This is how the world of inequality works.

This is how the world of inequality works. It happened in the 2008 crash. The culprits of the crash profited from their act, while the people pays for it, and still paying for it. 

The narrative repeats itself ad nausea with today’s news - “WeWork co-founder’s $1.6b payout irks staff.” 

This is where being a billionaire is both glorious and unconscionable. But they need not be mutually exclusive right? For George Orwell was spot on when he said: “Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” 

And the co-founder Adam Neumann of WeWork just got his “platinum parachute” of $1.6b at a time when WeWork is “still facing the prospect of mass job cuts and a corporate crisis.” While one gets superrich, the rest may just lose their job. 

In George Orwell’s world, the truth that the rich often spins to the poor to justify their indispensable existence is the same as Adam getting his billions while his employees can only say this, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” In fact, Mike Adams, “who sold a start up to WeWork, described the payout to Mr Neumann as an “injustice.”” 

But what is injustice in a world where people like Adam can always do philanthropy with one hand to the adulation of the world, and with the other hand, grab his platinum parachute without remorse and jump off into the golden sunset? 

Sooner or later, we will forget our colonized and extractive past, where we were once the victims, for a glittering future we hope we will have a fair share in only to find that the rich - who once colonized or exploited us - have always been far ahead of us, regaling in the light while the rest grope anxiously in the dark.

Let me just say that we are all addicted to materialism and the vain promises it makes to all. It is like standing in the long queue to buy a lottery ticket hoping to strike it big so that we may one day join the exclusive club of those who control the sale of the tickets. 

But little did we realise that at our deathbeds, we have been chasing a mirage in a system that has always been rigged to favour the organisers of the lottery draw. When hope floats, we turn into lemmings just following the queue in front of us towards a certain plunge. Mind you, the fact that a few make it in the strike is not an emblem of equality but a delusion of equality. 

Sadly, materialism is a “cure” for all the wrong things...that is, an authentic life, a clean conscience and an enduring heart for charity and personal sacrifice. 

What I mean is that, in a world where money has the final say, the cognitive dissonance we occasionally suffer from because of our humanity is readily comforted (or numbed) by the wealth we surround ourselves with or by the hope that we will one day be as wealthy as those who have made it in their own strivings like Adam of WeWork did. That’s the cure for the wrong thing, from feeling less than human, from the pangs of a good conscience. 

But alas, many die not only not realising that dream, they also feel deeply betrayed by it. 

Here is what I mean in another news this morning. It is entitled “Teen among 39 found dead in lorry near London.”

It reports that “British police found the bodies of 39 people inside a truck, believed to have travelled from Bulgaria, at an industrial estate near London yesterday, and said that they had arrested the driver on suspicion of murder.”

PM Boris Johnson said: “We know that this trade is going on - all such traders in human beings should be hunted down and brought to justice.”

Jeremy Corbin said: “Can we just think for a moment of what it must have been like for those 39 people, obviously in a desperate and dangerous situation, for their lives to end, suffocated to death in a container?” 

Mm...can the culprits imagine that? Do they care? I guess their first thot would be, “Shit, my investment!”

That is the extreme side of the world rigged by materialism and individualism that we live in. The system liberally subjects our conscience to the acquisition of wealth at all costs and the cure for it when we ever feel less than human is to do some charity just to feel human again. 

Some have even come to a stage whereby they don’t even bother about the faceless sacrifices made (in a discarded truck located far away from their padded mansion) because it is a winner-takes-all and justifies-all kind of world; which incidentally George Orwell, Karl Marx and Mahatma Gandhi had warned us about. 

Let me end with this quote by Henry David Thoreau for your mid-week musing: -

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.”