Cruelty grows through small, rational choices that make power easier to preserve and other people easier to discard.
Tag: #wealth
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the strange ontology of power
Extreme wealth is not independence. It is an unusually successful dependence upon everyone else.
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status hierarchy: role-play
Perceived importance is simply the output function of an ongoing game of organisational status hierarchy, social roleplay and meritocratic make-believe.
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wealth drag
Wealth is usually treated as evidence that society is working. But extreme accumulation may also reveal something stranger: a system increasingly organised around preserving wealth, whether or not that preservation still serves the world around it.
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billionaire welfare
Extreme wealth is not proof of independence. The billionaire appears to stand above society, but in reality stands upon it.
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what is economic reality?
Economic reality is not found in the cash register. It is found in the relational field that makes the register mean anything at all.
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trillionaire
Civilisation was not built to worship wealth, but it has been redesigned to serve it.
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caravan of confusion
Power does not erase wisdom’s serial warnings about the corruption and cruelty that often accompanies extreme wealth; it orchestrates and sustains an institutional matrix to demonstrate why the warning applies to someone else.
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can’t buy me love
Wealth is not virtue; it is often merely the moment at which exploitation, inheritance, appetite, spectacle, and institutional obedience acquire sufficient polish that the public begins misunderstanding aggregate power as sufficient proxy for strategic wisdom and true moral virtue.
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Extreme Wealth
Extreme wealth simplifies the world around it, not by insight but by attraction. Certain ideas adhere because they are easy to recognise, easy to repeat, and easy to circulate. They fit branding, reward loyalty, and move smoothly through systems that privilege speed over reflection. In this way an ideological frame consolidates, not because it is […]
Shark skin is a sheet of teeth: millimetre-scale placoid denticles, each with an enamel crown, dentine core and pulp cavity, rooted in the dermis and oriented from nose to tail so that one way feels smooth and the other rasps like sandpaper. In fast swimmers such as the shortfin mako Isurus oxyrinchus and other pelagic […]
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The Hand of Law
Law presents itself as a guardian of rights and social peace, but its core function is to preserve the legal order and the interests that dominate it. Rights are recognised only when they stabilise that order; when they challenge the hierarchy that sustains it, they are restricted or quietly ignored. Property is the central unit […]
