You want a real-world reason to heed Jesus's warnings about the spiritual death that can accompany wealth? Read Eric Konigsberg's fascinating NYT profile today of psychotherapists to the super-rich. The soul-destroying pride really stands out. Excerpt:
Dr. Stone said those two kinds of patients tended to have different problems: "In my experience, there was a high incidence of depression in the people who were born rich. And by contrast, the people today who are making a fortune are so often narcissistic in a way that excludes depression."
And this, about a Washington politician:
The politician would not listen to his therapist.In fact, nobody -- not the Harvard-educated foreign policy specialist who was supposed to be advising him, and certainly not Dr. Karasu -- could persuade him that he was wrong. About anything.
It was anxiety that had brought the man to therapy , and both the cause and the symptoms followed a pattern. "He had learned how to maneuver everyone to come around to his point of view," Dr. Karasu said. "He had removed the foreign policy consultant from his circle after the man had disagreed with him."
Dr. Karasu saw this as an opportunity to press the patient. "But this person knows more than you," he told the elected official, a wealthy businessman who had turned to public service, yearning for a greater challenge, after quickly making a fortune in the private sector.
"But I'm his boss," the patient insisted.
"The issue wasn't foreign affairs; it was control," Dr. Karasu recalled. "That was his attitude to me as well: 'I know what is best because look at who I am.' "
While it is common for a patient to resist treatment, Dr. Karasu said, "There are some people who, no matter how intelligent they are, they think they know my business better than I do. And they are very difficult to reach."
To what extent do you think the narcissism of the super-rich can be said to exemplify the narcissism of 21st-century America -- which, compared to the rest of the world, is super-rich?
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I think this comes of the prevalent idea that the rich are rich because they've earned it and they deserve it; the poor are poor because they are lazy, stupid, or irresponsible and they deserve to be poor. It lets the rich convince themselves that they really are better than everybody else. It doesn't matter that many of the rich really haven't earned it, and clearly don't deserve it... that they have gotten where they are because of inherited wealth, expensive education, and lots of connections. It also doesn't matter than inferior schools and class differences (ways of speaking and mannerisms) can make it very difficult for smart, hardworking, and responsible poor to get ahead.
I don't believe that wealth is really a problem. Poverty, however, is.
That said, I do think that some people can be workaholics and let their personal relationships suffer because they have more control over event that occur at work while personal relationships require more negotiation and improvisation.
But the history of man is the history of poverty and man's attempts to rise out of bare subsistance. We've only been in that condition for the past 2 to 4 centuries and much of the world's population is still living on a dollar a day.
So, in general, I don't think people should be ashamed of their 401(k) balances or a vacation in Europe. A good friend of mine recently told, as he was on his way to visit Europe for the fifth time, that he felt a little guilty. But I told him that he was very frugal in other areas of his life, had worked 60 hours per week for years and had earned the money.
Let's not feel guilty about making money. But let's feel guilty if we sit on our fat apathy, don't challenge ourselves with productive education and then seek scapegoats who made better decisions with their time when they were in college.
The exchange with the politician sounds like what you would hear from a substance abuser who isn't ready to own up to the abuse. In this case, the "substance" is a sense of entitlement that comes with wealth, power and fame.
There's no shortage of enablers of this kind of abuse: people who suck up to bosses and rich relatives or neighbors when they are misguided or irrational; people who defer to celebrities who don't know what they're talking about; people who profit by stroking the egos and indulging the whims of the wealthy; people who equate inherited wealth or the ability to make money with intelligence or wisdom.
Fact is, we live in a society that offers much greater rewards for seeing people for what they have than for what they are. As our ancestors said, "Them that has, gets."
Sorry, Rod, I meant to come back earlier and say thanks for the explanation. I guess I was confused by your disdain for the therapeutic, as opposed to therapy. Still not quite clear on how you distinguish between those things! I think it would be interesting to talk about "psychologizing away questions that are more properly moral." Like, which is which, and how do you tell the difference?
Sig -- and by the way, can I mention how much I hate this new software, which forces us all to retype our names and e-mail addresses with each post? -- by the "therapeutic," I mean what Rieff means: an approach to life that seeks the amelioration of anxiety, often at the expense of actually dealing with the problems that cause our anxiety, or sometimes even just living with a certain level of anxiety as the price of being authentically human. A therapeutic approach to politics, for example, would mean seeing politics primarily as a means of assuaging hurts and massaging emotions. A therapeutic approach to, well, life would mean learning to get comfortable with one's faults, instead of working to overcome them.
Admittedly it's tricky to know when a personality trait is properly medical, and when it's a moral condition. I struggle with this regarding my oldest son, whose sensory processing disorder makes him very sensitive to certain sensory inputs. I thought for a while when he was younger that he was being pointlessly cantankerous when he would protest loudly and rudely about the temperature of his bath (which was lukewarm to the touch). It was only later that I came to understand that for him, lukewarm really was too hot. That's a flawed example, but I think you see what I mean.
Rock: I don't believe that wealth is really a problem.
The Bible, and other ancient moral traditions, disagrees with you. It's not wealth per se that's the problem, but the false sense of pride and entitlement that wealth engenders. Of course it's possible to be a wealthy saint, but the Lord himself said that would be more difficult. Why? I think the story to which I linked gives you a pretty good idea.
Rock: A good friend of mine recently told, as he was on his way to visit Europe for the fifth time, that he felt a little guilty. But I told him that he was very frugal in other areas of his life, had worked 60 hours per week for years and had earned the money.
Your friend might truly have no reason to feel guilty about going to Europe, I don't know. I'm certainly in no position to judge. But I do think it's a mistake to assume that if someone earned the money fair and square, there's no moral dimension to how they choose to spend it. Leona Helmsley left billions to the care and feeding of dogs. Well, it's her money, she can do with it as she sees fit. But I don't think the fact that she has, or had, the right to dispose of her wealth as she wished immunizes her from criticism over the choice she made. Choice of any sort is not self-validating.
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