The Rich are not Evil and the Poor are not Lazy

We need a different line in the sand.

The Candidates. Courtesy: Las Vegas NV Blog

As I watched the Democratic debates yesterday I could not help but get mixed emotions. You heard it over and over again. Wall Street vs. Main Street, rich vs poor, us vs them.

Having worked in a financial technology firm whose biggest customers were the largest banks in the world, I can tell you that, yes, there is a lot of greed that pervades those circles, but I can also tell you that there are a lot of well-meaning people who are just trying to do a good job.

Watching the debates, I could not help but pick up the language that colored broad swaths of our community as good, bad, lazy, greedy, powerless, dominant, etc.

Effectively, the process was as follows. You draw a line in the sand, i.e. rich vs poor, black vs white, citizens vs immigrants, old vs young. Then you make your best effort to color the sides so that one looks more favorable than the other.

For example, it’s not the rich vs the poor, it’s the greedy vs. the powerless.

No, no, someone else would say, it’s not the rich vs the poor, it’s the entrepreneurial “job creators” vs. the lazy “welfare nation”.

Guess what? You’re both wrong.

I understand the need for this as a shorthand for political immediacy.

And I am not arguing against the process because I think it is unfortunately a necessary compromise in this age of split-second attention spans.

What I am really railing against here is this:

They are all the wrong lines to be focusing on.

Let’s take the rich vs the poor. Bernie Sanders is running on a platform of Democratic Socialism as he describes where it is a moral imperative to redistribute wealth from the top 1% to the rest of the country. I don’t have an issue with this necessarily.

Bernie drew his line in the sand based on wealth and it is pretty clear where he is siding.

I think it’s the wrong line.

So what do we use as a framework?

In my opinion, the line we should be focusing on is not one based on numbers or geography or creed or color, but one based on action and intent. It is based on your track record of behavior and your intentions towards your fellow man and woman.

Forget wealth, profession, color, geography, religion, and ask yourself this question, do you do what you do every day with creative intent or consumptive intent? In other words, do you live to create or do you live to consume?

This is the line in the sand I believe works.

Take any person from any walk of life and you will find that their contribution to society hinges not on external traits but on the nature of their intent that drives their hands, their heart and their head.

Take the 1% again. Who are the members of the 1% that Bernie is really railing against? Answer: those who have consumptive intent, who use their wealth as a power base simply to maintain and persist their ability to consume luxuries and lifestyles.

Members of the 1% may strike a counterargument at the 99% saying they are not industrious enough, not entrepreneurial enough, not working hard enough.

But who are they really railing against? Those who find comfort in consuming what they can just to get by, to live with their engine in “idle” and to not put their creative energies into their life in any way they can within their means and their power.

So no, the Rich are not Evil and the Poor are not Lazy. Neither are the Rich “Job Creators” and the Poor a “Welfare Nation”.

Creativity comes from everywhere but you need to look more than just skin deep.

To truly measure a person’s worth, first seek to understand their intent.

Then draw a line in the sand.