Extremely wealthy people discard their own spouses and children as easily as they discard thousands of factory workers. They feel absolutely no guilt as they scheme and connive, and they will rip off other rich people in massive Ponzi schemes with as little feeling as they'll rape their housekeepers. The rich strap their supposedly beloved family pets to the top of their expensive cars for days at a time, and find the animal's resulting terror and diarrhea
I worked in a state park mechanics garage one year, and the head mechanic, who had also worked in a regular service station garage for a long time, told me he didn't trust rich people as far as he could throw their fancy cars. He said he had many more checks bounce from customers who drove expensive autos than the guys who drove the used cars, the beaters, the old pickup trucks.
I focus on the relationships between people, and what kind of necessities are produced by people's environment which force them to act a certain way. The higher you climb the social ladder, the more competition there will be. That is normal. Just like a game where the creatures you have to fight get increasingly more difficult to beat. It is logical that the people you meet higher up on the social ladder are a lot more competent, and generally also a lot more cunning. There is nothing wrong by default with the fact that weaker family members who are part of rich families will be kicked out. That is the evolutionary process going on; the weaker ones will eventually perish, and that is good for the entire family, because otherwise it would not be able to survive. Sorry for saying so.
However, I cannot permit myself to think weak thoughts for just a moment or to cry about the ways of the world. I have to prepare myself for defending what is mine and those whom I care about. I cannot afford to think about whether being rich makes me and my family evil. If I am not strong enough, then my cousins as well as others will take everything away from me, and they are already doing just that. My cousins have much higher positions in my family's company, and I am too young and too inexperienced to secure anything for myself and to protect my father's position.
I chose to study law because if my cousins manage to get everything, then at least I will be able to take good care of myself. I need more time to prepare myself and to get the knowledge that I need, but time is running out. I do not care whether people think it evil that relatives are like this. They are just fighting for their own survival as well, and since my father only has a daughter, they perceive his weakness as a chance for them to secure their own future, and thus they can benefit their own children. I do not blame them for being like this and seeing me and my father as an easy target. Together they are much stronger, and I know practically nothing about running the company even though I have been psychologically prepared my whole life.
If my father were to demand that I should take the first flight to wherever he is doing business right now and that I should take a high position in his company, then I would not be able to do it and my cousins would surely manage to bully me out of the company, because I am yet too inexperienced to handle the matters of the company whilst they are tremendously cunning individuals who will seize every opportunity to get rid of me and to use my weaknesses to win my father's trust and to become the only heirs to the company. You could call them evil, but that is not it. They know their interests and they are fighting hard for those interests. It is just that I am too young, perhaps not intelligent enough, and way too inexperienced to measure up to them. That is reality, and I have to face it to improve myself.
I cannot stand by idly and cry about how I lack intelligence and experience. The only thing that I can do is to work tremendously hard, to make myself smarter at all costs, and to do well at whatever I can do well. I will not disappoint my father, and even if I am only a daughter, I hope that I can protect his position, make him happy, and show him that even if hard work is my only redeeming quality, he can put his trust in me. I can be sad about what I do not have in life and what I cannot get, but I can also be satisfied with what I do have. Being 'rich' does not really mean that one has only privileges. Those privileges - whatever they may be - come at huge personal costs. It is not so easy at all to live in a wealthy family. Surviving will always remain difficult.
People who are not wealthy may have dreams about the perfect life of a rich family, but it is not like that at all. It is tremendously difficult, and you always have to live under huge stress, and all those around you as well. You can never trust people too much, whilst you have to trust them at least a little bit in order to work with them. Rich families are struggling hard to survive just like anyone else, but the pressures that they are enduring and the ordeals that they have to overcome can only be truly understood by those who have lived through them. I am saying that people have generally no idea what they are talking about. They are saying what they are saying while they have privileges - to them normal things - that rich people do not have, at least I am speaking from my own experience - but that counts for something I guess.
I have, for instance, never once had time to think about love or romance. That is simply impossible in my situation. Marriage is like a business deal when you are born into a wealthy family, and you will have to accept that. Your parents - and sometimes others as well - will practically make the decision for you whom to marry, and that is it. At least, that is how it often works in very rich families in East Asia. If you get involved in some love affair while you are a son or daughter of a very rich family, the family will make sure to end that love affair as soon as possible if it does not suit their interests. That is how it works. You have to stick with your own 'kind' and your parents will only be happy if the person you are with has a 'good' (i.e. financially interesting) background as well. In a way, this has positive genetic effects, because, after all, the stronger genes will be selected for and the weaker ones will be selected against. It is essentially eugenics practised by individual families.
I know that people will be inclined to condemn any eugenic practices, but that is how life - and evolution - works. We are all part of a bigger whole, and that whole - although its parts may look bad - is what matters. Even if you might be inclined to condemn what my cousins are doing to me, try to understand them for a moment, try to see things in the right context, and try to imagine for a moment what benefits their actions might yield for their own offspring. After all, we are just seeing evolution here at a microscale. If I manage to prove that I count for something, then I will be able to secure a future for my own offspring and the process will continue - every single generation will be tested and the weaker ones will be weeded out. My hammering this point home may be seen as evil, and people may see me as a Social Darwinist, but I am merely pointing out how things work, what people do, and not what they say.
I follow what people do, and I do not merely listen to what they say. I have learned that from young age. My parents wanted me to be tough, and so I never had any time to play. I had to study, not merely what they present to you at school, I had to learn all there is to know about the world. Particularly I had to study people, I had to learn to understand them, because humanity is the most important thing of all to understand. For that reason, my father took me along on his business trips abroad and thus I did not merely grow up knowing only my own people - the Chinese people - but many foreign peoples as well. My father always told me: 'Do in Rome as the Romans do.' He always wanted me to study different cultures, to pay attention to the peculiarities of different peoples, and at the same time still pay enough attention to the idiosyncrasies of individuals. My whole life has been a training so far, and although there is much emphasis on this training in my family, I think that ultimately life is a training to everyone - life will not be easy on anyone.
In my family, a lot more emphasis had to be put on that training because it was crucial to survival, and my parents wanted to make sure that I would be ready for whatever might be expected of me in the future. Personally, I do not feel much for working in the company. I want to do something else. I want to be a lawyer. However, I cannot mindlessly follow my own dreams, because my family has dreams as well. At least I have one consolation: if my family's dreams fail, then I can follow my own. However, I will do my utter best to pursue my family's dreams and to not disappoint my parents. I want to be a good daughter to them, and I believe that obedience is a good thing - obedience can even be said to be my religion. I believe that the Confucian philosophy is right, and I think that we cannot look at the world merely focusing on ideas, but we have to focus on relationships as well, and we need to let go of ideas when they are not good for those relationships. I love my parents, so I cannot abandon them, their dreams, and everything that they have built so far.
To sum up everything, saying that rich families are generally evil is too simplistic. You do not understand their circumstances if you talk like that. You have to try to understand their relationships, why they act the way they do, what their vital interests are, and so on. You can merely look at superficial things, merely focus on ideas, but that will not get you anywhere. Ideas that are too lofty are totally irrelevant when you need to deal with the realities of the world. You need to focus on what people do, and not on what they say; if they say that focus on the interests of your family is evil, then what they are saying is total nonsense that is of no practical use to you in this world, because, after all, to maintain a successful family and to make sure that it survives, your family has to care very deeply about their vital interests and do whatever it takes to protect those interests. If it takes kicking people out of the family, then so be it. That is how things work. You can merely look at it superficially - only see the outer harshness of things - but then you will never understand what is truly going on. After all, it is easier to criticise others for their decisions than to stand by your own decisions.
Rating people as good or bad is a waste of time. Everyone does good things and bad things. Evil behavior like paying people less than they need to escape from poverty, consuming more than you need, acting like competition is the only option when cooperation is a much better solution, believing that you are better than other people. Those are the things that wise people stop doing and the things wise people encourage others to stop doing.
You can have your own opinion and be a true liberal who believes all humans are equally good. If you get killed by a Negro, I will call that Negro evil. Or if your family gets ruined by a cunning Jew, I will call that Jew evil. However, you are free to think those people are not evil. Your choice. I am not going to argue with that, and we will see how successful that attitude is in the real world.
I would pick my cereal through a complex process whereby I weighed the tastiness of the cereal against the coolness of the prize. For instance, Captain Crunch, while tasty, made my mouth feel like I had been chewing fiberglass. In that case, CC would have to have a friggin' AWESOME prize.
People agree that criminals are evil.
So we can also agree that some people are more evil than others.
Jews are doing evil to Gentiles around the globe.
Therefore, Jews are evil to us.
If you are a Jew, then you may think you are doing only good.
i don't agree that criminals are evil. Behavior is evil.
I worked in a state park mechanics garage one year, and the head mechanic, who had also worked in a regular service station garage for a long time, told me he didn't trust rich people as far as he could throw their fancy cars. He said he had many more checks bounce from customers who drove expensive autos than the guys who drove the used cars, the beaters, the old pickup trucks.
Boogers aint funny..did you know you could rob a bank with a booger.....ewwwwww
Plus they send you to a club medium prison...
Or a boogerberry saucerhead...
I focus on the relationships between people, and what kind of necessities are produced by people's environment which force them to act a certain way. The higher you climb the social ladder, the more competition there will be. That is normal. Just like a game where the creatures you have to fight get increasingly more difficult to beat. It is logical that the people you meet higher up on the social ladder are a lot more competent, and generally also a lot more cunning. There is nothing wrong by default with the fact that weaker family members who are part of rich families will be kicked out. That is the evolutionary process going on; the weaker ones will eventually perish, and that is good for the entire family, because otherwise it would not be able to survive. Sorry for saying so.
However, I cannot permit myself to think weak thoughts for just a moment or to cry about the ways of the world. I have to prepare myself for defending what is mine and those whom I care about. I cannot afford to think about whether being rich makes me and my family evil. If I am not strong enough, then my cousins as well as others will take everything away from me, and they are already doing just that. My cousins have much higher positions in my family's company, and I am too young and too inexperienced to secure anything for myself and to protect my father's position.
I chose to study law because if my cousins manage to get everything, then at least I will be able to take good care of myself. I need more time to prepare myself and to get the knowledge that I need, but time is running out. I do not care whether people think it evil that relatives are like this. They are just fighting for their own survival as well, and since my father only has a daughter, they perceive his weakness as a chance for them to secure their own future, and thus they can benefit their own children. I do not blame them for being like this and seeing me and my father as an easy target. Together they are much stronger, and I know practically nothing about running the company even though I have been psychologically prepared my whole life.
If my father were to demand that I should take the first flight to wherever he is doing business right now and that I should take a high position in his company, then I would not be able to do it and my cousins would surely manage to bully me out of the company, because I am yet too inexperienced to handle the matters of the company whilst they are tremendously cunning individuals who will seize every opportunity to get rid of me and to use my weaknesses to win my father's trust and to become the only heirs to the company. You could call them evil, but that is not it. They know their interests and they are fighting hard for those interests. It is just that I am too young, perhaps not intelligent enough, and way too inexperienced to measure up to them. That is reality, and I have to face it to improve myself.
I cannot stand by idly and cry about how I lack intelligence and experience. The only thing that I can do is to work tremendously hard, to make myself smarter at all costs, and to do well at whatever I can do well. I will not disappoint my father, and even if I am only a daughter, I hope that I can protect his position, make him happy, and show him that even if hard work is my only redeeming quality, he can put his trust in me. I can be sad about what I do not have in life and what I cannot get, but I can also be satisfied with what I do have. Being 'rich' does not really mean that one has only privileges. Those privileges - whatever they may be - come at huge personal costs. It is not so easy at all to live in a wealthy family. Surviving will always remain difficult.
People who are not wealthy may have dreams about the perfect life of a rich family, but it is not like that at all. It is tremendously difficult, and you always have to live under huge stress, and all those around you as well. You can never trust people too much, whilst you have to trust them at least a little bit in order to work with them. Rich families are struggling hard to survive just like anyone else, but the pressures that they are enduring and the ordeals that they have to overcome can only be truly understood by those who have lived through them. I am saying that people have generally no idea what they are talking about. They are saying what they are saying while they have privileges - to them normal things - that rich people do not have, at least I am speaking from my own experience - but that counts for something I guess.
I have, for instance, never once had time to think about love or romance. That is simply impossible in my situation. Marriage is like a business deal when you are born into a wealthy family, and you will have to accept that. Your parents - and sometimes others as well - will practically make the decision for you whom to marry, and that is it. At least, that is how it often works in very rich families in East Asia. If you get involved in some love affair while you are a son or daughter of a very rich family, the family will make sure to end that love affair as soon as possible if it does not suit their interests. That is how it works. You have to stick with your own 'kind' and your parents will only be happy if the person you are with has a 'good' (i.e. financially interesting) background as well. In a way, this has positive genetic effects, because, after all, the stronger genes will be selected for and the weaker ones will be selected against. It is essentially eugenics practised by individual families.
I know that people will be inclined to condemn any eugenic practices, but that is how life - and evolution - works. We are all part of a bigger whole, and that whole - although its parts may look bad - is what matters. Even if you might be inclined to condemn what my cousins are doing to me, try to understand them for a moment, try to see things in the right context, and try to imagine for a moment what benefits their actions might yield for their own offspring. After all, we are just seeing evolution here at a microscale. If I manage to prove that I count for something, then I will be able to secure a future for my own offspring and the process will continue - every single generation will be tested and the weaker ones will be weeded out. My hammering this point home may be seen as evil, and people may see me as a Social Darwinist, but I am merely pointing out how things work, what people do, and not what they say.
I follow what people do, and I do not merely listen to what they say. I have learned that from young age. My parents wanted me to be tough, and so I never had any time to play. I had to study, not merely what they present to you at school, I had to learn all there is to know about the world. Particularly I had to study people, I had to learn to understand them, because humanity is the most important thing of all to understand. For that reason, my father took me along on his business trips abroad and thus I did not merely grow up knowing only my own people - the Chinese people - but many foreign peoples as well. My father always told me: 'Do in Rome as the Romans do.' He always wanted me to study different cultures, to pay attention to the peculiarities of different peoples, and at the same time still pay enough attention to the idiosyncrasies of individuals. My whole life has been a training so far, and although there is much emphasis on this training in my family, I think that ultimately life is a training to everyone - life will not be easy on anyone.
In my family, a lot more emphasis had to be put on that training because it was crucial to survival, and my parents wanted to make sure that I would be ready for whatever might be expected of me in the future. Personally, I do not feel much for working in the company. I want to do something else. I want to be a lawyer. However, I cannot mindlessly follow my own dreams, because my family has dreams as well. At least I have one consolation: if my family's dreams fail, then I can follow my own. However, I will do my utter best to pursue my family's dreams and to not disappoint my parents. I want to be a good daughter to them, and I believe that obedience is a good thing - obedience can even be said to be my religion. I believe that the Confucian philosophy is right, and I think that we cannot look at the world merely focusing on ideas, but we have to focus on relationships as well, and we need to let go of ideas when they are not good for those relationships. I love my parents, so I cannot abandon them, their dreams, and everything that they have built so far.
To sum up everything, saying that rich families are generally evil is too simplistic. You do not understand their circumstances if you talk like that. You have to try to understand their relationships, why they act the way they do, what their vital interests are, and so on. You can merely look at superficial things, merely focus on ideas, but that will not get you anywhere. Ideas that are too lofty are totally irrelevant when you need to deal with the realities of the world. You need to focus on what people do, and not on what they say; if they say that focus on the interests of your family is evil, then what they are saying is total nonsense that is of no practical use to you in this world, because, after all, to maintain a successful family and to make sure that it survives, your family has to care very deeply about their vital interests and do whatever it takes to protect those interests. If it takes kicking people out of the family, then so be it. That is how things work. You can merely look at it superficially - only see the outer harshness of things - but then you will never understand what is truly going on. After all, it is easier to criticise others for their decisions than to stand by your own decisions.
Rating people as good or bad is a waste of time. Everyone does good things and bad things. Evil behavior like paying people less than they need to escape from poverty, consuming more than you need, acting like competition is the only option when cooperation is a much better solution, believing that you are better than other people. Those are the things that wise people stop doing and the things wise people encourage others to stop doing.
You can have your own opinion and be a true liberal who believes all humans are equally good. If you get killed by a Negro, I will call that Negro evil. Or if your family gets ruined by a cunning Jew, I will call that Jew evil. However, you are free to think those people are not evil. Your choice. I am not going to argue with that, and we will see how successful that attitude is in the real world.
I would pick my cereal through a complex process whereby I weighed the tastiness of the cereal against the coolness of the prize. For instance, Captain Crunch, while tasty, made my mouth feel like I had been chewing fiberglass. In that case, CC would have to have a friggin' AWESOME prize.
Hell, I have bought cars using less rigor.
My mom, too. We would go to the store with a ginormous pile of books and walk out with a transistor radio or something.
They taste like duck.
They are certainly well marbled.
Also, did you know that water is wet?
Seriously, I have always thought that massive wealth could only be gained and held by a competitiveness that bordered on brutality.
Soylent Green Stamps are PEOPLE!
(does anyone here remember Green Stamps?)