EAT THE RICH is slave mentality

It’s been such, in the last few decades, that wealth inequality has surged between the haves and have-nots. But if you were to be born in any era of your choice under the Rawlsian “Veil of Ignorance,” you’d still want to be born now. In other words, being poor today is still a better deal than being born poor yesterday. This is also Steven Pinker’s argument on today’s level progress, that it’s at an all-time high (water access, information access with the internet, new medicines, mind blowing technologies, the number of wars is low by historical standards, we have more human rights than we ever dreamed, tons of consumable goods, and decent social versus Monarchy). And yet, people feel less prosperous than ever. So there’s a de-correlation between how amazing access to things is now versus the way people feel about that access.

That’s odd. Right?

People will blame social media, I did most of my adult life, but media itself has always existed. It has always been used as a way of generating narratives for the public. That’s where Noam Chomsky made his money, by pointing this out in Manufacturing Consent. The point about today however, putting media aside, is that (I think) they are displeased with their relationship to the world because it has been de-spiritualised by a scientific age; life is so predictable, safe, and easy (in the West specifically) that we have stopped trying to understand what our lives mean from a spiritual and symbolic standpoint. We are flesh and bones and have an expected mortality age of X, a fertility rate of Y and boom, any mystery is gone. We now live in a world governed by facts and stats. This is also where Steven Pinker’s school of thought lives, by the way: his is a way of seeing the world through numbers, calculations, predictions, etc. It’s the mathematical world over the symbolic world in which he starts and ends his analysis and that why lots of people will not follow him in the long run. It’s as simple as STEM versus the Humanities, and that the STEM has won over the humanities as so exemplified by Pinker.

Let’s go further.

How does all my talk about progress tie into slave mentality and the EAT THE RICH movement?

Because we live in a statistical world, we have forgotten how to derive meaning in our lives from the symbolic, from anything other than predictions and facts. Because they real fact is not that your average mortality age is 83, it’s that you have no idea when you’ll die. You know this. You live a life as though you will die old. It’s not guaranteed. Therefore, you are living under false pretenses. Your life is therefore an illusion. A nice illusion that keeps you going. But a false one nonetheless. The Transformation Framework, by the way, tackled your illusion head on, heals it, and frees you to become who you are. It is in a sense, in becoming a more symbolic person that transformation holds its power as you go deeper and deeper into it.

Illusions...? Ah, yes. We have all sorts of illusions or “remedies” like Yoga or meditation, gold, watching sports, playing them, but they largely miss the point of symbolic living. The Western mind is not receptive to the numinous, to the “mystery” that is the symbolic world, that is your own birthright to it. And EAT THE RICH is as narrow a way of healing inequality as Yoga is of healing your mental health. It’s all missing the point because it’s just ointment, it’s Advil numbing a much deeper resistance: the resistance to freedom.

EAT THE RICH is, in essence, a cry for less freedom, ironically.

First, its metaphorical language of “Eating” will fall on deaf Western ears. We are not hungry. We are not hungry! It’s clearly the wrong symbolism to use because we are not hungry. People respond deeply to the symbolic; just pick a different metaphor! But we won’t pick a different metaphor because secondly, we’ve lost our understanding of the symbolism in life. We have science to guide us instead. We are addicted to the tangible. Addicted. Thirdly, and on a more psychological level, the deeper reason why EAT THE RICH will not work is because it specifically is a movement. A movement is a group of followers, right? But what are followers but sheep needful for leadership? What do you think happens once we have “eaten the rich”? What will the followers have in its stead to worry about, to hide behind? What about the prophets of that movement? Where will their validation come from? How will their need for status be generated? Because they will not be martyrs nor will they be canonised and I suspect this is related to their deep deep fear of death. Their symbolic life is neutered, do you really think they can take on Death?

Movements like these work specifically because they do not work.

They are yet another mechanism by which people may escape from freedom (Read Erich Fromm). The keyword is freedom “from” by the way, as opposed to freedom “to”. A freedom from guidance, from mommy and daddy who tell us what to do and what to think. Human beings cannot fathom that because we are excellent at executing orders. We have developed entire cultures around executing orders. Today we call it “work culture” and its code is “work ethic.” But none of this culture leads to a freedom “to”. To act, to be, to live; there is no land of the free under that viewpoint, and people know it deep down.

EAT THE RICH works because it cannot be done.

It’s what I call “misplaced revolt.” It’s totally the right intent by the way, it’s in the right vector of transformation this Revolt-against-the-usurper-idea. But it’s misplaced. The usurper is inside the follower’s mind and he remains a slave to yet another master, his movement, his movement’s leader that charismatic male, that guru, that Queen. The follower does not want to solve his own usurper problem. He knows something isn’t right inside, or maybe he is unaware of it, but regardless he channels it into a movement like EAT THE RICH to feel himself moving forward. He might be heard saying “At least I am doing something! Look Daddy! I’m walking!”. All the while he avoids the real revolt, the one that needs action, through transformation, in a targeted assassination of the usurpers within him.

What is true about EAT THE RICH?

There’s a wealth gap. Yes indeed. But there always has been one (See Pareto). There’s a need for change so that the young may own property in their countries in order to have a stake in the future in order for them to be incentivised to work hard and build . yes indeed. True as well. And this instinct for revolt is so true, it’s so beautiful, it’s so right on, and I think it is honest. However, it is misplaced. Am I missing something else that is true about EAT THE RICH? You fill in that blank. Because my point is that it is mostly an untrue movement. Symbolically, it does not speak to people archetypally because they are not hungry, neither physically nor libidinally. Psychologically, it only works because it will lead to no change at all. And while people will feel like they are productive in living out their revolutionary instincts, while that’s a true part of the movement, they will continue to misplace that instinct instead of working internally on killing the usurpers of their own minds.

So that’s also why I said in the beginning that EAT THE RICH is slave mentality. Because a true sheep, a true slave, does not want freedom. He is identified with his existence as a slave. In order to survive the defilement of his purity, he had to justify himself somehow in order to go on. He became identified with his slavery in a Stockholm-syndromed way, putting himself into a pattern of externalising authority onto his life—he has lost (but can reclaim ) his freedom, but instead, he maintains a mental model of slavery that keeps him feeling “Safe” feeling like “I know myself.” And perhaps the deepest fear of all mankind is not knowing who one is (Even Jung admited not knowing who he was in the Red Book, so good luck!).

We all spend our lives answering this question in piecemeal ways, in one way or another we have to answer the collective, and we have to answer “God” why the heck we are here? Why us? What’s so special? What am I adding to this whole theatre. And that’s where the fabric originates. The fabric of who we are. We weave together external elements given to us by other people who don’t know who they are in order to explain ourselves to them. That is a trailhead to being lost in life. Success, in my definition of transformational success, is knowing to find the trail head again, and taking the correct path–this means walking back a hell of a long way backwards. Ouch.

What’s the moral of this essay? Why am I talking about EAT THE RICH?

We see it everywhere. Movements like EAT THE RICH. From either point on the political spectrum by the way. Movements keep people feeling active, in a collective, it’s so deeply religious from a symbolic standpoint. Let’s all keep moving in any direction imaginable-together! Because then I’m not weird, I’m not alone, and I can keep hiding. In reality, people fear nothing more than realising that this is them. That their whole life is spent hiding from themsleves. Maybe tomorrow I’ll answer my calling. And in that simple phrase, that innocuous phrase, they continue to resist transformation, they continue to not to live in this very. Instead, they will seek out external mechanisms like a movement or yoga to reclaim their need for sovereignty, to recapture their volition. But it is often just a band-aid. It’s a front. It’s a child’s blanket under which to continue sleeping so that the real light of die may never enter our closed eyes. Something holds you back from transforming into yourself. It’s not “your fault” per se, but this soul of yours is hiding somewhere in you, longing to be freed into a loving expression. That’s the gift you want to give the world but are not. It’s all disguised, this soul, in the stories we think we need to believe about our life in order to live a good one. It’s the narrative about ourselves that we keep ruminating on and on about in our minds. It’s the people who have long ago transformed into being, into this reality and who continue to give us impressions of freedom when another box of cereal gets put on a shelf. It’s the polarising politics that keep us loyal to a team, that enable us to vent our darkness in “productive” ways when we go on marching in the street for causes that, year after year, lead nowhere because they are not designed for radical change; they are designed to keep us unconscious, safe, and productive.

This continues even deeper;

Because we have forgotten the symbolic meaning in things, the noble within us, the holy within other human beings, we have given up. And yet we see it every day, in random acts of kindness, in moments of bliss at the sight of a laughing baby, in the moment when you make love with your partner and forget about yourself. Those are the moments that show you what freedom truly is; free. And maybe because it’s free, we spit on it, and don’t buy into its simplicity any more than we care about the latest distraction on the market keeping us unconscious, keeping us from avoiding the moments when we forget about our ego.

The message is the same to you as it is to me.

To see yourself as more than noble, as something eternal. Have you forgotten to humanise even yourself? Or have we become fully consumed? Products. Things that navigate this world in reaction only to our inability to look inward and say, “Enough!” Enough of the usurpers, those who steal and those who send me away on dangerous missions so that I may never rule my own kingdom.

But that’s you.

You are that person. And you can also not be that person. But you need transformation. You need it in order to utter even just the simplest of words to yourself: “I love you”.