped around a telephone pole.
We can’t afford to stick our heads in the sand. We need to demand change from our politicians. We need to hold the fossil fuel industry to account. We need to stop giving the dragon Smaug a free pass and start demanding that those profits go into fixing the problem they’ve created.
We don’t need to eat the rich. We need the rich to accept that we are all in this together. We need to return to a system that values equality.
If you want to make America great again, then how about instituting the tax rate in the 1950s, when America became an economic powerhouse. A 90% tax rate may sound absurd, but in practice, the wealthiest 1% of Americans ended up paying roughly 40% income tax. But taxing the super wealthy and taxing corporations like the fossil fuel industry is the only way we’re going to stop them from eating their own tails. If it costs them to pollute, they’ll do something about reducing emissions.
