Mentality

Years ago I got on an organized crime kick. That is, I had been reading up on terrorism (and how to counter it, ofc), and terrorists often get their money through criminal activity. So I also started reading up on organized crime.

One of the things that struck me was the mentality of the criminals. They had a lot of contempt for ordinary people. The suckers and losers who played by the rules and earned a legitimate income.

But here's the thing. If we didn't have all those ordinary people doing ordinary things - like farming, or factory work - we would starve. And we wouldn't have smartphones. Or cars.

People act like it's unimportant because there are so many people who can do the job. They act like it's easy to replace them (though, honestly, it isn't. Even the most menial task goes faster when someone has experience... and getting that experience always takes time.) 

Anyways. The world would fall apart without farmers and factory workers. 

The same could not be said for criminals.

There are lots and lots of books on capitalism, and I don't want to get sidetracked here into a lengthy discussion on it. I will say that there's some truth to the fact that certain skills aren't as easy to find. A good CEO, a genius inventor... they can make a noticeable difference and deserve to be paid more for it. (Though not every CEO is a 'good' one, so they don't all deserve the same pay. And there's a difference between 'deserves to make 3x as much as an entry level worker' and 'deserves to make 1000x times as much'. We look for those individuals and often forget that it takes the entire organization and all the people within it to accomplish what they do.)

Criminal organizations are bad. Oh, the same methods terrorists use to fund their organizations can also be used by revolutionaries... and if you have an authoritarian and corrupt government, well. Perhaps it's useful to have people who know how to get around surveillance and other such things. The real issue is a matter of scale, I think. Like how they say we all have some cancer cells, but that it's when things get out of balance and the cancer begins to metastasize that we get sick. 

A healthy body would have that in check.

There's a lot I don't know about finance and economics, and I have learned the importance of credit and allowing people access to financial resources... so I'm not going to lambast the entire system.

But a lot of the financial types operate more like con artists and criminals, tbh. Like... stock prices are supposed to reflect the expected return over the years. If the stock price goes up, it's because the company is doing well and you can expect to receive more in the quarterly return.

We all know it doesn't work like that. That stock prices are almost the same as gambling. That a lot of people are determined to game the system, buy low and sell high (or short a stock when it's high and they expect it to tumble.) 

The stock price reflects fads and hype, as much as any real valuation of what the company dividends are expected to be.

This is what was depressing me about that book, Kleptopia. I get that people want to make their mark, want to change their status. There's a whole thing in history about the challenge of second sons (in a world of primogeniture, where the first son inherits and the second son has to find their own way. This also doesn't even mention women, too.) That's part of the whole mystique about the colonies, where second sons could get ahead in a way that they couldn't back home. 

Of course, most of those opportunities aren't there any more. 

What's disturbing is that they aren't getting ahead by truly building things. They aren't creating, they aren't inventing. Many of the Russian oligarchs came to power by essentially taking over the old Soviet Union resources for a song. 

And getting ahead becomes more about who's best able to take advantage of the system, of getting yours at the expense of others. Of considering those 'others' as stupid, or weak, or deserving to lose because they clearly weren't as talented, then you have a number of powerful and wealthy people who basically think "I got mine, how you do?"

It's the opposite of servant leadership, the opposite of good shepherds taking care of the flock. The opposite of building, nurturing, tending. The opposite of investing in your business or farm or people.

It's predatory, it's destructive, and the attitude spreads as more and more people believe that that's 'just the way it is', that this is how it has to be, and you either become a part of it or you lose.