My friend told me that many people in China are quite impressed by Musk because of his achievements. I told her that it seems to me that many people throughout the rest of the world ought to be looking at the richest and most famous people in the U.S. as a collection of crazy folks. But afterward I thought about the most famous, wealthy, and immaculately coiffed citizens of the First World (particularly the U.S.) and the psychological impact these people have on many of the rest of us. For in looking at these people it's easy to get swept up in their propaganda, believing that these people are rich because they possess rare and unique accomplishments of stellar value. These people prop up the systems of inequity that exist in the world by telling us that if we only imitated them, we could be like them. This is the foundation of the thriving sale of many worthless "business advice" or "life coaching" books, conferences, podcasts, and the like.
But I'd like to say that these rich people are on their way to hell, because the foundation of their wealth is evil, since they have made themselves great by exploiting their fellow human beings. And what they promise through their aspirational propaganda is impossible. There is no way we can all be rich - especially not obscenely rich. Why? Because the earth is a finite planet. And no matter how much Elon Musk boasts of how he's going to open up outer space as a "final frontier", at present neither he nor anyone else is even close to colonizing Mars, let alone anywhere else. So why the aspirational propaganda? It serves merely as a means of normalizing and legitimizing really horrible behavior on the part of the world's richest and most powerful people.
What is the implication that the earth is a finite planet? Simply this: that anyone who wants to get really, really, really rich can lay claim to only a limited amount of stuff as long as they are limited to living on earth. Once such a person actually lays claim to those resources, there are far fewer unclaimed resources available to the rest of us - even for those of us who wish to imitate the first person who successfully made himself really, really, really rich. Once a second person succeeds in obtaining wealth similar to the first guy, the remaining unclaimed wealth shared by all the rest of us shrinks drastically yet again. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that once a certain mass of rich people comes into existence, all the rest of the world must subsist on mere crumbs.
To put it another way, imagine a group of ten neighborhood kids who are trying to split a pound cake between them. The biggest and most greedy and arrogant kid bites off a 7 ounce piece of the cake. Then the second most greedy kid manages to bite off another 6 ounce piece. A fight breaks out between the remaining kids for the remaining part of the cake, and in the process most of the cake gets turned into crumbs. However, one other kid manages to snag a 2 ounce piece. What will the remaining seven kids eat?
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