Other People’s Money – Deifying And Demonizing The Wealthy

We look up to the wealthy. We track them in popular culture as celebrities. I bet you can name your favorite billionaire… and your most hated billionaire. It’s quite divisive, actually. We see other people’s wealth and make assumptions. We assume they must be smarter than the rest of us. Or we might assume they must be devious and evil. Ultimately, we are trying to understand how they ended up with these resources and we didn’t. We rarely assume it was blind luck. But often it was. Timing is everything. The right idea at the right time makes for a great business, regardless of who is in charge. But we don’t like to think of our lives as being driven by chance. Some billionaires are truly brilliant business strategists. Others just kind of fell into it. And some might have used untoward business practices to get there. We see each one of them as a deity to be followed and mimicked or as a demon to be lashed out against.

We rarely see them as human… which they all are… every one of them. They are just people. They are not deities. They are not demons. They are somewhere between, just like anyone else. They are imperfect, just like that person you see in the mirror each day.

We demonize the wealthy as a way to justify our own lack of wealth. If the wealthy are evil, the. We do not want to be evil. Therefore, we don’t want to be wealthy. We convince ourselves that wealthy is bad so it’s a good thing we are swimming in debt, or just getting by.

But deifying the wealthy can have the same self-oppressive result. When you deify a billionaire, you are creating a large separation between you and them. You essentially say that they are wealthy because they are particularly special in a way that you could never be. It could never be YOU. The result is the same. You never try to improve your financial situation.

Consider the following questions: