Beautifully Broken Issue #37: Andrew Carnegie & Noblesse Oblige: What The Rich Owe The Poor

IDEAS, ART & WISDOM TO REPAIR OUR BEAUTIFUL WORLD

Happy Saturday! Welcome to Beautifully Broken Issue #37: Andrew Carnegie & Noblesse Oblige: What The Rich Owe The Poor As We Head Back To The Middle Ages

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IDEAS:  Noblesse Oblige vs Robber Barons

An Oxfam report in 2016 showed that 62 people owned the same amount of wealth as half the world and of course that was before the massive wealth transfer to the 1% that occurred during the pandemic.

The middle class is in free fall, the world is separating into rich and poor (much like it was for most of history before World War 2) and we are moving into the age of being ruled by billionaire oligarchs and their corporations who exercise power over nations as a king once would. Government and elected officials are lobbied by these kings and their corporations and have turned influencing policies (that are meant to serve the best interests of the population) to serve their own interests into a fine art form. It doesn’t matter whether you are on the left or the right of politics, the only affiliation that will matter is whether you are rich or poor, the rest is bread and circuses.

The recent shooting of a healthcare executive by a young vigilante has brought to the fore the issue of how oligarchs and their corporations are increasingly prioritizing profits over human life and societal outcomes. Giving no thought to what kind of a world they’d like to live in, the new plan of oligarchs worldwide seems to be to start planning to live in floating palaces outside of the jurisdiction of nation states while plundering those states from within via their corporations. You only start thinking like this when you see the system crumbling down around you, and are faced with the choice of slowing growth in order to shore up the wellbeing of the nation or keeping the engine at full steam knowing it will blow up but prioritizing fast growth and profits at all costs.

The situation we find ourselves in is similar to America’s Gilded Age.

The Gilded Age (late 1870s to the late 1890s) was named by 1920s historians after an 1873 Mark Twain novel. Historians saw late 19th-century economic expansion as a time of materialistic excesses marked by widespread political corruption.

It was during this time that the medieval German label Raubritter (robber baron) was resurrected to describe greedy, socially irresponsible industrialists and, since we seem to be heading back into a kind of Middle Ages scenario where we are ruled by techno-kings, it’s worth considering the robber baron and a corresponding French term that describes the responsibility the nobility has to the people in terms of the exercise of their wealth and power—noblesse oblige.