alt Hacker NewsHow hard is it for the wealthy to not smack everyone else around at every possible opportunity? What happened to noblesse oblige?
(This is not a rhetorical question, I would love to hear others' take on the psychology and history of the subject. Really, how hard is it?)
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It becomes a scorecard. Success in life is strictly about making the number go up. It doesn't matter if they could spend $100K a day for life and never go broke. They must have a bigger number and be higher on the Forbes (e.g.) list. Some people are so obsessed with it they lie and make up things to claim their number is much higher than it actually is.
> everyone else around at every possible opportunity?
How exactly to become wealthy then?..
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> What happened to noblesse oblige?
Some things made noblesse oblige way harder to manifest.
Meritocracy. "I deserve what I have", versus "I got lucky have what I have" made harder to share back.
Globalization. When you use one community to produce and another to consume, and third to register a company, and owner lives in fourth it's hard to associate yourself with the community. Where exactly to give back? You won't even see those people.
Secularizarion. Though USA is still significantly religious place comparing to europe.
Easiness to move. Today you're here, tomorrow you're there in new zealand bunker.
Culture. Somehow the rich are in the people who are heavily interconnected, spend time together at the khe khe pedoisland.
Natural selection. The ones who care less about others mathematically have more advantage than those who care enough to spend resources on non-resource-aggregation activities.
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So. There is no intristic motivation to do so (with majority), there is no external motivation, and there is no repercussions of not giving back.
One thing that happened is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics, right? Mark Zuckerberg is panned for having 'defunded' a school. What happened was he paid for it for a while and then stopped in a planned manner. Those who didn't ever pay were better off. In general, at the margin you move some guy who was ambivalent to opposed. Jordan Henderson spoke for gay rights, and got panned when he moved to Saudi Arabia, while many footballers did not speak out about gay rights ever and received no censure over this.
The general rule with many of these causes is that unless you're willing to be absolutely committed, it's better not to be involved. If you cannot prove to yourself absolute fidelity perpetually into the future, it's better to not do it at all. The punishment for the apostate far outweighs the punishment for the infidel.
So your commitment has to be at least high enough to be willing to bear the resulting punishment for your apostasy. And if it is any less than that, you are strongly encouraged to just stay out of it. It's not that anyone is mean or anything. It's just that on the margin not-participating costs nothing and participating incurs a massive liability. That causes a shift in the window.