The Immorality of Wealth
Sorry I haven’t been blogging much these past few days. I’ve been working on some reorganization, some projects, and time got away from me. I’ve caught it now, and scolded it a bit, and it promises me that this won’t happen again. So, with that dealt with, I think I can begin.
I watched “In Time” a few days ago. It was an okay movie, decently acted, but with little to nothing that stands out as even worth remembering. Except the message. For those of you who haven’t watched In Time, it’s the story of a world where time is quite literally money. At 25, your clock starts, and you have a year left to live. You can earn more time by working, or gambling, or fighting, or stealing, but if you don’t you’ll die. The most important quote, one that the film feels the need to repeatedly and emphatically state as if unsure that you heard them the first time, is that “for a few to be immortal, many must die”.
There we have it, the central concept of the film’s philosophical bent. Buried in the action, and the beautiful 20-somethings, and the Justin Timberlake, is a little nugget of an idea I can’t help but take issue with. The film tries to act as a parable of the real world, and in a less-than-sly leeching off the concepts of the 99%/1% dichotomy misses a key point. In the film, time is money, and because of the inherent importance of a person’s life, the stealing and hoarding of money becomes the literal murder of hundreds of thousands. But they forget that in the real world, time isn’t money. Certainly they are related (one doesn’t get money without putting in time), but the relationship isn’t 1 to 1, and there are other ways to spend your time. You have emotional needs, things you want to do as an individual, and by conflating money and time, the writers are forced to simplify life to little more than work and more work.
I am not saying that those who are rich may not also be immoral, but I do not believe the idea that wealth is inherently immoral. There are those who make the case that no one gets rich on their own, and this is true. But say you make a company, building computers out of your garage. You save up, and invest in the parts you need, and you search around for buyers, and grow, and grow, and soon you can hire people. Thanks to their efforts, you can now make more computers, and more money, and you keep growing.
Soon you’ve got a sizable business, and you’re improving your models, and innovating, and you hire a marketing team, and beef up your product team. You hire some more managers, and all of these people work together to make the product. Things are good.
The business keeps growing, and years later you’re a wealthy man. Your business went public, and you made millions. You did it by selling a product that people wanted, and by managing your business well. You hired good people, and positioned yourself well in the market. Are the individual people in your business, the people who built the individual parts, and made the posters, entitled to the same amount of money you earned? Or, more importantly, are you inherently a bad person for having that money?
I don’t think so. You gave people jobs, and a product they wanted, and you’ve reaped the rewards of all that. Should you pay your workers a fair wage? Yes. Should you treat everyone at your company well, and respect their basic human rights? Yes. And would it be nice if you donated to charity? Absolutely. You’ve got money to spare.
But you owe people nothing beyond that. Everyone owes to those around them nothing more than basic human decency and respect. No one else is entitled to the fruits of your labor, and if they get those fruits, it should be because you’ve given it to them out of a feeling of fellowship, not because someone else has ordered you to. If you’re forced to, the decency is gone, and acts of good become acts of legality.
In “In Time”, the main wealthy businessman is essentially a loan shark. That’s a bad man, loan sharks are bad! Yes they are. But not all rich people are loan sharks. And at the end of the film, the viewer is left with a truly sinister idea: that they are.
