A little over a decade ago I worked for a company that designed and fabricated stonework for buildings. Not just anyone can clad their house in marble, so I wound up interacting with some very wealthy people. I can’t say who, because they’re still just as wealthy and powerful and I’m about to shit all over them. I came away from the experience with much less respect for them afterwards. They essentially have no interaction with ordinary people at all. They don’t do anything for themselves, and they don’t engage with the real world. It’s no wonder they lack empathy and only act in their own self-interest. The real world is an abstract concept to them, I doubt they think about any of us as being real people.
I was raised dirt poor, like food insecure and periodically unhoused poor. The guy I interacted with was literally a billionaire and had always been a billionaire. His staff treats him like a noble lord, and they buffer him from nearly any circumstance that would lead to him experiencing reality. One perk of being a white guy with good diction and vocabulary is that you can hide your low-class upbringing. Put me in some decent clothes and they’ll assume I’m from a similar background and speak more openly. The conversations were disturbing. The things they said about poor people, my people, were horrible. They think about us like animals if they think about us at all. I had to sit there and smile the whole time.
Even before he became a political figure, he could have had the entire LAPD at his house within moments of the first sign of trouble. It’s not like the french revolution. They have a modern army that is well trained to deal with large groups. They’ve had lots of practice. We can’t just roll up on him with a guillotine in the back of our truck and expect to actually prevail.
My experience at that job radicalized me somewhat and drove from me any lingering desire I might once have had to obtain wealth. I do not want to live in that world. I want to unmake that world.