Tomorrow Is Not for Sale
By: Daniele Ihns
Tags: Society, Politics, The Masterpiece, Future, Environment

The Problem with Billionaire Syndrome

Problems arise when a person’s desire to join the millionaire’s club becomes directly proportional to their desire to disconnect from a beggar.

Let me call in another Medium writer to illustrate this problem further, Jessica Wildfire:

“Billionaire syndrome happens when we start empathizing with the super-elite, and not the people they exploit. We let them teach us how to hate ourselves for being constantly broke. We crave to be more like them, so much that we fantasize about it. We make excuses for how they treat people. We learn to despise other people who don’t have money. We call them lazy, or toxic — or both.”

Billionaire syndrome is a real dynamic in our society. “It’s easier to believe you can be a billionaire than it is to believe you can change the system that caters to them,” as Jessica explains it.

The beggar is here today, in our faces, as are our friends who are struggling to make ends meet. We could be working together to fix the social problems that make most of us so uncomfortable. But we are not. We are focused on trying to avoid becoming one of the “unfortunate ones” in the future.

This tells us a lot about our collective willingness to live in the present: it’s non-existent. It’s easier to believe you will not one day become a beggar than to empathize with the beggar and try to fight the inequalities that generate them.

And here is a paradox, the more we try to escape the present by dreaming of an idealized future, the worst our collective future will become.

Ailton Krenak. Image source: Wikipedia.

From the Outside Looking In

The title of this article, “Tomorrow is Not for Sale,” is a direct translation of an article that was published earlier this year by Brazilian philosopher Ailton Krenak, who won the Intellectual of the Year Award in 2020 for his contribution to democracy.

Ailton is a Brazilian native Indian, who was forcibly separated from his tribe at age 9 and taken into our civilization. Since then he has been one of the most prominent leaders of the indigenous people’s movement in Brazil.

Brazilian native tribes are some of the last remaining people whose way of life we can compare to those taught by Jesus, Diogenes, or Buddha. We should pay attention to them since they offer an outsider look into our society and shine a light on our vices.

Ailton takes the occasion of the pandemic to remind us of our human condition, as an integral part of nature, susceptible to plagues, death, and extinction like any other species.

His original article is a humbling warning to us, what he calls the “white men” as opposed to native Indians. What we call humanity is for him nothing more than silly child play, as he observes it from the outside:

“It is as if we had several children playing and, imagining this childhood fantasy, they continued to play indefinitely. But as we become adults, we [must realize that] we’re devastating the planet, digging a huge gap of inequalities between peoples and societies.”

We are so addicted to the money game that we lose sight of the essence of what it means to be human, alongside other human beings and nature. His call to action is urgent. We must end our arrogant, egotistical anthropocentrism if we are to survive as a species.

It’s a message that rings close to Umair Haque’s warning: by the middle of the century if our civilization is to survive, our society will need to undergo a great transformation:

“Our moral community [those that we care about] must include the fish who clean our rivers, the insects who turn our soil, the trees who give us air to breathe, the rivers that give us water to drink, the water that passes through us and becomes the rain and the river again. We must learn to care for them just as we care for our “own.” The time for petty human tribalisms is now past.”