The problem with rich people
What the very rich and the very poor have in common
Although Hegel was a proponent of the free market, he was honest enough to admit that a free market necessarily creates poverty, and he had no solution to that. He left it to his pupil Marx to come up with one, with mixed results. But, like Marx, Hegel wasn’t concerned about poverty purely out of a feeling of empathy for hungry children. Nor did he think that all should necessarily be equal.
Hegel’s problem with poverty is more precise: it’s that the poor, as it were, fall out of society itself. Poverty is when you cease to be a member of society because you don’t have access anymore to the basic infrastructure required to participate in society. Infrastructure like housing, a job, and in our times, access to the internet. Incidentally, this is why we should define poverty not as some hard limit of material deprivation: if everyone in your class is playing Pokemon GO, but you’re not allowed a phone, that is also a form of poverty.
So what happens when you can’t participate in society anymore? You’re forced to live on the margin, and become a kind of scrounger in the eyes of those who are still “in”, even if they would never admit to looking at a homeless person the same way they would look at a stray cat or pigeon. It also means that you have no reason anymore to respect society’s rules. Why would you, considering this society has spat you out? The result is not just petty crime, which can still be explained in terms of material need (how can you judge a mother stealing baby formula?), but also petty acts of resentment, like voting yes on Brexit, that on a large enough scale can have disastrous consequences for society.
On the other side of the wealth spectrum we have another group, the very rich, that also don’t participate in society, for very different reasons. When you’re very rich you’ve made it out, you don’t have to live anymore by the same rules as everybody else. You don’t have to have a job, you don’t have to worry about following the law (just pay the fine if you get caught). You’re living the fantasy that the regular John can only dream about. But without society telling you what to do, your only guide to life is your ego. This creates rich people who spend their money to satisfy their ego, paying people to admire them, using their influence to mold the world into affirming their genius and generosity.
During the #MeToo era, and more specifically the scandal surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, we have also seen another side of how rich people can enjoy being outside of society’s rules. What for us are forbidden fantasies generated by the very strictures of society, for those outside of society they become real. This can be a homeless person masturbating in public, or it can be a member of the British royal family raping children on a private island. When you’re not accountable to anyone or anything, you become a slave to your desires (which aren’t even really yours, as any Lacanian will tell you).
Many people dream of becoming rich, I certainly do. But I wonder if we should treat those dreams as ego-driven fantasies that are never meant to be realized. After all, according to Hegel, the highest form of freedom is not to be a slave to your whims, but to be a part of something bigger than you, in which you recognize the ethical substance of your community.
