• Dasus@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Well thank you. Now that I thought about where it came from, one guy who definitely helped me realise how many traits proper junkies and some hustle-life hedgies share. Sam Polk.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/opinion/sunday/for-the-love-of-money.html

    IN my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted.

    Wealth addiction was described by the late sociologist and playwright Philip Slater in a 1980 book, but addiction researchers have paid the concept little attention. Like alcoholics driving drunk, wealth addiction imperils everyone. Wealth addicts are, more than anybody, specifically responsible for the ever widening rift that is tearing apart our once great country. Wealth addicts are responsible for the vast and toxic disparity between the rich and the poor and the annihilation of the middle class. Only a wealth addict would feel justified in receiving $14 million in compensation — including an $8.5 million bonus — as the McDonald’s C.E.O., Don Thompson, did in 2012, while his company then published a brochure for its work force on how to survive on their low wages. Only a wealth addict would earn hundreds of millions as a hedge-fund manager, and then lobby to maintain a tax loophole that gave him a lower tax rate than his secretary.

    It’s literally the worst addiction there is, because with money, you can get any other thing you might also be addicted to, and with enough money, you don’t just start perceiving the world differently (like say when you’re reeeaally high on certain substances), your world literally and actually changes, twists, as no-one around you wants to be honest with you and you end up fucked up and delusional like JKR or Elon Musk.

    And that sort of thing happens with drug dealers as well, now that I think about it, actually. A lot of them, even minor ones, start thinking they’re hot shit because they have some drooling junkies chasing then anywhere, chasing freebies.