The venerated French thinker Montesquieu is known to have made the following observation: “True is it that when a democracy is founded on commerce, private people may acquire vast riches without a corruption of morals. This is because the spirit of commerce is naturally attended with that of frugality, economy, moderation, tranquility, order, and rule. So long as this spirit exists, the riches it produces have no bad effect. The mischief is, where excessive wealth destroys the spirit of commerce, then it is that the inconveniences of inequality begin to be felt.”
In his sonnet, the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelly famously included the following statement on the ephemeral basis of human hubris: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; look on my works, (entirely crumbled into ruins), ye mighty and despair!”
It is our view that the official handbook of mental diseases, the DSL, should be supplemented with the category of relentless manic disease, evinced by the irrational and pathologically driven aspirations of the celebrated billionaire class for even further monetary wealth. In this exotic atmosphere, it might be usefully and empathically recalled that many citizens merely live “from paycheck to paycheck.”
The metaphysically rational and ubiquitious office of “money” is as a medium of exchange, accepted for payment of goods and services. Montesqueieu’s statement, quoted above, that excessive wealth, however, is destructive, corrupting, and productive of feelings of inequality, seems to be empirically valid. As a perceptive guide, research reveals that one billion remarkably, represents one thousand million dollars. We are advised that, unrelated to its ubiquitously utilitarian function as a medium of commercial exchange, the following individuals are reported to own this medium of exchange to an astronomic extent.:Elon Musk, 200 billion dollars; Jeff Bezos, 195 billion dollars; Warren Buffet, 133 billion dollars; and Bill Gates, approximately 106 billion dollars. Such quantities of assets, like a cosmic recitation of “light-years,” are difficult, if not impossible, to easily comprehend; however, it is to be bizarrely noted that these competitive, Ozymandan accumulators of uneeded, astronomical quantities of wealth ardently lobby for superfluous “tax breaks.”
By their neurotic and reductive aspirations, these modern day Ozymandic Pharaohs, blindly and reductively, ignore all societal humanistic values of empathy and unselfish action.
Their unrelenting, mania and singularly horse-blinder dedication to the competitive accumulation of assets, to the exclusion of all other considerations, in our view, is notably pathological.
-p.
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