Finance, Government

When You Sell Your Soul, You Never Get Anything For It

It’s alright to look out for yourself and your family and to build a reasonably comfortable existence. But there’s a line that should not be crossed.

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I took my old man to The National World War I Museum and Memorial last week. I’d promised to take him on this trip months ago, and figured then that we’d wait until the pandemic subsided. Since the pandemic did not appear to be going anywhere though, and since we’ve both been fully vaccinated, we finally pulled the trigger.

It’s a great museum. Inspired on the topic, I dug into Ernst Jünger’s gripping WWI memoir Storm of Steel as soon as we got home. It’s easy to overlook WWI in favor of later wars like WWII that are easier to understand, that have a cleaner, clearer narrative. But I think WWI is a good war to study if you want a stronger understanding of the nature of conflict. Chaos, moral ambiguity, and unintended consequences are the norm, not the exception.

Since visiting the WWI Museum and Memorial, it’s been hard not to ruminate on all the ways in which our modern circumstances echo the prewar days. Had a .380 bullet to Franz Ferdinand’s neck not sparked the Great War, something else would have done it. Cultish nationalism, though barely crystalized as a concept at that point, spread across the globe. The countries most eager to enter the conflict when war broke out were all led by authoritarians. Technological change proceeded at a dizzying pace — as did inequality, and then, correspondingly, social unrest. Nobody knew it was coming, but a global pandemic that would leave millions dead was on the horizon. The dim hum of barely contained danger undergirded everything.

I don’t think we’re on the verge of another armed catastrophe exactly like WWI. But in a lot of ways, we’re already in the opening phases of a different sort of world-spanning conflict. Tensions are at a 21st century high point between the haves and the have-nots, the authoritarians and the democrats, the educated and the ignorant. Almost daily revelations keep raising the temperature.

This week, a massive report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, dubbed the Pandora Papers, revealed how some of the world’s most rich and powerful people hide trillions of dollars’ worth of assets.  Leaders of the United Kingdom, Russia, Jordan, Pakistan, and Brazil, among others, were named in the Pandora Papers. U.S. localities, including South Dakota, were called out as money-laundering hubs. More troubling than the fact that powerful people are dodging taxes is that a lot of them are plundering their own countries to accumulate this kind of wealth in the first place.

Meanwhile, a whistleblower testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee “that Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy.” In and of itself that is hardly new information for anyone who’s been paying attention over the past five years. Extremely damning for Facebook though are internal documents showing that it was well aware of how dangerous its algorithms are. Money is the obvious motive for Facebook to ignore its (and in turn, all of our) problems: “they have put their astronomical profits before people,” said the whistleblower.

And that’s really the heart of what could become an even bigger problem than it already is. It’s in the personal interests of the powerful to be just greedy enough. Too greedy though, well, history has proven that chaos is a difficult houseguest to evict.

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As an atheist who’s nonetheless read the good book cover-to-cover, I’ve got to appreciate the poetry of a decent Bible verse when I hear it: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” It’s alright to look out for yourself and your family and to build a reasonably comfortable existence. But there’s a line that should not be crossed. When accumulation becomes outright pillage, it often doesn’t end well for the haves either. People getting very, very rich at the expense of millions of other people aren’t typically eager to give up some of their power. If they don’t, though, a lot of them might wind up regretting it.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].

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