The New York Times contained two statements, in different contexts,
that say opposite things. The first appears in their "most
blogged" box. It is from July 15:
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/business/15gilded.html?ex=1342152000&en=b93e1c0193b4182c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss">The
Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Published: July 15, 2007
...These days, Mr. Weill and many of the nation’s very
wealthy chief executives, entrepreneurs and financiers echo an earlier
era — the Gilded Age before World War I — when
powerful enterprises, dominated by men who grew immensely rich, ushered
in the industrialization of the United States. The new titans often see
themselves as pillars of a similarly prosperous and expansive age, one
in which their successes and their philanthropy have made government
less important than it once was.
“People can look at the last 25 years and say this is an
incredibly unique period of time,” Mr. Weill said.
“We didn’t rely on somebody else to build what we
built, and we shouldn’t rely on somebody else to provide all
the services our society needs.”...[emphasis added]
The second is from a Times Select (subscription or
academic access only) column from today (7/20/2007):
href="http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/20/opinion/20brooks.html?hp">
href="http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/20/opinion/20brooks.html?hp">A
Partnership of Minds
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: July 20, 2007
Douglas Hofstadter was a happily married man. After dinner parties, his
wife Carol and he would wash the dishes together and relive the
highlights of the conversation they’d just enjoyed. But then,
when Carol was 42 and their children were 5 and 2, Carol died of a
brain tumor.
A few months later, Hofstadter was looking at a picture of Carol. He
describes what he felt in his recent book, “I Am A Strange
Loop”...
...The Greeks say we suffer our way to wisdom, and
Hofstadter’s suffering deepened his understanding of who we
are, which he had developed as a professor of cognitive science at
Indiana University...
...A self, he believes, is a point of view, a way of seeing the world.
It emerges from the conglomeration of all the flares, loops and
perceptions that have been shared and developed with others.
Douglas’s and Carol’s selves overlapped, and that
did not stop with her passing...
...It exposes the errors of those Ayn Rand individualists who
think that success is something they achieve through their own genius
and willpower.
It exposes the fallacy of the New Age narcissists who
believe they can find their true, authentic self by burrowing down into
their inner being. There is no self that exists before society...[emphasis
added]
Brooks also writes:
I
bring all this up in an Op-Ed column because most
political and social disputes grow out of differing theories about the
self, and I find Hofstadter’s social, dynamic, overlapping
theory of self very congenial.
I'm not sure what basis Brooks has for the statement, "most political
and social disputes grow out of differing theories about the self."
Presumably, it is his opinion, since it is in an
Opinion-Editorial column.
Even if only some, but not most, political and social disputes grow out
of differing theories of the self, it is an interesting idea.
I touched on this in a post (
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2006/06/essay_on_independence.php">Essay
on Independence) a long time ago.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
I must say that, on the surface, Mr. Weill's statement seems incredibly
stupid. "We didn’t rely on somebody else to build
what we built." What? They did not have any
customers? They did not rely on electronic data processing,
invented and built by "someone else"? They did not rely on
political clout to make their previously-illegal activities legal, and
to make bankruptcy more difficult? They did not rely on
insider deals? They did not rely on political cover to allow
them to profit from
href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000039&sid=axnIyNZ5tqmM&refer=columnist_evans">money
laundering?
But
rel="tag">Sanford Weill is not stupid.
Rather, he profits from perpetuating the American myth that
citizens of astonishing wealth are somehow special,
href="http://www.bullyonline.org/workbully/npd.htm">somehow
entitled to special treatment. Some people are very
skilled at acting as though they are entitled, and getting other people
to go along with it. It is not stupid, but it is immoral.
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There is something analogous to a pyramid scheme in the accumulation of wealth. One brings in relatively small dollar amounts over as large an input population as possible, funneling them to the top of the pyramid.
There is potential value in this, usually not fully realized, in that these large sums of money could be used to initiate projects that benefit society through large corporate works that employ many people. Unfortunately, human greed is powerful. Those at the top develop a sense of ownership of that money, even though it represents the work of many below them. They cannot afford to pay higher wages to their hourly workers, cannot afford better benefits for them, decry the horrendous taxes they must pay as unfair.
I agree that we live in a new age of robber barons, and like the robber barons, even their philanthropy takes on a selfish theme: foundations in their name, major projects at hospitals in their name, our American equivalent of lordships.
But where did the money really come from?