Eh, I think it’s oversimplification to attribute it to a single motivation. There are definitely people like OP is describing, but there are also definitely the ‘temporarily embarrassed millionaire’ types. And honestly I think a damn big percentage is just plain ol’ fear of change wrapped in several layers of rationalization.
Another reason: it’s really easy for unimaginative people to sound smart with cynicism. They’d rather be superior than be right.
“Look at that crash! I told you that flying machines can’t work.”
Oo yeah, for real. I kind of stumbled upon this in my teens (maybe everyone does), but luckily was able to snap out of it, woke up, and realised I could form flexible informed opinions that define my whole personality
“It’s way easier to fool someone than it is to convince them they’ve been fooled.”
This is a mistake that many leftists do, thinking that people don’t like authoritarianism. A lot of people crave for it
people tend dislike authoritarianism, but tend to be afraid of society changement. Everybody got contradiction
In theory, a benevolent dictatorship is a good system, that can cut through a lot of bureaucracy and enact good changes in a timely fashion. The obvious problems are who gets to be dictator and how do you keep the dictatorship benevolent.
If I could unilaterally make somebody a dictator and believed they would do what’s best, I’d do it. But I don’t know if there is such a person. To me it just seems like people believe in and trust certain public figures to agree with them, and enact the same changes they’d want.
A lot of people just lack critical thinking skills and imagination. A lot of people like being at the bottom of hierarchy. A lot of people like when people they dont like suffer, even if it means they do, too. A lot of people are religious. All of these things are plagues on our society, and a lot of them are done on purpose by those in power.
Its a lot of just world fallacy too
Our first mistake as a nation was not kicking out the royalists.
Alexander Hamilton
The thread is so lost anymore it doesn’t even matter. In America it is just survival as America becomes Russia. You can’t defend anyone when you can’t even get your doctor visit or medication to live if you even try to rock the boat for more than 3 days. If that. Modern feudalism.
She ain’t wrong
It’s also “don’t rock the boat.” Because if society decides that rich people don’t get to be filthy rich, the rich peoppe will take it out on the peasants so they can stay as rich as possible. IOW if we don’t leave the rich people alone they’ll be mean to us and take even more.
This is the same logic as “If I give the bully some money, then they won’t take all of my money”. If they can get some, why wouldn’t they take the rest? Appeasement doesn’t work. They just push for more.
Or they are just brainwashed, and can’t fathom another type of society after ~500 years of capitalism.
I’ve known far more Musk fanboys than I would have liked to, and I wouldn’t say they see him or other genocidal pedophiles as gods or anything.
In fact, it’s quite difficult to describe it or compare it to anything, because that sort of blind admiration just plain doesn’t make any sense, and usually contradicts their other beliefs. Which is a big sign of being affected by propaganda.
I hate it, but also think it is true. A slave does not want to be free and all that - it does explain so many things
My mother, and one of my nieces, think this way.
They do a ton of work for a man they think should tell them how to live life. Even how to vote. They gladly abdicate their agency as a human so they “don’t have to think about silly things like politics.”
The irony is my mother is an incredibly strong woman. But it’s religion that makes her think this way. My nice is just very much a people pleaser, and her fiance is just the baby of the family, so he makes demands and expects everyone else to clean up after him.
This is a drama I wouldn’t wish anyone to go through. Religion is insanity indeed
They see people like Musk, and they see strength, if only because of their economic capabilities. They want a society of strength. A society where people hoard around the few to lift them up. A society that enables greatness. Somebody who can look mortality in the eyes and reject it. To bring us into the future with vitality.
What they fail to see is that by turning the mighty into gods, we turn ourselves into coggs. In the pursuit of lifting them up, we alienate ourselves from the meaningful. Makes us sacrifice for the superficial. We become lifeless and in fear of the meaningful.
I don’t defend the rich but I also don’t claim it’s stupid hard to make 75k and up and I will never in my life say starting a career that can help you live comfortably is an impossible task.
I think the unwillingness to invest in one’s self and to sacrifice your thought process of fuck climbing up the ladder, is what’s hurting people’s personal wealth growth.
I think that as much people are preserving themselves and not going into careers because they don’t offer as many benefits as the boomers, I also think people are limiting themselves and I think that if you don’t want to invest in your future, that’s your own fault.
However, I do not agree with generational wealth but I don’t disagree on passing a home down. If you’re fortunate enough to have a house passed down to you, then that’s what you are, fortunate.
I dont agree with trusifarians using their wealth to buy up more property or to be greedy and glutenous with their money.
I don’t hate on the six figure earners but I think once you make 450k/year, you can start figuring out ways to better society.
I think once you hit a 20mil* net worth, you can figure out ways to help other people.
It’s like the Stanford marshmallow experiment. It’s not willpower, it’s that people have been taught that any money we save will be lost.
We’re all expected to invest or lose money to inflation. But most of us don’t know anything about investing. So we trust our money to some Wall Street type, and then get called stupid when we pick the wrong dudes. But you don’t get called stupid if you just spend the money now.
It’s even worse in the USA where everyone has the specter of medical debt hanging over us. You can do everything right and then just get a massive forever debt from which bankruptcy can’t save you. Better to spend the money on a community that might appreciate it.
And I pointed this out before that rich people inadvertently will end up becoming involved in politics, even if there was not interest or want to in the beginning or was never a goal; It’s shocking how many of them end up getting to know their mayor at a personal level to leverage them.
Most don’t leverage their local government for the better and it’s rare to see it. It’s rare that someone will like actually fund a food bank for a year and become involved in the community. Imagine having enough money to set a trust for a church to have an indefinite food bank? That would be so fucking cool, I would so do that if I had that kind of money to toss around. Or or or like buying old hospitals and completely demolishing them and putting up modern hospitals.
So we trust our money to some Wall Street type, and then get called stupid when we pick the wrong dudes.
99% of account managers and financial advisors are just some dude. The only sensible thing to invest in is an index fund like VOO, SPLG, FXAIX, IVV, or for non-US stuff, VEU, VSS, or something else based on an index appropriate to your needs.
Genuinely, the best known growth strategy in a capitalist market is also the lowest-brain strategy. Buy an index fund, and then do nothing.
Everything else is just giving money to someone else to do a worse job on average.
You’re not wrong, but do you hear yourself? That’s a terrifying alphabet soup of complicated choices. And in the next thread we’ll talk about AI IPOs dumping on the index fund suckers before a collapse.
Yes, it’s alphabet soup, but no, the choices are not complicated.
In USA? Buy VOO.
Not in USA? Buy VEU and maybe VOO if you want.
people defend rich because they believe in masters
No: the rhetorical defense of rich people usually arises when action against rich people such as “eat the rich” or “steal all their assets” has been proposed, and people say “well not all rich people deserve that.”
Which is true. I don’t even think a majority of rich people deserve some punishment for how they accrued their wealth. If you have some conception that they should be dropping crumbs of wealth for you along the way, consider:
- 1 this is rooted in your education, so you really just despise the fact that they rich were educated different from your or had a different outcome to that same education - which is not their fault, since education is top-down nowadays.
- 2 they may well have already dropped their crumbs, and you were just not among the lucky recipients of it. People prioritise their own family first, and families can be very extensive once you’re in the Business of throwing away cash.
- 3 Literally nothing in society insists upon or suggests that rich people reinvest their wealth in others, or other walks of society - esswntially running counter to how it was historically, for the record.
- 4 if someone does decide to give away money they get distracted by charity, which is less direct than government schemes to redistribute wealth. Are you going to be vaguely annoyed at people who have done well for themselves rather than the governments ineptitude and charity inefficiency?
And importantly - it is well demonstrated that people can become rich through ethical means. This has been shown to be true over and over again.
Instead of just getting mad at the vague sense of rich people “not doing what you want them to do,” reach out and create dialogue with them to lay out your vision for society. Nobody wants to give away money without thinking it will be used effectively.
Elon Musk fan boys
We should call them SpaceX fanboys because they’re two different things, really. People support SpaceX because it has been the most technologically successful rocket launching in enterprise in history and is the best bet at space colonisation for its high level or organisation no massive amounts of funding, assuming Elon isn’t just a “for profit” kind of guy now.
I cannot imagine liking Elon musk just by himself. He is misguided and loves AI and hasn’t taken the time to uhh remedy his PR image. He was buddies either trump. Its like: “do you support the Soviet union and hate stalin” or “do you support the Indian independence movement but disapprove of Mohatma Gandhi (child molester btw)”
People who like Elon musk like him because he politically aligns with them, that is the main reason at the moment. Whether in terms of AI, bitcoin or right wing politics.
1: conservative women like men because they like hierarchy
It is true for some but for many its just that they don’t like men being criticised all the time - or the traditional way of life in general. Those ones do not take it to a performative “let me stay home baking for my husband all day” position.
And if people have the right to gay marriage et cet, give them the right to align with that traditional way of life, right? Even if they feel it involves some degree of subservience.
This is an awful allegory for the rich- poor relations, because men-women in a relationship is a binary. Rich and poor is a gradient. If someone approves of rich, they might be like “so I don’t understand why anyone would need a billion dollars or more but i support peoples right to hold more money than other people up until that point.”
Whereas the question of ‘do you like men or not’ comes down to "do you literally tolerate >50% of society’s right to exist on their terms or not?
They’re not talking about doctors who are working class but earn more. They’re talking about capitalists.
The binary is “does the money come from labor or from owning something?” Whether or not they are doing a specific action.
So what you’re describing is a grave miscommunication in which someone hears “rich” in 2026 and thinks “millionaire”.
As always, then they should say that. No more “x is y” “no I meant chi is y!” debateslop
So what you’re describing is a grave miscommunication in which someone hears “rich” in 2026 and thinks “millionaire”.
No; rich is an incredibly broad, general, term. Anyone who speaks the English language knows that. So again, you have to be specific in your arguments when you lay them out for it to even make logical sense
IMHO if you really want a good debate, you need to ask up front. Rich means a lot of different things to different people and they are indeed saying what they mean.
Therefore we should never commit to a “remove rich people from society” ideology because it’s just a stand in term for “people i don’t like”
Nah, brah. This is kinda true but kinda bullshit. Since they’re not citing shit I’m not gonna either. I’ll go vibe mode too.
People, my fellow Americans, are disillusioned because they’ve never known anything else. They don’t want anything better because they’ve never been taught that better things aren’t even imaginable at best, most likely an existential threat. We’re peak society because fuck you, the conservative elite they told us so. It’s been that way for decades, most people don’t know anything else.
We’re all a captive market because the system that was supposed to protect us has been corrupted and is complicit. It doesn’t have to be. A huge problem is it’s extremely profitable to realize this and act on the opposite side, to be evil and want to exploit everyone, especially the undereducated and marginalized.
It sucks! Talking with brainwashed fools is exhausting, but they’re victims like the rest of us, and we should be working on inroads instead of division. Cut your losses for some, sure, but a lot of people are inspired by populism in both directions. We need to leverage that now.
Talk to your neighbors y’all! They’re noticing the shit hitting the fan, but they’re afraid to talk about it. We’re in a lot of this shit because our representatives were too polite/cowardly/ineffective to hold abysmal conservative/fascist leaders accountable in the first place. We never convinced their voters that their so called leaders are con artists stealing their comfort of living as a result. It’s the most obvious it’s ever been now. Let’s take advantage, no?
Thats also giving some of the women too much credit.
They are aware that they can exchange vagina for money. You say the right things, act the right way and some guy who hates the idea of his wife having more say than him will happily keep her from ever working a day in her life.
