Aristocracy Versus Humanity

Alexander the Great thought he was a god, but he still had to use the latrines like the rest of his common soldiers. There will always be people who have more or less wealth than others, but when those with wealth become single-minded about grabbing it out of the hands who have less, the question arises: how do they believe they deserve to have so much more than others that the rest of humanity suffers? The implicit justification must be that these super-wealthy must believe that they are above the rest of the humanity, that there is something "special" about them, that they are, in short, the "new aristocracy", a European concept our forefathers tried to eradicate when they began the American experiment in democracy. So let us take a look at the super-wealthy who are calling the shots these days. I would lay odds that they belong to homo sapiens like the rest of us -- i.e., that they are not descended from divine beings, much less are divine beings themselves. But maybe we should be clear about what a "god" or "deity" is. Gods or deities do not have mortal bodies. They are, by definition, ethereal. Their powers are natural, not obtained through sly litigation, market manipulation or graft. Now back to humans. Humans are mortal, they are flesh-bound animals, albeit of a very sophisticated sort. That means, no matter how wealthy a member of the human race is, that person still has to defecate, urinate, perspire, sleep, bathe, eat, breathe, pass gas, take in water, and exercise the body. If it is a rich woman, she must menstruate, just like the poorest woman. If it is a rich man, he must ejaculate just like the poorest man, in order to beget children. If the rich woman has given birth, she will lactate, just as the poorest woman will. The rich are as mortal as the poor, and subject to every disease or form of decay the poor are, including everything from the terror of cancer, the struggle to stave off obesity, or the aesthetic nuisance of hair loss. In a nudist camp, you would not be able to tell the difference between those camp-goers who were poor, rich or middle class (unless of course a person had been severely undernourished by financial privation). History has shown that the aristocracy has tried to cover its mortal pile of dung by making claims that they are somehow endowed with superior intellectual gifts, but history has also shown that some of the greatest nitwits who ever lived have sprung from among the wealthy. Now the neo-aristocrats might claim that they are different than the old aristocracy, because they won their place through well-deployed force and single-minded cleverness. But I have news for them: those methods are just how the old aristocracy came by and maintained its wealth and power (all pretensions of "blue blood" aside). As far as the poor and the middle class go, they have historically and to this day produced many of the most gifted innovators in every sphere of scientific, technological, artistic and intellectual endeavor, but if the super-wealthy make a desert of the world of opportunities for those beneath them, they will choke off this reservoir of talent (which is the majority of humanity). It has to be that the super-wealthy, being mere humans like the rest of us, are also capable of the normal human emotions of love, compassion, sentiment, regret, guilt. If only these people who act as though they are aristocrats amidst our wounded democracy could just apply those human feelings to their fellow human beings, whose only real difference from them is that they have less material wealth. Physical anthropologists and the Genome Project have established that all the branches of humanity that survive today are descended from a single human mother, whom they poetically call, "Eve". That means we are all genetic siblings. So let us stop breaking up the family with violence, intimidation and greed. It is a disgrace and it is unnatural. If there were intelligent races from other planets observing us, they would be appalled. On the other hand, if we can all recognize that every one of our fellow human beings deserves a decent existence, the rich would still be rich, just not super-rich. Then maybe we could finally eliminate the shame of poverty. Is there an economist in the house who might explain where there is any harm in that?