cool dude

this bullshit

Pick one

ask him if firefighters are in the 1%

continue on to talk about teachers, but before letting him say that ‘some teachers are really shitty at their job’ ask them if he truly believes there are no driven teachers being rewarded with the shittiest financial means the country can get away with

continue opening the conversation with other occupations, like nurses and construction workers. and ask him, how many nurses it took for a driven and passionate hedge fund manager to make his first billion

don’t even bring up concepts like class war or anything, just talk about the material reality and embody what you want to say rather than explaining it

I don’t think your friend is going to change without a random event happening to him that puts him in a precarious position. He’s saying it’s better to be a homeless person in NYC than any historical wealthy person or any ancient sumerian king. That’s a brutal misunderstanding of what it’s like being homeless. No homeless person would ever think “man this sucks but at least I’m not Emperor Shenzhong and living in a palace with a thousand servants.”

Your friend is stuck thinking he lives in paradise, he disregards what poor people now think and feel, and he lives in a bubble.

Truly spoken like a dude who has never met or even seen an actual working class person in his life. “Truly hardworking” lmao does he think 99 people are just always playing on their phone and not doing their job, or does he think that somehow billionaires are actually performing physical and mental labour commensurate to their personal wealth?

This is either a child or someone who needs to genuine complete from-scratch reeducation about all aspects of reality. Wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he also is unaware that the earth is not flat or that there is a tiny man who lives in his computer.

So all the 1% are cool except vast, overwhelming majority (I think the stats are >90% in 'merica) who are there by way of inheritance?

Also, fuck these attitudes that accuse 99% of the population of not being hardworking, passionate and motivated. It’s an insult to every parent (including my own) who had to work shitty jobs all day long for decades just so their child/ren can have a roof and food and water and are among the poorest of all people.

And obviously, no, very few people pre-1800 would want to be a homeless person today. The only real exception is medical technology. Personally I’d trade my median wealth to be in a cool pre-1800 peasantry community.

hope he’s a teenager bc this is stupid

“uhh actually generational wealth doesn’t matter bc it all reaches equilibrium eventually, the people getting killed in the meantime are irrelevant”
okay then life doesn’t matter bc heat death of universe, also I can you and take your money or do a just for funsies

and generational wealth does NOT equalize. The richest families in developed Northwest Eurasia are something like 60% the same as they were 600 years ago

article
map
(this map doesn’t control for “rich getting richer” where some billionaires don’t inherit most of their wealth, but were already multi-millionaires to start with/had connections with billionaires–which is like pretending that using only half the available cheat codes in a video game make you a legitimate player)

this moron doesn’t understand anything about human dignity, and he thinks that absolute material wealth is the only thing that leads to human happiness. This says a lot about him, perhaps he wouldn’t mind being a slave (if rewarded with access to some matrix-like alternate-reality technology)

“passionate, hard working people get rewarded for their work” lmao

be passionate tree grower
plant trees in your shared community garden
get merk’d by
an extremely american story!

this is the mayoest, angliest, waspiest, boiled-eels-fermented-in-lye-iest, faux detached and fake enlightened take on the internet. Where you just spout bs but with the air of “it is what it is” to appear totally right

pretty much everyone loses their inheritance

That’s ridiculous. If somebody inherits money at a young age or youngish age - they can stick it in an index fund. It’s a safe investment and if they reinvest a majority of the proceeds - due to compounded interest it will grow a surprising amount over time.

And - of course - the larger the inheritance the greater the chance their parents will help them via their influence, networking etc.

It’s doubtful he ever sees it your way because “capitalism good musk good” sentiment is a fundamental difference that can only really be changed by real experience.

Without passing too much judgement, as long as your friend is firmly middle of the status quo and believes in the meritocracy, he will never have a the perspective required to see the world like we do.

Also, be weary of his language, he is on the verge of calling poor people lazy whether he means to or not.

They wouldn’t have

1 % of wealth has nothing to do with hard work lol, but with investments. Unless you take the world, then it has to do with imperialism.

Unless your friend thinks dipshit writing ad pitches works 1000 harder than bangladeshi seamstress.

“humans are not equal” what the fuck you should bully him just on that. you should be very harsh and very challenging, ask him to explain why he is better than everyone with less money.

…So one is asked to go back in history to the mythical day of the original social contract made between equals, who later became unequal because they really desired it, as evidenced by the inequality of the sacrifices to which they consented. I do not think that this way of avoiding the questions of the specificity of capitalism even deserves to be considered elegant.

• Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, page 17

You should talk with your friend about systemic racism in the US. An entire group of people repeatedly dispossessed from the value of their labor. The argument your friend is using has racist undertones whether they know it or not.

The inheritance thing suggest to me he’s already thinking about flaws in the “meritocracy”, he just hasn’t considered all the implications.

The one percent isn’t self-made. Their success is built off of society – contingent on it. The same way your or I don’t generate our own electricity, don’t crack our own petroleum, don’t purify our own water, don’t grow our own food – Bill Gates does not write every line of code for windows, Jeff Bezos does not box every product for shipping, James Walton does not keep his aisles stocked. Every day you and I depend on the labor of other people to live the lives we live, and we contribute our own labor into the pool. Every day, Jeff and BIll and James and their class make millions on the labor of other people – but they don’t have to contribute their labor back. The money they take is a privilege bestowed by the simple fact of ownership. They own the warehouses and shops and companies that everyone else work in.

More over, none of them would be where they are if not for the work that was already done by society. Bill Gates relied on the invention of Allen Turing, on the free programming done between universities and research firms on the early DARPANET. Jeff Bezos relied on the already built internet infrastructure and the postal systems ran by government. James Walton just ate up local groceries that had already established profitable ventures.

You really need to start from square one, because this dude is misunderstanding the most basics of material reality.

The 1% don’t make money through their own hard work, they make it through other people’s hard work. Value is created by labor, and the only people performing that labor are the workers, not corporate executives like CEOs and other suits. All the “profits” going to executives and shareholders are therefore value stolen from the workers.

Some of this might be hard to get through depending on how young and naive they are. I’ve worked both manual labor jobs, and jobs where I’ve interacted with administrative/executive types daily, so I’ve got firsthand experience with how much the latter are worthless dipshits and ghouls. Rejecting capitalism is easy when you actually see how the sausage is made from start to finish. But if this dude’s experience is limited to watching the west wing or whatever while they work a cushy desk job, then they’re probably going to base their ideology off of the typical “unskilled labor” propaganda that permeates western society.

If he’s open to it, get him to watch some labor theory of value 101 videos. Here’s a decent one. But, if he really believes in his heart that people like Bezos are somehow “more deserving” of their wealth than Amazon delivery drivers who are working so intensely that they have to piss in bottles, then I don’t think it’s worth your energy trying to convince him of basic humanity. Personally, I would just bully such a person until they feel enough shame to do some introspection, or avoid me so I don’t have to deal with their bullshit. (I’m going to be honest, anyone who says “us humans are not equal, we don’t deserve what we have” is not worth your energy imo, but good luck anyways if you consider them enough of a friend to try and deprogram them.)

The 1% of humans who he describes as good human beings are not the same 1% that own the wealth. In fact the wealthy 1% cannot abide the virtuous 1% and do everything they can to see that number doesn’t increase.