Ten days ago, the Democratic Socialists of America held a demonstration in Ketchum, Idaho, protesting Allen & Company’s annual July festival of oligarchs, cultural icons, and financial power brokers as an abominable excrescence of an inhumane capitalist system. Fifty people walked from Ketchum to Sun Valley and back to protest billionaires and the economic and legal system that has produced approximately 3,400 people worldwide who have more than a thousand million dollars.
It seemed like a reasonable thing for socialists to do. In a world where children are starving because their parents don’t have enough money to buy food, having and keeping more money than you can spend is understandably offensive to well-meaning people who likely have been sharing favorite lunch goodies since kindergarten.
It doesn’t appear to have been offensive to the billionaires themselves, who took a fleet of private jets to a tribal gathering under clear summer skies in central Idaho. There, they made deals securely behind security, unmolested by people waving signs telling them to go away and die, or at least go away and contemplate the evil in their hearts, if they indeed have hearts. Great wealth insulates the human psyche against empathy, even when it's confronted with photos of dying five-year-olds in refugee camps or the sad life stories of geriatric adjunct instructors still struggling to pay off college loans.
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I don’t approve of billionaires or of any system that produces them, but there’s no joy in trying to remedy the economic morbidity of great wealth. It’s depressing to propose any solutions to stagnant and rotting pools of money, dying economies and their dying institutions, even if you’re an economist.
The dying part is unpleasantly literal. Excess wealth focuses one’s attention, inevitably, on the passage of time and what it will do to any presently happy circumstances. It’s a paradox, but excess money summons up the things that money can’t buy.
The current fascination with immortality science among billionaires is a symptom of the unpleasant truth that humans cannot live forever. At some point, money must be bequeathed to some unsupervised person who will fritter it away, or pervert the family charity, or try to elect socialists, or simply retreat to a decaying mansion and live there, among a few hundred cats and piles of unwashed dishes and bedding and unopened Amazon packages, until death releases them from their inherited bondage.
The bad news for immortality-seekers is that they’re charging up a stairway that doesn’t go to heaven. The human psyche, no matter how many mind-supplements and neuro-vitamins it’s marinated in, is subject to progressive psychoses and/or dementias. A brain can appear physically normal and still age into a buzzing hive of pathology.
Billionaires, by definition, are hoarders, who compulsively attempt to imbue the material world with deep spiritual value. It doesn’t work well, and it only works at all while the hoarder remains in the material world.
Billionaires, also by definition, are addicted to money, and the progression of addiction is as dangerous to them as it is to your condo neighbor who’s cooking meth in his bathtub—it doesn’t end well for your neighbor or for you, once his priority becomes embodying his own product.
Finally, billionaires are paranoiacs, if the amount of security around Sun Valley last week is any indication.
Paranoia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and addiction are all psychoses, if your definition of psychosis means a life-or-death attempt to make your outside conform to an increasingly hallucinatory inside.
Paranoia serves to structure an indifferent universe into a hostile one, which, sadly, is a universe easier for humans to love. OCD and addiction contain deadly but predictable steps toward doom, steps that humans apparently find preferable to living in a paralyzingly uncertain world.
None of these hedges against reality gets better in the long run.
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The overwhelming question behind these musings: Where’s the Stairway to Heaven?
Put less happily, it’s How Can I Keep My Soul Immortal If I Keep Trying to Destroy It?
Trigger warning: I’m not certain souls exist. But the soul—call it a spark of the divine—is a useful construct if you want to look at why some people behave decently in the face of evil and some people turn over and expose their bellies to the dark side.
While I think it’s likely that everyone is born with a soul, not all people die with one, because along the way they’ve done something that wrecks their soul, or at best makes their soul flee for whatever monastic refuge souls escape to when their heart is broken by the human they’re saddled with.
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The prime material evidence of souls is a negative. You can tell if someone doesn’t have one.
It happens, tragically, to those addicts and compulsives and paranoiacs I mentioned earlier, but it also happens to people so invested in a dismal consensus reality that their prime directive becomes Go Along to Get Along.
I won’t say that all billionaires lack souls, but I will say that money and power are among the most insidious and mutagenic drugs available to human beings. Given time, they will kill your soul.
Perhaps the best way to preserve your soul is to believe you have one in the first place, and to assume that it’s a wonderful and fragile thing that requires loving care. Never subject it to the moral shocks that will occur if you murder someone or deprive them of their livelihood or education. If I might translate that into everyday life: live in humility and moderation, don’t be greedy, stay away from a life measured in possessions, and don’t destroy the hope that other people have for a good life.
For me, admitting the possibility of a soul required decades of listening to and trusting a still, small voice inside that pointed out my mistakes and cruelties and tried to get me to stop committing them. It meant trying to do the right thing, even when I had only a vague idea of what the right thing was.
It hurt, but I listened.
Lest you think I’m about to quote dogma, I’ve stayed away from any organized religion, although I do now and then read through Ecclesiastes and the Sermon on the Mount. Reading those two texts every few years has made it easier to believe in a soul.
Regardless of what you think about the divinity of Christ, it’s reasonable to say that Jesus possessed that spark of the divine that every child is born with, and that he nurtured that spark as well as he could, and that (here’s the not-so-simple trick) he used the pain of his short life to make that spark stronger rather than weaker.
That’s about the only stairway to heaven I have any chance of finding. If I had a billion dollars, I sincerely doubt that I’d look for it at all.
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This summer, it has become increasingly apparent that civilization is self-destructing. Industrial waste products have turned the planet into a hothouse and poisoned large parts of the biosphere. A major extinction will happen if economic activity continues to grow, and it has to grow or die.
Resource depletion won’t let us escape this scenario. It’s true that if we run out of free raw materials, capitalism will slow and stop, and our complex machines, supply chains, and institutions will undergo a great simplification. But lots of people will die of starvation or disease or war, and as human interactions devolve inexorably to might-makes-might, natural selection will favor those humans who lack souls. The upshot: we might go extinct slowly, and then all at once.
We may already be at all at once. More and more of our leaders pride themselves on their realpolitik, a sado-realism that allows them to happily sacrifice others to achieve their aims. The meat waves forced to run toward machine guns in Ukraine, the children dead from the cutoff of US aid programs in Africa, and the corpse-ridden ruins of Gaza underscore a willingness among our leaders to live without souls, without mercy, and finally without meaning. It’s hard to distinguish the life without meaning from the one that worships death.
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Why, if we have souls, have we made a world which is a killing ground for souls?
The most obvious answer is that we don’t like having souls, and don’t like what they concern themselves with. We don’t like grief or pain, we don’t like vulnerability, we don’t like the shadowy parts of our lives, we don’t like the idea of being part of a world ecosystem and its churning cycles of birth and death. We want to get rid of the pain of grief so much that we’ll anesthetize ourselves to the joy of living.
Without jumping into a Freudian weed-patch, let me say that our civilization is experiencing a general psychosis of narcissism. The ego, or “I” that most people call themselves, has widely mutated into a childish dictator, one who sees the world as an extension of itself. Billions of people have reduced the universe to fit their perceptions, which means that a rich and expansive reality—represented by the unconscious, archetypes, unlived lives, and souls—is off limits to them.
Our leaders, most of them hungry ghosts high on wealth, power, and the asshologenic neurologic stimulants available in the pharmacopoeias of the elite, are living in a shrunken and shrinking arena, one which demands continually fewer possibilities. Ultimately the possibilities narrow to the vanishing point.
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Democratic socialists, along with other utopians, suggest that humanity might achieve a sustainable world for itself, where renewable energy powers low-impact manufacturing and distribution systems, and a stable and smaller population finds a way to keep science and ethics and the arts going strong.
It’s hard to imagine such a world without a change in leadership on the scale of the Nuremberg trials. Not without finding a way to repair the damage to the world that has already been done. Not without draconian moral strictures that limit power and wealth and the ability to deliberately ignore or cause the suffering of others. Not without achieving sanity on a species-wide basis.
Sounds like heaven, if you can believe that.