Popular
A New Zealand guerrilla-gardening collective accepts backing from an American billionaire for a farm on isolated land, unaware he is secretly mining rare earths there.
People who see themselves as rebels would rather face an enemy than a rival, so they recast rivals as enemies, which makes them easier to look down on. A rival has to be measured against, but an enemy can simply be scorned.
To a certain kind of rich operator, disaster is a chance, not a threat. He insures himself against global catastrophes he does nothing to prevent, and might even help bring about if there is money in it.
Fortunes that get told as the stories of self-made builders often come from luck, loopholes and good timing. After that, compound growth does most of the work.
Powerful people can show their rank by making others wait for no reason. Idling on a phone while people stand by tells them their time belongs to him.
Activist movements drift into scolding each other for doing too much or too little, and into endless arguments over who truly belongs. Would-be allies get treated as double-dealers, so the cause becomes forbidding and off-putting.
When things reliably happen the way a person wants, whatever the consequences, he loses the sense of right and wrong that friction would have taught him. Wealth past a certain point becomes a kind of independent rule of one's own, and can carry an old grudge, a lifelong sense of being better than others, now turned into revenge.
Local good works never reach the root cause if the problem is the market itself and the individualistic, consumerist habits everyone shares. The activist, the rich man and the ordinary shopper are all inside the same system.
We readily see murderous, grasping ambition in our political enemies but rarely see it in ourselves. Each person, idealist or tycoon, can be the ruthless overreacher of their own story.