30 individual humans will “earn” over half a billion dollars between just themselves - just this year. This is only a tiny fraction of this type of extreme wealth in the world and isn’t even the most extreme example of the wealth gap with which most of us are familiar.
Meanwhile, people who weren’t lucky enough to gain massive international popularity by being chosen to play the lead in a new, wildly popular cinematic franchise will flip burgers/operate a teller’s desk/repair your HVAC system for less than 1% of one of these annual incomes over the course of decades of back-breaking work.
This is ok in our world. Can you believe that?
I can't anymore.
I don’t mean to troll any responses into correcting me, so I’ll clarify that I’m totally fine with very wealthy individuals attaining those riches through hard work and dedication to their craft. A company's CEO should be paid more than the teams that help run the company. I don’t want that job - tell me what to do and pay me less for it. I totally get this sort of hierarchy. I want the head of a company to have the incentive to lead me and a team. That's a position I'm unwilling to take on due to the stress of it.
But that isn’t what we’re dealing with.
We’re dealing with Tom Cruise being told what to do (and doing it well, according to many critics and fans) and making $100M dollars for performing well at his job. I don't want to discount the difficulty of the job of an actor. I absolutely validate the position of the thespian and performer and think they deserve fair wages as any other worker does.
But that's not what we're talking about.
We’re talking about Robert Antokol obtaining a salary of $372M in a year for running a game development company. Now, if you divide half that amount ($186,000,000.00) amongst the 3800 persons Playtika (the game dev company over which Antokol presides) employs, that’s $48,947.37 per employee per year. Nice bonus, amiright???
And the CEO still gets $186,000,000.00 dropped into their lap for the year. Not a bad deal at all! I'd take a portion of a percent of that and be living better than anything I could imagine in my current state.
It seems diminutively fair to me to give a $50,000-ish bonus to each employee while still paying such a massive sum to one individual who certainly would be no where without his devoted workers.
This doesn’t even touch on the fact that each board member of Playtika also takes home hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and how little time each of them contribute in comparison to the team members fashioning the product that's defined by the board.
No one man or woman does enough work to be valued so far above their lowest paid worker. No one.
We have a problem in this world. The ultra rich are a major contributor to it. I don’t really believe in an abject realization of evil, but this is very close to one of the few things I would define pretty close to such a concept.
If you run a company where you pay your average worker an annual salary equivalent to 0.03% of what you take home in the same amount of time, this is a shade of evil. There is no justification for it.
I fully support the movement that has been taking place since The Great Resignation began a decade before the pandemic. People deserve better. So much better.
Is this movement even effectual though?
Skill trades and hard work should be valued much more equivalently to the elite, idealistic roles than what is currently attributed to them.
The road construction worker operating under life-threatening conditions to keep our travel routes traversable and safe deserves just as much recognition and compensation as, or even more than, a project manager or accountant who, while deserving of the dividend proffered them due to their attention to education and understanding of and ability within complex business systems, statistically will not be risking their well-being at nearly the same rate, nor contributing tactically skilled, physically demanding, and spatially difficult labor to their occupational focus as the blue collar person does.
Whether physically or mentally demanding, occupations of any type should offer the worker comfort and prosperity as they give of their lives to the mechanism in which they exert themselves. Nice thoughts, eh?
I do wish that words were enough to fix this. I wish legislative referendum had the capacity to affect the injustice of it. I may even hate the state of poverty and its oppressive master, high wealth, enough to wish a military force could enact a change through occupation and injunctive coercion. Even that would not be enough though.
There is no sudden fix or resolution to this fabricated yet tangible slavery that entraps most of humanity. The curse of the power of money is ineffable and unrelenting. It is without predator aside from an unexpected act of natural motions - which may include self-immolation, introspectivisms and self-realization, and/or self-transcendency. I am optimistic toward the continuance of a certain valuing of community and cooperative evolution as we have seen only recently emerging through the evolutionary course of life on earth. I am also cautious in this positivity because, well, we could enact nuclear warfare and then be done with this attempt at expanding the spark of awareness.
Thank you for joining me on this ferocious unwrapping of mind-speak as I confront the state of the human race as it has always been. No answers are given here. Merely perspectives and convolutions. And that is all I've ever had.
Please remember to do "good" with the vastness appointed you by chance. Remember to lift your companions in this life to equality and commiseration. We can become the species to attain true peace, interdependency, and equilibrium with this strange force pushing against gravity defined as life. I really believe this.
The only question that bothers me in the dark corners of my home is, will we?
