They seemingly have so much, these billionaires currently dismantling everything of human value and trying to bully us into submission. But when I look at them I can’t get past the sense of lack. Based on their behavior, neither can they. More more more, their compulsive refrain. Bottomless and insatiable. At what point would their money and power afford them anything that matters? Any kind of genuine meaning? Connection? Pleasure rooted in something other than the pain of others? Are they even capable of rest or does the urge for more surge through them relentlessly, keeping them miserably awake through the night?
Dear Oligarchs I’ve noticed owning the world does not spark joy in you so maybe let it go?
Certainly, they can’t imagine the pain of enduring poverty of financial and material resources. They are, materially, comfortable. But that may mean little since they clearly live in a poverty of their own making (in this I will agree that they are self-made). Could there be a deeper poverty of spirit than asserting we should rid ourselves of empathy? No amount of adding more digits—infinite zeroes to the ends of their accounts—will fill the emptiness inside of them if nothing they have seen on this planet can stir anything in them.
Maybe Try Mars These billionaires who want to destroy everything—do we even inhabit the same planet? Ingenious compositions of shadow and light, colors afire with the sun, the cycles of shedding and growth. Do you see the cat snuggling or demanding breakfast (again)? Do you see all the arms wrapped around, all the ways we comfort one another despite all the weary reasons to give up?
These sorts of men call empathy weakness when it actually takes far more bravery than all the brute force and rage in the world. Empathy requires you to put yourself in touch with your own human pain to imagine and be moved by the pain of another. And investing in that pain in service of interconnection pays dividends.
In contrast, dominance doesn’t ask much of you, nor does it leave you with anything worth having. It doesn’t ask you to look into the eyes of other human beings and see what’s within them. It doesn’t ask you to see others as human beings at all. It asks you only to embrace the fantasy of your singular importance. I imagine the outer layer of that could feel heady, maybe even euphoric, but when that burns off—inevitably quite quickly like a spoiled child midway through Christmas day—there’s nothing left but a black hole shredding anything inside you that matters. And there you are, all alone. Maybe worshipped by some, in a way that also denies your humanness, that proclaims you’re a genius when you know you’re just a con man, and it all must leave them bereft and powerless to understand why.
Hack We’ve been captured by a man who’d rather live on Mars than save this air these trees the depths of these oceans endless iterations of this sunset. He’d rather leave us nothing but the suffocating rock.
No wonder they call the things that save lives, tend illness, feed bellies, fund arts nothing but “waste, fraud, and abuse.” It must tantalize them to see that, for other people, these things—nourishing, lively, connected, caring things—can be taken in, can transform you, can weave you into the fabric of everything. Empathy is the poetry of our humanity. Both the giving and the getting of empathy break us open into the fullness and simplicity of being alive on this planet with other live beings. And this is something that these greedmongers can’t get anywhere. You can’t pay for this with money or by pushing around people you think are less than you. Your abused assistant can’t wait in a long line and hand deliver it as you sit behind your desk. You have to pay for it with that initial risk of pain that opens up the world to you and makes the pain of living worth it.
And if you are a coward. Nothing. You get nothing. You feel nothing worth feeling, not for long anyway. I wouldn’t trade what we have—the love, the tenderness, even the pain and struggle—for all those endless zeroes. Not for anything.
Impotence There's magic in the tenderness of hearts beating steadily together even as the horrors come. Magic in the warmth of mirror neurons firing. Billionaires can stuff their pockets with everything, but they can't have this.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for staying alive to what’s tender and human in you. Let this be our superpower for transforming the world in a way these spiritual have-nots don’t see coming!
Magnificent meditation, poems, and images! Thank you for giving me hope.