Money ! Sex ! Work !

Is it all about guilt?

A long time ago I personally came to the conclusion that there was no way to live on earth without the stain of guilt, maybe the concept of Original Sin was a rueful recognition of this condition. Yet there is perhaps the chance that one may leave the earth forgiven. But that is another story.

-- Belmont Club's Wretchard

Michael Barone has touched on some very important guilt in his analysis of the "trustfunder left":

Who are the trustfunders? People with enough money not to have to work for a living, or not to have to work very hard. People who can live more or less wherever they want. The "nomadic affluent," as demographic analyst Joel Kotkin calls them.

These people tend to be very liberal politically. Aware that they have done nothing to earn their money, they feel a certain sense of guilt. At the elite private or public high schools they attend, and even more at their colleges and universities, they are propagandized about the evils of capitalism and globalization, and the virtues of environmentalism and pacifism. Patriotism is equated with Hiterlism.

Their loyalties, as Samuel Huntington explains in "Who Are We?," are not national, but transnational -- they are citizens of the world with contempt for those who feel chills up their spines when they hear "The Star Spangled Banner." They are taught to have contempt for the economic contribution they make to their country as investors and to feel guilty if they make no other contribution. Their penance is that they must vote left.

(Via InstaPundit.)

The problem is that neither the trustfunder left nor those who exploit their guilt with ad hominem insults, ridicule and various shame tactics are being logical.

These people should be asking whether and precisely why they should feel guilt. Is it because they have money? Or is it that the money was earned by someone else -- in this case, a parent?

It is natural enough to feel guilty over money which has been stolen or is the result of criminal profits. That is because the money is seen as having an illegal taint, and most people with consciences do not enjoy living on the fruits of crime. While this might be expected to apply to inherited criminal profits, it's a bit different for those lucky enough to be descended from a family of guiltless sociopaths. (Interestingly, most of the children of Mob bosses with whom I've been acquainted lack the guilt which plagues the children of legitimate business people. Might it be because Mob kids are raised in shame, as opposed to guilt cultures?)

I have also noticed that "old money" types are less likely to feel guilty than the children of the recently self-made. I can't say I know why, but I suspect it has something to do with having had generations to develop protective calluses against such things. I was shocked years ago to hear a sixth generation member of one of Philadelphia's Snottiest Old Families (the types who donate heavily to both parties) jokingly remark, "The rich get richer, and the poor have babies, and we just have to stay ahead of them all!"

But the self-made, upwardly mobile businessman or professional who has worked himself to the bone does not generally have the time to thinking about doing political end-runs around the latest "isms" to infect the body politic. It's all he can do to send his kids to the best schools. Guys like that naturally tend to think that the system which has been so good to them will continue to do the right thing, and educate their children properly. What a shock to have the kids return for their first Christmas home from college only to denounce their parents' wealth as "evil."

That's it in a nutshell. The Marxist, zero-sum philosophy is that wealth is simply evil. It is theft. Therefore, if you inherit it, you should feel very guilty.

But in logic, in order for there to be any real guilt, there has to be something intrinsically bad about wealth. Otherwise, there would be nothing evil about inheriting it, for there is no way that good money can be turned into bad money simply because it is handed from person A to person B.

This is where our much-vaunted "Puritan work ethic" comes into play. The moral communitarians on the left as well as many of the social conservatives on the right denounce those who do not "work" as bad. Not living up to their alleged "responsibilities." Again, this is no more logical than denouncing people as "bad" for loving a member of the same sex, but it is part of the culture (and it was a major reason "hard-working" Puritans in the North felt morally superior to the "lazy" slaveholders in the South).

To those who adhere rigidly and unthinkingly to the Puritan work ethic, one must work even if one does not have to work. "Work" is often defined not as self-employment, nor as investment activity, but as working for a regular paycheck. Work is something which is normally not to be enjoyed.

"Like the rest of the world!"

Such moralistic, shame-based thinking is judgmental and mistaken, yet it is played to the hilt by ideologues and moral scolds on both sides.

The result is that many of the trustfunders feel guilty because they do not have to work, and this guilt (whether deserved or not) is steered for a variety of reasons towards leftist political causes. Their enemies become the rest of the people who do work -- and the more successful they are, the more they're hated (the latter in turn often oblige by hating those who don't have to work). Their friends become all others who don't work. This can include other trustfunders, welfare recipients, penniless bohemians, or homeless outcasts psychologically unsuited for work.

What surprises me is how seldom people stop to think. Is money evil? Is wealth bad? Why is the presence of gainful employment necessarily more virtuous than its absence? For the most part, these are moral judgments made by other people whose goal is to shame, influence, manipulate. Why should money be a source of shame in a free country? If there is nothing shameful about earning money or creating wealth, then it follows that there can be nothing shameful about giving it to another generation. It follows, then, that inheriting money cannot be more "evil" than making it in the first place.

Furthermore, those designated as heirs (or beneficiaries of trusts) are guilty of nothing more than an accident of birth. At law, they are the "natural objects" of their parents' bounty. In a country operating with a free economy, why should that be a source of shame?

Trustfunders who haven't thought these things through are lost sheep. I know the breed well. They're ashamed of their wealth and keep it in the closet. They remind me of the guilty homosexuals whose sexuality presents as a sort of deer-in-the-headlights syndrome.

And if anyone can explain why the presence of money should be any more a source of guilt than the presence of sexuality, I'd like to hear about it.

Barone concludes:

The good news for Democrats is that they have found a new source of votes and money. The bad news is that an important part of their core constituency has the characteristic that the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin ascribed to the press, "power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages."
Power? Hey, whatever happened to sex without responsibility?

Not that I have anything against responsibility, but the problem is, the members of the trustfunder left have been taught to believe that they are behaving in a responsible manner. But it's all based on bullshit guilt.

I'd say a dose of irresponsibility (and by that I mean freedom from this externally imposed guilt) would go a long way.

Trustfunders arise! You have nothing to lose but your ill-gotten guilt!

posted by Eric on 03.22.05 at 05:47 PM





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Comments

As a hard-core catholic boy, I've been bred and indoctrinated into the guilt guild. It aint so bad once you get used to the acne and heartburn.

mdmhvonpa   ·  March 22, 2005 09:21 PM

Anyone dumb enough to believe that a fixed quantity of wealth exists, and that those who have more have stolen it or don't deserve it, is confused beyond any cure. Imo, they are religious in the worst way, able only to adopt and repeat various dogmas or platitudes as the content of their "thought". Naturally, they want to avoid guilt because it is "bad" to be guilty or blameable, and in their scheme of things someone is always to blame. Perhaps they do feel some guilt for being well-off, but "it's never their fault", which comprises, again, total confusion.

I don't mean to disparage your analysis, only to say that I don't think the trustfunders could even understand it, though we want to hope they could since we can see things in this way. They can't, imo.

J. Peden   ·  March 23, 2005 12:34 AM

Money, in and of itself is not an evil thing. However, the way we have designed our free market to create large sums of money off the backs of 3rd world countries is aggregious.
For example, is it moral to buy clothing that was made from a slave labor camp in indonesia? WE don't allow these camps in the US, because we know it's immoral, but that doesn't stop our malls from selling it. I buy this stuff too, I'm guilty.
We artifically inflate prices of grains coming into the country to help our farmers, but that means 3rd world nations cannot make enough money to continue growing crops, even when that nation is literally starving to death!
We spend more money (as a nation of individuals) on sports teams/ paraphenalia/ networks/ college teams, people who have little or no value to society, than we do on education, or drug prevention, or removing poverty, or solving real world illnessses. (by the way, do you know the #1 killer in the world is diarrhea, which can be cured for less than a dollar a day).
So money is not evil, but the viewpoint that wasted money is 'ok', cheap goods are 'ok', and pretending there are no ill side affects for vast consumption of goods is, in my opinion, naive and ignorant. But it's a human trait to neglect suffering when it's not directly inflicted on us. Ayn Rand would be proud, but Jesus wouldn't.

alchemist   ·  March 23, 2005 01:06 PM

alchemist: Briefly, the production of goods is farmed out to other Countries because the labor is cheaper. The laborers work in these third world Country factories because they want to - they get paid more than their other options would get them. This provides a net gain in jobs and wealth for that Country. There is no reason to pay these laborers more than the labor market will bear, and reasons not to, and reasons why it simply can't be done [simple labor competition]. The goods shipped elsewhere become cheaper, holding down prices of competitor products, making currency more potent and actually stimulating greater production. Standards of living increase in the involved Countries. No one is taking profits off the back of the poor. Risk takers and organizers of the whole enterprise need the reward to even try it and keep the businesses in business. Marx was wrong.

J. Peden   ·  March 24, 2005 02:01 AM

I am a fan of the Almanac of American Politics, but Barone's analysis does not really fit the data. I think he was making the common mistake of confusing aggregate with individual patterns: yes, richer states and counties mostly support the Democrats, but richer individuals tend to support the Republicans. See here for our fuller discussion: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2005/03/the_trustfunder.html

Your psychological analysis may well be valid, but demographically speaking, I suspect the leftists are only a small subset of the trustfunders. For example, Bush got 62% of the votes of the people with incomes over $200,000.

Andrew Gelman   ·  March 24, 2005 08:28 AM

Look,

The simple fact is that many of the factories in Asian countries are basically slave labor. I understand that say, i make less money in phoneix than someone in New York because of worth of goods... that's not what i'm talking about.
I'm talking about child labor, i'm talking about pollitical prisoners in China forced to make goods that are sold in America. I'm talking about buying goods from countries that are ruled by harsh dictatorships where the people have no hope for freedom. If the american people put their foot down, and said "we won't buy this crap, we'll accept our goods being more expensive but made in decent conditions", overnight China would grow labor laws, as would other countries.
but we don't, because we really, really like having 100 pairs of 20$ shoes and buying cheap clothes in bins at the mall. We like getting cheap oil, even if we have to buy it off friends of terrorists. That is the american way.

alchemist   ·  March 25, 2005 11:47 AM


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