One of the recurring themes in the Dungeon Crawler Carl book series is that your enemies aren’t people, they’re systems of power.
In the books, nearly everyone is a victim, including the monsters and NPCs they fight. The real baddies are the super wealthy, who create systems of power to pit the poor against each other.
It reminds me a lot of life, and that’s on purpose.
The wrong enemy
There’s this scene in the Pixar movie A Bug’s Life where Hopper, the main villain, says…
Those puny little ants outnumber us 100-to-1. And if they ever figure that out, there goes our way of life.
Nearly every system of oppression that exists today is designed to pit people who share the same struggles against each other so that we fight among ourselves instead of uniting to dismantle systems of power.
Race? Made up. Social construct.
Don’t get me wrong: racial struggles and identity absolutely exist. But there’s no biology around race. It’s a social construct that was made up to justify the subjugation, enslavement, and abuse of various groups of people (by deeming them biologically inferior in some way).
Immigrants aren’t the reason you can’t find a job. Trans kids aren’t the reason your kid didn’t make the varsity team. Black people aren’t the reason you didn’t get into your top choice for school.
We are all fighting for crumbs that fall from the overloaded trough of the rich.
No good billionaires
Just before Christmas, Taylor Swift donated $1 million to Feeding America.
She got a lot of praise for it. It’s a lot of money.
It’s also 0.0625 percent of Taylor’s wealth. If you make $100,000 a year, it’d be like you donating $62, but makes an even smaller impact on her life than it would yours.
After that, Taylor still has $1,599,000,000 left over. It makes no material difference to her life whatsoever.
People were not happy when I pointed this out.
It was still a good thing, Taylor is “poor” by billionaire standards, and she does far more good than most.
But the mere fact that she is a billionaire at all—that anyone is—is the problem.
Billionaires should not exist
I’m going to pick on Taylor Swift for just a few more minutes, though there are far more deserving targets.
- Taylor has multiple gigantic homes that sit empty a majority of the year… while thousands of people sleep on the streets every night.
- Taylor owns (or owned) multiple private jets, while millions of people don’t know where their next meal is coming from.
- Taylor Swift made $190 million after taxes from her last tour. The median income in the US in 2021 was $37,586.03.
That level of disparity is shocking.
Billionaire math is wild. Let’s say you make $100k a year.
- It would take you 10 years to make $1 million.
- It would take you 10,000 years to make $1 billion.
Billionaires should not exist. No one should have that much money. Not while people starve and die of exposure and preventable medical issues.
Philanthropy is PR
Is that $1 million Taylor donated going to feed a lot of people? Of course it is!
But she could personally wipe out hunger in the US for a year if she wanted to and still have absurd amounts of “go fuck yourself I’m taking a private flight to space” money… if she wanted to.
When the rich do philanthropy, it’s brand sanitization. It’s PR.
It’s why so many people fought me to tell me “how good of a person Taylor is for doing stuff like this.” Yes, this is good. It’s not nearly enough.
It’s what allows Taylor to pollute the planet with her jets and hoard empty houses like a dragon does gold. By throwing a few crumbs to the masses every now and then.
Solidarity
It’s important for us to cultivate class solidarity. Everyone who works for money shares the struggle.
This is not to say class is the only thing that matters. Race, gender, sexuality, and so on all intersect with class and create additional struggles and issues and nuances and layers.
Don’t be an asshole. Be intersectional.
But recognize that you have far more in common with your fellow workers than you do differences.
Share your salary. Have people’s backs. Build coalitions. Use whatever privilege you have to stand up for people with less of it.
Stand together and fight the system.
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