Kardashians, Hairy Bikinis, Elvis, Wealth, and Virtue

“Kim Kardashian is so sexy, her butt is like a big mountain of pudding.” – South Park

I hear the only way they can be avoided is if you don’t have any money.

This is the last of the series of three posts about virtue, at least for now.  The other two are linked near the bottom.

If you look at rich people, you can see fairly rapidly that being wealthy isn’t a sign of a virtuous life.  There are no shortages of bimbos in Hollywood® who get famous by “leaking” a sex tape to get famous, in fact it’s odd now to have a famous person who doesn’t have a series of sex tapes, although if you take my advice you’ll skip the Ruth Bader Ginsburg tape.

This unearned fame is perplexing to me.  It seems to be that to progress as a celebrity you should have done as little as possible to help mankind.  The entire idea that people willingly give money to the Kardashian family makes me vaguely ill, or maybe that’s just thinking of the Kardashians in general.  The Kardashians look like a species that’s closely related to humanity, but just far enough apart from us that mating with them would be illegal in almost every state, except maybe California.

Come to think of it, they do live in California.  Hmmm.

A Kardashian in its natural state.  I believe they have insurance against Velcro.

As I’ve mentioned before, Epictetus (a dead Stoic Greek philosopher dude) felt that wealth was neither virtue nor vice in and of itself.  The Stoics certainly thought that preferring wealth was okay, but getting all bent out of shape about it (or about anything) wasn’t.  But, Kardashians aside, are there virtues that are associated with getting wealthy?

I looked and found (LINK) a study of traits were found to be present more in high earners than “average” earners.  They were:

• High earning people don’t hate or worship money – they don’t avoid wealth nor place too much importance on money. Of course, when you’re pulling down $400,000 a year, a few extra bucks for a giant-sized plutonium-plated Elvis™ PEZ® dispenser doesn’t even get your attention.  However, if you’re making $14,000 a year, counting the grains of rice in a box of Rice-a-Roni® (The San Francisco Treat™!) makes sense to make sure that the Dollar Store© isn’t cheating you again.

All hail Elpezvis!  And thanks to Karl for this wonderful photo!

• Not fans of luck. The psychological name for this was “internal locus of control.”  Yeah, sounds like part of the navigation system on the U.S.S. Enterprise.  In human-speak, it means whether or not they felt they were lucky (or unlucky) or their situation in life was due to their hard work and effort.  My bet is if you ask any really successful person this question that they’ll give that answer – but I’m also aware that MANY people work even harder than the average CEO, putting in more hours doing harder, messier, more thankless work.
• Rich people wanted to be wealthy and put more value on it than average income people. Part of this might have been related to average income people rationalizing – I know that I put less importance on hair now that it’s left my scalp like Guatemalans leaving Guatemala because it’s Guatemala.  I wonder what my hair had against my scalp?  Could I build a wall to keep it from migrating down my back?
• Had more “financial knowledge” – this was self-reported – they didn’t give them a test.
• Workaholics had more wealth, which doesn’t surprise me, and high-earners were “enablers” – loaning money to deadbeat relatives. I’m guessing this is a function of “not trying to borrow money from people who don’t have it.”

The only virtuous bit I could find in all of that (and I had to stretch to do it) was that the rich seem to develop an indifference to money when they have some.  It’s like an indifference to pizza after you’ve had enough lasagna to stuff Sardinia, however.  Sure, it’s virtuous, but only just barely.

What I didn’t see on the list was conscientiousness, or faithfulness, or discipline or even self-control.  True virtues seemed to be missing.  I guess I have to deal with facts:  jerks get rich.  Unscrupulous people get rich, nepotists get rich (a lot!).  CEOs trade in wives like used Yugos®, and CEOs move from company to company the way I move from room to room in my house.

Ahhh, all the luxury of communist Eastern Europe combined with the reliability of an Italian car.  How could it lose?

Do I hate wealth?  I absolutely do not.  Do I hate the wealthy?  Not a chance, some of them are awesome.  Do I think that churches preaching “prosperity gospel” are helping Christianity?  Probably not.  I’m pretty sure that God wants your faith more than he wants you to have a Mercedes-Benz®, even if all your friends do drive Porsches©.

But wealth is fleeting.  Companies fail over time.  Sears™ used to dominate multiple fields – appliances, tools, insurance, even their own credit card.  Now they’re tottering on the edge of bankruptcy.  And that serves a purpose, just like the death of an individual.  The economy must be cleansed over time, or else it becomes, well, sick.

Stealing from Eaton Rapids Joe (LINK) where he compares the economy to a salmon stream:

At one time it was commonly believed that dams would benefit salmon spawning.  It was believed that regulating the flow so that it was constant would be most beneficial.

The unintended consequence was that the constant stream cut a deep and narrow channel, just like a band saw.

The narrow channels intercepted very little sunlight…the driver of nearly all life on the planet.  The channel was devoid of pools and riffles, gravel beds of various coarseness, rocks to break the current and beds of seaweed.  They were a desert for salmon fry.

His blog is excellent, and you should visit it daily (LINK).

But like that salmon stream, when we seek to get wealth without virtue, have a country without virtue (Roman Virtues and Western Civilization, Complete with Monty Python) or even attempt to become immortal (Books, Stoics, Immortality (Now Available on Stick)) we condemn ourselves to a world where hairy near-human Kardashians are free to wander without fear of a razor.

And that is a world no man wants to live in.

It’s . . . spreading!