Shucking Oysters: More, More, More
By Alex Allen
Big yachts. Fast cars. Private jets. The island in the Bahamas. The villa in France. For most of us, living like this is about as likely as getting off the Bayne Sound Connector in the same order that we boarded. Our days are spent commuting to work, struggling with the cost of living, and maybe feeling that sometimes the good things in life are passing us by. Compared to billionaires and rock stars, our lives can seem as exciting as a bivalve mollusk.
On Hornby recently, Vegas billionaire Lorenzo Fertitta, former Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO, had his 285-foot super yacht Lonian anchored at Tribune Bay. Fertitta also brought along a second megayacht, the 215-foot Hodor, a catamaran-style companion vessel that carried his big boy toys, like his jet skis, motorcycles, Peloton bikes, personal submarine, and helicopter.
George Monbiot wrote that great wealth flattens the world. “If you can go anywhere and do anything, everything is over the horizon…Place has no meaning, other than as a setting that might impress the friends you no longer trust.” There’s also a connection between speed, noise and ego. Monbiot unapologetically noted: “There must be something unresolved about a person who feels the need to fill the sky with noise and capture the attention of everyone he passes, whether he is on the road or the water.”
Making money – chunks of it – seems to be the only way to have a meaningful life, apparently. We live in a culture that prioritizes excessive pursuits of self-interest and competitiveness. Over 20 years ago, John de Graaf, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor observed that a “powerful virus has infected American society, threatening our wallets, our friendships, our families, our communities, and our environment.” In their book, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, they define this affliction as “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.”
It’s the desire to be more wealthy, more successful, more better. Affluenza is also defined as the inability of an individual to understand the consequences of their actions because of their social status or economic privilege. People said to be suffering from this virus are in a constant state of dissatisfaction because they always want more than what they already have. Not much has changed today. In fact, it’s probably worse.
In our society of growing income inequality, those with financial privilege are more likely to sequester themselves from the riff raff at large. Unfortunately, this phenomenon fosters a sense of entitlement that can be self-perpetuating: the wealthy feel they have earned their way into an elite class with superior intellect and talent. As a result, they believe the rules of society do not apply to them.
Christopher Ryan asked in his book, Civilized To Death: The Price of Progress: What if the cold-heartedness so often associated with the rich isn’t the result of “having been raised by a parade of resentful nannies, too many sailing lessons, or repeated caviar overdoses, but the compounded disappointment of being lucky but still feeling unfulfilled?”
In an essay called “Extreme Wealth is Bad for Everyone – Especially the Wealthy,” Michael Lewis observed: “It is beginning to seem that the problem isn’t that the kind of people who wind up on the pleasant side of inequality suffer from some moral disability that gives them a market edge. The problem is caused by the inequality itself: It triggers a chemical reaction in the privileged few. It tilts their brains. It causes them to be less likely to care about anyone but themselves or to experience the moral sentiments needed to be a decent citizen.”
It’s not so much that being rich makes you less generous. Wealth creates a social distance between the haves and the have nots. The us-versus-them mentality applies to physical space, too. Ryan points out how money affords certain comforts which create physical distance between those who can afford isolating luxuries and those who can’t. “We use money to insulate ourselves from the risk, noise, inconvenience,” Ryan wrote.
According to one study, over the course of seven experiments, wealthy individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, make a habit of unethical decision-making, take valued goods from others, lie in a negotiation, cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize, and endorse unethical behaviour at work than lower-class folks. “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything, the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereo-typically associate with, say, assholes,” Paul Piff, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley told New York magazine.
Of course, there are exceptions. There are a few rich people who have a sense of decorum when navigating the “difficult currents their good fortune generates without succumbing to Rich Asshole Syndrome.”
So, yes, little grasshopper, there’s more to life than the endless pursuit of private luxury. It’s the vitality of our community, the health of our environment, and the ins and outs of everyday existence that makes us rich, not a $160 million yacht that costs $15 million a year to maintain and operate.
