| Look above and you see the more rich and powerful stacked one after another, wealth and power increasing seemingly infinitely the higher you look. Look below and you see the poor and powerless, stacked one after another, poverty and powerlessness infinitely desperate the lower you look. Unless you're near the very top or the very bottom, at every level of this power ladder the view is the same. "I recently asked a wealthy political donor why he was supporting Bill de Blasio and his attacks on the wealthy." "Because inequality is a problem in New York," he said. "The rich have gotten their way for too long." http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2013/10/... Compared to the poor in developing and undeveloped countries where people earn $5 a day, your wealth and power relative to them might as well be the same as the wealth and power from 0.1% percenter relative to you. Them looking at you would feel the same as you (assuming $100,000 income) looking at a CEO making $5 million a year. The only question is, with your wealth and power, how will you diffuse your power to reduce the world's inequality? If you can solve this problem, you can show the example for your family and close friends. If your family and close friends can solve this problem, so can your community, your neighbourhood, the rest of your city and nation. |
It's an issue of mentality. A society is what it is because its members share a set of assumptions, ideas, mentalities. The one-percenters get even more one-percent-y every year because we all hold certain "truths" to be "self-evident".
For starters, we need less individualism. I'm not saying less individual freedom, mind you.