I had my first true inkling that being rich might have its own challenges in the mid ’80s, when I was in a relationship with a millionaire. At the time I was living in a tiny apartment on Columbus Avenue in Manhattan, which was still in the early phase of massive gentrification. More than once, I remember him standing at my window looking at the people walking up and down the street, and saying: “They all want to be where I am.” More than the words, it was the unmistakable tone of melancholy that I heard in his voice that affected me. Nothing in his demeanor resembled happiness. I also remember another phrase he often said: “What comes after success?”
One of the mythologies of our culture is that having money is the single most important factor in the choices we make, the most reliable path to a life of happiness, and the ticket to feeling good about ourselves. In some significant ways, money indeed provides access to more resources, such as material goods of any kind as well as services that may not be available to all. Having enough money means a certain kind of immediate ease with all manner of decisions. I don’t intend to minimize the significance of such material benefit.
And still… The more I have come to know the lives of people with significant access to resources, the more struck I am with how many challenges and hardships they experience. Given how easily and often the rich are maligned (a challenge in and of itself), I wanted to offer my intuitive and learned understanding of the plight of the rich. If you happen to have access to money, you will likely recognize some of these dilemmas. If not, I hope you can imagine it. My goal, here as often, is to support our collective movement toward a world that works for all, the currently rich and the currently poor, by reducing the veil that hides our humanity from each other.
The Plight of Isolation
A friend once reflected that having more resources means being more isolated, even in the most physical of ways. When a person acquires a home and a piece of property to go with it, it means more distance from the next neighbor. The likelihood of community, of an interdependent way of living within the human family, are greatly diminished. Even those of us with moderate resources have accepted this way of living. Instead of the thick web of sharing resources that’s been the human mainstay for millennia, all our material needs and more are now mediated through paid relationships.
In addition to this basic isolation, the rich amidst us have several other specific challenges that keep them separate from others.
Does Anyone Really Love Me?Anyone who has lots of money can never truly know who is there because they love them, and who is there because they can get benefit from being near someone with money. Whether it’s friends, lovers, or fundraisers, unless they have their own financial security, the possibility that their friendliness is instrumental, designed to get money, would be so difficult to dispel enough so that the love can be relaxed into completely.
Can I Trust Anyone?A very related unease is an ongoing anxiety about how honest people can be when the temptation exists of getting more access to resources through a rich person’s assets. Some months ago I had the occasion to do some coaching for a man who has significant access to resources based on an invention he designed. I remember being touched and saddened to notice his level of anxiety around an incident of this kind, and by his sense that this kind of anxiety was an inevitable part of his life.
Can I Be Seen?Given how much value is attached to money in our modern societies, anyone with access to money is likely surrounded with people who envy them. People with privilege are often brought up to hide whatever struggle they may have (about which more in a moment), but on top of that the circumstances and the cultural context often render their struggles invisible. I had my own tiny experience of this dynamic some years back. Although my own access to material resources is fairly limited, I know I have significantly more than huge portions of the human population, and even relative to many, many people in the US, where I live. I had a housemate who came from and lived in poverty. Our shared living, which lasted only a few months, destroyed our previous friendship. When we were being facilitated by a third person to come to amicable closure, my former friend was adamant that I wasn’t struggling at all during those awful months we lived together. She simply couldn’t see it, even when I named it.
Am I Humanly Acceptable?I truly don’t know how prevalent the experience of guilt or shame is about having so many more resources than others. I know it exists at least for some people, based on my interactions with them as well as what I’ve read about the dynamics of privilege. It doesn’t surprise me that so many people with resources believe that those without resources are there because of their own doing. I imagine every human heart would be crushed at the recognition that one’s own resources are there in stark contrast, and almost invariably at the expense of, the resources of others. In order to cope with this reality, some theory that “justifies” the vastly unequal distribution of resources in the world must be created. Such a theory then serves as a defense, protecting the heart from the agony, and serving to make sense of one’s own humanity. Speaking for myself, I know I have my own way of accepting my relative privilege. I make peace with it in two ways. One is that I trust my overall intention of stewarding my resources for the benefit of all, because I’ve dedicated my life to this vision. The other is that I happen to be an exquisitely sensitive and somewhat traumatized organism that requires a fair amount of complex health-promoting expenses to be able to thrive enough to do the work I do. And even knowing this, it’s not simple. If nothing else, I am so clear that many fellow humans struggle with equal sensitivities and don’t have access to the support structures I have created for myself, and therefore likely cannot dedicate themselves to any cause other than surviving.
The difficulty is far from purely internal. Just as much as the rich are seen with envy, they are also viewed with judgment, which leads to nasty joking, endless gossiping, and attribution of lack of care. I often wonder what it would be like for a person to know that anyone they interact with is likely to be judging them, wondering about their motives and choices. I imagine if more people understood these experiences, there would be less envy.
Can I Have Peers?When one person has access to resources, that power means they often can, in principle, deliver unpleasant consequences to those with fewer resources. This, and the fact that all of us, rich and poor alike, are usually trained to defer to those with more resources than us, means that a person with resources is likely to be surrounded with deference. My own experience of this kind of deference has been painful enough, and I don’t have nearly the kinds of resources others have. I have a visceral experience of the grief of being deprived of the meaningful exchange of equals with so many people I come in contact with. I am not surprised that people with resources end up choosing each other as friends and lovers. If nothing else, this is a way they can have instant understanding and a sense of equality without much effort.
Growing Up Rich
My experience of hearing stories from people raised in high privilege is limited. Those people whose stories I did hear told of brutal upbringings. At first I was surprised. Then I wasn’t. As skewed and small as my sample has been, and I know it may not be generalizable, these stories made enormous sense to me. The same kind of sense that has led me to conclude that boys, despite everything I am aware of that’s done to girls, get worse treatment. Anyone who is raised to be in a position of dominance in relation to others must be made to overcome what I believe is a natural aversion to getting any advantage at the expense of another. In order to tolerate the suffering of others, we must become numb enough to our own humanity and our own suffering. Both boys and people with privilege of both genders are taught to hide and manage their own feelings and human experience to a degree that I feel immense sorrow about, for them and for the rest of us. For them, because I want everyone to have full access to their heart. For the rest of us, because such numbness interferes with the spontaneous flow of empathy and care that would otherwise prevent harm from being inflicted on others. Indeed, research showsthat the rich have less empathy than those of lower classes.
The Weight of Resources
As a final aspect of the challenge of being rich, I am reflecting on what access to so much resource brings with it. I remember, and still often experience, the sense of utter overwhelm and helplessness when I first moved to this country and saw the unbelievable range of options available in even the most basic supermarket. I know it now to be choice without much meaning. I remember a time when I was involved with a major remodeling project and the barrage of decisions that needed to be made about matters that ultimately didn’t interest me much. For anyone with truly significant resources, I imagine this weight multiplied many-fold, without adding much to the actual quality of living.
In addition to choosing and acquiring, the resources also need to be managed. Of course, with sufficient money, a person would have a whole team of people managing every aspect of their resources. I doubt this would bring much peace, as all of the dynamics I mentioned earlier would apply in those relationships. They would all be people hired to manage resources they themselves don’t have, which would bring the specter of envy, deference, and anxiety.
Lastly, and no less important, I know from myself how much of who I am, including what I most appreciate about who I have become, is based on being faced with constraints and difficulties. Not having to struggle to make ends meet, or to find meaningful work, or to gain others’ respect would simply provide fewer opportunities for learning, for self-reflection, and for moral and spiritual growth.
This brings me, once again, to this troubling finding about the rich having less empathy than the poor. In addition to the potential effect of a dehumanizing upbringing, the very access to resources, and the resulting isolation breed lack of empathy. We all need each other for our survival. The rich among us can mask that need more easily with money. When we can pay for something, we can more easily forget that some other human being made it, and therefore that we depend on that human being even when we pay for their work. When we are reminded of our need for each other to satisfy our basic needs, we learn much more easily how to be in a relationship, how to know when we can ask and when not, how to understand another person’s suffering, and when to offer our own generosity. I am grateful for the circumstances of my life that provided me with enough to not suffer the trauma and horror of poverty, and with little enough so that I know so firmly my place in the web of life and have such easy access to empathy and generosity.
I have no sympathy whatsoever for the rich.Let them suffer, IF they are sufferring.How can people with no souls suffer?
As an example of the crass revolting attitudes of these assholes, here is an update on the events taking place in Montreal tonight, in the context of a 3 month long battle between radical students and the government (and all of society really);
After a little lull in the battle here in Montreal, with negotiations having broken down last week between protestors and the government, demonstrators are targeting the opening of the Montreal Grand Prix tonight, which attracts up to 500,000 people usually (way down because of negative publicity this year). You can feel the tension ratcheting up. Some extremely anti-capitalist people, non -students who have decided to piggyback onto the overall energy, tried to disrupt the ostentatiously rich opening of this Grand Prix, but were caught in a police squeeze and turned away. They are now heading towards downtown Montreal where a whole street of yuppie bars and restos are having a gaudy celebration, with cute hot young women in very skimpy dresses serving the booze. There is also a nude march tonight (!!, a march of socially conscious females, not “hot” airheads), and the usual nightly demo in downtown Montreal, every night now for a month a and a half. I hope no violence erupts, but it is tense. It’s all a perfect situation for a propaganda offensive against the ostentatious rich having a “charity” ball at the opening ,at $1000 a pop for a Children’s hospital (as if these rich assholes really give a shit about a Children’s Hospital; there they are sipping champagne, the males walking in with their bimbos or throphy wives, after stepping out of their BMW’s, THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE!!). These people have no shame!
i’m noticing that after reading the article i feel empathy toward the rich, yet reading your response has so quickly pulled me back to my outrage at the horrifying destruction caused by the behavior of the rich (and thus powerful).
i’m aware some of these emotions come from a sense of my helplessness to do much to change things. but they do evolve into anger, and a sense of intolerance toward those who with such confidence rob us of our birthright.
this is the essence of the protests as i see them…………..to move towards balance of healthy living…..
Clearly the rich can mitigate their suffering. Do what Bill Gates has done. Do some GOOD with your fortunes.
…..hmmmm, thinking of all the elvises, michael jacksons, corporate giants……how they ‘always crave more’…………i dont think that ‘constant craving’ and demanding money is fun………….but the harsh reality we live in doesnt let ANY of off that hook…………………………CULTURALLY TRAUMAISED (see rachel buddeberg, Rachel’s Musings), all of us, to wish hard for a piece of that same ‘cake’…………..we’re trapped in the same cycle with the rich……..fearing the ”horror” of maybe being ‘moneyless’………thus homeless, friendless, hungry……………the fear and obsession we all share , which so far has prevented us, the ”not rich”, from casting off our lifeline to those rich we despise, yet can’t disengage from…………………….hmmmmm…………
Let me say that I rarely see ANY friendly face anywhere, whether poor, working class, middle class or rich.If I do ,it’s usually an artist, a bohemian, or a working class person. As far as the rich, I usually see arrogance, hauteur, insensitivity, the MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE lording it over us…like yesterday watching those people going into the Grand Prix opening. And then to read some populist editorialist today defending them! He actually wrote something to the effect that these were the people paying the welfare cheques of the activists, as if they were all on welfare! This is the level of debate we have to contend with!
I’ll make one notable exception to my rich-as-bad comment: the Kennedys, especially Robert Kennedy. No, they are not perfect, but speeches, articles, and books put out by them usually have a human depth that I rarely read anywhere, certainly deeper than anything on The Left, including Tikkun here with all this schmaltzy “spiritual” bullshit (Miki Kashtan, a prime example, out to “love” everyone including Hitler, like Ghandi did!). Really, I have tremendous admiration for Robert Kennedy. I highly recommend the reading of a memoir about him by his friend Jack Newfield ( a founder of SDS); and a bio of him by his other friend Arthur Schlesinger. Very moving books.
Marco, the Kennedy fortune wear earned from bootlegging, and father Joseph use his fortune to make kings and princes out of his sons while he allowed a lobotomy to be performed on his daughter.
As for Robert Kennedy. Well he started his political career sitting on the House Committee for un-American activities, Not al pretty faces can cover a dark past,
It is not so difficult to be rich. It is not impossible to be poor. It is difficult, sometimes impossible to be ourselves. The difference is the amount of challenges a wealthy individual faces. But I just can’t get too worked up over a portrait of some wistful, lonely, affluent cloud-dweller. If life is so ghastly, just do what Jesus told the “rich young ruler” to do. Give all you have to the poor!
It’s funny, growing up with an Indian father who went on a lot about karma, and a catholic Chinese mother, who had a hard start in life too (she had an edge, still does), the way that different beliefs colour experience. Although my father also grew up in poverty in Singapore during the Japanese occupation of WW2, the Indian idea of karma as a long (very long) process of refining the soul. It doesnt mean justice isn’t something to aim towards, but at the same time, humans are not, nor have they ever been, easy to understand, like or live with. I think this is a great article, but it would be so nice to step back and look at the spiritual complexity and for comments to appreciate thar the author is expressing a spiritual perspective, not simply a political one.
Don;
Your comments about Robert Kennedy are partly unfair. YES, the sources of the Kennedy fortune are PARTLY dubious (it was not all bootlegging). But then again, how many middle-class born 60 types are cashing in on their inheritances these days ( created in a dubious economic system), and partly using the money to do some good? Also, RFK changed after the assassination of JFK. He went from center- Left , with just a flirt with McCarthy in the early 50s, to moderate radical in the late 60s. Read the books I suggested and you will get a clear picture of his spiritual-ideologial trajectory.Also check the RFK Cenrer for Human Rights in Washington.
Marco
I wonder how successful he would have been if he did not come from money. At least Clinton rose out of a challenging past to become president.
I found this article disturbing. I have had many brushes with the rich — some of whom were appalled that I had actually lived in poverty, and at one point in my life was homeless. It was like I had some unspeakable disease that would infect them by my mere presence. I felt like they were offended that I am bright, articulate and keenly aware of what goes on in the world — like poor equals stupid!
I am sure that everyone has their pain, and their own life journey — but to ask for sympathy because they are rich is a huge stretch for me. They, more than most people, are able to make choices about how they will live their life and do not spend most of their waking time just trying to survive. They have the opportunity to do so much good in the world, but for the most part seem more interested in feeding their own greed.
I know that you cannot generalize, and I am sure that there is a rich person out there deserving of my sympathy. Perhaps we could show his or her plight on TV for some of us to sponsor. With our help, they too can have hope for tomorrow.
Don,
Rarely do the qualities of soul that RFK (and JFK) had come from money.True, the money helped them keep independent of donors who could influence them away from their vision. Well, I say OK to that! As far as Clinton, he is a typical modern crass yuppie , coming from a poor background, who had to compensate for his self-hatred as an Arkansas poor boy by hanging with other crass assholes like Robert Rubin,seducing every bimbo in sight, and spending a million dollars for his daughter’s wedding while people starve around the world , starvation that he is apparently so concerned about! And look at Wall Street: they are all Republican Ayn Randian assholes! The Kennedys and Franklin Roosevelt were considered traitors to their class. Not too many other rich people in their entourages (except for some art and Hollywood types and there were some fine ones: RE: JFK and RFK: Arthur Miller, John Frankenheimer, Paul Newman, etc…)! The business class HATED Roosevelt!…and he , famously, welcomed their hatred! Would that Obama said the same thing and rammed down their throaths laws that would control them. But, no. He cannot do that , and would not want to anyways even if he could.
Look , for all the faults of your country (I write from Canada), you had some great people : FDR, JFK, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and especially Robert Kennedy. As far as Clinton and Obama, ugh…
JFK and RFK may not have made it into Ivy League schools without money Their father controlled the party machine and was a king maker. I’m not saying that made ten bad men, juts men with a huge advantage,
We have no idea what RFK would have been like as president, You cannot specula. JFK did not live long enough to create and huge legacy.
“coming from a poor background, who had to compensate for his self-hatred as an Arkansas poor boy by hanging with other crass assholes like Robert Rubin,seducing every bimbo in sight”
tes, hé came from humble means and earned his way into good schools. There was no daddy making a hefty contribution to a school. The bimbo thing he learned from his mentor, JFK.
The only thing that this article truly exposits is the amazing arrrogance of privileged wealthand celebrity entitlement. Right now the poor filthy rich on the left and the right in this nation are monopolizing almost every social good.
Volunteerism, shared community work, education, meals and play, work that builds character by a rich person beginning in business in les than a stellar capacity, (aka working one’s way up), fair political and national access to office by populists and their ilk instead of a solely Ivy League monopoly, respect for character instead of plastic surgery enhanced, dental care assured good looks and the display of wealth as the only sure barometer for power…….these are the no longer extant decencies of a participatory democracy. we no longer have a participatory democracy.
We now have a rotten to the core plutocracy that is ever increasingly listing towards a police state, in which the rich own the police. The rich includes of course, the mob and the cartels, as well as those who smash souls and bodies and lives in The Market.
The poor have not any more got ready, ubiquitous access to nutritious food,, shelter and work of any kind that pays a living wage. The rotten rich who are the upper quadrant of our society, self congratulatory and intentionally insulated except for brief forays into well protected and controlled environments for all the right sort of people, carefully screened and waving their passports of privilege for entance, such as social service organizations in which an alien class preys upon the vulnerable and needy and brainwashes them into dogmatic theorism of the worst and most ineffective sort, such as our current corruption of feminism and the enforced pacifism of people who think ther is a one size fits all approach, (which they are [aid experts in), to each sphere of human endeavor that once was a thriving diverse, cacophany of exciting and random and healthy and vital path of service for spiritual seekers of every ilk… the absolate monarchy of the rich over health care, the exploitation of the poor and the working class into objects for the amusement and excess consumptivitis of the poor filthy rich…let us wake up and smell the expensive coffee!!!
It is a sick joke, that the problems in our society are 1% of the population’s oligarchy. It is the upper quadrant of our society, those top 25% who can afford to buy their kids and bribe their kids, and look down on those who have to discipline and yes, sometimes spank their kids…the folks who can fight over $45,000 a year kindergarten spots and which cushy dorm a kids gets at camp, and can give them graduation gifts of breast augmentation surgery for their high school graduation in such large numbers that a TED presenter noted in 2008 that it was the MOST given gift for graduation to HS girls one recent year.
The rich have not my sympathy, though those like many of the the Kennedys who have earned it, have my gratitude and respect. i have known many rich people and i grew up with one foot in wealth, one foot on the street as a throwaway kid, and that was because my home was not safe and i had to leave at an earlier age than any child should be on the streets and homeless. Yet my father and his father was a Yale man. and my aunt graduated from yale nursing school with a Masters RN during the war…and my family had old money and yes many good and loving souls.
This objection isn’t about the potential human value and social value, when merited by right action including spending nmoney and love in the service of the world’s disenfranchised, of the rich. it is about the fact that pitying or feeling bad for them is absolutely incomprehensibly unfair to the struggling working class, lower middle class and poor. How can one possibly equate discomfort with degradation, despair, denial of opportunity and basic human needs, and above all of socially institutionallized cruelties like foster care? How can one bemoan the competitive coop and exclusive gated community mentality with an inability to ever feel safe in one’s own home or neighborhood because one isn’t. Can one really feel for the sorrow of a lack of getting into Princeton with the absolute death camp of special education for kids whose lives will have a hideous and unrelieved trajectory of failure becasue they were diagnosed by rich “professionals” but never offered aid and succor or a meaningful educative alternative to babysitting in the most simple manner?
Yes my boyfriend was an investment banker manager for a very successful firm in the eighties, his friends included celebs, dot com successes and also in NYC in my field i met the staggering welathy noveau riche and the genteel old guard with regularity, while at the prep school i eventually attended on scholarship and ultimately paid back the cost of my education, i met the children of many celebrities, and numerous avante guard richies…
.i say that there are so many decent people among every socio-economic group, but among the rich the control freakism and the disrespect for religion as a valued form of spirituality, and the ugly incessant hypersexualized objectification of people that causes vanity and shame over really stupid stuff has taken such an inordinate toll taht VIP status and buying status is almost the only way to achieve it any more…so sad for a once meritocracy, because all thos who cheated their through graduate school are now doctors and leadersof society , and unlike those who actually workedm the cheaters liars and filthy rich powermongering group thinkers and popular instead of ethical socialites are performing surgery and controlling the social machines of this wounded abysmally blind country.
Miki, thank you for this well-considered post. It’s obvious you’ve thought about and struggled with what you’ve written here.
I, too, am in a position of relative privilege compared to the majority of the world’s population — living wage, health care, access to good food, ability to live in a pleasant US college town, etc. But I grew up in a family with lower-middle class and working-class parents, and until a few years ago had dealt with wealthy people only through my brief career in the arts. My first real exposure to the rich has come through my job with a small family foundation, and it’s been an eye-opener. I’ve seen how plenty of wealthy people have resources, but had as many miserable childhood experiences as anyone else. Money doesn’t make anyone immune from suffering. And it’s been interesting to try to drop my own deference toward my “superior” in the hierarchy and treat him as just another human being with insecurities. Yes, in the end he has the power to fire me, but I’ve seen that he’d rather learn how to work with me and everyone else.
I’ve learned that it’s too facile to say that the wealthy are all soulless [insert expletive here]. In the end, we’re all just struggling human beings, no matter what set of resources life has handed us.